Thomas Pauken - As Book Author

As Book Author

Pauken is the author of two books, The Thirty Year War: The Politics of the Sixties Generation and Bringing American Home: How America Lost Her Way and How We Can Find Our Way Back.

Published in 1995, The Thirty Year War is a memoir in which Pauken explains his involvement in politics beginning in the 1960s. The book traces Pauken's early interest in politics as a debater at Jesuit High School in Dallas; his time at Georgetown in which he was embroiled in the campus conflicts over the Vietnam War; his service in Vietnam and frustration with the execution of the war; his work for and ultimate disillusionment with the Richard M. Nixon White House, and his time in Reagan administration when he was director of ACTION. The noted conservative reporter and commentator Robert Novak, wrote in a forward to the book, that the The Thirty Year War demonstrates how "Pauken believes in what he says, and performs accordingly..." Novak concluded by writing that "Tom Pauken cherishes and nourishes the dangerous idea that the Republican Party should stand for something. He gives every indication that after fighting for 30 years, he is just getting his second wind."

In Bringing America Home (2010), Pauken outlines what he believes to be the causes of America's economic downturn, misguided foreign policy, and moral decline. Like the columnist and former presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan, Pauken places much of the blame on neoconservatives within the Republican Party leadership. He outlines a plan for addressing the nation's ills rooted in the Founding Fathers and traditional conservative principles. Booklist described the book as a "conservative manifesto of the highest caliber — humane, civilized, expressed by an active, living conscience." Bringing America Home argues that the George W. Bush presidential administration squandered the conservative political capital of the Goldwater-Reagan years.