July 3, 2025 • 35 mins
Katy Brodsky Falco details how women’s health has been defunded. Sam Tanenhaus examines his new book Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean
we don't have a great show for you today. Sam
tennant House stops by to talk about his new book Buckley,
The Life and the Revolution.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
That Changed America.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
But first we have Katie Brodski Falco on Women's House
and how it's been defunded.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Welcome to Fast Politics, Katie.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
You occupy the nonprofit space, but in a very interesting way.
Tell us about crime Lab, which is this incredible thing
you created, and then go from there.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
Sure, so I'll tell you kind of the genesis story
how I got to where I am now. My work,
the thread across all of my work has always been
justice reform. So I worked in criminal justice reform for
twenty years, and for ten years I ran nonprofit research
organizations in the criminal justice space. First was Crime Lab
(01:04):
for a University of Chicago and then at NYU Law
the Criminal Justice Lab with Anne Milgram, who's the former
Attorney General from New Jersey and was tapped by Biden
to run the DEA. So during that time I was
really working on how do we build bodies of rigorous
evidence to show which criminal justice interventions actually work so
(01:25):
that we can be responsible in investing taxpayer dollars towards
specific interventions. The reason that that body of rigorous evidence
didn't exist before that is because we don't prioritize the
outcomes of the people who are affected by the criminal
justice system, who were largely black and brown men. So
my job was how do we build that body of
rigorous evidence? And I went out in the private sector
(01:47):
to raise money to build randomized control trials around criminal
justice interventions to see what actually works. And then I
partnered with the public sector, with the Mayor's office in
New York, the Mayor's office in Indianapolis, other public sector
folks to incorporate those findings into what we're actually investing
our money into. And then how I ended up at
the Foundation Foreman's Health, which is an organization that I've
(02:08):
launched about a year and a half ago, is during
that time when I was building these RCTs and this
rigorous evidence in the criminal justice space, I had my
own lived experience within the women's health sphere. I had
help syndrome with the birth of my first child in
twenty fifteen, which is like a severe form of preaclansia,
and then I had breast cancer in twenty twenty. Those
(02:29):
were really eye opening experiences for me because my pitch
for Crime Lab to funders had always been you wouldn't
take a medication if there wasn't a randomized clinical trial
showing you that it was safe and efficacious for you
to take. Right, why are we doing this with the
these billions of dollars that we're investing in terms of
tax payer dollars? And then with my own lived experience,
(02:51):
I realized, actually, we don't have any of that rigorous
evidence around women's health either. The typical drug dosages that
we are prescribed are based on mail only clinical data.
How is this possible? And the more that I researched
the funding landscape in terms of how women's health research
gets funded, the more horrified I was.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
So, why don't we talk for a minute about what
happened when you had these two problems, what happened with
when you sort of went to doctors, what the research
was and how you got there.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Yeah, so with help syndrome. So my son was born
at thirty three weeks. I presented my obstetrician with the
very traditional symptoms of HELP syndrome, Like, if you googled
Help syndrome, what the symptoms are. That's what I came
to her and presented in her office the day before
we had to have this emergency C section, And she said, well,
(03:42):
you know, that's just third trimester pregnancy and it's not
her fault that she did Help can You syndrome is
a severe form of preaclamps ya that involves elevated platelet
levels and liver For me, it was liver failure that
goes along with hypertensive disorder and a bunch of other
issues that they think stem from an autoimmune response to
(04:04):
the fetus, although the mechanisms there are not clearly studied
and we don't have research on them. So I came
to my doctor. She didn't recognize any of the symptoms
because she had never been taught this in medical school,
because we don't educate doctors around various women's health diseases
because there is no rigorous research to teach in medical schools.
So I started looking, Hey, why isn't there any rigorous
(04:25):
research being generated here? And again, so I'm somebody who
I have access to care. I'm privileged in so many ways.
Speaker 4 (04:32):
Right.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
I live in New York City. I'm very close to
world class hospitals that have leading experts in various diseases.
I have insurance that it allows me to afford care
right at these places. And still this is my outcome.
Speaker 4 (04:46):
Right.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
So, Tao was born at thirty three weeks, three pounds
thirteen ounces. He spent six weeks in the NICU. I
spent a week and a half in the ICU out
of nowhere. No family history of this, you know, I
had no knowledge of what this was before I had it.
When I I went to try to get pregnant again,
I went to again, somebody with privilege access. I had.
My insurance allowed me to have a forty dollars copay
(05:09):
with the nation's leading expert in hypertension during pregnancy. And
she just so happens to be located in Manhattan, right, So, like,
I have access to care in all the ways. So
when I went to see that doctor, I said, is
it safe for me to get pregnant again? She said, yes,
here's the course of treatment that I would recommend. I said, wonderful,
where's the RCT for that. She said, I don't have
an RCT for that. Explain to us what an RCT is.
(05:31):
So when RCT is a randomized control trial, which is
the golden standard of research, right, we have RCTs for
most medications in order to get FDA approval. So I said,
how is it possible that we don't have rigorous evidence
around the safety and efficacy of this course of treatment
for secondary pregnancies. So help syndrome is in the category
(05:53):
of preeclamsia. Preaclamsya is the leading cause of maternal mortality
in this country, four hundred thousand women. I didn't realize
that this year alone will be diagnosed with preeclampsia. Three
hundred thousand women in this country will be diagnosed with
breast cancer this year, and yet we have three thousand
times the amount of research funding for breast cancer than
(06:15):
we do for preeclampsia. How can that be? I started
looking in the public sector, like, what are the funding
mechanisms here? In the public sector? You have NIH, which
is the leading funder of viol anymore not anymore, Baby
was the leading funder of biomedical research in the world.
And I'd love to talk about the funding cuts because
one of our Medical Advisory Board members put together a
(06:37):
very interesting deck on it used to be the leading
funder of biomedical research in the world, and yet women's
health research has remained less than eight percent of the
NIH budget for the last decade. Up until nineteen ninety three,
women were categorically excluded from clinical research trials in this country.
And it wasn't until twenty sixteen, which is nine years ago,
(06:59):
that we were required that mice in animal trials, that
we include female mice in animal trials. That's nine years ago. Okay,
So the public sector, and this is a political in
the sense that we're talking over the last thirty years,
we've remained around we've hovered around eight percent of the
NIH budget. That was through the Obama years and the
Clinton years, as well as the Bush years and the
(07:21):
Trump years. Right, So let's not be duped into thinking
that it was there was ever a great solution coming
from the public sector. Obviously now things are worse. As
of the end of April, there were eighty six million
dollars in funding cuts to women's health research. The largest
categories for the cuts were mental health, maternal health, and
looking at sex differences, meaning in cardiovascular disease, had women,
(07:43):
you know, experienced cardiovascular disease differently than men. There were
already also cuts in the women's health research pipeline in
the sense that there were fifteen million dollars in training
grants that were lost for things like a Department of
Research that's building research careers and women's health programs, things
like that, and also attacks on data sources.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Can you give us a minute on what these NIH
cuts look like?
Speaker 3 (08:06):
Sure, I mean, we don't have great information, so we're
putting it all together ourselves.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Why would we have good information?
Speaker 3 (08:13):
But we have selected titles of terminated grants. Things like
automated digital imaging for cervical cancer screening was cut. Things
like psychological underpinnings of gender disparities and adolescent mental health,
a study of hormones, the molecular mechanism of action and functions,
sexual assault recovery among sexual minority women. You know, this
(08:35):
is an addition, but there's a there's a full attack
on research. This is in addition to cuts in pediatric
cancer research.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Right. Well, that's because the ELON doesn't care about that.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
But the way the NIH grant cuts have worked is
that there's this cap on indirect funding.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Is that still in the work.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
They said they were going to put a cap on
indirect funding, so like.
Speaker 5 (08:54):
As a fifteen percent indirect right, which is what a
lot of private funders do, because academic institutions love federal
grants because they have really high indirect rates which can
support infrastructure, labs, equipment, things that academic institutions need.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Right.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
It's not exactly car services, right, No, But.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
That being said, a lot of private funders do limit
indirect rates. We limit indirect rates. You know. Some private
funders will say we don't pay for any indirect rates,
which is an aggressive stance. But academic institutions for a
long time have relied on indirect rates to fund infrastructure,
which is highly needed. So in the private sector what
(09:37):
I found shocking when I went to frankly through these experiences.
So with breast cancer, you see the other end. You
see that Evelyn Lauder, who was a visionary and a
great philanthropist, created the Breast Cancer Research Foundation in nineteen
ninety three and has raised one billion dollars to date
for breast cancer research, advancing treatments, research all of it,
(09:59):
and outcomes for women living with breast cancer. From which
I have greatly benefited. But when you look in the
private sector, you see these huge discrepancies in terms of
research funding, largely because the private sector, in terms of
the health space, is organized and siloed across disease. So
you have the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, then you have
the pre Eclampsia Foundation, in Alzheimer's Association, American Heart Association. Right,
(10:22):
each organization has their own fundraising capacity based on their leadership, right,
I mean, just varies how much money they can raise.
So when I had these experiences, I went looking for
an organization that was looking from the thirty thousand foot
perspective from a gender equity lens, right, because it is
wrong to me that we should have less research and
less funding for research looking at women's health than men's health.
(10:46):
So looking from a gender equity lens across the entire
continuum of the female life cycle to identify where there
are holes in rigorous research. Where there are holes in
rigorous research, do we have sources of funding to plug that?
Speaker 4 (11:00):
Right?
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Those research tolls if not fill the gap. Right, it
seemed like a strategic and efficient way to solve for
the problem. And when that organization didn't exist. After I
did much research in many interviews with doctors and advocacy
experts and research organizations across the country. When I realized
that that didn't exist, I created the Foundation for Women's Health.
(11:20):
You know, I was pretty horrified when the name existed
and the IRL existed for the website. So we launched
about a year and a half ago, and we are
superpower is absolutely our Medical Advisory Board, which is a
collection of eleven of the nation's leading experts in women's
health research, and their job is to attract the best
proposals from across the country and then grade the proposals
(11:42):
that we receive based on methodology, feasibility, innovation, and then
help me disseminate the findings. A big piece of our
theory of change is that not only do we have
to generate the research to make up for lost time,
but also when we have the research, it can't just
live in academic journals. It's wonderful for us to institutionalize
knowledge and academic journals, but we also have to disseminate
(12:03):
findings through traditional news media, social media, and then also
incorporate those findings into medical school curricula so that what
we are learning we can teach to doctors that we
don't have to wait for another generation of doctors who
don't recognize symptoms for these growing diseases just because they
were never taught about it in medical school. And then
(12:23):
we're also a venture philanthropy. We encouraged our researchers to
commercialize fundings, and we negotiate revenue sharing with funded intellectual
property from the research that we fund, so that we
can make this a sustainable organization. Because the idea that
this would be a philanthropy or charity just kind of
makes my blood boil. This is very much a justice
cause to me.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
I want you to talk about what the NIH and
the larger medical research issue when it comes to the
Trump administration, like is there a brain drain going on?
Speaker 3 (12:55):
Oh? Absolutely. We talk a lot about this pipeline for scientists.
I should say, we're going into women's health research. If
you can't get research funded, you can't do the work right.
And so if we are eliminating training grants that train
people how to develop careers in women's health, if we
don't fund budding scientists proposals around research and women's health
(13:20):
and they can't get the work funded, they're going to
go where they can get it funded, right, So we
do see a dramatic brain drain. People are looking to
move outside of the United States so that they can
get their women's health research funded, and not just for
women's health, but other areas that were cut as well.
So absolutely we're seeing a brain drain. And I think
you know, it's not only the junior scientists, it's also
(13:42):
the mid level scientists who are experiencing huge cuts to funding.
So our doctors have talked about our Medical Advisory Board
has advised that we keep our grants in lower amounts
this year so that you know, we can attract more
junior and mid level scientists. The truth is that very
senior scientists are going to be able to find private
(14:04):
funding sources for their research, and they're looking for like
one to five million dollar grants. The ones who are
going to suffer and don't have a path forward in
this career are the ones who are junior or mid level.
And so that's the gap that we're going to try
to fill, hopefully in a transitional way until we have
you know, a new administration.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Yeah, I mean where do these scientists go?
Speaker 3 (14:27):
I mean a lot are going to Europe, Canada. I
guess it depends specifically what your area of expertise is
and where you can find a job. I mean, there's
no certainty that you're going to be able to find
a job at an international university either, right, especially when
your entire network is in this country, because this is
where you've trained and studied, right. God, so we are
just losing the whole generation unless we do something to
(14:51):
fill the gap right now and urgently.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Yeah, such a dark moment in American life.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
It is. And also we are all already coming from
a deficit. American women are more likely to die from
avoidable causes than women in other countries. We're more likely
to die of heart disease than women in other countries.
We have more deaths and childbirth than women in other countries.
We're more likely to require multiple medications than women in
other countries. Like, if anything, this is something we should
(15:21):
be deeply invested in, especially because there's a return on investment.
McKinsey Health put together this wonderful report looking at the
economic return on investment and investing in women's health, and
it's remarkable the amount that we can add to the
GDP if we invested in healthy years of life for women.
It's kind of a no brainer argument if you take
the politics out of it and look at this from
(15:41):
a rational lens.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Yeah, certainly true. Thank you so much, Katie, Thanks Mollie.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
Sam Tennenhaus is a writer at The Prospect and the
author of Fuckly, The Life and the Revolution that Changed
America Welcome Too Fast, Politics, Sam tenan House.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
Not only am I happy to be here, I get
to say I've been wondering will I ever get to
do Molly's podcast? And I was so psyched, and you
told me and wanted me to do it.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
So I am here, and I have to tell you
the joke is so.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Sam tenan House is a very fancy I'm going to
give you a very fancy introduction. He's fancy literary critic
for a million years, was the editor in chief of
The New York Times Book Review for about a decade,
and now writes very serious and important and literary biographies.
And I kept seeing that he was on this podcast
called Know Your Enemy, which is a very smart podcast
(16:39):
by too, very very intellectual but somewhat left leaning. I
mean that not as a criticism, but as a describer.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
And I was like, they.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
Get to have Sam ten in house, Well, then I
should get to have Sam ten in house. But I
didn't have your email. So I was like, I'm never
going to be able to get Sam ten in house
because I don't have his email. And then I ran
into you at a tell was your program?
Speaker 4 (17:00):
So here we are, here, we are with some much
to talk about, So let's do it.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
Let's talk about it. So this is the kind of
biography that I love.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
And William F. Buckley tell us Why William F. Buckley matters?
Speaker 4 (17:15):
He matters because Molly, there's so many ways to answer it.
As a guy wrote about the book Nice Piece, Jim
Walcotts and Airmail. There were so many different facets to
Buckley that you are literally dazzled by him. But here's
what I'll start with. This is the guy with the
age of twenty five when he just graduated from Yale
(17:35):
in nineteen fifty, turned your clock back, invented the culture
wars we're living in right now. Everything you're hearing said
about Harvard Cha right now, change some of the vocabulary
and you're hearing Bill Buckley say it about Yale in
nineteen fifty. Only them was a shock because he was
Numero uno big man on campus. And then he calls
(17:59):
them out. He claims, you know, the towers of the
Abbey leaguer Chase filled with radical Hainesians and atheists, and
it causes an amazing sensation. And that's the beginning of
the modern conservative movement in America.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
So I read this book called America Last, which was
about how the right has always been kind of obsessed
with authoritarian dictators like Franco and has always loved those people.
And it got me thinking about this idea of William
of Buckley, And do you think it's right that William F.
Buckley walked so that people like Rush Limbaugh could run.
Speaker 4 (18:36):
Well, you're talking about Jacob Hobburn's great book, yeah, which
I read in various drafts, and Buckley is in it,
as you know, I mean, book is endorsed by Buckley's son, Christopher.
And you're right when you say, not only that WFB
will call him William Buckley. Bill Buckley made Rush Limbaugh possible.
He anointed Limbaugh, he did. Yeah, that's very good. Wow,
(19:02):
that comes near the end.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
Yeah, I'm just halfway through.
Speaker 4 (19:06):
Sorry, Yes, since I know you have some very super
smart literary listeners. You know there are not that.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
I really do. I have to say that there will.
Speaker 4 (19:15):
Be interested in one of my favorite lines in the book,
which I wrote early on but didn't get to use
to the right moment came, and that is and I'll
set it up. When god Man at Yale, William Buckley's
first book was published, his publisher here in the US,
Regnary Books, which was a more distinguished publisher than it
later became, hoped that maybe TS. Eliott, the poet laureate
(19:37):
and at that moment probably the best known literary person
in the English speaking world. Your mother could recite poems
by T. S. Elliott Buckley, Hoping Elliott will publish god
Man at Yale. And he says, I like young mister
Buckley's book. I think he's made a few strategic errors,
(19:57):
so I don't think we'll do it in England, but
I wish him every six and the twenty five year
old Buckley classic young guy says well, I'm appalled and
aghast that TS. Eliot has misunderstood my important book. So
what I say in my book when you get near
the end is the same man who once saw the
blessing of T. S. Eliot now bestowed that blessing on Russia.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Limbaugh.
Speaker 4 (20:23):
Wow, yes, wow, And so I think, what does that mean?
It means that even if you are the brilliant, area
die and wonderful person that Bill Buckley was much of
the time. Get my wife talking to you about Bill
Buckley and how gracious and kind he was. He's the
(20:43):
kind of man who actually takes the women in the
room seriously and says, where are you from? What are
your interests? And again that a little bit later. But
this guy understood. Buckley understood you don't win elections, you
don't win the culture war if you don't have Joe McCarthy,
one of the first guys he was involved, Wow, worked
(21:05):
very closely with You have a guy like Joe McCarthy,
you don't have a guy like Rush Limbaugh. And which
is what I also note that it should not have
been surprising, though it was to many Bill Buckley would
take up Rush Limbaugh because he'd been the most articulate,
impassioned defender of Senator Joseph McCarthy. In fact, if you
(21:25):
go to the George Clooney play about Edward Murrow, Buckley's
mentioned in it because when Joe McCarthy was not ready
to answer, right, Murrow makes his famous attack on McCarthy
and the hearings and how he's interrogating people and brutally
and humiliating these inoffensive people, and Edward R. Murrow goes
(21:46):
after McCarthy and says, will you respond to me? And
Joe McCarthy says, well, I don't think I want to
do it, but I've got a young guy here, Bill Buckley,
will do it instead. And Murrow would not let Buckley
on because he knew Buckley was a ray in debate
and that Buckley might be able to make a case
for McCarthy. And that's what made people nervous about him.
(22:07):
He was really really good at making his argument, even
when the argument seemed kind of off the charts. And
we see some of that now right now. You go
on all these shows, Mole, you talk with other people,
and you know there are some people there on the
other side who are really really good at it. They're
really good at it, and he was, yeah, and that
(22:30):
was his thing, so he'd invite you on his program.
You might be a great novelist like Norman Mailer, who
was his friend, or the great columnist Murray Kempton also
his friend.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Yeah, I just want to stop and just sort of
catch readers up just a little bit to this sort.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
Of exactly what this was. One to one William F. Buckley.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
He becomes a public intellectual. He has a show called
firing Line. It is the equivalent of CNN today.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
Is that fair? Yes? Yes, although I'll tell you something
about that, Molly. Not long before he died, the big
new cable news network that was very successful was Fox,
and you'll remember then, young though you are the big
bad guy was Bill O'Reilly. So I said to Bill Buckley,
who was known for being a tenacious debater, so what
(23:19):
do you think of Bill O'Reilly? He said, no, he
said he's a bully. He's a bully. Buckley was not
going to be a bully. He was going to try
to make you look bad, but he was not going
to be a bully. He's not going to do funny
things with the camera so that you look bad. He
would sit in a chair, both of you were there
facing each other, and you would have to I did
that program once and a million years ago, and you'd
(23:41):
have the conversation with him, and he would listen. He
was a great listener. Many people told me Bill Buckley
was the greatest conversationalist they'd ever know, And I thought,
why is that? I've been in his company. I met
him in nineteen ninety I booked when I was writing
a previous book. And he's a wonderful guy, and he's
very bright, and he's smart, he speaks well. But the
best conversationalist ever. Then I realized what they meant, the
(24:03):
best listener ever. He just hung on every word you said,
so he could turn it around and use it against you.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Oh, so he could turn around to use it against you.
Speaker 4 (24:14):
That Yeah, yeah, I call it predatory attentiveness.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
So. But let's talk about Buckley and the public intellectual
for a minute, because one of the things that happened
during his time as kind of the grandest public intellectual.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Is that he decides in nineteen.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Sixty eight to debate Gorvidal. I'd love you to talk
a little bit about is a really important democratic convention
for any number of reasons that actually don't not relate
to modern day. So talk to us through I would
love you to just do us do like two minutes
on the nineteen sixty eight Democratic Convention and the Buckley
(24:56):
Gorvidal debate.
Speaker 4 (24:58):
Well to set it up quickly, MA they debated through
both conventions, so it's be a dozen debates on ABC,
which was the smallest of the networks, and did not
want to do gabble the gable coverage. So they took
the most articulate guy in the right WAYM. F. Buckley,
and they said, who's the one guy you don't want
a debate? And he said, do not put me in
a room with Gorbadal. And they think, okay, they know
(25:20):
how to do TV good, we'll get Gorbadal. So the
two of them are going at each other first in
Miami where the Republicans have their convention that nominated Richard Nixon.
And what Vidal does is, and I have all this
in detail in the books. He thought Buckley was gay.
Many people thought Buckley was gay, but that Buckley was
hiding it. So Vidal's going to flush him out.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Which is very common to be closeted gay back then,
is very very common left right.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
It didn't matter what your politics were. Buckley's homes were
filled with gay people. He and his wife Fido were
great friends with Truman, Capodi and Phil Blast and you
name them. That's the world they lived in. But politically
it could be very damaging. And Vidal was in the closet,
which you don't realize because everybody was. So Buckley goes
after him, and Vidal set up. He's prepared for this
(26:07):
and he starts gabating Buckley by making very clever comments.
It calls him the Marie Antoinette of the right wing,
which then became a headline in a New York Times
book review review of Buckley's next collection. It's a very
cleverly written review and at the bottom, when you see
the id with the reviewer, it says, mister Mario Puzo's
(26:31):
new book will be about the mafia. It was Maria
known had heard of him, and the Godfather is about
to come out and he's going after Bucker. So now
they're in Chicago, and Chicago was the most tumultuous nomination
convention in modern history. Some will remember before Kamala Harris
was nominated, the fear the Democrats had in Chicago was
(26:54):
that it would be another nineteen sixty eight students protesting,
this time over Gaza police clashing with them. That's exactly
what happened in Chicago. It really did become violent. There
was what was later determined to be a police riot.
There were non violent student protesters. Alan Sorkin made a
series about it a couple of years ago. Attacked by
(27:17):
the police. That's right, the sork thing is quite accurate. Well,
the night that the most tempestuous, dangerous night, violent night. Now,
Buckley and Vidal are facing each other in the studio
and the moderator, Howard K. Smith of ABC says to
Gore Vidal, don't you think it's a bit much that
(27:38):
these anti Vietnam war protesters are holding up flags and
making chance in defense of the enemy, the communists in
North Vietnam? And Bucky says yes. And Smith says, isn't
that like being pro Nazi in World War Two? And
Bucky says, yes, it's like being a Nazi. And Vidal
says the only Nazi in this room, Bill is Hugh.
(28:01):
And Buckley loses and he says, stop calling me a Nazi.
You ink we're television Molly nineteen sixty eight. You think
wear I'll sock you in your goddamn face and you'll
stay blasted. And what happens in your what you can
see it, you know in that great film, A Best
(28:23):
of Enemies.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Right, That's what I was thinking about, because I had
just wanted to.
Speaker 4 (28:26):
Yeah, you see a smile come in Vidal's face. He
knows he's got him, he knows he's got Buckley, that
he's made Buckley lose it because Buckley's whole thing is
cerebral coolness. Oh really, mister Vidal, Oh quaink. He doesn't
say that, he starts name calling him. And what I
(28:47):
found is why I write these books privately. That's how
we often referred to Vandal. So what happened was that
thing got unleashed in him. Vidal knew that he could
do that, he would he press the button. And Buckley
never overcame that Vidal didn't care. Was a big joke
to him. But Buckley was really crushed by it. You
(29:08):
have to remember, not only he's a brilliant erud eye guy,
he's famous for this super sophisticated, ornate vocabulary. Now television
sets across the country, it's like trump parents are putting
their hands over their children's ears, you know, they don't
want to hear somebody talk to somebody else like that.
And it was a big event in that culture. Ten
(29:29):
million people saw it and it was a shocker.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
Yeah. So interesting.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
Now you break some news in this book, and I'd
love you to talk about it.
Speaker 4 (29:38):
All right, there's news of all kinds.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Yeah, but you know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 4 (29:43):
I know what you're talking about, which is that the
Buckleys are always thought of as and is true living
in this gorgeous estate in northwest Connecticut as its goal, Sharon, Connecticut.
Bill Buckley and his nine siblings grew up in this
magnificent estate forty seven acres date the kind of place
you have in back in the nineteen thirties and forties
(30:03):
when they're growing up, but you have a dozen servants
doing the lawns and grooming the horses in the stables
and all those. But they had a second home too,
and the second home was a winter estate in South Carolina.
And when the Buckley family, his parents were both from
the South, his father from South Texas, his mother from
New Orleans. When they went to Camden, South Carolina, where
(30:27):
the other house was, they were the Southerners coming home.
And they became very much involved in nineteen fifty four
in what was called Massive Resistance, and that was the
White South attempt to disobey, which they did quite successfully.
Sounds familiar the Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation, the
(30:52):
Brown Decision. The Buckley family sponsored and paid for a
newspaper that sided with the segregar a South. It was
called the Citizens Councils. Back then, there were the Uptown
plan there were the businessmen who were you know, they
didn't wear the hoods, you know, and have funny names.
But they would say, we understand you loaned money to
(31:14):
a member of the NAACP. I'm afraid your credit is
no longer good at our bank. And the Buckleys were
right in the center of it. It was a shock
or they didn't tell anybody about it. Yeah, yeah, I
discovered it in you know, the research you do and interviews,
because I thought I was going to write about another
newspaper in town. Because when you write these historical narratives,
(31:34):
I'm a storyteller. You use newspapers to give you, you know,
capture the color of the scene and give it lots
of details. So I went through I thought I was
going to be looking at something called the Camden Chronicle,
and then the archivist in Camden said, I think you
mean the Camden News. The Buckley paper. She hadn't read it.
(31:55):
Nobody down there had read it. They didn't know that.
When you turned to page three in the very first issue,
and you'll see the photograph in my book, you see
an invitation an ad, a full page ad inviting all
white citizens of Kershaw County to join attend the meetings
of the Citizens Council with a statement of principles. We
(32:17):
oppose race mixing in the schools. We oppose the NAACP,
which does not have the best interests of our colored
citizens in mind. You almost can't believe what you're reading.
And yet the Buckleys were incredibly kind, generous people, including
to the help. To tell that story was the most
(32:38):
exciting and difficult thing I had to do in the book,
because you have to enter it's like a twilight zone.
It's one that even you and I who are like
into the past, right, we don't get this stuff. We've
never seen it. And there it was. There it was,
and they never talked about it up north, but they
did in the South. So if you opened up the
(32:58):
Charleston newspaper, the Charleston News Courier, which was there big,
the big state newspaper, you would see casual references to
the Buckley's and their newspaper fighting for the white citizens
of South Carolina. I don't know how he got away
with that, I really don't. So that's what I mean.
There's other news, but that's the core one I think
you're talking about. Yeah, that is because it changed the movement.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
Yeah, I think it's very instructive about Buckley and also
just about the fantasy that trump Ism is somehow completely
unconnected to the Republican Party of old.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
That's it. That's it. I mean, you just said it. Yeah,
and think about when that's happening. Because it's a timeline
component to all of this, which is so important. All
of you people out there will run to write these
big histories. You have to have a timeline. You have
to either put it out on a piece of paper
or your computer. Whatever. The timeline here, Molly is at
the very moment that Buckley's first hero, Joseph McCarthy is
(33:55):
being exposed and humiliated by Ed Murrow and in television hearings.
At that same moment is when the Brown decision came
down and the movement shifted from being about anti communism
to being protecting the I'm going to use National Review
in Buckley's terms, the mores and cultural folk ways of
(34:18):
the Old South.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
Yeah, it's a really important point. Thank you, thank you,
thank you. Sam Tennan House. What's next for you?
Speaker 4 (34:26):
I'm going to write a little book about the Black Panthers.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
Oh fabulous.
Speaker 4 (34:31):
Yeah, and a guy named Clarence Thomas because they were
all in it together.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
At you.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
I've heard of him. Wow, he went to Yale with
the Black Panthers.
Speaker 4 (34:40):
He was basically a panther himself when he started out.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Clarence Thomas was a black panther.
Speaker 4 (34:47):
He was a black power guy who attended Black Panther rallies. Wow.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Wow, you heard it here, yes, all over the place,
Sam Tennanhouse.
Speaker 4 (35:00):
Pleasure, Mollie. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If
you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend
and keep the conversation going.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Thanks for listening.
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean
we don't have a great show for you today. Sam
tennant House stops by to talk about his new book Buckley,
The Life and the Revolution.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
That Changed America.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
But first we have Katie Brodski Falco on Women's House
and how it's been defunded.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Welcome to Fast Politics, Katie.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
You occupy the nonprofit space, but in a very interesting way.
Tell us about crime Lab, which is this incredible thing
you created, and then go from there.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
Sure, so I'll tell you kind of the genesis story
how I got to where I am now. My work,
the thread across all of my work has always been
justice reform. So I worked in criminal justice reform for
twenty years, and for ten years I ran nonprofit research
organizations in the criminal justice space. First was Crime Lab
(01:04):
for a University of Chicago and then at NYU Law
the Criminal Justice Lab with Anne Milgram, who's the former
Attorney General from New Jersey and was tapped by Biden
to run the DEA. So during that time I was
really working on how do we build bodies of rigorous
evidence to show which criminal justice interventions actually work so
(01:25):
that we can be responsible in investing taxpayer dollars towards
specific interventions. The reason that that body of rigorous evidence
didn't exist before that is because we don't prioritize the
outcomes of the people who are affected by the criminal
justice system, who were largely black and brown men. So
my job was how do we build that body of
rigorous evidence? And I went out in the private sector
(01:47):
to raise money to build randomized control trials around criminal
justice interventions to see what actually works. And then I
partnered with the public sector, with the Mayor's office in
New York, the Mayor's office in Indianapolis, other public sector
folks to incorporate those findings into what we're actually investing
our money into. And then how I ended up at
the Foundation Foreman's Health, which is an organization that I've
(02:08):
launched about a year and a half ago, is during
that time when I was building these RCTs and this
rigorous evidence in the criminal justice space, I had my
own lived experience within the women's health sphere. I had
help syndrome with the birth of my first child in
twenty fifteen, which is like a severe form of preaclansia,
and then I had breast cancer in twenty twenty. Those
(02:29):
were really eye opening experiences for me because my pitch
for Crime Lab to funders had always been you wouldn't
take a medication if there wasn't a randomized clinical trial
showing you that it was safe and efficacious for you
to take. Right, why are we doing this with the
these billions of dollars that we're investing in terms of
tax payer dollars? And then with my own lived experience,
(02:51):
I realized, actually, we don't have any of that rigorous
evidence around women's health either. The typical drug dosages that
we are prescribed are based on mail only clinical data.
How is this possible? And the more that I researched
the funding landscape in terms of how women's health research
gets funded, the more horrified I was.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
So, why don't we talk for a minute about what
happened when you had these two problems, what happened with
when you sort of went to doctors, what the research
was and how you got there.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Yeah, so with help syndrome. So my son was born
at thirty three weeks. I presented my obstetrician with the
very traditional symptoms of HELP syndrome, Like, if you googled
Help syndrome, what the symptoms are. That's what I came
to her and presented in her office the day before
we had to have this emergency C section, And she said, well,
(03:42):
you know, that's just third trimester pregnancy and it's not
her fault that she did Help can You syndrome is
a severe form of preaclamps ya that involves elevated platelet
levels and liver For me, it was liver failure that
goes along with hypertensive disorder and a bunch of other
issues that they think stem from an autoimmune response to
(04:04):
the fetus, although the mechanisms there are not clearly studied
and we don't have research on them. So I came
to my doctor. She didn't recognize any of the symptoms
because she had never been taught this in medical school,
because we don't educate doctors around various women's health diseases
because there is no rigorous research to teach in medical schools.
So I started looking, Hey, why isn't there any rigorous
(04:25):
research being generated here? And again, so I'm somebody who
I have access to care. I'm privileged in so many ways.
Speaker 4 (04:32):
Right.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
I live in New York City. I'm very close to
world class hospitals that have leading experts in various diseases.
I have insurance that it allows me to afford care
right at these places. And still this is my outcome.
Speaker 4 (04:46):
Right.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
So, Tao was born at thirty three weeks, three pounds
thirteen ounces. He spent six weeks in the NICU. I
spent a week and a half in the ICU out
of nowhere. No family history of this, you know, I
had no knowledge of what this was before I had it.
When I I went to try to get pregnant again,
I went to again, somebody with privilege access. I had.
My insurance allowed me to have a forty dollars copay
(05:09):
with the nation's leading expert in hypertension during pregnancy. And
she just so happens to be located in Manhattan, right, So, like,
I have access to care in all the ways. So
when I went to see that doctor, I said, is
it safe for me to get pregnant again? She said, yes,
here's the course of treatment that I would recommend. I said, wonderful,
where's the RCT for that. She said, I don't have
an RCT for that. Explain to us what an RCT is.
(05:31):
So when RCT is a randomized control trial, which is
the golden standard of research, right, we have RCTs for
most medications in order to get FDA approval. So I said,
how is it possible that we don't have rigorous evidence
around the safety and efficacy of this course of treatment
for secondary pregnancies. So help syndrome is in the category
(05:53):
of preeclamsia. Preaclamsya is the leading cause of maternal mortality
in this country, four hundred thousand women. I didn't realize
that this year alone will be diagnosed with preeclampsia. Three
hundred thousand women in this country will be diagnosed with
breast cancer this year, and yet we have three thousand
times the amount of research funding for breast cancer than
(06:15):
we do for preeclampsia. How can that be? I started
looking in the public sector, like, what are the funding
mechanisms here? In the public sector? You have NIH, which
is the leading funder of viol anymore not anymore, Baby
was the leading funder of biomedical research in the world.
And I'd love to talk about the funding cuts because
one of our Medical Advisory Board members put together a
(06:37):
very interesting deck on it used to be the leading
funder of biomedical research in the world, and yet women's
health research has remained less than eight percent of the
NIH budget for the last decade. Up until nineteen ninety three,
women were categorically excluded from clinical research trials in this country.
And it wasn't until twenty sixteen, which is nine years ago,
(06:59):
that we were required that mice in animal trials, that
we include female mice in animal trials. That's nine years ago. Okay,
So the public sector, and this is a political in
the sense that we're talking over the last thirty years,
we've remained around we've hovered around eight percent of the
NIH budget. That was through the Obama years and the
Clinton years, as well as the Bush years and the
(07:21):
Trump years. Right, So let's not be duped into thinking
that it was there was ever a great solution coming
from the public sector. Obviously now things are worse. As
of the end of April, there were eighty six million
dollars in funding cuts to women's health research. The largest
categories for the cuts were mental health, maternal health, and
looking at sex differences, meaning in cardiovascular disease, had women,
(07:43):
you know, experienced cardiovascular disease differently than men. There were
already also cuts in the women's health research pipeline in
the sense that there were fifteen million dollars in training
grants that were lost for things like a Department of
Research that's building research careers and women's health programs, things
like that, and also attacks on data sources.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Can you give us a minute on what these NIH
cuts look like?
Speaker 3 (08:06):
Sure, I mean, we don't have great information, so we're
putting it all together ourselves.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Why would we have good information?
Speaker 3 (08:13):
But we have selected titles of terminated grants. Things like
automated digital imaging for cervical cancer screening was cut. Things
like psychological underpinnings of gender disparities and adolescent mental health,
a study of hormones, the molecular mechanism of action and functions,
sexual assault recovery among sexual minority women. You know, this
(08:35):
is an addition, but there's a there's a full attack
on research. This is in addition to cuts in pediatric
cancer research.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Right. Well, that's because the ELON doesn't care about that.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
But the way the NIH grant cuts have worked is
that there's this cap on indirect funding.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Is that still in the work.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
They said they were going to put a cap on
indirect funding, so like.
Speaker 5 (08:54):
As a fifteen percent indirect right, which is what a
lot of private funders do, because academic institutions love federal
grants because they have really high indirect rates which can
support infrastructure, labs, equipment, things that academic institutions need.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Right.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
It's not exactly car services, right, No, But.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
That being said, a lot of private funders do limit
indirect rates. We limit indirect rates. You know. Some private
funders will say we don't pay for any indirect rates,
which is an aggressive stance. But academic institutions for a
long time have relied on indirect rates to fund infrastructure,
which is highly needed. So in the private sector what
(09:37):
I found shocking when I went to frankly through these experiences.
So with breast cancer, you see the other end. You
see that Evelyn Lauder, who was a visionary and a
great philanthropist, created the Breast Cancer Research Foundation in nineteen
ninety three and has raised one billion dollars to date
for breast cancer research, advancing treatments, research all of it,
(09:59):
and outcomes for women living with breast cancer. From which
I have greatly benefited. But when you look in the
private sector, you see these huge discrepancies in terms of
research funding, largely because the private sector, in terms of
the health space, is organized and siloed across disease. So
you have the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, then you have
the pre Eclampsia Foundation, in Alzheimer's Association, American Heart Association. Right,
(10:22):
each organization has their own fundraising capacity based on their leadership, right,
I mean, just varies how much money they can raise.
So when I had these experiences, I went looking for
an organization that was looking from the thirty thousand foot
perspective from a gender equity lens, right, because it is
wrong to me that we should have less research and
less funding for research looking at women's health than men's health.
(10:46):
So looking from a gender equity lens across the entire
continuum of the female life cycle to identify where there
are holes in rigorous research. Where there are holes in
rigorous research, do we have sources of funding to plug that?
Speaker 4 (11:00):
Right?
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Those research tolls if not fill the gap. Right, it
seemed like a strategic and efficient way to solve for
the problem. And when that organization didn't exist. After I
did much research in many interviews with doctors and advocacy
experts and research organizations across the country. When I realized
that that didn't exist, I created the Foundation for Women's Health.
(11:20):
You know, I was pretty horrified when the name existed
and the IRL existed for the website. So we launched
about a year and a half ago, and we are
superpower is absolutely our Medical Advisory Board, which is a
collection of eleven of the nation's leading experts in women's
health research, and their job is to attract the best
proposals from across the country and then grade the proposals
(11:42):
that we receive based on methodology, feasibility, innovation, and then
help me disseminate the findings. A big piece of our
theory of change is that not only do we have
to generate the research to make up for lost time,
but also when we have the research, it can't just
live in academic journals. It's wonderful for us to institutionalize
knowledge and academic journals, but we also have to disseminate
(12:03):
findings through traditional news media, social media, and then also
incorporate those findings into medical school curricula so that what
we are learning we can teach to doctors that we
don't have to wait for another generation of doctors who
don't recognize symptoms for these growing diseases just because they
were never taught about it in medical school. And then
(12:23):
we're also a venture philanthropy. We encouraged our researchers to
commercialize fundings, and we negotiate revenue sharing with funded intellectual
property from the research that we fund, so that we
can make this a sustainable organization. Because the idea that
this would be a philanthropy or charity just kind of
makes my blood boil. This is very much a justice
cause to me.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
I want you to talk about what the NIH and
the larger medical research issue when it comes to the
Trump administration, like is there a brain drain going on?
Speaker 3 (12:55):
Oh? Absolutely. We talk a lot about this pipeline for scientists.
I should say, we're going into women's health research. If
you can't get research funded, you can't do the work right.
And so if we are eliminating training grants that train
people how to develop careers in women's health, if we
don't fund budding scientists proposals around research and women's health
(13:20):
and they can't get the work funded, they're going to
go where they can get it funded, right, So we
do see a dramatic brain drain. People are looking to
move outside of the United States so that they can
get their women's health research funded, and not just for
women's health, but other areas that were cut as well.
So absolutely we're seeing a brain drain. And I think
you know, it's not only the junior scientists, it's also
(13:42):
the mid level scientists who are experiencing huge cuts to funding.
So our doctors have talked about our Medical Advisory Board
has advised that we keep our grants in lower amounts
this year so that you know, we can attract more
junior and mid level scientists. The truth is that very
senior scientists are going to be able to find private
(14:04):
funding sources for their research, and they're looking for like
one to five million dollar grants. The ones who are
going to suffer and don't have a path forward in
this career are the ones who are junior or mid level.
And so that's the gap that we're going to try
to fill, hopefully in a transitional way until we have
you know, a new administration.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Yeah, I mean where do these scientists go?
Speaker 3 (14:27):
I mean a lot are going to Europe, Canada. I
guess it depends specifically what your area of expertise is
and where you can find a job. I mean, there's
no certainty that you're going to be able to find
a job at an international university either, right, especially when
your entire network is in this country, because this is
where you've trained and studied, right. God, so we are
just losing the whole generation unless we do something to
(14:51):
fill the gap right now and urgently.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Yeah, such a dark moment in American life.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
It is. And also we are all already coming from
a deficit. American women are more likely to die from
avoidable causes than women in other countries. We're more likely
to die of heart disease than women in other countries.
We have more deaths and childbirth than women in other countries.
We're more likely to require multiple medications than women in
other countries. Like, if anything, this is something we should
(15:21):
be deeply invested in, especially because there's a return on investment.
McKinsey Health put together this wonderful report looking at the
economic return on investment and investing in women's health, and
it's remarkable the amount that we can add to the
GDP if we invested in healthy years of life for women.
It's kind of a no brainer argument if you take
the politics out of it and look at this from
(15:41):
a rational lens.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Yeah, certainly true. Thank you so much, Katie, Thanks Mollie.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
Sam Tennenhaus is a writer at The Prospect and the
author of Fuckly, The Life and the Revolution that Changed
America Welcome Too Fast, Politics, Sam tenan House.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
Not only am I happy to be here, I get
to say I've been wondering will I ever get to
do Molly's podcast? And I was so psyched, and you
told me and wanted me to do it.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
So I am here, and I have to tell you
the joke is so.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Sam tenan House is a very fancy I'm going to
give you a very fancy introduction. He's fancy literary critic
for a million years, was the editor in chief of
The New York Times Book Review for about a decade,
and now writes very serious and important and literary biographies.
And I kept seeing that he was on this podcast
called Know Your Enemy, which is a very smart podcast
(16:39):
by too, very very intellectual but somewhat left leaning. I
mean that not as a criticism, but as a describer.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
And I was like, they.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
Get to have Sam ten in house, Well, then I
should get to have Sam ten in house. But I
didn't have your email. So I was like, I'm never
going to be able to get Sam ten in house
because I don't have his email. And then I ran
into you at a tell was your program?
Speaker 4 (17:00):
So here we are, here, we are with some much
to talk about, So let's do it.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
Let's talk about it. So this is the kind of
biography that I love.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
And William F. Buckley tell us Why William F. Buckley matters?
Speaker 4 (17:15):
He matters because Molly, there's so many ways to answer it.
As a guy wrote about the book Nice Piece, Jim
Walcotts and Airmail. There were so many different facets to
Buckley that you are literally dazzled by him. But here's
what I'll start with. This is the guy with the
age of twenty five when he just graduated from Yale
(17:35):
in nineteen fifty, turned your clock back, invented the culture
wars we're living in right now. Everything you're hearing said
about Harvard Cha right now, change some of the vocabulary
and you're hearing Bill Buckley say it about Yale in
nineteen fifty. Only them was a shock because he was
Numero uno big man on campus. And then he calls
(17:59):
them out. He claims, you know, the towers of the
Abbey leaguer Chase filled with radical Hainesians and atheists, and
it causes an amazing sensation. And that's the beginning of
the modern conservative movement in America.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
So I read this book called America Last, which was
about how the right has always been kind of obsessed
with authoritarian dictators like Franco and has always loved those people.
And it got me thinking about this idea of William
of Buckley, And do you think it's right that William F.
Buckley walked so that people like Rush Limbaugh could run.
Speaker 4 (18:36):
Well, you're talking about Jacob Hobburn's great book, yeah, which
I read in various drafts, and Buckley is in it,
as you know, I mean, book is endorsed by Buckley's son, Christopher.
And you're right when you say, not only that WFB
will call him William Buckley. Bill Buckley made Rush Limbaugh possible.
He anointed Limbaugh, he did. Yeah, that's very good. Wow,
(19:02):
that comes near the end.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
Yeah, I'm just halfway through.
Speaker 4 (19:06):
Sorry, Yes, since I know you have some very super
smart literary listeners. You know there are not that.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
I really do. I have to say that there will.
Speaker 4 (19:15):
Be interested in one of my favorite lines in the book,
which I wrote early on but didn't get to use
to the right moment came, and that is and I'll
set it up. When god Man at Yale, William Buckley's
first book was published, his publisher here in the US,
Regnary Books, which was a more distinguished publisher than it
later became, hoped that maybe TS. Eliott, the poet laureate
(19:37):
and at that moment probably the best known literary person
in the English speaking world. Your mother could recite poems
by T. S. Elliott Buckley, Hoping Elliott will publish god
Man at Yale. And he says, I like young mister
Buckley's book. I think he's made a few strategic errors,
(19:57):
so I don't think we'll do it in England, but
I wish him every six and the twenty five year
old Buckley classic young guy says well, I'm appalled and
aghast that TS. Eliot has misunderstood my important book. So
what I say in my book when you get near
the end is the same man who once saw the
blessing of T. S. Eliot now bestowed that blessing on Russia.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Limbaugh.
Speaker 4 (20:23):
Wow, yes, wow, And so I think, what does that mean?
It means that even if you are the brilliant, area
die and wonderful person that Bill Buckley was much of
the time. Get my wife talking to you about Bill
Buckley and how gracious and kind he was. He's the
(20:43):
kind of man who actually takes the women in the
room seriously and says, where are you from? What are
your interests? And again that a little bit later. But
this guy understood. Buckley understood you don't win elections, you
don't win the culture war if you don't have Joe McCarthy,
one of the first guys he was involved, Wow, worked
(21:05):
very closely with You have a guy like Joe McCarthy,
you don't have a guy like Rush Limbaugh. And which
is what I also note that it should not have
been surprising, though it was to many Bill Buckley would
take up Rush Limbaugh because he'd been the most articulate,
impassioned defender of Senator Joseph McCarthy. In fact, if you
(21:25):
go to the George Clooney play about Edward Murrow, Buckley's
mentioned in it because when Joe McCarthy was not ready
to answer, right, Murrow makes his famous attack on McCarthy
and the hearings and how he's interrogating people and brutally
and humiliating these inoffensive people, and Edward R. Murrow goes
(21:46):
after McCarthy and says, will you respond to me? And
Joe McCarthy says, well, I don't think I want to
do it, but I've got a young guy here, Bill Buckley,
will do it instead. And Murrow would not let Buckley
on because he knew Buckley was a ray in debate
and that Buckley might be able to make a case
for McCarthy. And that's what made people nervous about him.
(22:07):
He was really really good at making his argument, even
when the argument seemed kind of off the charts. And
we see some of that now right now. You go
on all these shows, Mole, you talk with other people,
and you know there are some people there on the
other side who are really really good at it. They're
really good at it, and he was, yeah, and that
(22:30):
was his thing, so he'd invite you on his program.
You might be a great novelist like Norman Mailer, who
was his friend, or the great columnist Murray Kempton also
his friend.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Yeah, I just want to stop and just sort of
catch readers up just a little bit to this sort.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
Of exactly what this was. One to one William F. Buckley.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
He becomes a public intellectual. He has a show called
firing Line. It is the equivalent of CNN today.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
Is that fair? Yes? Yes, although I'll tell you something
about that, Molly. Not long before he died, the big
new cable news network that was very successful was Fox,
and you'll remember then, young though you are the big
bad guy was Bill O'Reilly. So I said to Bill Buckley,
who was known for being a tenacious debater, so what
(23:19):
do you think of Bill O'Reilly? He said, no, he
said he's a bully. He's a bully. Buckley was not
going to be a bully. He was going to try
to make you look bad, but he was not going
to be a bully. He's not going to do funny
things with the camera so that you look bad. He
would sit in a chair, both of you were there
facing each other, and you would have to I did
that program once and a million years ago, and you'd
(23:41):
have the conversation with him, and he would listen. He
was a great listener. Many people told me Bill Buckley
was the greatest conversationalist they'd ever know, And I thought,
why is that? I've been in his company. I met
him in nineteen ninety I booked when I was writing
a previous book. And he's a wonderful guy, and he's
very bright, and he's smart, he speaks well. But the
best conversationalist ever. Then I realized what they meant, the
(24:03):
best listener ever. He just hung on every word you said,
so he could turn it around and use it against you.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Oh, so he could turn around to use it against you.
Speaker 4 (24:14):
That Yeah, yeah, I call it predatory attentiveness.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
So. But let's talk about Buckley and the public intellectual
for a minute, because one of the things that happened
during his time as kind of the grandest public intellectual.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Is that he decides in nineteen.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Sixty eight to debate Gorvidal. I'd love you to talk
a little bit about is a really important democratic convention
for any number of reasons that actually don't not relate
to modern day. So talk to us through I would
love you to just do us do like two minutes
on the nineteen sixty eight Democratic Convention and the Buckley
(24:56):
Gorvidal debate.
Speaker 4 (24:58):
Well to set it up quickly, MA they debated through
both conventions, so it's be a dozen debates on ABC,
which was the smallest of the networks, and did not
want to do gabble the gable coverage. So they took
the most articulate guy in the right WAYM. F. Buckley,
and they said, who's the one guy you don't want
a debate? And he said, do not put me in
a room with Gorbadal. And they think, okay, they know
(25:20):
how to do TV good, we'll get Gorbadal. So the
two of them are going at each other first in
Miami where the Republicans have their convention that nominated Richard Nixon.
And what Vidal does is, and I have all this
in detail in the books. He thought Buckley was gay.
Many people thought Buckley was gay, but that Buckley was
hiding it. So Vidal's going to flush him out.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Which is very common to be closeted gay back then,
is very very common left right.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
It didn't matter what your politics were. Buckley's homes were
filled with gay people. He and his wife Fido were
great friends with Truman, Capodi and Phil Blast and you
name them. That's the world they lived in. But politically
it could be very damaging. And Vidal was in the closet,
which you don't realize because everybody was. So Buckley goes
after him, and Vidal set up. He's prepared for this
(26:07):
and he starts gabating Buckley by making very clever comments.
It calls him the Marie Antoinette of the right wing,
which then became a headline in a New York Times
book review review of Buckley's next collection. It's a very
cleverly written review and at the bottom, when you see
the id with the reviewer, it says, mister Mario Puzo's
(26:31):
new book will be about the mafia. It was Maria
known had heard of him, and the Godfather is about
to come out and he's going after Bucker. So now
they're in Chicago, and Chicago was the most tumultuous nomination
convention in modern history. Some will remember before Kamala Harris
was nominated, the fear the Democrats had in Chicago was
(26:54):
that it would be another nineteen sixty eight students protesting,
this time over Gaza police clashing with them. That's exactly
what happened in Chicago. It really did become violent. There
was what was later determined to be a police riot.
There were non violent student protesters. Alan Sorkin made a
series about it a couple of years ago. Attacked by
(27:17):
the police. That's right, the sork thing is quite accurate. Well,
the night that the most tempestuous, dangerous night, violent night. Now,
Buckley and Vidal are facing each other in the studio
and the moderator, Howard K. Smith of ABC says to
Gore Vidal, don't you think it's a bit much that
(27:38):
these anti Vietnam war protesters are holding up flags and
making chance in defense of the enemy, the communists in
North Vietnam? And Bucky says yes. And Smith says, isn't
that like being pro Nazi in World War Two? And
Bucky says, yes, it's like being a Nazi. And Vidal
says the only Nazi in this room, Bill is Hugh.
(28:01):
And Buckley loses and he says, stop calling me a Nazi.
You ink we're television Molly nineteen sixty eight. You think
wear I'll sock you in your goddamn face and you'll
stay blasted. And what happens in your what you can
see it, you know in that great film, A Best
(28:23):
of Enemies.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Right, That's what I was thinking about, because I had
just wanted to.
Speaker 4 (28:26):
Yeah, you see a smile come in Vidal's face. He
knows he's got him, he knows he's got Buckley, that
he's made Buckley lose it because Buckley's whole thing is
cerebral coolness. Oh really, mister Vidal, Oh quaink. He doesn't
say that, he starts name calling him. And what I
(28:47):
found is why I write these books privately. That's how
we often referred to Vandal. So what happened was that
thing got unleashed in him. Vidal knew that he could
do that, he would he press the button. And Buckley
never overcame that Vidal didn't care. Was a big joke
to him. But Buckley was really crushed by it. You
(29:08):
have to remember, not only he's a brilliant erud eye guy,
he's famous for this super sophisticated, ornate vocabulary. Now television
sets across the country, it's like trump parents are putting
their hands over their children's ears, you know, they don't
want to hear somebody talk to somebody else like that.
And it was a big event in that culture. Ten
(29:29):
million people saw it and it was a shocker.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
Yeah. So interesting.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
Now you break some news in this book, and I'd
love you to talk about it.
Speaker 4 (29:38):
All right, there's news of all kinds.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Yeah, but you know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 4 (29:43):
I know what you're talking about, which is that the
Buckleys are always thought of as and is true living
in this gorgeous estate in northwest Connecticut as its goal, Sharon, Connecticut.
Bill Buckley and his nine siblings grew up in this
magnificent estate forty seven acres date the kind of place
you have in back in the nineteen thirties and forties
(30:03):
when they're growing up, but you have a dozen servants
doing the lawns and grooming the horses in the stables
and all those. But they had a second home too,
and the second home was a winter estate in South Carolina.
And when the Buckley family, his parents were both from
the South, his father from South Texas, his mother from
New Orleans. When they went to Camden, South Carolina, where
(30:27):
the other house was, they were the Southerners coming home.
And they became very much involved in nineteen fifty four
in what was called Massive Resistance, and that was the
White South attempt to disobey, which they did quite successfully.
Sounds familiar the Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation, the
(30:52):
Brown Decision. The Buckley family sponsored and paid for a
newspaper that sided with the segregar a South. It was
called the Citizens Councils. Back then, there were the Uptown
plan there were the businessmen who were you know, they
didn't wear the hoods, you know, and have funny names.
But they would say, we understand you loaned money to
(31:14):
a member of the NAACP. I'm afraid your credit is
no longer good at our bank. And the Buckleys were
right in the center of it. It was a shock
or they didn't tell anybody about it. Yeah, yeah, I
discovered it in you know, the research you do and interviews,
because I thought I was going to write about another
newspaper in town. Because when you write these historical narratives,
(31:34):
I'm a storyteller. You use newspapers to give you, you know,
capture the color of the scene and give it lots
of details. So I went through I thought I was
going to be looking at something called the Camden Chronicle,
and then the archivist in Camden said, I think you
mean the Camden News. The Buckley paper. She hadn't read it.
(31:55):
Nobody down there had read it. They didn't know that.
When you turned to page three in the very first issue,
and you'll see the photograph in my book, you see
an invitation an ad, a full page ad inviting all
white citizens of Kershaw County to join attend the meetings
of the Citizens Council with a statement of principles. We
(32:17):
oppose race mixing in the schools. We oppose the NAACP,
which does not have the best interests of our colored
citizens in mind. You almost can't believe what you're reading.
And yet the Buckleys were incredibly kind, generous people, including
to the help. To tell that story was the most
(32:38):
exciting and difficult thing I had to do in the book,
because you have to enter it's like a twilight zone.
It's one that even you and I who are like
into the past, right, we don't get this stuff. We've
never seen it. And there it was. There it was,
and they never talked about it up north, but they
did in the South. So if you opened up the
(32:58):
Charleston newspaper, the Charleston News Courier, which was there big,
the big state newspaper, you would see casual references to
the Buckley's and their newspaper fighting for the white citizens
of South Carolina. I don't know how he got away
with that, I really don't. So that's what I mean.
There's other news, but that's the core one I think
you're talking about. Yeah, that is because it changed the movement.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
Yeah, I think it's very instructive about Buckley and also
just about the fantasy that trump Ism is somehow completely
unconnected to the Republican Party of old.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
That's it. That's it. I mean, you just said it. Yeah,
and think about when that's happening. Because it's a timeline
component to all of this, which is so important. All
of you people out there will run to write these
big histories. You have to have a timeline. You have
to either put it out on a piece of paper
or your computer. Whatever. The timeline here, Molly is at
the very moment that Buckley's first hero, Joseph McCarthy is
(33:55):
being exposed and humiliated by Ed Murrow and in television hearings.
At that same moment is when the Brown decision came
down and the movement shifted from being about anti communism
to being protecting the I'm going to use National Review
in Buckley's terms, the mores and cultural folk ways of
(34:18):
the Old South.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
Yeah, it's a really important point. Thank you, thank you,
thank you. Sam Tennan House. What's next for you?
Speaker 4 (34:26):
I'm going to write a little book about the Black Panthers.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
Oh fabulous.
Speaker 4 (34:31):
Yeah, and a guy named Clarence Thomas because they were
all in it together.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
At you.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
I've heard of him. Wow, he went to Yale with
the Black Panthers.
Speaker 4 (34:40):
He was basically a panther himself when he started out.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Clarence Thomas was a black panther.
Speaker 4 (34:47):
He was a black power guy who attended Black Panther rallies. Wow.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Wow, you heard it here, yes, all over the place,
Sam Tennanhouse.
Speaker 4 (35:00):
Pleasure, Mollie. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If
you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend
and keep the conversation going.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Thanks for listening.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.