OPINION:
Patrick Buchanan took no prisoners.
He aimed to defend America’s superiority. If his political nemeses got hurt feelings during his riddling, tough.
Sound familiar? Sure. Mr. Buchanan was President Trump before the president’s rocket ride to the White House.
America first. Keep countries from screwing us on trade. Speak English. Build the wall. Stop the invading hordes from defacing our country’s mighty culture.
Those were Buchanan staples before he quit writing and commenting on TV a couple of years ago.
If he is up to it at age 86, he should be up for a titanic reward: the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Mr. Trump should be honored to deliver the first such medal of his second term to one of the truest patriots of the past half century.
Mr. Buchanan would receive it in the White House, where he was the communications master for Presidents Nixon and Reagan.
Mr. Buchanan tried to win the presidency in his own right three times, but he was too far ahead of his time, especially on the immigration front.
Two decades later, Mr. Trump grabbed his baton, rebranded it as MAGA and won. Now he can thank Mr. Buchanan by placing the top civilian medal around his neck.
I would pay to hear Mr. Buchanan’s acceptance speech. He is that humorous and compelling.
It would bring memories of his days at MSNBC, where his brilliance forced the liberal channel to fire him. He simply got a promotion to my namesake channel, Fox News, where we caught the deepest, cleverest commentator in the biz.
Here is the truth among liberals: They paid attention to him. Why? Because Mr. Buchanan could flat-out write. His prose was entertaining like no one else’s in the newspaper, magazine or blog arenas. Period. Paragraph.
Those last two words are stolen from Mr. Buchanan. With a rare grasp of geography, names, politics and history, Mr. Buchanan had old-school lines that made his columns and books sing. Such as “headed for the tall grass” (meaning chickened out).
Mr. Buchanan could have done stand-up.
He said he wouldn’t criticize Dan Quayle, the vice president under George H.W. Bush, because “I don’t want to be accused of child abuse.”
When asked what he thought about gun control, he replied, “I think it’s important to have a steady aim.”
No wonder Nixon hired him. He found a thoroughbred in 1966 and rode Mr. Buchanan’s speechwriting and ideas to the presidency two years hence.
The stunning gallop was captured in Mr. Buchanan’s book “The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority.”
Being the Nixon and Buchanan cheerer I am, I bought the tome the minute it went on sale. A ticket to see the man who, in his 20s, had the guts to join the former vice president when all anyone else saw was a loser of 1960 and 1962.
During what Nixon called his wilderness years in New York, Mr. Buchanan was just about the whole staff. He talked about it in a riveting speech and Q&A at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, in 2014.
He had plenty to talk about. That book is right up there with fellow Nixon scribe Bill Safire’s “Before the Fall” as one of the coolest political productions you could ever read.
Favorite takes: “Years later, after I had dropped off a speech draft in the Oval Office, [Nixon] read it and muttered, ‘For God’s sake, Buchanan, get some lift into it!’ As I reached the door, he said loud enough to hear, ‘Why can’t I get speechwriters like Wilson’s?’ Not until I was outside the Oval Office did I retort, sotto voce, ‘Wilson wrote his own speeches.’”
The Rev. Martin Luther “King [Jr.] had moved so far out of the mainstream that Black columnist Carl Rowan penned an attack on him in Reader’s Digest. Bill Buckley wrote that King was becoming ’the Harold Stassen of the civil rights movement.’ That there would be a national holiday for King was unimaginable in that spring of 1968, as would the claim by 21st-century conservatives that Dr. King was somehow one of us.”
Marvelous stuff from Mr. Buchanan. He followed with another classic volume, “Nixon’s White House Wars,” detailing the Vietnam War-ending, all-volunteer-army-starting, Israel-rescuing, moon-landing Nixon presidency of 1969 to 1974.
Toward the end of Mr. Buchanan’s final book was a reliving of the funeral for Spiro Agnew, who, as vice president, roared with Mr. Buchanan’s prose to become a hero of the right. Millions cheered Agnew. On this 1996 day, however, he drew a scant crowd, but Mr. Buchanan didn’t desert him.
As the Baltimore Sun wrote, “The closest thing to a national celebrity [at graveside] was Patrick J. Buchanan, the populist former Republican presidential candidate who long ago co-wrote the speeches that made Agnew a sensation, alliterative anthems that may forever define his legacy.”
Mr. Buchanan is a loyalist to the hilt, as he also displayed throughout Mr. Trump’s political career. The president could return the favor and remind America of Mr. Buchanan’s big, beautiful legacy by locking in that Medal of Freedom.
• Bucky Fox is an author and editor in Florida.
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