Bannon's War Room - WarRoom Battleground EP 911： Buckley And The Conservative Revolution

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

00:00:07.000 Pray for our enemies.

00:00:09.000 Because we're going medieval on these people.

00:00:12.000 I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people.

00:00:17.000 The people have had a belly full of it.

00:00:19.000 I know you don't like hearing that.

00:00:20.000 I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that,

00:00:22.000 but you're not going to stop it.

00:00:23.000 It's going to happen.

00:00:24.000 And where do people like that go to share the big lie?

00:00:27.000 Mega Media.

00:00:29.000 I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.

00:00:34.000 Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?

00:00:38.000 If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.

00:00:44.000 War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Band.

00:00:53.000 You're a secular Jewish liberal from the New York Times.

00:00:58.000 You're saying things that, and a couple of years ago, the progressive ones say those are a lie.

00:01:03.000 The thing that worked to my advantage was I started writing about chambers in the early 90s after the Soviet Union collapsed.

00:01:13.000 Remember, there was that period when people were rethinking a lot of this.

00:01:17.000 And heroes were people like Solzhenitsyn.

00:01:20.000 And they opened up the KGB files.

00:01:21.000 They opened up the archives.

00:01:22.000 And we opened up our archives.

00:01:23.000 Yes, yes.

00:01:24.000 So he's got the real story of what went on.

00:01:26.000 You can get the real story.

00:01:27.000 And there was enough respect in that era for that kind of research that…

00:01:32.000 Solzhenitsyn thought we were…

00:01:33.000 He got over here.

00:01:34.000 He thought we were a mess.

00:01:35.000 He thought we were too weak.

00:01:36.000 Right?

00:01:37.000 This is not going to save the West, where America has declined to.

00:01:40.000 He's the first one that really, like an Old Testament prophet, told us about the weakness of the West.

00:01:45.000 He made the same argument that Buckley and Chambers and those…

00:01:49.000 And Buchanan later.

00:01:50.000 And those early, great anti-communist maids.

00:01:53.000 He identified Alger Hiss as a communist spy working for the military intelligence.

00:02:01.000 I mean, this is the hardcore guys.

00:02:03.000 In 1939, to senior people in the State Department.

00:02:06.000 After the war, he's telling Henry Luce that he's working at Time.

00:02:09.000 This guy's a Soviet agent at Yalta.

00:02:11.000 He's number three on the phone to FDR.

00:02:14.000 Now he's back and saying, we're going to change.

00:02:16.000 He's got to be going insane because he keeps telling the powers that be,

00:02:19.000 the people that can shut it down.

00:02:21.000 Hey, by the way, this guy's just not a fellow traveler.

00:02:23.000 He's not a sympathizer.

00:02:24.000 He's an active agent of military intelligence for the Russians.

00:02:28.000 And he keeps rising in power.

00:02:30.000 Is anybody going to do anything about it?

00:02:31.000 The thing that really got to him was the kind of papering over of the facts about communism.

00:02:37.000 That was very big for Buckley, too.

00:02:39.000 Buckley would take up liberal congressmen like Allard Lowenstein, the liberal Democrat,

00:02:44.000 because he knew he was anti-communist.

00:02:46.000 People think that's a joke today.

00:02:48.000 It was not.

00:02:50.000 Okay.

00:02:51.000 Welcome.

00:02:52.000 Monday, 15 December, year of early 2025.

00:02:54.000 Thank you for sticking around for the second hour of the late afternoon, early evening edition of the war.

00:02:59.000 I want to thank you.

00:03:00.000 And I want to really thank the guys in Denver and the team there for that great kind of mashup highlight reel for the first two hours of Buckley, the life and the revolution that changed America with Sam Tannenhaus, the author.

00:03:16.000 Sam, welcome back.

00:03:18.000 Look, just because the war and posse gets a lot of feedback that, hey, you guys buy a lot of books, your readers.

00:03:25.000 Your first interviews, which were around, I think, Thanksgiving.

00:03:28.000 In fact, I think we played it.

00:03:30.000 We couldn't even play it the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

00:03:32.000 There was so much going on.

00:03:33.000 We actually played it the first part of that week.

00:03:36.000 Talk to me about the impact it had on just the book sale, the publisher, whatever, because I can tell you the audience has been looking forward to this and they just love the book, but they really loved you just kind of hanging out, telling stories.

00:03:50.000 Well, thanks so much, Steve.

00:03:51.000 I got an email the day after you put up that, you know, the first show, the conversation we had, and it was forwarded.

00:04:02.000 It was my editor forwarding an internal memo from Random House that said, rush, reorder 3,000 copies for a book like mine.

00:04:12.000 You know, it's a big book, a lot of history, a lot of stories, but a lot of history.

00:04:17.000 It's a book that tries to show you what America was like for many, many years, and the great guy who was at the center of it is almost unheard of.

00:04:28.000 And early on, I'll tell you, when we heard, the publisher heard that you were interested in talking to me, the publicist, who's a top publicist at Random House, big publisher, as you know, said, this will move books.

00:04:44.000 And everybody says, okay, we kind of think that.

00:04:47.000 And then, you and I had the conversation, that great conversation down in Washington, you put it up, and the reprint order came.

00:04:57.000 And I've been doing this for a long time, Steve, I've been writing books for 40 years, I just have not seen this before.

00:05:04.000 And so now I know, it's like, you know, the space launch, you know, the shuttle launch, they're all gathered around, they're going to listen to us talk and have a good conversation.

00:05:15.000 And then they're going to look at the numbers.

00:05:17.000 And I see on Amazon, for listeners out there, good place to order, and they have the stock, they did get it reordered in time, so you can go on Amazon and get the book.

00:05:28.000 I was in Little Rock, do a thing at the Clinton Center the other day, and we went to a bookstore, they had one copy left, and they had back orders for the rest.

00:05:37.000 And it's because of what you're doing, and listen, no one's more grateful than me.

00:05:42.000 No, but our audience, we want to always get them the best books and conversations and access to people like yourself.

00:05:49.000 So before we start this, I want everybody, it is a great Christmas gift, particularly if there's a young person in your life that doesn't really understand what happened to the country after the war, after World War II,

00:06:02.000 and really the turmoil behind the placid kind of surface, the turmoil the country was in, it's a great gift.

00:06:09.000 They will really learn, it's so well written, you go from kind of story to story.

00:06:13.000 Because it's building, it's not just about Buckley's life, that's important enough in itself,

00:06:17.000 but Sam really goes and tells really the political history of the country and builds about the revolution that brought not just Ronald Reagan,

00:06:26.000 but also Donald Trump after that. So you're an active part of this, you're a World War and Posse member, this is your history.

00:06:32.000 Also for yourself, if you're going to get a little time, and everybody should take a little time off over the holidays,

00:06:38.000 although we're not here, we're going to be on every day as we always are.

00:06:43.000 You can curl up with this, and you'll learn a lot. And you kind of think it through, particularly at post-World War II, about where we are today.

00:06:53.000 In fact, we left last time, Sam, Alger Hiss, we did a good little cover at the beginning.

00:06:59.000 Alger Hiss was just found, was being found guilty of, I guess, of perjury.

00:07:04.000 But his brings in, and Buckley was still a very young person at the time.

00:07:08.000 We still got to get to Yale and everything that happened at Yale.

00:07:13.000 The Ivy League schools really ran the country more than they run it today.

00:07:16.000 Talk to me about Buckley's experience, particularly coming in this tumultuous time that you got guys like Richard Nixon coming on the scene.

00:07:24.000 There's part of the Republican Party. It'd almost be like MAGA.

00:07:28.000 You had the Eisenhower, Taft, Conservative Inc, or, you know, were kind of, you know, I don't want to say Eisenhower was a globalist, but more of the Republican establishment.

00:07:40.000 You had firebrands like Nixon coming up, McCarthy, that were pointing out there was something deeply wrong with the country that you had more than just globalists.

00:07:49.000 You actually had infiltration of communism.

00:07:51.000 I think people today just forget because they just look at it through, you know, Robert Redford movie, right, The Way We Were.

00:07:58.000 They don't realize how this whole issue of communism really gripped the nation.

00:08:03.000 And Buckley, when he went to Yale, kind of wrote this book that put him on the national scene right away, sir.

00:08:10.000 Yes. Well, what happened was, as you said, yeah, they exposed the communist spy rings.

00:08:17.000 And at first, there was a lot of resistance to that. People didn't think it was really happening.

00:08:21.000 Then the evidence comes out. And we talked about this, I think, in our first conversation.

00:08:26.000 Nixon was the guy who saw there was something off about the blue blood, Alger Hiss, and that sort of, you know, dumpy, frumpy accuser, Whitaker Chambers, who is no joke, by the way, right?

00:08:40.000 He's a big editor at Time Magazine, brilliant writer and journalist, that it was Chambers who was telling the truth.

00:08:47.000 Well, Buckley was following this really closely. Why? He's at Yale University.

00:08:51.000 And he goes there in 1946, who was part of that first group after World War II, right, the GI Bill.

00:08:59.000 Buckley didn't need the GI Bill, but he's surrounded by a lot of guys who could use it, who would not have been at a place like Yale if they didn't have that opportunity.

00:09:09.000 Why? Because Yale was strictly blue blood before them. And Buckley looked like he was blue blood, but he wasn't really.

00:09:18.000 And this is really important to understand. Buckley grew up in a huge estate, what's called the northwest corner of Connecticut.

00:09:25.000 It's New England. Beautiful area. The house is still there. 47 acres, magnificent estate.

00:09:31.000 Looks like the White House, looks like the north portico of the White House, raised with servants and groomsmen in the 1930s and 40s.

00:09:38.000 But the Buckleys were Catholic. They were super devout Catholics.

00:09:43.000 So when they worshiped in their little town of Sharon, Connecticut, they did not go to the beautiful historic Episcopal Church or the Congregational Church, which are always the main ones in Connecticut.

00:09:56.000 No, they went around the corner, almost into an alleyway where there was a little Catholic church called St. Bernard's that had been thrown up overnight because suddenly there were more Catholics living in the area.

00:10:08.000 And this is really important. People don't believe me when I tell them this, Steve. Buckley and his siblings and parents didn't go alone to worship on Sunday.

00:10:18.000 They took the household servants with them, white and black and Hispanic because Buckley spoke all these languages. They lived all over the world.

00:10:27.000 That's who got in the Buckley's big Buicks and drove around the famous Green and Sharon and went to church. Buckley was an altar boy.

00:10:34.000 He and his three brothers were all altar boys in this very modest little Catholic church.

00:10:39.000 So I realized when I was writing this book, that's the beginning of Buckley's connection with what later was called the silent majority, middle Americans.

00:10:50.000 Today, we call them MAGA. We call the people who are who are excluded by the elites.

00:10:55.000 So Buckley's raised with wealth. His father made a fortune and lost it in oil.

00:11:00.000 His father is super conservative because he saw the Mexican Revolution up front.

00:11:05.000 People should know, even historians forget this. The first great revolution in Mexico, in the world, was not the Soviet Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

00:11:17.000 It was the Mexican Revolution, 1910 to 1920. Buckley's father was a casualty of it.

00:11:24.000 And, but not a passive one. He actually organized guerrilla resistance. I found this in the research.

00:11:32.000 He had the weapons of the time when guys with mercenaries with Winchester rifles crossing the border to try to stop the Mexican Revolution.

00:11:42.000 It didn't work. OK, so he goes up north, takes his family.

00:11:46.000 But hang on. But hang on. But hang on. But hang on. I want to make sure people know this because it's very important for the Buckley's development is that one of the main reasons he did that is his Catholicism.

00:11:55.000 Remember, the Mexican Revolution is a revolution as bitter as the French Revolution.

00:12:01.000 You know, this is the start of the revolution of the 20th century, but it was bitter and almost went back to the French Revolution of being anti-clerical.

00:12:07.000 You know, the Freemasons and, you know, and they had the the secularist and quite frankly, with with the beginning of communist influence was after the church.

00:12:19.000 And Buckley's father, not just about oil and about material goods, but he was an ardent Catholic.

00:12:25.000 And there were a lot of serious Catholic businessmen that actually financed the, you know, try to finance the stop of how radical this Mexican Revolution was because it was anti-clerical and killing so many priests. Correct?

00:12:37.000 Yes.

00:12:38.000 Yes. Buckley's father was a financier of the Cristero counter-revolution.

00:12:43.000 That was a Catholic counter-revolution in the 1920s.

00:12:46.000 Right around the time Bill Buckley was born, born in 1925, almost exactly 100 years ago.

00:12:51.000 So this is the atmosphere the world Buckley's raised in.

00:12:54.000 Very unusual.

00:12:55.000 It's not Kennedy-style Irish Catholic.

00:12:59.000 It's almost Spanish-Mexican counter-reformation Catholicism.

00:13:04.000 They really believe, you know, we have the post-liberal group out now that we hear a lot about, super-educated Catholics who think America and the Western democracies should have a closer association with the church.

00:13:19.000 Well, Buckley grew up in a family that believed that.

00:13:21.000 And his brother-in-law, Brent Bozell, became the first, I would argue, of the post-liberals before the word even existed.

00:13:29.000 He lived in Spain for much of his life, a throne and altar Catholicism. 0.82

00:13:34.000 Buckley comes out of that.

00:13:35.000 He goes off to Yale University, right?

00:13:37.000 He's taking his first classes, and he's getting instruction from professors who tell him, well, you know, the Bible, religion, Catholicism, it's another superstition.

00:13:50.000 It's like people in the deepest jungles in the Philippines or Africa who have these rituals they follow. 0.98

00:13:57.000 Buckley can't believe he's hearing it.

00:13:59.000 And I'll tell you something, Steve, this is why it's important to do podcasts like yours and others.

00:14:04.000 One of the first podcasts I did was with a very famous journalist in our moment, Andrew Sullivan, who is Catholic.

00:14:12.000 He's kind of centrist, liberal, raised in England with an Irish family.

00:14:17.000 He told me, because he read my book, I was fascinated by Buckley's history.

00:14:22.000 He said when Andrew Sullivan went to Harvard in the 1980s as a scholarship student, he could not believe his professors never discussed the Bible as possibly being revealed truth.

00:14:36.000 It was just like an artifact from an ancient time.

00:14:41.000 Well, Buckley sees that he's sitting in the classroom, he can't believe what he's hearing.

00:14:45.000 Buckley, during World War II, taught himself speed writing.

00:14:49.000 So he's able to write down everything the professor is saying in the classroom.

00:14:55.000 Buckley won the competition, super stiff competition, to become what was then called the chairman, we would say editor, of the Yale Daily News.

00:15:06.000 Emphasis on daily.

00:15:08.000 It was also called the OCD, oldest college daily in America.

00:15:13.000 How important was it?

00:15:15.000 Henry Luce, the founder of Time Magazine, got a start at the Yale Daily News.

00:15:20.000 A guy named Kingman Brewster, who was a hero to Buckley and a leader of the America First Committee, got a start at the Yale Daily News.

00:15:30.000 Buckley aims his sights as that when he gets at Yale.

00:15:34.000 And I talked to his classmates who said they'd never seen anything like Buckley.

00:15:39.000 The brilliance, the dynamism, and the ambition.

00:15:43.000 You know, Buckley would meet you and he didn't care if you were rich or poor.

00:15:47.000 He didn't care what your background was.

00:15:49.000 He wanted to know, what do you think?

00:15:51.000 What do you believe?

00:15:52.000 What do you think about communism?

00:15:54.000 Communism, because communism's blowing up in Central and Eastern Europe.

00:15:58.000 And Steve, you know this very well.

00:16:00.000 Who's bearing the brunt of those communist insurrections behind the Iron Curtain?

00:16:06.000 It's the priests.

00:16:07.000 It's the clergy. 0.99

00:16:08.000 They're forcing them out of their jobs or killing them.

00:16:12.000 And Buckley sees this is going on in a different way around him.

00:16:18.000 There's kind of a war on religion and a war on the free enterprise economics he was raised with, right?

00:16:25.000 So Buckley becomes, in the old term, you and I still remember it, the big man on campus.

00:16:31.000 He's the best known, most popular guy in his entire Yale class, which, by the way, was two or three times larger than any previous class because the end of World War II and the beginning of the GI Bill.

00:16:46.000 So Buckley is becoming famous while he's a college student.

00:16:50.000 The way we can kind of get that because we have these really prominent young guys, you know, the late Charlie Kirk or Nick Fuentes or guys on the left who make their bones, they make their names when they're super young.

00:17:04.000 Buckley invented that by using the college newspaper to wage war against Yale University.

00:17:11.000 And in one of the first editorials he wrote when he won the competition to be the chairman, that meant he could write a daily editorial.

00:17:21.000 And I talked to classmates who said before Buckley came along, the newspaper would come in your office and you'd scan it to see how the Bulldogs, the Yale Bulldogs were doing in the game against Cornell or Harvard.

00:17:33.000 Once Buckley came around, you went right to the editorial.

00:17:36.000 He was the first student journalist to call out his professors by name.

00:17:41.000 And so he named this guy who he said is treating the classroom as a pulpit to try to persuade Christians like Bill Buckley that their religion doesn't count for anything.

00:17:55.000 He couldn't believe it.

00:17:56.000 So he writes his very, very famous book, God and Man at Yale.

00:18:02.000 Right.

00:18:03.000 It's great just from the title there on.

00:18:05.000 And Steve has a fantastic subtitle.

00:18:08.000 This is why Buckley was, in my view, a genius.

00:18:11.000 The subtitle is The Superstitions of Academic Freedom.

00:18:16.000 He takes the professor's attack on religion and says, well, maybe your super progressive point of view is its own kind of fake religion.

00:18:30.000 And it just blows up.

00:18:31.000 It became the biggest nonfiction bestseller.

00:18:34.000 But hang on.

00:18:35.000 But hang on.

00:18:37.000 But hang on.

00:18:38.000 But hang on.

00:18:39.000 This is so important.

00:18:40.000 The publisher, nobody's, when this book's getting ready to come out of doing it, this is really public intellectuals or intellectual history of Yale University.

00:18:49.000 They think this has such a tiny market.

00:18:52.000 It's kind of like your Buckley book.

00:18:53.000 They think this has such a tiny market.

00:18:55.000 They can't possibly think that this is of interest to middle class Americans.

00:19:00.000 Talk to me about this.

00:19:01.000 This book blows up so far past expectations because you're basically, it's a student talking about the woke professors at Yale in the 1950s.

00:19:14.000 Right?

00:19:15.000 Yeah.

00:19:16.000 So people think it's such, the publishers think nobody's going to be interested in this.

00:19:19.000 The book blows up to be one of the biggest books of the year.

00:19:22.000 And back in the time when people were putting out heavy duty books all the time of nonfiction, sir.

00:19:28.000 Yes.

00:19:29.000 So Buckley knows he's got something and his publisher does.

00:19:34.000 Of course, the mainstream publishers aren't going to touch a book like this.

00:19:37.000 My publisher, Random House, right?

00:19:39.000 They're not going to touch a book like this.

00:19:41.000 But there's a new publisher called Regnery.

00:19:44.000 And I think a lot of your viewers are probably familiar with it because they did a lot of conservative books.

00:19:49.000 But Bill Buckley kind of created that firm as an important publishing house.

00:19:53.000 And look, he had help from his father.

00:19:55.000 Buckley's father was behind him.

00:19:57.000 He invested in the book.

00:19:58.000 He invested in ads.

00:20:00.000 But here's what happened.

00:20:01.000 The book is circulating.

00:20:03.000 And the Yale establishment, the administration thinks, all right, we know this is Bill Buckley.

00:20:09.000 He's a very bright guy.

00:20:10.000 He's a good debater, superstar college debater.

00:20:14.000 He's very clever at making his points.

00:20:16.000 But all he's doing is writing about, like, textbooks in economics and religion.

00:20:21.000 Who cares?

00:20:22.000 But Buckley was also a really excellent writer.

00:20:26.000 And what he did, this is a lesson.

00:20:29.000 I hear from a lot of young people, a lot of young conservatives who go through my website, samtananous.com, and they send me notes and they're fascinated by Buckley.

00:20:37.000 How did he do it?

00:20:38.000 Well, one thing I tell them was he really studied his professors closely.

00:20:43.000 He learned from them.

00:20:44.000 He wanted to write a book they would respect.

00:20:48.000 He didn't want to sound like a guy from flyover country who's going after the elite.

00:20:56.000 He's a guy inside the ivory tower, right, who's going to show the emperor's new clothes.

00:21:04.000 And what happens is it's perfectly timed with Yale's 250th anniversary.

00:21:11.000 It's having a huge party for itself.

00:21:14.000 Buckley's book comes out, and Life Magazine, which was huge then.

00:21:18.000 It's 7 million readers.

00:21:20.000 Buckley is like the kid you invite to your son's birthday party and tells you the son is a dope addict, right?

00:21:26.000 He's blowing up the whole thing.

00:21:29.000 And he does it with style and wit.

00:21:31.000 So when he goes out on the campus tours, does the book publishing tour just the way guys like me do now, he's always cool and calm.

00:21:41.000 And he kind of makes funny needles rather than denounces and attacks.

00:21:45.000 So people think, wow, this is an Ivy League guy.

00:21:48.000 Like, this is not some Yahoo.

00:21:50.000 This is like this super intellectual, smart journalist.

00:21:56.000 And what Buckley saw was that if he made the case in the right way, the world would stand up and take notice.

00:22:04.000 And they did.

00:22:05.000 And the book started flying off the shelves.

00:22:07.000 So I found an ad his publisher took out days after the book was published saying, don't worry, we'll have 5,000 more copies.

00:22:14.000 It's kind of like, you know, random house saying, well, let's rush the new order out, you know, let's get the books there.

00:22:21.000 And it got bigger and bigger.

00:22:24.000 And Buckley knew how to present himself as sort of the voice and promoter of his own book.

00:22:32.000 And he wouldn't just thump his chest and say, look at me, I'm a smart guy with a best seller.

00:22:37.000 He would say, no, here's what the problem is.

00:22:40.000 You know, here's the thing we have to do something about.

00:22:43.000 A little bit like Charlie Kirk that way, because he spent a lot of time on campuses.

00:22:47.000 Now, one difference is Charlie Kirk liked to duke it out with students.

00:22:52.000 Buckley would take on professors.

00:22:54.000 He'd say, show me the smartest professor you have at Harvard, and I'll debate him.

00:22:58.000 Right?

00:22:59.000 Tucker Carlson, remember, used to like do that.

00:23:01.000 Bring out your English professor.

00:23:03.000 And I'll speak to him in three languages.

00:23:05.000 This actually happened in St. Louis.

00:23:07.000 Some guy, an English professor insulted him publicly.

00:23:10.000 And Buckley said, oh, yeah, let's have a debate.

00:23:13.000 You choose your language.

00:23:14.000 You want it to be in English, French, or Spanish, because I speak all three fluently.

00:23:18.000 Right?

00:23:19.000 So he's like bigger, larger than life.

00:23:22.000 And everybody starts to realize he may be the leading what Buckley himself called a counter-revolution

00:23:32.000 of, wait for the phrase, radical conservatives.

00:23:36.000 He invented the term.

00:23:38.000 Right.

00:23:39.000 I just want to make sure we're going to go to break here in a moment.

00:23:42.000 We're going to go to break here in a moment.

00:23:43.000 I want to thank Birch Gold for sponsoring us.

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00:23:55.000 I don't want to bury the lead.

00:24:00.000 You said, no, he said it was coming out on Yale's 250th anniversary.

00:24:04.000 The nation's 250th anniversary is coming up next year.

00:24:10.000 So, no, these folks think, hey, look, we love the United States.

00:24:13.000 We support the United States.

00:24:14.000 But we're the original gangsters.

00:24:16.000 We were here, what, 80 years before Yale was formed, 80 years before the revolution.

00:24:22.000 Harvard and Yale, they go way back.

00:24:24.000 And what they attack Buckley on, correct me if I'm wrong, I found it fascinating.

00:24:28.000 They go, well, one of the problems with Buckley is he doesn't quite get our program at Yale.

00:24:34.000 And the reason he doesn't get the program, because we've been here longer than the nation, right, by almost 100 years.

00:24:39.000 He doesn't really get it because he's a Catholic, right?

00:24:43.000 They actually went, the line of attack and a lot of the editorials they put out is that Buckley doesn't really understand Yale or understand the way we roll because he's the ultimate outsider.

00:24:53.000 The two ultimate outsiders at the time were Catholics and Jews, right?

00:24:56.000 So he says, we don't, he doesn't understand us because he's a hidebound Catholic. 0.96

00:25:00.000 Give me a minute on that, Sam, before we go to break.

00:25:02.000 There's a fantastic line another conservative of the period had, Peter Barrett.

00:25:07.000 He said, Catholic baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberal.

00:25:12.000 Very true. Hang on. Buckley's the book is not just about a man.

00:25:21.000 It's about a man in a period of time.

00:25:23.000 That period of time would be post-war America in the radical conservative revolution that manifests itself later with Barry Goldward, with Richard Nixon, with Ronald Reagan, and with Donald John Trump.

00:25:36.000 A revolution, folks, that you have been the tip of the tip of the spear.

00:25:40.000 If you want to see the intellectual background of how it got started, the books by Sam Tannenhaus, it's Buckley.

00:25:47.000 Make sure you get it.

00:25:48.000 By the way, give it as a gift.

00:25:50.000 Not only do the people think you're classy, but at a thousand pages, they'll say, hey, you guys are heavy duty readers.

00:25:59.000 Of course, we know you are.

00:26:00.000 You're going to love it.

00:26:01.000 Every feedback I've gotten from every person that bought the book on the first time is they absolutely love it.

00:26:06.000 Johnny Kahn's going to take us out with American Heart.

00:26:10.000 I couldn't think of a better song to take us out for the first half.

00:26:13.000 John Kahn, one of the original partners with Andrew Breitbart at Breitbart.

00:26:18.000 Talk about another just giant.

00:26:20.000 Buckley, the man in the revolution.

00:26:23.000 Sam Tannenhaus, the author.

00:26:25.000 Sam is going to be with us today.

00:26:26.000 He's also going to be with us during the week on The Morning Show this week.

00:26:31.000 Short commercial break.

00:26:32.000 We're going to be back in the warm in just a moment.

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00:32:13.000 Okay, welcome back.

00:32:14.000 Sam Tannehouse is with us.

00:32:16.000 The book is Buckley.

00:32:17.000 Sam, I also want to mention, first off, everybody that bought the book and got back to me in the interim has absolutely loved the book.

00:32:25.000 And they've given it as gifts, and so I know a lot of our audiences want to give them to young people.

00:32:30.000 But also, if you know a boomer in your life, get it to them, because they're going to see a side of Buckley that they've never seen before.

00:32:36.000 But I have to mention, since we spent so much time in the first two hours talking about Whitaker Chambers and really the pre-war America, people bought the Whitaker Chambers books.

00:32:47.000 I think Amazon sold out, and I've gotten feedback.

00:32:50.000 People absolutely love that.

00:32:51.000 Give me a minute on Chambers.

00:32:53.000 Well, Chambers is one of Buckley's heroes, first of all.

00:32:56.000 Chambers is really important because he was the guy who had been far left, actually been a Soviet spy, who defected, realized he was a Christian, and that Christianity was the only faith that had the conviction and the values to contest totalitarianism.

00:33:18.000 And so he became really the originator of what we think of today as a kind of Christian anti-communism.

00:33:26.000 And he was a hero to Buckley.

00:33:28.000 Buckley and his siblings grew up reading Chambers and admiring him.

00:33:32.000 And Buckley came to Chambers' rescue in his last years.

00:33:35.000 Chambers became, no surprise, persona non grata.

00:33:38.000 People hated him.

00:33:39.000 And Buckley saw that he was a great man and kind of became his sponsor in his last years.

00:33:45.000 Great act of friendship by Buckley.

00:33:48.000 What does it say about America then, but even America today or the West, that two of the stalwarts against the communists were not simply Christians, but not mainstream.

00:34:01.000 I mean, Whitaker Chambers came, and I tell people, look at Whitaker Chambers for lived Christianity. 0.69

00:34:07.000 I think he was a Quaker, right? 0.53

00:34:09.000 He was. 0.90

00:34:10.000 When he converted, he went all the way from an atheist, hardcore Marxist, atheist, intellectual, this thing is ridiculous, it's a superstition, to a lived Christianity that's almost back to first century Christianity. 0.97

00:34:22.000 And Buckley's a traditional Catholic, Latin mass Catholic.

00:34:26.000 I mean, Buckley would be what we call trad Catholic today, not a mainstream thing.

00:34:31.000 What does it say that there were not mainstream Protestant churches?

00:34:35.000 Evangelicalism was not. 0.93

00:34:36.000 That was looked at as also, even the Billy Graham thing, everything about revivalism and evangelical back then was looked at as like, this is not.

00:34:44.000 But the power structure in our country was WASP, a white Anglo-Saxon mainstream Protestantism. 0.56

00:34:51.000 What does it tell you that two of the fiercest warriors against the communists were kind of on the margins of Christianity?

00:34:58.000 I'm not saying the Catholic churches, but Buckley's interpretation of it.

00:35:01.000 Well, they were on the margins of what we would think of as a kind of socially respectable Protestantism.

00:35:07.000 You know, one of somebody, not a professor of Bill's, but of his brother, Reed, who became a writer, was a famous scholar, not remembered today very well, called Clance Brooks, who was a literary scholar from Louisiana.

00:35:22.000 When I was doing my research, I found that back in the 1930s, he'd made some of the same arguments about liberal Protestantism that Chambers and then Buckley did, that this is really kind of like a slightly church-inflected New Dealism.

00:35:38.000 That's really what it became.

00:35:40.000 It became progressive politics with a kind of what we would call woke ideology that almost seemed more important than liturgy, the Bible, the traditions of the church.

00:35:53.000 And as you say, Buckley was very much a trad Catholic.

00:35:57.000 He was doing the Latin Mass till the end of his days.

00:36:01.000 He and Francis found priests who would do the Latin Mass.

00:36:05.000 Exactly. Back when the Latin Mass was hard to get to.

00:36:08.000 Sam, two things for this hour I want to make sure we finish with is, because people know the National Review.

00:36:16.000 Most people know William F. Buckley's National Review, but the way it started, how young he was when it started, he was a wunderkind.

00:36:22.000 But before that, and this goes back to, in your book, it's fascinating.

00:36:26.000 Buckley changes in the military.

00:36:28.000 The military changed him.

00:36:29.000 He was an officer.

00:36:30.000 It toughened him up a bit.

00:36:32.000 He got to actually lead men who were not the Yale types or the private school types.

00:36:37.000 The military, you can tell, was important in the formation of William F. Buckley as a man.

00:36:42.000 But then after all this happens, he wants to go.

00:36:45.000 He really, his first focus is the Central Intelligence Agency, correct?

00:36:49.000 Yeah, he had a professor at Yale, brilliant, fascinating guy named Wilmore Kendall, who had been in the OSS, right, the Office of Strategic Services that preceded the CIA World War II operation that had many brilliant people doing analysis, counterintelligence.

00:37:05.000 And Wilmore Kendall, after the Korean War started, which happened right after Buckley graduated in 1950, right at the time he got married in this remarkable ceremony out in Vancouver, because Buckley's wife, Pat Taylor, was richer than he was and became famous socialite in New York.

00:37:23.000 They had the wedding to top all weddings in Vancouver, thousands of people there.

00:37:28.000 Then suddenly North Korea invades South Korea, and Buckley was ready to become a teacher at Yale.

00:37:34.000 He was going to teach Spanish there and write his book.

00:37:39.000 And his mentor, Wilmore Kendall, who was doing intelligence now for the military and the CIA, tells him, well, if you want to make a difference, I can set you up with some people who were operating this new intelligence agency.

00:37:54.000 So Buckley goes to Washington, and he meets two guys, one of them is a famous writer and thinker, James Burnham, who's very much in the news today, one of the originators of the modern conservative argument, and he became a mentor to Buckley.

00:38:10.900 The other was a hot shot who came out of the army named E. Howard Hunt, Watergate fame slash notoriety.

00:38:20.900 He became Buckley's station chief in Mexico City, because Mexico City had the biggest office, CIA clandestine office in the hemisphere, because there are a lot of communists down there, a lot of Soviet operatives, and Latin America looks like it may be.

00:38:40.900 Maybe really tilting to the Soviet sphere.

00:38:42.900 So Buckley was sent to Mexico City because of his great Spanish.

00:38:45.900 And I want to tell people this.

00:38:47.900 Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.

00:38:50.900 I also want to say, 10 years removed from the CIA office and stationed in Mexico City with E. Howard Hunt, founded by E. Howard Hunt, one of the most controversial parts of the Kennedy assassination drama, correct?

00:39:06.900 Correct. I mean, we still haven't quite gotten to the, we haven't gotten to the bottom of the, we haven't gotten to the bottom of that station in relation.

00:39:14.900 And E. Howard Hunt's role, or proposed role, or rumored role, or mythical role in the Kennedy assassination.

00:39:21.900 E. Howard Hunt was a, well, behind the scenes, my point is, he is a, he's a power player, although, and a wild man, doesn't play by the rules, even at a relatively junior level. He's, he's a guy making a difference.

00:39:36.900 I mean, Buckley and Burnham, the managerial revolution may be one of the most important books ever written in the United States about the industrial, really post war America and how organization man is going to take charge.

00:39:48.900 It's really the beginning of kind of globalization in the way that if you can't measure it, you can't manage him. It's all, it's all Burnham.

00:39:55.900 Anybody who wants to know how important James Burnham is, should read a book, or reread a book, because everybody knows it, George Orwell's 1984 came directly out of James Burnham.

00:40:08.900 He'd been totally impressed by Burnham's argument that there was a secret, what we would call the deep state, right? What, what Burnham called the managerial elite. That was his term for the deep state. And Orwell actually has an entire manuscript, if you remember 1984, that circulates underground. That's kind of his version of James Burnham.

00:40:34.900 So Burnham was huge. And, but Hunt was a different guy. You're right. He was the operative. Burnham's the intellectual. Hunt is the counterintelligence operative. If you remember the revolution in Guatemala that was done in the early 1950s, the first big CIA victory was done through a kind of counter programming, side war, they called it, psychological warfare. Burnham had the idea. Hunt carried it out.

00:41:04.900 He was Buckley. He was Buckley's boss. So one of the strains, the lines of storytelling in the book is Buckley as a CIA asset, as they called him back then, in the war against communism.

00:41:17.640 So Buckley's in Mexico City with his wife, his newlywed, right? Their newlyweds are about to give, she's about to give birth to their, their child, Christopher Buckley, the famous writer. This is 1951. And he says, oh, gosh, that book I wrote about Yale, it's blowing up back in the United States. He's in Mexico City while this is happening.

00:41:38.460 So he goes to his boss, Howard Hunt, and he says, Howard. And Howard Hunt said, Buckley and he were always operational equals, right? Seven years apart in date of birth. Hunt's a little older, but he recognizes. He said Buckley's a genius. He's super sophisticated intellectually. And Buckley did some CIA missions.

00:42:00.440 He translated an important book into English and then back into Spanish that circulated in the early anti-communist years, but written by a Peruvian communist. It's communist. So Buckley's getting all this experience, but all the actions back home.

00:42:16.020 So he tells Howard, I'm going to leave the CIA. I'm going to go back and try to live a public life. Leading a public life meant becoming an ally of Joe McCarthy. And we talked about that. Some of my favorite chapters in the story I tell about Buckley and Joe McCarthy, a much different relationship than people realize.

00:42:34.520 Bill Buckley was very close to Joe McCarthy, as Jack Kennedy was, by the way, and Nixon for a time, right?

00:42:43.720 But hang on, hang on, hang on.

00:42:44.660 This generation is full of warriors.

00:42:46.780 I want to get into, exactly. Buckley's ideal of a life well lived and the ideal of a man in post-war America was both an intellectual, but a man of action, right?

00:43:02.080 He said he felt you had to be both, an intellectual, public intellectual, but also a man of action. He just wasn't for going to the university and becoming a scholar and just living that sheltered life.

00:43:14.360 Buckley was drawn to this, and he realized, and the people he looked at that he admired were both intellectuals and smart people, but also people that would go out there and take risk, right?

00:43:23.800 And actually confront and be kind of intellectual warriors are in his regard, even, you know, because he was always head in the back, you know, doing CIA operations.

00:43:32.680 That's what I found amazing about your book. You kind of tie it together.

00:43:36.180 But let's go to McCarthy. We have, people don't understand, Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Bill Buckley.

00:43:42.840 Today, McCarthy's thing is trashed, right?

00:43:45.880 You see some of the people that people admired most about defeating the Soviet Union and standing up for American values.

00:43:52.700 They admired McCarthy.

00:43:54.880 What Buckley saw in the book he wrote with his brother-in-law, Brent Bozell, I think it's a really interesting observation, insight they had.

00:44:03.520 And by the way, somebody who was going to publish an essay Buckley wrote defending McCarthy and changed his mind, he told me it was an act of cowardice, was a guy named Henry Kissinger, an anti-communist who published a magazine in these days.

00:44:20.860 And Buckley was a bigger guy than Kissinger back then.

00:44:23.680 I interviewed Kissinger a few times for this book.

00:44:25.560 And he said the first time he met Buckley, Buckley took him to lunch at the New York Yacht Club.

00:44:31.460 And Kissinger was a young Harvard professor.

00:44:33.660 He said, this guy was out of my league, socially out of my league.

00:44:38.020 You know, he's operating in a different sphere.

00:44:40.840 And so there's a great exchange.

00:44:43.140 And Kissinger remembered it verbatim 50 years later.

00:44:48.180 Kissinger says to Buckley in his naivete, he says, how come you guys on the right, Kissinger's sort of in the middle,

00:44:54.040 a little bit left back then, he says, how come you guys on the right are so aggressive in the way you attack people when liberals aren't?

00:45:04.080 And Buckley just smiles at him and says, they haven't calibrated you yet, Henry.

00:45:10.040 In other words, they haven't figured out what your ideology is.

00:45:13.940 Once they do, they'll come after you too.

00:45:16.700 And Kissinger never forgot that because Buckley was right.

00:45:20.060 So that's why when Kissinger went to work for Nixon in the White House, he had Buckley come visit him all the time.

00:45:25.480 Well, Buckley is now realizing he's got a singular place in the culture.

00:45:32.780 Look, there are other conservatives around with very big names.

00:45:35.820 Ayn Rand, right, with Atlas Shrugged, it's going to be published soon, and the Fountainhead.

00:45:40.820 There are people like Burnham.

00:45:42.480 There are people like Whitaker Chambers.

00:45:44.160 They're very well-known, but they're gun-shy.

00:45:48.720 They're gun-shy.

00:45:50.040 They get attacked, denounced, ritually all the time.

00:45:55.400 It's easy to mock them in a totally liberal-dominated culture.

00:46:00.520 What does Buckley do?

00:46:01.740 He says, come on.

00:46:02.920 We know the phrase, debate me.

00:46:05.400 Come on.

00:46:06.240 Well, take me to Harvard.

00:46:07.780 Put your best guy out there.

00:46:09.340 You want me to defend my book?

00:46:11.180 Here's what I found.

00:46:12.240 And you're right about another thing, Steve.

00:46:14.500 I want to make sure we don't lose sight of.

00:46:17.420 Buckley wasn't just denounced when that book came out for being a Catholic who didn't get it.

00:46:23.900 He was virtually accused of being an agent of the true conspiracy in America, not the communist conspiracy, the Vatican conspiracy to take over America.

00:46:37.840 This is what they said about Buckley.

00:46:39.040 Very respected people, including at the upper echelons of the Yale administration.

00:46:46.060 In fact, I saw a correspondence where graduates of Yale, Jews and Catholics, because there were quotas against both of them, are saying, what, you have to be a Protestant to write about Yale?

00:46:57.400 And then one guy just said to the president, you're smearing him.

00:47:01.160 You're smearing him as a Catholic.

00:47:02.840 You're saying he doesn't have an argument to make because he's a Catholic and not a triple named or Episcopalian, right?

00:47:11.280 So that's what Buckley sees is that's the opposition.

00:47:15.640 He wants to take it on.

00:47:17.540 He's a happy warrior.

00:47:21.420 That's one difference between Buckley and Chambers.

00:47:24.240 Chambers is a great figure.

00:47:25.500 We know this.

00:47:26.400 But Chambers had suffered a lot.

00:47:29.160 Buckley is a guy who's had a lot of things go his way.

00:47:32.480 He's just as serious minded.

00:47:35.100 But he has a kind of confidence and youth.

00:47:37.800 Look, he's a great looking guy.

00:47:39.560 He's a great talker.

00:47:41.160 People, you know, they meet him.

00:47:42.240 They're attracted to him.

00:47:43.940 Cosmic presence at Yale, somebody said.

00:47:46.020 So he goes out there and he's a one man opposition.

00:47:50.120 He starts a magazine.

00:47:51.160 He starts writing columns.

00:47:52.460 He's writing the books.

00:47:53.560 He goes on TV.

00:47:54.800 Even before he started his famous show, Firing Line, he would go on any talk show that would have him.

00:48:00.240 And there were a few shows, programs like The Author Meets the Critic.

00:48:04.820 And they bring Buckley on.

00:48:06.260 And he demolished whoever was on the other side.

00:48:08.680 He made it fun.

00:48:10.220 He made it fun.

00:48:11.380 He's clever.

00:48:12.220 He's amusing.

00:48:13.160 He tells jokes.

00:48:14.040 He's got the kind of eyebrow thing where he winks at the audience.

00:48:17.960 And it's all working for him.

00:48:19.400 And this, as you say, when he's in his 20s.

00:48:22.740 So he starts National Review at the age of 29.

00:48:26.940 Starts a magazine because he knows to win the argument, you have to shape the terms of the argument.

00:48:34.860 That was his explanation for why McCarthy was finally brought down.

00:48:39.720 Not because McCarthy didn't have a case to make, but because the liberals were able to pin him.

00:48:45.480 They pin him in a corner. 0.99

00:48:46.780 They say, this is a crazy man. 0.99

00:48:49.080 This is a fanatic. 1.00

00:48:52.360 This is a fascist. 0.95

00:48:53.900 We're familiar with these terms, I think.

00:48:56.700 And that's how they go after McCarthy.

00:48:58.880 Hang on.

00:48:59.560 I want to leave this hour.

00:49:01.580 We're going to have you back.

00:49:02.740 I think we're going to try to do it.

00:49:04.120 I said it was going to be Wednesday.

00:49:05.940 I think it may be Thursday.

00:49:07.020 We're going to work with you at the best time.

00:49:08.320 But I want to have it on the morning show.

00:49:10.240 Before I leave, just so we've got a couple of minutes.

00:49:12.100 Kennedy, both Jack and Bobby, and Bobby worked for McCarthy, Nixon, Roy Cohn, Bill Buckley, people that later on became kind of giants in the American landscape.

00:49:26.180 Although Roy Cohn has become bigger, I think, even today because he was one of the mentors for Donald Trump.

00:49:31.400 What was it they saw in McCarthy that they admired?

00:49:37.880 Sincerity, for one thing.

00:49:39.220 He meant it.

00:49:39.920 But he meant what he was saying.

00:49:43.300 One of my favorite scenes in the book is something Bill Buckley told me about when I interviewed him.

00:49:47.980 McCarthy's going down.

00:49:49.520 They're going after him.

00:49:50.640 They're attacking him.

00:49:51.800 They're about to take him under.

00:49:54.020 And Buckley, who was a great writer, flies.

00:49:57.140 You could take the shuttle back then.

00:49:58.540 It's 1954.

00:49:59.900 Goes to see Joe McCarthy and his wife, Jeannie, in their little house in Capitol Hill.

00:50:04.540 And Buckley's going to write a speech for him.

00:50:06.340 He's going to write a speech that McCarthy will deliver to gain some respectability back.

00:50:12.100 So Buckley's really tired.

00:50:13.720 You know, he's been going nonstop all day.

00:50:16.040 And so he says, Joe, I have to go to sleep.

00:50:18.420 My mind's not working.

00:50:20.180 Wake me up in the morning and then we'll finish the speech.

00:50:22.860 And then the knock comes on the door and Buckley can't believe it's already the morning because it feels like he's hardly gone to sleep.

00:50:31.920 McCarthy calls him out.

00:50:33.640 McCarthy is on the floor in his bathrobe tracing railroad line routes through China.

00:50:42.700 Right. 0.66

00:50:42.940 So this is not quite the ignoramus, everybody's calling him.

00:50:46.660 And he's in a bathrobe and Buckley looks up and he sees it's one o'clock in the morning. 1.00

00:50:52.640 And he says, Joe, you son of a bitch. 1.00

00:50:56.140 What are you doing? 1.00

00:50:57.180 And Joseph, well, I got so excited I had to show you.

00:51:00.540 He has to show.

00:51:01.440 He's figuring out, you know, how the Chinese are going to invade, right? 0.99

00:51:06.920 Formosa, as they called it then, Taiwan.

00:51:09.140 And he meant it.

00:51:10.380 He meant all this stuff.

00:51:11.600 And McCarthy, whether he's right or wrong or exaggerating or mixing up the facts, whether you hate him or love him, he means what he says.

00:51:21.960 And it's an era when not many people are doing that.

00:51:25.820 Hang on.

00:51:26.420 We're going to get you back this week.

00:51:28.060 Sam Tannenhaus, the book is Buckley, The Man in the Revolution.

00:51:32.120 Get it for yourself.

00:51:33.880 Get it for your friends.

00:51:34.940 Get it for the kids on your Christmas lift.

00:51:37.280 Sam, where do people go for your sight?

00:51:38.960 Where do they go to catch up with all your writings?

00:51:42.220 Sam Tannenhaus dot com.

00:51:44.820 You see my name there?

00:51:46.040 S-A-M. 1.00

00:51:46.760 That's one word.

00:51:48.300 Tannenhaus dot com.

00:51:49.700 And you can see all my stuff there.

00:51:50.920 Thank you, brother.

00:51:52.540 Let's say if you want a great Christmas gift, it's right here.

00:51:55.680 The book is Buckley.

00:51:57.180 We're going to be back either Wednesday or Thursday this week.

00:51:59.760 I'll make an announcement with Sam to continue the story of Bill Buckley in America.

00:52:06.280 See you tomorrow morning at 10 a.m.

00:52:10.840 Eastern Standard Time when you're going to be back in the war room.

00:52:15.340 We're going to leave you with the right stuff from Tom Wolfe and the great masterpiece from Philip Kaufman.

00:52:21.800 Couldn't think of a better way to take us out today.

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Bannon's War Room - December 16, 2025

WarRoom Battleground EP 911： Buckley And The Conservative Revolution

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