Dec. 1, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:45
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| This is the primal screen of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies because we're going to medieval on these people. | ||
| Here's not got a free shot all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you've tried to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big line? | ||
| MAGA Media. | ||
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
| Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | ||
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
|
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Waru, here's your host, Stephen K. Battle. | |
| Okay, welcome. | ||
| It is Saturday, 29 November in the year of our Lord 2025. | ||
| And this show I have wanted to do for a long time. | ||
| Very special. | ||
| We have the author Sam Tannenhaus joins us. | ||
| He just wrote the definitive, actually the authorized biography of William F. Buckley. | ||
| But it's titled The Life and the Revolution that Changed America. | ||
| We're going to talk a lot about both, Bob Buckley's life and the revolution. | ||
| But we're also going to talk about his other books. | ||
| Sam, thank you so much. | ||
| Honored to have you in here. | ||
| I've been doing this for a long time. | ||
| What a pleasure. | ||
| We've talked on the phone. | ||
| I interviewed for stories, but we never met, so this is great. | ||
| Just incredible. | ||
| Your books, first off, you've written three, quite frankly, you're a non-observant, secular, liberal, Jewish guy from New York, lives in Connecticut now, but editor of the New York Times Book Review. | ||
| So you're not a, you wouldn't want to say a part of conservative Inc. or MAGA, but I tell people, if you read your three books on conservatism, your book on Whitaker Chambers, which is quite frankly a masterpiece, your book on Buckley, which I think this is a masterpiece, and then you read the book you started with, The Death of Conservatism, which had a massive influence on me when I first read it, and Andrew Breitbart back in 2009, I think the book came out. | ||
| How does someone with your background be the best chronicler of really getting to the heart of what conservatism is and the impact it's had on America? | ||
| Well, so great of you to describe me that way, Steve, not everyone else does. | ||
| Some of our friends on the right have some trouble with it. | ||
| Although I have to say, I hear time and time again that all sorts of people read these books. | ||
| Well, for those of the Whitaker death of conservatism, conservative Inc. did not want to touch it. | ||
| That's one of the reasons I told Andrew, I said, hey, National Review, Weekly Standard, all these guys aren't touching this book. | ||
| This book is very powerful. | ||
| But you cannot, if you want to read about lived Christianity and its worldview about the atheism of Marxism and its fight against that, there's no better vehicle to read that than the Whitaker Chambers biography, right? | ||
| I mean, that tells the entire story. | ||
| Yeah, because of Chambers himself, you know, it's interesting, Steve, right before September 11th, all those years ago, when George W. Bush was president, they did a 100th anniversary. | ||
| You know, Buckley's 100th anniversary is coming up, right? | ||
| Almost as we speak. | ||
| And they did one on Chambers. | ||
| And so they invited me because my book had come out. | ||
| It came out in 97. | ||
| And here it was, 2001. | ||
| It's the summer of 2001. | ||
| And I get into the elevator, and Robert Bork was in it. | ||
| And I'd given a talk, Ralph DeTaladonna. | ||
| Remember him? | ||
| He'd given a talk. | ||
| Those are pretty right-wing figures. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| Pretty conservative. | ||
| That's the three senior guys in the conservative movement. | ||
| And Judge Borker, right? | ||
| Remember, everybody called him Judge Bork. | ||
| He's in the elevator with me. | ||
| And he said, look, I really like the Chambers book. | ||
| What are you doing next? | ||
| So I'm going to do Bill Buckley. | ||
| He said, Bill Buckley, how could you go from the giant Whitaker Chambers to Bill Buckley? | ||
| And I'm thinking, you're not getting it. | ||
| Because, yeah, Chambers and Buckley are two very different kinds of guys, but they were almost like tell our audience. | ||
| We have a lot of younger audience too. | ||
| Let's start with who was Whitaker Chambers and why is it so important for people today, particularly young people, to understand his story? | ||
| Whitaker Chambers, born in 1901, died in 1961, was the founder of the modern anti-conservative, I mean, anti-communist movement that was based on a Christian conservatism. | ||
| And it sounds very different from what we read today because Chambers came out of the left. | ||
| And you ask, well, why am I writing about these guys? | ||
| It's because the basis of all this is really the old American left, the kind of pro-communist, pro-socialist, turn everything upside down left-wing in America. | ||
| Chambers was a prodigy in that movement in its big years in the 1920s and 30s, became an underground. | ||
| When people don't realize how close the country, after the Great Depression, and Roosevelt and a lot of our audience hates Roosevelt, but he was capitalism trying to provide a solution because the country could have very much slipped into what was happening in Europe, to socialism, communism, or some sort of great revolution in this country, given the impact that the Great Depression had. | ||
| Yeah, very much so. | ||
| That's why the hard left always hated Roosevelt. | ||
| They thought he was kind of cheating, you know, it's camouflage. | ||
| He's because he's going to save the system rather than destroy it, right? | ||
| Well, Chambers joined the Communist Party in the mid-1920s after he dropped out of college, Columbia University, and became a dedicated Soviet agent, not just a communist, a Soviet agent, became a spy. | ||
| And right here in Washington, just talk about that because this infects the Buckley book and the whole movement. | ||
| That the Soviets and the KGB, right, at the time, they had an active program to kind of repute what they felt were the best and brightest in this very city to actually be active agents of the Soviet Union. | ||
| Yeah, they infiltrated it. | ||
| They infiltrated the New Deal. | ||
| And I remember I was doing a documentary once on Joe McCarthy, another guy Buckley was very close to. | ||
| And Chambers had a different view of McCarthy, and we can get into that later. | ||
| But and the documentarian, she did a pretty good job. | ||
| At one point, she said to me, Well, how many active agents were there in these years, the 1930s during the New Deal before World War II? | ||
| So you have to remember the Nazis and the Soviets are kind of circling each other. | ||
| Hitler and Stalin are circling each other. | ||
| We don't know which way it's going to go. | ||
| She said, So, how many people are in the communist apparatus, as they call it, in these underground cells? | ||
| And I said, Well, maybe 75. | ||
| And she said, Well, is that a lot? | ||
| And I said, Well, depends on who they were and what they were doing, right? | ||
| So, if it's somebody in the State Department and the guy that was at Treasury on the dollar, if you have 75 Grendoons, it doesn't matter. | ||
| But if you have bright young things that are in a movement that, you know, in the New Deal and can shape things, you make a big impact. | ||
| Well, yeah, we can get into that a little bit with McCarthy, too, because, you know, Buckley was a big champion of Joe McCarthy and actually made what I think is a pretty powerful argument for McCarthy, which is in this book. | ||
| The McCarthy section alone in this book makes it worthwhile for people to buy just about our current time today, because you make a brilliant observation on McCarthy that McCarthy was so powerful, not because the facts he brought, but the way he said things, that he really got a great, he was the first really grassroots guy. | ||
| I mean, you had Father Coughlin and other guys before the war, the America Firsters. | ||
| But McCarthy, now that communism was becoming a reality and we had beaten the fascists, he talked in a way, in a street vernacular, in a way he talked that galvanized people's. | ||
| We don't know all the theoretical things on Marx's Leninism, but we know these are bad guys and they want to change America and we want them out. | ||
| What your description of McCarthy and Buckley singing McCarthy is quite frankly stunning, and it speaks to the moment we're in today. | ||
| Well, what Buckley saw, Steve, you'll get this too, was Buckley was a Catholic, McCarthy's a Catholic, and there's no institution. | ||
| Bobby Kennedy was a Catholic. | ||
| Listen, Jack Kennedy walked out of the room if he heard somebody make a negative comment about Joe McCarthy. | ||
| You know this, right? | ||
| If he was in a gathering like this and somebody attacked Joe McCarthy, Jack Kennedy would say, I'm sorry, and he'd walk out of the room. | ||
| Well, the standard also in this book, it's not, and I told you before when we set you up to come, is that the modern conservative movement, but the organized Protestant churches, they don't make a big deal about McCarthy's Catholicism. | ||
| I mean, Buckley's Catholicism. | ||
| It imbued everything. | ||
| I mean, Catholicism and anti-communism were kind of his two things, right? | ||
| And being against the liberal movement. | ||
| But there was definitely a suppression. | ||
| In fact, when God and Man at Yale comes out, the Yale attacks the book by going to different intellectuals and say, this is the problem with a kid who comes here that's too Catholic, right? | ||
| They had quotas limiting Catholic. | ||
| They called him an agent of the Vatican, 1951. | ||
| They said, well, we do have a conspiracy in America. | ||
| This is what credentialed liberal critics of God and Man at Yale, Buckley's first book, wrote. | ||
| We do have a conspiracy in America, and it's run by the Vatican, not by the communists. | ||
| Let's go back to Chambers. | ||
| Here's the thing that I think is powerful, and I want people to buy the Buckley book. | ||
| And if you get a chance, get the Whitaker Chambers book, too. | ||
| You talk, these are not just biographies of individuals. | ||
| You talk about the age that they lived in. | ||
| So it's really much, the book is a subtitle, The Life and the Revolution that Changed America. | ||
| Whitaker Chambers, although a biography, you get the best sense of the 1930s, the turmoil that the country was in before World War II, because of the economic conditions of the Great Depression and how, and what Marxism did to really drive Whitaker Chambers' Christianity even more, right? | ||
| I mean, this is why he became, essentially, really became a Christian. | ||
| Well, the brilliance of Chambers was that he saw Marxism itself as a kind of religion, right? | ||
| It's kind of bad religion. | ||
| And what that means is the dedicated followers of it are going to be more committed to their politics than the neutral, kind of technocratic, well, let's tinker at the edges, see if we make the system work a little bit. | ||
| And Chambers would say, are you effing kidding me? | ||
| Now, he was very elevated. | ||
| Chambers spoke seven languages. | ||
| He read Dante in Italian during the Algeria perjury case. | ||
| You see Chambers reading The Purgatory. | ||
| In the original Italian. | ||
| He was a brilliant guy. | ||
| And that's what drew me to him, by the way. | ||
| You know, we're asking me, Steve, why am I writing about these guys? | ||
| I grew up in a household that was your classic kind of aspiring, assimilated, second-generation Jewish Americans. | ||
| My father's a college professor, political scientist. | ||
| He was the one who had me read Witness when I was 14 years old. | ||
| Chambers' great memoir. | ||
| He said, you have to read this. | ||
| This is the greatest book on anti-communism by an ex-communist. | ||
| Your father told you. | ||
| My father told him as my father. | ||
| You read it. | ||
| How old were you reading? | ||
| I was 14. | ||
| My father was a totally classic liberal. | ||
| It broke his heart in 1972 when he had to vote for George McGovern. | ||
| He didn't want to, but he did, right? | ||
| So we know who those guys were. | ||
| But the thing that really got to him was the kind of papering over of the facts about communism. | ||
| That was very big for Buckley, too. | ||
| Buckley would take up liberal congressmen like Allard Lowenstein, the liberal Democrat, because he knew he was anti-communist. | ||
| People think that's a joke today. | ||
| It was not. | ||
| I mean, that was the hardest. | ||
| Some of the hardest anti-communists actually were Democrats. | ||
| It was a total threat to the freedom of the world. | ||
| Chambers knew it. | ||
| Chambers put his life on the line. | ||
| You know, one thing he used to point out about his memoir, Witness, because Chambers was a linguist. | ||
| He was a classical linguist. | ||
| In Greek, witness is the same word as martyr. | ||
| He was going to put himself out there. | ||
| And so he took the risk, right? | ||
| Famous lines during the Hiss confrontation right here in Washington, 1948. | ||
| Chambers has testified he's broken with the party. | ||
| He's decided the post-war, people should understand, even for McCarthy, because everything started with McCarthy. | ||
| It didn't. | ||
| It started towards the end of the war with the House on American Activities, that people realized that something was going on in the war and the Soviet Union was rising in power. | ||
| Clearly, in military power, they had been really the nation that had destroyed the Wehrmacht, right? | ||
| And so people were concerned about infiltration, everything. | ||
| So the anti-communism movement really started even at the end of World War II. | ||
| By this time, it's an official part of the apparatus here in D.C. | ||
| Yes, that's right. | ||
| And Chambers early on in 1939, when the notorious pact had been signed between the Nazis and the Soviets. | ||
| Is that what drove him over the edge? | ||
| Yeah, because they had fought the Nazis so long in the 30s, and now to have Stalin and Hitler do a deal. | ||
| He'd already broken with the movement by then because he saw where it was headed. | ||
| His bosses, this stuff sounds crazy, but you have to read it because it's right there in the story. | ||
| As early as 1937, he had a Russian boss, a spy master. | ||
| So at this point, Chambers is living in Baltimore with his friend Alger Hiss. | ||
| Alger Hiss is working for the State Department. | ||
| Chambers is coming to Washington and picking up documents from his contacts, like Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department, the guy who later wrote the Morgenthau Plan for World War II. | ||
| And Bretton Woods. | ||
| Bretton Woods. | ||
| I mean, this is one of the towering intellectual financials. | ||
| All this stuff is going on. | ||
| Chambers is the courier. | ||
| Chambers has got the brilliant languages, right? | ||
| He's got the Columbia education, all this stuff. | ||
| Hang on one second. | ||
| We're going to take a commercial break. | ||
| I want to get to the punchline of the story. | ||
| I want to hold him on edge. | ||
| Sam Tannehaus is with us. | ||
| He's going to be with us for the entire morning. | ||
| We're going to talk about really the nation and conservatism from really the 1920s all the way up. | ||
| You actually finished. | ||
| Buckley's book ends where the death of conservatism takes up, which is a brilliant. | ||
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| Sam Tenenhouse is our guest. | ||
| The book is Buckley, The Life and the Revolution that Changed America. | ||
| Like I said, with his Whitaker Chambers book in his Buckley book, if you want to take a history of the United States from the 1920s all the way up to basically the turn of the century, you can't get a better two books to really tell you about America, what we went through, and how the conservative movement really kind of started, the modern conservative movement started. | ||
| And then if you read Death of the Conservatism, you'll see how the conservative movement, I think, ended in the rise of populist nationalism, what the mega movement is today. | ||
| We're in Baltimore, Whitaker Chambers. | ||
| So Chambers is an underground spy for what was then called the NKVD. | ||
| It's what we know as the KGB. | ||
| It's really military espionage. | ||
| He's meeting with a group of people, about a dozen of them, who are giving him documents. | ||
| And you think, well, who cares if a guy like Alger Hiss in the State Department is giving him cables, diplomatic cables? | ||
| Well, because the cables are sent in code. | ||
| And you give them to the Soviets, and guess what? | ||
| They've got the codes. | ||
| So FDR, Franklin Roosevelt, who'd been a naval officer, starts switching. | ||
| Yeah, Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, right? | ||
| So he starts switching the codes. | ||
| They realize there's a problem. | ||
| So after 1939, you now have the pact between the Soviets and the Nazis. | ||
| And that's in the United States. | ||
| That's when, because my parents were in Norfolk, that's when you see America start to kick up and get, they know a war's coming. | ||
| Once they see that pact sign, they go, okay, something's going to happen in Europe, and we got to be ready for it. | ||
| You see, budgets, the draft comes, a huge fight in the draft. | ||
| Because I remember most people, hey, World War I left such a bad taste in everybody's mouth, right? | ||
| They said, hey, we're not doing that again. | ||
| No League of Nations, none of that. | ||
| We're really isolation. | ||
| You got Lindbergh, all the American first crowd. | ||
| But in this city, you start to see the draft, you start to see armaments, you start to see we're getting ready because people realize downrange a big fight's coming. | ||
| Yeah, and not long after that, you have the Lundlease program when Churchill kept him alive. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| So it's all happening now. | ||
| And Chambers goes to a very high-ranking guy, Adolph Burley, who is a kind of a security officer in the State Department, and he tells them, You've now got people working for you who had been spying for the Soviets, and that material is not going to go to Nazi Germany. | ||
| And so Burley, it's a great question. | ||
| Is that the thing that triggers him from being a KGB, a KGB spy, a Russian spy, to actually going and saying this is a problem? | ||
| Was the signing of the pact that all his idealism went away? | ||
| Because he said, if they're prepared to do it with the Nazis, it's not the idealism I work for as far as what, you know, communism to make the world better. | ||
| That was actually the last step, Steve, because there was an earlier one. | ||
| So just a little before then, he had a Soviet spy master, Colonel Beekoff, this guy that sent over from Russia. | ||
| And he said to Chambers as early as 1937, he said, Look, we have a new mission for you. | ||
| We're going to send you on a boat to go over to Spain and fight Franco. | ||
| We're going to be a spy there. | ||
| And anybody who followed what was going on, this is the Spanish Civil War, knew that Stalin was carrying out purges there. | ||
| He was purging all, right? | ||
| George Orwell wrote a fantastic book about him. | ||
| How much to Catalonia? | ||
| Homage to Catalonia. | ||
| And he was and Chambers realized they were sending him over there to knock him off. | ||
| So he starts erasing. | ||
| Because they thought he was weak or he thought he was weak. | ||
| There's a great line he gave in his hearings that nobody picked up on because it's just too subtle. | ||
| Chambers, super literary guy. | ||
| And everything he says, if you look at his face and his testimony, there's a kind of half-smile he has all the time. | ||
| And someone says, well, is it really true, Mr. Chambers, that you were not really a Stalinist, but a Trotskyist? | ||
| And Chambers says, I am not now and never have been a Trotskyist. | ||
| He's making fun of what Alger Hiss says when they bring him in then, right? | ||
| So Chambers got worried about that, and he started to arrange his own break from the party. | ||
| He adopts aliases. | ||
| He moves to different apartments. | ||
| And the guy he is unable to break away is Alger Hiss. | ||
| And there's this line. | ||
| Alger Hiss, who's like Johns Hopkins, he's the golden boy. | ||
| He was a Supreme Court clerk to Felix Frankfurter. | ||
| He was called one of Frankfurter's happy hot dogs, they called him, right? | ||
| Guy on the left, helped write a lot of the New Deal legislation. | ||
| Chambers really liked Hiss. | ||
| He said, I'm very fond of Mr. Hiss. | ||
| He goes to Hiss and he says, look, they're coming after me. | ||
| They're going to come after all of us now. | ||
| You have to break with this movement. | ||
| And Chambers never forgot what Hiss said to him. | ||
| He says, well, he said, Stalin plays for keeps. | ||
| And Chambers remembered that when he was a kid. | ||
| That was a term you use and you were playing marbles. | ||
| Like, you got to keep the marble if you want it. | ||
| That to Hiss, this is the game. | ||
| And he wants to be really famous words. | ||
| Steve, you know very well. | ||
| Chambers goes back to his wife and he says, we're going to leave. | ||
| You and I are going to leave the winning world for the losing world because they thought the communists were going to win. | ||
| So then 1939, the pact gets signed. | ||
| Chambers meets with Adolph Burley, this beautiful house in Washington with this estate, right, overlooking the Potomac. | ||
| They meet at midnight. | ||
| And Chambers says, I have to tell you, there are spies now who've been working for the Soviet Union, and their stuff is going to be transmitted to the Soviet Union, to the Nazis. | ||
| We know it now because there's the pact. | ||
| So Burley says, well, give me some names. | ||
| And so Chambers does, and they include Alger Hiss. | ||
| 1939. | ||
| It's not until 1948 that they find. | ||
| But let's say this is why it's so important. | ||
| First off, just having you talk about this and having it in the book is kind of monumental because the liberals in this country never want to talk about the spirit. | ||
| What happened in the Roosevelt administration is they want to shut, they don't want any discussion of this because this would play to some of what the right were saying. | ||
| Hey, this thing is really a front for socialism, for communism. | ||
| And they're saying, no, we're actually saving communism. | ||
| You had a bunch of, this was the Joe Kennedy crowd that were saying, you know, this is a problem. | ||
| So Adolph Berlin and these guys, the first thing to do is to make sure we're not outing anybody, but we can kind of tone it down. | ||
| That's what they thought they could do. | ||
| They thought we'll handle it internally. | ||
| Now to handle it externally means you're going to get thrown out of office because the American people go, you've got communists in the government. | ||
| They got a KGB spy ring. | ||
| And who's the guy who actually goes before the public? | ||
| And well, Nixon prosecuted Hiss, as it were, through the House. | ||
| But the guy who does it publicly is James McCarthy. | ||
| But Alger Hiss, when I say golden boy, and Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss, and this is what gets back to Yalta. | ||
| Alger Hiss is the senior aide-de-camp for Roosevelt in Yalta when Roosevelt is so sick, right? | ||
| And that is the key meeting of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, how the war is going to come to an end and what the post-World War is going to look like. | ||
| And you have Alger Hiss, who is a KGB spy, is the guy moving the papers and his aide-de-camp. | ||
| That's why the guys on the right have always said, and I keep saying, I don't care what they say about why Phil Marshall Montgomery and Patton stopped 70 miles from Berlin, right, when that was the entire objective of the war and let the Russian army, which were what, two or 300 miles away, you know, grind it up and they took Berlin. | ||
| But there's Yalta has always been a massive issue for whether it was Nixon, Buckley, McCarthy, currently, you know, Bannon and everybody today to say, hey, and Alger Hiss was a golden boy. | ||
| I mean, they keep saying, oh, these are Grundoons. | ||
| Even to have you say it is like the left never wants to talk about this. | ||
| I.F. Stone, Alder Hiss, Harry Dexter White, any of this crowd. | ||
| Well, and another thing is that's important is: did you get grief when you had the detail in the book when Whitaker Chambers came, when the Whitaker Chambers book came out? | ||
| Yeah, actually, less than I thought it would, but I got plenty of it. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It's funny, some writers who are friends of mine now really came after me when that book came out. | ||
| That who was I to tell this story and to make Chambers seem like a sympathetic guy. | ||
| And there were just enough old-style liberal anti-communists, as they used to call them, including Arthur Schlesinger, who reviewed it for the Times. | ||
| And he said, no, this is the story. | ||
| He said, this is as close a story as we're going to get, but that kind of liberal is gone now. | ||
| So it's even Chambers' great anti-communism and Buckley's. | ||
| Buckley's fighting it to the end. | ||
| You will meet the children of Russian émigrés in this country. | ||
| One of them is one of our greatest novelists now, a guy named Gary Steingart. | ||
| You've probably heard of him. | ||
| I saw him at a book event, and he said, I have to tell you, my parents emigrated from Russia in the 70s. | ||
| Bill Buckley was a god to them because he was the only one who was saying we can bring the Soviet Union down. | ||
| He's the only one saying, let the Jews out, you know? | ||
| So all this other stuff that is circulating now, but even now, Buckley won't get credit for it. | ||
| It steams me a little bit. | ||
| But at any rate, so we'll get to that later. | ||
| But so Chambers sees Hiss as doing this, but not only that, Chambers was a brilliant writer. | ||
| And when he broke from the underground, he got a job at Time Magazine. | ||
| And early on, the anti-communist loose. | ||
| Anti-communist, but very classic Republican loose, right? | ||
| And so it's like 1940. | ||
| And Chambers is just a guy working away, get a good salary, but you're a faceless guy. | ||
| No bylines, Time Magazine in those days. | ||
| You just wrote your article. | ||
| And Henry Luce reads this devastating critique of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, when it was made into a film. | ||
| It's by John Ford. | ||
| John Ford. | ||
| And Chambers said, it's a magnificent film, but the novel is trash. | ||
| And Luce reads this thing and he says, This is the best film review I've ever read. | ||
| Who wrote this? | ||
| And it's dumpy Whitaker Chambers. | ||
| They call him in and Luce says, Who are you? | ||
| And he realizes he has a genius on his hands. | ||
| And Chambers says, Not only that, I'll tell you everything that's going on. | ||
| I'll tell you this. | ||
| Your own magazine is filled with pro-communist writers who are going to start turning the copy of their dispatches. | ||
| They are going to be totally pro-communist in Russia and in China. | ||
| So Chambers becomes the villain there, too. | ||
| All of this is in the book, of course. | ||
| Then finally, they get around after the war ends. | ||
| Yalta happens. | ||
| Yalta. | ||
| Hang on, we're going to come back to you after take a short commercial break. | ||
| This is even better than I thought. | ||
| I could do this for days. | ||
| This is fake. | ||
| A great writer. | ||
| You actually know this. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Because it's of the anyway, take a short commercial break. | ||
| We'll talk about it when we get back. | ||
|
unidentified
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | |
| Welcome back. | ||
| I didn't realize you were such a great storyteller. | ||
| Your books, but you're a rank and tour. | ||
| Whitaker Chambers. | ||
| Where are we? | ||
| All right. | ||
| So, Yalta. | ||
| Yalta happens. | ||
| And there's this. | ||
| Explain to people, though. | ||
| And why is Yalta so big in the post-war America? | ||
| Everything you see, the losing at China, all of it, McCarthy, really from the post-war era to all the way up to really Jack Kennedy, this thing, what happened at Yalta drives so much. | ||
| 1945, the war's been won. | ||
| So the leaders of the three great allied nations, U.S., U.K., Soviet Union, all meet Yalta, right? | ||
| Which is where it's Crimea or somewhere, right? | ||
| And they all get together and they're going to divide up. | ||
| We can't believe it. | ||
| They're fighting about it in Ukraine right now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can't believe that they would do this until we see it happen. | ||
| Now, they actually have maps in front of them, and they're carving up Central and Eastern Europe, who gets what piece of what. | ||
| And Stalin's coming out of it looking very well. | ||
| And the right thing. | ||
| Well, because the reality is they lost 65 million people, 25 million military, and another 30 or 35 million starved to death. | ||
| I mean, they broke the Wehrmacht, Arsenal of Democracy, the heroism of America and the troops and the 8th Air Corps, unbelievable. | ||
| What the British did, unbelievable. | ||
| But that technically where the war was fought, which was in Eastern Europe and the Ukraine and all that, the center of gravity of this great war where the Russian army, the Red Army, broke the back of the Wehrmacht and then broke Hitler was all in the East. | ||
| So Stalin realized they had paid in blood of what they said that we had paid for material goods. | ||
| Yo, that's absolutely right. | ||
| And when I go back even further in history and you go back to Tolstoy and War and Peace, and that's where Napoleon gets stopped in Russia, it's the same thing. | ||
| And you have to. | ||
| It's what's happening in Ukraine. | ||
| They'll throw as many bodies into the meat grinder as they have to. | ||
| Well, you know, and what do they say about Russia? | ||
| It never lacked for strong leaders, right? | ||
| Yeah, they'll do it. | ||
| They'll do it. | ||
| And they were doing it then. | ||
| And so Chambers is at Time magazine. | ||
| Remember, there are no bylines then, and everything is strict reporting. | ||
| So they get cables in those days. | ||
| The cables would come in from the foreign office. | ||
| And then these guys like Chambers is now running the foreign news department. | ||
| And we have to say, Time magazine at that point was kind of like, it's like Fox. | ||
| It's like Tucker Carlson. | ||
| The New York Times and the BBC combined. | ||
| First, give a second. | ||
| Luce and his wife, one of the most extraordinary women in American history, Claire Booth Luce, had really gotten Henry Luce even more thinking about the grand strategy of America. | ||
| So you had her, you had Theodore White, Teddy White. | ||
| I mean, the crew of writers he had and people that could actually deliver great copy. | ||
| Because remember, they called Time magazine the first draft of history. | ||
| And these guys took it seriously. | ||
| And they were really good at it. | ||
| They were great writers. | ||
| And then they had guys in the home office like Chambers who would rewrite and then smooth it out. | ||
| And Chambers was famous for his own copy, the flow in his copy, right? | ||
| Chambers had been a prodigy as a short story writer and poet when he was a kid. | ||
| I mean, I haven't even touched on that. | ||
| He's called the hottest literary Bolshevik in America, right? | ||
| So now he's gone the other way. | ||
| And now he knows a lot of world history. | ||
| One of Chambers' languages is Russian, along with German. | ||
| He spoke German like a native. | ||
| His Russian is really good too. | ||
| And he sees what's going on. | ||
| And he knows that Alger Hiss is this guy he used to run as a spy who's now at Yalta. | ||
| So Chambers retreats. | ||
| He's not at Yalta. | ||
| He's FDR's aide-de-camp at Alta. | ||
| I mean, he's the guy bringing the papers in. | ||
| I mean, he's, because FDR is very ill at this time. | ||
| In fact, he's within 90 days of dying. | ||
| That's how ill he is. | ||
| And Whitaker Chambers is kind of running the deal. | ||
| Alger Hiss. | ||
| Alger Hiss was working. | ||
| Yeah, well, they had phone extensions. | ||
| FDR was one. | ||
| Alger Hiss was three. | ||
| End of story. | ||
| Well, so Chambers is watching all this, and he goes off to do his, you know, he lived on a farm in Maryland, and he'd come in, he'd work these odd hours. | ||
| He's become a Quaker by now, very odd, oddball character, but everybody knows he's brilliant. | ||
| And he types this thing up. | ||
| He has a story. | ||
| He writes a parable, right? | ||
| It's not a report in Time magazine. | ||
| It's an essay. | ||
| He calls it a historical fantasy that he's invented. | ||
| It's called The Ghosts on the Roof. | ||
| And he imagines the ancient czars of Russia watching Yalta and saying, Wow, we got our guy in Stalin. | ||
| He's the one who's actually going to create an empire for us. | ||
| And Chambers slips it in to Time magazine. | ||
| He gives it to his editor. | ||
| And there's like a delegation that descends on a guy named Tom Matthews, T.S. Matthews. | ||
| He said, You're going to publish this thing? | ||
| How can you do it? | ||
| All he's doing is feeding all the right-wing frenzy out there. | ||
| And Matthew shows it to Luce. | ||
| And Luce says, This is like the work of a literary genius. | ||
| He's created this story. | ||
| It's like a story by Franz Kafka. | ||
| Luce shows it to his wife, whom you mentioned, Claire Booth Luce. | ||
| Brilliant. | ||
| And says, This thing is a playwright. | ||
| He wrote the women a number. | ||
| She was a two woman. | ||
| She was a Republican Congresswoman. | ||
| She was one of Buckley's first idols. | ||
| But they got a lot of his have that in the book. | ||
| One of his first ideas. | ||
| He admired the way she could give a speech like nobody else. | ||
| Nobody else, you know, with the turns of friends. | ||
| Fray was the power couple in New York. | ||
| You're talking at the highest level of Manhattan society and the elite in the country. | ||
| They had a penthouse apartment across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art after they moved out of the Waldorf, right? | ||
| And Buckley was very proud. | ||
| He told me, he said, I think I'm the only person who edited Harry and Claire Luce, because they both wrote pieces for him, right? | ||
| But that's later. | ||
| That's the 1960s. | ||
| So Chambers writes this thing, and Time Magazine publishes it, and it blows up. | ||
| And they want to fire Chambers right then and there, right? | ||
| His colleagues, his esteemed colleagues. | ||
| And Luce says, no, we're not doing it. | ||
| So they're already loaded for bear with Chambers. | ||
| So then a few years later, or actually months later, Life Magazine was read by even more people than Time. | ||
| Time was for the readers. | ||
| Life was the photo magazine. | ||
| That was Claire Luce's idea to do life, right? | ||
| Huge circulations. | ||
| These magazines had bigger circulations in that much smaller America than any print publication does today. | ||
| In a blue-collar house, you know, with five kids, Catholic, we got Time Magazine, we got Newsweek, we got life, and then we got a look. | ||
| But the Life magazine would come in, and it was like that was the world. | ||
| It was a world. | ||
| It showed you the world. | ||
| Those photographs, well, one of the you may remember at the end of Life magazine that have the photo of the week. | ||
| And the photo of the week was in 1945. | ||
| It was a handsome, debonaire State Department official, Alger Hiss, flying home with the charter for the United Nations, and he was its first Secretary General. | ||
| And Chambers goes, Are we allowed to say this? | ||
| He kind of goes back and he says, This was the guy who was in the Communist Party with me. | ||
| Nobody wants to believe it. | ||
| So, for the audience, he identified Alger Hiss as a communist spy working for the military intelligence. | ||
| I mean, this is the hardcore guys. | ||
| In 1939, to senior people in the State Department, after the war, he's telling Henry Luce, he's working at Time, this guy's a Soviet agent at Yalta. | ||
| He's number three on the phone to FDR. | ||
| Now he's back at his thing. | ||
| Where do Treme's got to be going insane? | ||
| He keeps telling the powers that be, the people that could shut it down. | ||
| Hey, by the way, this guy's just not a fellow traveler. | ||
| He's not a sympathizer. | ||
| He's an active agent of military intelligence for the Russians, and he keeps rising in power. | ||
| Is anybody going to do anything about it? | ||
| Well, and this is the way these stories always turn. | ||
| It's why they're fun to tell. | ||
| Is so Chambers finally gets a hearing in Congress because in 1946, right, with Truman succeeds Roosevelt, as you said, Roosevelt was near death. | ||
| Harry Truman succeeds him. | ||
| And then the Republicans running on a platform they call Had Enough, right? | ||
| 1946. | ||
| And lo and behold, some anti-communists get elected to the House and the Senate. | ||
| I'll give you three names. | ||
| There are two congressmen. | ||
| One guy's named Jack Kennedy. | ||
| The other is Richard Nixon. | ||
| Paul had been in the Pacific in the war, came back home, and wanted the country to get moving again. | ||
| And they realized things were wrong in D.C. | ||
| And both these guys coming in on that platform, although Nixon's more of a fire breather than Jack Kennedy. | ||
| And there's a third guy, too, who gets elected to the Senate, Joe McCarthy from Wisconsin. | ||
| All post-war. | ||
| All post-war. | ||
| And now they're all sort of getting ready to move. | ||
| And so HUAC, the famous House Committee on Un-American Activities, which we kind of turned the order around, we call it HUAC. | ||
| And you can always tell when you talk to the old-style anti-communist and ex-communist witnesses, the guys I knew when I was writing the book. | ||
| Nobody remembers their names anymore. | ||
| You know, Herbert Rommerstein and Victor Riesel. | ||
| They always insist on calling it HCUA, House Committee on Un-American Activities. | ||
| So at any rate, so they start having hearings in the summer of 48. | ||
| It's an election year. | ||
| Congress goes home for the vacation. | ||
| The House goes home. | ||
| And they started having these hearings on communist infiltration. | ||
| And they're not really getting anywhere. | ||
| And then they say, well, look, we've got this one other witness. | ||
| The FBI's been tracking him. | ||
| The naval intelligence had also been interviewing Chambers on and off all these years. | ||
| Alger Hiss mysteriously leaves the State Department to run the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace because pressure is already coming from within. | ||
| They want to get rid of him, right? | ||
| But also, this is the NGOs we always talk about today. | ||
| They're one of the most well-endowed from as tough a capitalist as you could ever have, but now they're kind of a front organization for nefarious communist activities. | ||
| You know, the gospel of wealth becomes sort of the gospel of socialism, right? | ||
| So they bring Chambers in, and he's just there to corroborate a previous witness. | ||
| No one remembers her anymore, named Elizabeth Bentley, because she'd also been one of these couriers. | ||
| And she's, look, we're going to speak in kind of, you know, unwoke terms, whatever, but she's this kind of middle-aged, you know, kind of dumpy woman, and she's giving her testimony. | ||
| You figure she's a Soviet spy. | ||
| We don't have much to worry about. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they said, well, let's see if we can corroborate her. | ||
| Right. | ||
| One of the journalists at the time, I think it was A.J. Liebling, called her the nutmeg Mata Harry because she's from Connecticut, like where I live now, Nutmeg State. | ||
| So then they bring it, and they say, well, we've got this other guy. | ||
| We've got this guy at Time magazine. | ||
| And so Chambers gets the subpoena from HUAC in August, right, to testify before the House committee. | ||
| He doesn't want to do it. | ||
| He says to a friend of his, he said, look, the guy says to him, well, just tell them what you know. | ||
| You've already talked about all this stuff. | ||
| You've been talking to ONI, Office of Naval Intelligence. | ||
| You're talking to the FBI. | ||
| You talk to Adolph Burley. | ||
| Why not just go before Huak, tell them what you know? | ||
| And Chambers says, well, you know, he looks around and says, they don't like informers around here. | ||
| And one of the things that's so great about Chambers, I really admire about him, Steve, is that he calls himself an informer. | ||
| I know it. | ||
| I know it. | ||
| You know, he doesn't pretend he's doing something different from what he does. | ||
| He has this gorgeous, beautiful, heartbreaking line in Witness where he says, an informer is somebody who's fetching a soiled bone. | ||
| He said, I don't want to name these people I worked with. | ||
| I'm not going to say what they did. | ||
| I don't want to be that guy, right? | ||
| That's a term we use now. | ||
| I don't want to be that guy. | ||
| I'll tell you as an aside, several very good filmmakers came to me and said, you know, I'd like to make a book, a movie about Chambers. | ||
| I said, well, never happen. | ||
| It will never happen. | ||
| You cannot make the snitch the hero. | ||
| The country won't accept. | ||
| And then they would all back down in the end, right? | ||
| Like one guy who made very small offer for was De Niro, Robert De Niro, his production company years ago. | ||
| Well, that's an interesting story, all this. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So anyway, hang on one second. | ||
| I want to go to break and come back with this. | ||
| You know, De Niro and those guys, it's interesting. | ||
| I would argue that I think we get it made now because of the success of Goodfellows, which focuses around the rat. | ||
| I only know that from prison because in prison, they tell you, hey, if you're a rat, you're the lowest down those. | ||
| I mean, you do not want to go to prison and have that what they call in your papers. | ||
| If you have that, you've been a government informant in federal prison, the life is not good. | ||
| Anyway, short commercial break. | ||
| Sam, 10 in house, Whitaker Chambers and Buckley, next. | ||
|
unidentified
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | |
| Okay, welcome back, Birch Gold. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want to thank our sponsor. | |
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| Sam, Whitaker Chambers is about to become a witness. | ||
| And he's torn because now he realized publicly he's going to be out as an informer. | ||
| And throughout history, the informers always had a black mark on them. | ||
| Yeah, you know, in the first trial, there were two trials after the hearings. | ||
| The defense attorney for a Hiss called him a leper. | ||
| He's a moral leper. | ||
| What happens when the leper comes down? | ||
| You know, leper, get away. | ||
| You know, this is the informer. | ||
| Chambers, very sensitive guy, you know, a literary guy. | ||
| And he'd been close to these people. | ||
| He still felt very close to them, right? | ||
| So he goes before in what they call executive session. | ||
| You know all this stuff. | ||
| That's the private meeting. | ||
| And I got the documents. | ||
| And more classified, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I got the, I got one of my sources for the Chambers book, all those years ago. | ||
| These guys are all long gone, of course, gave me the executive testimony, the private testimony. | ||
| The Democratic Party did not want. | ||
| I mean, you could have taken down the Democratic Party for a generation if you knew that there were active Soviet subversion of the Democratic Party, which a lot of people on the right, but they were kind of marginalized were saying. | ||
| And now you showed the evidence. | ||
| That's why these executive sessions, all of this, this was a huge, this kind of consumed Washington, right, for years. | ||
| These types of things. | ||
| And when it happened and the timing here, yeah, you know, quiet Washington people looking for stories. | ||
| One of the great things I did, Steve, was to interview a reporter. | ||
| I wonder if you knew him, a guy named Murray Martyr, who wrote for the Washington Post. | ||
| He covered the Hiss case. | ||
| And I came down here like in the oh, mid-90s. | ||
| He was already retired. | ||
| He was 75 years old. | ||
| And he said, nobody ever talks to me about this stuff. | ||
| And I just turned on the tape recorder and he walked me through a lot of things. | ||
| They never talked about it today because it's a part of history they don't want to talk about. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Now, all it does is it gives comfort to the bad guy so you can't talk about it. | ||
| Great ringers like me can say, hey, we told you. | ||
| We told you, yeah, we actually write about something. | ||
| You want to come out and do it? | ||
| Dan Colter says the book about the right-wing book about the thing with Joe McCarthy is the greatest book since the Bible. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| No, it's true. | ||
| And nobody wants to hear it. | ||
| Nobody wanted to hear it then. | ||
| Washington's a one-company town, and the company's a government. | ||
| You don't want to hear that. | ||
| It's infiltrated. | ||
| So Chambers says, Yeah, I'll tell you what I have. | ||
| And he goes before the committee, and they're kind of disappointed. | ||
| They're meeting behind closed doors. | ||
| He's very soft-spoken, Chambers. | ||
| He has a low-pitched voice. | ||
| It doesn't carry well. | ||
| He doesn't exactly mumble. | ||
| He's incredibly articulate, but he's uncomfortable. | ||
| He's not a fantastic-looking guy either, like Elizabeth Bentley before him. | ||
| And he'd been up the night before. | ||
| He came and stayed with a friend of his in Washington, a guy at Time Magazine, who put him up. | ||
| He lived in Calorama. | ||
| Chambers stayed with him. | ||
| And this guy gets up, a very good journalist, Frank McNaughton. | ||
| And he gets up. | ||
| He sees Chambers in the early morning. | ||
| Chambers is pacing around. | ||
| He said, What's going on, Wit? | ||
| And he said, I think they may try to come after me here. | ||
| They don't want me to testify. | ||
| The communist is going to try to kill me. | ||
| And Frank McNaughton says to him, Look, you're safe here, Wit. | ||
| You got nothing to worry about. | ||
| Chambers had this reputation for being a guy who, if you went out to lunch with him at Time Magazine, he'd always sit with his back to the wall. | ||
| It's like you're going out with a mobster. | ||
| He's looking over his shoulder. | ||
| People find it comical. | ||
| They don't believe any of this stuff is really happening when they were trying to get rid of him, right? | ||
| So, anyhow, so now he goes, goes to the meeting. | ||
| The big meeting is going to be in the caucus room, right? | ||
| The House caucus room, biggest. | ||
|
unidentified
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Famous. | |
| Famous, right? | ||
| It's the biggest venue they have, but they bring the witness, you know, behind the scenes first. | ||
| And there was a great investigator for the committee, Hugh Wack Committee, named Robert Stripling, guy from Texas, Midland, Texas, George Bush was from. | ||
| And he starts questioning Chambers, and Chambers is kind of hemming and hawing. | ||
| He doesn't want to talk about this stuff. | ||
| But Chambers says to him, Well, I've also got this statement I've written. | ||
| And Stripling looks at it and he says, The other said, No, we'll go in public with this guy. | ||
| And nobody knows why. | ||
| And Stripling told another interviewer, a guy named Alan Weinstein, wrote a fantastic book called Perjury, gave me all his documents too. | ||
| And Stripling says to him, He said, I've seen this guy's statement. | ||
| It's dynamite what this guy has to say. | ||
| So they haul him out. | ||
| They all move into the caucus room. | ||
| Chambers is there, right? | ||
| He's like as short as I am and, you know, and big and dumpy and all this. | ||
| And he goes in front of a microphone like this. | ||
| And he says, Well, I'm going to read my statement. | ||
| And he says, I was part of a Soviet apparatus. | ||
| He doesn't mention spying. | ||
| He wants to protect everybody. | ||
| He says, but we were involved. | ||
| And underground, I was part of a cell. | ||
| And the members included. | ||
| He starts going through the names. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And one of them is Alger Hiss. | |
| And like, that's the name that registers with everybody. | ||
| And Chambers knows it. | ||
| He's at Time Magazine. | ||
| He'd risen very high at Time Magazine. | ||
| He was in those days, Steve, making $30,000 a year. | ||
| Multiply it by about 15 to see what that salary is for a journalist now. | ||
| Chambers is putting it all on the line. | ||
| He says, And they said, Alger Hiss. | ||
| Everybody starts racing to the phones. | ||
| So the headlines the next day: senior editor of Time Magazine accuses president of the Carnegie Endowment of being a Soviet agent. | ||
| So, what the left wanted to say for a long time is this nobody accused another kind of mid-level guy of being a communist. | ||
| Why did they care? | ||
| No. | ||
| Check out the headlines. | ||
| We're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to come into our second hour. | ||
| This is so much better than I even thought this was going to be. | ||
| And I thought it was going to be great. | ||
| No, this is fantastic. | ||
| One of the questions I'm going to ask you to think about until we come back is: why is this history not talked about? | ||
| It's not taught anywhere, and it's not even talked about in the city. | ||
| If we were to talk about McCarthy and HUC and Whitaker Chambers and World War II and all of it, it's like you're talking about the ancient Romans and Greeks. | ||
| In fact, people know the ancient Romans and Greek better than this. | ||
| Short commercial break. |
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