00:04:34.460Blackford Oaks, best-selling novelist. And you just reminded me of something, Steve,
00:04:37.700I'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.
00:07:13.980Yeah. 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.
00:07:30.220You actually, you can feel the love for these men and the interest in American history at
00:07:37.020time as told through their journeys, not men of the left, or Chambers kind of starts out
00:07:41.980the other way, but Buckley's, the most adamant stand in the breach to bring conservatism
00:07:47.660and make it a national civic religion.
00:08:27.620So 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.
00:13:38.940Ezra Klein is now looking at YouTube things on Buckley.
00:13:42.140And it is very interesting how that happens.0.77
00:13:47.160And I think now, see, if I'd written a book that was an expose of Timothy McVeigh and the skinheads.
00:13:55.320And I did it the same way I do here with, you know, hundreds and hundreds of footnotes going into archives, interviews, great storytelling.
00:14:05.380And 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.
00:14:32.980And they're just great figures with these incredible stories.
00:14:35.480This is one of the things we've been doing, and the audience appreciates this.
00:14:38.680It'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.
00:14:46.520One 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.
00:14:58.900Here, 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.
00:15:14.560Yeah. 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.
00:15:31.680This 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.
00:15:46.720And 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.
00:15:58.760Yeah. 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.
00:16:15.020There's a magnificent scene on New Year's Eve when it actually – the fall of Cuba to the rebels.
00:16:27.600Because they think Castro is just a great social liberator, right?
00:16:31.900So they think – what does Buckley know that they don't?
00:16:35.640Well, his father had made his career in Mexico, in Mexican oil, at the time of the revolution.
00:16:41.880And 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.
00:16:52.240And that's, Buckley looks at Cuba, and he has a pretty good idea.0.66
00:16:55.820That's what's going on there, partly because of the Catholic Church.
00:18:04.140Buckley 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.
00:18:15.980Probably the single most famous thing he ever said.
00:18:22.820Well, 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.
00:18:30.740and Leonard was a Harvard dropout. They kicked him out because he never went to class. He just
00:18:36.300wrote for the newspaper instead. The Crimson, he wrote for the Crimson, but that wasn't good
00:18:40.840enough for the authorities. No, and he had a scholarship. He was from Long Beach, California.
00:18:44.660He doesn't fit in. He's not a preppy. He doesn't belong there. Not only did they revoke his
00:18:50.220scholarship, Leonard's widow told me this, Harvard made him pay it back. Wow. So he hates Harvard.
00:18:56.160Buckley says, well, John, why don't you go up to Cambridge and report on Castro's speech?
00:20:19.100Castro was the first guy they were saying was charismatic.
00:20:22.420So Leonard puts this into his piece, and then he gives it to Buckley, and Buckley adds some sentences.
00:20:27.000And 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.
00:22:26.320And he says, well, what should we do about the charismatic rebel in Cuba?
00:22:31.560He'll say, I'll tell you what we should do.
00:22:33.720And this comes right out of what his father had taught him about Mexico.
00:22:36.900He 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.
00:22:58.900So 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.
00:23:11.720And people think, you are out of here.
00:24:51.660He 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.
00:25:05.680I 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.
00:25:25.980Hugely so. And Buckley made an unusual tactical error when he went after the Vatican for that
00:25:33.220encyclical where they were critical of capitalism. Many years later, he said, I couldn't understand
00:25:38.900why the Vatican would be so indulgent of the communists when Castro was persecuting clergy
00:25:47.420in Cuba. But he never said that at the time. He only said it later. If he had brought that point
00:25:53.140up, you would have had a very interesting controversy. Viewers and listeners, do not think
00:25:58.560Donald Trump is the first president to quarrel with the Vatican. Bill Buckley, if he'd been
00:26:04.980president, would have done it too. But a huge cultural name. We kind of take our guidance
00:26:09.960from Buckley there. We're up against the Vatican all the time, like for the secret deal they signed
00:26:15.700with the Chinese Communist Party. We're going to take a commercial break. I want to thank our
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00:28:44.020So 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.
00:28:57.580Intellectual, read books, was an author, but also the glamour of being a revolutionary.
00:29:02.860Of course, his wingman is Che Guevara.
00:29:06.540And 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.
00:29:17.020And all of a sudden, the United States after 1960 and President Kennedy comes in, there's in the best and the brightest.
00:29:24.240When you read Albert Stanton's book, there are obsessed with standing up to communism as communism tries to spread throughout the world. Right.
00:29:33.860And on one hand, they're going to try to do it intellectually, but they're going to make some stands to this.0.86
00:29:38.320Cuba, more than Vietnam, is like Bobby Kennedy said, we've got 50 Vietnams here every day back in the early days.
00:29:46.080So they dismissed Vietnam as being anything important because we didn't have a commitment.
00:29:50.500Cuba was different. Cuba was always central to the Kennedy, to the best and the brightest.
00:29:54.880And President Kennedy as an anti-communist warrior.
00:29:58.220Yeah. You know, there's a great moment.1.00
00:29:59.600you mentioned the best and the brightest, where David Haberstam describes how they're getting
00:30:04.040ready to invade Cuba. They're thinking about it. And some guy in the State Department, I forget who
00:30:09.440it is, says, do you have any idea how big Cuba is? They think it's like he says they think it's the
00:30:17.300size of Long Island. No. So this general lays out a map. It's 800 miles long. He said, it's like
00:30:23.700going from New York to Chicago. You think this place is easy to invade? You think these people
00:30:28.200don't have something that they're going to fight for. And so they said, no, don't do it.
00:30:32.620And during the debates, remember the famous debate, Kennedy and Nixon in 1960,
00:30:38.640Kennedy was sort of taunting Nixon. They said, what are you going to do about Castro?
00:30:42.980Well, they knew there wasn't all that much you could do. Right. Kennedy keeps goading Nixon.
00:30:48.560Then Kennedy wins. Now it's up to him. He's the guy who has to do something.
00:30:53.700It's not up to him. But let's go back to time frame. I keep telling people,
00:30:57.000When we talk about the Bay of Pigs, it happens in April.
00:31:00.700You don't take office until the third week of January.
00:31:14.180The Bay of Pigs happens, I think, in early April of 61.
00:31:19.420And they came and gave Kennedy admitted later, he's just learning the job.
00:31:25.420They 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.
00:31:49.040This is what the Mossad and the CIA pitched to President Trump.
00:31:54.300We're going to bomb Tehran for 48 hours, and you're going to have a mass uprising to overthrow these horrendous dictators.
00:32:09.440Exiles 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
00:32:16.920and they're going to land and it's going to be an immediate uprising of the cuban people because0.65
00:32:22.180cuban people are deeply religious and they hate castro they hate the communists just all i got
00:32:28.440to do is read bill buckley he's telling me that right yeah so yeah and and guess what just like0.88
00:32:33.960in tehran was not accurate right for many different reasons there was no they landed the bay of pigs
00:32:43.380And in fact, not only was it not a revolution, not a spontaneous call for people to come,
00:32:50.240they actually helped thwart the landing on the beach.
00:35:04.740And 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.
00:35:17.580He wasn't prepared. He wasn't prepared. He's a young guy up against that season.
00:35:21.880Khrushchev was the guy they sent to Stalingrad. He was the commissar they sent to Stalingrad to because they were losing.
00:35:28.880They sent him to Stalingrad to shoot some generals because they weren't retreating an inch.0.98
00:38:01.580In 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.
00:38:20.500And after the assassination, guess what friend of Buckley's in the CIA was feeding him information?
00:38:26.860But also it was Howard Hunt saying, well, this looks like there's something else going on here.
00:38:31.660There might be a bigger conspiracy here.
00:38:37.300During 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?
00:38:49.860on both the Bay of Pigs, was he an interventionist
00:41:16.680The one who heard the most was his son, Christopher, who recorded some of them in his great little memoir, Mom and Pop.
00:41:22.340He 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.
00:41:32.620Buckley paid all of Howard Hunt's legal bills himself because Buckley would do this.
00:41:37.340Buckley would give money to also a liberal
00:42:04.920But 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?
00:42:21.560Of course, obviously, Oswald, the whole situation, Oswald goes to New Orleans, he's part of this Cuban operation.
00:42:27.340What did Buckley think about all that?
00:42:29.440Buckley really admired Kennedy as a person.
00:42:42.840You know, Irish America, Catholic at its peak.
00:42:45.300My 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.
00:47:44.780This is this is both of you combine these from pre-World War Two all the way up to really, I guess, Trump.
00:47:55.320Right. You get a whole picture of panorama of the country.
00:47:58.500I'll tell you something. I shouldn't say this, but a guy whose work I respect, I think you do, too.
00:48:02.840Mike Lind, Michael Lind. Oh, sure. I love Mike Lind.
00:48:04.680He 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.