Buchanan's last shot was heard round the world

In the final days of Richard Nixon's presidency, a White House aide fired the "smoking gun" that immediately forced Nixon from office, according to a new memoir.

In Nixon's White House Wars, the battles that made and broke a president and divided America forever (Crown 2017), Patrick J. Buchanan describes how he designed a plan that would eject Nixon right away, rather than have him cling to the White House through a protracted ordeal.

Buchanan, who calls himself "America's leading populist conservative," is a well-known press aide to Republican presidents who saw his own presidential aspirations dashed in 2000 after a weak showing. Buchanan has been a big fan of Donald Trump, who has picked up a number of Buchanan's populist pitches.

Buchanan tells of floating a White House trial balloon to have the House bypass impeachment hearings and send the matter straight to the Senate for trial, where it was hoped the Senate would find that though the accusations were serious, they were not serious enough for removal of Nixon. The longtime Nixon speechwriter was shamed by pro-Nixon newspapers and politicians that accused the aide of trying to cut and run, rather than defend the president.

Yet Buchanan, if he didn't know already, quickly discovered  that all was lost and designed a plan to push Nixon out with no further delay. He and Nixon assistant Steve Bull -- who had in his possession Nixon's calendar -- discovered that Nixon's credibility was facing irretrievable damage.

According to Buchanan:

On Aug. 4, 1974, the aide learned the content of a crucial tape recording, which Nixon had defiantly withheld from Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski. Worse, the president had told the nation he had no involvement with the Watergate affair while knowingly sitting on proof that he was deceiving the public.

Jaworski had subpoenaed 64 tapes but Jaworski had confidentially offered to settle for 18 -- among which was a tape of a Nixon conversation with right-hand man H.R. Haldeman recorded on June 23, 1972. That tape had been checked out by Nixon on May 6, 1974. After listening to it it, Nixon quickly spurned Jaworski's offer, refusing to release any tapes at issue. From then to August, the president had "continued to speak of his non-involvement in the Watergate coverup that seemed contradicted by the tape to which he had listened on May 6."

Nixon, writes Buchanan, "had discovered what had appeared to be a smoking gun, refused to surrender it, then continued to deny that any such gun existed."

Buchanan then cooked up a "two-track strategy." Release the "smoking gun" tape and either the firestorm forces the president out immediately or, by some miracle, he survives with the worst political damage behind him.

Nixon aide Ray Price bought the idea, as did other close Nixon advisers and -- somehow -- the deed was carried out and Nixon lost all support from Republicans in media and in Congress, as Buchanan had foreseen. Buchanan was then left with the unpleasant task of convincing Nixon's daughters, Tricia and Julie, that it was time to throw in the towel. Tricia, he says, wanted to fight on but Julie seemed to accept the decision.

Other observations:

Nixon had no mandate to win the war in Vietnam, but only to extricate the United States without loss of face, Buchanan at one point notes. Yet the young Buchanan was one of Nixon's most ardent hawks and guardian of arch-conservative causes. Buchanan observes that Nixon's "secret plan" to end the Vietnam war was very likely based on national security adviser Henry Kissinger's belief that one must be prepared to use great force to ensure good faith at the negotiating table. However, the North Vietnamese -- bolstered by fervent antiwar dissent -- didn't buckle, despite U.S. demonstrations of military might.

On the Cambodia incursion ordered by Nixon, Buchanan, whose health ruled out military service, says the action was justified because well-armed North Vietnamese forces were crossing into South Vietnam at will and inflicting nasty casualties on U.S. troops. Those forces were also undermining America's negotiating position. Here Buchanan shows a certain contempt for his unprincipled employer -- a theme running through his book -- when he chides Nixon for succumbing to domestic dissent and limiting what U.S. forces could do, thus vitiating the purpose of the action.

Nevertheless, Buchanan dedicates his book to Nixon with a quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby:

--"They're a rotten crowd," I shouted across the lawn. "Your'e worth the whole damn bunch put together."--

In fact, in 1969 Buchanan reached a personal crisis after his visit to Red China with Nixon and Kissinger, who opened the way to normal diplomatic relations with the communists. Realpolitik had taken the place of American moral leadership, helping to condone Mao's genocidal repressions -- and Buchanan decided to resign. But, after further consideration, he withdrew his resignation in order, as he says, to be a conservative voice from the inside.

The press aide then went on to shape the "silent majority" strategy that presaged Nixon's 1972 landslide. Critics concluded that "silent majority" was code for "white majority."

The campaign harshly attacked "forced busing" of white schoolchildren, Lyndon Johnson's social welfare programs and "radical liberals"  -- including Democratic candidate George McGovern -- who it was said cared nothing for peace with honor.

Such rhetoric and beliefs were, and still are, rather normal for conservatives, and it is certainly unfair to categorically brand conservatives as racists.

Yet, we learn that while serving President Gerald Ford, Buchanan, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, had sought to become ambassador to the apartheid regime of South Africa, on grounds that the white-dominated country had a strong economy and would make a natural Cold War ally. He said the same of Rhodesia, which, under the name Zimbabwe, went into an economic tailspin under the black dictator Robert Mugabe.

Buchanan also takes responsibility for youthful editorials highlighting materials that showed that communists, seeing their opportunity, had slipped into Martin Luther King's inner circle. The documents, he believes, came from J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.

Like Hoover before him, Buchanan grew up in Washington when it was still a segregated southern town. Unlike Hoover, Buchanan is a Catholic who attended a Jesuit high school.

Buchanan's first post-college job was as an editorial writer for the truculently conservative St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Though Missouri did not secede from the Union, it was a hotbed of Confederate sympathizers, and major regions of the state retained a strong southern orientation a century or more after the Civil War.

From there, Buchanan went on in 1966 to become a political adviser to Nixon during Nixon's wilderness period at a New York law firm.

The pugnacious press aide conducted warfare against the liberal media, such as The New York Times, often using the cooperative vice president, Spiro T. Agnew, to air views that resonated with the "silent majority" before Agnew was forced to resign on corruption charges. Ironically, on leaving Ford's White House, the New York Times News Service picked up Buchanan's new Globe-Democrat column. But, unlike another Nixon speechwriter, the late William Safire, Buchanan never became a New York Times columnist.