From Stalinism To Reaganism: Daniel Flynn On Frank Meyer And “Fusion” Conservatism

How does one man whose formative years are largely defined by five “s’s” – sex, satanism, suicide, secret agents, and Stalinism – somehow wind up as a defining intellectual behind the rise of America’s conservative movement? Daniel Flynn, a Hoover visiting fellow and author of The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, takes us through an improbable journey that involves Princeton and Oxford, deportation, socialism, capitalism and Hayek, William F. Buckley and the founding of The National Review, Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan, plus a few unexpected cameos along the way (Bob Dylan, Joan Didion and the Berlin Wall’s architect, to name a few).  

Episode Transcript

(00:04):
- It is Friday, October 31st, 2025.
And welcome back to Matters of Policy
and Politics, a HooverInstitution podcast.
I'm Bill Whalen. I'mthe Hoover Institutions,
Virginia Hobbs Carpenter distinguished
policy fellow in journalism.
And while I can lay claim tothat rather wordy job title,
I'm but one of many Hoover fellows
who are dabbling in podcasting these days.
If you don't believeme, go to our website,
which is hoover.org/podcast,

(00:26):
and you'll find a whole list
of podcasts there for your listing.
Great stuff that includesthe audio version
of the Goodfellows broadcast
that I have the great honor of moderating.
Today we're gonna talk abouta very important figure in the
rise of conservatism in America.
But if you're guessing RonaldReagan, Barry Goldwater,
William F. Buckley, if you wantto walk, go all the way back
to Silent Cal Coolidge.

(00:46):
Guess again. Who is thispioneer you're about to find out
as they introduce our guest?
Daniel Flynn is a HooverInstitution visiting fellow
and a senior fellow senioreditor at the American Spectator.
He's also the author of multiple books.
His latest workout sincemid-August is titled The Man Who
Invented Conservatism, theUnlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer.
Dan, welcome to the podcast
and on this day devoted to people

(01:07):
who like to carve pumpkins.
Thank you for curving ona little of your Halloween
to talk about Frank Meyer with us.
- Hey, thank you for having me.
- Alright, so let's getinto this man's life.
But first, tell me whatinspired you to write this.
I would note this is a lengthy bio.
It's 544 pages, which tellsyou one of two things, Dan.
This is either a labor of love
or you just got caught up in this

(01:29):
and just found out more than you expected.
- Both I, you know, alot of people, if you go
around in a bookstore, you'llsee biographies of Lincoln
and Churchill and Frank, you know, of
Hitler, right?
All to me.
I, I don't see why peoplestill write books about that
because we, I think we knowpretty much everything we need
to know about those guys.

(01:50):
I don't think there's gonna bemuch new that's gonna pop up.
I take a very differentapproach, which is I think about
who should there be a biography about?
Who should we know about?
And to me, Frank Meyer really had one
of the most fascinating untold stories
of the 20th century when he was on
with Mike Wallace in1961 on his TV program.

(02:10):
Wallace said, you know, I would venture
to guess maybe one in a thousand
of my viewers knows who you are.
And I, my sense is
that in the 64 years since it'sprobably like one in 10,000,
so people are saying,Frank Meyer, who's that?
Well, I Meyer, to me, you know,a lot of these ideologues,
they kind of lead black andwhite lives, gray lives.

(02:31):
There's some of them likeWhitaker Chambers, Wilmore,
Kendall, they, they, you know,they led Technicolor lives.
Frank operated in 3D his lifesort of overflows with sex.
Satan, suicide secret agents,
Stalinism.
So I, you know, I have all five S's there.
And I think, you know,for people that think

(02:52):
of conservatives or thinkof dialogues as sort
of like dry milk toast kind of characters,
Frank's life is kind ofa, a jolt to the system,
- Right?
So he is born in 1909. He dies in 1972.
I think he's 62 years ofage, time of his death,
I believe he dies of cancer,
which probably not coincidentally,you see most photos

(03:12):
of him, he's got a cigarettein his hand or a cigar.
This means he comes ofage in the Depression.
He lives through World War ii.
He then experiences the Cold War,
but he doesn't live tosee the Reagan revolution.
He doesn't live to seethe contract with America.
He doesn't live to see what isgoing on today vis-a-vis mega
and this current conversationwe're having about the

(03:32):
future conservatism.
- No, he does not.
And I think for people lookingback, I mean, I, I don't know
that Frank would beshocked by any of this,
but I think people,
conservatives looking backon his life would be shocked.
I mean, when he went toEngland in the late 1920s,
there was zero communistpresence at Oxford.
He started somethingcalled the October Club.

(03:54):
And at Oxford they wentfrom zero communists
to 300 communists in thestudent body rather quickly.
And as he's doing this,as he is on the board
of the Communist Party ofGreat Britain, he's calling
for the violent overthrowof Ramsey McDonald.
And at the same time, surreptitiously,
he's dating RamseyMcDonald's youngest daughter.
I have a letter from SheilaMcDonald saying, listen, come

(04:16):
by 10 downing the coast's clear.
My dad's not around. We'llhave dinner seven o'clock.
Is that good? So if you're doing that,
you're probably notlong for Great Britain.
And so Frank had MI five andabroad, MI six, falling him.
They know what tweed he's wearing.
They know what bars he drinks at.
They know what bank he goes to.
They do a black bag job on his house.

(04:38):
They, they,
they do a put a mail cover onhis incoming correspondence.
So you know, if unsurprisinglythere's deportation hearings
for Frank, he becomes acause Celebr in England.
And he has Clement Atley, you know,
pleading his case on thefloor of the House of Commons,
Michael Strait, who was later the
publisher of the New Republic.

(04:58):
He remembers marchingaround London saying,
free Frank Meyer, free Frank Meyer.
So he is really like one ofthese free Mumia characters,
free Angela Davis type characters.
But in, in 1934, he'skicked out of the country
and he goes to work on peaceactivism from, for a guy
who you may know, Walter Ulrich.
Yes. Who at that pointhad murdered two people.

(05:20):
And Ulrich is later thearchitect, essentially,
of the Berlin Wall.
And Meyer goes to work on peaceactivism for Walter Brook.
So his time in the CommunistParty, he lasts until 1945.
And him, Louis Boudin's, EarlBrowder, who's the chairman
of the Communist Party,they kind of get tossed out,

(05:40):
Browder gets tossed out on his face.
Myron Boudin's kind ofget out of the party,
and that begins his road toconservatism at that point.
- Okay. You've talkedabout his being in Europe,
and we'll get more to that in a
minute, but let's back up a second.
Let's go back to hischildhood for a second.
So he is born, I believe,in Newark, New Jersey.
He's raised in Newark. We love
to have these romanticnarratives of conservative icons.

(06:02):
Barry Goldwater rise outof the West, Ronald Reagan,
a cowboy, but also partof Reagan is the pathos
of growing up, you know, poor in Illinois
and having a, a fatherhood, adrinking problem and so forth.
William F. Buckley, also his,you know, his upbringing, his,
you know, his conversion atYale would experience at Yale.
It's a certain romanticstory for conservatives,
but we look at Frank Meyer,

(06:22):
and this is a childhoodthat could be described.
It's not lyes, but it'snot rigged poor either.
It's, I think privileged is the word
that you've used to describe it.
- Hi, his father was a capitalist.
The company that hefounded made raincoats,
it's still around today.
His mother was very muchinvolved in, in Jewish causes.
He lived in a hotel,
which tells you a little bitabout, you know, his upbringing.

(06:43):
He went to the NewarkAcademy at Prep school
and he, you know,
at 16 he goes on vacation atBelgrade Lakes, which is sort
of the inspiration for on Golden Pond.
And he meets a boy justlike him, precocious,
intellectually curious.
And that boy was meetinghis father basically
almost for the first time.

(07:03):
And that was Eugene O'Neal.
And so he is becomes bestfriends with Eugene O'Neal Jr.
And if you've ever read The Iceman Cometh,
if you've ever read,you know, almost any of
Eugene O'Neill's plays, hisson is his grimace creation.
And Meyer and him havea very tight friendship.
They sort of go into theCommunist Party, they come out

(07:26):
and in 1950
after drinking FrankMeyer's whiskey, they,
they stay up all night drinking.
The next day, Elsie Meyerfinds Eugene O'Neill at
the foot of his steps.
You know, he had, he had slashednot only his wrists in his
an in his ankle Senecastyle, he wanted to go out,
not like some of thesecharacters in his father's place,
but he was a, a, a classist.

(07:48):
And he, he went out like,like, like the Romans did.
And so that particularmoment in Frank Meyer's life,
you know, that may be the, the,
the sort of the turning point.
That may be the, the big moment.
But certainly back in 1926,
meeting Eugene O'Neillbeing introduced to this guy
that had already won twoPoller prize prizes, you know,
that was validating for Meyer and LA.

(08:09):
Later when he goes on towrite in Defense of Freedom,
the molding of Communists, hewrites those books on the same
desk that Eugene O'Neal usedto write a number of his plays.
- Alright, young Frankends up at Princeton,
and there he discovers athing called antisemitism.
- Yes. So Princeton more sothan the other Ivy's head

(08:29):
of reputation for racism andantisemitism and admissions.
And there was a guy named Radcliffe Heinz,
who was the head of the admissions.
He gets a letter from basicallyMeyers Booster at the Newark
Academy, a guy who wasaffiliated with Princeton.
And he said, listen, even thoughthis kid's Jewish features
are unmistakable, could, he's a,

(08:51):
he's a really good student,could you take 'em?
And the director of admissionssays, well, you know,
we have plenty of fine cleancut Christian Americans.
These are his words. Italmost sounds like a parody
coming to Princeton.
I'm afraid that he willtake away a spot from one
of these guys, and hedoesn't even strike me
as a Hebrew of the better type.
So they reject Frank, hedecides to take a second year,

(09:13):
a postgraduate year at Newark Academy
and try to get in again.
He gets into Princeton.
But what he finds issort of a student body
that is reflective
of the fine clean cutChristian Americans attitude
that the director of admissions had.
And he has a very rough go of it.
A lot has been madethat, you know, he, he,
he certainly met James Burnham there,

(09:35):
and James Burnham becomes his rival
later at National Review.
They sort of fight for thesoul of National Review,
and a lot is made of, ofBurnham being kind of a symbol
to Meyer of all that hehated in, in Princeton.
I think that's a little bit overblown,
but he had a very rough time.
He starts writing poemsabout Satan, you know,

(09:55):
Milton Satan, not, not,not Satan with the hood
and, you know, a bunch ofcandles or something like that.
But you have to think that that's sort
of a reaction against these fine,
clean cut Christian Americans.
And there's not a wholelot of difference be,
and you know, at least in the alphabet
between Satan and Stalin.
And so within a very shortperiod of time of of,
of writing those poems,
he starts getting caught up in communism.

(10:19):
- Why is he an atheist?- At 14,
I found the earliest evidenceof his writings in a,
a Jewish archive in New Jersey,
and he writes for his temple newspaper,
and he basically says to all,all those people who think
that the temple is empty, comeover the, the holidays, see
how many people arecelebrating the holidays.
You know, he's really a robust defense

(10:41):
of his Jewish faith By 16, Ihave an award-winning essay
that I got from the Newark Academy
where he's defendingBolsheviks defending atheism.
So something happensbetween the ages of 14
and 16, I would imagineat, at the Newark Academy,
because his mother is,
and his father, they're heavilyinvolved in Jewish causes,
they're heavily involved in the temple.

(11:03):
And Frank had been heavilyinvolved in the temple, both
as a writer for the, the publication
and as a, some type of a,
a patrol leader at the, at the temple.
And by 16, he is not thathe's clearly an atheist.
He's clearly has these sortof bull BOLs sympathies.
- And what does he decide to hop a boat
and go study at Oxford?

(11:24):
- Well, he, he, he, he sortof asked to leave Princeton.
He, he, and he does avery Frank Meyer thing.
If you leave Princeton, yourgrades aren't that great.
People were saying, well, why don't you go
to this experimental college at the,
at the University of Wisconsin?
And he thinks, no, I wannago to Cambridge or Oxford.
You know, that's, that's avery Frank Meyer thing to do.
It's got, you know, youdrop out of Princeton, you,

(11:45):
you should go lower than Princeton.
No, he, he thinks of the,
the best two universities inthe world doesn't get into
Cambridge, gets into Oxford.
And he, unlike at Princeton,he has a blast at Oxford.
He is sort of the, the big man on campus.
He's playing all sorts ofintramural sports, hanging out
with RW Southern, wholater becomes a, you know,
famous historian and a aa lot of other players.

(12:09):
You know, as I said, he starts
to date the Prime Minister's daughter,
but he starts to date alot of other women too.
Woman, Sheila Duff, who was a sort
of an anti-Nazi journalist.
He dates her, he dates allsorts of women over there.
So it, it's very much the reverseof what he experienced at,
at, at, at Princeton.

(12:29):
He comes under the tutelageof a guy named Slinger Erhart,
who if you've read BridesheadRevisited, he is so,
at least I'm told he's the model of Mr.
Sam Grass. He's the firstCatholic tutor at, at
Oxford since Elizabeth Behan Times.
And Frank comes, saysto himself, well, I have
to make a decision either becomea Catholic or a communist.

(12:51):
And I think most people look at that
and say, well, what kindof a choice is that?
Those are polar opposites.
And to Frank, what he said is
that they were both demanding faiths.
He, when Mike Wallace asked him, you know,
why didn't you stay or reformed Jew?
And he said, well, if ReformedJudaism asked something
of me, maybe I would've stayed If, if, if,
or if I was an Orthodox Jew

(13:12):
or if I was a a conserved Jew,I probably would've stayed.
But they didn't ask anything of me.
So Frank says, am I gonna be a Catholic?
Am I gonna be a communist?
Well, he sort of tables theCatholicism choice for later,
and he joins the Communist Party.
He, he starts this communistgroup, the Oxford Club,
which they still have at OxfordClub, at Oxford, I'm sorry,

(13:33):
still October Club at Oxford,
and walks into the CommunistParty headquarters in London,
which I'm sure these guys thoughtsomeday there's gonna be a
whole bunch of youngpeople knocking on our door
and saying, let us sign up for communism.
And that day came with, with Frank Meyer
and a bunch of his fellowstudents from Oxford.
And you have to think, youknow, there was a great deal

(13:55):
of energy for communismafter the Russian Revolution,
but it dies down.
It, it sort of thought of as like, bism
or any number of Frankishideas by the late 1920s.
And so when Frank comes into that office,
these guys are like, well, geez,
our prayers have been answered.
And very shortly, you know, the, the,
the Great Depression is kicking in.
So it's not just Frank'sskill as an organizer,

(14:16):
but it's also the, the,
the economic times peopleare starting to, to,
to consider alternatives to capitalism.
And it, it just booms.
I mean, Frank, Frank startsthis movement in England, in,
in, in the MI six files, MIfive files, they say repeatedly,
they call him the founder
of the Communist mo Communist
Student Movement in Great Britain.
So he's very much the JohnnyAppleseed of, of, of communism,

(14:40):
at least among the youth in Great Britain.
And a lot of things comeout of that, like, you know,
the king and country pledge,like, you know, guy Burgess
and the Cambridge ring, that movement
that Frank Meyer started, alot of that stuff comes out
of it, comes out of it a little bit later.
But he, he sort of lays the seeds.
- And what was the attraction for Frank?
Because he, obviously, adecade, decade and half, decade

(15:00):
and a half later, he's of a very
different mind about communism.
But what appealed to him as a young man?
What, what, what, what did communism
attracted him? What,what did he see in it?
- I think Frank was a very sheltered,
socially sheltered young man in the sense
that he lives in this high hat hotel.
He goes to a fancy prep school, he goes
to Bay Hill College in England,
and the working class to him,he reads about them almost

(15:23):
as an anthropologistwould read about them.
I mean, he reads about them in Marx,
and he, he thinks, well, whenhe is in England, he's writing
to his, his family and says,you know, this 45 pounds
that you're giving me every week,
or whatever it was, it's not enough.
And I, I look around and,
and all these poor people in England,
and those people are making less than him.

(15:43):
He's just getting an allowance from home.
So he really doesn't have aclue on, on how they're living,
but he's thinking, there's,there's gonna be a revolution.
There's gonna be a revolution.
So part of it was the times, part
of it was the social isolation.
Ironically, later when heleaves, well, the sort of,
the first umra in,
in his communism comeswhen he joins the army,

(16:04):
and he finally meets the proletariat
that Marx had been talking about.
And he meets plumbers
and electricians for the firsttime assembly line workers.
And he realized these guys don't want
to overthrow the government.
What's, you know, this,this doesn't match up with
what Marx told me.
But for the 1930s, he was, you know, a
and a, a really hardcoreMarxist who even, you know,

(16:24):
his faith even wasn't shaken by the, the,
the Nazi Soviet Pac. He stayed,
- Okay, so he's socializing,he's organizing,
but what does he do tomerit being deported?
- Okay, so- Granted, merit, merit be the,
may the wrong choice of words here,
but what, what does he do
to sow piss off the
British government that they want him out?

(16:45):
- Well, what they citeis that in this newspaper
that he starts, he starts anewspaper called the Student
Vanguard that's distributed out throughout
England on campuses.
And they, there was aprofessor at the London School
of Economics who had beena policeman in India.
And in this publication,my Meyer, they said
that this guy was a spy, andhe spied on colonial students.

(17:05):
Now, when Meyer got toLenon School of Economics,
he quickly became thepresident of the student body.
And he got that way because him
and a guy named ChristianMenon, who was kind
of number two in Indiaunder Nero at this point,
they're both students obviously,
but they fix the electionand they fix the election.
They get Meyer as thestudent body president.
He's working under Ron LawMalinowski in anthropology.

(17:28):
And Malinowski is like,listen, you have to do work.
All you're doing is allthis communist activism.
But they, they basicallyslander this guy, this,
this professor as, as a spyon, on colonial students.
And Harold Laskey, the Marxist,the guy who was the head
of the Labor Party briefly,
he had gotten Meyer into theLondon School of Economics.
He basically got him fromthe country indirectly.

(17:51):
He tells this guy,listen, the, do you know
what these guys are talkingabout saying about you?
Very quickly, the, thepublication is banned.
They don't abide by the band.
And the, the president of,of the head, the director
of the Lenon School ofEconomics, he suspends them,
he kicks Meyer Outtaschool, they take away his
presidency of the, of the student body.
They take away hisRockefeller money, his job,

(18:14):
they take away his, his, hisassistantship of bar Malinowski
and deportation hearings start.
And there is this hugetumult in England to,
you know, some people are defending him.
There's a petition whereem, Forrester, the novelist,
Bertrand Russell, the philosopher,Clement Atley, a number
of Nobel Prize winners, theyall signed this petition,

(18:35):
essentially say, keepFrank Meyer in the country.
This guy's work isindispensable in anthropology.
Now that was complete nonsense.
He wasn't really doingany work in anthropology.
But, you know, for a fewmonths, Frank is a cause celeb.
That's the stated reason.
I have to think that his relationship
with the Prime minister'sdaughter had some type of effect.
Now I have about 160 pages

(18:56):
of declassified materialon Frank Meyer from
the British Archives.
And they, they, you know, likeI said, they know all sorts
of things about Frank,
but they don't mention once
that he's dating their boss's daughter.
And I, I just have to thinkthey were watching him
so closely, they had to know he was,
he was going with this girl.
I mean, I have these letters from her,

(19:16):
and they're talking aboutthe dates they go on that,
you know, some of the dates are in public.
So, you know, the state is heslandered this professor and,
and he had no business in the country.
I think the the reason behindthe scenes may have had
something to do with, with his
relationship with Sheila McDonald.
But I, that's not something I can prove.
- He is 32 going on 33 atthe time of Pearl Harbor.

(19:37):
Does he volunteer for the ward?It's, again, drafted more.
How does he serve hiscountry? And he's a communist.
So that is not complicatinghis joining the armed services,
or maybe I'm thinking ColdWar, not World War ii.
- Well, the, the Frank got confused.
He was working for a guy namedMorris Childs in Chicago.

(19:57):
And Childs is, you know, laterbecomes kind of famous as a,
as a double agent at that time.
He's not a double agent. And he says,
listen, I want to join up.
We're exhorting everyoneto join the military
to fight against Nazism.
I want to join. And part ofthe reason he wanted to join is
that in England, he had recruited
as his understudy a teenagernamed John Cornford,
who was the great grandsonof Charles Darwin.

(20:19):
When Meyer gets deported, KornFord takes over as the head
of the communist students in England.
He goes to to Spain and he dies a day
after his 21st birthday.
John Korn Ford becomes kind oflike the mar the martyr icon
of the UK left thereafter.
Meyer was very tight with JohnCornford so tight, in fact
that he named his firstborn son after him.

(20:40):
So I have to think a degreeof guilt weighed upon him
that my friend died fighting the fascist.
I want to go and fight the fascist too.
But the Communist party,to his surprise, says,
no, you can't go.
You're too valuable here.
And so he fights them on this,it lasts about six months.
And finally in the fall, late summer of,
of 1942, Morris Childsays, you want to go, go.

(21:03):
And, and so Meyer joins
and it's a revelatoryexperience for him, like I said,
because he meets all theseguys that aren't communists.
It's a very differentlife that he's used to.
He gets injured. I mean, he's,
he's 33 years old, as you say.
So you, you get to be that age.
You're not, you know, you'retrying to keep up with 19
and 20 year olds, it'snot gonna go well for you.

(21:24):
And he basically washes outof Officer candidate school.
And so he has a year
and a half to get surgeries to recuperate,
and during that time, he startsto question and questioning
and communism do not go together.
And at that time, he wrotea letter to Earl Browder,
who's the head of theCommunist Party, a guy he knew
but didn't really know well

(21:44):
and says to him somethingthat was very important
for the history of the communist movement.
But I think even moreimportant for the history
of the conservative movement,he writes him a letter
after talking to his friend, Louis Budz,
and says, we need to reach out
to Americans that aren't just Marxists,
but if we wanna, if we wannahave bowlers in our party,

(22:05):
if we wanna have normal people, we have
to tether the Marxist tradition with,
with the American tradition,not just on the 4th of July,
but every day we have tohave a fusion between Marxism
and right, the American founding.
And Browder responds
and says, you know, I wasgoing down that path anyways.
And so the Communist partychanges very rapidly.

(22:27):
It becomes the communist political
association cease being a party.
They stopped playing the international
at the beginning of their meetings.
They play the StarSpangled Banner Browder,
who had been the General Secretary,
now becomes the President.
People greet each other as Sir
and madame, not as comrades anymore.
And so they do this actin, in, when they're,
the Soviet unions alignedwith the United States.

(22:48):
They act like they're just sort of a, a,
a left wing pressuregroup and not a party.
They're not a, a a, you know,a part of the Soviet Union
that ironically keepsMeyer in the movement.
He had been almost fromthe start in Great Britain.
I mean, he was on the board of the
Communist Party of Great Britain.
He was a very powerful personat a very young age in the
Communist Party in Britain,in the United States.

(23:08):
It was different. Ittook him about 10 years
to reach the statusthat he had in England.
But finally in 19 44,19 45, he is very tight
with Earl Browder, the,the head of the party.
He's an advisor to him, they're,
they're friends at this point,
and that's gonna have dramatic
consequences for Myers's future.
- But at this time, he also would be
reading the Road to Serfdom.

(23:29):
- Correct. So two things happen.
One is, and they bothhappen at the same time.
Basically the same week.
Meyer reads a book that changes him,
and it's by a guy
that he knew at the LennonSchool of Economics.
Friedrich Hayak wrote the Road to Serfdom,
and he reviewed it inthe new masses, which
ostensibly you're reading a book review,

(23:50):
but really you're reading,
you're seeing a man crack up in real time.
You're seeing his, you know,14 years of commitments crumble
before you, you're seeinga man have an epiphany.
It's not exactly apositive review, it's sort
of like a mixed to positive review.
But the, the pointthere is that, you know,
this is communist control publication.
You wouldn't have any sort
of free market type bookbeing praised in a communist

(24:13):
control publication, except at
that point in the Communist Party.
And Meyer praises it a few days later,
something called the OSE lettercomes to the United States.
And this is ostensibly bya guy named Jacque Dulo,
who is the moon faced, you know, head
of the Communist Party of France.
And Meyer reads this,
and it basically, it scoldsthe American Communist says,

(24:33):
you know, stop playingnice with the Democrats,
stop having class class collaboration.
We need to have class conflict
and essentially gives them a warning.
The Cold War is coming, you know, without,
without using that terminology.
And Meyer thinks, gee,we just had this war
that's killed tens of millionsof people around the world.
What this guy saying is hewants a waterfall, this war

(24:55):
that's crazy.
And Meyer, Earl Browder, Louis Nans
and others think, you know,they start fighting it.
They don't realize, well, atleast Meyer didn't realize
that at first.
He thought this was fromthe French Communist Party.
He thought this was somethingthat he could oppose.
In reality, it was written in the Kremlin,
it had Stalin's blessing.
And very quickly, Meyer's Ally,Earl Broder gets thrown out

(25:19):
of, on his face, out of theCommunist party, Meyer kind
of uncharacteristically,slinks away his friend Louis,
but ends who becomes probablythe most, you know, the, the,
the witness who testifiesmore than any other
communist against the Communist Party.
He leaves in a very dramaticfashion in the morning,
I think it, in, in, in October,
there was an October morning in,
in 1945 when in themorning he's the managing

(25:41):
editor of the Daily Worker.
He's in effect that the editor
of the communist mainpublication that evening,
he was converted to Catholicism in St.
Patrick's Cathedral by noneother than Fulton Sheen,
who's sort of the, the mostflamboyant, dramatic priest,
maybe in the history of the United States.
And so he goes out with a bang Meyer kind
of just sneaks away

(26:01):
and reassess his ideasfor the next few years.
- Alright, so at thispoint Daniel was thinking,
this is an interesting life story,
but you know, it, you haven'ttold us why he is the man
who invented conservatism.
So let's get to that question,that answer by talking about
what happens in the 1950s,
and this would be his involvementwith the National Review,
which is founded, I believein 1955 by William F. Buckley.

(26:24):
- Correct. Meyer was presidentat the creation of that.
He, he was president atthe creation of a lot
of various conservative groups.
And the Conservative Party of New York,
the American Conservative Union,young Americans for Freedom
Philadelphia Society, can go on and on.
And so with National Review,

(26:45):
what happens is there's a guy named Billy
Slam, it's his idea.
And he said, when I came up with this idea
of National Review, I thoughtof it as, as the, the outs,
you know, taking on the ends
that this would be a veritableconspiracy of friendship.
And unfortunately, slam wassort of ill suited to lead
that conspiracy of friendship.
He was kind of not, peopledidn't get along with him.

(27:06):
He gets booted
and Meyer takes his placeas the literary editor.
He also takes his place askind of the defacto leader
of the anti James Burnhamcontingent in National Review.
Burnham being sort of amore moderate conservative
and Meyer being a more, moreextreme on, on the right.
And the third thing is he,he becomes kind of the master

(27:29):
of ceremonies for that veritableconspiracy of friendship.
And so all throughout the 1950s, 1960s,
Meyer who's up in Woodstock,
has people basically ports company.
And you had people like Richard Allen
who became the NationalSecurity Advisor under
Ronald Reagan would come up to visit him.
You'd have David Broadno,who used to, who was a,
a great talk radio host,Joan Didion, Gary Wills,

(27:51):
who won a Pulitzer Prize.
You, if you went toWoodstock in the 1960s,
and you were conservative, itmeant something very different
for you than it meant for everyone else.
This meant the pilgrimage to go see Meyer.
And so Meyer cultivates this movement.
He has this fight withinna within National Review
for the soul of themagazine with James Burnham.
My sense is he lost that fight,
but he won the fightoutside of the magazine.

(28:13):
He won the fight for the soulof the, of the, the movement
by coming up with this,this philosophy fusion,
which we talked aboutas applied to communism.
That's where he came up withthe idea with, with communism.
And then he said, well, gee,Marxism really doesn't mesh
or fuse with the American tradition.
What does? And so Meyer'sphilosophy was basically,
you know, if, if you're a, ifyou're a conservative in Great

(28:34):
Britain, you're gonnaconserve the monarchy,
you're gonna conserve the aristocracy,
whatever the institutions overthere, you're gonna conserve
what is unique about us,what is our big tradition?
And for Meyer, that wasthe American founding,
what does the founding mean?
Well, the, the founding means freedom.
And in this way, he told traditionalists
and libertarians two disparate groups
that nevertheless foundthemselves on the right.

(28:55):
He said, listen, youguys are not in conflict.
You're in cooperation.
You take away freedom from things that,
that traditionalist value like virtue.
What do you have? You have,you have coerced virtue.
That's not virtue. You takeaway thousands of years
of tradition from freedom,that freedom's gonna collapse,
you know, pretty very shortly.
So these two ideas, intention sometimes

(29:17):
and cooperation, sometimesthey go together.
That was ba his basic ideology.
- So this is the inventionof conservatism then.
- Well, you know, Frank, the title is,
I don't think anyoneinvented conservatism.
I think conservatismdevelops conservatism.
- Yeah, yeah. I'm curious this,because when you talk about,
you know, tradition, liberty
and anti-communism, well, liberty, freedom

(29:39):
and anti tyranny go back tothe roots of the republic.
That's why it's been aconstant in our society.
- Yeah. So the title refers
to when Frank came over from the left, he,
he was a man from a system.
Marxism is a system,
- Right?
- And he thought, to beat a system,
you've gotta create a system.
So very early on he thoughtconservatism was something
to be invented, and thatwas sort of the remora

(30:00):
of his time from Marxism.
That's a fundamental sort
of misunderstanding of conservatism.
Conservatism is not invented.
Conservatism is somethingthat develops organically.
And Meyer's journey,the last, you know, 20
or so years of his life wasa journey figuring out that,
you know, conservative is not so,
conservatism is notsomething to be invented.
It's something that's to bedeveloped or to be conserved.

(30:24):
And, and, you know, he looksbackward at the founding.
And it, it, you know, thisis not not something that,
you know, is an idea thatcame outta someone's head,
but just over the centuriesis something that develops.
So that's, that's wherethe title comes from.
But if you know, as far as ifyou wanna take it, literally,
I'm, I'm, I'm not a a a too literal a guy,
but, you know, he was a founder of so many
of these organizations.

(30:45):
He did come up with thisphilosophy that was sort
of a defacto philosophy ofconservatives, let's say,
from Goldwater through Ronald Reagan.
And I think it was, Imean, it was so effective
and it was so, it took somany people over that most
of the people who werefusions probably had
never heard of the term fusion.
They probably had never heardof the, the term Frank Meyer.

(31:05):
Right. But I think that's,that's sometimes a sign
of someone's influencethat they're so influential
that people don't even know who they are.
- Yeah, I think what we'regetting at here is the idea
of origins of makingconservatism a marketable,
sellable concept to theAmerican electorate.
And for me, this has alwaysbeen a very much a chicken
and egg question with BarryGoldwater and Ronald Reagan.
Did Barry Gold, was it more important
that Barry Goldwater took the hit in 1964,

(31:27):
but introduced a set of ideas, picked up
and embraced by Ronald Reagan?
Or was it more important tohave a very likable spokesperson
of Ronald Reagan champion those ideas?
Chicken in the egg question, if you will,
but here right now, FrankMeyer, going back to 1960,
in 1960, he talks about
what he calls conscious conservatism.
What does, what does consciousconservatism mean? Well,

(31:47):
- I think that, that for Meyer,I mean, in, in 1960, he knew
that, I mean, well, hisfriend l Brent Bezel,
obviously Ghost writes, right?
Goldwater's book, but by, you know,
the conscience of a conservative.
And at that point, Meyeris very much enthralled
with Barry Goldwater.
And he writes the seven pagememo to Bill Buckley, to,

(32:11):
to Jim Burnham and to BillRush, the other bigwigs at,
at, at National U.
And he says, listen,it may take us 20 years
to elect one of our own president.
This is in 1960. So he, he hadit, he had it, he said, so I
- Back, back up, back up a second.
He said, in 1960, itwas gonna take 20 years,
- It's gonna take 20 years to

(32:31):
elect one of our own president.
- He nailed it and- He nailed it.
And so he, he said,
but this guy, RichardNixon, he's not one of,
he's an opportunist.
Let's not endorse this guy.
Let's use all of our poweron congressional candidates
and let's make a symbolicendorsement of Barry Goldwater.
This is in 1960. Now, they didn't make
that symbolic endorsement,

(32:52):
but that's how much
of a front runner he was ona guy like Goldwater, right?
During the campaign,
he is advising Goldwater to some degree.
I mean, he's getting like a per diem,
he's not a paid advisoror anything like that.
But he realized that Goldwater is kind
of not suited for this role.
That he's a cantankerous guy,

(33:12):
he's can be rough around the edges.
And when we talked aboutMeyer nailing it 20 years,
20 years ahead of time withReagan, with Goldwater,
he was such a homer that atthe, you know, September of,
of 1964,
he is writing in nationalyouth saying Goldwater may
win in a landslide.
Well, the landslide happened,it just buried the wrong guy.

(33:34):
And so the moment Goldwaterloses, he moves on
and he sees this guy in,in the infomercial for,
for Goldwater, Ronald Reagan,
who gives this great speech for Goldwater.
And Meyer says, that'sthe guy, he's a star.
Now, of course he was a star. Yes.
But almost immediately Meyer pivots
and says, this is gonnabe our guy, Ronald Reagan.

(33:56):
Obviously he doesn't liveto see Reagan, you know,
it all come to fruition.
But he, he pegged Reaganas, as the next guy
- For the record, RonaldReagan won 44 states in 1980.
And Barry Goldwaterlost 44 states in 1964.
So how's that for a flip, Dan?
Who do you think had the longer march?
Would it be Ronald Reagan going from FDR
and Truman to conservatism?
Or would it be FrankMeyer going from communism

(34:19):
to conservatism?
- Well, I think to go fromStalinism to yeah, you know,
becoming a Goldwater Republican,
Reagan Republican isprobably a longer journey.
But there were other people that took
that journey, obviously.
I mean, a lot of his,the people that he was
with at National Review, almost all
of them other than Bill Buckley ca became

(34:39):
converts to conservatism.
You know, Jim Burnhamwas an advisor to, to,
to Leon Trotsky Trotskysaid of Burnham, well,
Burnham's not stupid,
he's not like his friend DwightMcDonald, but he's a snob.
And at National Review,Meyer and Billy Slam
and some of the others, bill Rickenbacker,
they looked at Burnham the same way
that Trotsky looked at him.

(35:00):
They thought of him as a snob.
And so Meyer clashes over the direction
of the conservative movement with Burnham.
They have a big fight.Burnham is in the office.
So he has Buckley's ear.
He's also a very, Burnham wasan incredibly intelligent man.
He was lawyerly very cool.
Meyer was excitable andhe was not in the office.

(35:21):
And I think for these reasons,bill Buckley tended to listen
to, to Burnham maybe a littlebit more than he listened
to Meyer, even if he mayhave been a little bit more
sympathetic politicallyto Meyer's outlook.
- And how did Frank andBill Buckley interact?
How'd they get along? I, I sawa tribute that Buckley wrote
after he passed in 1972.
But it's not a terribly personal tribute.

(35:41):
He just credits him asbeing a great thinker.
But it's not, not really personal.
- I, I think they got alongquite, quite well, probably
because Frank was an early telecommuter.
If Frank were in the office,
he would've been gone probably very early.
Now, if you think of these, you know,
sometimes people call'em the Three Musketeers,
the three amigos, FrankMeyer, Wilmore Kendall, and,

(36:04):
and Brent Bezel, unlike Jim Burnham,
these weren't likedomesticated characters.
These were like mad men.
You know, if you watch a series Mad Men,
I have a letter from Wilmore Kendall,
there's about a thousand letters,
and these are gonna go to, to the Hoover
Institution very shortly.
But I have a thousandletters from Wilmore Kendall
between him and Meyer.
And in one of the letters he says, listen,
I don't have that book review.

(36:26):
'cause Meyer's the literaryeditor in National Review,
I don't have that bookreview that you asked for.
And I'm afraid this time Idon't have a very good excuse.
Remember that 19-year-oldco-ed I told you about?
Well, she showed up on my door again
and this time I didn't turn her away.
And so Kendall's life is dysfunctional.
Brent Bezel is over in Spain,and he has a very sharp pivot.

(36:46):
He goes from being sortof a maite conservative,
a freedom loving and conservativeto kind of a Theo Con.
And his wife is, you know,bill Buckley's sister.
And she's having tremendous problems
with alcoholism over there.
He's having start, you know,
he starts at some point in the 1960s
to have mental health problems.
Meyer is, is, and,
and those guys wash out
of National Review eventually, right?

(37:07):
Meyer, I think
because he was up in Woodstock,even though he was like some
of these guys in different ways,
he never washes out a national review
because he's never around the water cooler
to kind of annoy anyone.
He's, you don't, you can deal
with him, you can not deal with him.
He's doing his work inWoodstock, New York.
And it was very rare thathe came down to the office.
I think Bill Buckley liked him.

(37:29):
I think Bill Buckley was influenced
by him tremendously inthe sense that Buckley,
I conservatism is essentially Frank Meyer,
Meyer conservatism.
And I, I, it's not to say
that he got his ideas from Frank Meyer
or anything like that, butthey were certainly simpatico
on, on what they believed.
- I have a note, by the way,while the buyers were living in
Woodstock, they homeschooledtheir kids, didn't they?

(37:50):
- They did, I think evenmore so than anti-communism.
I think the issue that FrankMeyer was more animated
and passionate about was homeschooling.
And so both of their kids,it was kind of a, you know,
validation of what they did.
They both get into Yale, they both become,
I think chess Grand Mastersor something like that.
- One. I think they're bothlike a rank, they're both like a

(38:11):
ranked below Grand Master.
- Yeah. Okay. So, so at onepoint Gene was the 19th rank,
or the 18th ranked chessplayer in the United States,
- Right?
- John won the amateurchampionship you wanna share
of the amateur championship one year.
So they, they, you know,it was sort of a validation
of their education of their kids.
And obviously Gene Meyeris one of the, you know,
he's the president of theFederalist Society for years And,

(38:32):
and recently retired from that.
So he had a great as well.
But you know, at at one pointthere's a man from the state
of New York that comes to their house
and says, where are your kids?
They're not in the public school.
And they said, well, youknow, we teach them at home.
And he said, you, you didn't get our
permission to teach them home.
And Frank yells from the other room,
I don't need your permissionto do anything with my kids.

(38:53):
You need my permission todo something with my kids.
And he, you know, that was sort of his,
his libertarian attitude coming out in,
in, in the homeschooling.
And so other than a, a yearin kindergarten for John,
they were, they were guys that,
that homeschooled their kids,
people that homeschooled their kids.
- And he is okay with them going to Yale.

(39:13):
- Yes. And at that point,Yale had sort of changed.
They had a very, you know,they, they, they were,
they were focusing moreon brains rather than sort
of like a well-rounded student.
And I think those guys were the kind
of the high brains thatthey were looking for.
- So part of being a Hoovervisiting fellow dentist
that you get access toour remarkable archives.
I'll tell you a funny story.

(39:34):
A colleague of mine here,
his son interned thissummer in the archives.
And this kid is just kind
of ingenious at buildingthings, constructing things.
And he stumbled acrossa typewriter once owned
by William F. Buckley, and herestored the sucker himself.
So that's the kind of stuffsitting in our archives.
But you discovered that we have
Frank Meyer material in archives.
Tell tell us what, what we have.

(39:56):
- Okay, so for this book,
there were material fromJames Burnham's papers.
There was material from HenryRey's papers both at the,
the Hoover Archives anda number of other papers.
There's some Frank Meyer papers there.
What happened was,
when I looked at the FrankMeyer collection at Hoover,
I said, there's something wrong here.
There, there, there's no,you know, the rhythm is off.

(40:18):
And I've been looking atarchival stuff for, you know,
25, 30 years.
There's something wrongabout this collection.
There are no, there wasno, you know, letters,
there are no tax returns.
Things that people would keep, right?
And so I started calling around
and saying, you know, does anyone know
where Frank's papers are?
And I thought, well, gee, maybehe, he, he threw them away
or maybe he, 'cause he was a telephone
guy, he didn't have them.

(40:39):
And I, out of desperation,because COVID happened,
and Hoover and all theseother places shut down.
I said, what am I gonnado? And so I start calling
around looking for Frank's papers,
and it took me about two years.
And finally I talked to this couple
that had bought the Meyer house.
And they said, oh no, wedonated the papers to Hoover.
And I said, no, you didn't.And they said, no, we did.

(40:59):
I said, no, you donated some of them,
you kept some of the papers.
And they said, what do you mean?
I said, well, you have, you
just don't know it, you have them.
So finally they said,well, we have a warehouse.
I said, take me to your warehouse.
And in August of 2022,
after two years of searching,I go into this warehouse.
There's 663 boxes. Igo through all of them.

(41:21):
Of those, there are 15 boxesthat are Frank Meyer's papers.
So Hoover had a smallper, had a percentage
of Frank Meyer's papers,
and then all of a suddenI find the rest of it.
I find the letters, the birth, you know,
his, his dance cards.
I know who he danced with atThelen School of Economics.
I know who he lost his virginityto a rather famous woman.
I know what his IQ score was.

(41:42):
I know you know so much about him.
There's a thousand letters between Kendall
and Meyer, between Brent Bezel and Meyer.
There's letters from Token,
there's homemade Christmascards from Joan Didion.
There's, I just did an article in Law
and Liberty on the correspondence
between Leo Strauss and Frank Meyer.
So there's all these figuresthat have these lost letters
that I think would've been an incinerator

(42:03):
or in a, you know, alandfill within a few years.
Thankfully, I think in a matter
of months they're gonna beat the Hoover Institution
reunited with the Frank Meyerpapers that are already there.
So I, I had a great time inthe archive at Hoover getting
all sorts of material aboutFrank Meyer and others.
And now we're gonna have a reunion with,
with these papers that I found.

(42:24):
And so the collection at Hoover's gonna be
even bigger on Frank Meyer.
- Outstanding. Alright, let'sshift to obligatory question.
What would Frank Myer make oftoday's conservative movement?
Let me read to yousomething that he wrote in,
in its titled, why Freedom.
And the following is he says,the goal of conservatism,
he says is quote, to helparticulate in theoretical
and practical terms, theinstinctive consensus

(42:46):
of the contemporary Americanconservative movement.
A movement which is inspiredby no ideological construct,
but by devotion to the fundamentalunderstanding of the men
and women who made western civilization
and the American republic.
So Frank Meyer meets DonaldTrump. And what would he think?
- Frank Meyer was not a populist.
And he, you know, he, he was pro McCarthy,

(43:06):
he advised Jim Buckleyto go after union votes.
So there was somestrategic populism there.
But as far as things like,you know, plebiscite votes,
and, you know, he, the guy
that he really despised in the late 1960s
was George Wallace.
And he wrote a letterto really slam saying,
I don't fear this guy winning.
I fear some demagoguecoming along years later,

(43:27):
taking his templatewithout the racist baggage
and, you know, winning election
and being sort of a conservative imposter.
So I think in some wayshe would, you know, clash
with Donald Trump, Ithink on foreign policy.
Ironically, he wouldprobably like Donald Trump.
He, Henry Kissinger wrote him in 1968,
Kissinger and Meyer were friends.

(43:48):
And he said, listen, I'mgonna be the National Security
Advisor under Richard Nixon.
What should our foreign policy be?
And Meyer said, listen, you know,
there's this messianic crusaderstate in the Soviet Union
that, you know, we need to take care of.
We, we need to roll themback wherever they go.
We need to defeat them minus,
minus this disorientingforce in our foreign policy.

(44:10):
The whole idea of foreignaid, of United nations,
of any sort of alliances,even the Vietnam War,
which he was very much for.
All of this would be a farce.
And so there is no more Soviet Union.
And so trump's, I mean,people called it isolationist.
I think he's but much moreactive in foreign policy,
at least in the secondterm than people thought.

(44:30):
Yes. But I think hewould not have a problem
with Trump's foreign policy.
Obviously the government's$7 trillion right now.
That's the federal budget.
You know, we have a almost a$2 trillion debt, a deficit,
and we have a $38 trilliondebt, all of that stuff.
Meyer would be dead set against Trump
and the Republicans, the bigspending that's going on.

(44:51):
I mean, he, I mean obviously the
Democrats involved in that too.
But he, you know, in in,
in his big book inDefensive Freedom, he said
that there were threefunctions of government.
One is, is, you know, courtsto adjudicate disputes, police
to sort of get the bad guys and defense.
Everything else is extraneous.
Everything else we don't need.
And so a guy like that, that has
that bare bones attitude about government,

(45:13):
I think he would lookwith kind of a side eye on
what the Republicans are doing today.
- That's what I'm curiousabout. Just you take an
intellectual like this and
how real politic is he whenhe looks at Washington?
In other words, he diesin 1972, he projects
that Reagan could win,someone will win by 1980,
but he's not around for whenrepublicans actually get their
fingers on government whenthey're running Congress,

(45:34):
when they're running the White House,
both at the same time when it's their
game and their rules and theory.
So I'm just curious,
what he would think is hewatches the Republican Congress
struggle, you know, withconservative ideals when he watches
Republican presidents, George W. Bush,
Donald Trump also kind ofdecide, frankly, on a daily basis
how to be so conservative.
- Yeah, I I think that, I mean,
that's an excellent question.

(45:54):
Yeah. Frank was probably, ideally suited
to be on the outside looking
- In. Yeah,
- He was kind of a pure guy inthe sense that, I mean, even,
even we talked earlier, I mean,at the end of his life, he,
he converts to Catholicism
for the last six hours of his life.
And Meyer, there's certainly,we talked about communism
or Catholicism that choice,some people reach for the beer,

(46:16):
some people need that 110 proof stuff.
And Frank was one of those guys
that needed the strong stuff.
And that shows with hislife in communism that shows
with him being sort of purethan thou as a conservative.
And I wonder if the momentconservatives took power,
I don't know how hewould've looked at, I mean,
even even a guy like Reagan, you know,

(46:37):
doing all sorts of great things.
I think he probably stillwould've had criticism,
although he was a, you know, he,
he truly was a hugebacker of Ronald Reagan.
So much so that 1968,
when Hugh Kenner wrote a critical piece
of Ronald Reagan nationalview, he engineered
behind the scenes to have apiece attacking Kenner's piece.
And this damaged hisfriendship with Kenner

(46:57):
to such an extent thatHugh Kenner, the one
of their main literary guys, a guy
who Buckley had been his bestman at his, his his wedding,
Buckley, had paid for hisyoungest daughter to go
to go to college.
And Meyer was very tight with him.
He resigns from the magazine
because what Meyer did,so you can be the chief
ideologist at the postwar, right?
Like Meyer was trying to be,you can be the literary editor,

(47:20):
sometimes you can't be both.
Sometimes those things don't go together.
And in that instance they didn't.
- So what is the current state
of fusion conservatism in your,
- Well, I think as long asDonald Trump's president
of the United States people,the conservative movement is,
you know, kind of lockstuck and barrel his,
or people that callthemselves conservatives.

(47:41):
They're very Trumpian. And if,
and if you make a criticism of Trump,
you're gonna hear about it.
You know, I remember even,even in my newsletter,
I have a newsletter, spectator
am for the American Spectator.
And when it was clear thathe had lost to Joe Biden,
I wrote my newsletter,well, okay, oh well he lost.
And I had, you know,dozens of people, you know,
cancel my subscription.

(48:01):
How dare you say. So evenmaking a factual observation,
you're gonna, you're gonnahear about that from people.
So fusion, there are still a number
of people who are fusions.
The reason I'm optimistic for fusion,
and I, you know, I don'treally have a dog in the fight
so much, but the reason I'm optimistic is
because it's sort ofthe natural thing to do.

(48:22):
If you're a conserv American conservative,
what is it that you want to conserve?
I think everyone's always gonna go back
to the American founding.
And so that's sort of a natural philosophy
for American conservatives to have,
even though at this point,obviously fusion is not as strong
as it was say in the1960s, seventies and 1980s.
- Well put. So in 20 28, 70 could run

(48:43):
as a non-Trump fusion conservative.
But what would youthink they would run on?
What would put it, there's way, what would
Frank want them to run on?
- I think, you know, the, the fact
that we have a massivegovernment trying to,
to shrink the government.
I mean, we have a, a all thisdiscussion over say like Snap
and all these programs thatare supposedly ending today,
last year we paid over atrillion dollars in interest

(49:06):
alone on the debt.
So we have about one seventhof our budget is going
to service the interest.
That doesn't make any sense.
That's gonna get higherand higher the more
deficit spending we do.
So I would, I wouldimagine that the big thing
for Frank would be shrinking the size
and scope of the federal government.
Unfortunately, I don'tknow that there's a lot of,

(49:27):
there should be an appetite for that,
but I don't know that there'sa big appetite for that there.
There doesn't seem to,even a lot of Republicans,
they're saying, Hey, let's, you know,
let's give these Obamacare subsidies,
let's get snap reopened,
let's get the food stamps out there.
There's not a question forthese people about what,
you know, the existence ofthese programs to begin with.
They all seem to have bought into the idea
that it's a good idea for government

(49:48):
to get into the feed you business.
It's a good idea to get government
to get into the healthcare business.
And I think Frank Meyer would'vebeen a person that said,
well, why are we even in this to be with?
- And what do you think FrankMyer would make of China?
Which is fusion in that it's communist,
but it also has embraced economic growth.
- Bill Buckley's, one ofhis last conversations
with Frank Meyer, he was inChina covering Nixon's sort

(50:09):
of opening
- Up, he died the year he dies the year
Nixon goes to China. Right.
- One of those trips. Yeah.
And, and he, yeah, he dies in 72.
And he said the irony of this were,
were these two oldanti-communist talking while one
of us is in China whileRichard Nixon is opening
relations with the Chinese.
Right. And so, you know, I, I think,

(50:31):
I mean obviously he was aanti-communist par excellence in
the sense that, you know,when he was a communist.
I mean, he worked for the guy who
who created the Berlin Wall.
One of the guys he had speak at Oxford,
prince Murky dies in the Gulag.
He knows other people that,that die or kill for communism.
He knew what it was about.

(50:51):
And so he was extremely anti-communist.
I would, I would imagine hewould be extremely against
the, the Chinese communists.
- So you, Dan, have done a great job
of cutting me off in terms ofall these little force Gump,
like things I wanted tobring up about his life.
You, you referenced hisintersection with 10 Downing Street
and his involvement with thePrime Minister's daughter.
You referenced his tie to the Berlin Wall
and the gentleman whodesigned the Berlin Wall,

(51:13):
you mentioned Joan Didion.
Now, did he know, did, howdid he know Didion exactly?
- He was the first editor topublish a freelance article
by Joan Didion, according to Joan Gideon.
And not just, you know, he, hedidn't just know Joan Didian.
I mean, he lived next doorfor the last three years
of his life with Bob Dylan.
He, early on in Nashville,

(51:33):
when he takes over the literarysection, he says, you know,
this, this guy that's writing the sci-fi
reviews, he's not cutting it.
I'm gonna get my neighborto write the sci-fi reviews,
who's a guy named Theodore Sturgeon.
Theodore Sturgeon comes up with live long
and prosper and Star Trek.
He writes a couple of Star Trek episodes.
He writes the episodein which Leonard Nemo
invents this thing.
I can't do it. And some people can do it.
I can can't do that.

(51:53):
- Listen, Frank is tryingto make the Vulcan V
with his forefingers.
- Yes. So, and,
and he come, the sturgeon comesup with the prime directive
and all this time that he'swriting for Star Trek, right,
he's writing about a hundred book
reviews for National Review.
So Frank did weave in, in
and out of a lot ofstrange, you know, the idea
that he would weave in and outta the lives
of people like TS Elliot andHG Wells and Eugene O'Neill.

(52:16):
And then by the end of his life, Bob Dylan
and Joan Gideon, we think of them
as sort of more modern people.
Star Trek. He did havethis Forrest Gump quality.
- Okay. HG Wells is an HGWells connection here as well.
- Yeah. He invited HGWells to speak at Oxford
for the sole purpose of denouncing him
and shouting him down, whichis a very strange reason

(52:37):
to in invite someone to campus.
HG Wells had given his liberalfascism speak the speech,
the famous speech he gave in 1933.
And Meyer, who had left Oxfordat that point, had graduated,
said, let's get this guy in here.
They had him speak andMeyer starts shouting
and denouncing HG Wells.
And as he's doing this,
there's another American in the room,
a guy named Wilmore Kendall,who used to, who became

(52:59):
for about a decade, one ofMeyer's closest friends.
He's watching this. Hewrites a letter to his father
and says this crazy Americanscreaming at HG Wells saying
You're, you know, saying allthese nasty things you don't
know about the
proletariat, you don'tknow about this and that.
And, and Meyer made this big scene
with HG Wells at Oxfordthat was so notable
that Wilmore Kendall wrotea whole letter about it

(53:20):
to his father without everrecognizing that he had met one
of his closest friends allthose years ago at Oxford.
They would reconvene in thefifties without even knowing
they had, they had met in the 1930s
- And this one figure wehaven't talked about yet.
So let's briefly spend a minuteon her. And that's his wife.
- Elsie Meyer was Frank'spartner in everything.
And, and they were both inthe Communist party together.

(53:42):
Elsie was at the Flint sit down strike.
She was, you know, maybe notas big of a deal in the party,
but she was a, a regular Jimmy Higgins,
as they would say in the party.
And in National Review,
she was essentially editingthe book review section.
Frank was assigning the reviews.
Frank was picking the books.
Frank was picking the reviewers,
she was doing the actual editing.
And so when Frank dies, Buckley gives,

(54:05):
basically gives her frank salary,
it gives her a little bit more.
And for a year she's the literary editor,
but she's pushed out
because they want George willto be the literary editor.
She takes this very hard
and she says, you know,
I'm just basically a copy editor here.
She took Frank's death extremely hard.
And as we discussed early in the program,
their best friend was Eugene O'Neil Jr.

(54:27):
And they would sit there and drink
and recite Shakespeare in the living room.
Frank went on, you know, lecture tours
with Eugene O'Neil Jr.
Eugene O'Neal Jr. Obviouslytakes his own life.
They all believed in suicide.
And so in April of 1975,Elsie goes out to where her,
one of her cats had been buried.
And she takes her own life and,and, and, and goes that way.

(54:49):
And they, you know, that was part
of their libertarian philosophytoo, that you this sort
of idea of self willfulness
and that you have control
of your own, you know, your own fate.
But that's probably in thestor in, in, in the book.
I mean, that's the saddest story.
I mean, I I I I'm not too emotional,
but when I finished the book
and the part about Elsie taking her own
life, I mean, I was tearing up.
- Yeah, that is sad. So wehave a wonderful tribute in the

(55:11):
form of bi biography of 544 page biography
that explains its man's lifein just brilliant detail.
And this is really a greatread. Congratulations.
But what else is therein the way, attributes
to this matter, institutesnamed Dr. Frank Meyers statues,
is there a Frank Meyer scholaranywhere across America?
And those, how does his role carry on?
- Well, I, I know at theFund for American Studies,
you look at one of, Ithink it's David Jones

(55:33):
or one, one of those guys that was
a kind of a founder of that group.
There's a big painting ofhim and he's holding a book
and he's holding in defensive freedom.
No, there's no, I I,I don't think there's,
Frank has been a guy that'sbeen, been largely forgotten.
And that's why I was soexcited to write this book
because, you know, who is it out there
that we should know about, but don't,
and Frank Meyer, to mewas one of those people.

(55:54):
He just has this exciting, popsoff the page kind of story.
And he also was obviouslya very significant person,
not only in the history of conservatism,
but in the history ofcommunism in England.
And as I, you know, as I sayin the beginning of the book,
you know, the communists werecaught on a wiretap erasing
Frank Meyer from the history.
So we know why he's not inthe history of communism.

(56:17):
They said it, they, youknow, they said, let's,
let's rewrite the history.
Let's get him outta there oncehe testified against them.
It's a little different for conservatives
because what happened with conservatives,
if you wanna learn aboutJim Burnham, you go
to the Hoover Institution,that's where his papers are.
If you wanna learn aboutBill Buckley, you go to Yale.
'cause that's where his papers are.
Where was Frank Meyer's papers?
Well, they were in a warehouse,
and it took me a few years to find them,
but the lack of of hispapers, I think is part

(56:39):
of the reason why he was forgotten.
As, as a conservative,
- Dan, I'm thinking I've everencountered a young woman
who's given birth to a child
and then says right away, I can't
wait to have another child.
Usually, usually there's a little grace
period where we recover from that.
But your book came out inAugust. What's next for you?
- Well, I'm coming to the HooverInstitution in a few days,
and hopefully what's next is going

(57:00):
to be in the archives there.
And I hope to, to base whateverI do on, you know, the,
the research that I've beendoing in that basement, one
of my favorite places in theworld, the, the Hoover Library,
the archives down inthat, that ground floor.
And, you know, whatevercomes of what I do,
it's gonna come out of that,
it's gonna come out of the research there.

(57:22):
- You know, I, I find the story
of the Buckley typewriterjust wonderfully quirky.
So I'm curious just to whatelse is sitting in the,
in those archives thatwe don't know about?
- Well, there's, there's,I have a whole bunch
of stuff here that's coming.
There's so much interestingstuff that's gonna be coming
that I, I just think peoplewill, will, will find very ex,
I mean, there's, there's hundreds
of letters I have hereI something like dozens

(57:42):
or hundreds of from Barry Goldwater.
And a lot of this stuffis, you know, things
that people haven't seen.
So it's gonna add to our understanding
of various characters,particularly those characters
around National Review.
And I, I find that very exciting.
- Okay. Well I look forwardto having you out here, Dan,
and congratulations again on the book.
It's a great lead. Iis a fascinating topic.
- Thank you so much,bill. I appreciate it.

(58:04):
- Thank you. You've beenlistening to matters of Policy
and Politics at HooverInstitution podcast.
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(58:25):
By the way, while you're splunking
around the Hoover website,why don't you sign up
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which means anytime DanFlynn is in the news,
he will find out about it.
Dan Flynn's book, by theway, it's, once again,
its title is The Man WhoInvented Conservatism,
the Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer.
Dan, where else can we find you?
- I'm, I write for the AmericanSpectator, so spectator.org.

(58:46):
I have a newsletter there.
I called the Spectator a
and you know,
next week you're gonna findme at the Hoover Institution.
But most days you find me at the,
the American Spectators website.
But I have, I, one of the greatthings about this project,
I have a million articles out there
and you know, I have anarticle in the Journal
of Libertarian studies on thecorrespondence between Meyer

(59:07):
and, and Murray Rothbart about Ay Rand.
It sort of settles a few arguments.
I have this article about theselost letters of Leo Strauss
between him and FrankMeyer at Law and Liberty.
So I'm trying my best touse this archival material.
I have to put out new informationabout old, old things.
- Well, I, the old thingsare fascinating things to me.

(59:27):
So again, congratulations,
just a great book and a really fun read.
Well done. Thank you so
- Much, bill- For the Hoover
Institution, this is Bill Whalen.
We'll be back soon withthe new and stone matters
of policy and politics.
Till next time, take care.Thanks for joining us today.
- This podcast is a productionof the Hoover Institution,
where we generate and promoteideas advancing freedom.

(59:47):
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