PAT'S SCHOOL DAYS WITH "THE POPE'S MARINES"

By LANCE MORROW

A FEW YEARS AGO, I KNELT AND TOOK A RUBBING from the Vietnam Memorial wall in Washington--the name of Aloysius P. McGonigal. I knew the story of his death. McGonigal, a Jesuit priest, had found his way to Vietnam as a chaplain. During the Tet offensive in early 1968, he seized an M-16 and tried to storm the citadel in the old imperial capital of Hue. He died going up the hill, with a communist's bullet in his head.

The chaplain's charge went against the Geneva Convention, but not against his own nature. Pat Buchanan and I had known Father McGonigal at Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C., in the mid-'50s, when McGonigal was the prefect of discipline there. McGonigal looked like a fire hydrant cased in a black cassock--short and squat, with iron muscle bulges. He radiated punitive rage. One morning he hammered a boy to the classroom floor with his fists and left him there with a concussion, the other boys too terrified to intervene. The Jesuits shipped McGonigal off to southern Maryland, to listen to the songbirds in a quieter parish.

Pat Buchanan was Gonzaga class of '56. I suspect that Pat's character is configured like a tree trunk, in a series of concentric rings--that his huge family and his autocratic, combative father formed the core, and that the crucial second ring, shaped in adolescence, was raw, authoritarian Gonzaga, which educated his father and then, in turn, each of the seven Buchanan brothers.

We were tough and slovenly--and we studied Greek: Studs Lonigan with brains. We did three hours of homework a night and drank too much beer on weekends. We hitchhiked or rode the streetcar and bus to North Capitol and Eye streets, to a neighborhood called Swampoodle. Gonzaga was a proud but touchy school in a squalid neighborhood, with a whorehouse across the street (a source of some entertainment in Latin class, when we would translate Virgil and through the window covertly watch the women emerge to stretch and take the morning sun on their stoop).

We were an elite, as the Jesuits were. An elite, but dispossessed: grievance vibrated through Gonzaga like electricity; I felt that same vibration, after all these years, in Buchanan's voice in Iowa and New Hampshire--outrage and a warning of violence.

The power-and-money elite sent their children to St. Albans (where Al Gore studied later on) or to Georgetown Prep, the Jesuits' country-club campus, out in Bethesda. Although Pat's father was a prospering accountant, many Gonzaga boys harbored a shame of the excluded, and a concomitant anger, as if we came from the immigrant servant class (as indeed many Catholics did) and were being educated, however brilliantly, belowstairs. The Jesuits' accomplishment was to redirect our aggressions into intellectual contact sports--debating, oratory.

The themes of the angry left-behind resonate 40 years later in Buchanan's constituency, whom technology and cultural anarchy have left stranded. He has perfect pitch for their loss. He has perfect pitch for the '50s, his left-behind decade--his prelapsarian world.

Buchanan's adolescent universe was as tribal as the Balkans, divided into parishes. He came from Blessed Sacrament. On weekends, the Buchanan boys and other warriors from Gonzaga would load up someone's father's car with six-packs (the Buchanans wrecked half a dozen of their dad's Oldsmobiles, until his insurance was canceled) and go marauding, like whiteboy Crips and Bloods, but armed with only their fists and a fierce Hibernian truculence. In their cars, they would slowly circle the Hot Shoppe on Connecticut Avenue, hoping for girls, settling for a fight.

I look at Buchanan's face now and see, when it is at rest, the design of a Greek mask of tragedy, a curious effect. When Buchanan speaks I hear the driving, urgent undershadow of menace (promises of dark things, of retribution) that Senator Joseph R. McCarthy conjured; their voices are eerily similar, and, like Pat, Joe McCarthy had considerable personal charm.

Time traveling with Pat--back to the '50s, to the culture war of the cold war, with that sissy Adlai Stevenson orating in flickering grays on the Philco. Gonzaga did not make Buchanan a demagogue, but something in the school's inherent anger long ago and its bullying, underdog-wants-to-be-overdog righteousness went into Pat's brain, and came out nasty and dangerous.

Buchanan's constituency is divided between the angry blue-collar dispossessed, whose grievances are economic, and the religious Fundamentalists, whose issues are moral. But both groups share Buchanan's aggrieved nostalgia for American economic and moral pre-eminence. They want economic protectionism and moral protectionism, the patriarchal stabilities of the '50s.

I graduated two years after Pat Buchanan, and three years ahead of William Bennett, the entrepreneurial virtue-monger of the '90s. We are all Gonzaga boys. I see any one of us, long ago, mounting the stage in the dusky Gonzaga auditorium and declaiming "A Message to Garcia," while black-cassocked Jesuits perch along the sidewalls, alert and ominous as crows.