Bannon's War Room - WarRoom Battleground EP 1017： Bay Of Pigs 2.0

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

00:00:07.640 Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people.

00:00:12.880 Here's the time I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people.

00:00:17.160 The people have had a belly full of it.

00:00:19.060 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,

00:00:22.260 but you're not going to stop it.

00:00:23.180 It's going to happen.

00:00:24.460 And where do people like that go to share the big lie?

00:00:27.860 Mega Media.

00:00:28.760 I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.

00:00:34.640 Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?

00:00:38.400 If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.

00:00:44.820 War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Vann.

00:00:51.960 Okay, welcome. You're in the War Room.

00:00:53.740 and we have one of our favorite people in rank and tour sam tannenhaus joins us with the bucket

00:00:59.500 book now listen as much as we humped the hardback of a book that's not ours and we love it and we

00:01:06.060 love you as a writer hey as hard as we humped it i never got a signed copy of the hardback

00:01:10.640 but you did come in today you're very gracious you're very gracious to sign the copy of the

00:01:15.820 new paperback that's out well right and is this my is this my consolation prize i get a copy i get

00:01:21.160 a signed copy i say in tannah house first edition signed copy of the buckley book would have been

00:01:26.920 something that i don't know would have had some real value on ebay well let me let me give you

00:01:30.700 that one then i didn't know you wanted it steve i'm so cute actually as i i feel very uncomfortable

00:01:36.480 i don't get have authors sign books because i mainly you know in paperback i never have that

00:01:42.760 because i like marking my books up even the hard copy of books i did mark up the first copy of

00:01:48.160 Buckley, I got it, marked it up for our first conversation with him over a couple of hours.

00:01:53.200 Have you ever had a, have you ever had someone, you're a renowned writer, you ran the New York

00:02:00.240 Times book section, which is, you know, besides the New York Review of Books is probably the most

00:02:05.820 legendary book review in the country. Were you a guy that often got signed books?

00:02:11.720 Only once. And that was when one of my heroes, John Updike, the great novelist came in.

00:02:18.160 and his new book had come out, and I'd reviewed it myself,

00:02:21.220 which he didn't often do at the time, but I wanted to do it.

00:02:23.420 It was so important you reviewed it.

00:02:24.920 Yeah, I wanted to, because I wanted to write a kind of essay about him.

00:02:30.080 So I took the new book.

00:02:31.260 It wasn't one of his best, but that happens when you write 50 or 60 or 70 of them.

00:02:35.260 Please tell me.

00:02:36.840 I'm not going to hear a story, because you're kind of a hero to me.

00:02:39.440 I'm not going to hear a story where you actually asked John Updike,

00:02:43.380 after reviewing the book, to sign the book.

00:02:46.820 I'm afraid I did, Steve.

00:02:49.200 I'm afraid I did.

00:02:50.540 Is Updike that big?

00:02:51.960 He was that big to you?

00:02:52.900 He was to me, Steve, because I was a kid when I discovered him.

00:02:55.740 And the writers you discover when you're really young are the ones that stay with you.

00:02:59.000 So I had this copy of one of his Rabbit novels.

00:03:01.980 Remember the Rabbit novels?

00:03:02.960 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:03:02.980 The second one.

00:03:03.860 That's the one I had.

00:03:05.080 And that's the one he reviewed.

00:03:05.920 That's the one.

00:03:06.740 Well, no, it's the one I had him autographed.

00:03:08.660 It's one of my favorite books.

00:03:09.920 I'm amazed you remember that title.

00:03:11.380 A lot of people don't.

00:03:12.460 So I had it.

00:03:13.080 And Updike designed his own book jackets.

00:03:16.240 yeah he was an artist when he was a kid his ambition was to be a cartoonist he ended up

00:03:21.420 being a writer instead and um and so he was very proud of his jackets i'm kind of like you i don't

00:03:27.260 keep the jacket i just you know mark the thing up this had like coffee cup stains on it and i gave

00:03:34.220 it to him i said mr uptake i've just got one book please can you uh sign this thing for me he said

00:03:40.040 oh i'm happy to do that and i said well let me spell the name for you because my name's pretty

00:03:43.700 difficult i said no i think i can do it and he he wrote the last name people always spell my last

00:03:51.020 name wrong he got it right sam tan and i said to my benefactor so that was it yeah so i held on to

00:04:00.520 that when i've never asked another go back in time there did not what year was that that was in the

00:04:05.060 80s correct well when i did that with him yeah that was not long before he died he died just

00:04:10.040 after that oh and i want to tell you another story about that see if you're gonna kick out

00:04:12.820 So I did a video interview with him. It was 2008, which was the year Bill Buckley died.

00:04:19.340 And Updike came in.

00:04:21.300 Buckley and Updike died in the same year?

00:04:22.900 Yeah, they were pretty much contemporaries. They liked each other.

00:04:25.440 Two big cultural figures.

00:04:26.760 Yeah, yeah. Buckley really admired Updike. In fact—

00:04:30.860 Because Buckley became a novelist.

00:04:32.680 He did.

00:04:33.260 The Blackford Oaks.

00:04:34.460 Blackford Oaks, best-selling novelist. And you just reminded me of something, Steve,

00:04:37.700 I've never told anybody else before that Bill Buckley tried to get John Updike to write the introduction to a new edition of Whitaker Chambers' Witness.

00:04:49.560 Wow.

00:04:50.020 I've got the correspondence.

00:04:51.620 And Updike didn't want to do it, so he backed off.

00:04:54.340 Because Whitaker Chambers was identified.

00:04:56.900 He's a man.

00:04:57.200 Yeah. 0.72

00:04:57.880 But he did it because of the First Amendment, that Updike would be a great defender.

00:05:02.840 Well, that's it. 0.97

00:05:03.520 Right. So so Updike is in there and we have an interview doing one of our first video interviews, 2008.

00:05:10.040 And so we went to the boardroom and the Times.

00:05:12.900 And I said, well, here we are in an election year, Mr. Updike.

00:05:15.880 Who do you think Rabbit Angstrom, your hero, would vote for?

00:05:18.780 Because Rabbit's this kind of he's like a Reagan Democrat.

00:05:22.000 Yes. That's what's fun about the book.

00:05:24.100 Updike takes his own politics out and he does the politics of the guys writing back.

00:05:29.040 And he and he was very pro-Obama.

00:05:30.740 And Updike said, well, I am so pro-Obama, I can't imagine creating a character who wouldn't vote for him.

00:05:39.600 And I said, well, you know that Rabbit, in the last novel you wrote, voted for George Bush.

00:05:46.720 And Updike said, he did?

00:05:48.300 He didn't remember.

00:05:49.100 He didn't remember.

00:05:50.980 That's a great story.

00:05:52.500 Wow.

00:05:52.820 So he did.

00:05:54.480 And then I said, well, that's how these guys write so many books.

00:05:56.840 They don't remember what they put in them.

00:05:58.000 i want to because i don't have my heart i was out in my library one of my other places but i got the

00:06:04.420 soft uh the paperback which i love more of water chambers i have a question yeah you're a upper

00:06:11.200 west side or upper you're well i live in connecticut connecticut but you you lived you did

00:06:15.280 live in new york city i did at one time yeah i lived downtown uh are you observing jewish or

00:06:20.980 secular secular okay you're a progressive liberal secular jew who who was the editor of the new york

00:06:30.440 times um book section which is one of the cultural institutions of the established order how do you

00:06:37.720 write no no this going back to and really good you write the book particularly in today's politics

00:06:45.180 You write a book about Whitaker Changers many decades ago, a guy who was an atheist, that his journey is an atheist to a devout Christian.

00:06:54.620 And then you write Buckley, who is a devout, and I don't think people know this, particularly the devout Catholicism that drove him.

00:07:01.900 The empathy and love, the writing is so spectacular.

00:07:07.400 But you can tell in both books that you are, you like these guys.

00:07:12.860 Oh, yeah.

00:07:13.400 You like them.

00:07:13.980 Yeah. Well, they're great men. Yeah. But in today's time, in 2026, that doesn't happen. A progressive editor of the New York Times Bookaroo, that's also an author, doesn't write, take two cultural icons of today. You can't write an empathetic book.

00:07:30.220 You actually, you can feel the love for these men and the interest in American history at

00:07:37.020 time as told through their journeys, not men of the left, or Chambers kind of starts out

00:07:41.980 the other way, but Buckley's, the most adamant stand in the breach to bring conservatism

00:07:47.660 and make it a national civic religion.

00:07:50.800 How does that happen?

00:07:51.800 And what have we lost in this country that you agree with me?

00:07:55.660 It's impossible for that to happen today.

00:07:57.560 Yeah, I know it's impossible, Steve.

00:07:59.240 And I saw some disappointment with the reaction to my book.

00:08:03.320 People were fine about the book.

00:08:04.880 They like it.

00:08:05.400 I'm a good storyteller.

00:08:07.240 But don't give Buckley an inch.

00:08:10.560 And I think, but Buckley wasn't like that.

00:08:12.820 After reading the book, or they just came into such a mindset that they couldn't?

00:08:16.260 Well, that's where you're at the tricky part, Steve.

00:08:19.260 Because they'll say, all right, this guy's a pretty good writer.

00:08:21.960 He does his homework.

00:08:23.660 He tells his story.

00:08:25.280 He's making me like Buckley.

00:08:27.620 So what's he up to here? What's the secret agenda here? That's what it ends up being. So you end up getting depicted as, you know, I'm looking at the great side, you know, about conspiracies and coincidences. I become, in their mind, somebody who's trying to promote this evil product.

00:08:45.260 Exactly.

00:08:45.620 And I'm thinking, no, these are like great Americans.

00:08:48.680 You haven't changed, right?

00:08:49.860 But that's why modern – what does it mean about the country and the point we are in culturally that that is a thing?

00:08:58.900 And you saw it just firsthand with the release of the Buckley book.

00:09:01.840 Yeah, people just won't listen.

00:09:04.140 I'll tell you about an interview I did.

00:09:05.560 A young guy called me up.

00:09:07.860 He was doing something on Buckley's famous wife, Pat Buckley.

00:09:11.620 For listeners of yours of yours who are interested in the Met Gala, you know, that big fancy costume thing.

00:09:20.400 Pat Buckley basically invented that back in the 80s and 90s.

00:09:23.800 A little classier back then.

00:09:25.160 A little somewhat classier.

00:09:26.560 And that's what I was evolved into.

00:09:28.580 That's what I thought this guy was going to interview me about, about how when the Buckleys did it, it was a classy thing.

00:09:34.140 I thought, OK, that's a good story.

00:09:36.260 Instead, two minutes in the conversation, he starts hammering Buckley.

00:09:41.620 And I said, well, what's going on here?

00:09:44.020 And he said, well, he had these horrific, inexcusable, insufferable opinions.

00:09:52.660 And I said, well, if that's true, how come he was friends with Jesse Jackson, George

00:09:58.980 McGovern, Norman Mailer, right?

00:10:03.100 Murray Kempton, the great columnist, John Kenneth Galbraith, the liberal.

00:10:06.840 I said, why do you think they all were friends with Buckley?

00:10:10.740 And this guy says, maybe they wanted to redeem him.

00:10:16.180 And I said, isn't it possible they thought he was smart and funny and kind and warm and generous?

00:10:25.280 Yeah.

00:10:25.740 Isn't it possible they actually liked him for who he was?

00:10:29.080 I have found you're right about this.

00:10:31.840 You almost can't make the case for not even the other side, somebody outside your little circle now.

00:10:39.500 And I think this is what I'm supposed to do as a backup room.

00:10:42.840 You saw that in this situation of releasing the hardback edition of the Buckley.

00:10:47.920 Well, yes, I did.

00:10:49.620 I'll tell you a story about the Riddick Chambers book.

00:10:52.660 That one was up for all the prizes.

00:10:54.620 He was a finalist, and Buckley was.

00:10:56.560 And it was up for a couple.

00:10:57.440 But Chambers was shortlisted.

00:10:59.580 They're both beautifully written.

00:11:00.860 I think one of the things about Chambers is that in the midst of time now,

00:11:05.080 except for some people in the hardcore conservative movement

00:11:08.100 that come out of Hillsdale College or something like that,

00:11:10.520 he's lost in time.

00:11:11.680 So when you read the book, you bring back both books,

00:11:15.600 but you bring back an era that most people have not gotten access to.

00:11:19.840 You make it so accessible because the arc of the story is so compelling,

00:11:23.460 and he's such an odd figure.

00:11:25.540 He is, and it's all about the story, as you know, in these books.

00:11:29.000 So this book is up.

00:11:31.040 It was shortlisted.

00:11:32.900 It was a finalist for the National Book Award.

00:11:35.180 Very big prize.

00:11:35.940 I thought, well, that's great.

00:11:37.900 Is that bigger than the Pulitzer Prize, in your opinion?

00:11:40.060 In the literary world, it probably, or it used to be.

00:11:42.700 I don't know between us right now, between us and your listeners, either one of them counts for as much as they used to.

00:11:49.400 But in those days, it did.

00:11:50.480 This is 1997.

00:11:52.980 So then I was at an event.

00:11:55.860 After, you go to some ballroom somewhere, and they put like a medal around your neck when you're a finalist, and it's like a dog show.

00:12:06.120 And then they announced the winner, and the winner goes out and makes a speech.

00:12:10.520 Oh, you get a medal just for being a finalist.

00:12:12.780 Just for being a finalist, yeah.

00:12:14.180 Yeah, that's like making the final four, right?

00:12:16.340 So somebody came up to me not long after that, a very good historian.

00:12:21.700 He used to do a lot of the scripts for the Ken Burns films.

00:12:25.720 And he said, I want to tell you something.

00:12:27.540 He said, I was on the committee.

00:12:30.100 I don't know why you're bringing these stories out of me.

00:12:31.900 He said, I was on the committee for the National Book Award.

00:12:34.800 and your book was going to get it.

00:12:37.680 But there was one person,

00:12:39.640 the chairman of the jury

00:12:40.840 was a friend of Alger Hiss's son, Tony.

00:12:45.440 And he said,

00:12:46.020 and this is what Jeffrey Ward,

00:12:47.280 famous historian told me,

00:12:48.500 said, I'll never.

00:12:49.740 Jeffrey Ward was Burns' co-writer

00:12:52.140 for the Civil War.

00:12:52.740 Yes, he was.

00:12:53.560 He's a very big guy.

00:12:55.000 Wrote famous books about FDR.

00:12:56.500 And Jeffrey Ward said to me,

00:12:57.820 I'll never forget what this judge said

00:13:00.440 about my book.

00:13:01.920 She said, quote,

00:13:03.160 I don't care what the facts are.

00:13:06.480 We're not giving the prize to that book.

00:13:09.400 You see, that foreshadows today.

00:13:11.540 She was actually on the right side of history.

00:13:13.680 Yeah, very good point. 0.88

00:13:14.920 She's on the right side of history. 0.93

00:13:16.060 She saw what was going.

00:13:16.960 She saw exactly where we would be in 25 years.

00:13:20.520 Yeah.

00:13:20.780 Because that's the attitude today.

00:13:22.160 This can't get shortlisted for the National Book Award.

00:13:26.260 No, not today.

00:13:26.820 Not today, because you're making Whitaker Chambers empathetic.

00:13:31.140 You're giving Whitaker Chambers a platform is what they would say.

00:13:34.040 Yes, that's right.

00:13:34.880 And especially Buckley, because now all these people are going on looking at YouTube.

00:13:38.360 Yes.

00:13:38.940 Ezra Klein is now looking at YouTube things on Buckley.

00:13:42.140 And it is very interesting how that happens. 0.77

00:13:47.160 And I think now, see, if I'd written a book that was an expose of Timothy McVeigh and the skinheads.

00:13:55.320 And I did it the same way I do here with, you know, hundreds and hundreds of footnotes going into archives, interviews, great storytelling.

00:14:05.380 And I showed how there's a conspiracy to destroy America that a handful of people who used to be in the U.S. Army or Marines are behind.

00:14:13.820 That book would get on that short.

00:14:15.380 Yes, yes, exactly.

00:14:16.720 But not taking a major cultural figure.

00:14:18.520 Somebody told me, very respected scholars have told me, they said, it's your subjects.

00:14:25.220 You take them too seriously.

00:14:27.380 People don't want to think they should have to take Bill Buckley or Whitaker Chambers seriously.

00:14:32.360 Yes.

00:14:32.980 And they're just great figures with these incredible stories.

00:14:35.480 This is one of the things we've been doing, and the audience appreciates this.

00:14:38.680 It's happened the last couple of times, is taking things that are happening today and looking for perspective to the two books and your understanding of American history.

00:14:46.520 One I want to get you on today is obviously, you know, it's being discussed, but it's even going to be more discussed, the situation in Cuba and Buckley, and particularly in the Buckley book, Dear Urine of Communism.

00:14:58.900 Here, Buckley, talk to me about Buckley and Cuba and bring that up to like today of why the origins of the Cuban Revolution and Castro and all that informed so much of how the country thinks about Cuba today.

00:15:14.560 Yeah. Well, the chapter in that book, if I was just looking at it again, it's called Freedom Fighters. And when Castro won, he had that revolution. They're up in the mountains and they come down, they overthrow Batista. And now this very young guy, you're younger than Buckley.

00:15:31.680 This is 1959. Castro is in his early 30s. And he is now the dictator, the leader. We don't know who he is yet of Cuba, which is a much bigger country than Americans realized, you know. And there it is, 100 miles off the coast of Florida.

00:15:46.720 And Havana was a spot. I mean, the godfather would show that. But Havana was a I remember when I was a kid in the International League back in the 50s. I think Havana was still a team. They still had a team in the International League.

00:15:58.760 Yeah. Great ballplayers came out of it. Boxers. Remember all the great Cuban heavyweight fighters? And Godfather II, anybody who hasn't seen it, I assume most of your audience has. The Havana scenes are fantastic. And they are set during the revolution, right? They're down there in the casinos.

00:16:15.020 There's a magnificent scene on New Year's Eve when it actually – the fall of Cuba to the rebels.

00:16:19.480 You see it happen.

00:16:20.540 So Buckley thinks that liberals are misreading Cuba.

00:16:26.820 Why does he think that?

00:16:27.600 Because they think Castro is just a great social liberator, right?

00:16:31.900 So they think – what does Buckley know that they don't?

00:16:35.640 Well, his father had made his career in Mexico, in Mexican oil, at the time of the revolution.

00:16:41.880 And he would write, Buckley's father was writing letters to Woodrow Wilson saying, what you think is a social revolutionary is a bandit who's murdering people.

00:16:52.240 And that's, Buckley looks at Cuba, and he has a pretty good idea. 0.66

00:16:55.820 That's what's going on there, partly because of the Catholic Church.

00:16:59.900 They're chasing all the priests out.

00:17:01.420 They deported dozens of priests and bishops of Havana to Spain.

00:17:07.100 Get them out of the country.

00:17:08.040 So Buckley has an idea, says, OK, let's find out what's really going on in Cuba.

00:17:12.680 So first, Castro's being treated as a hero.

00:17:16.440 First of the New York Times was over the top.

00:17:19.640 And this guy was an agrarian reformer and was this kind of romantic rebel, right?

00:17:25.440 There was no underpinnings of the basically hardcore Marxist-Leninist.

00:17:30.280 It was Stalinistic when it came to the church or any organized religion.

00:17:34.920 One of National Review's early really great jokes that Buckley came up with, there used to be this famous ad.

00:17:41.100 People would say, I got my job to the New York Times because of the one ads.

00:17:44.620 They showed Fidel Castro.

00:17:46.460 They said, I got my job to the New York Times, right?

00:17:50.700 It's really what made him acceptable to an American audience for a while.

00:17:54.180 Well, so then what happens is Castro is invited to give a speech at Harvard.

00:18:01.940 So this is perfect for Buckley.

00:18:04.140 Buckley had just made that really famous comment, right, where he says, I'd sooner be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard University.

00:18:15.980 Probably the single most famous thing he ever said.

00:18:18.360 And dead spot on.

00:18:19.860 Oh, yeah.

00:18:20.580 So how are we going to do it?

00:18:22.820 Well, we've got a really brilliant young guy on staff, a guy named John Leonard, who went on to have the same job I later did, editing the book review.

00:18:30.740 and Leonard was a Harvard dropout. They kicked him out because he never went to class. He just

00:18:36.300 wrote for the newspaper instead. The Crimson, he wrote for the Crimson, but that wasn't good

00:18:40.840 enough for the authorities. No, and he had a scholarship. He was from Long Beach, California.

00:18:44.660 He doesn't fit in. He's not a preppy. He doesn't belong there. Not only did they revoke his

00:18:50.220 scholarship, Leonard's widow told me this, Harvard made him pay it back. Wow. So he hates Harvard.

00:18:56.160 Buckley says, well, John, why don't you go up to Cambridge and report on Castro's speech?

00:19:03.800 So he goes up there.

00:19:04.660 There's a spring of 1959.

00:19:06.600 I'm just looking at this again.

00:19:08.240 And Castro was given the commencement.

00:19:09.760 So in Harvard Yard, when you go, because your colleges do their own.

00:19:12.620 But when I was there, Volcker gave it actually in Harvard Yard.

00:19:17.100 And the whole university can kind of show up.

00:19:19.040 But 7000 people were in a stadium to see him.

00:19:22.600 And he's introduced by McGeorge, McGeorge Bundy.

00:19:26.120 Remember him?

00:19:27.560 Right.

00:19:27.840 The guy who was the national security advisor soon under Kennedy.

00:19:31.620 The best and the brightest.

00:19:32.580 So exactly.

00:19:33.620 So it was a little obsessed by Cuba.

00:19:37.120 Well, and Leonard can't believe what he's hearing.

00:19:39.700 So he files a report to Buckley.

00:19:41.780 Because McGeorge Bundy is the president of Harvard College at the time.

00:19:44.860 Yeah.

00:19:45.140 Yeah.

00:19:45.440 He's one of the top deans.

00:19:46.560 Yeah.

00:19:46.920 The undergraduate dean, which is the same thing.

00:19:49.280 Yeah.

00:19:49.740 And Leonard can't believe what he's seeing.

00:19:51.340 And I was looking at it again.

00:19:52.580 He says, well, the social event of the season at Harvard, he calls it because he nails it.

00:19:56.820 It's a social event. 0.73

00:19:58.040 He said, everybody's wearing Castro like little beanie caps.

00:20:01.600 Everybody wants to look like Fidel.

00:20:04.300 And there was a new word that was just being, this will interest you because you like the history so much.

00:20:10.100 There was a new word that was being used in politics that had never been used before.

00:20:14.440 We're familiar with it.

00:20:15.460 The word's charisma.

00:20:17.460 It means star power.

00:20:19.100 Castro was the first guy they were saying was charismatic.

00:20:22.420 So Leonard puts this into his piece, and then he gives it to Buckley, and Buckley adds some sentences.

00:20:27.000 And Buckley says, well, however dazzling a personality he may be, that doesn't keep him from bulldozing over the bones of the people he's killed in Cuba.

00:20:39.020 So this thing is running.

00:20:40.460 Then Buckley says we have to do more than that.

00:20:43.080 We have to find out what's going on in Cuba.

00:20:45.240 So he arranges through all his contacts in Latin America for John Leonard to get a press pass to go to Havana.

00:20:52.980 And what he's going to do is interview a journalist who'd been on the left, the way these guys so often are, then turned around.

00:21:02.240 His name was Ernesto de la Faye.

00:21:04.640 John Leonard goes down to interview him.

00:21:06.340 And the government says, no problem, Mr. Leonard.

00:21:09.700 Come on in.

00:21:10.760 We'll make him available to you.

00:21:12.640 Never happens.

00:21:13.240 happens. He can't talk to anybody. He's sitting in his hotel room. And he writes a report that says

00:21:18.900 Defe is in prison. He's facing possible execution and a show trial. He is not allowed to see anyone

00:21:29.000 in his family. They've never been in touch with him. And they publish it in National Review.

00:21:33.460 And it was one of the first articles that told the truth about what was going on in Cuba. That's

00:21:39.400 1959. Well, then later, Buckley was not yet a syndicated columnist. That came a couple of years

00:21:46.540 later. He wrote his columns in National Review and he wrote about Castro. Remember, Buckley was

00:21:51.160 fluent in Spanish. I've met Spaniards, you told me. I asked them once, was Buckley fluent in

00:21:57.360 Spanish? They said, no, he wasn't fluent. He was perfect. You could not tell. Because remember,

00:22:02.480 he was going to, you couldn't tell if it was a Hispanic person talking or not. It was that good. 1.00

00:22:06.900 But he was a teacher.

00:22:08.100 His first gig was really teaching Spanish.

00:22:10.220 At Yale.

00:22:10.840 Yeah.

00:22:11.340 Yeah. 0.86

00:22:11.640 And he'd been raised by, you know, Mexican servants.

00:22:14.760 And he knew Spanish culture, all of it.

00:22:16.360 He knew it really well.

00:22:17.680 So he goes – and Buckley regretted that he hadn't gone to Havana himself.

00:22:21.860 He always regretted that.

00:22:22.880 He sent this young guy instead.

00:22:24.380 Well, then Buckley writes a column.

00:22:26.320 And he says, well, what should we do about the charismatic rebel in Cuba?

00:22:31.560 He'll say, I'll tell you what we should do.

00:22:33.720 And this comes right out of what his father had taught him about Mexico.

00:22:36.900 He said, if Cuba is going to appropriate any American property, we're taking that back and we're going to take it with military force if we have to.

00:22:45.420 Oh, wow.

00:22:45.540 And he says, by the way.

00:22:46.800 He was an interventionist right at the beginning.

00:22:48.820 Only when it came to communism.

00:22:50.980 He's a little bit like Pat Buchanan that way.

00:22:52.720 When it's communism, yes, but never anything else because communism, they're killing priests.

00:22:56.920 They're destroying his religion. 0.76

00:22:58.360 So Catholicism.

00:22:58.900 So Buckley also says, he says, you know, there's talk out there that the Soviet Union actually is going to set up missile launch pads in Cuba.

00:23:11.720 And people think, you are out of here.

00:23:13.720 What's the date of this?

00:23:14.640 1960.

00:23:15.960 Hello.

00:23:16.600 And people think this is a conspiracy guy.

00:23:21.400 He's out of his mind. 0.64

00:23:22.420 All of a sudden, he's a wingnut. 0.74

00:23:24.660 Right wing, right wingnut.

00:23:25.760 And he said, if they're going to do it, we've got to stop it.

00:23:29.300 Two years later, of course, we end up having to do that.

00:23:33.160 So you think, OK, but maybe that's Cold War paranoia, right?

00:23:36.360 So I do my job as a historian.

00:23:38.340 I'm thinking, well, what a Khrushchev, who was the leader of Russia then, right?

00:23:41.840 The premier general party secretary.

00:23:44.300 What was he doing during the Cuban Missile Crisis and also during the Bay of Pigs invasion,

00:23:50.700 which JFK blew because he wouldn't send his own people in?

00:23:53.880 So here's what the very quite liberal biographer, William Taubman, Bill Taubman, records Khrushchev

00:24:01.540 saying.

00:24:02.560 Khrushchev could not understand why Jack Kennedy would allow Castro to operate in his backyard.

00:24:10.000 He said, I can't believe he liked Castro.

00:24:11.620 He said, I can't believe he's letting him do this.

00:24:14.180 Why?

00:24:14.620 Because what did Khrushchev do when he had uprisings in Hungary and Poland?

00:24:18.300 He sent the tanks in, right?

00:24:20.660 He sent the tank brigades in.

00:24:22.380 And he can't believe that JFK isn't going to send the Marines down there.

00:24:27.140 Then he says something.

00:24:28.820 Well, OK.

00:24:29.480 So he actually thought it would have made sense for us to send our own people there.

00:24:33.920 And listen, there are many schools of thought and all these issues.

00:24:36.700 So I think, well, what did Khrushchev really plan to do with the missiles in Cuba?

00:24:42.400 Because there was an argument that said, well, maybe they're defensive missiles.

00:24:46.820 What kind of argument is that?

00:24:48.200 Because it's already a provocation one.

00:24:49.960 So there, what did Khrushchev say?

00:24:51.660 He said, we're going to try to put some missile bases down there. And even if they take three of them out, we'll have two that we can send to the U.S. and get their cities. That is what Cruz Jobs said. It's exactly what Buckley is saying, and they call Buckley a nut.

00:25:05.680 I want to go back. We've got a minute here on this side. His understanding from his father of the Mexican Revolution, the Civil War, particularly the anti-clerical nature of it and getting rid of the Catholic Church and see how much of that inform Buckley's understanding early on of the true nature of Castro when everybody else missed it.

00:25:25.980 Hugely so. And Buckley made an unusual tactical error when he went after the Vatican for that

00:25:33.220 encyclical where they were critical of capitalism. Many years later, he said, I couldn't understand

00:25:38.900 why the Vatican would be so indulgent of the communists when Castro was persecuting clergy

00:25:47.420 in Cuba. But he never said that at the time. He only said it later. If he had brought that point

00:25:53.140 up, you would have had a very interesting controversy. Viewers and listeners, do not think

00:25:58.560 Donald Trump is the first president to quarrel with the Vatican. Bill Buckley, if he'd been

00:26:04.980 president, would have done it too. But a huge cultural name. We kind of take our guidance

00:26:09.960 from Buckley there. We're up against the Vatican all the time, like for the secret deal they signed

00:26:15.700 with the Chinese Communist Party. We're going to take a commercial break. I want to thank our

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00:28:25.420 War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Vance.

00:28:31.360 Okay, you triggered me. You said, and Kennedy didn't send his guys in in the Bay of Pigs.

00:28:38.100 So I just want to make sure people have the timeline here.

00:28:40.980 It's so great to talk about Critical Path with you.

00:28:43.020 Yeah, let's work it through.

00:28:44.020 So the 58-59, Cashier comes to power, and he's – what you referred to him as – what the progressive left thought is that he was a left-bank intellectual.

00:28:57.580 Intellectual, read books, was an author, but also the glamour of being a revolutionary.

00:29:02.860 Of course, his wingman is Che Guevara.

00:29:04.500 So these guys are highly romantic.

00:29:06.540 And they're also they they they're fighters. I mean, they basically won as rebels to beat Batista, who is no easy, you know, no easy guy that then.

00:29:17.020 And all of a sudden, the United States after 1960 and President Kennedy comes in, there's in the best and the brightest.

00:29:24.240 When you read Albert Stanton's book, there are obsessed with standing up to communism as communism tries to spread throughout the world. Right.

00:29:33.860 And on one hand, they're going to try to do it intellectually, but they're going to make some stands to this. 0.86

00:29:38.320 Cuba, more than Vietnam, is like Bobby Kennedy said, we've got 50 Vietnams here every day back in the early days.

00:29:46.080 So they dismissed Vietnam as being anything important because we didn't have a commitment.

00:29:50.500 Cuba was different. Cuba was always central to the Kennedy, to the best and the brightest.

00:29:54.880 And President Kennedy as an anti-communist warrior.

00:29:58.220 Yeah. You know, there's a great moment. 1.00

00:29:59.600 you mentioned the best and the brightest, where David Haberstam describes how they're getting

00:30:04.040 ready to invade Cuba. They're thinking about it. And some guy in the State Department, I forget who

00:30:09.440 it is, says, do you have any idea how big Cuba is? They think it's like he says they think it's the

00:30:17.300 size of Long Island. No. So this general lays out a map. It's 800 miles long. He said, it's like

00:30:23.700 going from New York to Chicago. You think this place is easy to invade? You think these people

00:30:28.200 don't have something that they're going to fight for. And so they said, no, don't do it.

00:30:32.620 And during the debates, remember the famous debate, Kennedy and Nixon in 1960,

00:30:38.640 Kennedy was sort of taunting Nixon. They said, what are you going to do about Castro?

00:30:42.980 Well, they knew there wasn't all that much you could do. Right. Kennedy keeps goading Nixon.

00:30:48.560 Then Kennedy wins. Now it's up to him. He's the guy who has to do something.

00:30:53.700 It's not up to him. But let's go back to time frame. I keep telling people,

00:30:57.000 When we talk about the Bay of Pigs, it happens in April.

00:31:00.700 You don't take office until the third week of January.

00:31:04.060 April's the next day.

00:31:05.160 Oh, it was planned.

00:31:06.160 No, no, it was planned during Eisenhower.

00:31:08.020 My point is, I mean, not just planned.

00:31:10.540 They're rolling.

00:31:11.260 This is an execution mode.

00:31:14.180 The Bay of Pigs happens, I think, in early April of 61.

00:31:19.420 And they came and gave Kennedy admitted later, he's just learning the job.

00:31:25.420 They come and give him a presentation. Was it John Foster Dulles, Alan Dulles, CIA, and they give him a thing. And it's the most it's I hate to say this. It's kind of like we're going to bomb Iran. We're going to bomb Tehran for 48 hours. And and the people are going to rise up in revolution. It never changes, folks.

00:31:49.040 This is what the Mossad and the CIA pitched to President Trump.

00:31:54.300 We're going to bomb Tehran for 48 hours, and you're going to have a mass uprising to overthrow these horrendous dictators.

00:32:01.520 That's essentially the Bay of Pigs.

00:32:02.980 We're going to land this counter-revolutionary force that we've trained for years. 0.87

00:32:08.620 Exiles from Cuba.

00:32:09.440 Exiles that we've trained in Louisiana and Florida and Mississippi, the School of Americas, the infamous School of – our famous School of Americas. 0.99

00:32:16.920 and they're going to land and it's going to be an immediate uprising of the cuban people because 0.65

00:32:22.180 cuban people are deeply religious and they hate castro they hate the communists just all i got

00:32:28.440 to do is read bill buckley he's telling me that right yeah so yeah and and guess what just like 0.88

00:32:33.960 in tehran was not accurate right for many different reasons there was no they landed the bay of pigs

00:32:43.380 And in fact, not only was it not a revolution, not a spontaneous call for people to come,

00:32:50.240 they actually helped thwart the landing on the beach.

00:32:53.300 Yeah.

00:32:53.680 And Castro was waiting for them, too.

00:32:55.400 You know, they totally underestimated how committed Castro was.

00:32:59.540 They had 1,200, you know, the Central Brigade, 1,200, 1,400 of these Cuban exiles.

00:33:05.860 Castro was waiting for them. 0.63

00:33:07.500 And yeah, they think, well, they must hate Castro as much as we do.

00:33:11.340 And they forget the dictator he overthrew.

00:33:13.960 Reminds you a little bit, Steve, to go way back in Iran.

00:33:16.460 Baptista was no day at the beach. 1.00

00:33:18.520 No, I mean, he's like a gangster. 0.90

00:33:20.800 You go back to Iran, and we're hearing a lot about 1979. 0.84

00:33:25.880 1953.

00:33:26.380 We don't hear about 1953, where the CIA engineered the coup that brought the Ayatollah in.

00:33:33.440 I mean, you know, we don't like to tell those people history.

00:33:35.080 So Dulles and now the Joint Chiefs get involved, and they had signed off on this thing.

00:33:39.120 And now LeMay and these guys, they all want American air power.

00:33:43.260 First thing they want is close air support.

00:33:45.920 And Jack Kennedy, who had fought in World War II, and he had his war hero, and he had the Department of Labor.

00:33:55.040 His labor secretary had fought in World War II.

00:33:56.880 Many guys had fought in World War II.

00:33:59.080 They were very hesitant, and he was adamant.

00:34:00.960 He says, hey, the pitch I got up to now, nothing's happened according to plan.

00:34:05.780 I think that we're not going to do that.

00:34:07.260 We're going to and they go, you're going to leave him on the beach.

00:34:09.500 And he was against even extraction, extraction exercises said, hey, look, it is what it is.

00:34:14.520 Yeah, that's for many conspiracy theorists.

00:34:18.580 That is the beginning even more than Vietnam, that that is the beginning of members of the government and others, particularly the CIA.

00:34:28.220 Because afterwards he came out and says, hey, I'm Dulles has got to go.

00:34:31.740 Fire them all. 0.99

00:34:32.520 Fire them all. Dulles got to go. And I'm going to get my hands on the CIA. 1.00

00:34:36.240 hey, we're going to take care of this thing.

00:34:37.560 This thing has had too many screw-ups, right?

00:34:40.380 So we don't know what's going on from Suez to everywhere.

00:34:45.080 We've got to get our hands on it.

00:34:46.460 And that begins the deep state's move on Jack Kennedy.

00:34:54.860 Yeah, that's a very interesting argument.

00:34:57.300 And there's another strand of it, too,

00:34:59.260 is if you just look at it through Kennedy administration foreign policy.

00:35:04.480 All right.

00:35:04.740 And so early on, you'll remember this, Steve, even before Cuba, there had been that or maybe it's a little after there was the the summit where Khrushchev really beat him up, beat up Jack.

00:35:17.580 He wasn't prepared. He wasn't prepared. He's a young guy up against that season.

00:35:21.880 Khrushchev was the guy they sent to Stalingrad. He was the commissar they sent to Stalingrad to because they were losing.

00:35:28.880 They sent him to Stalingrad to shoot some generals because they weren't retreating an inch. 0.98

00:35:33.000 Khrushchev was a thug. 0.98

00:35:35.020 This is as hard as you can get. 0.96

00:35:36.800 Very tough customer.

00:35:37.120 He's one of the guys when Stalin died, remember they had the whole thing with Beria.

00:35:40.900 Khrushchev was in the back of that.

00:35:41.960 Khrushchev is hard as nails.

00:35:43.640 Very tough guy.

00:35:44.720 Sees JFK.

00:35:45.740 Looks like a prep school kid to him.

00:35:49.060 And he embarrasses him.

00:35:51.520 And that's when.

00:35:52.560 In Vienna.

00:35:53.340 Yeah.

00:35:53.840 And that's one school of argument that says that's when Jack Kennedy decided he had to be the tough guy.

00:35:59.400 Oh, because when he first met with Eisenhower, when during the transition, Eisenhower didn't talk that much about Cuba.

00:36:06.420 He talked endlessly about Laos.

00:36:08.480 Remember Laos?

00:36:09.420 You've got to make the stand there.

00:36:11.340 So then Kennedy thinks, OK, I'll be a tough guy.

00:36:13.720 We'll make the stand in Vietnam.

00:36:16.920 And you're thinking, Vietnam?

00:36:18.480 How many educated Americans could even find it on a map back then? 0.94

00:36:23.280 And they decide to do it in Vietnam.

00:36:25.080 And as you know, it's the CIA again.

00:36:27.640 They have them, right?

00:36:29.400 carry out a coup and an execution of DM, who's a president, right? Early 63. That commits us to

00:36:37.240 that war. Buckley always thought, why didn't I go in the CIA? They were recruiting the best

00:36:46.860 and the brightest in the post-war Ivy League with his language skill. In fact, he had a gig in

00:36:53.080 Mexico City. He had a gig in Mexico City, became also central to the plot against President

00:36:57.920 Kennedy later, the Mexico City tapes, or the Mexico City about the Oswald going to Mexico

00:37:04.920 City.

00:37:05.840 When Buckley turned his hand to being a novelist, Blackford Oaks, he went back.

00:37:12.120 Blackford Oaks was a CIA agent, correct?

00:37:15.140 And the very first of those novels, Saving the Queen, it was the first published account

00:37:22.700 of what CIA training was like in Washington, D.C.

00:37:26.620 At the farm.

00:37:27.560 At the farm. It was published in 1975. And in those days, remember, that's when the church

00:37:33.480 committee and the others are exposing the CIA. And Buckley wants to defend it. He thinks these

00:37:38.720 are patriots. So the CIA, which vetted everybody's book, you know, they go through it, they red

00:37:43.900 pencil it, they trusted Buckley. So they let him write what he wanted to. So he described what his

00:37:48.840 own training had been like in Washington back in 1950. Then Buckley goes over to Mexico City,

00:37:53.520 And we know who his boss was, a guy named E. Howard Hunt.

00:37:57.300 For conspiracy theorists, you're having a field day now.

00:38:00.540 Yeah, now you can get into it.

00:38:01.580 In the exact – the station chief and the operatives in the Mexico City embassy that later becomes so controversial because actual – either a guy who doesn't look like Oswald shows up saying he's Oswald right before – in September, right before the assassination.

00:38:20.500 And after the assassination, guess what friend of Buckley's in the CIA was feeding him information?

00:38:26.860 But also it was Howard Hunt saying, well, this looks like there's something else going on here.

00:38:31.660 There might be a bigger conspiracy here.

00:38:34.320 So Buckley always knew that stuff.

00:38:35.980 He had all these contacts.

00:38:37.300 During the Bay of Pigs and then later the missile crisis, given Buckley's understanding of Spanish culture, particularly the church, what Castro had done, where did he come out on all this?

00:38:49.860 on both the Bay of Pigs, was he an interventionist

00:38:52.740 and felt we should do more in that?

00:38:54.280 Because you mentioned that Kennedy didn't send his guys in.

00:38:56.760 Yeah, he was an interventionist.

00:38:58.820 That's always been a bone of contention

00:39:00.120 among the hardcore guys like Buckley.

00:39:02.120 You did leave him on the beach.

00:39:03.580 You could have won if you just reinforced him.

00:39:05.380 Yeah, and Howard would tell him this stuff

00:39:07.900 because Howard had worked with those guys, Howard Hunt.

00:39:10.580 And then when they became exiles and were living in Miami,

00:39:14.980 Howard Hunt, after he was released from jail

00:39:17.120 following Watergate, went down to Miami

00:39:19.100 He was looking after those guys.

00:39:21.080 So he was very close to them.

00:39:22.920 And, I mean, it ruined his career.

00:39:24.880 Buckley was very personally loyal.

00:39:26.520 You know, it's one thing everybody loved about him.

00:39:27.880 And he helped Howard Hunt out all his life and tried to support him in all the things he did.

00:39:33.340 And he really respected the CIA.

00:39:36.240 Buckley, you're right.

00:39:37.120 He did come out of that upper class culture.

00:39:39.860 Buckley knew.

00:39:40.960 Buckley knew immediately when the Watergate break-in happened and E. Howard Hunt was named,

00:39:48.240 he realized this was more than just a break-in of Democratic Party hair.

00:39:51.980 There was something.

00:39:53.260 E. Howard Hunt had his hand in many different operations

00:39:57.060 throughout the thing that Buckley knew about, right?

00:39:59.380 Well, then I've got a scene in the book, I remember,

00:40:01.380 when after Howard Hunt's wife dies in a plane crash during Watergate.

00:40:06.780 By the way, the beautiful, brilliant, tough-as-nails, E. Howard Hunt's wife.

00:40:11.320 Yes.

00:40:11.960 She's an extraordinary woman.

00:40:12.600 She was an extraordinary woman.

00:40:14.020 You know who really admired her was Norman Mailer.

00:40:15.560 There's a lot of pages on her in his book, Harlot's Ghost, about the CIA.

00:40:20.060 And then Howard Hunt, because Buckley had been trying to get Howard to tell the real story of Watergate.

00:40:25.580 He wouldn't do it.

00:40:26.580 He wouldn't even tell Buckley what went on.

00:40:28.300 Then finally, so there's like the winter of 72, early 73, Howard Hunt goes to see Buckley, tells him everything, everything.

00:40:38.360 Tells him about a plot to murder Jack Anderson, the columnist.

00:40:43.160 I mean, tells him everything.

00:40:44.560 He knew more about Watergate than Woodward and Bernstein did, and Bill Buckley, and he kept it to himself.

00:40:50.900 What I saw was he would drop these little hints.

00:40:53.260 No one ever picked up in this book?

00:40:54.520 He dropped little hints in his column.

00:40:56.100 He'd say, well, I think Nixon's okay in Watergate unless we find out, say, there's an attempt to assassinate Jack Anderson.

00:41:03.460 And you're reading this, you say, what's Buckley talking about?

00:41:06.260 Buckley's talking, he's telling you.

00:41:07.520 Did Buckley ever write that down in anywhere?

00:41:09.160 Or is it ever, did he record anything that is in any of his papers, the true stories he heard from Howard Hunt about, about Watergate?

00:41:15.840 Never did.

00:41:16.680 The one who heard the most was his son, Christopher, who recorded some of them in his great little memoir, Mom and Pop.

00:41:22.340 He told me once, I think Christopher decided that he better kept to himself, that Buckley told him at one point he he was getting phone calls from Hunt in prison.

00:41:32.620 Buckley paid all of Howard Hunt's legal bills himself because Buckley would do this.

00:41:37.340 Buckley would give money to also a liberal

00:41:40.220 What a loyal guy

00:41:41.200 Incredibly loyal, he helped me

00:41:42.860 Because everybody abandoned Hunt

00:41:44.620 Yeah, that's why Buckley stood by him

00:41:46.900 It was not about Nixon, it was about Howard Hunt

00:41:49.100 And he wanted to defend him

00:41:51.060 He really admired Hunt

00:41:52.840 And he liked him

00:41:54.040 And he thought he was a patriot

00:41:55.760 And he was getting really abused

00:41:58.880 The other guy who stood up for them all was Reagan

00:42:01.100 Reagan stood up for all the Watergate guys

00:42:03.540 What

00:42:04.920 But Kennedy and Buckley, their relationship, did he admire him, the relationship there, and particularly as it relates to the, because the two big incidents in Kennedy's administration, because Vietnam was still, until they assassinated Diem, was still, Cuba was everything, right?

00:42:21.560 Of course, obviously, Oswald, the whole situation, Oswald goes to New Orleans, he's part of this Cuban operation.

00:42:27.340 What did Buckley think about all that?

00:42:29.440 Buckley really admired Kennedy as a person.

00:42:34.300 He liked his style.

00:42:36.320 He liked his wit.

00:42:37.500 Because it's very Ivy League.

00:42:38.660 Very Ivy League and also great, listen, Irish.

00:42:42.420 Yes.

00:42:42.840 You know, Irish America, Catholic at its peak.

00:42:45.300 My theory is, based on a lot of digging and reading, is that Blackford Oaks, although his personality is modeled on Buckley, his physical appearance is Jack Kennedy.

00:42:57.860 Jack Kennedy.

00:42:58.100 I'm going to tell you a Blackford Oaks story you haven't heard before.

00:43:00.640 Oh.

00:43:00.900 my so i start my investment banking firm in hollywood after i leave golden sacks and we're

00:43:07.200 doing a lot of film financing a lot of restructuring and my kid brother who is also a

00:43:12.100 naval officer pilot leaves the navy and comes to work for me and he's put in kind of the organizing

00:43:16.960 of the film production site and things like that and we're talking about potentially starting to

00:43:21.580 do our own progress because we're learning distribution we're learning finance and my

00:43:25.920 kid brother brings up blackford oaks the novel series and i go what are you talking about he

00:43:30.860 says i think these would make a great television wasn't really a thing that like it is today he

00:43:35.140 says i think these would make great films and i had not read them because i don't read a lot of

00:43:39.120 fiction and um so um my kid brother gives me saving the queen and it's so mesmerizing yeah

00:43:46.820 right and you tell buckley knows the inside and you know that scene where he's in the room with

00:43:51.060 the queen and everything like that he has a great love of the material it's such a compelling and

00:43:55.100 he's a smart guy. And I didn't really know at the time he had all these CIA connections. I go,

00:43:59.660 man, this is like an insider's view. This is really an American James Bond from a very

00:44:06.460 sophisticated thing. And I told my brother Chris, I said, look, what are you talking about here?

00:44:10.900 He says, well, I want to contact Buckley and see if we get the rights and go make a film,

00:44:15.700 start making films. And I go, it'll be like a James Bond franchise. And I go,

00:44:19.900 Bill Buckley's not going to talk to us. It's Bill Buckley. I'm sure he's had 20 producers,

00:44:23.880 with David Brown, all these classy producers

00:44:25.600 have talked to him all.

00:44:27.020 So my kid brother calls, he gets Buckley on the phone.

00:44:30.320 They start having conversations.

00:44:31.860 I don't think any, because Hollywood was so liberal,

00:44:34.600 I don't think anybody had ever approached Buckley

00:44:37.200 about actually making the films,

00:44:38.600 having some conversations, and they talked about it.

00:44:40.700 Now, we had so much other stuff we were doing,

00:44:42.680 it didn't come to fruition.

00:44:44.060 But he said he was the nicest guy, the most engaging guy,

00:44:47.420 and he really wanted to have him made in the film.

00:44:50.040 I'm sure he did.

00:44:51.080 Yeah, I've seen correspondence,

00:44:52.240 I don't know if it was about your brother,

00:44:53.360 where he says, well, there's somebody who's written a script for one of the...

00:44:56.460 I don't know if your brother went that far.

00:44:57.580 Somebody wrote a script.

00:44:58.700 Was on Saving the Queen or one of the later ones?

00:45:00.240 I can't remember now.

00:45:02.240 And I think he mentions it maybe...

00:45:03.920 But for him to take that, given his love of the CIA at the agency,

00:45:08.980 particularly when he was joining it,

00:45:12.880 and also for him to take the risk profile-wise of actually writing a novel, right?

00:45:20.200 Because you know you're going to get hammered if you're a serious political observer, right?

00:45:26.280 To start writing a novel, they go, it's always like a sideshow here, right?

00:45:29.360 It's an easy way to go after them.

00:45:30.900 And then the opposite happened.

00:45:32.420 People had the same reaction to the book.

00:45:33.880 They couldn't put them down.

00:45:35.240 He would write them really fast.

00:45:36.700 Big time.

00:45:37.000 Because he knew readers wanted to keep things going.

00:45:39.720 And that was a big surprise to his book editor.

00:45:41.720 He said, I thought you were going to write some intellectual treatise and turn it into a novel.

00:45:45.700 He said, you've written like a page turner.

00:45:47.360 Because the novel Buckley really liked was Day of the Jackal.

00:45:51.220 Remember Day of the Jackal?

00:45:52.240 That was a fantastic film.

00:45:53.900 Really great film.

00:45:54.800 You couldn't make that film today because it's too realistic.

00:45:57.620 Yeah, right.

00:45:58.280 In fact, I think they did a remake.

00:45:59.740 They didn't, but the original.

00:46:00.740 The remake was a lot different.

00:46:01.920 The original was fantastic.

00:46:03.100 The original is mesmerizing.

00:46:04.720 Yeah.

00:46:05.300 As Edward Fox is the assassin, right?

00:46:07.240 Yes.

00:46:08.200 It's shot in the streets of Paris all throughout.

00:46:11.080 I mean, it's a real film.

00:46:12.540 Why didn't he become a bigger star, Edward Fox?

00:46:14.640 He was so great.

00:46:15.240 Or was he a big star?

00:46:16.220 in england i always thought he was like in in um a bridge too far he plays general horrocks he's

00:46:23.200 always kind of that second lead oh i think they try to make him a leading man at one time it like

00:46:27.740 in the day of the jackal he's a guy that can actually be the jackal a movie star is going

00:46:32.200 to be a movie star right he's he's uh if sean connery had done it it had been a different thing

00:46:38.000 or had been sean connery's a movie star he actually was a actor yeah right and i think that's why he

00:46:43.000 to become a bigger movie star we've got to wrap up we've already done an hour and um and i gotta

00:46:47.280 get a train no you gotta get a train hang on just the paper so should people be out buying the

00:46:51.600 paperback it comes out in early june everything now you go on amazon and get that do you want to

00:46:56.260 sell is look we want to do good by random house they want us to keep selling hardbacks they

00:47:02.200 probably do until this comes out in june the hardback copy the hardback edition that you've

00:47:06.540 got how many printings is it through it's i think it's in the fifth now at least half of them thanks

00:47:11.780 to you well i'm just saying you've only been in your first brain when you came here no because

00:47:16.140 people love all this needed was to get access to the story and people jumped in there and here's

00:47:23.840 what they tell me it's just one great vignette and one great story after the next that's the

00:47:28.620 power of your books i do want to make a plug for whitaker chambers yeah this is actually

00:47:34.940 this is brilliantly written i love this book this will work a literature don't you think

00:47:41.320 Well, that's an interesting film.

00:47:42.500 No, this is not for me to say.

00:47:43.780 No, no, no.

00:47:44.780 This is this is both of you combine these from pre-World War Two all the way up to really, I guess, Trump.

00:47:55.320 Right. You get a whole picture of panorama of the country.

00:47:58.500 I'll tell you something. I shouldn't say this, but a guy whose work I respect, I think you do, too.

00:48:02.840 Mike Lind, Michael Lind. Oh, sure. I love Mike Lind.

00:48:04.680 He sent me a note and he said, years from now, the only books anyone will read to learn about the conservative movement are these two biographies.

00:48:13.880 Because the stories are there.

00:48:15.260 The big deal in the stories.

00:48:16.220 I tell people, get Tannenhaus, Whitaker Chambers, and Buckley.

00:48:22.880 You're going to really understand American history, modern American history.

00:48:26.880 You haven't. 0.98

00:48:27.600 And only an outsider could do it.

00:48:29.880 You couldn't do it.

00:48:30.300 If you were a conservative, I don't think you could have written these books.

00:48:32.440 I think it took the perspective of somebody that had been part of the liberal cultural apparatus.

00:48:39.600 Yeah, I haven't thought of it that way.

00:48:40.900 I think of more of it's discovery for me.

00:48:43.120 So it becomes more exciting than if I say growing up.

00:48:45.560 Real quickly, where they go homepage, where they go to get your…

00:48:47.840 SamTannenHouse.com.

00:48:49.000 Got everything there.

00:48:50.040 Everything there.

00:48:51.000 Yeah.

00:48:51.360 And Amazon, you'll see the books there.

00:48:52.840 June 2nd, go order it now.

00:48:54.760 You will not, you'll be able to mark it up.

00:48:56.440 It's magnificent.

00:48:57.940 Sam, thank you once again for coming.

00:48:59.360 Steve, what a pleasure.

00:49:00.360 It's always so much fun.

00:49:01.240 Great brand control.

00:49:01.760 I end up learning more than I am.

00:49:03.940 You're my Orson Bean to my Johnny Carson.

00:49:07.100 Just kidding.

00:49:08.160 Orson Bean, Nixon's favorite comedian.

00:49:09.960 I did not compare myself.

00:49:12.120 And Andrew Breitbart's father-in-law.

00:49:15.780 Andrew Breitbart's father-in-law.

00:49:17.080 I did not show that next time.

00:49:19.360 See you tomorrow.

Bannon's War Room - May 26, 2026

WarRoom Battleground EP 1017： Bay Of Pigs 2.0

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