The Adventures of Schuyler Colfax

Atlanta, GA

February 8, 2023

“America is becoming again a house divided against itself. In the savagery of our politics we imitate the Third Republic; in our social and cultural life, we begin to resemble Weimar.”

– Pat Buchanan, Right from the Beginning (1988)

I awoke in the middle of the night, on the floor, in a chilly room surrounded by several people I hardly knew. I’d met them the previous morning, after coming off a red eye flight from San Francisco into New Hampshire. 

From the plane I descended rickety stairs onto the frozen tarmac. Carrying my small duffle under light snow, I walked thru the airport, found a taxi, and made my way to a makeshift campaign headquarters the middle of Manchester.

Around the room at ramshackle desks, people shuffled paper and dialed the phones. I’d decided only a few weeks earlier to make this trip, and had no idea who I was trying to find. 

Before I figured it out, someone found me. A young man emerged from a back office and met me by the door.

“Can I help you?”

“I think I’m here to help you,” I replied.

I explained I was with the Contra Costa Young Republicans in the San Francisco Bay Area, and had come to New Hampshire for the impending primary. 

“There are Republicans in the San Francisco Bay Area?”, came the predictable response. 

In the early 90s, there actually were…albeit in limited quantity and of milquetoast tendencies. I may have been the only one supporting Pat Buchanan. 

I’d decided a few weeks earlier too travel to Manchester. The primary was three days away. Wresting the nomination from an Establishment incumbent was obviously a long shot. 

But after the betrayal of the prior three years, allowing President Bush to waltz unchallenged thru the primaries was a prospect Pat Buchanan couldn’t abide.

He announced his candidacy a couple months earlier. When he did, I recalled the first chapter of his wonderful biography. 

Right from the Beginning opens with a gathering of confidantes encouraging Buchanan to seek the 1988 presidential nomination. Ronald Reagan was retiring, and the Republican race was wide open. 

That year, Pat thought better of it, and deferred to the Vice President. But after an administration fraught with reckless invasions, foreign misadventures, increased regulations, and rising taxes, Pat Buchanan couldn’t sit idle.

He rarely could. A rambunctious youth who grew up combative and Catholic in post-war Washington, he saw that city change from a sleepy Southern town into the imperial capital of a post-modern West.

Reading his reminiscences, it’s obvious Pat loved post-war America. And he adored the pre-conciliar Church. Like Buchanan, my ancestry is Irish Catholic. But between his adolescence and mine, the world changed.

When I was raised in the 1970s, the Faith had…to say the least…begun to fade. All my grandparents remained faithful Catholics, but my parents had fallen away. They by no means ever discouraged religion or steered me from the Church. My mother had me baptized as a baby and sent me to a Catholic school. But religious practice wasn’t a priority. 

I went to college with no concern for Catholicism. Aside from periodic Easters or the occasional Christmas, I never attended Mass. It’s not that I avoided it; it just never crossed my mind. I’d drifted from shore and was lost at sea. I just didn’t know it.

Buchanan’s book woke me up, and brought me back. When I graduated from Georgia Tech, I moved to Sacramento. A co-worker introduced me to conservative writers, which led me to Pat Buchanan. 

His Catholicism captivated me as much as his conservatism. In his biography, Pat described growing up not in a “neighborhood” or a “school district”…but in a parish.

Pat analogized the pontificate of Pius XII to the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. For American Catholics of those generations, these men were the only leaders they’d ever known. When Pius died, as Pat put it, the Second Vatican Council was but a glint in Giuseppe Roncalli’s eye. 

I’d received First Communion as a kid, but had never been Confirmed. Within a year of reading Buchanan’s book, I was. 

Remembering his admiration for the Tridentine Mass, a year or so later I attended a “one-off” version that was somehow permitted at St Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco. I was mesmerized. I’d found what I was after, and have sought it ever since. 

It’s not an overstatement to say that were it not for Pat Buchanan, I’d not be a practicing Catholic. And if I hadn’t been, my wife (a Russian immigrant from Soviet Ukraine who later converted with me as her sponsor) and two sons likely wouldn’t be either. I owe Pat Buchanan much more than a political debt.

Like most of Pat’s writing, Right from the Beginning is an informative read, but also a fun one. That book began to crystallize my thinking. 

But more important, it caused me to think…and taught me to. It helped me appreciate men who understand history, value tradition, and cherish ideas.

For more than three decades, Pat Buchanan has been an ideological mentor. Not because I agree with everything he says (I don’t), but because what he believes is based on sound reasoning and philosophical foundations. And he’s not ashamed to say what they are.

Unlike most modern politicians and pundits, Buchanan has deep respect for western civilization, ancestral wisdom, and religious faith. And he communicates unpopular opinion with uncompromising clarity and candid conviction.

Then again, much of what Pat Buchanan espoused was not so much unpopular as it was impermissible. 

Many Americans thought it. Few had the guts to say it. Using prose that was pithy and punchy, he was a reliable conveyor of what most people believed…but were afraid to say. 

He regularly herded sacred cows into his rhetorical abattoir. If something was obviously dysfunctional, degrading, or destructive, he said so, regardless the opinions of secular censors.

Pat had no problem unequivocally denouncing every abortion, promoting traditional marriage (i.e., marriage), opposing unrestricted immigration, and denouncing Wilsonian wars that sacrificed American interests on the heretical altar of an imperial elite. 

In Right From the Beginning he recounted dining in Japan and that the atomic bomb Truman dropped would’ve incinerated his waitress. In his estimation, there was no defense for such an atrocity.

One of Pat’s best books was Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. In it, he not only questioned the wisdom of a conflict we’ve been conditioned to revere, but castigated a prime minister we’re expected to worship. No one who reads that book with good faith and an open mind can conclude the standard interpretation of World War II is inarguably obvious.

Ten years earlier, in A Republic, Not an Empire, Buchanan reminded Americans of their remarkable heritage, lamented how it had been abandoned, and warned of dangers that awaited if it weren’t reclaimed. 

Needless to say, he wasn’t heeded. Two years later, the Twin Towers came down. Within five, American troops were in Baghdad and Bagram. To pay for such malfeasance, the printing press ran hot. An exorbitant debt of “only” $6T at the turn of the century is over $31T now. And the United States are being torn at the seams.

As always, Pat Buchanan told us so. 

When I walked into his campaign headquarters, I was told to meet Buchanan at the campaign bus. Taken aback, I readily agreed. I’d expected to lick envelopes, dial phones, and attend a few rallies. But apparently, the staffers assumed anyone coming all the way from California must be important, and should be with the candidate.

For three days, I was. On the bus with Pat, his wife Shelley, and his campaign manager, we continually criss-crossed New Hampshire till the primary Tuesday night. When we finished a strong second, we felt like we’d won. The campaign would continue.

I followed Pat from New Hampshire to Georgia. I rode with him on “Asphalt One.” I heard everything he said as he traversed the state, and as he discussed what he’d say next. But Super Tuesday comprised too many states, and our upstart campaign couldn’t compete. I returned to California. Despite the result being a foregone conclusion, I worked for him there till the primary in June.

By then it was all over. But Pat didn’t stop. After the Rodney King riots that spring, he implored us “to take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.” Again, we didn’t. So here we are.

Few prognosticators were more prescient than Pat Buchanan. In one of the best speeches ever given at a national party convention, he acknowledged in 1992 the “culture war” the Left had launched. The address was cheered that night and well-received by millions who recognized the impending threat to American traditions. Only after a few days of media spin was rebranded as the “divisive” address we’re supposed to recall it as today.

For several decades and with accelerating frequency, the notion of “normal” has been under assault. Pat Buchanan has been at the ramparts, warning of the invasion that’s come from within. Last week, after sixty years standing sentry, Pat Buchanan sheathed his sword.

A voice that was initially raised at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat has silenced itself. For someone like Pat, that can’t be easy. But after all he’s done, he’s earned the respite.

For Richard Nixon he coined the term “silent majority”, and for the rest of us he encapsulated it. Even the pundits who pilloried Pat publicly loved him personally. He’s always funny, charming, witty, and informed. He has a knowledge of history, political sense, and a philosophical core.

That’s why I went to New Hampshire. I knew “right from the beginning” Pat was the real deal. When I stepped into that office, I had no place to stay. So they offered the floor of that empty apartment a few blocks away. That was fine. If Pat could do what he did, I’d do what I could and sleep where I must.

Right From the Beginning includes a chapter entitled “The Adventures of Schuyler Colfax”. It chronicles how during his mischievous college years, Buchanan adopted the name of Grant’s Vice President when he and his friends roamed DC searching for trouble.

After finishing the book, I somehow found Pat’s home address. I wrote him a note telling him how much I enjoyed the book, respected his work, and admired what he was doing. 

Within two weeks, an envelope arrived. It was from Pat Buchanan. He told me “that if you can keep the faith out there [in San Francisco] you can keep it anywhere.” And he thanked me for “the good letter.”

Then he signed it “S. Colfax.”

I appreciated the note, but am grateful for so much more.

JD