Blood and Politics (50 page)

To Buchanan’s civic opponents the election results felt much like David Duke’s initial win in District 81. Once again a significant percentage of (white) people had voted for a candidate whose most salient credentials were as an unabashed bigot. The former Reagan White House insider succeeded so well at co-opting Duke, that Wilmot Robertson’s
Instauration
magazine declared the intrepid columnist a “clean” version of the erstwhile cow pasture cross burner.
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Duke’s own run through the Republican primaries was short. In Georgia he managed to meet the qualifications, but party officials removed him from the ballot anyway. He made one quick foray into South Florida at the invitation of some Cuban right-wingers, but party officials there also denied him ballot status.
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In the process, his campaign machinery broke down. By February 1992, Duke’s campaign had only fifty-eight thousand dollars in the bank, and fifty thousand of that was a carryover from the governor’s race. His top managers dropped out, apparently
fatigued after three years of constant campaigning. And Duke never established any strong state organizations outside Louisiana, with the exception of South Carolina. There William Carter, a chiropractor and former Populist Party state chair, raised money and brought Duke in to speak and shake hands. Despite spending more time in the Palmetto State than either George Bush or Pat Buchanan, Duke received only 7 percent of the vote—10,553 ballots on primary day. His totals were equally squalid elsewhere. In both Texas and Tennessee he got 3 percent. Mississippi was his best state, at 11 percent, and 16,426 votes. Even at home in Louisiana he polled only 9 percent—11,955 votes—and did not carry his home parish. By April David Duke had officially quit the race.
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Carto’s
Spotlight
quickly analyzed Duke’s failed primary bid. His core supporters were weary, it said, “afraid he was becoming a professional office-seeker.” Most important, however,
The Spotlight
pointed to the real nerve center of white nationalism in 1992, Pat Buchanan. “Any hope Duke had of mounting an effective challenge to George Bush ended with the entrance of Buchanan into the Republican race.”
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When Duke finally withdrew from the race, he endorsed Pat Buchanan; an endorsement Buchanan formally ignored.

Buchanan proved a formidable insurgent in the Old Confederacy on Super Tuesday, March 10. In Georgia he virtually repeated his New Hampshire performance with 36 percent of the vote, and in Florida he tapped a nerve at 32 percent. In both states party officials had kept David Duke off the ballot. Still, in Louisiana and Mississippi, Duke was listed, and Buchanan was forced to split their joined constituency. In Louisiana many of Duke’s key supporters, including his former campaign lieutenant Kenny Knight, voted for Buchanan.
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Buchanan won 27 percent of the Republican vote there. Duke pulled only 9 percent. In Mississippi, Buchanan received 17 percent to Duke’s 11 percent. In both states their combined totals approximated Buchanan’s New Hampshire percentage. Nevertheless, as the weeks turned into months, it became obvious that the president was winning majorities in every contest. Buchanan’s national support slipped into the low twenty percentages and then the teens. At the time Alabama voted on June 2, Buchanan won a miserable 8 percent in the state that once boasted the Confederacy’s capital.

In the Pacific Northwest, where the idea of a white republic had drawn many militants to live, Buchanan did poorly on primary day. Christian patriots of varying strands were noticeably active in the region, particularly in Oregon, certainly more so than in New Hampshire. Survivalists
had settled in the three states around the Aryan Nations camp in the Idaho Panhandle. Their inability to influence the Republican vote in the region evidenced the tactical gulf between mainstreamers, such as those in Louisiana, and the subculturalists billeted away in the mountains. The adjutant then answering the phone at Richard Butler’s camp, for example, declared Buchanan “basically anti-Christ.”
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In Oregon, Buchanan garnered 19 percent of the Republican vote, in Washington State only 10 percent, and in Idaho 13 percent. Even if all the Christian patriots had been concentrated in one state, it is unlikely that they would have much influenced the totals. For many Aryans, registering to vote was akin to endorsing the Beast system.

By the end of the primaries Buchanan had collected 2,988,380 votes in thirty-four states and Washington, D.C. And during the campaign year he had raised a total of $14,521,899. More than $7 million of the total was from individual contributions, most of that in relatively small amounts. The other half came from Federal Election Commission matching funds. Both the vote totals and contribution amounts dwarfed anything David Duke could have hoped to muster. The financial numbers unequivocally demonstrated that Buchanan had established an independent fund-raising base within the Republican Party. But numbers alone can’t convey the complexity of his run through the primaries.

In addition to his more widely reported opposition to abortion rights, Buchanan had courted Duke’s constituency, touted issues such as white majority dispossession, and received endorsements from throughout the movement. “Buchanan is saying—practically to a word—what
The Spotlight
has been saying on the big issues for many years,” Carto’s tabloid opined.
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At points Buchanan’s relationship to explicit movement operations such as Liberty Lobby seemed a bit like the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart’s flirtations with virtue. Sometimes his association with potentially embarrassing personalities remained undetected. Such was the case with Boyd Cathey, who floated in the Holocaust denial etherworld, but was more firmly planted among a small band of neo-Confederate intellectuals.
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Cathey volunteered as Buchanan’s official North Carolina state campaign chairman, but his vote-mobilizing skills were unremarkable. In that state’s primary, Buchanan received 55,420 votes, or about 20 percent of the Republican total. At the time, Cathey also served on the Institute for Historical Review’s editorial advisory board and as a senior editor at
Southern Partisan
, a glossy quarterly magazine dedicated to Confederate honor in the history of the War Between the States. The magazine declared the television commentator cum presidential aspirant “the current leader of the conservative movement in America.”
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Cathey and
Southern Partisan
were not exactly rewriting the history of the Civil War; they were simply keeping alive the Confederate historical view that had dominated (white) historiography for decades, until the civil rights movement forced a reconsideration of its claims. And Cathey apparently preferred to obscure his exact relationship with the Institute for Historical Review. When interviewed, he claimed to have resigned from the advisory board in 1992. The way Cathey told it, a reporter might have reasonably concluded that his name was listed on the IHR’s board by accident.
¹⁶
Despite Cathey’s claims, a July 1989
IHR Newsletter
squib described him with familiarity and pride in his educational achievements. Cathey had received a master’s degree in history at the University of Virginia in 1971 and a doctorate from the Pontifical University of Navarra in Spain. He had also studied at the International Seminary of St. Pius X in Switzerland and taught at the St. Pius X Institute in Argentina. At home in his native North Carolina, Cathey worked in the archives of the state’s department of cultural resources. And he was still listed on the IHR’s advisory board during the years Buchanan ran for president.

If the connection between Buchanan’s North Carolina chairman and the Institute for Historical Review went unnoticed in the press, some of Buchanan’s other supporters did create minicontroversies. Consider the campaign’s New Jersey state volunteer coordinator, Joe D’Alessio, who also served as the New Jersey chairman of the Populist Party and temporarily embarrassed the candidate. An Associated Press reporter had heard D’Alessio publicly compare interracial marriages to mongrel animals. “If you have two purebred dogs and you mate them, what do you get? You get a mutt,” he had said.
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As a result, D’Alessio was forced to resign.
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Despite the snub of D’Alessio, the Populist Party’s enchantment with Buchanan overshadowed any parochial organizational concerns. And the party’s monthly newspaper didn’t mention its state chair’s slip from grace. In fact, one of the Populist Party’s eleven national committee members, John Justice, gave Buchanan a thousand dollars just five months after the incident.

John Justice was just one among four thousand donors who gave in excess of $250 to the campaign and fewer than a handful who were even remotely associated with the movement. John Toland, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author who had spoken at an IHR meet but was not otherwise active in movement circles, gave Buchanan $400. A reverend from Virginia who often carried water for Liberty Lobby gave $900. From Nebraska, a regular donor to Holocaust denial efforts gave $250. Samuel G. Dickson, the attorney from Georgia, gave $500.
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Dickson had supported Duke’s first bid for the presidency in 1987, but his contribution to Buchanan’s campaign, unlike D’Alessio’s, had no visible deleterious effect. And Ed Fields, who along with Dickson had sponsored the British führer John Tyndall’s 1991 American tour, lent his own dirtied hands to Buchanan. With the same energy that he had once used to laud Bob Mathews’s Order gang, Fields mailed Buchanan’s campaign materials to hundreds on the
Truth at Last
subscriber list. Bearing a February 24 postmark and containing a “Dear Friend” letter signed in blue ink by Pat Buchanan, Fields’s envelope was filled with brochures obviously intended to help in the primary.

Not all white supremacists supported the Republican insider. In one confrontation prior to the California primary, Pat Buchanan fared poorly at the hands of Tom Metzger, then still prominent among skinheads and other subculturalists. As part of Buchanan’s campaign against darkly hued, Spanish-speaking immigrants, he planned a photo opportunity on the Mexican border—not far from where Duke had created his own media story more than a dozen years before. Near a hole in the fence oft used as a crossing point, a small group of Buchanan’s advance men and supporters waited—along with the requisite television news cameras—for the candidate to appear and take appropriate verbal umbrage at those dashing across the border. The only problem was Metzger, who waited with great fanfare for Buchanan to appear. Where was the “great white hope”?, he sneered like a perfect villain in a street theater, “I want to talk with him.” When Buchanan did finally appear, he was forced to huddle in a small circle of supporters to avoid contact with Metzger. But the ornery Aryan worked his way into camera range nevertheless. “Pat,” he yelled as all the cameras swung away from the candidate and toward him, “what are we going to do about all those rich Republicans making millions off the wetbacks in the Imperial Valley?” As the cameras swung back and forth, Buchanan beat a hasty retreat after less than fifteen minutes of photoless opportunity. With the cameras all to himself, Metzger then staged his own press conference. If he were president, he argued volubly, he would station National Guard troops like a picket fence along the border with orders to “shoot to kill.” The immigration problem would be over in one night, he declared.
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Tom Metzger played footage from the border incident on his community access cable program,
Race and Reason
.
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In the middle of the primary season riots broke out in Los Angeles, affecting the campaigns of every Democrat and Republican, and Buchanan was not immune. Touched off by the verdict in a highly
charged trial of four white police officers, the riots had their roots in a case that had originated the year before. Police had kicked and clubbed an unarmed black motorist, Rodney King, fracturing his skull, breaking his leg, and smashing his teeth in an orgy of ganglike violence. Unbeknownst to the officers, an inadvertent witness videotaped the incident. In the days and months that followed, footage of the beating was played and replayed on television, further enraging a local population already angry over years of police misconduct and brutality.

As a result of the outrage, local authorities appointed an independent commission headed by Warren Christopher, President Jimmy Carter’s former deputy secretary of state, to investigate the Los Angeles Police Department. The commission’s official report found a “significant number of officers in the L.A.P.D. who routinely use excessive force.” It also examined digital messages transmitted prior to King’s beating, and it found a complete repertoire of racist, sexist, and homophobic banter across the police airwaves. “Batten down the hatches,” read one, “several thousand Zulus approaching from the North.” Another message was even more pointed: “I’m not happy until I’ve violated somebody’s civil rights and then put them in jail.” Additional insults were recorded in seven hundred different messages over a period of less than two hundred days.
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As the commission’s conclusions were debated in Los Angeles, a national discussion of police racism and brutality ensued. Local police departments found themselves under increased scrutiny, and President Bush’s Justice Department re-reviewed fifteen thousand complaints of misconduct.
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Although the department could have brought federal charges against the four officers under a 120-year-old civil rights statute first passed to curb Klan-style violence, it ceded prosecution to the state. The defendants were granted a change of venue to Simi Valley, California, a predominantly white suburban enclave of homeowners, quite unlike the multiracial neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Their attorneys succeeded at shifting the blame from the police to the victim. Prosecutors failed to pursue vigorously any racial animus underlying the incident. The Simi Valley jury found the officers innocent.