Commentator, journalist, and presidential candidate Patrick Joseph Buchanan (born 1938) represented the hard-line conservative wing of the Republican Party.

Patrick Buchanan was born in Washington, D.C., on November 2, 1938. His father, William Baldwin Buchanan, was a partner in a Washington, D.C., accounting firm. His mother, Catherine Elizabeth (Crum) Buchanan, was a nurse, an active mother, and a homemaker.

Buchanan traced his father's family as coming from Scotland and Ireland and settling in the southern region of America in the late 1700s. He related how some of his ancestors fought for the Confederacy, while another family branch lived in the North. His mother's side of the family were of German immigrant heritage and had settled in the Midwest.

Buchanan grew up in an energetic household. He was the third of nine children. He had six brothers and two sisters. He learned his combative personality from his father. The elder...