Blood and Politics (52 page)

Picking up the analysis at the beginning of the Reagan ascendancy,
Francis had demurred that MARsian “values were anti-business, even anti-capitalist.”
³⁹
He even engaged in a bit of Burnham-like class analysis to make his point. The reason the pre–World War Two Old Right could not be resurrected, Francis argued, was that its social base was gone. Main Street businessmen, who had kept precious Anglo-American traditions alive, had been replaced with corporate managers seeking world markets and low-cost brown-skinned labor. At the same time, Francis believed postwar conservatives were also doomed. The business conservative’s obsession with “low taxes and small budgets, anticommunism and law and order” had ignored the real concerns of their once and future constituents, such as the maintenance of Anglo-European culture.

Two decades later Francis imagined his MARsians engaged in a process of self-transformation that would distinguish them as the agents of change throughout society. He argued that Buchanan’s primary campaign provided “an organized mode of expression” that would foster the development of Middle American “consciousness and power.”
⁴⁰
Francis also believed Middle American Radicals had been changed by the end of the Cold War. Where Middle Americans had once advocated foreign intervention, now their new nationalism was isolationist. The change was visible in Francis himself. In a 1981 essay he had argued for “the military and economic preeminence of the United States” and “international activism.” After the Berlin Wall fell, however, he argued the reverse. Nationalism should “emphasize less expansionism and activism abroad and more opposition to a globalist foreign policy that jeopardizes Middle American economic and cultural interests.” Middle American Radicals were transformed into Middle American Nationalists.

If Buchanan failed to represent Middle American interests after the primaries, Francis remained certain the heart of his new social force would continue beating on, either inside the Republican Party or outside it. As Republican regulars prepared for their national convention in August 1992, Francis’s assessment of Middle American prospects brought him full circle. “Mr. Buchanan was by no means the first to give political expression to this force, and he may not be the one who brings it to revolutionary fulfillment. Perhaps it was David Duke who actually initiated it in recent times, and perhaps it will be H. Ross Perot who brings it to fruition,” he wrote in a style more suggestive of Karl Marx than of William Buckley. “Yet regardless of who began it and who will finish it, the Middle American Revolution is not going to go away.”
⁴¹

At the same time, Francis deplored what he called paramilitary infantilism and conspiracy mongering on the political right. Sympathy with issues associated with white survivalists and Christian patriots—whether of the Pat Robertson or the Posse Comitatus variety—did not
extend to their strategies or even their worldview. Like Lenin excoriating errant trends in the Communist International, Francis’s critique of his erstwhile comrades reeked of hard-eyed realpolitik. Paramilitarism as a response to the power of the police was infantile. Conspiracies were the hobgoblins of demon-obsessed minds. Nevertheless, Francis brimmed with the same anger that motivated David Duke’s and Pat Buchanan’s candidacies.

Like few others inside the beltway, Francis understood the feelings of white victimization. “There was a subtext to what Mr. Duke explicitly and formally said in his speeches and campaign literature,” Francis wrote. “The historic core of American civilization is under attack. Quotas, affirmative action, race norming, civil rights legislation, multiculturalism in schools and universities, welfare, busing, and unrestricted immigration from Third World countries are all symbols of that attack and of the racial, cultural, and political dispossession they promise to inflict upon the white post-bourgeois middle classes.”
⁴²

At the Republican Party convention Buchanan gave a speech some liberals credited with handing the 1992 elections to the Democratic Party and Bill Clinton. President Bush obviously believed that Buchanan’s three million primary votes represented more than just a protest against a sitting president, because he gave the former presidential speech-writer a prime-time speaking slot, right before the Gipper himself. Buchanan’s claim that a culture war
between
Americans had replaced the Cold War with the Soviet Union reverberated across millions of television screens like a hand grenade tossed into a crowded theater. “My friends,” Buchanan said, “this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”
⁴³

Compared with his culture war commencement address at Falwell’s Liberty University the previous June, Buchanan’s convention speech on August 17, which had been vetted beforehand by Bush aides, was actually fairly mild.
⁴⁴
He called for the party’s dissident right wing to come “home” and vote for President Bush. He didn’t mention any opposition to the president on matters of trade, tariffs, taxes, or immigration, although issues of economic nationalism had been his most distinctive campaign calling card in the primaries. On issues dear to the Christian right—abortion, gay rights, and state aid for religious schools—Buchanan rallied the convention and excoriated the Clinton-Gore ticket. In so doing, he highlighted the grip on much of the party’s grass roots held by the antiabortion movement and the Reverend Pat Robertson’s Christian
Coalition. According to a
USA Today
survey, 47 percent of the delegates to the Republican convention considered themselves born-again Christians.
⁴⁵
In their book on the 1992 election,
Mad as Hell
, Jack Germond and Jules Witcover concluded that something new in national party politics had emerged: “the delegates of the religious right were a different breed of activists who believed those who disagreed with them were not just wrong but evil.”
⁴⁶

Pat Buchanan presented himself to the convention as a defender of the faith. But at heart he understood that the battle was about power. Here Sam Francis’s footprint showed itself repeatedly in Pat Buchanan’s walk and talk. In a later speech re-rehearsing what he called the “savagery of the reaction” to his convention talk, Buchanan invoked his friend by name. What is the cultural war about? he asked. “As columnist Sam Francis writes, it is about power; it is about who determines the norms by which we live, and by which we define and govern ourselves.

“. . . Who decides what is right and wrong, moral and immoral, beautiful and ugly, healthy and sick? Whose beliefs shall form the basis of law?”

There it was, completely undisguised. The question at issue for Buchanan was not
what
the common beliefs of the Republic should be, but
whose
beliefs. Not which ideas should hold hegemony, but which people should rule. Whose nation is it anyway? Buchanan and Francis often asked. Their answer was always the same: the United States was and should be a white nation, a Christian nation. If others happened to be citizens, they should submit to the will of the real Americans.

By the third week of August 1992, all the drama had been drained from the Republican Party convention. Pat Buchanan’s culture warriors went home. And President George Bush and Governor Bill Clinton prepared for their respective post–Labor Day campaign sprints. Out of the range of television cameras and most print reporters, however, a political volcano boiled with paramilitary infantilism and conspiracy mongering on the remote edge of Ruby Ridge, Idaho. Before we watch that part of the story explode into gunfire, however, it is necessary to retrace the first months of 1992 and the Populist Party candidate’s campaign travails.

February 8, 1992.
The presidential campaign played like a late-night police television soap opera. Bill Clinton sagged down in the pack, stung by the first charges of impropriety. President George Bush paced in the wings, unsure about how to tell voters how much he really cared. Ross Perot took potshots at all the candidates, like a sniper on the edge of town. Pat Buchanan danced in close enough to land a few heavy blows on the otherwise distant president. David Duke tangled with state party bureaucrats, trying unsuccessfully to unravel access to their primary ballots. And at the Holiday Inn in Clemmons, North Carolina, a small group of young Klansmen patrolled the parking lot while about eighty people from a dozen states attended a meeting ostensibly under the rubric of the Populist Party. The party’s state chairman, A. J. Barker, presided like a precinct house captain directing a crew of squabbling detectives. Ed Fields announced his support for Pat Buchanan’s anti-immigrant policies. Otherwise the room was divided over whom to support in the race for president.
¹

Only Kirk Lyons, recently moved from Texas to North Carolina, seemed to have a grasp of the fundamental tasks at hand. “Don’t worry about field marshalling and building long lines of tactics. You’ve got to get to the grass roots,” he told the assembly. Later he asked, “Well, folks, how are we going to take power? You’ve got to get somebody out there. This is your moment of opportunity. Get into the Duke campaign. Get into the Buchanan campaign. Get into the Gritz campaign.”
²

The “Gritz campaign” Lyons mentioned was that of retired Lieutenant Colonel James “Bo” Gritz, the same person who four years before had accepted and then declined a spot as David Duke’s running mate for the Populist Party. Now he was its presidential candidate. A charismatic
figure with a natural knack for telling his audience what it wanted to hear, Gritz could have been a successful politician in any mainstream party. But his penchant for things paramilitary made him a better stump speaker than a legislator. Gritz remained an enigmatic figure, full of personal and political contradictions. In a movement dominated by purists and subculturalists on one side and mass-market opportunists on the other, Bo Gritz was none of the above. He was a military man and a brother to all those Americans under arms. Although graying and increasingly thickset and paunchy, he still carried himself like a drill sergeant. And his path to the Populist Party passed from trusted Pentagon insider to conspiracy-mongering outsider.
³

Born James Gordon Gritz in 1939, he enlisted in the army in 1957, served faithfully for twenty-two years in hot spots from Southeast Asia to Central America, and retired as a lieutenant colonel with sixty-two medals and citations, including ten Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts. The military was his home. While in the service he graduated from college and then earned a master’s degree from American University in Washington, D.C. He forever considered himself a Special Forces commander and referred to “SF” as his “mistress.” During the Vietnam War, Gritz led a force of South Vietnamese in off-the-grid special operations, including recovery in Cambodia of a spy plane’s electronic record (black) box. He claimed to have personally killed “400 Communists.” Gritz’s military service record was sufficiently glorious to merit five laudatory pages in General William Westmoreland’s own memoirs of Vietnam. Gritz left the military as an underwater demolitions expert, a sixth-degree black belt in karate, a skilled aviator, and with a commander’s love for his fellow soldiers.
⁴
The experience defined him for life thereafter.

After formally retiring from a Pentagon desk job, Gritz led several (officially) unauthorized forays into Southeast Asia, searching for American POWs still held by the Vietnamese. Among Gritz’s early backers was H. Ross Perot, who had famously arranged the rescue of his own employees from Ayatollah Khomeini’s new regime in Iran. Arrested inside Laos in 1983 with a small group of others, Gritz became an icon in the minimovement to recover POWs and MIAs. (He often asserted that he, Bo Gritz, was the real-life inspiration for Sylvester Stallone’s movie hero John Rambo. But Rambo’s artistic creator denied any connection to Gritz.) Over the next few years this certifiable war hero turned into a Cassandra of disappointment, conspiracy, and imminent doom. From his home in Sandy Valley, Nevada, Gritz traveled widely, sometimes as pilot of his own plane, speaking to meetings of true patriots and conspiracy buffs. Picked off the POW-MIA circuit by Willis Carto, Gritz had been a popular speaker at Liberty Lobby’s convention in 1987.
⁵

While digging into the far right’s bunkers, Gritz also flitted around the edges of the conspiracy-sotted sections of the left, joining with a few other disgruntled military and intelligence personalities working with the Christic Institute. A small outfit headquartered in D.C., Christic was then raising fistfuls of money from liberals to pursue a fatally flawed lawsuit aimed at a so-called Secret Team operating deep in the bowels of government. For his part, Gritz rolled up U.S. covert operations, intelligence agency subterfuge, and drug smuggling into one big plot to establish a “one-world government.” He knew about it, he said, because he had been there and seen it with his own eyes. And his war record and chestful of medals bestowed him with credibility as well as honor. When Gritz self-published his six-hundred-page memoir cum exposé,
Called to Serve
, he subtitled it
Profiles in Conspiracy from John F. Kennedy to George Bush
.
⁶

Gritz sold his memoir at every available stop and inscribed it to one and all: “Forever your Brother.” He also acted as if he meant it. Gritz’s memoir was devoid of the biological determinism that often permeated David Duke’s talks. And the Vietnam vet countered charges that he was a racist by pointing at pictures of his two obviously Amer-Asian children, often alongside his Anglo wife, Claudia, in the book. At the same time,
Called to Serve
repeated the usual anti-Semitic canard about the Federal Reserve’s being controlled by “Eight Jewish families.” Gritz included on his list of American Jewish banking families the venerable (American Baptist) Rockefellers, presumably because all the other anti-Semites did the same.
⁷