Renouncing Buchanan Not Difficult

This is a question, addressed with urgency, to Sen. Bob Dole and Steve Forbes. They have only five days, at most, to answer.

Would you support Pat Buchanan if he wins the Republican nomination?

They will face each other next Thursday in the New York State primary. Because of Republican primary rules in New York, Buchanan will be on the ballot only in about 20 of 31 districts.

The winner gets 93 delegates to the nominating convention - a massive block. The question should be answered by Tuesday at the latest, to sink in before the primary.

Whether Buchanan wins the nomination, his voice will be heard during the campaign and after, right up to the next one.

New Yorkers, and all Americans, should know if Dole and Forbes are willing to say in public what I am convinced they believe - that Buchanan is not just another candidate, but a miasma exuding and spreading divisiveness and bigotry and that in the White House he would be a threat to American democracy. If they do not believe it, that would also be interesting to know.

The risk that has stopped Republican candidates from renouncing Buchanan, is that his supporters might not vote for them after he lost in San Diego.

For Forbes, the question is an opportunity to show what advertising has not: the kind of a man he is. So far he has played it too flat.

Forbes paid for that advertising from the fortune his father, Malcolm, left him. Isn’t he obligated to invest other heritages from Malcolm - candor, generosity of spirit, gutsiness?

Dole is the embodiment of Republicanism to most Americans. It will be hard to renounce a possible candidate of his party. But when political loyalty damages party and nation it becomes a Mafia blood oath.

The key to understanding Buchanan is that he has carried on a long public masquerade. This is often the sign of a disturbed personality. He presents himself as a straight shooter who believes in family and in law, order and stern punishment of criminals.

But his own character drives him to make exceptions for certain criminals - perverted serial killers who wiped out family upon family.

Consider Karl Linnas. The United States wanted to deport him because he had lied about his record to get into the country after World War II.

In 1986, a federal appeals judge ruled that the evidence was overwhelming that he had been the chief of a Nazi death camp in his native Estonia. His “duties” were “such as to offend the decency of any civilized society.” They included taking mothers, fathers, children, by the thousands, to an antitank ditch, throwing them in tied, and helping his gun squads murder them, whole families.

From the Reagan White House, Patrick Buchanan used his power and pressure, including memos on White House stationery, to hold up deportation to Soviet-occupied Estonia, the only place Linnas could stand trial. He wanted him sent to asylum in Panama. He failed.

Further information is available to Dole and Forbes at the present office of a former federal prosecutor who defeated the Buchanan-backed appeal - Rudolph Giuliani, the Republican mayor of New York, who knows and fights Mafias, all sorts.

Neil Sher has memos to and from the Justice Department and Buchanan. He headed the Justice unit that hunted Nazi war criminals in the United States and that Buchanan tried to destroy.

Linnas - just one case in the story of Buchanan compulsions. They also drove him to mock the anxieties of Holocaust survivors and their families, to the crackpot crusade to convince Americans that carbon monoxide from diesel engines could not have killed prisoners in the Treblinka camp - the chants of the evil theology of Holocaust denial.

Add to this the ethnic taunts about “Jose,” the lies about U.N. domination of America, the iciness of mouth and soul about “Zulus” and other unacceptably pigmented immigrants, and we have it - the psychic anger that creates obsessions about selected others. Pat - Washington’s sidekick, Pat with the merry eyes.

So it is a choice, for Dole and Forbes. Would you support Buchanan or renounce him by refusing now? Presidents face tougher ones.