Buchanan Checks His Right Flank

There were no introductions at first when the frail old man joined the line of local dignitaries warbling “God Bless America” onstage at the Cobb County Amphitheater as Patrick J. Buchanan took his presidential campaign to Georgia.

But as he basked with the candidate in a thundering sound wave of rebel yells and war whoops, Lester Maddox, the stooped former Georgia governor and unrepentant segregationist, stood as one more embarrassing reminder of Buchanan’s inability to shed his associations with extreme elements in his drive for the Republican presidential nomination.

The more seriously Buchanan is taken, the more rival campaigns and news organizations peer into the pedigrees of those surrounding him. The unrelenting microscopic examination is forcing the former talk show debater to quietly tighten internal reviews of campaign personnel even as he derides the continuing scrutiny as an “establishment” effort to derail him.

Every week, it seems, some new Buchanan campaign operative comes under fire. One national co-chairman, Larry Pratt, spoke at rallies attended by white supremacists and militia members. Another, Mike Farris, showed up at a meeting in January of antiabortion radicals who condone the killing of doctors who perform abortions. Volunteers in Florida, Louisiana and New York have been linked to former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, neo-Nazis and the John Birch Society. In Georgia, Maddox’s surprise appearance provided only the latest contretemps.

Tuesday night, Buchanan’s sister and campaign manager, Angela “Bay” Buchanan, said Maddox had walked up, uninvited, onstage that evening to join the candidate. But the 80-year-old Maddox, who said he was too old to join Buchanan’s campaign, said the next day in an interview that local Buchanan aides “recognized me behind the chain of rope and invited me up there.” Before Buchanan appeared, Maddox endorsed him from the stage and led a crowd of 2,000 howling Buchanan supporters in a brief songfest.

Peppered daily with questions about his aides and supporters, Buchanan shrugged off Maddox’s appearance. “Heaven’s sakes,” he said at a rainy South Carolina rally, “there were lots of folks on the stage.”

In the presidential try he depicts as “a great cause,” Buchanan’s lingering extremist problem has confronted him with the classic dilemma facing agents of populist upheaval: how to distance a movement from fringe elements without losing credibility among die-hard supporters.

“These are those rare situations where it is either us or them,” said Larry J. Sabato, professor of political science at the University of Virginia. “You cannot straddle the line. It doesn’t work for Pat to pretend to be cooperative.”

But within the Buchanan campaign, top aides are trying to concoct a delicate dual response--brushing off assaults on Buchanan’s well-known friends and backers while at the same time trying to wall off the lower ranks from volunteers and delegates who have ties to fringe groups.

The risks and rewards are apparent. Clinging to high-profile friends on the right such as Pratt and Farris helps shore up Buchanan’s conservative base while he flirts with Wall Street-bashing and other populist causes. Purging anonymous extremists--such as the Florida white supremacist who was ejected from the Buchanan campaign several weeks ago--has a negligible impact among those same supporters.

But the small-scale guerrilla campaign operation that has enabled Buchanan to surprise opponents in the Louisiana and Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary has so far been unorganized and ineffective in fending off extremists. Local Buchanan volunteer chapters are mostly left to themselves, a hothouse atmosphere for enterprising zealots.

Bay Buchanan conceded as much the night Maddox ambled onstage in Marietta, Ga.

“Anyone out there who wants their face on CNN only has to walk in one of our offices,” she said. “We’re concerned that a lot more of them are going to come out of the woodwork just so they get attention.”

In recent days, the Buchanan campaign has begun hiring more advance teams and other campaign officials to deal with the expected long haul to the Republican national convention in San Diego. Bay Buchanan, who oversees the logistics of her brother’s campaign, said she is looking for “experienced people,” a euphemism suggesting more stringent background checks.

After the campaign was stung by revelations last month about the Florida volunteer’s white supremacist ties, Bay Buchanan ordered state organizations to inform the campaign of any other suspected extremists.

“We’ve called our leaders and told them if there’s anyone in their groups who hate other Americans, they’ve got to go,” she said.

But the damage is already done. Buchanan aides allege that the Bob Dole and Steve Forbes campaigns have tried to exploit ties between Buchanan operatives and extremist groups in media ads and more submerged “push polls”--telephone surveys that try to influence those contacted.

Forbes and Dole campaign officials scoff at the complaints, saying Buchanan is the source of his own problem.

For his part, Maddox does not understand all the fuss. Georgia governor from 1966 to 1970, Maddox’s notoriety dates to a mid-1960s incident when, as a fried chicken restaurateur, he allegedly chased several black youths from his restaurant with a pickax handle.

Maddox denies ever wielding the pickax handle in anger, but still calls Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and civil rights legislation “the biggest mistake we ever made.”

He said he would have considered a role in Buchanan’s campaign if he was a younger man. But hobbled by age and disease, he would have stayed in the audience Tuesday night if he had not been recognized.

“I’m a living wreck,” he said. “I’ve got cancer of the throat, cancer of the head, melanoma, two heart attacks. But I’ll tell you something, son. I’m still in better shape than that federal government.”

Times researcher John Beckham contributed to this story.