Dec. 3, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
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| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies because we're going to make evil on these people. | ||
| Here's not got a free shot on 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. Bannon. | |
| You've just had an explosion across the battlefield that is American politics here in the imperial capital. | ||
| You've actually had a senior editor of, I would argue, one of the most, if not the most influential publication on a weekly basis, before you had cable TV and podcasts and everything like this, the revered Time magazine accuse in an open hearing in front of the nation, arguably one of the most respected individuals that had been in government for a long time, had been aide-de-camp to Roosevelt, | ||
| the first Secretary General of the United Nations, just to get the kickoff, and now leading the most prestigious NGO, the Carnegie Endowment of Peace, as being a Soviet agent. | ||
| What happens? | ||
| Well, Chambers goes through about eight or nine names and says, and mentions some others, well-known, not as well-known as hiss, and the others all go silent. | ||
| Because, well, if somebody accuses you of something, accuses you of being a communist, you've got to remember, Steve, this is an era where if you're accusing someone of being a communist and they're not, that's potential slander or libel, right? | ||
| Because it's not. | ||
| No, no, read them. | ||
| When you watch the movie Oppenheimer, I mean, we went from allies, quote unquote, to now mortal enemies, right? | ||
| And not just, it was not just about geopolitics at the time. | ||
| These are two distinct views of how one views humanity, the world, all of it. | ||
| This is the story of Whitaker Chambers goes from a hardcore, if not Trotsky, Marxist-Leninist, atheist, to a Christian that is Christianity informs every movement of his life, right? | ||
| And you see this whole battle right there. | ||
| That's why this is so big. | ||
| This consumed post-war America. | ||
| The war against, they called it the Cold War, but it got hot in many places. | ||
| This is what consumed us up until all the way through President Reagan's presidency. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, and Chambers insisted it was a moral battle. | ||
| That's what nobody wanted to hear. | ||
| It's not just moving. | ||
| It's a spiritual war. | ||
| It's a moral war. | ||
| That's why, you know, when a friend of mine, I think of yours too, Pat Buchanan, tries to say these things, right? | ||
| I said a long time ago, you know, he's hooted off the stage. | ||
| Hang on for a second. | ||
| Hang a second. | ||
| Hang a second. | ||
| How is one of the leading Jewish intellectuals in the country a friend of what they tell us today is the greatest anti-Semite in the nation, Pat Buchanan? | ||
| I revere Pat Buchanan, but to hear you say that you're a buddy of his is pretty shocking. | ||
| Well, first of all, any journalist who interviews Pat Buchanan knows how straight he is, how direct, how uncensored, and how helpful he will be. | ||
| And, you know, people are shocked by this. | ||
| It was actually a friend of mine who told me a long time ago before I interviewed Pat Buchanan, said he's a really nice guy. | ||
| I didn't believe it. | ||
| Then I met him many years. | ||
| But there's something else going on here, too. | ||
| Now we're going to get to something that's in the Buckley book, if we want to switch over there. | ||
| Because Buckley now comes on the stage. | ||
| He does come on the stage, very shortly. | ||
| Very short, a bit player, but in the wings, but all of a sudden you're going to see the kernels of all this. | ||
| This is why it's the revolution that changed America. | ||
| We're now going to get in. | ||
| It's more than Buckley. | ||
| It's what Buckley sees down the road. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And Pat Buchanan, of course, is still a younger guy than Buckley. | ||
| But he was raised in all this. | ||
| Remember, he comes from Washington and he was raised in all this politics. | ||
| And when Pat Buchanan had his big fight really with the neoconservatives during the First Iraq war, something I think you know a little bit about, that first Gulf War. | ||
| And the way I treated it in my book, and if you go back and look at the documents and debates at the time, because it's recirculating right now, right now it's happening. | ||
| There are accusations that if you are skeptical of Israel and the way it's conducting this war right now in Gaza, you are anti-Semitic. | ||
| And so they look for every opportunity to make that point. | ||
| Well, if you go back to the debate Pat Buchanan had, you're talking about the Gulf War in the 90s or the first one in the 90s. | ||
| In the 90s. | ||
| I want people to understand this is not after 9-11. | ||
| This is pre-9/11. | ||
| This is when the first Bush is president, the invasion of Kuwait, the threat to Kuwait. | ||
| Maggie Thatcher tells Bush, you know, don't get wobbly. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Don't get wobbly, George. | ||
| Don't get wobbly, George. | ||
| Right, it's not skull and bones, Bohemia Grove anymore. | ||
| We got to do it. | ||
| And Pat Buchanan says, Why are we fighting this war for Israel? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And well, and he's denounced and smeared in many respects for that. | ||
| But that was a battle about that war, which in retrospect, maybe Pat Buchanan was right about. | ||
| What do you mean by that? | ||
| That's so controversial. | ||
| We're going to get, we may not get clicks, although I think we will out of the first part of this about Whitaker Chambers, which I think is brilliant, and people are going to say, but right now, you're going to go viral. | ||
| So tell me, what's the argument for why Pat Buchanan might have been correct to say, which if everybody says, hey, the good war that we fought over the last four years is the Gulf War, right? | ||
| Because you were, you know, a little nation was invaded by a bigger nation. | ||
| This is where America had to stand up. | ||
| Also, it might have something to do with oil. | ||
| But why was Buchanan? | ||
| Because Buchanan really got the separation at kind of the beginning of this whole movement. | ||
| This part of this movement really started with that whole powerhouse debate they had then. | ||
| Well, you know, Steve, if you go back and look at the debates in Washington among like the major intellectual players of that era, and I mean, like Irving Crystal, not his son Bill, Irving Crystal. | ||
| Gene Patrick. | ||
| Kirk Patrick. | ||
| Yeah, I went to Georgetown after she started things. | ||
| She was a hammer. | ||
| And they're saying, why are we looking to start a new Cold War in the Middle East? | ||
| And Pat Buchanan had a line. | ||
| And Irving Kristol was not just, he had been, I think, a Trotskyite. | ||
| He was, and he was one of the guys who lead the effort anti-Chemists to make sure we got the Jews out of Russia. | ||
| I mean, this guy was a hammer, right? | ||
| When these guys are actually backing up Pat Buchanan, these are not intellectual lightweights. | ||
| These are about as heavy a public national security intellectuals as you can have. | ||
| Well, I'll give you an example of this. | ||
| Near the end of his life, when my wife, Kathy, who got very close to Bill Buckley as I did, we went to see him in his house in Stanford 2008. | ||
| Now we're going to turn the clock forward. | ||
| And she said to him, Well, Bill, is there any conservative writer now you really respect? | ||
| He said, Irving Kristol. | ||
| It was the one, right? | ||
| Not Bill Kristol, Irving Kristol. | ||
| Irving Kristol and Gene Kirkpatrick, you go back and look at some of Pat Buchanan's early books, including the one he wrote on how the Republicans could build a majority. | ||
| He wrote that. | ||
| Remember, he and Bill Rusher were writing this book. | ||
| Now we're getting into the weeds. | ||
| But I know the people who follow this stuff were introduced. | ||
| Remember, young people are thirsting for this information because none of this stuff is taught. | ||
| You're talking about something that happened 30 years ago and is never discussed. | ||
| Yeah, I know it's true because I see it when I go around and talk about this stuff. | ||
| Well, you look at Pat Buchanan's early writing and you will see one of those early books is dedicated to one of his mentors, Professor Irving Kristol. | ||
| This idea, right, that somehow that intellectual elite declared war on Pat Buchanan over that is untrue. | ||
| They agreed with him. | ||
| Charles Krauthammer, I remember him? | ||
| I remember him saying the isolationist position is totally defensible and consistent on intellectual and ideological grounds. | ||
| And so here's a line Pat had that really resonated with me later. | ||
| He said, we already almost destroyed the empire over a strategically meaningless country, Vietnam. | ||
| Why are we meddling in a strategically important one, the Middle East? | ||
| I'll tell you another thing about this, too. | ||
| Fascinated me. | ||
| I found it in the Buckley book. | ||
| So after Buckley started National Review, 1955, it was not long before the Suez Canal crisis, right, over oil. | ||
| The end of the British Empire. | ||
| End of the British Empire. | ||
| Everybody favors the Brits, the French, and for once the Israelis. | ||
| National Review hated Israel early on. | ||
| And your viewers and listeners should know this. | ||
| I've got it in the book. | ||
| Nasha Review referred to Israel in 1956 as, quote, the first modern racist nation, unquote. | ||
| And so. | ||
| Was that Buckley's Catholicism, traditional Catholicism? | ||
| Or what was that? | ||
| What brought that to the forefront of National Review? | ||
| Catholicism was one aspect. | ||
| Another was came from a writer that people knew only as a pro-McCarthy anti-communist named Frida Utley. | ||
| And she had covered the Middle East, and she said to Buckley, I'm going to write a piece that defends the group nobody else is looking at. | ||
| There are these displaced Palestinians there, and they have a case to make. | ||
| And she wrote a book about it. | ||
| And there was one columnist in Washington of all people, Mary McGrory, the liberal, picked up on it. | ||
| Or it was Dorothy Thompson, that's who it was, another great liberal columnist, picked up on it. | ||
| That's this part of the Algonquin. | ||
| Yeah, and she said, Frida Utley is making a case here. | ||
| No one's paying attention to the Palestinians. | ||
| So Buckley, she sends the story to Buckley, and Buckley says, What do we do with it? | ||
| And he says, I know what we'll do. | ||
| We'll just invent a new column. | ||
| We'll call it the open question. | ||
| And this is the first one we're going to run. | ||
| So smart. | ||
| And that's why Buckley was great. | ||
| He could open, he could open up instead of this kind of, you know, whom do we denounce, who do we exclude? | ||
| You think, make the good argument, and I'll run it. | ||
| Well, that changes over time. | ||
| We're going to get to the part about we got to exclude some guys here, the Birchers and the Objectivists. | ||
| The Objectivists is a bizarro Enron cult. | ||
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Right. | |
| The Birchers are dangerous because they're conspiracy wing nuts. | ||
| But let's go back. | ||
| Let's go back to when Buckley comes in on the wing of the stage. | ||
| It's at the end of the Alger Hiss part, but the beginning of the McCarthy part. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And so, and by the way, one of the most fascinating parts of the book is that Buckley's transformation, personal transformation about, because unlike Bush, who are a Kinetic family who kind of went to Texas and pretend they're Texans, Buckley's actually a Texan. | ||
| I mean, his family who kind of hard-boiled all guys down in Texas that they moved to Connecticut and he was raised in Connecticut. | ||
| But, you know, Buckley here, one of the transformers is when he has to go into the Army, which he kind of tries to avoid for a long time during World War II. | ||
| He's anti-World War II. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's controversial, he's very anti-World War II. | ||
| He finally goes in, but in being an infantry officer, even though just most of it's in training, it does transform him and to be kind of more of a guy's guy. | ||
| Guy's guy. | ||
| I'd add a second thing to that, too, which really made sense to me when I went to Buckley's hometown, Sharon, Connecticut, which is what they call the Northwest Corner, Litchfield County, right near Dutchess County, New York, and Western Massachusetts. | ||
| So I tell people when the Buckleys were declaring Roosevelt, war in the Roosevelts in the 1930s, they're declaring war on the guy they saw at the Riding Beck Horse Show every summer. | ||
| Like this very much an inside elites. | ||
| This is the elites. | ||
| Well, but I mentioned that because when my wife and I went to Sharon, Connecticut, not where Buckley lived as an adult, but where he grew up. | ||
| And you can see the house there. | ||
| That's where the Young Americans for Freedom first met. | ||
| You can see the boulder with the statement on it and all this. | ||
| And you walk to that town, you see right across from the Buckley house is the oldest church in town. | ||
| And in Connecticut towns, you really learn this. | ||
| It's always the Congregational Church. | ||
| Then next door is the Episcopal Church. | ||
| High church. | ||
| High church down the street, the Methodist little lower church. | ||
| You have to go practically into a back alley to find the Catholic Church. | ||
| And that's where the Buckleys worshiped. | ||
| The household servants got in the cars with them and they drove to church together. | ||
| So who's worshiping at St. Bernard's, the Catholic Church in Sharon, Connecticut? | ||
| It's the working class. | ||
| That's who Buckley saw. | ||
| Buckley was an altar boy. | ||
| He and his brothers are all altarboard. | ||
| His father was an altar boy in Duval County, Texas. | ||
| The one, right? | ||
| The county that won. | ||
| I have no air quotes here, but won the Lyndon Johnson Senate campaign in 1948. | ||
| Buckley's grandfather was a sheriff in that county. | ||
| So he comes out of the country. | ||
| Make sure they count him right. | ||
| The living of the dead. | ||
| They count him by the pound. | ||
| We're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
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We're back with Sam Tennenhaus in a moment. | |
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| Okay, if you really want to understand America and the conservative movement, and particularly if you have a college student or a young person in their 20s that you think needs to get up to speed, this is the Christmas gift you want to get them. | ||
| Buckley by Sam Tennenhausen. | ||
| And by the way, if you ever get Whitaker Chambers for yourself, particularly if you're, especially if you're a Christian and you're saying, hey, in the world today, you know, that's so much like anti-Christian philosophy out there, you think it's pressure, read the book of Whitaker Chambers. | ||
| It is one of the most moving stories of, I guess, a convert that had lived Christianity against the pressures of the world. | ||
| This book is amazing, Buckley. | ||
| And I want to throw down a challenge. | ||
| When Whitaker Chambers, the book, Whitaker Chambers, came out in the 90s, who was the biggest promoter of that book in media? | ||
| Don Imus. | ||
| Remember him? | ||
| Oh, he dominated. | ||
| The 90s, he dominated, right? | ||
| Yeah, the book was nominated for the National Book Award, and it came in a box, and Imus got it. | ||
| And he started reading it, and he started talking about it. | ||
| And I didn't know this at first. | ||
| I listened to the program, but I would hear it in the afternoon. | ||
| I listened to him in the morning, but I also listened to the sports guys in the afternoon. | ||
| I was working, I was writing at home. | ||
| And somebody called me up and they said, Don Imus is promoting your book. | ||
| And then it became a thing. | ||
| You may remember this. | ||
| It became a joke. | ||
| Remember, Charles McCord would do these things. | ||
| I'm going to kill myself if you don't stop talking about Imus and about Tannenhausen and Chambers. | ||
| Imus called me up. | ||
| His wife called me up. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| And asked how she could get a custom-made Woodstock typewriter to give Don for Christmas because the typewriter was the same. | ||
| We're going to get to that. | ||
| We're going to get to that document. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| Why is the typewriter a story? | ||
| You talked about the farm. | ||
| Tell me about the typewriter, Nixon, the farm, all of it. | ||
| Well, after Chambers first testified. | ||
| They say he's a liar. | ||
| They say he's a liar. | ||
| The apparatus came down. | ||
| This is why, if you're a Christian, you've got to read this book. | ||
| Everything that he feared, why he was kind of a schizophrenic, turned out to be true. | ||
| They were out to get him. | ||
| As soon as he said this thing publicly, the entire apparatus in the world crushed this guy, right? | ||
| There were three accusations that the party would use to smear somebody. | ||
| One is to say he's a homosexual. | ||
| That's a term that was used back then. | ||
| Two, that he's mentally unstable. | ||
| And three, he's an alcoholic. | ||
| They said this about Chambers. | ||
| Go back. | ||
| I want to make sure people understand this. | ||
| This is what the Russians would do to basically try to smear somebody, right? | ||
| But they would do it through their agents. | ||
| Through their agents here, American agents. | ||
| But one, you were gay, you were homosexual. | ||
| Two, you were mentally unstable. | ||
| And three, you were an alcoholic. | ||
| And in Chambers' case, they try to do all three. | ||
| Yeah, and they spread them around. | ||
| And Chambers did happen to have history of homosexuality. | ||
| The others were untrue. | ||
| And so there's a really famous moment in the Hiss case. | ||
| It's one that brings tears to the eyes of grown men, Steve. | ||
| It's when they finally bring, Hiss is the only one of the accused who insists on answering Chambers. | ||
| He says, no, these are, he sends a letter after Chambers has named him and seven or eight others. | ||
| Hiss sends a note to the committee, the House committee, and he says, I demand equal time. | ||
| I want to come before the committee and repudiate these lies that have been told about me. | ||
| So they say, well, come on in, Mr. Hiss. | ||
| So he does. | ||
| And what was Hiss's thinking? | ||
| Understanding he actually was a spy. | ||
| He felt, I'm Alger Hiss. | ||
| I can go in front of and dominate where these guys are the worst witnesses in the world, Bentley and Chambers. | ||
| I'm Alger Hiss. | ||
| I can command any stage I'm on. | ||
| I'll command the stage and show that, show that, show that he's just jealous or he's mentally unstable or he drinks too much or he's not a credible witness. | ||
| And the other thing he's got going for him, Steve, is that the HUAC congressmen are really held in low repute. | ||
| It's the committee nobody wants to be on. | ||
| They're the red baiters. | ||
| They've done the Hollywood 10, right? | ||
| Yeah, Ronald Reagan. | ||
| This is Ronald Reagan's rise to power. | ||
| The whole movie The Way We Were is about this film. | ||
| They bring these moments. | ||
| This moment they. | ||
| Because they think anybody that comes forward, he goes, you had Adolph Menji, you had people in Hollywood come forward, but even the people that came forward and named names were smeared by the mainstream media being a rat. | ||
| You were an informer. | ||
| So there's the whole thing about being an informer. | ||
| Even if you were accurate about these people being communist, right? | ||
| It was the whole stench of being an informer. | ||
| There were two blacklists, and we only hear about one of them. | ||
| We hear about the blacklist of the accused communists. | ||
| We don't hear about the blacklist of the witnesses who never got work again because they came out and testified. | ||
| Ayn Rand actually came out of that politics, but we can get to that later because she was an Azure notion. | ||
| I can't believe you take these views on everything. | ||
| This is how politics has changed so much in the country. | ||
| You're a secular Jewish liberal from the New York Times. | ||
| You're saying things that, and a couple of years ago, the progressive letters say, those are lies. | ||
| You're just lying about Eye of Stone. | ||
| Still, remember, Altra Hiss is still a fight. | ||
| It's still an intellectual fight. | ||
| How did you get through your life by coming out and writing about this and actually telling the truth of the story? | ||
| You know, one of my culture and politics have changed in this nation. | ||
| Well, they have changed. | ||
| And they were starting to then. | ||
| I mean, one thing that worked to my advantage was I started writing about Chambers in the early 90s after the Soviet Union collapsed. | ||
| Remember, there was that period when people were rethinking a lot of this. | ||
| And heroes were people like when they opened up the KGB files. | ||
| They opened up the archives. | ||
| And we opened up our archives. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| So you've got the real story about it. | ||
| You get the real story. | ||
| And there was enough respect in that era for that kind of research that. | ||
| Salty Nicholson thought we were, he got over here. | ||
| He thought we were a mess. | ||
| He thought we were too weak, right? | ||
| He got over here and said, this is not going to save the West. | ||
| What America has declined to. | ||
| He's the first one to really, like an Old Testament prophet, told us about the weakness of the West. | ||
| He made the same argument that Buckley and Chambers and those in Buchanan later. | ||
| And those early, great anti-communists made. | ||
| The country is weak. | ||
| It has no moral spirit. | ||
| It has no fiber. | ||
| We're repudiating our own identity. | ||
| I mean, all this stuff. | ||
| Social Nicholas said that at Harvard. | ||
| At commencement. | ||
| I mean, it's unthinkable today. | ||
| Then he went to Vermont and he said, this place is a disaster. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| He went up to Vermont. | ||
| Remember, David Rebnick went and interviewed him. | ||
| David Rednick is a guy who gets a lot of this stuff. | ||
| And we have some very Lennon's tomb as a family. | ||
| Lennon's tomb is fantastic. | ||
| And I can't do it here, but I'll show you the note Remnick sent me about this book in Chambers. | ||
| He sent me a note not long ago. | ||
| He said, basically, like, this is the history nobody has told that needs to be told and will be there forever. | ||
| He says, forget everything else. | ||
| Forget what the critics say. | ||
| All this. | ||
| But there's another guy who's really important to me is a guy I know. | ||
| Not well, but I've written about him and I've met him a few times. | ||
| It's Robert Carroll. | ||
| And the series on Lyndon Johnson before and the power broker. | ||
| When Great Room. | ||
| I want to learn about New York City. | ||
| When Gregon Carter hired me vanity. | ||
| This is a Robert Carro type. | ||
| I am pleased to say that more than one reviewer has said that. | ||
| And what I'm really proud of is that. | ||
| No, because it's so detailed about every aspect of black. | ||
| That's what, folks, it's a thousand pages, so you're going to get your money's worth. | ||
| But it's a page turner. | ||
| Because you're learning about American history as you go. | ||
| It's the story of America as told through the actions, the human agency of one person. | ||
| That's what I learned from Bob Carroll. | ||
| You know, his books are called, as you know, The Years of Lyndon Johnson. | ||
| So, what I think of the books I write as being these two big ones. | ||
| But you don't go to the public library. | ||
| He's one of those guys at the New York Public Library that has the cubicle. | ||
| There's like 10 guys that do it out. | ||
| You know what I'm talking about? | ||
| Yeah, he doesn't do that anymore. | ||
| I lived across the street from the New York Public Library for years. | ||
| I loved it. | ||
| That's how I did some of Chambers. | ||
| We lived in Tesla's, right next to Tesla's lab on Tesla Way. | ||
| That's a whole place. | ||
| Yeah, because the Engineers Club has been turned into a Senate co-ops. | ||
| Because those are the guys that couldn't get into the Harvard, Yale, or the University Club because they hadn't gone to Ivy League schools. | ||
| But, you know, Westinghouse Carnegie, so they started the Engineers Club. | ||
| Tesla was part of that. | ||
| And that's right across from the New York Public Library, which is a magnificent. | ||
| You just go over there and get lost in reading all day. | ||
| And they were one of the groups in the basement, I think it is. | ||
| They have 10 writers they allow to be in residence to kind of get a little cubicle and work. | ||
| I never got that. | ||
| I never applied for it. | ||
| Probably wouldn't have gotten it. | ||
| But when I was working on Whitaker Chambers, you know, it was a long time ago. | ||
| I'm in my 30s. | ||
| I would go to the New York Public Library. | ||
| And I'd see other giants there. | ||
| You'd see Norman Mailer sitting at a table just reading a book. | ||
| You just couldn't believe what you would see back then. | ||
| And those are the days, you know, they dig the stuff out of the archive and they send it to them. | ||
| Bring up the book. | ||
| That's where I first read Bill Buckley's magnificent essay on Whitaker Chambers in the New York Public Library. | ||
| Nothing was digitized. | ||
| It was an Esquire Magazine. | ||
| And I'll tell you something. | ||
| You're asking me, why do I do this stuff? | ||
| I grew up in a household that didn't think a lot of Bill Buckley. | ||
| And then a couple of things turned me around on him. | ||
| And one was when I was working on Chambers, I went to the New York Public Library and I read an essay in Esquire Magazine. | ||
| It was actually the first piece Bill Buckley published there, though I didn't learn that much later, called The End of Whitaker Chambers. | ||
| It was a memoir about him interspersed with letters. | ||
| And I realized, this guy's like an exquisite writer. | ||
| Why didn't anybody tell me this? | ||
| You know, and you sort of get mad in retrospect. | ||
| There's nobody in front of a classroom who's going to say, by the way, I might want to look at Bill Buckley's memoir, Cruising Speed, to see what great journalism is like. | ||
| Nobody says this. | ||
| You have to find it. | ||
| But he, we're going to take a short break here. | ||
| We're going to have to extend this a couple hours. | ||
| So what we're going to do is to have you back. | ||
| This is our weekend show. | ||
| We're going to have you back. | ||
| We'll figure it out. | ||
| Because Buckley, that's why he wrote God and Man at Yale, because he saw even then the professors, how they were trying to twist things, which was a traditional, you know, I've given this book as a gift to some of the most senior people in this administration who went to Yale, right? | ||
| To say how shocking it is, because right now, you know, they're taking the names off buildings and transgenderism so big and they're doing pronouns. | ||
| I go, guys, back in the old days, and I'm talking the 1950s, 1940s, 1950s, it was a different place. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Sam Tannenhaus, really the biographer of America, pre-World War II, all the way through, the conservative movement. | ||
| He's done it in three magnificent books, Whitaker Chambers, Buckley, and The Death of Conservatism, is our guest. | ||
| We'll be back in a moment. | ||
|
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | |
| Why focus on the typewriter? | ||
| It was for a reason. | ||
| The typewriter becomes. | ||
| By the way, we're going to do another at least a couple of hours with Sam, and we're going to figure the schedule out. | ||
| Why is the typewriter the farm in Maryland? | ||
| Why is all this important? | ||
| And it leads to the beginning of one of the most important presidencies in this country, Richard Nixon's. | ||
| Well, what happened was we're in 1940. | ||
| 1948. | ||
| 1948. | ||
| Summer of 1948, there's an election coming. | ||
| And the Republicans think they might lose the House in 48. | ||
| So here's their chance. | ||
| They won it quickly in 46 because people were kind of tired of the war. | ||
| Like they turfed out Churchill. | ||
| And so you got they won that midterm and they take control. | ||
| You have HUAC, but now in 48, a lot of people in the country are going, is this what we're spending our time on? | ||
| Yeah, and the Republicans don't have the strongest candidate in Tom Dewey. | ||
| And Truman's actually a good campaigner, so who knows what's going to happen? | ||
| And you have coattails and you're swept out of power. | ||
| So Alger Hiss makes his appearance and he's incredibly suave and debonaire. | ||
| And so there's a key moment. | ||
| And he's everything the hard right hates, personified. | ||
| But everything that the kind of liberal mentality, particularly the urban mentality of New York City and San Francisco, it's what the high ideal has been of an Ivy League globalist. | ||
| And New Dealer, right? | ||
| You know, he came through the New Deal. | ||
| He'd worked in a lot of the key departments involved, as we said before, in the United Nations founding that, the Alta conference summit, all this. | ||
| Now he comes to front, very polished, smooth guy. | ||
| And he seems kind of amused by it, by it all. | ||
| Oh, Mr. Hiss, you know, so Whitaker Chambers is, you know, he's the senior editor of Time Magazine. | ||
| Why is he calling you a communist? | ||
| So, you sure you were never a communist? | ||
| And he's making it up. | ||
| And Hiss says, well, I don't know anybody named Whitaker Chambers. | ||
| And they said, really? | ||
| You don't even know him? | ||
| And Hiss says, well, I've seen pictures of him. | ||
| I might even confuse him with you, Mr. Chairman, in this committee, because the chairman's got this round face. | ||
| The audience breaks up. | ||
| Laughs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Laughs, and he's passed on the newspapers. | ||
| One detail: he's under oath, correct? | ||
| Under oath. | ||
| This leads up to the point. | ||
| He's under oath. | ||
| Graduate of the Harvard Law School. | ||
| And there's a lawyer, a very smart young lawyer elected to Congress from California, Orange County. | ||
| A total outsider. | ||
| 35-year-old guy, former naval officer. | ||
| Former naval officer. | ||
| And he's watching Hiss, and he doesn't like him either for all those reasons you mentioned. | ||
| And he later says. | ||
| Because Nixon's an outsider with a chip on his shoulder, and he's looking at the personification of the establishment. | ||
| When Nixon despised, that just treats guys like Nixon like nothing. | ||
| When Nixon was a young guy, we all know this has been reported in all the biographies. | ||
| You can always tell the really interesting presidents because they get great books written about them, including Nixon. | ||
| And Nixon, when he was a kid, was admitted, you know, coming from that little town, Yorbolinda, California, he's admitted to Harvard. | ||
| But he's the son of a grocer. | ||
| He can't afford to go there. | ||
| So instead, he goes to the local college with here, and then he gets his law degree at Duke, finishes third in his class, and no law firm will hire him. | ||
| Can't get a job. | ||
| Can't get a job. | ||
| The FBI wouldn't hire him. | ||
| He tried to get a job there. | ||
| Nobody wants him. | ||
| So here he is. | ||
| He's got the cut of the jib. | ||
| It's not just intellectual. | ||
| You're the total opposite package. | ||
| Yeah, he's got nothing going for him. | ||
| But he's very, very smart. | ||
| And he has a great word. | ||
| He says, there's something mouthy about Hiss. | ||
| He says, he's talking too much, right? | ||
| There's this thing where somebody asks you the question, give them the answer. | ||
| Don't make the joke about the chairman of the committee. | ||
| And something sticks in Nixon's head. | ||
| Also, he is talking to Robert Stripling, the very smart investigator who's been interviewing these communists for years. | ||
| And he says to Nixon, he's saying he doesn't know a guy by the name of Whitaker Chambers. | ||
| Chambers isn't going to call himself by his real name when he's an underground agent. | ||
| He's going to go by an alias, right? | ||
| So maybe if we look closely at Hiss's transcript, he's not answering the questions. | ||
| He's evading them. | ||
| So then a journalist, a guy named Bert Andrews, a very smart journalist for the Herald Tribune in New York. | ||
| The Herald Tribune was the Republican establishment's New York Times. | ||
| It was like Time magazine. | ||
| But they had a smart journalist there named Bert Andrews, who'd been covering these investigations. | ||
| And he calls Nixon aside. | ||
| He sees that Nixon means business here. | ||
| And he says, are you really investigating this case? | ||
| He says, what if Chambers is telling the truth? | ||
| Let's just make this weird assumption that a guy who's throwing up, throwing away a high-paying job, a senior executive at Time magazine, might not make this stuff up unless he's got a good reason for it. | ||
| And that reason is he's not making it up. | ||
| He's telling the truth. | ||
| So I said, well, have you really looked at Hiss? | ||
| Have you seen whether the things Chambers said about him make sense? | ||
| So they go out and they interview Chambers. | ||
| And they said, well, Hiss says you don't know him. | ||
| They go out to Chambers' farm in Maryland, right? | ||
| He has his little farm. | ||
| He and his wife are there, back to the earth types, like old ex-socialists, right? | ||
| Only Chambers really does it. | ||
| He doesn't just talk about it. | ||
| He actually works on a farm with his kids and his wife, milks the cows himself and all this. | ||
| Because now he's a Quaker. | ||
| He's a Quaker. | ||
| He's a believing Quaker. | ||
| And he's doing that when he's not going into Time magazine. | ||
| He's actually going home, right, working on his farm. | ||
| And they go to see him. | ||
| And Chambers says, well, I'm kind of surprised to see you guys when everybody else is calling me names. | ||
| And they say, well, we want you to prove that you knew Alger Hiss. | ||
| I knew Alger Hiss. | ||
| Here are the addresses we lived at. | ||
| Here's the car I loaned him when, or rather, that Hiss loaned me because I needed one to get around so I could go back and forth and make the rounds. | ||
| He goes through all this stuff. | ||
| Bring a courier, that Hiss actually loaned him a car so he could do this nefarious activity. | ||
| Important thing, though, Chambers does not yet say that Hiss is passing him documents. | ||
| All he says is, yeah, we would meet in these cells. | ||
| My wife, Esther, knew his wife, Priscilla, very well. | ||
| And Esther, who is a painter and artist, says, oh, yes, here's the dress Priscilla wore. | ||
| You know, when we went to her apartment, once I had the baby there, and the baby wet the floor, and she brought this lovely little blanket for him. | ||
| I think, either, and Burt Andrews says to Nixon, either this guy is a fantasist or he really knew Alger Hiss because it's too detailed. | ||
| He's got too much stuff. | ||
| So there's a funny thing that happens. | ||
| They start setting up more interviews. | ||
| They do one with Hiss in what's now that Grand High at the first Trump Hotel. | ||
| Back in those days, there's a Hotel Commodore. | ||
| And they call Hiss and Chambers in for meetings. | ||
| Again, off the record now. | ||
| So it's not the same. | ||
| They're in executive session. | ||
| Executive session. | ||
| Because they understand, and Nixon understands that what they have is a game changer. | ||
| Game changer for him politically. | ||
| He can come from a nobody to a national figure. | ||
| Also, they could actually take down real communists. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, the story goes, and other HUA guys said this later. | ||
| Nixon was the only one who really nailed the communist, who really got the guy. | ||
| This is why the reason this is all about work. | ||
| This is why they hated him. | ||
| They hate him to the mirror of his bones, and this is the reason they hated him. | ||
| You should see the letter Nixon wrote me by hand before my book came out, the Chambers book, back in the 90s when I was writing first op-ed pieces. | ||
| I did one in the Times, which Nixon didn't read, but he did read the one in the Wall Street Journal, and he wrote me a letter by hand. | ||
| Who is the guy? | ||
| I'm drawing a blank, who wrote that great recent biography of Nixon. | ||
| Ferling or the guy who also did, he's a friend of mine. | ||
| I'm feeling embarrassed about this. | ||
| It's a senior thing. | ||
| He wrote a biography about Tip O'Neill, Jack Farrell, John Farrell. | ||
| That's our furling. | ||
| And he quotes, yeah, Jack Farrell. | ||
| He quotes that letter in. | ||
| It's a great biography. | ||
| Yeah, really good biography. | ||
| And he quotes the letter that Nixon wrote to me because I put it in the Hoover archive back when archives were interested in my stuff, and they're not anymore. | ||
| But they were back then. | ||
| A great guy, Robert Conquest, arranged me. | ||
| I had no money. | ||
| So I was able to sell the Chambers archive to the Hoover Institution. | ||
| Well, at any rate, so I have a copy of the letter that was written by hand. | ||
| And so I'm going to paraphrase it. | ||
| Nixon says something like, well, back in the days of prestige media, you know, they were not going to listen to a guy like me. | ||
| He's remembering back to 1948. | ||
| Still with a chip on his shoulder. | ||
| Still with a chip on his shoulder. | ||
| Having been president. | ||
| Never give it up, man. | ||
| You need that fire. | ||
| People hate it when I say it, but it's really true. | ||
| Nixon's my favorite president. | ||
| He's the one who's my. | ||
| Oh my God, how do you even get into it? | ||
| Do they let you in restaurants in New York? | ||
| No. | ||
| My own family doesn't understand that one. | ||
| I don't hear Dershowitz whining about his defense of Trump. | ||
| You're going back to the railhead of this. | ||
| And I don't think. | ||
| You defended Pat Buchanan. | ||
| You're defending Nixon. | ||
| You just said Nixon's your favorite president. | ||
| I'm not saying I think he was the best president, though I think much of what he did was a lot better than what he gets credit for. | ||
| But he's my favorite one. | ||
| He's the one I identify with. | ||
| I've met a lot of people, a lot of literary people who told me their parents liked Nixon. | ||
| Often people from other parts of other countries, because they'd say, Nixon was the outsider. | ||
| Nixon was the one they never gave a break to. | ||
| Nixon's the introvert in the extrovert's profession. | ||
| He doesn't have Trump's amazing public skills. | ||
| Although, as you know, Nixon liked Trump. | ||
| And there were people. | ||
| Monica Crowley is now the ambassador in Portugal. | ||
| That was Nixon's aide-de-camp for the moment. | ||
| I knew Monica way back when she was writing all those books for Harry Evans. | ||
| And so Nixon begins to realize there's something very powerful about Chambers. | ||
| Remember, there are a few Quakers in this case, including Nixon's a Quaker. | ||
| And Chambers. | ||
| I didn't make that connection. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| And Priscilla Hiss was a Quaker. | ||
| Alger Hiss's. | ||
| I didn't know that either. | ||
| There's a whole Quaker thing going on here. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| So always inside stories and those things. | ||
| If we ever get to Buckley and Gourvidal, I'll tell you the inside stories. | ||
| No, we're going to hold that for the next one. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| The Buckley stuff's got so much gold and platinum. | ||
| So here we are. | ||
| And so they start gathering the evidence. | ||
| So at one point, there's a really great moment in the Hiss case. | ||
| Chambers had said, well, Alger and I were both, he uses this great term nobody uses anymore. | ||
| He said that we were amateur ornithologists. | ||
| He said, bird observers. | ||
| It sounds like Buckley. | ||
| Doesn't it say bird watcher? | ||
| He said, well, we do bird observers. | ||
| We do it here on the canal. | ||
| And they say, oh, really? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Chambers said, Alger once got really excited when we saw a rare warbler, a prothonotary warbler. | ||
| And there's one guy on the HUAC committee, a guy named John McDowell from Pennsylvania, I think, who is a bird watcher. | ||
| They bring Hiss in. | ||
| And he says, Mr. Hiss, we know, right, we get it. | ||
| You know, you didn't know Chambers. | ||
| You've told us all that. | ||
|
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But tell us a little bit about yourself. | |
| Are you interested in birds? | ||
| And his says, oh, yeah. | ||
| And McDowell says, you ever see a Prothonotary Warbler? | ||
| He said, you bet I did. | ||
| I saw one right here in the canal. | ||
| And like, they'd heard the story before. | ||
| They'd heard it from Chambers. | ||
| And they're thinking, there's no way this guy makes up that Alger Hiss had seen this bird that, right? | ||
| So it's little details like that. | ||
| It's a kind of material. | ||
| They turn history. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, and I'll say, we don't see this level of like exactitude in our legislators now. | ||
| On the committees? | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| We're going to take a short break. | ||
| Sam Tannenhaus. | ||
| The book is Buckley. | ||
| I want everybody to, if you have a young person, first of all, get it for yourself. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| If you want to see kind of the lead up to President Trump, and that's why death and conservatism, we'll talk about that next time, is really got my interest peaked back after the financial crisis in 2009 when I read this book. | ||
| I go, wow, this guy's nailed it. | ||
| The problem with the Republican Party and Conservative Inc. back then. | ||
| But Buckley's the book to get now. | ||
| Want to drive some sales on this, particularly give it young people in your family, college in their 20s. | ||
| You're sitting there, you don't think they know much, but they're thirsting for access to information. | ||
| Buckley's the book. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| Back with Sam in a moment. | ||
|
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People look agreeing, but because this is a heavy book. | |
| And it's magnificent. | ||
| It reads like a novel. | ||
| It reads like you're reading a Russian novel. | ||
| It's like War and Peace because you're seeing the history, but you bring these characters to life. | ||
| Not just Buckley, but McCarthy, Jack Kennedy, Claire Booth Luce. | ||
| You have these vignettes of these people, and you realize why they made such a big impact in American history. | ||
| The book is Buckley, The Life and the Revolution that Changed America. | ||
| And it leads you right up to the age of Trump. | ||
| I want to finish. | ||
| We're going to have you back on in this coming week, but I want to have you, because we could do this for hours. | ||
| I want to finish the pumpkin story because you see Nixon, you see Whitaker Chambers, Hiss, the whole establishment. | ||
| This is one of the biggest moments in post-war history about this committee. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, what happened is they start seeing the evidence and they think, okay. | ||
| The bird watching thing gets the guys in committee to realize this guy's lying. | ||
| Under oath. | ||
| He's purging himself. | ||
| And then they start doing the research. | ||
| And that's what they were good at back then. | ||
| Stephen, we've been talking about this before. | ||
| In those days, the congressional committee would really do the work. | ||
| And they started. | ||
| Not like today. | ||
| They were serious people. | ||
| Serious people that were hunting down car leases. | ||
| They see Chambers at one point said Hiss had given him a car, which they found. | ||
| And Hiss admitted that he'd given him the car, but he said Chambers had known him under a different name. | ||
| He'd known Chambers under a different name, George Crosley. | ||
| And all this stuff is starting to pile up. | ||
| And they realize that, well, they've got one thing. | ||
| They know that Hiss is lying about whether he knew Chambers. | ||
| But how does that prove that he'd known him as a communist? | ||
| And so they say to Chambers, look, we get it. | ||
| We get it. | ||
| That, yeah, Hiss is lying. | ||
| We know it now. | ||
| We can call him up in front of a committee again and say, did you know Whitaker Chambers? | ||
| And he might have to say, well, maybe his memory had slipped, but he'd known him. | ||
| So what? | ||
| And so there's a great confrontation there. | ||
| This is one that brings tears to grown men's eyes. | ||
| They have a big public meeting now in the caucus room, House Caucus Room. | ||
| Television cameras there, Steve, 1948. | ||
| At that point, 10,000 people in America own TVs. | ||
| But the ones that are the ones. | ||
| Bars have them. | ||
| Yeah, bars have them. | ||
| So they go and they watch, and there's Hiss again, and he's denying he knows Chambers. | ||
| And he looks at him. | ||
| Chambers is sitting there, and he looks at him with this kind of contempt. | ||
| And then they bring Chambers up, and they say, look what he's saying about you. | ||
| He's saying that the insinuations are out there. | ||
| Now, they don't say this publicly, what the insinuations are, but the press world knows what they are. | ||
| The media establishment, very small in Washington, much smaller town. | ||
| Everybody knows the communists and liberals they respect are saying, oh, well, I knew Chambers at Time magazine. | ||
| The guy's a total paranoid. | ||
| You know, my copy would come in from China. | ||
| He's turned it upside down. | ||
| He's some kind of anti-communist fanatic or, you know, he seems to come in at strange hours. | ||
| I think he's out drinking all the time. | ||
| So they start spreading all these lies about him. | ||
| Say, so what about this? | ||
| Why are you going after Alger Hiss? | ||
| Why have you chosen to persecute this man? | ||
| And Chambers then says, what you would expect him to say now is what we hear President Trump and people around say, F you, right? | ||
| But that's not what Chambers does. | ||
| Chambers says, in testifying against Mr. Hiss, people are saying that I'm acting out of some grudge or personal animosity toward him. | ||
| He said, I'm not. | ||
| I knew Mr. Hiss and I liked him. | ||
| I still like him. | ||
| But he and I are caught in a tragedy of history. | ||
| And so help me, God, I have no choice but to testify now. | ||
| And Steve, you know your religious history. | ||
| He says, I can't do otherwise. | ||
| He's doing Martin Luther, right? | ||
| Ichkannich Anders. | ||
| I can't do otherwise. | ||
| So then they say, all right, we get it. | ||
| We believe you. | ||
| Nixon and the others who say their headlines ever. | ||
| This is dominating all the news. | ||
| But you've got to prove he's a communist. | ||
| So, okay. | ||
| Now Chambers is afraid that he's not going to make his case and also the other side's going to come after him. | ||
| And he remembers something. | ||
| That when he defected from the party before 1939, in 1938, he'd kept some material he had. | ||
| He called it his life preserver. | ||
| And he gave it to a relative of his wife's. | ||
| She kept it in a dumb waiter in Brooklyn. | ||
| And he goes with this young guy. | ||
| They dig through the dumb waiter and they have a manila envelope. | ||
| And inside it are documents. | ||
| And those are typed documents that are secret classified information. | ||
| And by this time, Hiss has made the stupid mistake of suing Chambers for slander. | ||
| Chambers has to defend himself. | ||
| And he looks at his lawyer and he says, well, I've got something different for you now. | ||
| This is how one of my chapters ends. | ||
| And he says, what is it? | ||
| Chambers says, espionage. | ||
| And that's when he delivers the documents. | ||
| So now it gets to the HUAC people. | ||
| They have to Nixon. | ||
| To Nixon. | ||
| They have handwritten documents and typed documents. | ||
| And they say, do you have anything else? | ||
| Chambers says, all right, come out. | ||
| You can come out to my farm and I'll show you something else I've got. | ||
| So at night, they drive out to Chambers' farm in Maryland, Westminster, Maryland. | ||
| He walks them out. | ||
| It's winter. | ||
| It's December now, 48. | ||
| The election's already been held. | ||
| Republicans are not going to control the House anymore. | ||
| And somebody, either hiss or Chambers, is going to be indicted for perjury. | ||
| Chambers takes him out to a pumpkin patch and he pulls out a pumpkin with a hollow, with a, right, jack-o'-lantern with a hollowed-out middle. | ||
| And he said, gentlemen, I think this is what you're looking for. | ||
| They're tin canisters of microfilm that he's got from Alta Hiss. | ||
| We're going to bring you back in this coming week. | ||
| This has been amazing. | ||
| The book is Buckley. | ||
| We've only done the lead up to it. | ||
| The Buckley stories will just blow your mind. | ||
| Where do people go? | ||
| Do you have social media? | ||
| Do you have a website? | ||
| I have a website, samtannenhouse.com. | ||
| Samtannenhouse.com, all one word. | ||
| The book is Buckley. | ||
| Today, on a Saturday afternoon, maybe the day you go out to a bookstore and get it, or go to Amazon and order it. | ||
| I'm probably sold out at your local bookstore, but if not, go to Barnes ⁇ Noble, check it out. | ||
| Or a local, we love little, the small independent bookstores. | ||
| Go check it out. | ||
| Or go to Amazon. | ||
| Get the book. | ||
| Give it as a gift to friends you've got, to basically your children, your grandchildren. | ||
| Make sure they fully understand what America's gone through. | ||
| The Man and the Revolution, Buckley is the book. | ||
| Sam Tannenhaus. | ||
| So honored to have you in here. | ||
| I'm glad you look forward to having you back next week. | ||
| You're actually a right. | ||
| I realized something about two-thirds of the thing. | ||
| You're actually a right-winger. | ||
| You're a right-winger. | ||
| We're going to talk about it later. | ||
| Other people have accused you of that too. | ||
| Guys, have a great weekend. | ||
| We're going to be back here at 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. | ||
| On Monday, I'll be up on Getter on social media all weekend, putting up on another Action Pack weekend on my thoughts and observations. |
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