America Magazine interviews Pat Buchanan on Nixon, his new book, other things

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Because of Watergate, many Americans have come to caricature Richard Nixon as a criminal, but you worked with him personally in the White House at that time. What’s your assessment?

That’s simply false. There’s no question about it, when this stupid break-in occurred at the Watergate, that the five who were caught and one or two others—Liddy and Hunt—went high up into the Committee to Re-Elect the President. But they had nothing to do with the White House. We didn’t know this thing had happened or had been going on, except maybe John Dean, and so Nixon didn’t know about it. But what happened was that the Watergate people who were involved in it, the people who were complicit and responsible, came running to old friends in the White House and said “save us!” So they concocted the idea that the president’s top aides were conspiring to save the higher-ups and let other people take responsibility. They let people say things, and they said things or didn’t say things, that rendered them complicit in what was considered a conspiracy. But the original offense was indeed a third-rate burglary.

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What were President Nixon’s biggest mistakes?

His greatest mistake is that he didn’t burn the tapes as I told him to! But seriously, his biggest mistake was obviously in mishandling the Watergate break-in and not realizing that it was an infection that could kill him politically. That was certainly a mistake. It may not sit well with the American community, but he also told me later that he should have bombed North Vietnam three years earlier, back in ’69 rather than in ’72. That might have ended the war earlier and saved more American lives. I think that weighed upon him. There might have been a more permanent peace that could have averted what happened to the boat people in Saigon and to the Cambodians who went through the Cambodian holocaust of the Khmer Rouge. Those are hard things to have on your conscience.

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Your book does include a lot of personal anecdotes about your relationship with the president. Did your Catholic faith have any other influence on your work for President Nixon?

I think the Catholic faith is consistent with the kind of conservatism I believe in. You know, I’m a traditionalist, I’m a Latin mass Catholic and I hold to traditional views of responsibility. I’m not a libertarian in the sense that I think all these social programs should be abolished in any sense. I’m familiar with Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno and all of those things that influenced me in Catholic school. I went through the nuns and the Jesuits. I mean, I had eight years of nuns and never had any other sort of teacher in my grammar school, and eight years of Jesuits in high school and college. These were pre-Vatican II orders and you could not escape that influence. It’s a part of who you are.

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