>I thought it was Larry Pratt who got booted from Pat Buchannon's 1996
>campaign committee after it was revealed that he gave speeches at
>Christian Identity or Neo-Nazi meetings in Colorado.
[A couple of articles on Pratt...]
New York Times February 17, 1996, Saturday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section 1;Page 23;Column 6;Editorial Desk LENGTH: 728 words HEADLINE: Journal; The Pratt Fall BYLINE: By FRANK RICH
BODY: How stupid do they think we are? If we are to believe Pat Buchanan, he didn't have a clue until the day before yesterday that his campaign co-chairman Larry Pratt, commandant of Gun Owners of America, had any connections to the most racist, anti-Semitic and heavily armed organizations of the American far right.
But in fact every single piece of information about Mr. Pratt that made headlines this week is old news, having previously been uncovered by watchdog groups and published in countless journalistic outlets, from Rolling Stone to Playboy to this column in the year since Oklahoma City.
No less credible is Mr. Pratt's insistence that he "not knowingly" associated with kingpins of neo-Nazi movements. If Mr. Pratt, as he says, despises racists with "every fiber" in his body -- and has nothing to do with the rabid separatist-supremacist militias -- why is he as ubiquitous at their conclaves as burning crosses once were at the Ku Klux Klan?
Mr. Pratt didn't just speak at the couple of meetings with Aryan Nations folks that you've seen on the evening news, but at countless others featuring skinheads, Klansmen and Timothy McVeigh gun-culture heroes like Mark ("from Michigan") Koernke and Bo Gritz (who is fond of totting up the number of Jews in the Clinton Administration). Kenneth Stern of the American Jewish Committee chronicles some of the most egregious Pratt sightings in his recently published book, "A Force Upon the Plain"; he shows how Mr. Pratt is a key link between the racist religious right and the racist militia right.
But the story doesn't end there. Foolish as it would be for Americans to accept Mr. Buchanan's or Mr. Pratt's denials at face value, it would be an even bigger mistake to look at this incident as a freak, isolated occurrence: far-right gun nut turns up (predictably) in campaign of far-right candidate. Mr. Pratt's associations with the right go well beyond those that have resurfaced this week -- and his associations with the Republican Party are hardly limited to Mr. Buchanan.
As Mr. Pratt is frequently in the company of Pete Peters -- the Christian Identity leader who preaches that Jews are the devil's children and that racial minorities are subhuman -- so he also keeps company with G.O.P. "revolutionaries." Not for nothing did Mary Jacoby of the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call describe Mr. Pratt as "almost a shadow Congressman" last fall.
The Gun Owners of America political-action fund contributed to 19 G.O.P. House and Senate campaigns in '94 -- with the largest contribution going to Steve Stockman, the Texas freshman who surfaced as a militia booster after Oklahoma City. Dick Armey, the House majority leader, even turned up on the letterhead of a Pratt-run religious-right subsidiary organization called Committee to Protect the Family; it has warned of homosexuals' "intentionally contaminating blood banks" to spread AIDS and has raised big bucks for Randall Terry's militant anti-abortion organization, Operation Rescue.
Among the other far-right associations with which Mr. Pratt is affiliated -- including English First, the immigrant-bashing group -- is the Council for National Policy. The C.N.P. is a secretive umbrella organization of right-wing leaders whose membership also includes Mr. Armey, Mr. Stockman, the House majority whip Tom DeLay, the Senators Jesse Helms and Lauch Faircloth, not to mention radical religious-right G.O.P. puppeteers like Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson, Paul Weyrich and Donald Wildmon (himself a Buchanan campaign co-chairman). Their next meeting will be in Orlando in March -- no press allowed.
The good news is that none of Mr. Buchanan's major opponents for the Presidential nomination are plugged in to Mr. Pratt and his crowd; Bob Dole, to his credit, has been a Pratt nemesis on the Hill. The bad news is that the Pratt wing of the party is more powerful than Mr. Buchanan's candidacy and certain to outlast it.
The mere removal of Mr. Pratt as a campaign chairman -- or even the defeat of the campaign itself -- will not banish the forces he represents from the corridors of power. All the fuss this week about Mr. Pratt's role with a would-be President is, if anything, a distraction from examining the role he and his ideological soul mates play not just at the upper reaches of the Republican Party but in Congress right now.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: February 17, 1996
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Washington Post February 16, 1996, Friday, Final Edition Correction Appended SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A01 LENGTH: 1087 words HEADLINE: Under Fire, Buchanan Aide Leaves; Pratt Is Linked To Supremacists BYLINE: Kevin Merida, Washington Post Staff Writer
BODY:
A prominent anti-gun control activist serving as co-chairman of Republican Patrick J. Buchanan's presidential campaign took a leave of absence from the campaign yesterday after the release of a report linking him with white supremacists and right-wing militia leaders.
Larry Pratt, executive director of the Gun Owners of America and one of four Buchanan campaign co-chairmen, denied any connection with the extremist groups and said he was stepping aside "temporarily" because he did not want to hurt Buchanan's surging candidacy.
At last night's GOP debate in Manchester, N.H., Buchanan used his closing comments to defend Pratt as "a devout Christian" who he said was under attack because of his opposition to gun control. "I would urge the gun owners of New Hampshire and America to stand with Larry Pratt and stand with me," he said.
Buchanan's refusal to dismiss Pratt was criticized by Sen. Robert J. Dole's campaign manager, Scott Reed, who used the episode to revive an old controversy about Buchanan's views of the Holocaust. Polls show Dole and Buchanan to be in a virtual tie in next Tuesday's New Hampshire primary, and Buchanan said last night the "savage attack" on Pratt was "a sure sign" of his campaign's success.
Buchanan's supporters were also linked yesterday to campaign literature distributed in Louisiana the day of the caucus there that pointed out that Texas Sen. Phil Gramm's wife is Korean American. Campaign officials last night vehemently denied any involvement.
When Pratt joined the Buchanan campaign last year, a campaign press release said his role was "to spearhead efforts to mobilize the Second Amendment movement behind Mr. Buchanan's candidacy." The group that he heads, Gun Owners of America, based in Springfield, takes a more militant position opposing gun control legislation than the dominant gun lobby, the National Rifle Association.
The group gained prominence by supporting Steve Stockman (R-Tex.), who also has been linked to the militia movement, in his successful 1994 campaign against Rep. Jack Brooks (D-Tex.), then chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
The issue of Pratt's associations was raised by the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington watchdog group that yesterday unveiled a report -- "Under the Influence" -- on the presidential candidates' advisers. According to the study, Pratt, a former Virginia legislator, has attended and spoken at meetings that were organized by militia leaders and white supremacists.
Among those he has associated with, the report said, are: Bo Gritz, a former Green Beret who ran as the 1988 vice presidential running mate of former Klansman David Duke; former Texas Ku Klux Klan leader Louis Beam; Aryan Nations pastor Richard Butler; and Pete Peters of Christian Identity, a movement human rights observers say is known for its antisemitic and racist views.
Most of the material on Pratt's affiliations has already appeared in other publications, including a Playboy article written last year by Mike Reynolds of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Klanwatch.
The Buchanan campaign moved quickly to try to quell the Pratt controversy with Buchanan and Pratt holding separate news conferences, and Buchanan declaring that he had nothing to do with Aryan Nations or other racist groups and wants "none of them in my campaign." The response from the Dole campaign was almost as fast.
"There can be no allowance made for poisonous notions of racism and antisemitism," Reed said. "Given all the controversy over his musings on the Holocaust, Pat Buchanan should know that better than anyone."
In raising Buchanan's "musings on the Holocaust," Reed resurrected old allegations that had not yet resurfaced in the 1996 campaign.
Four years ago, when Buchanan was campaigning in New Hampshire against then-President George Bush, he encountered protesters accusing him of being antisemitic for writing, among other things, that "This so-called 'Holocaust Survivor Syndrome' involves group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics."
At the time, Buchanan vigorously defended himself, saying the allegation was an unfair attack based on his defense of accused Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk, who eventually was exonerated of the charge that he was the notorious Ivan the Terrible.
At his news conference, Pratt said he belongs to no militia organizations and has never discussed any racial views with white supremacists. But he acknowledged that he went to meetings at which they were present.
According to Klanwatch, one such meeting occurred in October 1992 in Estes Park, Colo., and was called to discuss the Idaho shootout between the FBI and white separatist Randy Weaver. According to Brian Levin, a Klanwatch official, Pratt railed against the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship and equal protection under the law for all races.
At a conference of militia leaders in Branson, Mo., last year, just days after the Oklahoma City federal building bombing, Pratt, according to Levin, said: "Yeah, I do see a connection to what happened to the [Branch] Davidians [in Waco, Tex.] and what happened in Oklahoma City. And that was that whoever did that in Oklahoma City had sunk to the level of the FBI. The government behaves as a beast. It did in Waco, and we have somebody, whoever it might have been, whatever group it might have been, assuming they can't rely on the Lord to take vengeance."
The literature distributed in Louisiana showed a picture of Gramm and his wife, Wendy, campaigning together. The caption, according to a copy obtained by The Washington Post, referred to Wendy Gramm's Korean heritage and said: "Many conservatives will not vote for him in the primary due to his interracial marriage. He divorced a white wife to marry an Asiatic."
Charles Black, a campaign adviser to the Texas senator, who dropped out of the presidential race on Wednesday, said Gramm campaign workers noticed Buchanan supporters passing out the literature at the polls on the day of the Louisiana caucus, Feb. 6.
Black said he was not accusing the campaign of sponsoring it. "I don't know if it was a renegade operation or not," said Black, "but the fact is some of the people he was playing footsy with are capable of that."
Buchanan's campaign manager, Terry Jeffrey, said last night that the Buchanan campaign had nothing to do with the literature and that to suggest otherwise was "an outrage."
Staff writers William Booth and Ann Devroy contributed to this report.
CORRECTION-DATE: February 22, 1996
CORRECTION: A story on Friday reported incorrectly that Bo Gritz was the Populist Party's 1988 vice presidential candidate. Gritz says he had agreed to be the nominee but withdrew when he learned David Duke was the party's nominee for president.
GRAPHIC: Photo, LARRY PRATT
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: February 16, 1996
------------------------------------------------------------------------