CAMPAIGN '96: THE MAKING OF BUCHANAN

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At the dinner table, Pop preached an anticommunism that was as fervent as his Catholicism. He was an intimidating, authoritarian figure who revered Senator Joseph McCarthy and Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. The elder Buchanan proudly reminded his brood that they were the descendants of Mississippi Confederates who fought to save Old Dixie. Not for the Buchanans the Leave It to Beaver homilies of backyard-barbecue morality. Pop fostered a sense of clannishness, of us-against-them resentment that made his children ever vigilant. Pat attended Mass each day, prayed every night and made the sign of the Cross before basketball free throws. He studied hard and played hard and probably got into at least one fistfight a week. "I loved those years," Buchanan wrote in his 1988 autobiography. "Nothing since has matched the singular sweetness of their memory."

Pat seemed to fight for the sake of fighting. During his senior year at Georgetown University, Buchanan was escorting a date home and picked a tussle with two cops. "I stuck a size 10 1/2 cordovan where I thought it might do him some good," Buchanan writes. In addition to receiving a broken wrist, he was booted out of school, his scholarship was revoked, and only a sharp criminal lawyer got him off with a misdemeanor. Pop Buchanan went to the Jesuits at Georgetown and pleaded to make his son's suspension temporary, and they agreed. Pat eventually graduated cum laude with a degree in English and philosophy, and won a fellowship to the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, where he became familiar with the elite media he was later to criticize.

He found that journalism suited him--he could pick fights in print and not with his fists. He became an editorial writer on the Midwest's most conservative paper, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, writing blood-and-guts editorials in favor of Barry Goldwater and against the Great Society, decrying communism and the Red Menace. He pictured himself as a young version of the right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler--"standing flat on his feet, swinging for the belly," as he wrote home at the time.

In 1965 Buchanan attended a party for Richard Nixon given by a Globe cartoonist; after fortifying himself with several Scotches, he collared Nixon and reminded the former Vice President that he had once caddied for him at Maryland's Burning Tree Country Club. (As Buchanan recalls in his memoirs, "The whole time out, I stayed close to the Vice President. When he relieved himself in the bushes, I stepped up alongside and did the same, even though we caddies were supposed to go off separately or wait until we got back to the bench area.") A month later Buchanan was newly installed as Nixon's young factotum, writing speeches, preparing briefing books, supervising the In box, all in preparation for Nixon's presidential run two years later. Nixon became a political father to Buchanan, manipulative rather than autocratic, shrewd rather than certain, pragmatic rather than ideological. When asked by reporters in New Hampshire last week whether he was electable, Buchanan found solace in his old mentor. "Nixon and I used to talk," Buchanan recalled. "The argument was that Nixon was unelectable. He said to me, 'We will refute the naysayers by winning.'" That is Pat's logic as well.