| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies because we're going to medieval 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. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The 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 the KGB files. | ||
| They opened up the archives. | ||
| And we opened the bar archives. | ||
| 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 Nichols 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. | ||
| We're at America's decline 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 early, great anti-communists made. | ||
| 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 did James got to be going insane? | ||
| Because 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? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Okay, welcome. | ||
| Monday, 15 December Year of Earl 2025. | ||
| Thank you for sticking around for the second hour of the late afternoon, early evening edition of The War. | ||
| I want to thank you. | ||
| And I want to really thank the guys in Denver, the team there, for that great kind of mashup highlight reel for the first two hours of Buckley, the life and the revolution that changed America with Sam Tennenhaus, the author. | ||
| Sam, welcome back. | ||
| Look, just because the Warren Posse gets a lot of feedback that, hey, you guys buy a lot of books. | ||
| You're readers. | ||
| Your first interviews, which were around, I think, Thanksgiving. | ||
| In fact, I think we played it. | ||
| We couldn't even play it the Saturday after Thanksgiving. | ||
| There's so much going on. | ||
| We actually played it the first part of that week. | ||
| Talk to me about the impact it had on just the book sale, the publisher, whatever, because I can tell you the audience has been looking forward to this and they just love the book, but they really loved you just kind of hanging out, telling stories. | ||
| Well, thanks so much, Steve. | ||
| Got an email the day after you put up that uh, you know the first uh, show the conversation we had and it was forwarded. | ||
| It was my editor forwarding an internal memo from Random House that said, rush, reorder 3 000 copies for a book like mine. | ||
| You know it's a big book, a lot of history, a lot of stories, but a lot of history. | ||
| It's a book um, that tries to show you what America was like for many, many years, and the great guy who was at the center of it is almost unheard of. | ||
| And and early on, i'll tell you when um, we heard the publisher, heard that you were interested in talking to me uh uh, the publicist, who's a top publicist at Random House, big publisher, as you know, said this will move books. | ||
| And everybody says okay, we kind of think that. | ||
| And then we, you and I had the conversation, that great conversation, down in Washington. | ||
| You put it up and the and the reprint order came. | ||
| And i've been doing this for a long time Steve, i've been writing books for 40 years. | ||
| I just have not seen this before. | ||
| And so now I know it's like you know that the uh, the space launch, you know the shuttle launch. | ||
| They're all gathered around, they're gonna listen to us talk and have have a good conversation and then they're gonna look at the numbers and and I see uh um, on Amazon for listeners out there, good place to order and they have the stock. | ||
| They did get it reordered in time so you can go on on Amazon, get the book. | ||
| I was in Little ROCK do a thing at the Clinton Center the other day and we went to a bookstore. | ||
| They had one copy left and they had back orders for the rest and it's because uh, of what you're doing and listen, no one's more grateful than me. | ||
| No, but our audience, we want to always get them the best books and and conversations and access to people like yourself. | ||
| So before we start this, I want everybody. | ||
| It is a great christmas gift, particularly if there's a young person in in your life that doesn't really understand what happened to the country after the war, after World War Ii and and really the turmoil behind the placid kind of surface, the turmoil the country was in. | ||
| Uh, it's a great gift. | ||
| They will really learn. | ||
| It's so well written. | ||
| You go from kind of story to story and because it's building, it's not just about Buckley's life. | ||
| That's important enough in itself, but sam really goes and tells really the political history of the country and builds about the revolution that brought not just Ronald Reagan but also Donald Trump after that. | ||
| So you're, you're an active part of this, you're a roaring posse member. | ||
| This is your history uh, also for yourself. | ||
| Uh, if you're going to get a little time and everybody should take a little time off over the, the holidays, or though we're not here, we're going to be on every day, as we always are, um the um, you can curl up with this and you learn a lot and you kind of think it through, particularly at Post-world War Ii uh, about where we are today. | ||
| In fact, we left last time Sam Alger Hiss. | ||
| We did a good little uh cover at the beginning. | ||
| Alger Hiss was just found. | ||
| Uh was being found guilty, I guess, of perjury, But his brings in, and Buckley was still a very young person at the time. | ||
| We still got to get to Yale and everything that happened at Yale. | ||
| The Ivy League schools really ran the country more than they run it today. | ||
| Talk to me about Buckley's experience, particularly coming in this tumultuous time that you got guys like Richard Nixon coming on the scene. | ||
| There's part of the Republican Party. | ||
| It'd almost be like MAGA. | ||
| You had the Eisenhower, Taft, Conservative Inc., or, you know, were kind of, you know, I don't say Eisenhower was a globalist, but more of the Republican establishment. | ||
| You had firebrands like Nixon coming up, McCarthy, that were pointing out there was something deeply wrong with the country, that you had more than just globalists. | ||
| You actually had infiltration of communism. | ||
| I think people today just forget because they just look at it through, you know, Robert Redford movie, right? | ||
| The way we were. | ||
| They don't realize how this whole issue of communism really gripped the nation. | ||
| And Buckley, when he went to Yale, kind of wrote this book that put him on the national scene right away, sir. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, what happened was, as you said, yeah, they exposed the communist spy rings. | ||
| And at first, there was a lot of resistance to that. | ||
| People didn't think it was really happening. | ||
| Then the evidence comes out. | ||
| And we talked about this, I think, in our first conversation. | ||
| Nixon was the guy who saw there was something off about the blue blood, Alger Hiss, and that sort of, you know, dumpy, frumpy accuser, Whitaker Chambers, who is no joke, by the way, right? | ||
| He's a big editor at Time magazine, brilliant writer and journalist, that it was Chambers who was telling the truth. | ||
| Well, Buckley was following this really closely while he's at Yale University. | ||
| And he goes there in 1946. | ||
| He was part of that first group after World War II, right? | ||
| The GI Bill. | ||
| Buckley didn't need the GI Bill, but he's surrounded by a lot of guys who could use it, who would not have been at a place like Yale if they didn't have that opportunity. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because Yale was strictly blue blood before them. | ||
| And Buckley looked like he was blue blood, but he wasn't really. | ||
| And this is really important to understand. | ||
| Buckley grew up in a huge estate, what's called the Northwest Corner of Connecticut. | ||
| It's New England. | ||
| Beautiful area. | ||
| The house is still there, 47 acres, magnificent estate. | ||
| Looks like the White House. | ||
| Looks like the North Portico of the White House. | ||
| Raised with servants and groomsmen in the 1930s and 40s. | ||
| But the Buckleys were Catholic. | ||
| They were super devout Catholics. | ||
| So when they worshiped in their little town of Sharon, Connecticut, they did not go to the beautiful historic Episcopal Church or the Congregational Church, which are always the main ones in Connecticut. | ||
| No, they went around the corner, almost into an alleyway where there was a little Catholic church called St. Bernard's that had been thrown up overnight because suddenly there were more Catholics living in the area. | ||
| And this is really important. | ||
| People don't believe me when I tell them this, Steve. | ||
| Buckley and his siblings and parents didn't go alone to worship on Sunday. | ||
| They took the household servants with them, white and black and Hispanic. | ||
| Because Buckley spoke all these languages. | ||
| They lived all over the world. | ||
| That's who got in the Buckley's big Buicks and drove around the famous Green and Sharon and went to church. | ||
| Buckley was an altar boy. | ||
| He and his three brothers were all altar boys in this very modest little Catholic church. | ||
| So I realized when I was writing this book, that's the beginning of Buckley's connection with what later was called the silent majority, middle Americans. | ||
| Today we call them MAGA. | ||
| We call the people who are excluded by the elites. | ||
| So Buckley's raised with wealth. | ||
| His father made a fortune and lost it in oil. | ||
| His father is super conservative because he saw the Mexican Revolution upfront. | ||
| People should know, even historians forget this. | ||
| The first great revolution in Mexico, in the world, was not the Soviet Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. | ||
| It was a Mexican Revolution, 1910 to 1920. | ||
| Buckley's father was a casualty of it. | ||
| And, but not a passive one. | ||
| He actually organized guerrilla resistance. | ||
| I found this in the research. | ||
| He had the weapons of the time, guys with mercenaries with Winchester rifles crossing the border to try to stop the Mexican Revolution. | ||
| It didn't work. | ||
| Okay, so he goes up north, takes his family. | ||
| But hang on, but hang on, sorry. | ||
| But hang on. | ||
| I want to make sure people know this because it's very important for the Buckley's development is that one of the main reasons he did that is his Catholicism. | ||
| Remember, the Mexican Revolution is a revolution as bitter as the French Revolution. | ||
| You know, this is the start of the revolution of the 20th century, but it was bitter and almost went back to the French Revolution of being anti-clerical. | ||
| You know, the Freemasons and they had the secularist and quite frankly, with the beginning of communist influence was after the church. | ||
| And Buckley's father, not just about oil and about material goods, but he was an ardent Catholic. | ||
| And there were a lot of serious Catholic businessmen that actually financed the, you know, try to finance the stop of how radical this Mexican Revolution was because it was anti-clerical and killing so many priests, correct? | ||
| Yes, Buckley's father was a financier of the Cristero counter-revolution. | ||
| That was a Catholic counter-revolution in the 1920s, right around the time Bill Buckley was born, born in 1925, almost exactly 100 years ago. | ||
| So this is the atmosphere the world Buckley's raised in. | ||
| Very unusual. | ||
| It's not Kennedy-style Irish Catholic. | ||
| It's almost Spanish-Mexican counter-reformation Catholicism. | ||
| They really believe, you know, we have the post-liberal group out now that we hear a lot about, super-educated Catholics who think America and the Western democracies should have a closer association with the church. | ||
| Well, Buckley grew up in a family that believed that. | ||
| And his brother-in-law, Brent Bozel, became the first, I would argue, of the post-liberals before the word even existed. | ||
| He lived in Spain for much of his life, thrown an altar Catholicism. | ||
| Buckley comes out of that. | ||
| He goes off to Yale University, right? | ||
| He's taking his first classes and he's getting instruction from professors who tell him, well, you know, the Bible, religion, Catholicism, it's another superstition. | ||
| It's like people in the deepest jungles in the Philippines or Africa who have these rituals they follow. | ||
| Buckley can't believe he's hearing it. | ||
| Now, I'll tell you something, Steve. | ||
| This is why it's important to do podcasts like yours and others. | ||
| One of the first podcasts I did was with a very famous journalist in our moment, Andrew Sullivan, who is Catholic. | ||
| He's kind of centrist liberal, raised in England with an Irish family. | ||
| He told me, because he read my book, I was fascinated by Buckley's history. | ||
| He said, when Andrew Sullivan went to Harvard in the 1980s as a scholarship student, he could not believe his professors never discussed the Bible as possibly being revealed truth. | ||
| It was just like an artifact from an ancient time. | ||
| Well, Buckley sees that. | ||
| He's sitting in the classroom. | ||
| He can't believe what he's hearing. | ||
| Buckley, during World War II, taught himself speed writing. | ||
| So he's able to write down everything the professor is saying in the classroom. | ||
| Buckley won the competition, super stiff competition, to become what was then called the chairman, we would say editor of the Yale Daily News. | ||
| Emphasis on daily. | ||
| It was also called the OCD, oldest college daily in America. | ||
| How important was it? | ||
| Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine, got a start at the Yale Daily News. | ||
| A guy named Kingman Brewster, who was a hero to Buckley and a leader of the America First Committee, got a start at the Yale Daily News. | ||
| Buckley aims his sights as that when he gets at Yale. | ||
| And I talked to his classmates who said they'd never seen anything like Buckley. | ||
| The brilliance, the dynamism, and the ambition. | ||
| You know, Buckley would meet you and he didn't care if you were rich or poor. | ||
| He didn't care what your background was. | ||
| He wanted to know, what do you think? | ||
| What do you believe? | ||
| What do you think about communism? | ||
| Because communism is blowing up in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. | ||
| And Steve, you know this very well. | ||
| Who's bearing the brunt of those communist insurrections behind the Iron Curtain? | ||
| It's the priests. | ||
| It's the clergy. | ||
| They're forcing them out of their jobs or killing them. | ||
| And Buckley sees this is going on in a different way around him. | ||
| There's kind of a war on religion and a war on the free enterprise economics he was raised with, right? | ||
| So Buckley becomes, in the old term, you and I still remember it, the big man on campus. | ||
| He's the best known, most popular guy in his entire Yale class, which, by the way, was two or three times larger than any previous class because the end of World War II and the beginning of the GI Bill. | ||
| So Buckley is becoming famous while he's a college student. | ||
| Today, we can kind of get that because we have these really prominent young guys, you know, the late Charlie Kirk or Nick Fuentes or guys on the left who make their bones, they make their names when they're super young. | ||
| Buckley invented that by using the college newspaper to wage war against Yale University. | ||
| And in one of the first editorials he wrote when he won the competition to be the chairman, that meant he could write a daily editorial. | ||
| And I talked to classmates who said, before Buckley came along, the newspaper would come in your office and you'd scan it to see how the Bulldogs, the Yale Bulldogs were doing in the game against Cornell or Harvard. | ||
| Once Buckley came around, he went right to the editorial. | ||
| He was the first student journalist to call out his professors by name. | ||
| And so he named this guy who he said is treating the classroom as a pulpit to try to persuade Christians like Bill Buckley that their religion doesn't count for anything. | ||
| He couldn't believe it. | ||
| So he writes his very, very famous book, God and Man at Yale, right? | ||
| It's great just from the title thereon. | ||
| Steve has a fantastic subtitle. | ||
| This is why Buckley was, in my view, a genius. | ||
| The subtitle is The Superstitions of Academic Freedom. | ||
| He takes the professor's attack on religion and says, well, maybe your super progressive point of view is its own kind of fake religion. | ||
| And it just blows up. | ||
| It became the biggest nonfiction bestseller. | ||
|
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|
But hang on, but hang on. | |
| But hang on. | ||
| This is so important. | ||
| The publisher, nobody's, when this book's getting ready to come out and doing it, this is really public intellectuals or intellectual history of Yale University. | ||
| They think this has such a tiny market. | ||
| It's kind of like your Buckley book. | ||
| They think this has such a tiny market. | ||
| They can't possibly think that this is of interest to middle class Americans. | ||
| Talk to me about this. | ||
| This book blows up so far past expectations because you're basically, it's a student talking about the woke professors at Yale in the 1950s, right? | ||
| So people think it's such the publishers think nobody's going to be interested in this. | ||
| The book blows up to be one of the biggest books of the year in back in the time when people were putting out heavy-duty books all the time of nonfiction, sir. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So you, so Buckley knows he's got something and his publisher does. | ||
| Of course, the mainstream publishers aren't going to touch a book like this. | ||
| My publisher, Random House, right? | ||
| They're not going to touch a book like this. | ||
| But there's a new publisher called Regnery. | ||
| And I think a lot of your viewers are probably familiar with it because they did a lot of conservative books. | ||
| But Bill Buckley kind of created that firm as an important publishing house. | ||
| And look, he had help from his father. | ||
| Buckley's father was behind him. | ||
| He invested in the book. | ||
| He invested in ads. | ||
| But here's what happened. | ||
| The book is circulating and the Yale establishment, the administration thinks, all right, we know this is Bill Buckley. | ||
| He's a very bright guy. | ||
| He's a good debater, superstar, college debater. | ||
| He's very clever at making his points. | ||
| But all he's doing is writing about like textbooks in economics and religion. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| But Buckley was also a really excellent writer. | ||
| And what he did, this is a lesson. | ||
| I hear from a lot of young people, a lot of young conservatives who go through my website, samtananhouse.com, and they send me notes and they're fascinated by Buckley. | ||
| How did he do it? | ||
| Well, one thing I tell them was he really studied his professors closely. | ||
| He learned from them. | ||
| He wanted to write a book they would respect. | ||
| He didn't want to sound like a guy from flyover country who's going after the elite. | ||
| He's a guy inside the ivory tower, right? | ||
| Who's going to show the emperor's new clothes? | ||
| And what happens is it's perfectly timed with Yale's 250th anniversary. | ||
| It's having a huge party for itself. | ||
| Buckley's book comes out and Life magazine, which was huge then, at 7 million readers, says this is, Buckley is like the kid you invite to your son's birthday party and tells you the son is a dope addict, right? | ||
| He's like, he's blowing up the whole thing. | ||
| And he does it with style and wit. | ||
| So when he goes out and the campus tours, does the book publishing tour just the way guys like me do now, he's always cool and calm and he kind of makes funny needles rather than denounces an attack. | ||
| So people think, wow, this is an Ivy League guy. | ||
| Like this is not some Yahoo. | ||
| This is like this super intellectual, smart journalist. | ||
| And what Buckley saw was that if he made the case in the right way, the world would stand up and take notice. | ||
| And they did. | ||
| And the book started flying off the shelves. | ||
| So I found an ad his publisher took out days after the book was published saying, don't worry, we'll have 5,000 more copies. | ||
| It's kind of like, you know, Random House saying, well, let's rush the new order out. | ||
| You know, let's get the books there. | ||
| And it got bigger and bigger. | ||
| And Buckley knew how to present himself as sort of the voice and promoter of his own book. | ||
| And he wouldn't just thump his chest and say, look at me, I'm a smart guy with a bestseller. | ||
| He would say, no, here's what the problem is. | ||
| You know, here's the thing we have to do something about. | ||
| A little bit like Charlie Kirk that way, because he spent a lot of time on campuses. | ||
| Now, one difference is Charlie Kirk liked to duke it out with students. | ||
| Buckley would take on professors. | ||
| He'd say, Show me the smartest professor you have in Harvard, and I'll debate him. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Tucker Carlson, remember, used to like do this. | ||
| Bring out your English professor, and I'll speak to him in three languages. | ||
| This actually happened in St. Louis. | ||
| Some guy, an English professor, insulted him publicly. | ||
| And Buckley said, Oh, yeah, let's have a debate. | ||
| You choose your language. | ||
| You want it to be in English, French, or Spanish? | ||
| Because I speak all three fluently. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So he's like, bigger, larger than life. | ||
| And everybody starts to realize he may be leading what Buckley himself called a counter-revolution of wait for the phrase radical conservatives. | ||
| He invented the term. | ||
| I just want to make sure we're going to go to break here in a moment. | ||
| We're going to go to break in a moment. | ||
| I want to thank Birch Gold for sponsoring us. | ||
| Take your phone at Bannon, 9898-98. | ||
| Get the ultimate guy for investing in gold and precious medals today in the age of Trump. | ||
| Make sure you check it out, particularly since silver is on fire. | ||
| I don't want to bury the lead. | ||
| You said, no, he said it was coming out on Yale's 250th anniversary. | ||
| The nation's 250th anniversary is coming up next year. | ||
| So, no, these folks think, hey, look, we love the United States, we support the United States, but we're the original gangsters. | ||
| We were here, what, 80 years before Yale was formed, 80 years before the revolution, Harvard and Yale, they go way back. | ||
| And what they attacked Buckley on, correct me if I'm wrong, I found it fascinating. | ||
| They go, well, one of the problems with Buckley is he doesn't quite get our program at Yale. | ||
| And the reason he doesn't get the program, because we've been here longer than the nation, right? | ||
| By almost 100 years, he doesn't really get it because he's a Catholic, right? | ||
| They actually went the line of attack in a lot of the editorials they put out is that Buckley doesn't really understand Yale or understand the way we roll because he's the ultimate outsider. | ||
| The two ultimate outsiders of the time were Catholics and Jews, right? | ||
| So he says, he doesn't understand us because he's a hidebound Catholic. | ||
| Give me a minute on that, Sam, before we go to break. | ||
| There's a fantastic line another conservative of the period had, Peter Barrett. | ||
| He said, Catholic baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberal. | ||
| Very true. | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| Buckley's the book is not just about a man. | ||
| It's about a man in a period of time. | ||
| That period of time would be post-war America. | ||
| In the radical conservative revolution that manifests itself later with Barry Goldwater, with Richard Nixon, with Ronald Reagan, and with Donald John Trump. | ||
| A revolution, folks, that you have been the tip of the tip of the spear. | ||
| If you want to see the intellectual background of how it got started, the books by Sam Tannenhaus, it's Buckley. | ||
| Make sure you get it. | ||
| By the way, give it as a gift. | ||
| Not only do they people think you're classy, but at a thousand pages, they'll say, hey, you guys are heavy-duty readers. | ||
| Of course, we know you are. | ||
| You're going to love it. | ||
| Every feedback I've gotten from every person that bought the book on the first time is they absolutely love it. | ||
| Johnny Kahn's going to take us out with American Heart. | ||
| I couldn't think of a better song to take us out for the first half. | ||
| John Kahn, one of the original partners with Andrew Breitbart at Breitbart. | ||
| Talk about another just giant. | ||
| Buckley, the man in the revolution. | ||
| Sam Tannehaus, the author. | ||
| Sam is going to be with us today. | ||
| He's also going to be with us during the week on the morning show this week. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to be back in the warm in just a moment. | ||
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Sign up for free and be part of the new band. | |
| Okay, welcome back. | ||
| Sam Tennehaus is with us. | ||
| The book is Buckley. | ||
| Sam, I also want to mention, first off, everybody that bought the book and got back to me in the interim has absolutely loved the book and they've given it as gifts. | ||
| And so I know a lot of our audiences want to give them to young people, but also if you know a boomer in your life, get it to them because they're going to see a side of Buckley that they've never seen before. | ||
| But I have to mention, since we spent so much time in the first two hours talking about Whitaker Chambers and really the pre-war America, people bought the Whitaker Chambers books. | ||
| I think Amazon sold out and I've gotten feedback. | ||
| People absolutely love that. | ||
| Give me a minute on Chambers. | ||
| Well, Chambers was one of Buckley's heroes, first of all. | ||
| Chambers is really important because he was the guy who'd been far left, actually been a Soviet spy, who defected, realized he was a Christian, and that Christianity was the only faith that had the conviction and the kind of values to contest totalitarianism. | ||
| And so he became really the originator of what we think of today as a kind of Christian anti-communism. | ||
| And he was a hero to Buckley. | ||
| Buckley and his siblings grew up reading Chambers and admiring him. | ||
| And Buckley came to Chambers' rescue in his last years. | ||
| Chambers became no surprise for Sona Nrata. | ||
| People hated him. | ||
| And Buckley saw that he was a great man and kind of became his sponsor in his last years. | ||
| Great act of friendship by Buckley. | ||
| What does it say about America then, but even America Today or the West, that two of the stalwarts in against the communist were not simply Christians, but not mainstream. | ||
| I mean, Whitaker Chambers came, and I tell people, look at Whitaker Chambers for live Christianity. | ||
| I think he was a Quaker, right? | ||
| When he converted, he went all the way from an atheist, hardcore Marxist, atheist, intellectual. | ||
| This thing's ridiculous. | ||
| It's a superstition. | ||
| To a live Christianity that's almost back to first century Christianity. | ||
| And Buckley's a traditional Catholic, Latin mass Catholic. | ||
| I mean, Buckley would be what we call trad Catholic today, not a mainstream thing. | ||
| What does it say that they were not mainstream Protestant churches? | ||
| Evangelicalism was not, that was looked at as also, even the Billy Graham thing is everything about revivalism and evangelical back then was looked at as like, this is not what that's, but the power structure in our country was WASP, a white Anglo-Saxon mainstream Protestantism. | ||
| What does it tell you that two of the fiercest warriors against the communists were kind of on the margins of Christianity? | ||
| Not saying the Catholic churches, but Buckley's interpretation of it. | ||
| Well, they were on the margins of what we would think of as a kind of socially respectable Protestantism. | ||
| You know, one of somebody, not a professor of Bill's, but of his brother Reed, who became a writer, was a famous scholar, not remembered today very well, called Clarence Brooks, who was a literary scholar from Louisiana. | ||
| When I was doing my research, I found that back in the 1930s, he'd made some of the same arguments about liberal Protestantism that Chambers and then Buckley did, that this is really kind of like a, it's like a slightly church-inflected New Dealism. | ||
| That's really what it became. | ||
| It became progressive politics with a kind of what we would call woke ideology that almost seemed more important than liturgy, the Bible, the traditions of the church. | ||
| And as you say, Buckley was very much a trad Catholic. | ||
| He was doing the Latin Mass till the end of his days. | ||
| He and Francis found priests who would do the Latin Mass. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Back when the Latin Mass was hard to get to. | ||
| Sam, two things for this hour I want to make sure we finish with is, because people know the National Review. | ||
| Most people know William F. Buckley's National Review, but the way it started, how young he was when it started, he was a von der Ken. | ||
| But before that, and this goes back to in your book, it's fascinating. | ||
| Buckley changes in the military. | ||
| The military changed him. | ||
| He was an officer. | ||
| It toughened him up a bit. | ||
| He got to actually lead men who were not the Yale types or the private school types. | ||
| The military, you can tell, was important in the formation of William F. Buckley as a man. | ||
| But then after all this happens, he wants to go. | ||
| He really, his first focus is the Central Intelligence Agency, correct? | ||
| Yeah, he had a professor at Yale, brilliant, fascinating guy named Wilmore Kendall, who had been in the OSS, right, the Office of Strategic Services that preceded the CIA World War II operation that had many brilliant people doing analysis, counterintelligence. | ||
| And Wilmore Kendall, after the Korean War started, which happened right after Buckley graduated in 1950, right at the time he got married in this remarkable ceremony out in Vancouver, because Buckley's wife, Pat Taylor, was richer than he was and became famous socialite in New York. | ||
| They had the wedding to top all weddings in Vancouver, thousands of people there. | ||
| Then suddenly North Korea invades South Korea. | ||
| And Buckley, who was ready to become a teacher at Yale, he was going to teach Spanish there and write his book. | ||
| And his mentor, Wilmore Kendall, who was doing intelligence now for the military and the CIA, tells him, well, if you want to make a difference, I can set you up with some people who are operating this new intelligence agency. | ||
| So Buckley goes to Washington and he meets two guys. | ||
| One of them is a famous writer and thinker, James Burnham, who's very much in the news today, one of the originators of the modern conservative argument. | ||
| And he became a mentor to Buckley. | ||
| The other was a hot shot who came out of the army named E. Howard Hunt, who later gave Watergate fame slash notoriety. | ||
| He became Buckley's station chief in Mexico City because Mexico City had the biggest office, CIA clandestine office in the hemisphere, because there are a lot of communists down there, a lot of Soviet operatives, and Latin America looks like it may be really tilting to the Soviet sphere. | ||
| So Buckley was sent to Mexico City because of his great Spanish. | ||
| And I want to tell people this. | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| I also want to say 10 years removed from the CIA office in station in Mexico City with E. Howard Hunt, founded by Howard Hunt, one of the most controversial parts of the Kennedy assassination drama, correct? | ||
| I mean, we still haven't quite gotten to the, we haven't gotten to the bottom of the, we haven't gotten to the bottom of that station in relation in E. Howard Hunt's role or proposed role or rumored role or mythical role in the Kennedy assassination. | ||
| E. Howard Hunt was an yeah. | ||
| Well, behind the scenes, my point is he is a, he's a power player, although, and a wild man doesn't play by the rules, even at a relatively junior level. | ||
| He's he's a guy making a difference. | ||
| I mean, Buckley and Burnham, the manager of revolution, may be one of the most important books ever written in the United States about the industrial, really post-war America and how organization man is going to take charge of this really the beginning of kind of globalization and the way that if you can't measure it, you can't manage them is all is all Burnham. | ||
| Anybody who wants to know how important James Burnham is should read a book or reread a book because everybody knows it, George Orwell's 1984 came directly out of James Burnham. | ||
| He'd been totally impressed by Burnham's argument that there was a secret, what we would call the deep state, right? | ||
| What Burnham called the managerial elite. | ||
| That was his term for the deep state. | ||
| And Orwell actually has an entire manuscript, if you remember, 1984, that circulates underground. | ||
| That's kind of his version of James Burnham. | ||
| So Burnham was huge. | ||
| But Hunt was a different guy. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| He was the operative. | ||
| Burnham's the intellectual. | ||
| Hunt is the counterintelligence operative. | ||
| If you remember the revolution in Guatemala, that was done in the early 1950s. | ||
| The first big CIA victory was done through a kind of counter-programming, psych war, they called it, psychological warfare. | ||
| Burnham had the idea. | ||
| Hunt carried it out. | ||
| He was Buckley's boss. | ||
| So one of the strains, the lines of storytelling in the book is Buckley as a CIA asset, as they called him back then, in the war against communism. | ||
| So Buckley's in Mexico City with his wife, his newlywed, right? | ||
| Their newlyweds are about to give, she's about to give birth to their child, Christopher Buckley, the famous writer. | ||
| This is 1951. | ||
| And he says, oh, gosh, that book I wrote about Yale, it's blowing up back in the United States. | ||
| He's in Mexico City while this is happening. | ||
| So he goes to his boss, Howard Hunt, and he says, Howard? | ||
| And Howard Hunt said, Buckley and he were always operational equals, right? | ||
| Seven years apart in date of birth. | ||
| Hunt's a little older, but he recognizes. | ||
| He said, Buckley's a genius. | ||
| He's super sophisticated intellectually. | ||
| And Buckley did some CIA missions. | ||
| He translated an important book into English and then back into Spanish that circulated in the early anti-communist years, but written by a Peruvian communist, ex-communist. | ||
| So Buckley's getting all this experience, but all the actions back home. | ||
| So he tells Howard, I'm going to leave the CIA. | ||
| I'm going to go back and try to live a public life. | ||
| Leading a public life meant becoming an ally of Joe McCarthy. | ||
| And we talked about that. | ||
| Some of my favorite chapters in the story I tell about Buckley and Joe McCarthy, a much different relationship than people realize. | ||
| Bill Buckley was very close to Joe McCarthy, as Jack Kennedy was, by the way, and Nixon for a time, right? | ||
|
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But talking about generation warriors. | |
| I want to get into exactly. | ||
| Buckley's ideal of a life well lived and the ideal of a man in post-war America was both an intellectual but a man of action, right? | ||
| He felt you had to be both, an intellectual, public intellectual, but also a man of action. | ||
| He just wasn't for going to the university and becoming a scholar and just living that sheltered life. | ||
| Buckley was drawn to this. | ||
| And he realized the people he looked at that he admired were both intellectuals and smart people, but also people that would go out there and take risk, right? | ||
| And actually confront and be kind of intellectual warriors or in his regard, even, you know, because he was always head in the back, you know, doing CIA operations. | ||
| That's what I found amazing about your book. | ||
| You kind of tied it together. | ||
| But let's go to McCarthy. | ||
| We have, people don't understand. | ||
| Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Bill Buckley. | ||
| Today, McCarthy's thing is trashed, right? | ||
| You see some of the people that people admired most about defeating the Soviet Union and standing up for American values. | ||
| They admired McCarthy. | ||
| What Buckley saw in the book he wrote with his brother-in-law, Brett Bozell, I think it's a really interesting observation, insight they had. | ||
| And by the way, somebody who was going to publish an essay Buckley wrote defending McCarthy and changed his mind. | ||
| He told me it was an act of cowardice was a guy named Henry Kissinger, an anti-communist who published a magazine in these days. | ||
| And Buckley was a bigger guy than Kissinger back then. | ||
| I interviewed Kissinger a few times for this book. | ||
| And he said, the first time he met Buckley, Buckley took him to lunch at the New York Yacht Club. | ||
| And Kissinger was a young Harvard professor. | ||
| He said, this guy was out of my league, socially out of my league. | ||
| You know, he's operating in a different sphere. | ||
| And so there's a great exchange. | ||
| And Kissinger remembered it verbatim 50 years later. | ||
| Kissinger says to Buckley in his naivete, he says, How come you guys on the right, because Kissinger's sort of in the middle, a little bit left back then, he says, how come you guys on the right are so aggressive in the way you attack people when liberals aren't? | ||
| And Buckley just smiles at him and says, they haven't calibrated you yet, Henry. | ||
| In other words, they haven't figured out what your ideology is. | ||
| Once they do, they'll come after you too. | ||
| And Kissinger never forgot that because Buckley was right. | ||
| So that's why when Kissinger went to work for Nixon in the White House, he had Buckley come visit him all the time. | ||
| Well, Buckley is now realizing he's got a singular place in the culture. | ||
| Look, there are other conservatives around with very big names, Ayn Rand, right? | ||
| With Atlas Shrugged that's going to be published soon and the fountainhead. | ||
| There are people like Burnham. | ||
| There are people like Whitaker Chambers. | ||
| They're very well known, but they're gun-shy. | ||
| They're gunshy. | ||
| They get attacked, denounced ritually all the time. | ||
| It's easy to mock them in a totally liberal-dominated culture. | ||
| What does Buckley do? | ||
| He says, come on. | ||
| We know the phrase, debate me. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Well, take me to Harvard. | ||
| Put your best guy out there. | ||
| You want me to defend my book? | ||
| Here's what I found. | ||
| And you're right about another thing, Steve, I want to make sure we don't lose sight of. | ||
| Buckley wasn't just denounced when that book came out for being a Catholic who didn't get it. | ||
| He was virtually accused of being an agent of the true conspiracy in America, not the communist conspiracy, the Vatican conspiracy to take over America. | ||
| This is what they said about Buckley. | ||
| Like very respected people, including at the upper echelons of the Yale administration. | ||
| In fact, I saw a correspondence where graduates of Yale, Jews and Catholics, because there were quotas against both of them, are saying, what, you have to be a Protestant to write about Yale. | ||
| And then one guy just said to the president, you're smearing him. | ||
| You're smearing him as a Catholic. | ||
| You're saying he doesn't have an argument to make because he's a Catholic and not a triple name or Episcopalian, right? | ||
| So that's what Buckley sees is that's the opposition. | ||
| He wants to take it on. | ||
| He's happy. | ||
| He's a happy warrior. | ||
| That's one difference between Buckley and Chambers. | ||
| Chambers a great figure. | ||
| We know this. | ||
| But Chambers had suffered a lot. | ||
| Buckley is a guy who's had a lot of things go his way. | ||
| He's just as serious-minded, but he has a kind of confidence and youth. | ||
| Look, he's a great-looking guy. | ||
| He's a great talker. | ||
| People, you know, they meet him, they're attracted to him. | ||
| Cosmic presence at Yale, somebody said. | ||
| So he goes out there and he's a one-man opposition. | ||
| He starts a magazine. | ||
| He starts writing columns. | ||
| He's writing the books. | ||
| He goes on TV. | ||
| Even before he started his famous show, Firing Line, he would go on any talk show that would have him. | ||
| And there were a few shows, programs like The Author Meets the Critic, and they bring Buckley on and he'd demolish whoever was on the other side. | ||
| He made it fun. | ||
| He made it fun. | ||
| He's clever. | ||
| He's amusing. | ||
| He tells jokes. | ||
| He's got the kind of eyebrow thing where he winks at the audience and it's all working for him. | ||
| And this, as you say, when he's in his 20s. | ||
| So he starts the National Reviewer at the age of 29, starts a magazine because he knows to win the argument, you have to shape the terms of the argument. | ||
| That was his explanation for why McCarthy was finally brought down. | ||
| Not because McCarthy didn't have a case to make, but because the liberals were able to pin him. | ||
| They pin him in a corner. | ||
| They say, this is a crazy man. | ||
| This is a fanatic. | ||
| This is a fascist. | ||
| We're familiar with these terms, I think. | ||
| And that's how they go. | ||
| I'm going to leave this hour. | ||
| We're going to have you back. | ||
| I think we're going to try to do. | ||
| I said it was going to be Wednesday. | ||
| I think it may be Thursday. | ||
| We're going to work with you the best time, but I want to have it on the morning show. | ||
| Before I leave, just we got a couple of minutes. | ||
| Kennedy, both Jack and Bobby, and Bobby worked for McCarthy. | ||
| Nixon, Roy Cohn, Bill Buckley, people that later on became kind of giants in the American landscape, although Roy Cohn has become bigger, I think, even today, because he was one of the mentors for Donald Trump. | ||
| What was it they saw in McCarthy that they admired? | ||
| Sincerity, for one thing. | ||
| He meant it. | ||
| He meant what he was saying. | ||
| There's one of my favorite scenes in the book is something Bill Buckley told me about when I interviewed him. | ||
| McCarthy's going down. | ||
| They're going after him. | ||
| They're attacking him. | ||
| They're about to take him under. | ||
| And Buckley, who is a great writer, flies. | ||
| You could take the shuttle back then. | ||
| It's 1954. | ||
| Goes to see Joe McCarthy and his wife, Jeannie, in their little house in Capitol Hill. | ||
| And Buckley's going to write a speech for him. | ||
| He's going to write a speech that McCarthy will deliver to gain some respectability back. | ||
| So Buckley's really tired. | ||
| You know, he's been going nonstop all day. | ||
| And so he says, Joe, I have to go to sleep. | ||
| My mind's not working. | ||
| Wake me up in the morning and then we'll finish the speech. | ||
| And then the knock comes on the door and Buckley can't believe it's already the morning because it feels like he's hardly gone to sleep. | ||
| McCarthy calls him out. | ||
| McCarthy is on the floor in his bathrobe, tracing railroad line routes through China, right? | ||
| So this is not quite the ignoramus everybody's calling him. | ||
| And he's in a bathrobe. | ||
| And Buckley looks up and he sees it's one o'clock in the morning. | ||
| And he says, Joe, you son of a bitch, what are you doing? | ||
| And Joseph, well, I got so excited I had to show you. | ||
| He has to show. | ||
| He's figuring out how the Chinese are going to invade Formosa, as they called it then, Taiwan. | ||
| And he meant it. | ||
| He meant all this stuff. | ||
| And McCarthy, whether he's right or wrong or exaggerating or mixing up the facts, whether you hate him or love him, he means what he says. | ||
| And that's the era when not many people are doing that. | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| We're going to get you back this week. | ||
| Sam Tannenhaus. | ||
| The book is Buckley, the man in the revolution. | ||
| Get it for yourself. | ||
| Get it for your friends. | ||
| Get it for the kids on your Christmas lift. | ||
| Sam, where do people go for your site? | ||
|
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Where do they go to catch up with all your writings? | |
| SamTannanhouse.com. | ||
| You see my name there, S-A-M. | ||
| What's one word? | ||
| Tannenhouse.com. | ||
| And you can see all my stuff there. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| Let's say if you want a great Christmas gift, it's right here. | ||
| The book is Buckley. | ||
| We're going to be back either Wednesday or Thursday this week. | ||
| I'll make an announcement with Sam to continue the story of Bill Buckley in America. | ||
| See you tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time when you're going to be back in the war room. | ||
| We're going to leave you with the right stuff from Tom Wolf and the great masterpiece from Philip Hoffman. |