[BRIGADE] Pat's New Book!

Published: Tue, 07/08/14

Dear Brigade, today is the day - Pats new book is finally available!

Outstanding reviews are already coming in and an excerpt of the first chapter in online for you to read - see below.

Here's our link to use for Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553418637/forthecause-20

See more on the book and additional retailers on our site at: http://www.buchanan.org

As always, For the Cause - Linda

PS - When you visit our site sign up for Pats Twitter. Pat is Tweeting and we are also posting media events on Twitter. Also check his FaceBook page where you can comment on his columns and "Like" Pat!

Ben Stein on Buchanan's New Book, The Greatest Comeback

By Ben Stein at The American Spectator

I spent a good chunk of the day reading Pat Buchanan's amazingly fine new book, The Greatest Comeback, on his association with Richard Nixon from late 1965 until Nixon's amazing victory in the '68 election for President. The book is a masterpiece. Others, better at reviewing than I am, will review this book. I will just say I was entranced, astonished, overwhelmed by Pat's observations, his insights, his poetry, the scope of his vision. He is not afraid to be politically incorrect. He is overwhelmingly pro-RN, of course, but compelled to point out logical and historical mistakes in Nixon's worldview. Above all, The Greatest Comeback is the ultimate insider's guide to how the great game of presidential politics is played. I cannot think of a better way to spend your time or your book-buying dollar than on this book. The section on Nixon and Pat's trip to Africa in 1967 and what happened to the leaders they met on that trip will make you gasp.

All in all, for anyone interested in 20th century politics and how the human spirit works within the political process, and the most fascinating man ever to sit in the Oval Office, The Greatest Comeback is must reading. Chapter and verse to follow from the reviewers... my brain reeled at how much Pat Buchanan knows, how funny he is, and how well he writes...

Read more at The American Spectator

Nixon's the One

Book Review by Scott McConnell at The American Conservative

I've spent the day reading Pat Buchanan's The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority --his history cum memoir of Richard Nixon's capture of the 1968 Republican nomination, and then the presidency. Buchanan was a key part of this. Hired as a 27-year-old who had spent three years writing newspaper editorials for the St. Louis Globe Democrat, Buchanan joined Nixon's staff in 1966. He traveled with the candidate, handled much of his correspondence, wrote or drafted articles in his name, and wrote Nixon countless strategy memos, which came back with Nixon's handwritten comments. This trove of historical documents was kept by Buchanan in several filing cabinets in his home, and after literally decades of entreaties by his agent Fredrica Friedman, Buchanan produced this book. It's probably my favorite of Buchanan's books, rich in Republican Party and journalistic gossip, full of insight into Nixon, and at the same time deeply personal.

At 27, a time when many young people then or now are in school or trying to figure out what they might really want to do , Buchanan had already compiled a formidable resume as right-wing newspaper editorialist; then in a deftly executed maneuver of ambition and nerve, arranged to meet Nixon and suggest himself for a get-on-the-bus-early campaign role. (He had actually met the former vice president a decade earlier, as a caddy at Burning Tree--a fact which he conveyed to Nixon in that first professional meeting. )

Buchanan was valuable to Nixon in great part as a representative of the New Right, that part of the GOP which had nominated Goldwater two years earlier. He and Nixon saw eye to eye that the next Republican candidate would have to represent the right, but probably not be of it. There was then at least the potential of Ronald Reagan looming, and a subtext of the book is the worry that the charismatic Reagan would somehow get untracked, and a deadlocked convention would be stampeded into going for the movie star governor. Nixon, by contrast, had no political sex appeal: he was deeply intelligent, hard working, fascinated by the issues and personalities of politics. (He seemed bored by the practice of law, and in one unguarded moment told Buchanan that if he had to practice law for the rest of his life he would be "mentally dead in two years and physically dead in four.")

But one major hurdle to overcome was the sense that Nixon....

The Greatest Comeback by Patrick J. Buchanan - Book Excerpt

Excerpt by Crown Publishing Group on Scribd.com

INTRODUCTION

The Resurrection of Richard Nixon

Barring a miracle his political career ended last week.
--Time on Nixon (November 16, 1962)

Buchanan, was that you throwing the eggs?" were the ﬁrst words I heard from the 37th President of the United States.

His limousine rolling up Pennsylvania Avenue after his inaugural had been showered with debris. As my future wife, Shelley, and I were entering the reviewing stand for the inaugural parade, the Secret Service directed us to step off the planks onto the muddy White House lawn. The President was right behind us. As he passed by, Richard Nixon looked over, grinned broadly, and made the crack about the eggs.

It was a sign of the times and the hostile city in which he had taken up residence. He had won with 43 percent of the vote. A shift of 112,000 votes from Nixon to Vice President Humphrey in California would have left him with 261 electoral votes, nine short, and thrown the election into a House of Representatives controlled by the Democratic Party. In the ﬁnal ﬁve weeks, Humphrey had closed a 15-point gap and almost put himself into the history books along-side Truman--and Nixon alongside Dewey. But the question that puzzled friend and enemy alike that January morning in 1969 was: How did he get here?

In The Making of the President 1968, Theodore H. White, chronicler of presidential campaigns, begins with a passage from Dickens's A Christmas Carol: "Marley was dead to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker and the chief mourner. . . . Old Marley was dead as a door-nail."

That Richard Nixon would be delivering his inaugural address from the East Front of the Capitol on January 20, 1969, would have been mind-boggling a few years before. This is not to say that Nixon was not a man of broad knowledge, high intellectual capacity, or consummate political skill. He had been seen in the 1950s as the likely successor to Dwight Eisenhower. As vice president, he had traveled the world, comported himself with dignity during Ike's illnesses, survived a mob attack in Caracas, and come off well in his Kitchen Debate with Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev. In 1960, no one had challenged him for the Republican nomination.

Yet Nixon had lost. While the election was among the closest in U.S. history, and there was the aroma of vote fraud in Texas and Chicago, Nixon was seen as a loser....