Patrick J. Buchanan, the pugnacious conservative commentator whose insurgent candidacies briefly threatened the GOP’s frontrunners in 1992 and 1996, dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination and announced that he was seeking the Reform Party’s nomination on the last Monday of October in 1999.

Promising to shake up American politics, the 60-year-old Buchanan told a packed room of supporters and reporters at the Doubletree Hotel in Falls Church, Virginia, that his decision to leave the Republican Party — a party in which he proudly labored for nearly forty years — was a difficult one.… Read more ...