Episode 4964： A Conversation With Sam Tanenhaus And The Book Buckley： The Life and the Revolution That Changed America
Episode Stats
Summary
Sam Tannenhausenhaus joins us to talk about his new biography of William F. Buckley, The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, and to discuss his other books, The Death of Conservatism and The Conservative Ink.
Transcript
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Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people.
00:00:12.880
I got a free shot, all these networks lying about the people.
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I know you've tried to do everything in the world to stop that,
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And where do people like that go to share the big lie?
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I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
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Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
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If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
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It is Saturday, 29 November in the year of our Lord, 2025.
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And this show I've wanted to do for a long time.
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He just wrote the definitive, actually the authorized biography of William F. Buckley.
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But it's titled The Life and the Revolution that Changed America.
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We're going to talk a lot about both, about Buckley's life and the revolution.
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But we're also going to talk about his other books.
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Your books, first off, you've written three, quite frankly.
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You're a non-observant, secular, liberal Jewish guy from New York, lives in Connecticut now,
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So you're not a, you wouldn't say a part of conservative ink or MAGA, but I tell people,
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if you read your three books on conservatism, your book on Whitaker Chambers, which is quite
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frankly a masterpiece, your book on Buckley, which I think this is a masterpiece, and then
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you read the book you started with, The Death of Conservatism, which had a massive influence
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on me when I first read it, and Andrew Breitbart back in 2009, I think the book came out.
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How does someone with your background be the best chronicler of really getting to the heart
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of what conservatism is and the impact it's had on America?
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Well, so great of you to describe me that way, Steve.
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Some of our friends on the right have some trouble with it, although I have to say I hear
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time and time again that all sorts of people read these books.
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Well, for the history, The Death of Conservatism, the conservative ink did not want to touch it.
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I said, hey, National Review, Weekly Standard, all these guys are in touch in this book.
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But you cannot, if you want to read about lived Christianity and its worldview about the
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atheism of Marxism and its fight against that, there's no better vehicle to read that than
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Yeah, because of Chambers himself, you know, it's interesting, Steve, right before September
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11th, all those years ago, when George W. Bush was president, they did a hundredth anniversary.
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You know, Buckley's hundredth anniversary is coming up, right?
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And so they invited me because my book had come out.
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And I get into the elevator and Robert Bork was in it.
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That's the three senior guys in the conservative movement.
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He said, look, I really like the Chambers book.
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He said, Bill Buckley, how could you go from the giant Whitaker Chambers to Bill Buckley?
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Because, yeah, Chambers and Buckley are two very different kinds of guys.
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Let's start with who was Whitaker Chambers and why is it so important for people today,
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particularly young people, to understand his story?
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Whitaker Chambers, born in 1901, died in 1961, was the founder of the modern anti-conservative,
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I mean, anti-communist movement that was based on a Christian conservatism.
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And it sounds very different from what we read today because Chambers came out of the left.
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And you're asked, well, why am I writing about these guys?
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It's because the basis of all this is really the old American left, the kind of pro-communist, pro-socialist,
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turn everything upside down, left wing in America.
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Chambers was a prodigy in that movement in its big years in the 1920s and 30s, became an underground spot.
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When people don't realize how close the country, after the Great Depression, and Roosevelt, and a lot of our audience hates Roosevelt,
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but he was capitalism trying to provide a solution because the country could have very much slipped into what was happening in Europe,
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to socialism, communism, or some sort of great revolution in this country, given the impact that the Great Depression had.
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That's why the hard left always hated Roosevelt.
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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?
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Well, Chambers joined the Communist Party in the mid-1920s after he dropped out of college, Columbia University,
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and became a dedicated Soviet agent, not just a communist, a Soviet agent, became a spy, and right here in Washington.
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Just talk about that because this infects the Buckley book and the whole movement, that the Soviets and the KGB, right, at the time,
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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.
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And I remember I was doing a documentary once on Joe McCarthy, another guy Buckley was very close to,
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and Chambers had a different view of McCarthy, and we can get into that later.
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But, and the documentarian, she did a pretty good job.
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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?
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So you have to remember the Nazis and the Soviets are kind of circling each other.
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So how many people are in the communist apparatuses, they called it, in these underground cells?
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And I said, well, depends on who they were and what they were doing, right?
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And the guy that was at Treasury on the dollar.
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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.
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We can get into that a little bit with McCarthy, too.
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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.
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Now, the McCarthy section alone in this book makes it worthwhile for people to buy just about our current time today.
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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.
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I mean, you had Father Coughlin and other guys before the war, the America Firsters.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Well, what Buckley saw – Steve, you'll get this too – was Buckley was a Catholic, McCarthy was a Catholic, and there's no institution –
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Listen, Jack Kennedy walked out of the room if he heard somebody make a negative comment about Joe McCarthy.
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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.
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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.
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I mean Buckley's Catholicism, it imbued everything.
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I mean Catholicism and anti-communism were kind of his two things, right, and being against the liberal movement.
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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.
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They called him an agent of the Vatican in 1951.
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They said, well, we do have a conspiracy in America.
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This is what credentialed liberal critics of God and Man at Yale, Buckley's first book, wrote.
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We do have a conspiracy in America, and it's run by the Vatican, not by the communists.
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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.
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You talk – these are not just biographies of individuals.
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So it's really much – the book is a subtitle, the life and the revolution that changed America.
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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?
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I mean this is why he became – essentially he really became a Christian.
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Well, the brilliance of Chambers was that he saw Marxism itself was a kind of religion, right?
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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.
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See, we make the system work a little bit, and Chambers would say, are you effing kidding me?
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He read Dante in Italian during the Algeria's perjury case.
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You know, we're asking me, Steve, well, why am I writing about these guys?
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I grew up in a household that was your classic kind of aspiring, assimilated, second-generation Jewish Americans.
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My father was a college professor, political scientist.
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He was the one who had me read Witness when I was 14 years old.
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This is the greatest book on anti-communism by an ex-communist.
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It broke his heart in 1972 when he had to vote for George McGovern.
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But the thing that really got to him was the kind of papering over of the facts about communism.
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Buckley would take up liberal congressmen like Allard Loewenstein, the liberal Democrat, because he knew he was anti-communist.
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Some of the hardest anti-communists actually were Democrats.
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It was a total threat to the freedom of the world.
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You know, one thing he used to point out about his memoir, Witness, because Chambers was a linguist.
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And in Greek, witness is the same word as martyr.
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Famous lines during the Hiss confrontation right here in Washington, 1948.
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Chambers has testified he's broken with the party.
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In the post-war, people should understand, even for McCarthy, because everything started with McCarthy.
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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.
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The Soviet Union was rising in power, clearly a military power.
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They had been really the nation that had destroyed the Wehrmacht, right?
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And so people were concerned about infiltration, everything.
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So the anti-communism movement really started even at the end of World War II.
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By this time, it's an official part of the apparatus here in D.C.
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And Chambers, early on in 1939, when the notorious pact had been signed between the Nazis and the Soviets.
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Yeah, because they had fought the Nazis so long in the 30s, and now to have Stalin and Hitler do a deal.
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He'd already broken with the movement by then because he saw where it was headed.
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His bosses, this stuff sounds crazy, but you have to read it because, you know, it's right there in the story.
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As early as 1937, he had a Russian boss, a spymaster.
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So at this point, Chambers is living in Baltimore with his friend, Alger Hiss.
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Alger Hiss is working for the State Department.
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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.
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I mean, this is one of the towering intellectual financial figures.
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Chambers has got the brilliant languages, right?
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He's got the Columbia education, all this stuff.
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He's going to be with us for the entire morning.
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We're going to talk about really the nation and conservatism from really the 1920s all the way up.
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You actually finished Buckley's book ends with the death of conservatism.
00:15:05.900
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And it's where all the biggest voices in conservative media are speaking out.
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It's where I put up exclusively all of my content 24 hours a day.
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The book is Buckley, The Life and the Revolution that Changed America.
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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.
00:17:18.540
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.
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So Chambers is an underground spy for what was then called the NKVD.
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He's meeting with a group of people, about a dozen of them, who are giving him documents.
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And you think, well, who cares if a guy like Alger Hiss in the State Department is giving him cables, diplomatic cables?
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So FDR, Franklin Roosevelt, who'd been a naval officer, starts switching.
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So after 1939, you have the you now have the pact between the Soviets and the Nazis.
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That's when because my parents were in Norfolk.
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That's when you see America start to kick up and get they know a war is coming.
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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.
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Because remember, most people, hey, World War I left such a bad taste in everybody's mouth.
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You start to see we're getting ready because people realize downrange a big fight's coming.
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And not long after that, you have the Lend-Lease program when Churchill kept him alive.
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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.
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Is that the thing that triggers him from being a KGB spy, a Russian spy, to actually going and saying this is a problem?
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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?
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That was actually the last step, Steve, because there was an earlier one.
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And so just a little before then, he had a Soviet spymaster, Colonel Beekhoff, this guy that's done over from Russia.
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And he said to Chambers as early as 1937, he said, look, we have a new mission for you.
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We're going to send you on a boat to go over to Spain and fight Franco.
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And anybody who followed what was going on, this is the Spanish Civil War, knew that Stalin was carrying out purges there.
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George Orwell wrote a fantastic book about it, Homage to Catalonia.
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And Chambers realized they were sending him over there to knock him off.
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There's a great line he gave in his hearings that nobody picked up on because it's just too subtle.
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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.
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And someone says, well, is it really true, Mr. Chambers, that you were not really a Stalinist, but a Trotskyist?
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And Chambers says, I am not now and never have been a Trotskyist.
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He's making fun of what Alger Hiss says when they bring him in, right?
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And he started to arrange his own break from the party.
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And the guy he is unable to break away is Alger Hiss.
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And there's this line, Alger Hiss, who's like Johns Hopkins.
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He was a Supreme Court clerk to Felix Frankfurter.
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He was called one of Frankfurter's happy hot dogs, they called him, right?
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Guy on the left, helped write a lot of the New Deal legislation.
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He goes to Hiss and he says, look, they're coming after me.
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And Chambers never forgot what Hiss said to him.
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He said, well, he said, Stalin plays for keeps.
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And Chambers remembered that when he was a kid.
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That was a term you used when you were playing marbles.
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Chambers goes back to his wife and he says, we're going to leave.
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You and I are going to leave the winning world for the losing world.
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Because they thought the communists were going to win.
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Chambers meets with Adolf Burley, this beautiful house in Washington with this estate, right,
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They meet at midnight and Chambers says, I have to tell you, there are spies now who've been
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working for the Soviet Union and their stuff is going to be transmitted to the Nazis.
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It's not until 1948 that they finally call me to talk about it.
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But let's say, well, this is why it's so important.
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First off, just having you talk about this and having it in the book is kind of monumental
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because the liberals in this country never want to talk about the spirit.
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What happened in the Roosevelt administration is they don't want any discussion of this
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because this would play to some of what the right were saying.
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Hey, this thing is really a front for socialism, for communism.
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And they're saying, no, we're actually saving communism.
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You had a bunch of this was the Joe Kennedy crowd that were saying, you know, this is a problem.
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So Adolf Burrell and these guys, the first thing to do is to make sure we're not outing anybody,
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Because to handle it externally means you're going to get thrown out of office because the American people go,
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And who's the guy who actually goes before the public?
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Like, well, Nixon prosecuted Hiss, as it were, through the House.
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But the guy who does it publicly is Joe McCarthy.
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But Alger Hiss, when I say Golden Boy and Harry Duxley White, Alger Hiss, and this is what gets back to Yalta,
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Alger Hiss is the senior aide-de-camp for Roosevelt in Yalta when Roosevelt is so sick, right?
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That is the key meeting of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, how the war is going to come to an end
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and what the post-World War is going to look like.
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And you have Alger Hiss, who is a KGB spy, is the guy moving the papers and his aide-de-camp.
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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
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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,
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currently, you know, Bannon and everybody today to say, hey—and Alger Hiss was a golden boy.
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I mean, they keep saying, oh, these are grunt dudes.
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Even to have you say it is like, the left never wants to talk about this.
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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?
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Yeah, actually, less than I thought it would, but I got plenty of it.
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It's funny, some writers who are friends of mine now really came after me when that book came out,
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that who was I to tell this story and to make Chambers seem like a sympathetic guy?
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And there was—there were just enough old-style liberal anti-communists, as they used to call them,
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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.
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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?
00:26:22.220
So all this other stuff that is circulating now, but even now, Buckley won't get credit for it.
00:26:33.300
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.
00:26:48.300
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.
00:27:05.980
And Henry Luce reads this devastating critique of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath when it was made into a film.
00:27:18.620
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.
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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.
00:27:49.240
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I didn't realize you were such a great storyteller.
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.
00:29:52.640
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.
00:30:09.080
They're fighting about it on Ukraine right now.
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.
00:30:21.500
And Stalin's coming out of it looking very well.
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.
00:30:35.500
Arsenal of democracy, the heroism of America and the troops, and the Eighth Air Corps, unbelievable.
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.
00:31:03.220
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.
00:31:15.120
They'll throw as many bodies into the meat grinders as they have to.
00:31:17.980
Well, you know, and what do they say about Russia?
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.
00:31:55.400
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.
00:32:22.960
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.
00:32:52.580
And he knows that Alger Hiss is this guy he used to run as a spy who's now at Yalta.
00:33:12.800
I mean he's – because FDR is very ill at this time.
00:33:21.220
And Whitaker Chambers is kind of running the deal.
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.
00:33:42.120
He's become a Quaker by now, very oddball character, but everybody knows he's brilliant.
00:33:56.040
He calls it a historical fantasy that he's invented.
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?
00:34:30.300
All he's doing is feeding all the right-wing frenzy out there.
00:34:37.900
And Luce says, this is like the work of a literary genius.
00:34:46.980
Luce shows it to his wife, whom you mentioned, Claire Booth Luce.
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.
00:35:09.520
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?
00:35:23.880
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?
00:35:32.240
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?
00:35:45.980
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.
00:36:04.880
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.
00:36:25.720
Those photographs, well, one of the, you may remember at the end of Life Magazine that have the photo of the week.
00:36:35.980
It was the handsome debonair, State Department official, Alger Hiss, flying home with the charter for the United Nations.
00:36:56.180
And he said, this was the guy who was in the Communist Party with me.
00:37:01.460
So for the audience, he identified Alger Hiss as a communist spy working for the military intelligence.
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.
00:37:25.920
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.
00:37:36.340
He's an active agent of military intelligence for the Russians.
00:37:43.300
Well, and this is the way these stories always turn.
00:37:49.480
So Chambers finally gets a hearing in Congress.
00:37:54.520
Because in 1946, right, with Truman succeeds Roosevelt.
00:38:04.180
And then the Republicans running on a platform they call Had Enough, right?
00:38:11.140
And lo and behold, some anti-communists get elected to the House and the Senate.
00:38:23.480
All had been in the Pacific in the war, came back home, and wanted the country to get moving
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.
00:38:43.500
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
00:38:56.180
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.
00:39:11.380
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.
00:39:28.440
And they start having these hearings on communist infiltration.
00:39:34.240
And then they say, well, look, we've got this one other witness.
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.
00:39:57.660
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?
00:40:17.840
And he's just there to corroborate a previous witness.
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.
00:40:39.660
You figure if she's a Soviet spy, we don't have much to worry about.
00:40:42.860
But they said, well, let's see if we can corroborate her.
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.
00:41:00.160
And so Chambers gets the subpoena from HUAC in August, right, to testify before the House
00:41:11.560
He says to a friend of his, he said, look, the guy says to him, well, we just tell them
00:41:19.080
You've been talking to ONI, Office of Naval Intelligence.
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
00:41:34.120
And one of the things that's so great about Chambers, I really admire about him, Steve, is
00:41:40.740
You know, he doesn't, he doesn't pretend he's doing something different from what he
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.
00:42:06.480
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.
00:42:23.320
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.
00:42:38.460
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
00:42:48.340
I only know that from prison because in prison, they tell you, hey, if you're a rat, you're
00:42:54.400
the lowest down the, I mean, you do not want to go to prison and have that, what they
00:42:58.480
If you have that, you've been a government, a government informant in, in federal prison.
00:43:06.660
Sam Tannenhaus, Whitaker Chambers and Buckley next.
00:43:14.200
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00:44:42.520
One of the issues today about inflation is about de-dollarization.
00:44:48.240
You know the Chinese Communist Party heads it up.
00:44:50.400
What we try to do over the last couple of years is not sell you fish but teach you how to fish.
00:44:56.360
It's the process that drives the value of gold.
00:44:58.400
And why has gold been a hedge against times of financial turbulence for, I don't know, 5,000 years of man's history?
00:45:10.100
You get it all for the last four years when gold was $1,100 an ounce.
00:45:19.380
Seven free installments over the last four years.
00:45:21.460
We're working on the eighth free installment right now.
00:45:26.020
Philip Patrick and the team will talk to you about the logic.
00:45:32.160
Why is the Chinese Communist Party central bank buying gold at record rates because of the de-dollarization movement throughout the world because of the decreasing value of the dollar?
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.
00:45:57.380
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.
00:46:14.240
Chambers is a very sensitive guy, a literary guy.
00:46:20.700
So he goes before in what they call executive session.
00:46:29.880
I got the I got one of my sources for the Chambers book all those years ago.
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.
00:46:56.420
That's why these executive sessions, all of this.
00:46:59.340
This was a huge this kind of consumed Washington.
00:47:07.320
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.
00:47:13.420
A guy named Murray Martyr who wrote for The Washington Post.
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.
00:47:33.120
Now, all it does is he gives comfort to the bad guy so he can't talk about it.
00:47:37.400
Right wingers like me can say, hey, we told you.
00:47:43.720
Ann Coulter says the book about the right wing book about the thing that Joe McCarthy
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.
00:48:23.260
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.
00:48:33.580
He came and stayed with a friend of his in Washington, a guy at Time Magazine, who put
00:48:41.140
And this guy gets up, a very good journalist, Frank McNaughton.
00:48:51.820
And he said, I think they may try to come after me here.
00:49:00.740
And Frank McNaughton says to him, look, you're safe here, Whit.
00:49:06.520
Chambers have this reputation of being a guy who went out to lunch with him at Time Magazine.
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?
00:49:26.420
The big meeting is going to be in the caucus room, right?
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.
00:49:53.800
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
00:50:06.400
And Stripling told another interviewer, a guy named Alan Weinstein, wrote a fantastic book
00:50:14.860
And Stripling says to him, he said, I've seen this guy's statement.
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.
00:50:55.920
And I'm like, that's the name that registers with everybody.
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.
00:51:23.080
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.
00:51:50.160
This is so much better than I even thought this was going to be.
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?
00:52:05.300
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.
00:52:20.860
For Christmas, particularly if you have a young person in your house, Buckley, the man in the revolution.
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