September 14, 2025 • 41 mins
Newt talks with Daniel J. Flynn, senior editor at The American Spectator, about his new book, “The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer.” Frank Meyer was a pivotal figure in American conservatism. Initially a fervent communist, Meyer later became a key intellectual force behind the conservative movement, influencing figures like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Their discussion explores Meyer's transformation from a communist activist to a conservative thinker. Flynn highlights Meyer's passion, his role in shaping the conservative ideology known as "fusionism," and his influence on Reagan's political philosophy. They also discuss Meyer's personal life, his relationships, and his impact on the conservative movement uncovered through extensive archival research and personal letters. Flynn provides a comprehensive look at Meyer's complex journey and enduring legacy in American politics.
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 (00:04):
On this episode of news World, frank Meyer devised the
blueprint for American conservatism, fusionism championed by Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan,
and so many to this day. Yet earlier in his life,
communist in London Chantel free frank Meyer to block the
deportation of a comrade who was their cause celeb Those
(00:26):
fervent Marxists could never have predicted that their hero would
one day provide the intellectual energy necessary to propel conservatives
into political power. The Man who invented Conservatism unveils one
of the twentieth century's great untold stories. A communist termed conservative,
an anti war activist turned soldier, and a free love
(00:48):
enthusiast termed family man whose big idea captured the American right.
Here to discuss frank Meyer's life, I'm really pleased to
welcome my guests. Daniel Flemming, your editor of The American Spectator,
serves as a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution for
the twenty twenty four twenty twenty five Academic here and
is the author of seven books. Dan, welcome, and thank
(01:23):
you for joining me on your tour.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
What attracted you to dig into Frank Meyer's life.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
I think a lot of people are attracted to write
about figures like Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill that everybody knows.
I'm the opposite. I want to write about somebody that
I think people should know about but don't. And Frank
had one of those stories that you know, as you
put it in the introduction, it was one of the
great untold stories of the twentieth century. And so the
(01:53):
idea of telling this exciting story the way I look
at it, the early conservative movement or ideologues in general,
there are a lot of them that live kind of
black and white, dull lives. That's most of them. I
think there's a few that operated in technicolor. Whittaker, Chambers,
Wilmore Kendall would be examples of that. Fred Meyer lived
in three D. He really pops off the page. So
(02:15):
as a biographer, he did a lot of the heavy
lifting for me, just in the way that he lived
his life.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Before you decided to do the book, had you been
aware of and influenced by Frank Meyer?
Speaker 2 (02:26):
I had read in Defensive Freedom. I think for young
concerns coming up, that's one of those kind of maybe
a dozen canonical books, of which you'd have to have
read eight of them to kind of have entry into
serious conversations with other serious concernis. So i'd certainly read
in Defensive Freedom. I don't think I called myself a
fusionist or thought a whole lot about Frank Meyer, And
(02:48):
in fact, my prentice coming in is I don't want
to write about one of these audiolongs. I want to
write about someone exciting. I had written about Jim Jones
and Harvey Milk. In a previous book, I wrote about
Erin Claffer, who really was exciting character, various figures on
the American left, like Julius Wayland, John Reid. I thought
those were exciting guys. I thought, well, geef Rick Meyer,
(03:08):
he's boring. Well he was the furthest thing from boring.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
So in a sense, you approached this as a professional biographer.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yes, not as a Meyer writer, a fusionist or anything
like that, but just someone that wanted to tell an
interesting story. And as I say, Frank lived an interesting story.
So that made my job a lot easier. Part of what.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Strikes me in Meyer's life is that he had a
permanent sense of passion although it shifted radically from being
a passion for communism to being a passion for conservatism.
But would you agree that there was something at the
core of his being that required passion in order to
have fully lived his life.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
I think so, And I think people want to be
around passion. Very early on, I see a letter than
I found that is saying to Frank's from a prep
school teacher in Pennsylvania, saying to Frank, you know I
miss our scintillating conversations. Frank's back at Oxford. He's in Pennsylvania.
You know, I want to go drinking with you. You're
so exciting when you give toasts and you drink. And
(04:10):
I want to do a cooks tour this part of
the country with you. And all these books that you recommended,
I want to read them. And just went not and
all him. You know that letter was written by James Mitchner,
and that to me was very cobbin. But Frank came
all of these friends. This is a guy fifteen to
twenty years before he wrote Tales of the South Pacific,
which is one of the most famous books that became
of the most famous plays in American history. And here
(04:32):
he is as a prep school teacher, basically begging Frank
Meyer to be his friend. So when you say passion,
people exude passion while other people want to be around
that guy. In Great Britain, Frank was the Johnny Appleseed
of the communist movement amongst the youth. When I looked
at MI I five and I six to classified your tingle,
they repeatedly identify him as the founder of the student
(04:54):
Communist Party movement in Great Britain. And here's this guy
that does this in England, that is the Jonny apple
Steed of communism amongst the universities in England. He comes
over to America estentially does the same thing for conservatives.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Let me start with his Becker. What do you think
there was in his childhood and his early youth that
led him, first of all to be so passionately communist.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Well, his mother was very active in Judaism and his
father was a capitalist, and at about sixteen Frank rebelled
against both of those things, religion and capitalism. When he
gets to the United Kingdom, he kind of styles himself
a revolutionary and he found something called the October Club,
(05:39):
which is a club that still exists in Oxford to
this day, and Frank gets to Oxford, there are zero
Communists in Oxford. By the time he leaves, there's three hundred.
Frank in his youth, his parents had him when they
were both around forty years old. He comes into the
world into a family in which the parents think the
prospect of them having no kids is very real. So
(06:02):
he's not only an only child, but he might not exist,
so he's very valued from day one. He grows up
very wealthy and kind of a high hat hotel in Newark,
New Jersey. He goes to a fancy prep school. When
he's sixteen, he meets his best friend at Belgrade Lakes,
the inspiration for On Golden Pond, and his best friend
is Eugene O'Neil junior. And he meets Eugene O'Neil, the
(06:23):
greatest American playwright. And at sixteen, he's bombing a copy
of Tristram Shandy off of Eugene O'Neil. They're talking in
nineteen twenty six about the prospects of war between the
United States and Japan. They're playing kind of a Marco
Polo meets Risk game in the water at Belgrade Lakes,
so He's very comfortable around a guy that at that
(06:43):
point had already written two Politzer Prize winning plays. When
he meets Meyer, he's writing his third in Strange Interlude,
and so Meyer at sixteen to hang that comfort level
with the famous, the intelligent, the smart people like gen O'Neil.
I think it was a great bordering on sort of
an arrogance in Frank Meyer. And I think that's part
(07:04):
of the reason that he was able to convince as
many people to come over to his side when he
got to Oxford.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
He's a passionate advocate of whatever it is. He's passionately advocating.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Yes, and when he's at Oxford, and one of the
things he's passionate about as a lot of summer is
whooman and as he is advocating the violent overthrow of
the government of Ramsey McDonald. When I found in these
papers is that he was secretly dating the youngest daughter
of Ramsey McDonald. I have a letter from Sheila McDonald,
his youngest daughter, and Ramsey McDonald was a winning and
(07:37):
she says, listen the cost dis kiddiment. My dad's not around.
I'm over to ten Downing Street, will have dinner the
thing about any romantic figure in the history of communism
that you can come up with Chae Guavera, John Reid,
there is nobody that had the stones to pull off
something like that. That you were calling for the violent
of the Prime Minister of Great Britain and at the
(07:58):
same time you were secretly danger his daughter. Well, he
wasn't long for Great Britain, you know. I have about
one hundred and sixty pages of five and mi sixty
classified notes on Meyer. They knew where he did his banking,
they knew where he drank. They did a black bag
job on his apartment. They did put a mail cover
on his correspondence. But we're supposed to believe that they
(08:19):
didn't realize that he was dating. They're Big Boss's daughter.
He was dating Ramsey McDonald's daughter. I find that hard
to believe. What I know is true. What I know
is concrete, is that there were moves in the spring,
in late winter of nineteen thirty four to de poor
Frank Meyer. And this brings in people like Clement Attlee,
who becomes the Prime Minister of Great Britain. He gives
(08:40):
a speech in Meyer's defense on the floor of Parliament
there's a petition that goes around with Ian Forster who
re passage to India, Bertrand and Russell the Philosopher, the
Dean of Canterbury. They're all signing a petition Keith Frank Myron.
In this country, there are petitions, there are rallies, there
are dances. There when flood raises held for frank Meyer.
(09:00):
And ultimately this is a battle. He loses. Michael Strait,
who later was the publisher of the New Republican much
later was revealed as a Communist spy. He remembers as
a teenager marching around London with other student activists, chanting
free frank Meyer. Free frank Meyer. And in June of
nineteen thirty four they couldn't free him. They kicked him
(09:20):
out of the country. He went to work as a
peace activist under a guy whose name you probably remember,
Walter Ulbricht, who was the longest surving dictator of East Germany.
Imagine that a guy who had already ordered the murderer
of a policeman in Germany, Meyer is working under him
to promote peace. Melayer. In nineteen sixty two, he was
(09:41):
giving speeches on American college campus, is saying mister Khrushcheff
tear down this wall. That's twenty five years before Reagan
was doing it. Here he was in nineteen thirty four
working for the guy who would later erect the Berlin Wall.
So we talk of on long strange trip. Frank Meyer
certainly had a long strange trip, and it started in
nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties as a Stalinist.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
No, and he works for Olbricht. Is he working with
Rolbrooket in Germany?
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Oh, he's working in France because Oldbrooks at that time
was already wanted or suspected for martyring these two policemen.
And by nineteen thirty four Hitler Marrity has powers. So
the leading communists had already kind of scandal. I believe
during the Second World War, Oldbricht was safe and sound
in Moscow. But at this point he's in Paris.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
What happens tomorrow? I mean here he is, he's a
internationally known celebrity among communists, and then something happens.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
What happened, Well, he got to the United States, and
in the United States he's a communist for like ten years.
In Britain, he's on the board of the Communist Party
of Great Britain. He's the director of the student Bureau.
He's a big deal in Britain. In the United States,
he's sitting like a mid level manager. I mean, he
becomes the director of the Chicago Workers School. He's kind
of a big deal, but he's not at that higher
(10:54):
echelon in the property that he was in in Great
Britain until literally end. And so a couple of years
prior to the end of World War Two, Meyer gets
in the ear of Earl Brnoder, who was the head
of the Communist Plment in the United States, and he
splits in the lenum. He's frustrated, and he said, listen,
if we want to attract bowlers instead of these hardcore Marxists,
(11:14):
we need to fuse the American tradition with Marxism. And
we need to do this not just on the fourth
of July, we need to do this every day of
the year. Well, Browder went in that direction, The party
went in that direction. Whether Meyer was the one who
convinced him or not, I mean, that's just speculation. But
Broader went in that direction. And so Meyer had been
the director of Chogongo Worker School after he was teaching
(11:36):
at something called the Jefferson School. Browder was the general
secretary of the party. Now he was the president. They
used to sing the International when they started their meetings.
Now they sing the stump spangled Banning. So they try
to wrap up communism in the American flag and keeps
Meyer in the party. But in nineteen forty five there
comes from France something called the Duke close Slinner, which
(11:58):
Meyer and Browner and other communists interpreted as some guy
from France lecturing Americans on how toing the party, basically saying,
you can't be bunny buddy with capitalist anymore. You can't
support Roosevelt. There's going to be a Cold War coming
between the United States and the Soviet Union. You better
shape up and get on board and stop with this
all American communism stuff and made and broader or naive.
(12:20):
And they think, well, this is just this French goofball
running us this letter. It was the Kremlin. It was
Stalin telling them and warning them in not an overt way,
in a covert way, the Cold War is coming. This
temporary alliance that you have with Roosevelt in the United
States that's ending. Stop that Meyern Broader didn't want to
do that. The party dumps Brouter and they make a
(12:42):
villain of him, and frank Meyer kind of SLINKs out
of the party. But before he denies that, he comes
me part of a book called The Ruin to Sufican
by free Er Kayak, a guy he had known at
the London School of Economics. They both were Rockefeller funded
scholars there, and he reads this book and even as
a commune, that blows him away. He writes a review
(13:02):
of it. It's a positive review. It's a mixed to
positive review in a publication called The New Masses, which
was communist controlled, and at that time that's about the
only time in the history of Communist Party that you
can write a positive review of a right wing book,
of a conservative book, of a free market book. That
book the Road to Serve Them. You can not see
in his brain changing when he reviews the book in
(13:24):
The New Masses that he realizes that communism wasn't all
it's craped up to be. It was not democratic. What
was really democratic is the idea of freedom. I'm having
the freedom to choose what you wanted and not having
it driven down your throat by communist direct market controlled
by a few people, and so both you do close
letter and the road to serve them encourages Meyer to
(13:46):
leave the Communist Party. He does that in nineteen forty five.
He takes a break by nineteen fifty. When you read
what he's writing, it's clear that he has all the
language of a right winger. He is a conservative by
that point in the age had been complete by nineteen.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
Fifty, having been as deep inside as you could in
(14:23):
the Western communist movement. He writes, Communist theory is powerful,
not because it is true most obviously is not. It
is powerful because it is believed.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Yes, And he started not believing it in the first
crack in his armor. He had sent men to their
deaths as a recruiter for the Spanish Civil War. One
of the men that he got into the Communist Party
are boys that he brought was a guy named John Cornford,
who was the great grandson of Charles Darwin. Cornford became
the mono icon of the UK Communist left. Meyer set
(14:56):
him up as a successor, and when Meyer left he
became the head of the Common His party of the university
students in Great Britain work for young guys in Spain
the day after his twenty for his birthday, and Meyer
feels great guilt for this. Charmies that join up World
War two and he Commists are exhorting everyone to join
up and fight Hitler, and when my turns to join,
(15:16):
they say no, no, no, you can't go. And Meyer's confused, Well,
you're telling everyone to go and fight Haitler. I want
to fight Aitler. And they say, look, you can't go,
and so they have a big fight. Finally they let
Meyer go. And when he joins the military. He joins
the army, he realizes the men in his squad bay
are not the proletariat that Marx had told him about.
This is something that lived in a lot of social insulation.
(15:39):
He was very wealthy, and he's meeting plumbers and electricians
for the first time, guys that work on assembly lines.
And he realized that what Manox had told him about
the working class was a complete lie. So there were
a number of things that led up to his departure
from the Commists party, his defection, and of course it
all ends up with him testifying at the longest, most
expensive trial in the history of the United States tip
(16:00):
to that point, which was the Smith Act triminial of
nineteen forty nine. Meyer was called a slow witness, a
mystery witness, and he helped send Gus Hall, Eugene Dennis,
a lot of the leaders of the Communist Party, eleven
leaders of the Communist Party. He helped send them to
federal prison for five years.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
How did that transition to come into the FBI recruit
him or what?
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Maer was friends in the party with a guy named
Louis Butdenz. Louis Budenz was Ultimately he deflects in a
much more polorful way than Meyer does. Mayer was a
really powerful character, but at Meyer's defection, he kind of
slinked out of the party. It was very nondescript. Wolfspudenz
did something on precedent in the history of the Communist Party.
(16:41):
Him and Meyer for years were talking about Americanizing the
party and Meyer had some success in doing that. And
so when he left the party, he tips my rof
I'm leaving, and Meyer doesn't rat him out. Meyer remains
his friend, which is unusual for someone in the party.
But Louis Pudenz at this point is the editor of
the Daily Worker. On the same day that he leaves
(17:01):
the party. He is on the masthead as the managing
editor of The Daily Worker. The most famous Catholic priest
in the United States, Fulton Sheen converts him to Catholicism
and Saint Patrick's Cathedral, and it's in every newspaper with
the country. But heame's heah of the Daily Worker, just
converted to Catholicism, and now he's an anti communist. Meier
didn't leave like that, but Budenz a few years later,
in nineteen forty seven, he says, Meyer, listen, there's some
(17:24):
guys I want you to talk to. They're FBI agents.
You don't have anything to worry about. Let them come up.
So over the course of a month in nineteen forty seven,
every week the FBI came to visit Frank Meyer, and
he told his wife that he realized at that moment
what grace meant, because there was no good choice open
to him. He could either betray his old comrades, he
(17:44):
could betray his friends, or he could betray his country.
And what he decided to do after March Agony was
to go with his country over his friends, or as
I think Angrisolo put it, I love truth and I
love Plato. But if these things are in conflict, I'm
going to pick truth over my friends. But I think
essentially that's what Frank Meyer did and testifying and Los Budenz,
(18:06):
who was one of the most prolific witnesses against the
Communist Party, he's really the guy that convinced Meyer to
testify against his old comrades.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
At that point. And he clearly has decisively in his
own head broken with who he once was.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Yes, he did. The hard thing about that is he
had privatic affecting. He moved to, of all places, Woodstock,
New York. Now later Bob Dylan would move in next door.
You'd have members of the band live down the street.
Van Morrison lived down the street. In fact, now he's
the last person on earth to care about any of this.
But even in the nineteen forties, this was an artist colony.
(18:43):
This was a place where leftists from Grangenge Village retreated to,
and Frank chose that as a place to live, and
all sorts of people that had been his friends were
all of a sudden no longer as friends. To take
a guy like Philip Guston a few years ago, one
of his paintings went for twenty six million dollars. Well,
when I knew him in Woodstock, he was a starving artist.
But the moment Frank goes over to the other side,
(19:05):
becomes a conservative, Gustin won't have anything to do with him.
And there are a lot of people in Woodstock that
Frank becomes a pariaetu. So he's living isolated up on
this hill in Woodstock. He starts changing his hours. Frank
becomes a nocturnal creature. He buys a gun. I think
without reason, he is worried about the prospect of the
Communist Party exacting retribution. The Party obviously had killed a
(19:29):
lot of people. They didn't kill a lot of Americans,
but they had killed some Americans. And I think Frank,
with some justification bought this gun. And for the last
quarter century of his life. One of the things that
identified Frank Meyer was this was a guy that got
up in the afternoon and he slept till seven in
the morning, and these were his hours for the rest
of his life.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
The way that he operated from your perspective is he's
as comfortable being alone.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Well, his wife and he has two kids, I mean
one of his kids. You're listeners probably know Eugene Meyer.
Eugene Meyer was longtime president of the Federal of Society
and his youngest son John, both of them extremely successful
chess players, guys who graduated from Yale, very bright guys,
and also guys that cooperated a great deal with this book.
So he has his two kids, he has his wife.
(20:18):
He's kind of a strange hermit. He's living isolated up
on this hill in Woodstock, up on this mount in Woodstock.
And in fact, when Bob Dylan moved next door to him,
Dylan's whole reason for moving there was he was fed
up with the hippies. He wanted to go to some
place where people couldn't find him, and the best place
he could think of was Ohao Mountain Road in Woodstock.
So he moves back next to Meyer, but the properties touched.
(20:40):
But they're basically like a quarter mile away their houses,
but their properties are touching. And some moves to a
place where people really can't find him. Yet he is
a social animal, and he starts to do something after
he leaves the Communist Party, which is to make phone
calls and AM's tax returns from nineteen forty nineteen seventy two,
so his vook calls become so legendary that by the
(21:05):
early nineteen sixties he's spending about his corner of his
income on telephone bills and he's calling people. I interviewed
a lot of people and they talked about him calling
at all times of the night, and of course he
did do that. You'd get a call from frank Meyer
maybe at two in the morning or midnight. One of
his kids emailed me last night said, well, that wasn't
that common, So maybe those people were remembering the unusual
(21:26):
rather than the quote vigan. But he didn't call people
in all hours of the night. And people told me, well,
it wasn't unusual for him to have multi hour long
conversations with people. So he was a strange social animal
that he was living isolated on this mountain in Wouldstop
New York. But at the same time he created that
social connection. And the way he did that was from
the telephone, the iatola comane. He had his revolution through
(21:48):
cassette tapes. You had the people in Egypt, they did
it through Twitter. Frank Meyer's revolution was gone through at
and t That's wild.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
No, he creates a fusion through what that means because
Reagan cites him for that.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
He certainly did. And I think if fusionism was so
influential that even people that had never heard of the
word fusionism, Fuchists, even people that hadn't heard of Frank
Meyer's name, were effectively my rights. And basically what fusionism
was was a marriage of traditionalism and freedom. And Meyer
essentially said that listen, if you're a conservative in Great Britain,
(22:27):
maybe you're conserving the royalty or the arist democracy. If
you're conservative in Italy, maybe you're conserving the Catholic Church.
If you're a conservative in Ronca, the tradition that you
conserveerve is the American Founding, the Declaration of Independence, the
Freederalist papers, the Constitution, maybe Washington's phenologists, whole lot of
other things. As one of Frank's acolytes, Stan Evans put it,
(22:48):
on the cover of a book, the theme is freedom.
And I think what Stand meant in his book is
that you had thousands of years of Western civilization propping
up this liberty that we enjoy in the United States,
and if you take away our heritage, if you take
away that tradition, you will not have freedom. And so
there was this tension between tradition and virtue in the
one hand, and freedom on the other. And if you
(23:10):
take one away, the other is meaningless because flip the
quint in there. If you think about it, if you
have compulsory virtue, that's not virtue at all. You have
to have free choice to have true virtue. So there
is fusionism in a nutshell, the marriage of traditionalism and freedom.
And I think the reason it worked is one because
(23:30):
at its base distilled level, it's essentially true, that it's
easy to understand, and three that it had utility applications
for politics. I mean, if you read a book like
The Concernative Mind, which is a beautiful book by Russell Krumerk,
there's not a lot of political applications there. It might
train you how to think, it might give you an
(23:51):
appreciation for history, but it doesn't have a lot of
political applications. I think the reason why in Defensive Freedom
worked as a book and fusionism worked as a philosophy
was because it did have political applications.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
To what extent do you think Reagan became am I right?
Speaker 2 (24:09):
I think that Reagan was the embodiment of frank Meyer's
political dreams in nineteen sixty, Reagan successfully coursed the editors
of National Review not to endorse Richard Nixon. He viewed
Nixon as an opportunist, and he said, why don't we
just symbolically endorse Goldwater. We know he's not running for president,
(24:30):
but let's just symbolically endorse him and put all our
efforts into electing good conservatives at the congrucial level. It
may take, and it's probably going to take twenty years
before we elect one of our own person the United States.
It's going to take until nineteen eighty. And of course
he was prophetic about that immediately after Barry Goldwater, and
even before Barry Goldwater loses in nineteen sixty four, Meyer's
(24:53):
eyes get diverted to Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan, of course,
gave that great speech which was kind of an infomerci
for Goldwater, and I think Meyer, like a lot of people, thought,
why isn't this guy running for president rather than this
creaky guy over here? The stars done with the ballot time,
why not we got inves city rooting for president. And
so Mayan became associated with from y old Reagan so
(25:16):
much so then in nineteen sixty eight, when the new
Republic asked various prominent figures to write about what candidate
they were supporting. They naturally picked Meyer as the guy
to write about Ronald Reagan that his association as an
intellectual was at least connected with him, and this had
costs for Meyer.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
You know.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
One of the things Mayn did at nashery View was
he was the literary editor of Nasher Review. He was
the person who actually discotled John Didion, no parmenttal. Her
boyfriend was pushing her to all these editors around New
York and no one would take her, and Didon credits
Meyer as the first editor to publish her freelance work.
He was really a mentor to Joan Didion. He had
(25:55):
a guy named third Theodore Sturgeon ultimately became a writer
for Star Trek, came up with of Long and prosper
is the guy that came up with the prime directive
and Star tunk right the Ankerson where Leonard Nimoy invented
that split fingered salute that I can't do, but many
people can, you know, split their fingers down the middle.
So he had that guy writing reviews of science fiction
(26:15):
for Nash Review. Hugh Kenner guy Davenport, Gary Wills, all
these literary heavy hitters he had reviewing books and making
it early the best book review section in the United States. Now,
but tell me he's pushing Reagan. Hugh Kenner writes a
critical piece on Reagan and Nash are you so mocking
the idea that he would be president? Meyer, who was
great friends with Kenner, engineered behind the scenes a rebuttal
(26:38):
that was written by Jeffrey Hart and cost Hugh Kenner
to resign from Nasher. Hugh, So Kevin was a bunch
of friends with a guy named Guy to Avenport and
Guy Davenport were Nickson says, listen, Hugh from Mayer thinks
that Ronald Reagan should be president of the US. And
he puts a bunch of exhalation points because at that point,
the idea of anyone supporting Ronald Reagan as president, he's
(26:59):
thinking of him as as a movie actor. Frank is
cleitarly thinking him as president the United States, and he
loses arguably his best book reviewer, Hugh Kenninger, who resigns
from the magazine because Meyer engineered this takedown of his
criticism of Reagan. So Meyer, very early on was a
Reagan supporter, and of course, if you look at Reagan's
speech at nineteen eighty one at Sea Pack, which by
(27:22):
the way, Meyer came up with the idea for Seatpack
in the nineteen sixties he was a founder of the
American Conservative Union. He kept pushing the idea of this
conference that would sort of marry activism in the intellectual right. Well,
they didn't do it at the time, but they later
created Seatpack, and I think Meyer should be credited as
a founding father of it. In Navy One, Reagan is
sort of giving a hat tip to James Burnham and
(27:43):
William of Buckley and Rustil Kirk, but he stillops for
an extraordinary long time talking about Frank Meyer and how
he had paved the way for this moment. And I
think more than any of those thinkers on the post
war conservative right, you have to look at Frank Meyer
as someone who intellects actually is most sympatico with the
Reagan Revolution.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
In that context, Meyer is quid essentially intellectual. His impact
is about ideas and about writing. And one of the
things that really makes your book come alive is you
actually found a whole bunch of letters. Can you walk us.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
Through the My plan was to read a bunch of books,
read all issues of National Review, and then I would
know what questions to ask when I interview people. I
probably did about one hundred interviews. I would know where
to look when I would go into archives. But something
happened in twenty twenty that your listeners probably remember. COVID
shut everything down, particularly universities. They shut down for single years,
(29:00):
so I couldn't do any of archival work. I did
a Freedom of Information Act request from the friederal government
in twenty twenty one. They came back to me in
twenty twenty two and they said, well, we're now processing
requests from twenty fourteen, but your request, because it comes
after COVID, it's going to take a little bit longer.
In other words, come back to us in the twenty thirties.
That's the efficiency of the National Archives. And when I
(29:23):
looked at his papers at the Hoover Institution. I'm a
visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. I love going out there,
I love the archives. The ro Ar Chives was a
tremendous help for this book. But when I looked at
Meyer's papers out there, I noticed something was missing. I've
been doing archival work for about twenty five years and
the rhythm was off. So I, out of desperation, I
wished his papers into existence. I just needed to calling
(29:45):
people and saying, where's Frank's papers? And I got material
that was helpful for private collections, letterers, some property deeds,
things like that, but I still didn't have his papers.
And at a certain point John Meyer, about a year
and a half into search, I said, well, we did
sell the house to this couple, David's In Cabbage and
Karen Myers, and they bought all the color tents. So
(30:07):
I said, we told me about these people. At first
I went to Zink Cabbage and Myers and said, you
have Frank's papers and they said no, we donated them,
at least David did. And I said, no, you kept
some of them and they said no Jonatan, I said, no,
you don't know. You even do it on GROUPUS, but
you kept some of them. You just don't know it.
And this won a undrel period of months, and finally
they said, well, we have a warehouse and they said,
(30:28):
but there's a thousand boxes and there's nothing in there.
And even if there was something in there, you couldn't
go through all thousand of the box. I said, yes,
I could take me to your warehouse. So in August
of twenty twenty two, I drove at four in the
morning to Eltuna, Pennsylvania. I went through six hundred and
sixty three boxes and therein I found fifteen large moving
boxes that contained the papers of Frank Meyer. There's probably
(30:51):
over one hundred thousand letters there. There's letters from Tolkien, C. S. Lewis,
Joan Didion, William F. Buckley. There's one thousand letters from
Wilm We're Kendall, one thousand letters from Frent Bizzell, letters
from Jaguar Whover Battles, a lot of letters from Barry Goldwater.
And for the most part, these are letters that nobody
has ever seen before, or at least they haven't been
seen since Sender and Receiver. You know, I just read
(31:13):
a piece on Leo Strauss's back and forth with Frank Meyer.
That's completely fascinating. And these are letters that don't exist
in Stroums's papers. So there's pretty famous guy. I just
did a piece for the journal Libertarian Studies. It didn't
make it into the book, but Lotston thing was important
that didn't make in the book. But here is Maury Rothbard,
one of the leading figures of libertarianism, talking about Ein
(31:36):
Rand in real time when he's a member of her
inner circle and complaining about her, saying she's crazy or
saying she's brilliant. And so I was able to write
an article based on that. But really what this did
obviously was allow me to tell Frank Meyer's story in
his own words. I mean the idea that you have
the siphantic letter from James Mitchger or these love letters
(31:57):
of sorts from Prime Minister Ramsey Donald's daughter, other women,
you know, I find out that Meyer loses his virginity
to one of the great women in American aren't in
the twentieth century? Dorothy Canning Miller, for the longest time
was the curator of the Museum of Modern Art in
New York. There's all sorts of love letters in there,
there's all sorts of friendships, and really what it is
(32:19):
I think the book A guy named Robert D. Lourie
in the Spectator World, the UK Spectator just threw a
review that came out today and I was blown over
by it because he really got the book. He said
this book, it's really about friendships. It's really about why
we fall in love with people and then why we
fall out in love with people. And surely you get
that with Frank Meyer and Gary Wills. Garry Wills goes
(32:41):
in the opposite direction. Frank Meyer mentors him. Will says
he spent more time with Meyer than anyone out of
his family in the late fifties and early sixties, but
by in the early nineteen sethonies, he's a left winger.
He gets in the opposite direction of Meyer. So they
have this falling out. Wilmore Kendall, who's a guy who
was the mentor of Bill Buckley. You've seen your editor.
It's real behind the scenes stuff that you're getting from
(33:05):
these letters that you wouldn't get anywhere else. And then
of course you see Kendall falling out with Meyer, falling
out with Bill Buckley. At a certain point, Elsie Meyer says,
quit finding the following your friends to Wilmor Kendall, who
was a notoriously difficult man, and he says, I don't
know if any friend I'm in a fight with now
except Frank S. Meyer. If you're talking about William F. Buckley,
(33:25):
and he was William F. Buckley's teacher, He was his mentor.
He says, if you're talking about William F. Buckley, nobody
hasn't heard me Paul him a friend in at least
five years. He is not my friend. He is my enemy.
So this is hy drama stunt that you get these
letters that you're not going to get in any other book,
because there's no other scholar that has access to I
don't know, there's probably a hundred thousand looks than I
(33:47):
have here all sitting around my best overing my house
for the last three years. And I think best part
of the reason why this is an exciting book because
it is some original. It has so much strength that
came from this warehouse that nobody has had access to.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
Given on this, how much you've immerged yourself in him.
If Meyer were alive today, how do you think he
would view the current conservative movement?
Speaker 2 (34:11):
That's a very interesting question. On the one hand, Meyer
was decidedly not a populist in some ways without admitting it.
I mean, he was a big fan of Joe McCarthy,
and when James Buckley ran for Senate in nineteen seventy,
he was an advisor to him and his adrox to
Buckley was really populist. He said, listen, you're going to
reach him to these blue collar democrats. You can't win,
and you'll look in a three way race even you know,
(34:34):
as a Republican, even in a three way race, you've
got to reach out to these union people. Get union votes,
get blue call roads. So in some ways he'd be
fine with it, but he was not a populist. I
think the one way in which he would fit in
with what Trump is doing, with the maggot people are
doing is on foreign policy, and that seems very peculiar
because Meyer is a guy when one point was talking
(34:56):
about a preemptive nuclear streaming in the Soviet Union. I
mean he is so though it was a pulled warrior
down to the bone. He hated communism because he was
a communist. I mean the guy who brought him to
sign up as a member of the Communist Party in
Great Britain, a guy named Prince Mursky. He dies in
a gulag by the end of that decade. Meyer has
friends that get killed. Meyer has friends who are mumbered people.
(35:17):
He knows how evil communism is. So he was really
supportive of an active US foreign policy during the Cold War.
Henry Kissinger writes him a letter in nineteen sixty eight.
Kissinger says, and this is that one of the letters
in the collection. Kissinger says, you know, listen, I'm going
to be the national securityism under Richard Nixon. And so
we asked him what should do? What should we do
(35:37):
with foreign policy? And Myer says, well, of course, there's
this messianic crusader state that is an existential threat to
the United States and a lot of other nations in
the world. So our main should be to stop them,
to roll them back, to defeat them by whatever absent
this messianic crusader state. If there's a world in which
they no longer exist, of course, the idea of the
(35:59):
United Nations, the idea of foreign aid, the idea of
all these entangling alliances, they would be forsical. Even the
idea of the Vietnam War would be in complete farce.
If there were no Soviet Union, it would be no
business of ours with the social system of any other nation,
would be if it were not for communism trying to
take over this world. You think about today, I mean
(36:20):
the Russia, I mean think about how Ronald Russia has
been with Ukraine and they take over I don't know,
twenty percent of Ukraine, and people, justifiably you think that
this is madness, that this guy is a sort of
a hold order from the KGB. It's twenty percent of
one country. You come out of World War two and
they take over what twelve countries or something like that Europe.
(36:40):
And so the guy that Meyer was obsessed with in
those days, Stalin or his successors, I mean, they were
really doing bad business all around the world, and of
course he wanted to stop that. But he saw a
world in which they didn't exist, and he thought, in
that world, it doesn't make sense to manage the social
systems and make sure that every country was sort of
(37:01):
a democracy like we are. And he seems explicitly in
a debate with Alan Lowenstein at Yale he said this
with Kissing Jr. And he seved this in his last
column in Nationer Review, which he wrote in December nineteen
seventy one. And at that point he didn't know it.
But the cancer that he got and he was a chainsmoker,
like a lot of these guys, they really lived mad
met existence back then. The cancer that was eating away
(37:24):
at him. The last column, he writes, a National Review
is a view of the world without the Soviet Union
and what our foreign policy would be. And so in
that sense, I think he would be recomfortable with the
Trump people. I think on trade, sort of the more
populous aspect of it. On the bigger government aspect of it,
I think could be horrified.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
What's your next project?
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Wow?
Speaker 1 (37:45):
Not.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
There was a guy that I was writing about here,
and I used to call him my oldest friend because
I met him when he was ninety six years old,
and his name was Noah par Mattel. He was the
boyfriend of Joan Didion for six years, and I interviewed
him a series of times, and I thought, Wow, this
is one of the more interesting guys that I've ever
come across. And he had a bit of a con
man at him, but like a lot of Cohn men,
(38:07):
he was very charming. And so I think about beginning
about him, maybe in a long form article. I don't
know that people will go for a book, but that's
what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about some of these
wrongly Nasher Review people. In the first ten years, first
seven years of the publication, they were these three amigos,
these three musketeers, Frank Meyer, Brent Bozell, and Wilmer Kendall,
(38:30):
and they were sort of Nash Reviews great wing. When
Meyer came in there there was a guy named Billy Schlam.
He's the idea man behind Nash Review. He came up
with the idea. Schlam was a Communist who had met
Lennon at sixteen, turned like Meyer did, became an anti
Commuist conservative in the post war year, and his idea
was Nash Review. Bill Buckley did the heavy lifting, he
executed the idea, did the free raising. But early on
(38:54):
Shlam was sort of the leader of the right wing
in nasher review. He gets defenestrated because he's a big
pain in the neck and everyone thinks he's a pain
in the neck. And so Meyer takes over his role,
not only his book review editor, but it's sort of
the anti James Burnham in Nash Review. James Burnham was
an anti communist. But I don't know if I said
it or someone else said it, but his Paul, his
(39:15):
conspiratism essentially stopped at the water's edge. And so Meyer
was the leader of Nash Review's right wing faction. And
people like Meyer, Wilmore, Kendall, Brent Bazell to agree they
were living. If you've ever seen the show mad Men,
they were living sort of a mad Men existence. Kendall
writes Meyer a letter at one point saying, listen, I'm
talking about a heath kick my normal intake of seventy
(39:38):
sigarettes Sidenny from now down to a pack. I think
nowadays you look at a guy like Wilmer Pennell and say, well,
here personality disorder. And Meyer is up in Woodstock sort
of leading the battle of Nash Review's right wing. He
loses the battle within Nasher Review, but he wins the
broader war for the conservative movement. In other words, Nasher
Review increasingly takes on the look of what James Bernlan
(40:01):
wanted for it, which is still of an opinion a
regular opinion magazine. Myer means like a philosophical journal. So
he learns it's not battle of Nation Review, but this
wing and Nation Review they win the broader battle for
the soul of the conservative movement. It's interesting that as well.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
It's amazing. I want to thank you for joining me.
I'm frankly amazed both by your own career and the
range of people you've written about, and by your new book,
which I think is really badly needed, The Man who
invented Conservatism, The Unlikely Life of Frank Smer. It's available
now in Amazon and in bookstores everywhere. No one to
let our listeners know they can find out more about
(40:39):
the work you're doing by visiting the American Spectator website
at Spectator dot org. And I really appreciate you sharing.
This has been fascinating.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
This is the privilege to talk to you, mister speaker.
Thank you so much for having me on.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
Thank you to my guest Daniel J. You can get
a link to buy his new book, The Man who
Invented Conservatism on our show page at Newtsworld dot com.
News World is produced by Gingrish three sixty and iHeartMedia.
Our executive producer his Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson.
The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley.
(41:19):
Special thanks to the team at Gingish three sixty. If
you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple
Podcasts and both rate us with five stars and give
us a review so others can learn what it's all about.
Right now, Listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my
three free weekly columns at gingrashtree sixty dot com slash newsletter.
(41:39):
I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Newsworld
On this episode of news World, frank Meyer devised the
blueprint for American conservatism, fusionism championed by Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan,
and so many to this day. Yet earlier in his life,
communist in London Chantel free frank Meyer to block the
deportation of a comrade who was their cause celeb Those
(00:26):
fervent Marxists could never have predicted that their hero would
one day provide the intellectual energy necessary to propel conservatives
into political power. The Man who invented Conservatism unveils one
of the twentieth century's great untold stories. A communist termed conservative,
an anti war activist turned soldier, and a free love
(00:48):
enthusiast termed family man whose big idea captured the American right.
Here to discuss frank Meyer's life, I'm really pleased to
welcome my guests. Daniel Flemming, your editor of The American Spectator,
serves as a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution for
the twenty twenty four twenty twenty five Academic here and
is the author of seven books. Dan, welcome, and thank
(01:23):
you for joining me on your tour.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
What attracted you to dig into Frank Meyer's life.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
I think a lot of people are attracted to write
about figures like Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill that everybody knows.
I'm the opposite. I want to write about somebody that
I think people should know about but don't. And Frank
had one of those stories that you know, as you
put it in the introduction, it was one of the
great untold stories of the twentieth century. And so the
(01:53):
idea of telling this exciting story the way I look
at it, the early conservative movement or ideologues in general,
there are a lot of them that live kind of
black and white, dull lives. That's most of them. I
think there's a few that operated in technicolor. Whittaker, Chambers,
Wilmore Kendall would be examples of that. Fred Meyer lived
in three D. He really pops off the page. So
(02:15):
as a biographer, he did a lot of the heavy
lifting for me, just in the way that he lived
his life.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Before you decided to do the book, had you been
aware of and influenced by Frank Meyer?
Speaker 2 (02:26):
I had read in Defensive Freedom. I think for young
concerns coming up, that's one of those kind of maybe
a dozen canonical books, of which you'd have to have
read eight of them to kind of have entry into
serious conversations with other serious concernis. So i'd certainly read
in Defensive Freedom. I don't think I called myself a
fusionist or thought a whole lot about Frank Meyer, And
(02:48):
in fact, my prentice coming in is I don't want
to write about one of these audiolongs. I want to
write about someone exciting. I had written about Jim Jones
and Harvey Milk. In a previous book, I wrote about
Erin Claffer, who really was exciting character, various figures on
the American left, like Julius Wayland, John Reid. I thought
those were exciting guys. I thought, well, geef Rick Meyer,
(03:08):
he's boring. Well he was the furthest thing from boring.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
So in a sense, you approached this as a professional biographer.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yes, not as a Meyer writer, a fusionist or anything
like that, but just someone that wanted to tell an
interesting story. And as I say, Frank lived an interesting story.
So that made my job a lot easier. Part of what.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Strikes me in Meyer's life is that he had a
permanent sense of passion although it shifted radically from being
a passion for communism to being a passion for conservatism.
But would you agree that there was something at the
core of his being that required passion in order to
have fully lived his life.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
I think so, And I think people want to be
around passion. Very early on, I see a letter than
I found that is saying to Frank's from a prep
school teacher in Pennsylvania, saying to Frank, you know I
miss our scintillating conversations. Frank's back at Oxford. He's in Pennsylvania.
You know, I want to go drinking with you. You're
so exciting when you give toasts and you drink. And
(04:10):
I want to do a cooks tour this part of
the country with you. And all these books that you recommended,
I want to read them. And just went not and
all him. You know that letter was written by James Mitchner,
and that to me was very cobbin. But Frank came
all of these friends. This is a guy fifteen to
twenty years before he wrote Tales of the South Pacific,
which is one of the most famous books that became
of the most famous plays in American history. And here
(04:32):
he is as a prep school teacher, basically begging Frank
Meyer to be his friend. So when you say passion,
people exude passion while other people want to be around
that guy. In Great Britain, Frank was the Johnny Appleseed
of the communist movement amongst the youth. When I looked
at MI I five and I six to classified your tingle,
they repeatedly identify him as the founder of the student
(04:54):
Communist Party movement in Great Britain. And here's this guy
that does this in England, that is the Jonny apple
Steed of communism amongst the universities in England. He comes
over to America estentially does the same thing for conservatives.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Let me start with his Becker. What do you think
there was in his childhood and his early youth that
led him, first of all to be so passionately communist.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Well, his mother was very active in Judaism and his
father was a capitalist, and at about sixteen Frank rebelled
against both of those things, religion and capitalism. When he
gets to the United Kingdom, he kind of styles himself
a revolutionary and he found something called the October Club,
(05:39):
which is a club that still exists in Oxford to
this day, and Frank gets to Oxford, there are zero
Communists in Oxford. By the time he leaves, there's three hundred.
Frank in his youth, his parents had him when they
were both around forty years old. He comes into the
world into a family in which the parents think the
prospect of them having no kids is very real. So
(06:02):
he's not only an only child, but he might not exist,
so he's very valued from day one. He grows up
very wealthy and kind of a high hat hotel in Newark,
New Jersey. He goes to a fancy prep school. When
he's sixteen, he meets his best friend at Belgrade Lakes,
the inspiration for On Golden Pond, and his best friend
is Eugene O'Neil junior. And he meets Eugene O'Neil, the
(06:23):
greatest American playwright. And at sixteen, he's bombing a copy
of Tristram Shandy off of Eugene O'Neil. They're talking in
nineteen twenty six about the prospects of war between the
United States and Japan. They're playing kind of a Marco
Polo meets Risk game in the water at Belgrade Lakes,
so He's very comfortable around a guy that at that
(06:43):
point had already written two Politzer Prize winning plays. When
he meets Meyer, he's writing his third in Strange Interlude,
and so Meyer at sixteen to hang that comfort level
with the famous, the intelligent, the smart people like gen O'Neil.
I think it was a great bordering on sort of
an arrogance in Frank Meyer. And I think that's part
(07:04):
of the reason that he was able to convince as
many people to come over to his side when he
got to Oxford.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
He's a passionate advocate of whatever it is. He's passionately advocating.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Yes, and when he's at Oxford, and one of the
things he's passionate about as a lot of summer is
whooman and as he is advocating the violent overthrow of
the government of Ramsey McDonald. When I found in these
papers is that he was secretly dating the youngest daughter
of Ramsey McDonald. I have a letter from Sheila McDonald,
his youngest daughter, and Ramsey McDonald was a winning and
(07:37):
she says, listen the cost dis kiddiment. My dad's not around.
I'm over to ten Downing Street, will have dinner the
thing about any romantic figure in the history of communism
that you can come up with Chae Guavera, John Reid,
there is nobody that had the stones to pull off
something like that. That you were calling for the violent
of the Prime Minister of Great Britain and at the
(07:58):
same time you were secretly danger his daughter. Well, he
wasn't long for Great Britain, you know. I have about
one hundred and sixty pages of five and mi sixty
classified notes on Meyer. They knew where he did his banking,
they knew where he drank. They did a black bag
job on his apartment. They did put a mail cover
on his correspondence. But we're supposed to believe that they
(08:19):
didn't realize that he was dating. They're Big Boss's daughter.
He was dating Ramsey McDonald's daughter. I find that hard
to believe. What I know is true. What I know
is concrete, is that there were moves in the spring,
in late winter of nineteen thirty four to de poor
Frank Meyer. And this brings in people like Clement Attlee,
who becomes the Prime Minister of Great Britain. He gives
(08:40):
a speech in Meyer's defense on the floor of Parliament
there's a petition that goes around with Ian Forster who
re passage to India, Bertrand and Russell the Philosopher, the
Dean of Canterbury. They're all signing a petition Keith Frank Myron.
In this country, there are petitions, there are rallies, there
are dances. There when flood raises held for frank Meyer.
(09:00):
And ultimately this is a battle. He loses. Michael Strait,
who later was the publisher of the New Republican much
later was revealed as a Communist spy. He remembers as
a teenager marching around London with other student activists, chanting
free frank Meyer. Free frank Meyer. And in June of
nineteen thirty four they couldn't free him. They kicked him
(09:20):
out of the country. He went to work as a
peace activist under a guy whose name you probably remember,
Walter Ulbricht, who was the longest surving dictator of East Germany.
Imagine that a guy who had already ordered the murderer
of a policeman in Germany, Meyer is working under him
to promote peace. Melayer. In nineteen sixty two, he was
(09:41):
giving speeches on American college campus, is saying mister Khrushcheff
tear down this wall. That's twenty five years before Reagan
was doing it. Here he was in nineteen thirty four
working for the guy who would later erect the Berlin Wall.
So we talk of on long strange trip. Frank Meyer
certainly had a long strange trip, and it started in
nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties as a Stalinist.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
No, and he works for Olbricht. Is he working with
Rolbrooket in Germany?
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Oh, he's working in France because Oldbrooks at that time
was already wanted or suspected for martyring these two policemen.
And by nineteen thirty four Hitler Marrity has powers. So
the leading communists had already kind of scandal. I believe
during the Second World War, Oldbricht was safe and sound
in Moscow. But at this point he's in Paris.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
What happens tomorrow? I mean here he is, he's a
internationally known celebrity among communists, and then something happens.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
What happened, Well, he got to the United States, and
in the United States he's a communist for like ten years.
In Britain, he's on the board of the Communist Party
of Great Britain. He's the director of the student Bureau.
He's a big deal in Britain. In the United States,
he's sitting like a mid level manager. I mean, he
becomes the director of the Chicago Workers School. He's kind
of a big deal, but he's not at that higher
(10:54):
echelon in the property that he was in in Great
Britain until literally end. And so a couple of years
prior to the end of World War Two, Meyer gets
in the ear of Earl Brnoder, who was the head
of the Communist Plment in the United States, and he
splits in the lenum. He's frustrated, and he said, listen,
if we want to attract bowlers instead of these hardcore Marxists,
(11:14):
we need to fuse the American tradition with Marxism. And
we need to do this not just on the fourth
of July, we need to do this every day of
the year. Well, Browder went in that direction, The party
went in that direction. Whether Meyer was the one who
convinced him or not, I mean, that's just speculation. But
Broader went in that direction. And so Meyer had been
the director of Chogongo Worker School after he was teaching
(11:36):
at something called the Jefferson School. Browder was the general
secretary of the party. Now he was the president. They
used to sing the International when they started their meetings.
Now they sing the stump spangled Banning. So they try
to wrap up communism in the American flag and keeps
Meyer in the party. But in nineteen forty five there
comes from France something called the Duke close Slinner, which
(11:58):
Meyer and Browner and other communists interpreted as some guy
from France lecturing Americans on how toing the party, basically saying,
you can't be bunny buddy with capitalist anymore. You can't
support Roosevelt. There's going to be a Cold War coming
between the United States and the Soviet Union. You better
shape up and get on board and stop with this
all American communism stuff and made and broader or naive.
(12:20):
And they think, well, this is just this French goofball
running us this letter. It was the Kremlin. It was
Stalin telling them and warning them in not an overt way,
in a covert way, the Cold War is coming. This
temporary alliance that you have with Roosevelt in the United
States that's ending. Stop that Meyern Broader didn't want to
do that. The party dumps Brouter and they make a
(12:42):
villain of him, and frank Meyer kind of SLINKs out
of the party. But before he denies that, he comes
me part of a book called The Ruin to Sufican
by free Er Kayak, a guy he had known at
the London School of Economics. They both were Rockefeller funded
scholars there, and he reads this book and even as
a commune, that blows him away. He writes a review
(13:02):
of it. It's a positive review. It's a mixed to
positive review in a publication called The New Masses, which
was communist controlled, and at that time that's about the
only time in the history of Communist Party that you
can write a positive review of a right wing book,
of a conservative book, of a free market book. That
book the Road to Serve Them. You can not see
in his brain changing when he reviews the book in
(13:24):
The New Masses that he realizes that communism wasn't all
it's craped up to be. It was not democratic. What
was really democratic is the idea of freedom. I'm having
the freedom to choose what you wanted and not having
it driven down your throat by communist direct market controlled
by a few people, and so both you do close
letter and the road to serve them encourages Meyer to
(13:46):
leave the Communist Party. He does that in nineteen forty five.
He takes a break by nineteen fifty. When you read
what he's writing, it's clear that he has all the
language of a right winger. He is a conservative by
that point in the age had been complete by nineteen.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
Fifty, having been as deep inside as you could in
(14:23):
the Western communist movement. He writes, Communist theory is powerful,
not because it is true most obviously is not. It
is powerful because it is believed.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Yes, And he started not believing it in the first
crack in his armor. He had sent men to their
deaths as a recruiter for the Spanish Civil War. One
of the men that he got into the Communist Party
are boys that he brought was a guy named John Cornford,
who was the great grandson of Charles Darwin. Cornford became
the mono icon of the UK Communist left. Meyer set
(14:56):
him up as a successor, and when Meyer left he
became the head of the Common His party of the university
students in Great Britain work for young guys in Spain
the day after his twenty for his birthday, and Meyer
feels great guilt for this. Charmies that join up World
War two and he Commists are exhorting everyone to join
up and fight Hitler, and when my turns to join,
(15:16):
they say no, no, no, you can't go. And Meyer's confused, Well,
you're telling everyone to go and fight Haitler. I want
to fight Aitler. And they say, look, you can't go,
and so they have a big fight. Finally they let
Meyer go. And when he joins the military. He joins
the army, he realizes the men in his squad bay
are not the proletariat that Marx had told him about.
This is something that lived in a lot of social insulation.
(15:39):
He was very wealthy, and he's meeting plumbers and electricians
for the first time, guys that work on assembly lines.
And he realized that what Manox had told him about
the working class was a complete lie. So there were
a number of things that led up to his departure
from the Commists party, his defection, and of course it
all ends up with him testifying at the longest, most
expensive trial in the history of the United States tip
(16:00):
to that point, which was the Smith Act triminial of
nineteen forty nine. Meyer was called a slow witness, a
mystery witness, and he helped send Gus Hall, Eugene Dennis,
a lot of the leaders of the Communist Party, eleven
leaders of the Communist Party. He helped send them to
federal prison for five years.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
How did that transition to come into the FBI recruit
him or what?
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Maer was friends in the party with a guy named
Louis Butdenz. Louis Budenz was Ultimately he deflects in a
much more polorful way than Meyer does. Mayer was a
really powerful character, but at Meyer's defection, he kind of
slinked out of the party. It was very nondescript. Wolfspudenz
did something on precedent in the history of the Communist Party.
(16:41):
Him and Meyer for years were talking about Americanizing the
party and Meyer had some success in doing that. And
so when he left the party, he tips my rof
I'm leaving, and Meyer doesn't rat him out. Meyer remains
his friend, which is unusual for someone in the party.
But Louis Pudenz at this point is the editor of
the Daily Worker. On the same day that he leaves
(17:01):
the party. He is on the masthead as the managing
editor of The Daily Worker. The most famous Catholic priest
in the United States, Fulton Sheen converts him to Catholicism
and Saint Patrick's Cathedral, and it's in every newspaper with
the country. But heame's heah of the Daily Worker, just
converted to Catholicism, and now he's an anti communist. Meier
didn't leave like that, but Budenz a few years later,
in nineteen forty seven, he says, Meyer, listen, there's some
(17:24):
guys I want you to talk to. They're FBI agents.
You don't have anything to worry about. Let them come up.
So over the course of a month in nineteen forty seven,
every week the FBI came to visit Frank Meyer, and
he told his wife that he realized at that moment
what grace meant, because there was no good choice open
to him. He could either betray his old comrades, he
(17:44):
could betray his friends, or he could betray his country.
And what he decided to do after March Agony was
to go with his country over his friends, or as
I think Angrisolo put it, I love truth and I
love Plato. But if these things are in conflict, I'm
going to pick truth over my friends. But I think
essentially that's what Frank Meyer did and testifying and Los Budenz,
(18:06):
who was one of the most prolific witnesses against the
Communist Party, he's really the guy that convinced Meyer to
testify against his old comrades.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
At that point. And he clearly has decisively in his
own head broken with who he once was.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Yes, he did. The hard thing about that is he
had privatic affecting. He moved to, of all places, Woodstock,
New York. Now later Bob Dylan would move in next door.
You'd have members of the band live down the street.
Van Morrison lived down the street. In fact, now he's
the last person on earth to care about any of this.
But even in the nineteen forties, this was an artist colony.
(18:43):
This was a place where leftists from Grangenge Village retreated to,
and Frank chose that as a place to live, and
all sorts of people that had been his friends were
all of a sudden no longer as friends. To take
a guy like Philip Guston a few years ago, one
of his paintings went for twenty six million dollars. Well,
when I knew him in Woodstock, he was a starving artist.
But the moment Frank goes over to the other side,
(19:05):
becomes a conservative, Gustin won't have anything to do with him.
And there are a lot of people in Woodstock that
Frank becomes a pariaetu. So he's living isolated up on
this hill in Woodstock. He starts changing his hours. Frank
becomes a nocturnal creature. He buys a gun. I think
without reason, he is worried about the prospect of the
Communist Party exacting retribution. The Party obviously had killed a
(19:29):
lot of people. They didn't kill a lot of Americans,
but they had killed some Americans. And I think Frank,
with some justification bought this gun. And for the last
quarter century of his life. One of the things that
identified Frank Meyer was this was a guy that got
up in the afternoon and he slept till seven in
the morning, and these were his hours for the rest
of his life.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
The way that he operated from your perspective is he's
as comfortable being alone.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Well, his wife and he has two kids, I mean
one of his kids. You're listeners probably know Eugene Meyer.
Eugene Meyer was longtime president of the Federal of Society
and his youngest son John, both of them extremely successful
chess players, guys who graduated from Yale, very bright guys,
and also guys that cooperated a great deal with this book.
So he has his two kids, he has his wife.
(20:18):
He's kind of a strange hermit. He's living isolated up
on this hill in Woodstock, up on this mount in Woodstock.
And in fact, when Bob Dylan moved next door to him,
Dylan's whole reason for moving there was he was fed
up with the hippies. He wanted to go to some
place where people couldn't find him, and the best place
he could think of was Ohao Mountain Road in Woodstock.
So he moves back next to Meyer, but the properties touched.
(20:40):
But they're basically like a quarter mile away their houses,
but their properties are touching. And some moves to a
place where people really can't find him. Yet he is
a social animal, and he starts to do something after
he leaves the Communist Party, which is to make phone
calls and AM's tax returns from nineteen forty nineteen seventy two,
so his vook calls become so legendary that by the
(21:05):
early nineteen sixties he's spending about his corner of his
income on telephone bills and he's calling people. I interviewed
a lot of people and they talked about him calling
at all times of the night, and of course he
did do that. You'd get a call from frank Meyer
maybe at two in the morning or midnight. One of
his kids emailed me last night said, well, that wasn't
that common, So maybe those people were remembering the unusual
(21:26):
rather than the quote vigan. But he didn't call people
in all hours of the night. And people told me, well,
it wasn't unusual for him to have multi hour long
conversations with people. So he was a strange social animal
that he was living isolated on this mountain in Wouldstop
New York. But at the same time he created that
social connection. And the way he did that was from
the telephone, the iatola comane. He had his revolution through
(21:48):
cassette tapes. You had the people in Egypt, they did
it through Twitter. Frank Meyer's revolution was gone through at
and t That's wild.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
No, he creates a fusion through what that means because
Reagan cites him for that.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
He certainly did. And I think if fusionism was so
influential that even people that had never heard of the
word fusionism, Fuchists, even people that hadn't heard of Frank
Meyer's name, were effectively my rights. And basically what fusionism
was was a marriage of traditionalism and freedom. And Meyer
essentially said that listen, if you're a conservative in Great Britain,
(22:27):
maybe you're conserving the royalty or the arist democracy. If
you're conservative in Italy, maybe you're conserving the Catholic Church.
If you're a conservative in Ronca, the tradition that you
conserveerve is the American Founding, the Declaration of Independence, the
Freederalist papers, the Constitution, maybe Washington's phenologists, whole lot of
other things. As one of Frank's acolytes, Stan Evans put it,
(22:48):
on the cover of a book, the theme is freedom.
And I think what Stand meant in his book is
that you had thousands of years of Western civilization propping
up this liberty that we enjoy in the United States,
and if you take away our heritage, if you take
away that tradition, you will not have freedom. And so
there was this tension between tradition and virtue in the
one hand, and freedom on the other. And if you
(23:10):
take one away, the other is meaningless because flip the
quint in there. If you think about it, if you
have compulsory virtue, that's not virtue at all. You have
to have free choice to have true virtue. So there
is fusionism in a nutshell, the marriage of traditionalism and freedom.
And I think the reason it worked is one because
(23:30):
at its base distilled level, it's essentially true, that it's
easy to understand, and three that it had utility applications
for politics. I mean, if you read a book like
The Concernative Mind, which is a beautiful book by Russell Krumerk,
there's not a lot of political applications there. It might
train you how to think, it might give you an
(23:51):
appreciation for history, but it doesn't have a lot of
political applications. I think the reason why in Defensive Freedom
worked as a book and fusionism worked as a philosophy
was because it did have political applications.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
To what extent do you think Reagan became am I right?
Speaker 2 (24:09):
I think that Reagan was the embodiment of frank Meyer's
political dreams in nineteen sixty, Reagan successfully coursed the editors
of National Review not to endorse Richard Nixon. He viewed
Nixon as an opportunist, and he said, why don't we
just symbolically endorse Goldwater. We know he's not running for president,
(24:30):
but let's just symbolically endorse him and put all our
efforts into electing good conservatives at the congrucial level. It
may take, and it's probably going to take twenty years
before we elect one of our own person the United States.
It's going to take until nineteen eighty. And of course
he was prophetic about that immediately after Barry Goldwater, and
even before Barry Goldwater loses in nineteen sixty four, Meyer's
(24:53):
eyes get diverted to Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan, of course,
gave that great speech which was kind of an infomerci
for Goldwater, and I think Meyer, like a lot of people, thought,
why isn't this guy running for president rather than this
creaky guy over here? The stars done with the ballot time,
why not we got inves city rooting for president. And
so Mayan became associated with from y old Reagan so
(25:16):
much so then in nineteen sixty eight, when the new
Republic asked various prominent figures to write about what candidate
they were supporting. They naturally picked Meyer as the guy
to write about Ronald Reagan that his association as an
intellectual was at least connected with him, and this had
costs for Meyer.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
You know.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
One of the things Mayn did at nashery View was
he was the literary editor of Nasher Review. He was
the person who actually discotled John Didion, no parmenttal. Her
boyfriend was pushing her to all these editors around New
York and no one would take her, and Didon credits
Meyer as the first editor to publish her freelance work.
He was really a mentor to Joan Didion. He had
(25:55):
a guy named third Theodore Sturgeon ultimately became a writer
for Star Trek, came up with of Long and prosper
is the guy that came up with the prime directive
and Star tunk right the Ankerson where Leonard Nimoy invented
that split fingered salute that I can't do, but many
people can, you know, split their fingers down the middle.
So he had that guy writing reviews of science fiction
(26:15):
for Nash Review. Hugh Kenner guy Davenport, Gary Wills, all
these literary heavy hitters he had reviewing books and making
it early the best book review section in the United States. Now,
but tell me he's pushing Reagan. Hugh Kenner writes a
critical piece on Reagan and Nash are you so mocking
the idea that he would be president? Meyer, who was
great friends with Kenner, engineered behind the scenes a rebuttal
(26:38):
that was written by Jeffrey Hart and cost Hugh Kenner
to resign from Nasher. Hugh, So Kevin was a bunch
of friends with a guy named Guy to Avenport and
Guy Davenport were Nickson says, listen, Hugh from Mayer thinks
that Ronald Reagan should be president of the US. And
he puts a bunch of exhalation points because at that point,
the idea of anyone supporting Ronald Reagan as president, he's
(26:59):
thinking of him as as a movie actor. Frank is
cleitarly thinking him as president the United States, and he
loses arguably his best book reviewer, Hugh Kenninger, who resigns
from the magazine because Meyer engineered this takedown of his
criticism of Reagan. So Meyer, very early on was a
Reagan supporter, and of course, if you look at Reagan's
speech at nineteen eighty one at Sea Pack, which by
(27:22):
the way, Meyer came up with the idea for Seatpack
in the nineteen sixties he was a founder of the
American Conservative Union. He kept pushing the idea of this
conference that would sort of marry activism in the intellectual right. Well,
they didn't do it at the time, but they later
created Seatpack, and I think Meyer should be credited as
a founding father of it. In Navy One, Reagan is
sort of giving a hat tip to James Burnham and
(27:43):
William of Buckley and Rustil Kirk, but he stillops for
an extraordinary long time talking about Frank Meyer and how
he had paved the way for this moment. And I
think more than any of those thinkers on the post
war conservative right, you have to look at Frank Meyer
as someone who intellects actually is most sympatico with the
Reagan Revolution.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
In that context, Meyer is quid essentially intellectual. His impact
is about ideas and about writing. And one of the
things that really makes your book come alive is you
actually found a whole bunch of letters. Can you walk us.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
Through the My plan was to read a bunch of books,
read all issues of National Review, and then I would
know what questions to ask when I interview people. I
probably did about one hundred interviews. I would know where
to look when I would go into archives. But something
happened in twenty twenty that your listeners probably remember. COVID
shut everything down, particularly universities. They shut down for single years,
(29:00):
so I couldn't do any of archival work. I did
a Freedom of Information Act request from the friederal government
in twenty twenty one. They came back to me in
twenty twenty two and they said, well, we're now processing
requests from twenty fourteen, but your request, because it comes
after COVID, it's going to take a little bit longer.
In other words, come back to us in the twenty thirties.
That's the efficiency of the National Archives. And when I
(29:23):
looked at his papers at the Hoover Institution. I'm a
visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. I love going out there,
I love the archives. The ro Ar Chives was a
tremendous help for this book. But when I looked at
Meyer's papers out there, I noticed something was missing. I've
been doing archival work for about twenty five years and
the rhythm was off. So I, out of desperation, I
wished his papers into existence. I just needed to calling
(29:45):
people and saying, where's Frank's papers? And I got material
that was helpful for private collections, letterers, some property deeds,
things like that, but I still didn't have his papers.
And at a certain point John Meyer, about a year
and a half into search, I said, well, we did
sell the house to this couple, David's In Cabbage and
Karen Myers, and they bought all the color tents. So
(30:07):
I said, we told me about these people. At first
I went to Zink Cabbage and Myers and said, you
have Frank's papers and they said no, we donated them,
at least David did. And I said, no, you kept
some of them and they said no Jonatan, I said, no,
you don't know. You even do it on GROUPUS, but
you kept some of them. You just don't know it.
And this won a undrel period of months, and finally
they said, well, we have a warehouse and they said,
(30:28):
but there's a thousand boxes and there's nothing in there.
And even if there was something in there, you couldn't
go through all thousand of the box. I said, yes,
I could take me to your warehouse. So in August
of twenty twenty two, I drove at four in the
morning to Eltuna, Pennsylvania. I went through six hundred and
sixty three boxes and therein I found fifteen large moving
boxes that contained the papers of Frank Meyer. There's probably
(30:51):
over one hundred thousand letters there. There's letters from Tolkien, C. S. Lewis,
Joan Didion, William F. Buckley. There's one thousand letters from
Wilm We're Kendall, one thousand letters from Frent Bizzell, letters
from Jaguar Whover Battles, a lot of letters from Barry Goldwater.
And for the most part, these are letters that nobody
has ever seen before, or at least they haven't been
seen since Sender and Receiver. You know, I just read
(31:13):
a piece on Leo Strauss's back and forth with Frank Meyer.
That's completely fascinating. And these are letters that don't exist
in Stroums's papers. So there's pretty famous guy. I just
did a piece for the journal Libertarian Studies. It didn't
make it into the book, but Lotston thing was important
that didn't make in the book. But here is Maury Rothbard,
one of the leading figures of libertarianism, talking about Ein
(31:36):
Rand in real time when he's a member of her
inner circle and complaining about her, saying she's crazy or
saying she's brilliant. And so I was able to write
an article based on that. But really what this did
obviously was allow me to tell Frank Meyer's story in
his own words. I mean the idea that you have
the siphantic letter from James Mitchger or these love letters
(31:57):
of sorts from Prime Minister Ramsey Donald's daughter, other women,
you know, I find out that Meyer loses his virginity
to one of the great women in American aren't in
the twentieth century? Dorothy Canning Miller, for the longest time
was the curator of the Museum of Modern Art in
New York. There's all sorts of love letters in there,
there's all sorts of friendships, and really what it is
(32:19):
I think the book A guy named Robert D. Lourie
in the Spectator World, the UK Spectator just threw a
review that came out today and I was blown over
by it because he really got the book. He said
this book, it's really about friendships. It's really about why
we fall in love with people and then why we
fall out in love with people. And surely you get
that with Frank Meyer and Gary Wills. Garry Wills goes
(32:41):
in the opposite direction. Frank Meyer mentors him. Will says
he spent more time with Meyer than anyone out of
his family in the late fifties and early sixties, but
by in the early nineteen sethonies, he's a left winger.
He gets in the opposite direction of Meyer. So they
have this falling out. Wilmore Kendall, who's a guy who
was the mentor of Bill Buckley. You've seen your editor.
It's real behind the scenes stuff that you're getting from
(33:05):
these letters that you wouldn't get anywhere else. And then
of course you see Kendall falling out with Meyer, falling
out with Bill Buckley. At a certain point, Elsie Meyer says,
quit finding the following your friends to Wilmor Kendall, who
was a notoriously difficult man, and he says, I don't
know if any friend I'm in a fight with now
except Frank S. Meyer. If you're talking about William F. Buckley,
(33:25):
and he was William F. Buckley's teacher, He was his mentor.
He says, if you're talking about William F. Buckley, nobody
hasn't heard me Paul him a friend in at least
five years. He is not my friend. He is my enemy.
So this is hy drama stunt that you get these
letters that you're not going to get in any other book,
because there's no other scholar that has access to I
don't know, there's probably a hundred thousand looks than I
(33:47):
have here all sitting around my best overing my house
for the last three years. And I think best part
of the reason why this is an exciting book because
it is some original. It has so much strength that
came from this warehouse that nobody has had access to.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
Given on this, how much you've immerged yourself in him.
If Meyer were alive today, how do you think he
would view the current conservative movement?
Speaker 2 (34:11):
That's a very interesting question. On the one hand, Meyer
was decidedly not a populist in some ways without admitting it.
I mean, he was a big fan of Joe McCarthy,
and when James Buckley ran for Senate in nineteen seventy,
he was an advisor to him and his adrox to
Buckley was really populist. He said, listen, you're going to
reach him to these blue collar democrats. You can't win,
and you'll look in a three way race even you know,
(34:34):
as a Republican, even in a three way race, you've
got to reach out to these union people. Get union votes,
get blue call roads. So in some ways he'd be
fine with it, but he was not a populist. I
think the one way in which he would fit in
with what Trump is doing, with the maggot people are
doing is on foreign policy, and that seems very peculiar
because Meyer is a guy when one point was talking
(34:56):
about a preemptive nuclear streaming in the Soviet Union. I
mean he is so though it was a pulled warrior
down to the bone. He hated communism because he was
a communist. I mean the guy who brought him to
sign up as a member of the Communist Party in
Great Britain, a guy named Prince Mursky. He dies in
a gulag by the end of that decade. Meyer has
friends that get killed. Meyer has friends who are mumbered people.
(35:17):
He knows how evil communism is. So he was really
supportive of an active US foreign policy during the Cold War.
Henry Kissinger writes him a letter in nineteen sixty eight.
Kissinger says, and this is that one of the letters
in the collection. Kissinger says, you know, listen, I'm going
to be the national securityism under Richard Nixon. And so
we asked him what should do? What should we do
(35:37):
with foreign policy? And Myer says, well, of course, there's
this messianic crusader state that is an existential threat to
the United States and a lot of other nations in
the world. So our main should be to stop them,
to roll them back, to defeat them by whatever absent
this messianic crusader state. If there's a world in which
they no longer exist, of course, the idea of the
(35:59):
United Nations, the idea of foreign aid, the idea of
all these entangling alliances, they would be forsical. Even the
idea of the Vietnam War would be in complete farce.
If there were no Soviet Union, it would be no
business of ours with the social system of any other nation,
would be if it were not for communism trying to
take over this world. You think about today, I mean
(36:20):
the Russia, I mean think about how Ronald Russia has
been with Ukraine and they take over I don't know,
twenty percent of Ukraine, and people, justifiably you think that
this is madness, that this guy is a sort of
a hold order from the KGB. It's twenty percent of
one country. You come out of World War two and
they take over what twelve countries or something like that Europe.
(36:40):
And so the guy that Meyer was obsessed with in
those days, Stalin or his successors, I mean, they were
really doing bad business all around the world, and of
course he wanted to stop that. But he saw a
world in which they didn't exist, and he thought, in
that world, it doesn't make sense to manage the social
systems and make sure that every country was sort of
(37:01):
a democracy like we are. And he seems explicitly in
a debate with Alan Lowenstein at Yale he said this
with Kissing Jr. And he seved this in his last
column in Nationer Review, which he wrote in December nineteen
seventy one. And at that point he didn't know it.
But the cancer that he got and he was a chainsmoker,
like a lot of these guys, they really lived mad
met existence back then. The cancer that was eating away
(37:24):
at him. The last column, he writes, a National Review
is a view of the world without the Soviet Union
and what our foreign policy would be. And so in
that sense, I think he would be recomfortable with the
Trump people. I think on trade, sort of the more
populous aspect of it. On the bigger government aspect of it,
I think could be horrified.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
What's your next project?
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Wow?
Speaker 1 (37:45):
Not.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
There was a guy that I was writing about here,
and I used to call him my oldest friend because
I met him when he was ninety six years old,
and his name was Noah par Mattel. He was the
boyfriend of Joan Didion for six years, and I interviewed
him a series of times, and I thought, Wow, this
is one of the more interesting guys that I've ever
come across. And he had a bit of a con
man at him, but like a lot of Cohn men,
(38:07):
he was very charming. And so I think about beginning
about him, maybe in a long form article. I don't
know that people will go for a book, but that's
what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about some of these
wrongly Nasher Review people. In the first ten years, first
seven years of the publication, they were these three amigos,
these three musketeers, Frank Meyer, Brent Bozell, and Wilmer Kendall,
(38:30):
and they were sort of Nash Reviews great wing. When
Meyer came in there there was a guy named Billy Schlam.
He's the idea man behind Nash Review. He came up
with the idea. Schlam was a Communist who had met
Lennon at sixteen, turned like Meyer did, became an anti
Commuist conservative in the post war year, and his idea
was Nash Review. Bill Buckley did the heavy lifting, he
executed the idea, did the free raising. But early on
(38:54):
Shlam was sort of the leader of the right wing
in nasher review. He gets defenestrated because he's a big
pain in the neck and everyone thinks he's a pain
in the neck. And so Meyer takes over his role,
not only his book review editor, but it's sort of
the anti James Burnham in Nash Review. James Burnham was
an anti communist. But I don't know if I said
it or someone else said it, but his Paul, his
(39:15):
conspiratism essentially stopped at the water's edge. And so Meyer
was the leader of Nash Review's right wing faction. And
people like Meyer, Wilmore, Kendall, Brent Bazell to agree they
were living. If you've ever seen the show mad Men,
they were living sort of a mad Men existence. Kendall
writes Meyer a letter at one point saying, listen, I'm
talking about a heath kick my normal intake of seventy
(39:38):
sigarettes Sidenny from now down to a pack. I think
nowadays you look at a guy like Wilmer Pennell and say, well,
here personality disorder. And Meyer is up in Woodstock sort
of leading the battle of Nash Review's right wing. He
loses the battle within Nasher Review, but he wins the
broader war for the conservative movement. In other words, Nasher
Review increasingly takes on the look of what James Bernlan
(40:01):
wanted for it, which is still of an opinion a
regular opinion magazine. Myer means like a philosophical journal. So
he learns it's not battle of Nation Review, but this
wing and Nation Review they win the broader battle for
the soul of the conservative movement. It's interesting that as well.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
It's amazing. I want to thank you for joining me.
I'm frankly amazed both by your own career and the
range of people you've written about, and by your new book,
which I think is really badly needed, The Man who
invented Conservatism, The Unlikely Life of Frank Smer. It's available
now in Amazon and in bookstores everywhere. No one to
let our listeners know they can find out more about
(40:39):
the work you're doing by visiting the American Spectator website
at Spectator dot org. And I really appreciate you sharing.
This has been fascinating.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
This is the privilege to talk to you, mister speaker.
Thank you so much for having me on.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
Thank you to my guest Daniel J. You can get
a link to buy his new book, The Man who
Invented Conservatism on our show page at Newtsworld dot com.
News World is produced by Gingrish three sixty and iHeartMedia.
Our executive producer his Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson.
The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley.
(41:19):
Special thanks to the team at Gingish three sixty. If
you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple
Podcasts and both rate us with five stars and give
us a review so others can learn what it's all about.
Right now, Listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my
three free weekly columns at gingrashtree sixty dot com slash newsletter.
(41:39):
I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Newsworld
Popular Podcasts
CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist
It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.
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.
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.