Polemical Pat.

• Author: Rosen, James
• Position: Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever - Book review

Patrick J. Buchanan, Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever (New York: Crown Forum, 2017), 448 pp., $30.00.

"I did not understand then, nor do I now, why we did what we did," writes Patrick J. Buchanan towards the end of Nixon's White House Wars, the second of two volumes chronicling the decade he spent with the thirty-seventh president as a speechwriter, political adviser and confidant.

In this instance, Buchanan was referencing a tactical blunder committed during Watergate, the denouement of the Nixon presidency. But the author--a pugnacious visionary who believed conservatives could recast the electoral map by peeling off key constituencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal coalition--could just as easily have been summarizing Richard Nixon's five and a half years in the Oval Office, which repeatedly found Buchanan baffled by the steady leftward drift of a president he knew to be instinctually conservative. "Why we were doing this," the author complains ninety-three pages earlier, about something else, "I did not know."

Time and again, as Nixon and his men deliberated the conduct of the Vietnam War and the threats posed by the radical Left, school desegregation and affirmative-action programs, Supreme Court nominations and Great Society funding, Buchanan struggled to understand why the Nixon he knew intimately from 1965 onward, the wily politician whose worldview aligned so squarely with the "Silent Majority" of Americans--a phrase Buchanan himself had coined--had embraced the policy prescriptions of his political opponents.

"Why did the conservatives, who had so influenced the policy positions that Nixon had adopted during his comeback, fail to play a comparable role in the transition and the administration?" Buchanan asks. At one point, he even plaintively wonders whether the president and his key aides--principally, Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman and domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman--entertained an "inherent suicidal tendency or death wish."

This lamentation, exposing the inner workings of the "troubled marriage" between Richard Nixon and conservatism and drawing on a thousand memoranda Buchanan exchanged with the president, many previously unpublished, provides the chief value of Buchanan's book. Witty and well documented, rich with insights into Nixon, the nation and a cast of colorful characters--from Henry Kissinger to Hunter S. Thompson, Ronald Reagan to Coretta Scott King--White House Wars succeeds simultaneously as history and autobiography, polemic and portraiture, elegy and entertainment. In this and the first installment of his Nixon memoirs, The Greatest Comeback, which chronicled Nixon's wilderness years and capturing of the presidency in 1968, Buchanan has made an indispensable contribution to the...