Blasts GOP ‘Ingratitude’ for Not Standing By Reagan : Buchanan Praises North as Friend, Hero

White House communications director Patrick Buchanan, writing in today’s editions of the Washington Post, called fallen presidential aide Oliver North “a friend” and “an American hero” and assailed the GOP for not standing by Ronald Reagan.

“What a classic portrait of ingratitude,” Buchanan wrote.

Buchanan, in a column appearing on the Post’s opinion page, said, “Of all the lurid features in the bizarre tapestry of ‘Contragate,’ perhaps the most revealing is the behavior of the Republican Party Establishment, which owes all it has and all it is to Ronald Wilson Reagan.”

Presidential spokesman Larry Speakes said the Buchanan column was not cleared at the White House.

In his column, Buchanan said of North, the Marine lieutenant colonel at the center of the Iran- contras affair:

“Ollie North is a hero, the Billy Mitchell of his generation, a man who saw further than others and took risks to his own career, because he knew that in helping the peasant army in Nicaragua, he was buying time for his own distracted and indifferent countrymen--hold ‘the fort alone, till those who are half blind are half ready.’

“Ollie North is now disparaged as a ‘cowboy,’ a rogue, a ‘soldier of fortune’ by our Lords Temporal on the Hill and our Lords Spiritual in the press. Well, the day the United States ceases to produce soldiers of the kidney and spleen and heart and soul of Oliver North is the day this country enters on its irreversible decline.”