Bannon's War Room - Episode 4964： A Conversation With Sam Tanenhaus And The Book Buckley： The Life and the Revolution That Changed America

00:00:00.000 This is the primal scream of a dying regime.

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00:00:17.180 The people have had a belly full of it.

00:00:19.100 I know you don't like hearing that.

00:00:20.520 I know you've tried to do everything in the world to stop that,

00:00:22.280 but you're not going to stop it.

00:00:23.220 It's going to happen.

00:00:24.480 And where do people like that go to share the big lie?

00:00:27.880 MAGA Media.

00:00:28.780 I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.

00:00:34.660 Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?

00:00:38.420 If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.

00:00:44.840 War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.

00:00:51.840 Okay, welcome.

00:00:52.940 It is Saturday, 29 November in the year of our Lord, 2025.

00:00:55.940 And this show I've wanted to do for a long time.

00:00:59.640 Very special.

00:01:00.440 We have the author, Sam Tannenhaus, joins us.

00:01:03.520 He just wrote the definitive, actually the authorized biography of William F. Buckley.

00:01:09.640 But it's titled The Life and the Revolution that Changed America.

00:01:12.920 We're going to talk a lot about both, about Buckley's life and the revolution.

00:01:16.240 But we're also going to talk about his other books.

00:01:18.860 Sam, thank you so much.

00:01:19.800 Honored to have you in here.

00:01:20.640 We've been going to do this for a long time.

00:01:21.740 What a pleasure.

00:01:22.280 We've talked on the phone.

00:01:23.580 I interview for stories, but we never met.

00:01:25.600 So this is great.

00:01:26.220 Just incredible.

00:01:26.820 Your books, first off, you've written three, quite frankly.

00:01:36.000 You're a non-observant, secular, liberal Jewish guy from New York, lives in Connecticut now,

00:01:45.420 but editor of the New York Times Book Review.

00:01:47.660 So you're not a, you wouldn't say a part of conservative ink or MAGA, but I tell people,

00:01:56.540 if you read your three books on conservatism, your book on Whitaker Chambers, which is quite

00:02:01.840 frankly a masterpiece, your book on Buckley, which I think this is a masterpiece, and then

00:02:06.380 you read the book you started with, The Death of Conservatism, which had a massive influence

00:02:10.980 on me when I first read it, and Andrew Breitbart back in 2009, I think the book came out.

00:02:16.160 How does someone with your background be the best chronicler of really getting to the heart

00:02:22.680 of what conservatism is and the impact it's had on America?

00:02:26.980 Well, so great of you to describe me that way, Steve.

00:02:29.900 Not everyone else does.

00:02:31.560 Some of our friends on the right have some trouble with it, although I have to say I hear

00:02:36.260 time and time again that all sorts of people read these books.

00:02:40.000 Well, for the history, The Death of Conservatism, the conservative ink did not want to touch it.

00:02:44.720 That's one of the reasons I told Andrew.

00:02:46.180 I said, hey, National Review, Weekly Standard, all these guys are in touch in this book.

00:02:50.400 This book is very powerful.

00:02:52.240 But you cannot, if you want to read about lived Christianity and its worldview about the

00:03:00.680 atheism of Marxism and its fight against that, there's no better vehicle to read that than

00:03:06.260 the Whitaker Chambers biography, right?

00:03:07.860 I mean, that tells the entire story.

00:03:09.240 Yeah, because of Chambers himself, you know, it's interesting, Steve, right before September

00:03:16.020 11th, all those years ago, when George W. Bush was president, they did a hundredth anniversary.

00:03:22.700 You know, Buckley's hundredth anniversary is coming up, right?

00:03:24.940 Almost as we speak.

00:03:26.640 And they did one on Chambers.

00:03:29.180 And so they invited me because my book had come out.

00:03:32.160 It came out in 97.

00:03:33.340 And here it was, 2001.

00:03:35.320 It's the summer of 2001.

00:03:37.100 And I get into the elevator and Robert Bork was in it.

00:03:41.340 And I'd given a talk.

00:03:42.300 Ralph de Talladonna, remember him?

00:03:43.920 He'd given a talk.

00:03:44.860 Buckley himself.

00:03:45.660 Those are pretty right wing figures.

00:03:46.800 Yeah.

00:03:46.940 It's pretty conservative.

00:03:47.640 That's the three senior guys in the conservative movement.

00:03:51.480 And Judge Bork, right?

00:03:52.800 Remember, everybody called him Judge Bork.

00:03:54.240 He's in the elevator with me.

00:03:56.000 He said, look, I really like the Chambers book.

00:03:57.500 What are you doing next?

00:03:58.920 So I'm going to do Bill Buckley.

00:03:59.900 He said, Bill Buckley, how could you go from the giant Whitaker Chambers to Bill Buckley?

00:04:07.280 And I'm thinking, you're not getting it.

00:04:09.920 Because, yeah, Chambers and Buckley are two very different kinds of guys.

00:04:14.680 But they were almost like brothers.

00:04:16.340 Tell our audience.

00:04:17.120 We have a lot of younger audience, too.

00:04:19.960 Let's start with who was Whitaker Chambers and why is it so important for people today,

00:04:25.340 particularly young people, to understand his story?

00:04:27.360 Whitaker Chambers, born in 1901, died in 1961, was the founder of the modern anti-conservative,

00:04:37.300 I mean, anti-communist movement that was based on a Christian conservatism.

00:04:42.600 And it sounds very different from what we read today because Chambers came out of the left.

00:04:48.820 And you're asked, well, why am I writing about these guys?

00:04:51.620 It's because the basis of all this is really the old American left, the kind of pro-communist, pro-socialist,

00:05:01.440 turn everything upside down, left wing in America.

00:05:04.920 Chambers was a prodigy in that movement in its big years in the 1920s and 30s, became an underground spot.

00:05:11.480 When people don't realize how close the country, after the Great Depression, and Roosevelt, and a lot of our audience hates Roosevelt,

00:05:18.720 but he was capitalism trying to provide a solution because the country could have very much slipped into what was happening in Europe,

00:05:24.580 to socialism, communism, or some sort of great revolution in this country, given the impact that the Great Depression had.

00:05:31.200 Yeah, very much so.

00:05:32.660 That's why the hard left always hated Roosevelt.

00:05:35.300 They thought he was kind of, he was cheating, you know, it's camouflage because he's going to save the system rather than destroy it, right?

00:05:42.760 Well, Chambers joined the Communist Party in the mid-1920s after he dropped out of college, Columbia University,

00:05:48.920 and became a dedicated Soviet agent, not just a communist, a Soviet agent, became a spy, and right here in Washington.

00:05:57.120 Just talk about that because this infects the Buckley book and the whole movement, that the Soviets and the KGB, right, at the time,

00:06:05.640 they had an active program to kind of recute what they felt were the best and brightest in this very city to actually be active agents of the Soviet Union.

00:06:13.420 Yeah, they infiltrated it.

00:06:14.520 They infiltrated the New Deal. 0.74

00:06:16.300 And I remember I was doing a documentary once on Joe McCarthy, another guy Buckley was very close to,

00:06:21.100 and Chambers had a different view of McCarthy, and we can get into that later.

00:06:24.360 But, and the documentarian, she did a pretty good job.

00:06:28.660 At one point she said to me, well, how many active agents were there in these years, the 1930s, during the New Deal, before World War II?

00:06:37.200 So you have to remember the Nazis and the Soviets are kind of circling each other. 0.69

00:06:43.800 Hitler and Stalin are circling each other.

00:06:45.520 We don't know which way it's going to go.

00:06:47.000 So how many people are in the communist apparatuses, they called it, in these underground cells?

00:06:52.600 And I said, well, maybe 75.

00:06:55.400 And she said, well, is that a lot?

00:06:57.580 And I said, well, depends on who they were and what they were doing, right?

00:07:02.100 So if it's somebody.

00:07:03.200 If it's Alger Hiss. 0.90

00:07:04.120 If it's Alger Hiss in the State Department.

00:07:06.360 And the guy that was at Treasury on the dollar.

00:07:08.620 Henry Dexter White.

00:07:10.620 If you have 75 grundoons, it doesn't matter. 0.99

00:07:13.060 But if you have bright young things that are in a movement that, you know, in the New Deal and can shape things, you make a big impact.

00:07:22.500 Well, yeah.

00:07:22.860 We can get into that a little bit with McCarthy, too.

00:07:26.260 Because, you know, Buckley was a big champion of Joe McCarthy and actually made what I think is a pretty powerful argument for McCarthy, which is in this book.

00:07:34.740 Now, the McCarthy section alone in this book makes it worthwhile for people to buy just about our current time today.

00:07:44.640 Because you make a brilliant observation on McCarthy that McCarthy was so powerful, not because the facts he brought, but the way he said things, that he really got a great.

00:07:58.460 He was the first really grassroots guy.

00:08:00.380 I mean, you had Father Coughlin and other guys before the war, the America Firsters. 0.65

00:08:04.480 But McCarthy, now that communism was becoming a reality and we had beaten the fascist, he talked in a way, in a street vernacular, in a way he talked.

00:08:15.000 That galvanized people's – we don't know all the theoretical things on Marxist-Leninism, but we know these are bad guys and we want them – they want to change America and we want them out.

00:08:26.080 What – your description of McCarthy and Buckley's thing of McCarthy is quite frankly stunning and it speaks to the moment we're in today.

00:08:32.400 Well, what Buckley saw – Steve, you'll get this too – was Buckley was a Catholic, McCarthy was a Catholic, and there's no institution –

00:08:41.220 Bobby Kennedy was a Catholic?

00:08:42.260 Listen, Jack Kennedy walked out of the room if he heard somebody make a negative comment about Joe McCarthy.

00:08:50.620 You know this, right?

00:08:51.400 If he was in a gathering like this and somebody attacked Joe McCarthy, Jack Kennedy would say, I'm sorry, and he'd walk out of the room.

00:08:57.960 Well, the standard also in this book, it's not – I told you before when we set you up to come is that the modern conservative movement, but the organized Protestant churches, they don't make a big deal about McCarthy's Catholicism.

00:09:12.460 I mean Buckley's Catholicism, it imbued everything.

00:09:15.360 I mean Catholicism and anti-communism were kind of his two things, right, and being against the liberal movement.

00:09:22.540 But there was definitely a suppression.

00:09:25.900 In fact, when God and Man at Yale comes out, the Yale attacks the book by going to different intellectuals and say, this is the problem with the kid who comes here.

00:09:36.900 There's two Catholic, right? 0.86

00:09:37.980 That's right.

00:09:38.160 I mean they –

00:09:38.840 They had quotas limiting Catholic.

00:09:40.460 They called him an agent of the Vatican in 1951.

00:09:42.800 They said, well, we do have a conspiracy in America.

00:09:46.340 This is what credentialed liberal critics of God and Man at Yale, Buckley's first book, wrote.

00:09:53.700 We do have a conspiracy in America, and it's run by the Vatican, not by the communists.

00:09:58.620 Let's go back to Chambers.

00:10:01.360 Here's the thing that I think is powerful, and I want people to buy the Buckley book, and if you get a chance, get the Whitaker Chambers book too.

00:10:08.600 You talk – these are not just biographies of individuals.

00:10:11.600 You talk about the age that they lived in.

00:10:14.140 So it's really much – the book is a subtitle, the life and the revolution that changed America.

00:10:18.500 Whitaker Chambers, although a biography, you get the best sense of the 1930s, the turmoil that the country was in before World War II because of the economic conditions of the Great Depression and how – and what Marxism did to really drive Whitaker Chambers' Christianity even more, right?

00:10:36.860 I mean this is why he became – essentially he really became a Christian.

00:10:39.500 Well, the brilliance of Chambers was that he saw Marxism itself was a kind of religion, right?

00:10:45.520 It's a kind of bad religion. 0.99

00:10:47.260 And what that means is the dedicated followers of it are going to be more committed to their politics than the neutral kind of technocratic, well, let's tinker at the edges.

00:10:59.240 See, we make the system work a little bit, and Chambers would say, are you effing kidding me?

00:11:03.620 Now, he was very elevated.

00:11:05.020 Chambers spoke seven languages.

00:11:07.000 He read Dante in Italian during the Algeria's perjury case.

00:11:11.620 You see Chambers reading, right?

00:11:14.160 The Purgatory, right?

00:11:15.800 In Italian.

00:11:16.600 In the original.

00:11:17.160 In the original Italian.

00:11:18.420 He was a brilliant guy.

00:11:19.900 And that's what drew me to him, by the way.

00:11:22.480 You know, we're asking me, Steve, well, why am I writing about these guys?

00:11:25.300 I grew up in a household that was your classic kind of aspiring, assimilated, second-generation Jewish Americans.

00:11:36.700 My father was a college professor, political scientist.

00:11:39.980 He was the one who had me read Witness when I was 14 years old.

00:11:42.900 Chambers is a great memoir.

00:11:44.140 He said, you have to read this.

00:11:45.040 This is the greatest book on anti-communism by an ex-communist.

00:11:50.300 Your father told you that.

00:11:51.020 My father told me that.

00:11:51.820 You read it.

00:11:52.300 How old were you reading it?

00:11:52.820 I was 14.

00:11:53.800 My father was a totally classic liberal.

00:11:56.560 It broke his heart in 1972 when he had to vote for George McGovern.

00:12:01.780 He didn't want to, but he did, right?

00:12:03.740 So we know who those guys were.

00:12:05.720 But the thing that really got to him was the kind of papering over of the facts about communism.

00:12:12.420 That was very big for Buckley, too.

00:12:14.140 Buckley would take up liberal congressmen like Allard Loewenstein, the liberal Democrat, because he knew he was anti-communist.

00:12:21.200 People think that's a joke today.

00:12:23.260 It was not.

00:12:24.920 I mean, that was the threat.

00:12:26.860 Some of the hardest anti-communists actually were Democrats.

00:12:29.280 It was a total threat to the freedom of the world.

00:12:34.040 Chambers knew it.

00:12:35.160 Chambers put his life on the line.

00:12:36.740 You know, one thing he used to point out about his memoir, Witness, because Chambers was a linguist.

00:12:41.100 He was a classical linguist.

00:12:42.180 And in Greek, witness is the same word as martyr.

00:12:46.020 He was going to put himself out there.

00:12:48.460 And so he took the risk, right?

00:12:50.240 Famous lines during the Hiss confrontation right here in Washington, 1948. 0.73

00:12:56.500 Chambers has testified he's broken with the party.

00:12:59.340 He's decided the party has gone too far.

00:13:02.120 In the post-war, people should understand, even for McCarthy, because everything started with McCarthy.

00:13:08.180 It didn't.

00:13:08.540 It started towards the end of the war with the House on American Activities, that people realized that something was going on in the war.

00:13:16.800 The Soviet Union was rising in power, clearly a military power.

00:13:19.700 They had been really the nation that had destroyed the Wehrmacht, right? 0.93

00:13:23.100 And so people were concerned about infiltration, everything.

00:13:25.340 So the anti-communism movement really started even at the end of World War II.

00:13:31.180 By this time, it's an official part of the apparatus here in D.C.

00:13:34.180 Yes, that's right.

00:13:35.540 And Chambers, early on in 1939, when the notorious pact had been signed between the Nazis and the Soviets.

00:13:45.640 Is that what drove him over the edge?

00:13:46.820 Yeah, because they had fought the Nazis so long in the 30s, and now to have Stalin and Hitler do a deal. 0.75

00:13:51.880 He'd already broken with the movement by then because he saw where it was headed.

00:13:55.420 His bosses, this stuff sounds crazy, but you have to read it because, you know, it's right there in the story.

00:14:01.120 As early as 1937, he had a Russian boss, a spymaster.

00:14:06.020 So at this point, Chambers is living in Baltimore with his friend, Alger Hiss.

00:14:11.360 Alger Hiss is working for the State Department.

00:14:13.200 Right. Chambers is coming to Washington and picking up documents from his contacts, like Harry Dexter White and the Treasury Department, the guy who later wrote the Morgenthau plan for World War II.

00:14:24.360 And Bretton Woods.

00:14:25.120 Bretton Woods.

00:14:25.720 I mean, this is one of the towering intellectual financial figures.

00:14:28.100 All this stuff is going on.

00:14:29.200 Chambers is the courier.

00:14:30.640 Chambers has got the brilliant languages, right?

00:14:33.220 He's got the Columbia education, all this stuff.

00:14:36.960 Hang on one second.

00:14:38.100 We're going to take a commercial break.

00:14:39.160 I want to get to the punchline of the story.

00:14:41.080 I want to hold him on edge.

00:14:42.440 Sam Tannehouse is with us.

00:14:44.720 He's going to be with us for the entire morning.

00:14:47.380 We're going to talk about really the nation and conservatism from really the 1920s all the way up.

00:14:53.520 You actually finished Buckley's book ends with the death of conservatism.

00:14:59.020 Let me be blunt.

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00:16:22.160 Hello, America's Voice family.

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00:16:51.720 Sam Tannenhaus is our guest.

00:16:53.620 The book is Buckley, The Life and the Revolution that Changed America.

00:16:59.140 Like I said, his Whitaker Chambers book and his Buckley book, if you want to take a history of the United States from the 1920s all the way up to basically the turn of the century, you can't get a better two books to really tell you about America, what we went through and how the conservative movement really kind of started.

00:17:17.160 The modern conservative movement started.

00:17:18.540 And then if you read Death of the Conservatism, you'll see how the conservative movement, I think, ended and the rise of populist nationalism with the MAGA movement is today.

00:17:26.200 We're in Baltimore.

00:17:27.400 We're in Chambers.

00:17:28.020 So Chambers is an underground spy for what was then called the NKVD.

00:17:32.740 It's what we know as the KGB.

00:17:35.880 It's really military espionage.

00:17:37.940 He's meeting with a group of people, about a dozen of them, who are giving him documents.

00:17:42.660 And you think, well, who cares if a guy like Alger Hiss in the State Department is giving him cables, diplomatic cables?

00:17:49.200 Well, because the cables are sent in code.

00:17:51.340 And you give them to the Soviets. 0.97

00:17:52.840 And guess what?

00:17:53.600 They've got the codes.

00:17:54.640 So FDR, Franklin Roosevelt, who'd been a naval officer, starts switching.

00:17:59.620 Secretary of the Navy.

00:18:00.620 Yeah.

00:18:01.420 Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson.

00:18:03.580 Right.

00:18:03.920 So he starts switching the codes.

00:18:07.400 They realize there's a problem.

00:18:08.500 So after 1939, you have the you now have the pact between the Soviets and the Nazis. 0.52

00:18:14.260 And that's in the United States.

00:18:15.300 That's when because my parents were in Norfolk.

00:18:18.200 That's when you see America start to kick up and get they know a war is coming.

00:18:22.300 Once they see that pact signed, they go, OK, something's going to happen in Europe and we've got to be ready for it.

00:18:27.800 You see budgets.

00:18:28.760 The draft comes.

00:18:29.680 A huge fight in the draft.

00:18:31.240 Because remember, most people, hey, World War I left such a bad taste in everybody's mouth.

00:18:35.780 Right.

00:18:36.260 They said, hey, we're not doing that again.

00:18:37.680 No League of Nations.

00:18:38.760 None of that.

00:18:39.260 We're really isolation.

00:18:40.240 You got Linbury, all the American first crowd. 1.00

00:18:42.140 But in this city, you start to see the draft.

00:18:45.780 You start to see armaments.

00:18:46.940 You start to see we're getting ready because people realize downrange a big fight's coming.

00:18:51.380 Yeah.

00:18:51.660 And not long after that, you have the Lend-Lease program when Churchill kept him alive.

00:18:56.700 Yeah, that's it.

00:18:57.420 So it's all happening now.

00:18:58.540 And Chambers goes to a very high-ranking guy, Adolf Burley, who is a kind of a security officer in the State Department, and he tells them, you've now got people working for you who had been spying for the Soviets, and that material is not going to go to Nazi Germany.

00:19:17.600 And so Burley, it's a great scene.

00:19:19.600 Is that the thing that triggers him from being a KGB spy, a Russian spy, to actually going and saying this is a problem?

00:19:28.680 Was the signing of the pact, all his idealism went away because he said if they're prepared to do it with the Nazis, it's not the idealism I work for as far as what communism would make the world better?

00:19:41.200 That was actually the last step, Steve, because there was an earlier one.

00:19:44.220 And so just a little before then, he had a Soviet spymaster, Colonel Beekhoff, this guy that's done over from Russia.

00:19:51.760 And he said to Chambers as early as 1937, he said, look, we have a new mission for you.

00:19:56.460 We're going to send you on a boat to go over to Spain and fight Franco.

00:20:01.480 We're going to be a spy there.

00:20:02.500 And anybody who followed what was going on, this is the Spanish Civil War, knew that Stalin was carrying out purges there.

00:20:10.180 He was purging, right?

00:20:11.800 George Orwell wrote a fantastic book about it, Homage to Catalonia.

00:20:14.620 Homage to Catalonia.

00:20:15.760 And Chambers realized they were sending him over there to knock him off.

00:20:22.000 So he starts arranging.

00:20:24.380 Because they thought he was weak.

00:20:25.920 They thought he was weak.

00:20:26.940 There's a great line he gave in his hearings that nobody picked up on because it's just too subtle.

00:20:34.760 Chambers, super literary guy.

00:20:36.420 And everything he says, if you look at his face and his testimony, there's a kind of half smile he has all the time.

00:20:42.620 And someone says, well, is it really true, Mr. Chambers, that you were not really a Stalinist, but a Trotskyist?

00:20:50.240 And Chambers says, I am not now and never have been a Trotskyist.

00:20:54.900 He's making fun of what Alger Hiss says when they bring him in, right?

00:20:58.900 So Chambers got worried about that.

00:21:01.600 And he started to arrange his own break from the party.

00:21:07.200 He adopts aliases.

00:21:09.120 He moves to different apartments.

00:21:10.420 And the guy he is unable to break away is Alger Hiss.

00:21:14.460 And there's this line, Alger Hiss, who's like Johns Hopkins.

00:21:19.320 He's the golden boy.

00:21:20.060 He's the golden boy.

00:21:21.120 He was a Supreme Court clerk to Felix Frankfurter.

00:21:24.600 He was called one of Frankfurter's happy hot dogs, they called him, right?

00:21:28.020 Guy on the left, helped write a lot of the New Deal legislation.

00:21:32.400 Chambers really liked Hiss.

00:21:33.880 He said, I'm very fond of Mr. Hiss.

00:21:35.160 He goes to Hiss and he says, look, they're coming after me.

00:21:38.780 They're going to come after all of us now.

00:21:40.500 You have to break with this movement.

00:21:42.180 And Chambers never forgot what Hiss said to him.

00:21:45.820 He said, well, he said, Stalin plays for keeps.

00:21:49.860 And Chambers remembered that when he was a kid.

00:21:52.200 That was a term you used when you were playing marbles.

00:21:54.880 Like you got to keep the marble if you wanted.

00:21:57.560 That to Hiss, this is the game. 0.99

00:22:00.380 And he wants to be really famous words.

00:22:03.480 Steve, you know very well.

00:22:04.760 Chambers goes back to his wife and he says, we're going to leave.

00:22:08.520 You and I are going to leave the winning world for the losing world.

00:22:11.620 Because they thought the communists were going to win.

00:22:13.940 So then 1939, the pact gets signed.

00:22:17.340 Chambers meets with Adolf Burley, this beautiful house in Washington with this estate, right,

00:22:23.900 overlooking the Potomac.

00:22:25.300 They meet at midnight and Chambers says, I have to tell you, there are spies now who've been

00:22:31.120 working for the Soviet Union and their stuff is going to be transmitted to the Nazis.

00:22:37.460 We know it now because there's the pact.

00:22:40.200 So Burley says, well, give me some names.

00:22:43.840 And so Chambers does.

00:22:45.180 And they include Alger Hiss.

00:22:47.640 1939.

00:22:48.500 It's not until 1948 that they finally call me to talk about it.

00:22:52.480 But let's say, well, this is why it's so important.

00:22:54.300 First off, just having you talk about this and having it in the book is kind of monumental

00:23:01.160 because the liberals in this country never want to talk about the spirit.

00:23:04.200 What happened in the Roosevelt administration is they don't want any discussion of this

00:23:09.420 because this would play to some of what the right were saying.

00:23:12.100 Hey, this thing is really a front for socialism, for communism.

00:23:15.480 And they're saying, no, we're actually saving communism.

00:23:17.660 You had a bunch of this was the Joe Kennedy crowd that were saying, you know, this is a problem.

00:23:22.820 So Adolf Burrell and these guys, the first thing to do is to make sure we're not outing anybody,

00:23:26.880 but we can kind of tone it down.

00:23:28.780 That's what they thought they could do.

00:23:29.920 They thought we'll handle it internally.

00:23:32.000 Because to handle it externally means you're going to get thrown out of office because the American people go,

00:23:36.140 you've got communists in the government.

00:23:38.160 They got a KGB spy ring.

00:23:40.320 And who's the guy who actually goes before the public?

00:23:43.060 Like, well, Nixon prosecuted Hiss, as it were, through the House.

00:23:47.840 But the guy who does it publicly is Joe McCarthy.

00:23:50.240 But Alger Hiss, when I say Golden Boy and Harry Duxley White, Alger Hiss, and this is what gets back to Yalta, 0.88

00:23:56.240 Alger Hiss is the senior aide-de-camp for Roosevelt in Yalta when Roosevelt is so sick, right?

00:24:02.780 That is the key meeting of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, how the war is going to come to an end

00:24:09.700 and what the post-World War is going to look like.

00:24:12.280 And you have Alger Hiss, who is a KGB spy, is the guy moving the papers and his aide-de-camp.

00:24:18.940 That's why the guys on the right have always said, and I keep saying, I don't care what they say about why Phil Marshall Montgomery

00:24:27.220 and Patton stopped 70 miles from Berlin, right, when that was the entire objective of the war

00:24:33.040 and let the Russian army, which were, what, 200 or 300 miles away, you know, grind it up, and they took Berlin.

00:24:39.380 But there's—Yalta has always been a massive issue for whether it was Nixon, Buckley, McCarthy,

00:24:46.800 currently, you know, Bannon and everybody today to say, hey—and Alger Hiss was a golden boy.

00:24:51.780 I mean, they keep saying, oh, these are grunt dudes.

00:24:53.460 Even to have you say it is like, the left never wants to talk about this.

00:24:57.500 I.F. Stone, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, any of this crowd.

00:25:01.940 Well, and another thing is—that's important is—

00:25:05.660 Did you get grief when you had the detail in the book when Whitaker Chambers came—when the Whitaker Chambers book came out?

00:25:11.720 Yeah, actually, less than I thought it would, but I got plenty of it.

00:25:16.520 Oh, yeah.

00:25:17.860 It's funny, some writers who are friends of mine now really came after me when that book came out,

00:25:25.200 that who was I to tell this story and to make Chambers seem like a sympathetic guy?

00:25:32.020 And there was—there were just enough old-style liberal anti-communists, as they used to call them,

00:25:39.700 including Arthur Schlesinger, who reviewed it for the Times, and he said, no, this is the story.

00:25:44.320 He said, this is as close as stories we're going to get, but that—that kind of liberal is gone now.

00:25:50.560 So it's—even the—Chambers' great anti-communism and Buckley's—Buckley's fighting it to the end.

00:25:57.620 You will meet the children of Russian emigres in this country.

00:26:02.780 One of them is one of our greatest novelists now, a guy named Gary Steingart, you've probably heard of.

00:26:07.700 I saw him at a book event, and he said, I have to tell you, my parents emigrated from Russia in the 70s.

00:26:13.620 Bill Buckley was a god to them because he was the only one who was saying, we can bring the Soviet Union down.

00:26:19.140 He's the only one saying, let the Jews out, you know? 1.00

00:26:22.220 So all this other stuff that is circulating now, but even now, Buckley won't get credit for it.

00:26:28.780 It steams me a little bit.

00:26:31.140 But at any rate, so we'll get to that later.

00:26:33.300 But—so Chambers sees Hiss is doing this, but not only that.

00:26:38.320 Chambers was a brilliant writer, and when he broke from the underground, he got a job at Time magazine.

00:26:45.200 And early on—

00:26:47.020 The anti-communist loose.

00:26:48.300 Anti-communist, but very classic Republican loose, right?

00:26:53.760 And so it's like 1940, and Chambers is just a guy working away, get a good salary, but you're a faceless guy.

00:27:01.660 No bylines, Time magazine in those days.

00:27:04.140 You just wrote your article.

00:27:05.980 And Henry Luce reads this devastating critique of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath when it was made into a film.

00:27:16.460 By John Ford.

00:27:17.760 John Ford. 0.98

00:27:18.620 And Chambers said, it's a magnificent film, but the novel is trash.

00:27:23.180 And Luce reads this thing, and he says, this is the best film review I've ever read.

00:27:27.300 Who wrote this?

00:27:28.500 And it's Dumpy Whitaker Chambers.

00:27:31.600 They call him in, and Luce says, who are you?

00:27:34.980 And he realizes he has a genius on his hands.

00:27:37.940 And Chambers says, not only that, I'll tell you everything that's going on.

00:27:41.400 I'll tell you this, your own magazine is filled with pro-communist writers who are going to start.

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00:29:12.040 War Room.

00:29:13.080 Here's your host, Stephen K. Mann.

00:29:16.520 What's that?

00:29:17.660 Welcome back.

00:29:18.500 I didn't realize you were such a great storyteller.

00:29:20.380 You're books, but you're a rank and tour.

00:29:25.080 Whitaker Chambers.

00:29:26.700 Where are we?

00:29:27.520 All right.

00:29:28.040 So.

00:29:28.860 Yalta.

00:29:29.260 Yalta happens, and there's this.

00:29:31.500 Explain to people, though.

00:29:32.660 Yalta, and why is Yalta so big in the post-war America?

00:29:38.380 Everything you see, the losing of China, all of it, McCarthy, really from the post-war era to all the way up to really Jack Kennedy.

00:29:46.540 This thing, what happened at Yalta drives so much.

00:29:50.060 1945, the war's been won.

00:29:52.640 So the leaders of the three great allied nations, U.S., U.K., Soviet Union, all me, Yalta, right?

00:30:02.540 Which is where they're, Crimea or somewhere, right?

00:30:04.700 And they all get together, and they're going to divide up.

00:30:08.220 We can't believe that.

00:30:09.080 They're fighting about it on Ukraine right now.

00:30:11.300 Yeah.

00:30:12.260 You can't believe that they would do this until we see it happen.

00:30:14.740 Now, they actually have maps in front of them, and they're carving up Central and Eastern Europe.

00:30:19.080 Who gets what piece of what?

00:30:21.500 And Stalin's coming out of it looking very well. 0.91

00:30:25.520 Well, because, I mean, the reality is they lost 65 million people, 25 million military, and another 30 or 35 million starved to death.

00:30:33.500 I mean, they broke the Wehrmacht.

00:30:35.500 Arsenal of democracy, the heroism of America and the troops, and the Eighth Air Corps, unbelievable.

00:30:41.220 What the British did, unbelievable. 1.00

00:30:43.380 But that technically where the war was fought, which was in Eastern Europe and the Ukraine and all that, the center of gravity of this great war, where the Russian army, the Red Army, broke the back of the Wehrmacht and then broke Hitler, was all in the east.

00:30:56.900 So Stalin realized they had paid in blood of what they said that we had paid for material goods.

00:31:01.680 Yo, that's absolutely right.

00:31:03.220 And, you know, when I go back even further in history and you go back to, right, Tolstoy and war and peace, and that's when Napoleon gets stopped in Russia.

00:31:12.160 It's the same thing.

00:31:13.880 It's what's happening in Ukraine.

00:31:15.120 They'll throw as many bodies into the meat grinders as they have to. 1.00

00:31:17.980 Well, you know, and what do they say about Russia?

00:31:19.720 They never lack for strong leaders, right?

00:31:22.640 Yeah, they'll do it.

00:31:23.680 They'll do it.

00:31:24.280 And they were doing it then.

00:31:25.280 And so Chambers is at Time Magazine.

00:31:28.680 Remember, there are no bylines then.

00:31:30.320 And everything is strict reporting.

00:31:31.960 So they get cables in those days.

00:31:33.860 The cables would come in from the foreign office.

00:31:36.220 And then these guys like Chambers is now running the foreign news department.

00:31:41.720 And we have to say Time Magazine at that point was kind of like – it's like Fox.

00:31:48.480 It's like Tucker Carlson.

00:31:50.740 Combined.

00:31:51.060 The New York Times and the BBC combined.

00:31:53.360 First of all, give a second.

00:31:54.320 Luce and his wife.

00:31:55.400 One of the most extraordinary women in American history, Claire Booth Luce, had really gotten Henry Luce even more thinking about the grand strategy of America.

00:32:04.440 So you had her, you had Theodore White, Teddy White, I mean the crew of writers he had and people that could actually deliver a great copy.

00:32:15.860 Because remember, they called Time Magazine the first draft of history.

00:32:18.740 Yeah.

00:32:18.960 And these guys took it seriously.

00:32:20.300 And they were really good at it.

00:32:21.740 They were great writers.

00:32:22.960 And then they had guys in the home office like Chambers who would rewrite and then smooth it out.

00:32:28.700 Chambers was famous for his own copy, the flow in his copy, right?

00:32:32.040 Chambers had been a prodigy as a short story writer and poet when he was a kid and we haven't even touched on that.

00:32:37.460 It's called the hottest literary Bolshevik in America, right?

00:32:40.640 So now he's gone the other way and now he knows a lot of world history.

00:32:44.940 One of Chambers' languages is Russian along with German.

00:32:47.840 He spoke German like a native.

00:32:49.800 His Russian is really good too.

00:32:51.260 And he sees what's going on.

00:32:52.580 And he knows that Alger Hiss is this guy he used to run as a spy who's now at Yalta.

00:33:04.500 So Chambers retreats.

00:33:06.840 He's not at Yalta.

00:33:08.220 He's FDR's aide to camp at Yalta.

00:33:10.280 I mean he's the guy bringing the papers in.

00:33:12.800 I mean he's – because FDR is very ill at this time.

00:33:15.980 In fact, he's within 90 days of dying.

00:33:18.680 Of dying, of dying.

00:33:19.660 That's how ill he is.

00:33:21.220 And Whitaker Chambers is kind of running the deal.

00:33:24.160 Alger Hiss, you mean – 0.97

00:33:24.860 Alger Hiss, we're running the deal. 0.99

00:33:25.720 Yeah, well, they had phone extensions.

00:33:28.060 FDR was one. 0.74

00:33:29.720 Alger Hiss was three.

00:33:31.040 End of story.

00:33:31.660 Well, so Chambers is watching all this and he goes off to his – you know, he lived on a farm in Maryland and he'd come in.

00:33:40.680 He'd work these odd hours.

00:33:42.120 He's become a Quaker by now, very oddball character, but everybody knows he's brilliant.

00:33:47.280 And he types this thing up.

00:33:48.960 He has a story.

00:33:50.080 He writes a parable, right?

00:33:51.860 It's not a report in Time magazine.

00:33:54.820 It's an essay.

00:33:56.040 He calls it a historical fantasy that he's invented.

00:34:00.140 It's called The Ghosts on the Roof.

00:34:03.020 And he imagines the ancient czars of Russia watching Yalta and saying, wow, we got a guy in Stalin.

00:34:12.580 He's the one who's actually going to create an empire for us.

00:34:16.520 And Chambers slips it in to Time magazine and gives it to his editor.

00:34:22.380 And there's like a delegation that descends on Tom Matthews, T.S. Matthews, said, you're going to publish this thing?

00:34:29.260 How can you do it?

00:34:30.300 All he's doing is feeding all the right-wing frenzy out there.

00:34:34.480 And Matthews shows it to Luce.

00:34:37.900 And Luce says, this is like the work of a literary genius.

00:34:42.860 He's created this story.

00:34:44.300 It's like a story by Franz Kafka.

00:34:46.980 Luce shows it to his wife, whom you mentioned, Claire Booth Luce.

00:34:51.040 Brilliant.

00:34:51.340 And says, this thing is off the charts.

00:34:53.500 A playwright wrote the women.

00:34:55.100 Wrote the women. 1.00

00:34:56.360 She was a Republican congresswoman.

00:34:58.720 She was one of Buckley's first idols.

00:35:00.240 Buckley got a lot of his, had that in the book, one of his first idols.

00:35:02.980 He admired the way she could give a speech like nobody else.

00:35:05.140 Nobody else.

00:35:06.140 You know, with the turns of phrase.

00:35:07.840 But they was the power couple in New York.

00:35:09.520 You're talking at the highest level of Manhattan society in the elite in the country.

00:35:14.060 They had a penthouse apartment across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art after they moved out of the Waldorf, right?

00:35:22.440 And Buckley was very proud.

00:35:23.880 He told me, he said, I think I'm the only person who edited Harry and Claire Luce because they both wrote pieces for him, right?

00:35:30.460 But that's later.

00:35:31.180 That's the 1960s.

00:35:32.240 So Chambers writes this thing and Time Magazine publishes it and it blows up.

00:35:39.020 And they want to fire Chambers right then and there, right?

00:35:41.260 His colleagues, his esteemed colleagues.

00:35:44.200 And Luce says, no, we're not doing it.

00:35:45.980 So they're already loaded for bear with Chambers.

00:35:49.580 So then a few years later, or actually months later, Life Magazine was read by even more people than Time.

00:35:59.700 Life was the photo magazine.

00:36:01.200 That was Claire Luce's idea to do life, right? 0.99

00:36:03.780 Huge circulations.

00:36:04.880 These magazines had bigger circulations in that much smaller America than any print publication does today.

00:36:11.820 In a blue-collar house, you know, with five kids, Catholic, we got Time Magazine, we got Newsweek, we got Life, and then we got Look.

00:36:21.080 But the Life Magazine would come in and it was like, that was the world.

00:36:24.380 It was the world.

00:36:24.920 It showed you the world.

00:36:25.720 Those photographs, well, one of the, you may remember at the end of Life Magazine that have the photo of the week.

00:36:31.980 And the photo of the week was in 1945.

00:36:35.980 It was the handsome debonair, State Department official, Alger Hiss, flying home with the charter for the United Nations.

00:36:47.020 And he was its first secretary general.

00:36:50.480 And Chambers goes, are we allowed to say this?

00:36:53.340 He kind of goes back to this.

00:36:56.180 And he said, this was the guy who was in the Communist Party with me.

00:37:00.080 Nobody wants to believe him.

00:37:01.460 So for the audience, he identified Alger Hiss as a communist spy working for the military intelligence.

00:37:12.420 I mean, this is the hardcore guys.

00:37:14.120 In 1939, to senior people in the State Department.

00:37:17.540 After the war, he's telling Henry Luce, he's working at Time.

00:37:20.400 This guy's a Soviet agent at Yalta.

00:37:22.820 He's number three on the phone to FDR.

00:37:25.920 Now he's back and saying, we're going to be going insane.

00:37:28.520 Because he keeps telling the powers that be, the people that can shut it down.

00:37:32.360 Hey, by the way, this guy's just not a fellow traveler.

00:37:35.000 He's not a sympathizer.

00:37:36.340 He's an active agent of military intelligence for the Russians.

00:37:39.960 And he keeps rising in power.

00:37:41.840 Is anybody going to do anything about it?

00:37:43.300 Well, and this is the way these stories always turn.

00:37:46.020 It's why they're fun to tell.

00:37:49.480 So Chambers finally gets a hearing in Congress.

00:37:54.520 Because in 1946, right, with Truman succeeds Roosevelt.

00:38:00.120 As you said, Roosevelt was near death.

00:38:02.100 Harry Truman succeeds him.

00:38:04.180 And then the Republicans running on a platform they call Had Enough, right?

00:38:09.900 1946.

00:38:11.140 And lo and behold, some anti-communists get elected to the House and the Senate.

00:38:16.740 I'll give you three names.

00:38:18.180 There are two congressmen.

00:38:19.340 One guy's named Jack Kennedy.

00:38:21.640 The other is Richard Nixon.

00:38:23.480 All had been in the Pacific in the war, came back home, and wanted the country to get moving 0.99

00:38:28.300 again.

00:38:28.720 And they realized things were wrong in D.C.

00:38:30.420 And both these guys come in on that platform.

00:38:33.360 Although Nixon's more of a fire breather than Jack Kennedy.

00:38:37.120 And there's a third guy, too, who gets elected to the Senate.

00:38:40.200 Joe McCarthy from Wisconsin.

00:38:41.820 All post-war.

00:38:42.680 All post-war.

00:38:43.500 And now they're all sort of getting ready to move.

00:38:48.020 And so HUAC, the famous House Committee on Un-American Activities, which we kind of turn

00:38:53.280 the order around.

00:38:54.960 We call it HUAC.

00:38:56.180 And you can always tell when you talk to the old-style anti-communist and ex-communist

00:39:03.020 witnesses, the guys I knew when I was writing the book.

00:39:05.500 Nobody remembers their names anymore.

00:39:07.680 You know, Herbert Romerstein and Victor Rizal.

00:39:11.380 They always insist on calling it HCUA, House Committee on Un-American Activities.

00:39:17.580 So at any rate, so they start having hearings in the summer of 48.

00:39:22.080 It's an election year.

00:39:25.040 Right?

00:39:25.460 Congress goes home for the vacation.

00:39:27.220 The House goes home.

00:39:28.440 And they start having these hearings on communist infiltration.

00:39:31.880 And they're not really getting anywhere.

00:39:34.240 And then they say, well, look, we've got this one other witness.

00:39:36.500 The FBI has been tracking them.

00:39:39.220 The naval intelligence had also been interviewing chambers on and off all these years.

00:39:44.940 Alger Hiss mysteriously leaves the State Department to run the Carnegie Endowment for International

00:39:52.740 Peace because pressure is already coming from within.

00:39:55.960 They want to get rid of them.

00:39:57.200 Right?

00:39:57.660 But also, Sergei, this is the NGOs we always talk about today.

00:40:01.740 They're one of the most well-endowed from as tough a capitalist as you could ever have.

00:40:06.380 But now they're kind of a front organization for nefarious communist activities.

00:40:11.780 Well, you know, the gospel of wealth becomes sort of the gospel of socialism, right?

00:40:15.900 So they bring Chambers in.

00:40:17.840 And he's just there to corroborate a previous witness.

00:40:22.880 No one remembers her anymore.

00:40:24.060 Her name Elizabeth Bentley.

00:40:25.320 Because she'd also been one of these couriers.

00:40:28.200 And she's, look, I'm going to speak in kind of, you know, unwoke terms or whatever.

00:40:33.260 But she's this kind of middle-aged, you know, kind of dumpy woman. 1.00

00:40:38.200 And she's giving her testimony.

00:40:39.660 You figure if she's a Soviet spy, we don't have much to worry about.

00:40:42.100 Yeah.

00:40:42.860 But they said, well, let's see if we can corroborate her.

00:40:45.160 Right.

00:40:46.440 One of the journalists at the time, I think it was A.J. Liebling, called her the Nutmeg

00:40:50.980 Matahari, because she's from Connecticut, like where I live now, Nutmeg State.

00:40:55.080 So then they bring it and they say, well, we've got this other guy.

00:40:57.320 We've got this guy at Time Magazine.

00:41:00.160 And so Chambers gets the subpoena from HUAC in August, right, to testify before the House

00:41:10.140 committee.

00:41:10.520 He doesn't want to do it.

00:41:11.560 He says to a friend of his, he said, look, the guy says to him, well, we just tell them

00:41:15.880 what you know.

00:41:17.080 You've already talked about all this stuff.

00:41:19.080 You've been talking to ONI, Office of Naval Intelligence.

00:41:23.260 You're talking to the FBI.

00:41:24.780 You talk to Adolph Burley.

00:41:26.060 Why not just go before HUAC, tell them what you know?

00:41:29.280 And Chambers says, well, you know, he looks around and says, they don't like informers around

00:41:33.340 here.

00:41:34.120 And one of the things that's so great about Chambers, I really admire about him, Steve, is

00:41:38.540 that he calls himself an informer.

00:41:39.700 I know it.

00:41:40.340 I know it.

00:41:40.740 You know, he doesn't, he doesn't pretend he's doing something different from what he

00:41:45.780 does.

00:41:45.980 He has this gorgeous, beautiful, heartbreaking line in Witness where he says, an informer

00:41:52.700 is somebody who's like a, who's fetching a soiled bone.

00:41:57.140 He said, I don't want to name these people I worked with.

00:42:00.300 I'm not going to say what they did.

00:42:01.900 I don't want to be that guy, right?

00:42:03.880 That's a term we use now.

00:42:05.220 I don't want to be that guy.

00:42:06.480 I'll tell you, as an aside, several very good filmmakers came to me and said, you know,

00:42:14.000 I'd like to make a book, a movie about Chambers.

00:42:16.500 I said, will never happen.

00:42:18.020 Will never happen.

00:42:18.860 You cannot make the snitch the hero.

00:42:22.020 The country won't accept.

00:42:23.320 And then they would all back down in the end, right?

00:42:25.340 Like one guy who made very small off of four was De Niro, Robert De Niro.

00:42:29.800 He's a production company years ago.

00:42:31.440 Well, that's an interesting story.

00:42:32.660 All this.

00:42:32.860 All right.

00:42:33.560 So anyway, hang on one second.

00:42:34.700 I want to go to break and come back with this.

00:42:38.460 You know, De Niro and those guys, it's interesting.

00:42:41.180 I would argue that I think we get it made now because of the success of Goodfellas, which

00:42:46.540 focuses around the rat. 0.98

00:42:48.340 I only know that from prison because in prison, they tell you, hey, if you're a rat, you're 0.75

00:42:54.400 the lowest down the, I mean, you do not want to go to prison and have that, what they

00:42:57.700 call in your papers.

00:42:58.480 If you have that, you've been a government, a government informant in, in federal prison.

00:43:04.440 It is.

00:43:04.700 The life is not good.

00:43:05.560 Anyway, short commercial break.

00:43:06.660 Sam Tannenhaus, Whitaker Chambers and Buckley next.

00:43:11.840 Okay.

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00:44:33.180 War Room.

00:44:35.080 Here's your host, Stephen K.

00:44:37.100 Bannon.

00:44:38.160 Okay, welcome back.

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00:45:44.400 Sam, Whitaker Chambers is about to become a witness.

00:45:48.360 And he's torn because now he realized publicly he's going to be out as an informer.

00:45:53.100 And throughout history, the informers always had a black mark on that.

00:45:56.840 Yeah.

00:45:57.380 You know, in the first trial, there were two trials.

00:46:01.180 After the hearings, the defense attorney for Hiss called him a leper. 0.52

00:46:07.680 He's a moral leper.

00:46:09.000 What happens when the leper comes down? 0.97

00:46:11.140 You know, leper, get away. 0.99

00:46:12.880 You know, this is the informer.

00:46:14.240 Chambers is a very sensitive guy, a literary guy.

00:46:17.040 And he's been close to these people.

00:46:18.440 He's still very close to them, right?

00:46:20.700 So he goes before in what they call executive session.

00:46:24.680 You know, all this stuff.

00:46:25.420 That's the private meeting.

00:46:27.100 And I got I got the document.

00:46:28.460 And more classified.

00:46:29.220 Yeah.

00:46:29.500 Yeah.

00:46:29.880 I got the I got one of my sources for the Chambers book all those years ago.

00:46:35.080 These guys are all long gone, of course.

00:46:37.180 I gave me the executive testimony, the private.

00:46:40.220 Well, the Democratic Party did not want I mean, this could you could have taken down the Democratic Party for a generation if you knew that there were active Soviet subversion of the Democratic Party, which a lot of people on the right.

00:46:52.840 But they were kind of marginalized, we're saying.

00:46:55.080 And now you showed the evidence.

00:46:56.420 That's why these executive sessions, all of this.

00:46:59.340 This was a huge this kind of consumed Washington.

00:47:02.420 Right.

00:47:02.960 For four years.

00:47:03.900 Yeah.

00:47:04.180 Types of things.

00:47:04.860 And when it happened and the timing here.

00:47:07.120 Yeah.

00:47:07.320 You know, quiet Washington people looking for stories.

00:47:09.500 One of the great things I did, Steve, was to interview a reporter.

00:47:12.720 I wonder if you knew him.

00:47:13.420 A guy named Murray Martyr who wrote for The Washington Post.

00:47:16.060 He covered the Hiss case. 0.68

00:47:18.080 And I came down here like in the, oh, mid 90s.

00:47:21.460 He was already retired.

00:47:22.600 He was 75 years old.

00:47:23.980 And he said, nobody ever talks to me about this stuff.

00:47:26.060 And I just turned on the tape recorder and he and he walked me through.

00:47:29.800 They never talk about it today because it's a part of history they don't want to talk about.

00:47:32.560 Yeah.

00:47:32.880 Yeah.

00:47:33.120 Now, all it does is he gives comfort to the bad guy so he can't talk about it.

00:47:37.220 Right.

00:47:37.320 Right.

00:47:37.400 Right wingers like me can say, hey, we told you.

00:47:40.500 We told you.

00:47:41.240 Yeah.

00:47:41.600 We actually write about something.

00:47:43.080 You want to come out and hear it.

00:47:43.720 Ann Coulter says the book about the right wing book about the thing that Joe McCarthy

00:47:52.500 is the greatest book since the Bible.

00:47:54.680 Right.

00:47:55.400 Right.

00:47:55.860 No, it's true.

00:47:57.080 And nobody wants to hear it.

00:47:58.980 Nobody wanted to hear it then.

00:48:00.300 Washington's a one company town.

00:48:02.000 And the company's a government.

00:48:03.480 You don't want to hear that.

00:48:04.240 It's infiltrated.

00:48:04.820 So Chambers says, yeah, I'll tell you what I have.

00:48:09.220 And he goes before the committee and they're kind of disappointed in him.

00:48:12.460 They're meeting behind closed doors.

00:48:14.180 He's very soft-spoken, Chambers.

00:48:16.520 He has a low-pitched voice.

00:48:19.100 It doesn't carry well.

00:48:21.380 He doesn't exactly mumble.

00:48:23.260 He's incredibly articulate, but he's uncomfortable.

00:48:25.780 He's not a fantastic-looking guy either, like Elizabeth Bentley before him.

00:48:32.020 And he'd been up the night before.

00:48:33.580 He came and stayed with a friend of his in Washington, a guy at Time Magazine, who put

00:48:37.440 him up.

00:48:38.380 He lived in Calorama.

00:48:39.680 Chambers stayed with him.

00:48:41.140 And this guy gets up, a very good journalist, Frank McNaughton.

00:48:46.000 And he gets up.

00:48:46.780 He sees Chambers in the early morning.

00:48:49.420 Chambers is pacing around.

00:48:50.740 He said, what's going on, Whit?

00:48:51.820 And he said, I think they may try to come after me here.

00:48:56.720 They don't want me to testify. 0.95

00:48:58.020 The communists are going to try to kill me.

00:49:00.740 And Frank McNaughton says to him, look, you're safe here, Whit.

00:49:05.000 You got nothing to worry about.

00:49:06.520 Chambers have this reputation of being a guy who went out to lunch with him at Time Magazine.

00:49:11.300 He'd always sit with his back to the wall.

00:49:13.380 It's like you're going out with a mobster.

00:49:14.800 He's looking over his shoulder.

00:49:16.540 People find it comical.

00:49:18.120 They don't believe any of this stuff is really happening.

00:49:20.360 When they were trying to get rid of him, right?

00:49:22.640 So anyhow, so now he goes to the meeting.

00:49:26.420 The big meeting is going to be in the caucus room, right?

00:49:29.840 The House Caucus Room.

00:49:31.000 Famous.

00:49:31.580 Famous, right?

00:49:32.600 It's the biggest venue they have.

00:49:34.020 But they bring the witness behind the scenes first.

00:49:37.700 And there was a great investigator for the committee, HUAC committee, and Robert Stripling,

00:49:42.320 a guy from Texas, Midland, Texas, George Bush was from.

00:49:45.120 And he starts questioning Chambers, and Chambers is kind of hemming and hawing.

00:49:51.300 He doesn't want to talk about this stuff.

00:49:53.800 But Chambers says to him, well, I've also got this statement I've written.

00:49:58.160 And Stripling looks at it, and he says, the other said, no, we're going public with this

00:50:04.420 guy, and nobody knows why.

00:50:06.400 And Stripling told another interviewer, a guy named Alan Weinstein, wrote a fantastic book

00:50:11.540 called Perjury.

00:50:12.580 Gave me all his documents, too.

00:50:14.860 And Stripling says to him, he said, I've seen this guy's statement.

00:50:21.760 It's dynamite, but this guy has to say.

00:50:24.340 So they haul him out.

00:50:25.520 They all move into the caucus room.

00:50:27.520 Chambers is there, right?

00:50:28.760 He's like as short as I am.

00:50:30.460 And, you know, big and dumpy and all this.

00:50:33.540 And he goes in front of a microphone like this.

00:50:35.900 And he says, well, I'm going to read my statement.

00:50:39.000 And he says, I was part of a Soviet apparatus.

00:50:42.000 He doesn't mention spying.

00:50:44.020 He wants to protect everybody.

00:50:45.780 He says, but we were involved.

00:50:47.220 And in underground, I was part of a cell.

00:50:50.220 And the member is included.

00:50:51.900 And he starts going through the names.

00:50:53.500 And one of them is Altser Hiss.

00:50:55.920 And I'm like, that's the name that registers with everybody.

00:51:01.440 And Chambers knows it.

00:51:02.640 He's at Time Magazine.

00:51:03.780 He'd risen very high at Time Magazine.

00:51:06.020 He was in those days, Steve, making $30,000 a year.

00:51:09.840 Multiply it by about 15 to see what that salary is for a journalist now.

00:51:14.400 Chambers is putting it all on the line.

00:51:15.980 He says, there's an Altser Hiss. 0.98

00:51:18.680 And we're just racing to the phones.

00:51:20.900 So the headlines the next day.

00:51:23.080 A senior editor of Time Magazine accuses president of the Carnegie Endowment of being a Soviet agent.

00:51:33.040 So what the left wanted to say for a long time is this nobody accused another kind of mid-level guy of being a communist.

00:51:42.940 Why did they care?

00:51:44.100 No.

00:51:44.960 Check out the headlines.

00:51:47.180 We're going to take a short commercial break.

00:51:48.960 We're going to come into our second hour.

00:51:50.160 This is so much better than I even thought this was going to be.

00:51:53.560 And I thought it was going to be great.

00:51:54.660 No, this is fantastic.

00:51:56.260 One of the questions I'm going to ask you to think about until we come back is, why is this history not talked about?

00:52:02.600 It's not taught anywhere.

00:52:03.800 And it's not even talked about in the city.

00:52:05.300 If we were to talk about McCarthy and HUAC and Whitaker Chambers and World War II and all of it, it's like you're talking about the ancient Romans and Greeks.

00:52:15.480 In fact, people know the ancient Romans and Greek better than this.

00:52:18.200 Short commercial break.

00:52:19.500 Sam Tannenhaus.

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00:53:56.040 Bye.

00:53:56.380 Bye.

00:53:56.560 Bye.

Bannon's War Room - December 01, 2025

Episode 4964： A Conversation With Sam Tanenhaus And The Book Buckley： The Life and the Revolution That Changed America

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