WHY THE 'POST' IS AFTER BUCHANAN'S SCALP

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000200910001-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 19, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: May 11, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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HUMAN EVEI\' S
11 May 1985
Why the `Post' I
After Buchanan's Scalp
The Washington Post, perhaps the of Central America. He managed this
most powerful liberal journal in the not by inserting fiery passages and
country, whose articles are picked up right-wing buzzwords, but merely by
worldwide, is obviously frightened. passing the speech writer's texts on to
Executive Editor Ben Bradlee and Co. Reagan without bowdlerizing them, as
"
have been having nightmares, and his predecessors had done.
what's haunting them these days is a
feisty, strong-willed conservative, Pat-
rick J. Buchanan.
The Post has been in a state of near-
panic ever since Buchanan came on
board in early February as director of
communications under White House
Chief of Staff Donald Regan. Hor-
rified, it has meticulously detailed his
ascendancy, and now considers him the
second most powerful White House
adviser.
What especially rattles Bradlee's
Post is that Buchanan being Buch-
anan -is always battling to let
Reagan be Reagan. Unlike the Ba-
ker-Deaver team of the first term,
Buchanan is someone who eagerly
yearns to have Ronald Reagan im-
plement the conservative agenda,
and every hint that he's accruing
influence and clout sends cold
shivers down the backs of the Post's
major editors.
Buchanan's power is already con-
siderable. He heads the speech-writing
team, and managed to persuade Regan
to let Linda Chavez, a fighting neocon-
servative, succeed Faith Whittlesey as
director of the public liaison office.
Former staff director of the U.S. Civil
Rights Commission, Chavez has more
than 30-odd slots under her and reports
directly to Buchanan. Moreover, he is
not only on very good terms with
Regan, but he frequently gets to see the
President himself, who listens closely
whenever Buchanan speaks.
"In the weeks after he got to the
White House," the well-informed Fred
Barnes writes in The New Republic,
"Buchanan had a string of triumphs.
He urged Reagan to veto a farm bailout
bill, which Reagan did. He said Reagan
should ignore the well-publicized shov-
ing match involving a Korean dissident,
and Reagan did that. He made sure that
Reagan's speeches had a tougher con-
servative edge, especially on the subject
It was Buchanan, for instance, who
eagerly blessed the speech in which the
President - Clint Eastwood style -
threatened Congress to "matte my
day" by trying to force a tax hike.
Bradlee's Post can't abide such bald
conservatism. It wants "detente," the
death of "Star Wars," higher taxes, an
end of aid to the Contras, etc. And it
now appears to be mobilizing an array
of Post hit-men to try to destroy the
President's most powerful conservative
chess piece.
Bradlee's Post has trotted out Lou
Cannon, Reagan's unofficial biographer,
to be the chief enforcer against Buch-
anan, but other Post reporters are also
on the prowl. Not a week seems to have
gone by when Cannon hasn't shelled the
President's communications director
several times with heavy artillery fire.
Despite his nominal prestige, how-
ever, Cannon has no credibility as an
impartial observer, long having
discarded any semblance of objectivity.
Even before Buchanan had had a
chance to settle in his job, Cannon was
using him for target practice. The word
is out, moreover, that he has vowed to
"get" Buchanan, not only because he
finds his ideology odious but because
Buchanan has had the temerity not to
return Cannon's phone calls. (Imagine
that! Not returning the phone calls of a
prominent Post hatchetman who has
C'~1~JT7NW
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vowed to do you in. Tut, tut, Pat, you should go
to the gallows quietly.)
David Hoffman, a fellow Post reporter, inciden-
tally, has acknowledged to others that part of Can-
non's ire stems from Buchanan's failure to return
his calls.
To force Buchanan to knuckle under to the Post,
Cannon is not above misrepresenting the facts. The
April 27 Post carried a front-page Cannon story
with the headline: "Buchanan Seen Hurting Presi-
dent."
Astonishingly, Cannon then tried, without pre-
cisely saying so, to pin the loss of aid to the Con-
tras-which failed in the House by a two-vote
margin-on Buchanan, oven though the White
House flatly rejected Buchanan's strategy! Blam-
ing Buchanan for this defeat would seem to take
quite a bit of ingenuity, and although Cannon
wasn't up to it, he gave it his best shot.
In truth, many political experts believe that
Buchanan's key argument to the White House -
that the President could secure a victory only by
going on national television - was right on target,
and would have provided the President more than
the necessary margin of votes to win in the House.
Nevertheless, Cannon, obviously obtaining
leaks from aides to National Security Adviser
Robert McFarlane (who opposed the TV speech),
suggested that Buchanan's combative advice was
proving damaging to the President's Latin Amer-
ican policy.
Buchanan's recommended strategy, Cannon
wrote derisively, put him into direct conflict with
McFarlane. "First," said Cannon, "Buchanan
pushed for a nationally televised speech on the
issue last Sunday. When this approach was rejected
because Senate Majority Leader Robert J. Dole
[R.-Kan.] and other White House aides wanted a
speech on the budget instead, Buchanan kept
pushing.
"On Saturday, Reagan gave a radio speech on
the Nicaraguan issue, saying that failure to give aid
to the rebels would be 'a shameful surrender!' On
Sunday, Buchanan conferred with Central In-
telligence Agency Director William J. Casey and
;t her Administration conservatives, and wit en.
Jesse Helms [R.-N.C.], then tried unsuccessfully to
persuade Reagan to give a speech the following
night describing aid to the rebels as essential to
U.S. security."
In retrospect, that's precisely what Reagan
should have done. It was the failure to follow
Buchanan's strong recommendation that
resulted in the calamitous setback to the Con-
tra aid program, the key to the Administra-
tion's Central American policy.
As one State Department official lamented
about the President's failure to go on TV: "I can't
believe the President couldn't have persuaded at
least two of the 14 Republicans who opposed him
on the Michel resolution to switch with a major
Reagan speech, and it almost certainly would have
brought along a number of fence-sitting
Democrats as well." Furthermore, a victory on the
Contra vote would probably have paved the way
for additional presidential success on both foreign
and domestic issues. It surely would have helped to
drown out the media play on Bitburg.
In short, conservatives, you've seen the pattern
before. The media lust to weigh in heavily against
any conservative that gets close to the Presi-
dent-Ed Meese, Richard Allen, Jeane Kirkpat-
rick, etc.-and now they've set their sights on
Buchanan, the Post in particular. Will the media
bag him?
Probably not. Buchanan is tough and shrewd,
and he showed his mettle when he singlehandedly
took on the Senate Watergate panel more than a
decade ago and made monkeys out of his inqui-
sitors. Nevertheless, if Bradlee's vengeful Post
fails to get him, it won't be for lack of trying.
Meanwhile, don't be alarmed or distressed when
you see Buchanan under fire in the Post. You can
immediately assume it is an attack launched in
spite and wholly lacking in integrity. And you can
also assume that Buchanan wouldn't be under such
an assault unless he were doing something right.
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