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Pat Buchanan

Pat Buchanan is making his second attempt to win the Republican nomination for president. His first bid in 1992 fell short, but he did put together a significant challenge to incumbent president George Bush, winning 37 percent of the vote for a second place finish in the New Hampshire primary. Buchanan also left his mark on the race by delivering a fiery “cultural war” speech at the Republican convention in Houston, which some Republicans say cost Bush the election.

Buchanan’s “cultural war” is the main message of his latest campaign. In his 1996 announcement speech he said: “In too many of our schools our children are being robbed of their innocence. Their minds are being poisoned against their Judeo-Christian heritage . . . against values of patriotism, family and country. Our children are being indoctrinated in . . . the propaganda of anti-Western ideology. I will use the bully pulpit of the presidency of the United States . . . to defend American traditions and the values of faith, family, and country.”

Buchanan has also made populist economics a central theme in his campaign, denouncing corporations for shipping American jobs overseas and for selling out the American economy to an alien global economy: “[T]oday, our birthright of sovereignty, purchased with the blood of patriots, is being traded away for foreign money, handed over to faceless foreign bureaucrats at places like the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the U.N.”

The Corporate Seat at Buchanan’s Table

At Ross Perot’s convention in August 1995, Buchanan highlighted his opposition to the corporate global economy, swearing that if he became president, “their new world comes crashing down.” Buchanan said he would repeal NAFTA and GATT and describes himself as an economic patriot, or “America firster.” He fiercely condemns Washington lobbyists and foreign agents, who cash in on their years of service in the government and become high-priced influence-peddlers. Some of his advisers, however, are engaged in the very practices Buchanan rails against.

Take Richard V. Allen, who sits on Buchanan’s campaign advisory committee and heads the Richard V. Allen Company. Allen’s company was incorporated in June 1982 to consult on international economic activity. Specifically, the company helps market products for U.S. companies doing business in Europe and Asia, and for European firms operating in Asia. Clients have included R.J. Reynolds and a group of Japanese banks, construction firms, and trading companies. Allen’s company has been registered as a foreign agent and, until 1991, Allen himself was registered as a foreign agent for the Board of Foreign Trade of the Republic of China. Department of Justice records show that Allen’s company billed the Republic of China up to $500,000 a year for lobbying officials in the executive branch and Congress. In 1986, Allen joined the board of directors of the Credit International Bank, which caters to international traders and foreign investors. The bank was on the verge of bankruptcy, and Allen is widely recognized as having used his international connections to save it. As Regardie’s magazine reported in 1990: “Credit International finally opened its doors in February 1989 with $14 million in capital, about 80 percent of which came from Asian investors, including two members of Forbes’ billionaire club. Allen, with his extensive ties in the Far East raised most of the money. Several board members credit him with saving the venture.”

Allen is former national security adviser for the Reagan While House. He resigned in 1981 when a scandal blew up around him involving gifts from a Japanese businessman. A Justice Department investigation cleared Allen of any wrongdoing. Allen originally worked in the Nixon White House as a member of the President’s Commission on International Trade and Investment Policy.

Buchanan’s deputy press secretary, K.B. Forbes, told the Center that it was incorrect to assume the past work of one person who is on Buchanan’s advisory committee detracted from Buchanan’s message, adding, “Buchanan is a man who says what he means and means what he says.” Forbes said that Allen brought a wealth of diversity and experience to the campaign, including an expertise on foreign policy. Allen is the resident expert on Korea and Asia at the Heritage Foundation.

Forbes also said that building a national campaign involves putting together a diverse coalition. “Sometimes our pro-life friends support free trade,” he said. Forbes added that Allen had not served as an adviser on international trade “in many years.” Allen’s company was officially registered as a foreign agent at the Department of Justice until June 1993 and advises international businesses on trade issues.

John G. Breen, another Buchanan advisory committee member, is the CEO of the Sherwin Williams Company, a building materials company. He also sits on the boards of directors of Goodyear, the tire and chemical company; Mead, the paper supplies company; and Parker-Hannifin, an aerospace equipment manufacturer. These three international companies are actively pro-NAFTA and GATT. Goodyear lobbied heavily for GATT because its top executives believe that it will broaden the company’s export market. Forty-two percent of Goodyear’s revenue comes from sales abroad. By 1996, Goodyear expects exports to Mexico to grow between $20 million and $75 million. The company also has major operations in Guatemala. Goodyear chairman Stanley C. Gaull adamantly supported GATT and helped form the Ohio Alliance for GATT Now with Procter and Gamble. The Mead Corporation hired the firm of Sidley & Austin, to lobby for GATT. Sidley & Austin is registered as a foreign agent with the Department of Justice. The Parker-Hannifin Corporation has operations in 31 countries, recently buying up European companies such as Telemecanique Electro-Pneumatic, Atlas, and PolyFlex. Parker-Hannifin saw NAFTA as a profitable move for the company’s international businesses and tripled American exports to Mexico to $40.6 billion.

When asked about the contradiction between his companies’ support of GATT and NAFTA and his position with the Buchanan campaign, Breen told the Center that he supported free trade, but not NAFTA. And he said that the news media have incorrectly made those words interchangeable. Breen said he met Buchanan at a fundraiser in Cleveland earlier this year and, “Pat asked me to be on the advisory panel. There have been three advisory panel meetings in McLean [Virginia], and I haven’t been able to attend any of them.”

Buchanan blames “corporate greed” and the excesses of corporate power for America’s economic insecurity. Buchanan has said that the Republican Party needs to, “shed the in-the-bed-with-big-business-image,” and stop making a “golden calf and sacrificing to the corporate bottom line.”

Buchanan, however, has corporate CEO Thomas Monaghan on his advisory committee. Monaghan is the CEO of Domino’s Pizza, the largest fast-food delivery chain in the country. Domino’s has also expanded internationally, with 117 stores in Japan and 119 in Mexico. Domino’s is currently being challenged in court by 11 franchises and a franchise association that claim the pizza chain is violating antitrust law. The suit says Domino’s charges five times the customary price for dough and necessary products and says the company has used its agreement with its subsidiaries in “an unreasonable manner” to hinder franchisees from buying at competitive prices. No antitrust violations have been proven at this time.

Another member of the corporate community advising Buchanan and lending his name to Buchanan’s advisory committee is anti-GATT, anti-NAFTA textile magnate Roger Milliken, a previous contributor to the Center. Milliken hosted a fundraiser for Pat Buchanan in February 1995 that raised at least $46,500 for the campaign. Milliken told the Center for Public Integrity that he “introduced” Buchanan to the manufacturing community in South Carolina during the candidate’s visit.

Buchanan has said, “In a Buchanan White House . . . corporate contributors will not sit at the head of the table.” Nonetheless, Milliken, a billionaire and the CEO of arguably the biggest textile corporation in America, seems to have Buchanan’s ear. Milliken told the Center, “I took Buchanan around to visit the plants in South Carolina and educated Pat on the textile industry.” Now, as part of his slump speech against the global economy, Buchanan talks about “the single mom in a textile plant in South Carolina who has been forced by investment bankers on Wall Street to compete with Asian workers.”

In fact, Buchanan’s relationship with Milliken isn’t unique. Milliken has a history of getting Republican politicians to hear him out. From 1985 to 1993, Roger Milliken and his brother donated $345,000 to Newt Gingrich’s GOPAC and in 1990 House Speaker Newt Gingrich broke with his longtime commitment to free trade and came out for textile import quotas, which would directly boost Milliken profits.

In light of Buchanan’s anti-multinational, America-first, populist message, it is worth noting that he holds stock worth several hundreds of thousands of dollars in several corporations with overseas operations, including GE, AT&T, Eastman Kodak, du Pont, Waste Management, Inc., and Microsoft. He also has stock in such foreign corporations as YPF Sociedad Anonima — Argentina’s largest gas and oil company — and China Light & Power.

Eight Lanes to the Right of the National Rifle Association and Other Cultural Conservatives

A centerpiece of the Buchanan campaign is traditional morality and Christian values. Buchanan once told a Christian Coalition conference, “Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free.” Taking a close look at Buchanan’s advisers reveals Buchanan’s appeal to the radical right.

Larry Pratt, Buchanan’s campaign co-chair, is the executive director of Gun Owners of America. The editor of The Houston Press told the Center that Gun Owners of America is “eight lanes to the right of the NRA.” Pratt co-founded Gun Owners in 1975 with California religious-right figure H.L. Richardson. The group claims to have 150,000 members. Pratt and Gun Owners of America have been called, “the most visible link between congressional politics and the far right.”

Pratt is credited by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that tracks racism, with
introducing the concept of militias to the right-wing underground. In 1992, Pratt was invited to speak at a meeting organized by Pete Peters, the leader or Christian Identity, a movement that supports violence to promote white supremacy. Pratt was also a regular guest on Peters’ public-access cable television show. The 1992 meeting, held in Estes Park, Colorado, was called in response to the Ruby Ridge, Idaho, shoot-out between the FBI and white separatist Randy Weaver. Other guests featured at the meeting were former Ku Klux Klan leader Louis Bream, Aryan Nations attorney Kirk Lyons, and Aryan Nations pastor Richard Butler. Aryan Nations is a white supremacist organization that organizes neo-Nazi skinheads. It was at this meeting that Pratt elaborated on the concept of militias, which he modeled after the Guatemalan civil defense patrols, the infamous death squads that fight against Guatemalan guerrillas. Pratt also outlined the militia model in his 1990 book, Armed People Victorious. In 1995, Pratt edited the book Safeguarding Liberty, The Constitution & Citizen Militias. 

Klanwatch analyst Mike Reynolds said that the meeting in Estes Park “was a serious meeting. This was the first time the leadership of the radical Right was receptive to Pratt’s idea of militias.”

Pratt has since spoken at several far-right meetings including a Christian Identity gathering in Branson, Missouri, held a few days after the Oklahoma city bombing. He has also spoken at the “Dallas Preparedness Expo 1995” alongside Mark Koernke of the militia movement, and right-wing guru Bo Gritz. Gritz, who ran as David Duke’s vice presidential candidacy in 1988, runs a private community in Idaho where he trains residents in gun use and teaches his followers about the evils of “homos,” feminists, and the “eight Jewish families who control the economy.”

At meetings like the Preparedness Expo, where Pratt spoke about gun ownership rights and recruits for Gun Owners of America, inflammatory literature is widely available, including The Turner Diaries, a racist and anti-Semitic novel that depicts the bombing of federal buildings. The popularity of The Turner Diaries among the militia movement was cited by the FBI as influential in last April’s Oklahoma City bombing.

Pratt told the Center that he attended these meetings but didn’t hold the views of everyone there. He said, “We don’t prioritize allies; we prioritize positions, and we’re willing to go anywhere and work with anyone for our issue.” Pratt said that he has worked in coalition with The Fund for a Feminist Majority and mused, “I have never been accused of being a feminist.” Pratt also said he helped to remove an anti-Semitic book dealer from the Dallas Preparedness Expo.

Pratt said that he went to the Christian Identity meeting in 1992 because there were local activists at the meeting who had been at Ruby Ridge, and he wanted to gather information on what happened there. At the time of the Ruby Ridge shootout, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported, “At a roadblock . . . on Ruby Creek Road, up to 100 neo-Nazis, skinheads, survivalists, tax protestors . . . and followers of the Christian Identity movement have gathered.”

Pratt’s connection to fringe movements is also financial. Gun Owners has made contributions to CAUSE, the law firm headed by Aryan Nations attorney Kirk Lyons. CAUSE is an acronym for a grouping of the only remaining pure white nations: Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Europe. Pratt said the donations to CAUSE went specifically for Lyons’ class-action suit against the federal government on behalf of the Waco Branch Davidians. Pratt said it was ironic for Lyons that some of the Branch Davidians were black.

Pratt pointed out that former attorney general and ultraliberal Ramsey Clark was also defending the Branch Davidians. Pratt did not know if Gun Owners had also made donations to Clark.

Pratt said that his name is used by Buchanan to mobilize “our specific constituency” and Gun Owners has given the Buchanan campaign access to its membership lists. The Buchanan campaign said campaign co-chairmen like Pratt, “serve as surrogate speakers for the campaign and help identify our constituency at a national level.”

Although the Buchanan campaign was helpful and forthcoming on several issues, it ultimately refused to address Pratt’s association with Aryan Nations, Bo Gritz, Christian Identity, and the militias. Buchanan spokesperson K.B. Forbes said that Pratt supports the Buchanan campaign because Buchanan’s views on the Second Amendment parallel Pratt’s.

Another controversial member of the campaign is the Reverend Douglas Wildmon. Wildmon is a Buchanan campaign adviser and the founder of American Family Association, a group formed in 1988 to organize against the movie The Last Temptation of Christ. Wildmon condemned the movie for being funded by “Jewish money.” Central activists in the Christian movement like James Dobson of Focus on the Family have publicly distanced themselves from Wildmon because of their view that he is anti-Semitic.

Buchanan’s association with radical conservatives is highlighted by his friendship with Samuel Francis, an informal adviser. Francis, who told the Center that he has influenced Buchanan’s thinking on a range of issues, has been a close friend of Buchanan’s since 1980.

Francis was recently asked to leave the editorial page at The Washington Times where he had been a staff columnist and an editorial writer. Editor in Chief Wesley Pruden reportedly believed Francis to be a racist. In one Washington Times column, Francis quoted the Bible to prove slavery and racism were not sins. Pruden eventually fired Francis when Pruden read a statement Francis had made at a conference in Atlanta. Francis said, “Whites must reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of racial consciousness as whites.” Similarly, in an obscure newsletter called American Renaissance, Francis condemned Martin Luther King Day as a transfer of power to “Afro-centrism and other anti-white cults.”

In Chronicles, a conservative journal, Francis wrote, “Immigration from countries and cultures that are incompatible with and indigestible to the Euro-American cultural core of the United States should be generally prohibited, current border controls should be rigorously enforced, illegal aliens already here should be rounded up and deported, and employers who hire them should be prosecuted and punished.” Buchanan says he would outlaw immigration for five years and build a wall on our nation’s southern border.

Francis isn’t the only controversial ex-Washington Times editorialist advising Buchanan. John Loflon, a paid Buchanan campaign consultant, was fired by The Washington Times six years ago because of his “one-note” Christian editorials. Lofton recently said, “What has happened to The Washington Times and its original mandate to be a kind of moral crusade? The Times has homosexuals and adulterers and fornicators.” Lofton also says he has proof that Times staffers are nudists and wife-abusers.

Advisers

Richard Allen is on the advisory committee. See Corporate Seat.

John G. Breen is on the advisory committee.  See Corporate Seat. 

Angela “Bay” Buchanan, Buchanan’s sister, is a longtime confidante and adviser. She is the campaign manager. Bay Buchanan was Reagan’s 1980 campaign treasurer and later treasurer of the United States. She was also executive vice chairman of Citizens for the Republic, a California-based PAC that had its origins in Reagan’s 1976 presidential race. The Federal Election Commission found that the PAC played an illegal role in financing Reagan’s 1980 victory.

W. Grover Coors is on Buchanan’s campaign advisory committee. Coors is heir to the Colorado-based brewery and vice president of ACX Technologies, a ceramic packaging company for computer chips. The company was spun out of a Coors electronic packaging company. Coors has lobbied the Commerce Department to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign computer electronic packaging

Mark DeMoss is a member of Buchanan’s advisory committee. DeMoss is the executive director of the Virginia-based DeMoss Group, a public relations firm that works exclusively with the evangelical community. DeMoss worked for the Reverend Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority for six years. DeMoss told the Center that he has a relationship with Pat and Bay Buchanan going back about five years. “There’s a certain circle,” he said, “that centers around certain constituency groups.” DeMoss said Buchanan asked him if “I would give my name to the committee, and I said yes.” He also said the campaign has talked to him several times about campaign issues, but, “I’d rather not say on what specific policy.” DeMoss said he is knowledgeable about the church-based constituency and that’s why the Buchanans want him aboard

Michael Farris, the president and founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association, which was founded in 1983, is another campaign co-chairman. He is a lawyer who represents Christians in “religious freedom” cases. Farris is the former legal counsel for Concerned Women of America, a Christian activist organization, and in the 1980s he was director of the Washington state chapter of the Moral Majority. Disdaining the central and bureaucratic authority of the national Moral Majority, Farris changed the name to the Bill of Rights Legal Committee and also established a splinter activist group called the American Coalition for Traditional Values. In 1992, Farris wrote and published Where Do I Draw The Line? , a handbook for Christian activists. Farris was an unsuccessful Republican candidate for Virginia lieutenant governor.

Thomas Fleming, the editor of arch-conservative Chronicles magazine, is an informal adviser to Buchanan on foreign policy. Fleming is a maverick intellectual who has held teaching posts at Chapel Hill University, Miami University, and Shaw University. He also advised the U.S. Department of Education. Fleming says he is proud of Buchanan’s transition from a Nixon-Reagan hawk to a critic of U.S. military intervention that isn’t based convincingly in U.S. interests. “Buchanan is against this notion of the U.S as a global rent-a-cop,” Fleming said “I’m proud that Pat held back on supporting intervention on behalf of the Catholic Croats in the war there.”

Samuel Francis is an informal adviser.  See Eight Lanes to the Right.

Terrence P. Jeffrey is the campaign’s policy director. Before working on the 1996 campaign, Jeffrey was the executive director of American Cause, an educational foundation set up in 1992 by Buchanan. Jeffrey also worked on Buchanan’s 1992 campaign as director of research. Prior to helping with Buchanan’s presidential aspirations, Jeffrey was an editorial writer with The Washington Times.

Rabbi Yahuda Levin is a campaign co-chairman and the president of Jews for Morality, an informal group of Orthodox Jewish Rabbis based in Brooklyn, New York.

John Lofton is an informal adviser. See Eight Lanes to the Right.

Roger Milliken is on the advisory committee. See Corporate Seal.

Thomas Monaghan is on the advisory committee. See Corporate Seal.

John “Jack” Nash is an informal adviser to the Buchanan campaign. He is a registered lobbyist for the Milliken Company. He told the Center that he speaks with Buchanan’s sister and campaign chairman, Bay Buchanan, regularly on all sorts of issues.

Larry Pratt is one of four campaign co-chairmen. See Eight Lanes to the Right.

Brian Robertson is a paid policy analyst. He has been a policy analyst with the Christian Coalition.

Rev. Donald E. Wildmon is a campaign co-chairman. See Eight Lanes to the Right.

CeCe Zenti has been a paid consultant and runs Zenti Communications, which is based in Askeney, Iowa. Zenti worked with Buchanan through the summer of 1995 — leading up to the straw poll — “putting Buchanan in touch with key supporters and identifying his constituency in Iowa.” She organized Buchanan’s campaign swing through Iowa farm country. “We had a hard time getting Pat to go out to campaign on the farms here,” Zenti told the Center. “He was scared the farmers disagreed with him about NAFTA and GATT.” Zenti said Buchanan did go out and meet farmers and even if the farmers disagreed with him, they certainly enjoyed talking with him. She also wrote press releases for Buchanan and helped shape his pro-life message. She worked for Reagan’s 1980 campaign and Iowa Senator Charles Grassley’s campaigns.

Campaign Staff

Campaign Chair: Bay Buchanan
Assistant Campaign Chair: Polly Gable
Campaign Manager: Terrence Jeffrey
Press Secretary: Greg Mueller
Communications Director: Carolyn Melby
Finance Director: Connie Mackey