Right from the Beginning.

• Author: Fallows, James

Patrick Buchanan

He can be a likable character but his politics are poisonous

I think this book(*) is going to backfire on Pat Buchanan. It's a good-humored, childhood-to-early-manhood memoir that humanizes the famous attack dog of the right, making him more understandable, likable, even endearing in a "what a character!" way. But even as Buchanan's self-portrait softens the sharp edges of his personality, it brings into focus exactly what is objectionable about his role in politics. Pat Buchanan, this book makes clear, is not a political activist so much as a religious crusader. The combination of his brawler's temperament, the scorched-earth debating style he learned at home and school, and the dogmatic world view he retains from the fifties-era Catholic Church all help him bring to American politics the same tender reasonableness the Ayatollah brought to Iran. The constancy of Buchanan's personal faith is admirable. It also accounts for the most moving sections of this book, when he discusses his older brother's death and his own reflections as he nears his fiftieth birthday this fall. But when he takes his religion into politics he reminds us why separation of church and state is such a good idea.

Most of the book concerns Buchanan's boyhood years in Washington D.C., where he was born in 1938 and grew up as third of nine children in a Catholic family moving steadily toward the upper-middle class. His mother was a German Catholic from Ohio who came to Washington as a young nurse. His father, raised in Washington as a Treasury agent's son, was not Irish but mostly Scotch-Irish--a distinction that Buchanan says explains a lot. The hard-boiled Scotch-Irish, who came from Ulster to the Appalachians, were renowned for behaving exactly the way Buchanan does in print and on TV. (He quotes approvingly Thomas Sowell's description of immigrant-group traits: "The Germans were noted for their order, quietness, friendliness...The Scotch-Irish were just the opposite--quick-tempered, hard-drinking...constantly involved in feuds among themselves or with the Indians.") When Buchanan was little, his father was starting out as an accountant; by the time the youngest children were in college in the late sixties, the family was very comfortably established and had moved across the District line to Chevy Chase. As they prospered, neither their sense of self as ethnic Catholics nor their faith wavered. "To impress upon us what the loss of the soul through mortal sin meant, my father would light a match, grab our hands, and hold them briefly over the flame, saying: `See how that feels; now imagine that for all eternity.'"

If you've seen any of the movies or read any of the novels about growing up Catholic in the fifties (for example, Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?) you've got the comic tone of this book. On one side is Holy Authority: the priest in his parish, Papa with his strap and matchbook at home, the stern nuns drilling students on the Baltimore Catechism, the Jesuit brothers--the "Pope's Marines"--teaching in high school, all surmounted by Pius XII in Rome. On the other side is Randy Youth: boys ripping off their neckties as soon as the Jesuits are out of sight, getting in fights and sneaking out for smokes and ogling the girls, always scheming to beat the rules without getting caught. "In my junior year, someone wrote on a lavatory wall a commonplace obscenity about our math teacher, Mr. Hohman," Buchanan says in setting up a typical scene at Washington's Gonzaga High, the legendary Jesuit-run school that he and all his brothers attended:

When word got back to the headmaster's office, he broke off from his work, went over to the lavatory, inspected the wall personally--and called an emergency assembly of the entire school. "A disgusting phrase has been written about a Jesuit brother who has given his life to Christ," Father Troy said, his mouth grim, his eyes staring coldly out into the silent auditorium through the wire-rimmed glasses he always wore. He wanted to know who did it, so that the student's immediate expulsion would set an example for the school. No one said a word. The auditorium was like a tomb.

"What would decent people think of Gonzaga," Father Troy asked, "if they knew such things happened here?" He paused for effect. "What would become of Gonzaga's reputation, if the gentleman from Formal Wear, who had just come through the school measuring the juniors for their tuxedos for prom night, had chanced upon this disgusting phrase?" At that, the entire auditorium literally exploded--in laughter. It was not in disrespect of "Billy" Troy but in derision of the lascivious reprobate from Formal Wear, whose ribald comments to every junior being measured for a summer tuxedo were a standing joke throughout the school.

Buchanan tells us, numerous times, that he was an excellent student--first in his class at Gonzaga--but it appears that in other ways he was completely one of the guys. He is strangely evasive about the details of many teenage hijinks and portrays himself as having never thrown the first punch or really been in the wrong; it's as if he's still trying to talk his way out of a jam with the irate headmaster. (The few times that Buchanan tries to say he was wrong about something he practically gags on the words. When lamenting what the Church has lost by abandoning its old traditions for new ones, like the folk mass, he says: "And there are no few pangs of personal regret that when much of this was being thrown out like so much old furniture during the 1960s, some of us, who should have been there, were AWOL at the time." These "apologies" are the only mealy-mouthed sentences Buchanan is capable of writing.) But even without the juicy details the overall picture comes through. Buchanan says that his father had to come to jail to bail him out more often than...