Making It Us Vs. Them

At first he kept an uncharacteristically low profile, quietly seething over / the press and congressional reaction to Iranscam. But eventually and probably inevitably, Patrick Buchanan, the White House's bombastic director of communications, could contain himself no longer. Having served Nixon during the dark days of Watergate, he feels he knows how best to handle the current scandal. "These crises have a certain rhythm," says the old pro. "First it's a news story, then a policy controversy, then an investigation -- and then it turns into a political war. When it goes political, you've got to go into it full tilt."

The first salvo was a Washington Post op-ed piece condemning Republicans for abandoning the President who "brought us back from Watergate," and praising Oliver North. If he broke the law, Buchanan said, it was comparable to such illegal but noble acts as running escaped slaves up the Underground Railroad.

The article had been written without White House clearance. Buchanan waited until the middle of the Redskins-Giants game on Sunday before calling Chief of Staff Don Regan's most youthful aide, Thomas Dawson. Instead of allowing Regan's "mice" to read and pick apart the piece, he simply informed Dawson of what it said. White House Aide Dennis Thomas later griped, "It was like notifying somebody that a guy was out of the plane but before he hit the ground. There wasn't much we could do."

On Monday Buchanan attended the President's weekly policy lunch. Usually Buchanan tries to get there early so he can grab the seat right across from Reagan, the better to exchange some banter and eye contact. But this time he was late and had to sit at the end. "I wasn't happy about that because I wanted to get his reaction." The article did not come up, but Reagan showed he was in tune with the hard-nosed approach. He claimed that he was personally responsible for breaking the news of the secret dealings, quipping, "I ought to get the Pulitzer Prize."

Buchanan took that as a cue to continue his crusade. In a TV interview he elaborated on the President's joke and attributed it to "one guy at the White House." Said Buchanan: "Ronald Reagan and Ed Meese are the Woodward and Bernstein of this. They ought to get the Pulitzer Prize." At a Miami rally of some 3,000 Cuban Americans that night, he heated up his rhetoric. "If Colonel North ripped off the Ayatullah and took $30 million and gave it to the contras," he declared, "then God bless Colonel North."

Back at the White House on Tuesday, he ran into Don Regan, who advised, "You've got to give him some distance." But in his appearances on four networks over the next two days, Buchanan cut it pretty close: when asked if he was speaking for Reagan, Buchanan would answer that he "had reason to believe that the President approved of what I was doing."

When challenged by reporters at a Friday lunch about lionizing North, he shot back, "Look, friend, this country was founded by moral men in an act of treason against the Crown." He also issued his most explicit threat yet against Reagan's more outspoken Republican critics, saying they "can't be exempt from some type of political retribution." In part because of his pugnacious manner, Buchanan, who harbors presidential ambitions, lost out in his bid to become the new U.S. Ambassador to NATO. "I think I flunked my orals at the Department of State," he said last week. Who flunked him? "It was probably unanimous over there, but my guess is it was the Secretary of State."