Buchanan Twisted L.A. Riot Story, Angry Retirees Say

Patrick J. Buchanan’s speech before the Republican Convention may have drawn cheers in Houston, but at the Vermont Knoll Retirement Center in South Los Angeles, residents said Tuesday that his emotional finale left them cold.

Buchanan ended his speech Monday night with an apparent reference to the center at 83rd Street and Vermont Avenue, where he said two National Guard members arrived late one night during the riots. Their M-16s “at the ready,” Buchanan said, the 18th Cavalry members defended elderly residents from an angry mob that “threatened and cursed”--displaying the kind of determination, he said, needed to restore the nation’s cities to greatness.

In fact, said Jewell Anderson, the center manager, the residents are the ones who defended their home from looters and arsonists during the first days of rioting, which began on April 29. At one point, many of the 63 residents who remained at the center during the riots formed a human shield around their building, an act of valor later chronicled in The Times.

But by the time the 18th Cavalry members arrived, before dawn on May 2, Anderson said all was relatively quiet.

“There were no guns drawn. No mob attacking,” she said Tuesday. “It’s not that we would like to take any of the credit away from the National Guard, because we did appreciate them being here. But that was absolutely a different picture that was painted by Mr. Buchanan last night. I don’t know where he got those facts, but they were not correct.”

In his speech, Buchanan said that when the 18th Cavalry members arrived, a “mob was heading in to ransack and loot the apartments of the terrified old men and women . . . and the mob threatened and cursed, but the mob retreated because it had met the one thing that could stop it--force, rooted in justice and backed by courage.”

Terry Jeffrey, director of policy for the Buchanan campaign, said the former presidential candidate got the information he used in his speech from troopers he met at an Army compound in South Los Angeles.

“Very shortly after the riots ended, he did visit the 18th Cavalry and speak with the troopers, and they told him the story,” Jeffrey said. “And he stands by it.”

On Tuesday morning, the center’s residents began gathering in the lobby earlier than usual to drink coffee and swap impressions of the speech.

“Some were totally disturbed,” Anderson said. “They felt like, ‘Listen, the Bush Administration has not done anything for us. Certainly they’re not going to use us to glorify themselves.’ We don’t appreciate them using that as a springboard.”

Said Mordine Howard, 67: “I resented it.”