Sam Tanenhaus lays out how Whitaker Chambers, Alger Hiss, and the early Cold War forged the moral and political foundations of the modern conservative movement that still shapes American politics today.
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This clip aired on WarRoom’s morning show on December 3, 2025. Transcript begins below (lightly edited for clarity; may contain minor errors).
The Moral Struggle That Forged the Right
STEVE BANNON (HOST): You have just had an explosion across the battlefield that is American politics here in the Imperial Capitol. You have actually had a senior editor of, I would argue, one of the most, if not the most influential publication on a weekly basis before you had cable TV and podcasts and everything like this, the revered Time Magazine, accused in an open hearing in front of the nation, arguably one of the most respected individuals that had been in government for a long time, had been aide de camp to Roosevelt, the first Secretary General of the United Nations just to get the kickoff, and now leading the most prestigious NGO, the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, as being a Soviet agent. What happens.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): Well, Chambers goes through about eight or nine names and mentions some others, well known, not as well known as his, and the others all go silent. Because, well, if somebody accuses you of something, accuses you of being a communist, you have got to remember, Steve, this is an era where if you are accusing someone of being a communist and they are not, that is potential slander right because it is not. No, read them. Watch them.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): And when you watch the movie Oppenheimer, I mean, we went from allies, quote, to now mortal enemies. And not just, it was not just about geopolitics at the time. These are two distinct views of how one views humanity, the world, all of it. This is the story of Whitaker Chambers. Goes from a hardcore, if not Trotsky, you know, Marxist Leninist atheist, to a Christian that is, Christianity informs every movement of his life. And you see this whole battle right there. That is why this is so big. This consumed post war America, the war against, they called it the Cold War, but it got hot in many places. This is what consumed us all the way through President Reagan’s presidency.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): Yeah, well, and Chambers insisted it was a moral battle. That is what nobody wanted to hear. It is not just, it is not just moving chess pieces. It is a spiritual war. It is a moral war. That is why, you know, when a friend of mine, I think of yours too, Pat Buchanan, tries to say these things. He tries to say it, and a long time ago, you know, he is hooted off the stage.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Hang on a second. How is one of the leading Jewish intellectuals in the country a friend of what they tell us today is the greatest anti Semite in the nation, Pat Buchanan. I revere Pat Buchanan, but to hear you say that you are a buddy of his is pretty shocking.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): Well, first of all, any journalist who interviews Pat Buchanan knows how straight he is, how direct, how uncensored, and how helpful he will be. And, you know, people are shocked, but there is actually a friend of mine who told me a long time ago before I interviewed Pat Buchanan, said he is a really nice guy. I did not believe it. Then I met him many years.
But there is something else going on here too. Now we are going to get to something that is in the Buckley book if we want to switch over there.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Yeah, we will see it. Because Buckley now comes on the stage. He does come on the stage very shortly. A bit player, but in the wings. But all of a sudden you are going to see the kernels of all this. This is why it is the revolution that changed America. We are now going to get in. It is more than Buckley. It is what Buckley sees down the road.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): That is right. And Pat Buchanan, of course, is still a younger guy than Buckley, but he was raised in all this. Remember, he comes from Washington and he was raised in all this politics. And when Pat Buchanan had his big fight really with the neoconservatives during the first Iraq War, something you know a little bit about, that first Gulf War and the way I treated it in my book. And if you go back and look at the documents and debates at the time, because it is recirculating right now, what is happening is there are accusations that if you are skeptical of Israel and the way it is conducting this war right now in Gaza, you are anti Semitic. And so they look for every opportunity to make that point.
Well, if you go back to the debate Pat Buchanan had…
STEVE BANNON (HOST): You are talking about the Gulf War in the 90s.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): The first one in the 90s.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): In the 90s. I want people to understand this is not after 9 11. This is pre 9 11.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): This is when the first Bush is president, the invasion of Kuwait, the threat to Kuwait, Maggie Bush, you know. You have got, you have got, you got, wobbly. That is it.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Do not get wobbly, George. Do not get wobbly, George.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): Right. It is not skull and bones and right, do not buy me a grove anymore. We got to do it. And Pat Buchanan says, why are we fighting this war for Israel. And, well, he is denounced and smeared in many respects for that, but that was a battle about that war, which in retrospect maybe Pat Buchanan was right about.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): What do you mean by that is so controversial. We are going to get, we may not get clicks, although I think we will, out of the first part of this. Chambers I think is brilliant people, but right now you are going to go viral. Why. What is the argument for why Pat Buchanan might have been correct to say, which everybody says, hey, the good war that we fought over the last four years is the Gulf War, because you were, you know, a little nation was invaded by a bigger nation. This is where America had to stand up. Also, it might have something to do with oil. But why was, because Buchanan really got the separation and kind of the beginning of this whole movement, this part of this movement, really started with that whole powerhouse debate they had done.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): Well, you know, Steve, if you go back and look at the debates in Washington among, like, the major, like, intellectual players of that era, and I mean like Irving Kristol, not his son Bill, Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): I went to Georgetown after she started things. She was a hammer.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): And they are saying, why are we looking to start a new Cold War in the Middle East. And Pat Buchanan had a line.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): And Irving Kristol was not just, he had been, I think, a Trotskyite. He was, and he was one of the guys leading the effort to anti communists to make sure he got the Jews out of Russia. I mean, this guy was a hammer. When these guys are actually backing up Pat Buchanan, these are not intellectual lightweights. These are about as heavy of public national security intellectuals as you can have.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): Well, I will give you an example of this. Near the end of his life, when my wife Kathy, who got very close to Bill Buckley, as I did, we went to see him in his house in Stamford, 2008. Now we are going to turn the clock forward. And she said to him, well, Bill, is there any conservative writer now you really respect. He said Irving Kristol. It was the one. Not Bill Kristol, Irving Kristol.
Irving Kristol and Jeane Kirkpatrick, you go back and look at some of Pat Buchanan’s early books, including the one he wrote on how the Republicans could build a majority. He wrote that. Remember, he and Bill Rusher were writing this book. Now we are getting into the weeds. But I know that people are following this stuff.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): No, that is the way. Remember, young people are thirsting for this information because none of this stuff is taught. You are talking about some of them thirty years ago and it is never discussed.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): Yeah, I know it is true because I see it when I go around and talk about this stuff. Well, you look at Pat Buchanan’s early writing and you will see one of those early books is dedicated to one of his mentors, Professor Irving Kristol. This idea that somehow that intellectual elite declared war on Pat Buchanan over that is untrue. They agreed with him.
Charles Krauthammer, remember him. I remember him saying the isolationist position is totally defensible and consistent on intellectual and ideological grounds. And so here is the line Pat had that really resonated with me later. He said, we already almost destroyed the empire over a strategically meaningless country, Vietnam. Why are we meddling in a strategically important one, the Middle East.
I will tell you another thing about this too. Fascinated me. I found it in the Buckley book. So after Buckley started National Review, 1955, it was not long before the Suez Canal crisis over oil. The end of the British Empire. End of the British Empire. Everybody favors the Brits, the French, and for once the Israelis.
National Review hated Israel early on. And your viewers and listeners should know this. I have got it in the book. National Review referred to Israel in 1956 as "the first modern racist nation.”
STEVE BANNON (HOST): And so was that Buckley’s Catholicism, traditional Catholicism, or what was that. What brought that to the forefront of National Review.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): The Catholicism was one aspect. Another came from a writer that people knew only as a pro McCarthy anti communist named Freda Utley. And she had covered the Middle East and she said to Buckley, I am going to write a piece that defends the group nobody else is looking at. There are these displaced Palestinians there and they have a case to make. And she wrote a book about it.
And there was one columnist in Washington, of all people, Mary McGrory, the liberal, picked up on it. Or it was Dorothy Thompson, that is who it was, another great liberal columnist, picked up on it.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): That is this part of the Algonquin.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): And she said, Freda Utley is making a case here, no one paying attention to the Palestinians. So Buckley, she sends the story to Buckley and Buckley says, what do we do with it. And he says, I know what we will do. We will just invent a new column. We will call it The Open Question. And this is the first one we are going to run. And that is why Buckley was great. He could open. He could open up instead of this kind of, you know, who do we, whom do we denounce. Who do we exclude. Do you think, make the good argument and I will run it.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Well, that changes over time. We will get to the part about, we have got to exclude some guys here. The Birchers and the Objectivists, the Objectivist, the bizarro Ayn Rand cult. The Birchers are dangerous because of conspiracy wing nuts.
But let us go back. Let us go back to when Buckley comes in on the wing of the stage. It is at the end of the Alger Hiss part but the beginning of the McCarthy. And, by the way, one of the most exciting parts of the book is Buckley’s transformation, personal transformation. Because unlike Bush, who are a Connecticut family who kind of went to Texas and pretend they are Texans, Buckley is actually a Texan. His family who kind of harbored oil guys down in Texas, then they moved to Connecticut, and he was raised in Connecticut.
But Buckley here, one of the transforming things is when he has to go into the Army, which he kind of tries to avoid for a long time, going World War II. He is anti World War II.
Yeah.
He is very anti World War II. He finally goes in, but in being an infantry officer, even though most of it is in training, it does transform him and be kind of more of a guy’s guy.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): Guy’s guy. I would add a second thing to that too, which really made sense to me when I went to Buckley’s hometown, Sharon, Connecticut, which is what they call the Northwest Corner, Litchfield County, New York and western Massachusetts. So I tell people, when the Buckleys were declaring Roosevelt, war on the Roosevelts in the 1930s, they are declaring war on the guy they saw at the Rhinebeck Horse Show every supper. Like this is very much an inside world.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): This is the elites.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): Well, but I mention that because when my wife and I went to Sharon, Connecticut, not where Buckley lived as an adult but where he grew up, and you can see the house there. That is where the Young Americans for Freedom first met. You can see the boulder with the statement on it and all this. And you walk to that town, you see right across from the Buckley house is the oldest church in town. And in Connecticut towns you really learn this. It is always a Congregational Church. Then next door is the Episcopal Church.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): High Church.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): High Church. Down the street the Methodists, a little lower church. You have to go practically into a back alley to find the Catholic Church. And that is where the Buckleys worshipped. The household servants got in the cars with them and they drove to church together. So who is worshipping at St. Bernard’s, the Catholic Church in Sharon, Connecticut. It is the working class. That is who Buckley saw. Buckley was an altar boy. He and his brothers were altar boys. His father was an altar boy in Duval County, Texas. The one, right. The county that won, I have no air quotes here, but won the Lyndon Johnson Senate campaign in 1948. Buckley’s grandfather was a sheriff in that county. So he comes out of that.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Make sure they count them right.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): The living, not the dead.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): They count it by the pound.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Okay, if you really want to understand America and the conservative movement, and particularly if you have a college student or a young person in their twenties that you think needs to get up to speed, this is the Christmas gift you want to get them. Buckley by Sam Tanenhaus. And by the way, if you ever get Whitaker Chambers for yourself, particularly if you are, especially if you are a Christian and you are saying, hey, in the world today, you know, that is so much like anti Christian philosophy out there, you think it is pressure, read the book of Whitaker Chambers. It is one of the most moving stories of, I guess, a convert that had lived Christianity against the pressures of the pressures of the world. This book is amazing, Buckley.
And I want to throw down a challenge. When Whitaker Chambers, the book Whitaker Chambers, came out in the ninety. Who was the biggest promoter of that book in media.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): Don Imus, remember him.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Oh, he dominated. The nineties, he dominated, right.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST):
Yeah, the book was nominated for the National Book Award. And it came in a box, and Imus got it. And he started reading it, and he started talking about it. And I did not know this at first. I listened to the program, but I would hear it in the afternoon. I listened to him in the morning, but I also listened to the sports guys in the afternoon. I was writing at home. And somebody called me up, and I said, Don Imus is promoting your book. And then it became a thing. You may remember, it became a joke. Remember Charles McCord would do these things. I am going to kill myself if you do not stop talking about Imus and about Tanenhaus and Chambers. Imus called me up. His wife called me up. This is it. And asked how she could get a custom made Woodstock typewriter to give Don for Christmas. Because the typewriter was the…STEVE BANNON (HOST): We are going to get to that. We are going to get to that story now. Hold on. Why is the typewriter a story. You talked about the farm. Tell me about the typewriter, Nixon, the farm, all of it.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): Well, after… The pumpkin papers. After Chambers first testified…
STEVE BANNON (HOST): They say he is a liar. They say he is a liar. The apparatus came down. This is why, if you are a Christian, you have got to read this book. Everything that he feared, why he was kind of a schizophrenic, turned out to be true. They were out to get him. As soon as he said this thing publicly, the entire apparatus in the world crushed this guy, right.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): There were three accusations that the party would use to smear somebody. One is to say he is a homosexual, that is a term that was used back then. Two, that he is mentally unstable. And three, he is an alcoholic. They said this about Chambers.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Go back, I want to make sure people understand this. This is what the Russians would do to basically try to smear somebody, right.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): But they would do it through their agents. Their agents here. American agents.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): But one, you were gay, you were homosexual. Two, you were mentally unstable. And three, he is an alcoholic. And in Chambers’ case, they try to do all three.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): Yeah, and they spread them around. And Chambers did happen to have history of homosexuality. The others were untrue. And so there is a really famous moment in the Hiss case. It is one that brings tears to the eyes of grown men, Steve. It is when they finally bring… Hiss is the only one of the accused who insists on answering Chambers. He says, no, these are… He sends a letter after Chambers has named him and seven or eight others. Hiss sends a note to the committee, the House committee, and he says, I demand equal time. I want to come before the committee and repudiate these lies that have been told about me. So they say, well, come on in, Mr. Hiss. So he does.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): And what was his thinking. Understanding he actually was a spy. He felt, I am Alger Hiss. I can go in front of and dominate where these guys are the worst witnesses in the world. Bentley and Chambers. I am Alger Hiss. This is, I can command any stage I am on. I will command the stage and show that, show that, show that he is just jealous, he is mentally unstable, or he drinks too much, or you know, he is not a credible witness.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): And the other thing he has got going for him, Steve, is that the HUAC congressmen are really held in low repute. It is the committee nobody wants to be on. They are the red baiters. They have done the Hollywood Ten, right.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Yeah, Ronald Reagan. This is Ronald Reagan’s rise to power. The whole movie The Way We Were is about this film, about this moment. Because they think anybody that comes forward… You had, what, Adolphe Menjou. You had people in Hollywood come forward. But even the people that came forward and named names were smeared by the mainstream media as being a rat. You were an informer. So this is the whole thing about being an informer. Even if you were accurate about these people being communist, it was the whole stench of being an informer.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): There were two blacklists, and we only hear about one of them. We hear about the blacklist of the accused communists. We do not hear about the blacklist of the witnesses who never got work again because they came out and testified. Ayn Rand actually came out of that policy. So we can get to that later, because she was, as you know, she was.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): I cannot believe you take these views on everything. This is how politics has changed so much in the country. You are a secular Jewish liberal from the New York Times. Yet you are saying things that a couple of years ago the progressive left loved to say were lies. You are just lying about I. F. Stone. Still, remember, Alger Hiss is still a fight. It is still an intellectual fight. How did you get through your life by coming out and writing about this and actually telling the truth of the story.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): You know, one of my guys…
STEVE BANNON (HOST): This is how much culture and politics have changed in this nation.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): Well, they have changed. And they were starting to then. I mean, one thing that worked to my advantage was I started writing about Chambers in the early nineties after the Soviet Union collapsed. Remember, there was that period when people were rethinking a lot of this. And heroes were people like Solzhenitsyn.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): And they opened up the KGB files. They opened up the archives.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): And we opened up our archives. Yes, yes. So he has got the real story of what went on. You can get the real story. And there was enough respect in that era for that kind of…
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Solzhenitsyn thought we were… He got over here. He thought we were a mess. He thought we were too weak. He got over here and said, this is not going to save the West, where America has declined to. He is the first one that really, like an Old Testament prophet, told us about the weakness of the West.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): He made the same argument that Buckley and Chambers and those early, and Buchanan later, and those early great anti communists made. The country is weak. It has no moral spirit. It has fiber. We are puteating our own identity. I mean, all this stuff. Solzhenitsyn said that at Harvard, you know. At commencement. At commencement. At commencement. I mean, it is unthinkable today.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Then he went to Vermont, and he said, this place is a disaster.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): Yeah, yeah, that is right. He went up to Vermont. Remember, David Remnick went and interviewed him. David Remnick is a guy who gets a lot of this stuff. And we have some very interesting… Lenin’s Tomb is… It was fantastic, and I cannot do it here, but I will show you the note Remnick sent me about this book in Chambers. He sent me a note not long ago. He said basically like, this is the history nobody is told. That needs to be told. And will be there forever. He says, forget everything else. Forget what the critics say, all this.
But there is another guy who is really important to me. A guy not well, but I have written about him, and I have met him a few times. Robert Caro.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Oh, wow. The series on Lyndon Johnson. And The Power Broker.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): And The Power Broker. When… Great.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): You want to learn about New York City. When Greg and Carter… Robert Moses hired me. Vanity Fair. This is a Robert Caro type.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): I am pleased to say that more than one reviewer has said that, and what I am really proud of. No, because so detailed about every aspect of it.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): That is what, folks, it is a thousand pages. So you are going to get your money’s worth. But it is a page turner. Because you are learning about American history as you go. It is the story of America as told through the actions, the human agency of one person.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): That is what I learned from Bob Caro. You know, his books are called, as you know, The Years of Lyndon Johnson. So what I think of the books I write as being these two big ones.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): But you do not go to the public library. He is one of those guys at the New York Public Library that has the cubicle. There are like ten guys. They duke it out. You know what I am talking about.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): He does not do that anymore. I lived across the street from the New York Public Library for years. I loved it. That is how I did some of Chambers.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): We lived in Tesla’s, right next to Tesla’s lab on Tesla Way.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): Oh, really.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): The Engineers Club has been turned into a set of co ops. Because those are the guys that could not get into the Harvard, Yale, the University Club because they had not gone to Ivy League schools. But Westinghouse, Carnegie, so they start the Engineers Club. Tesla was part of that. And that is right across from the New York Public Library, which is magnificent. You just go over there and get lost in reading all day. And they were one of the groups in the basement that have ten writers they allow to be in residence to kind of get a little cubicle and work in there.
SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): I never got that. I never applied for it. I probably would not have gotten it. But when I was working on Whitaker Chambers, you know, that was a long time ago in my thirties. I would go to the New York Public Library. And I would see other giants there. You would see Norman Mailer sitting at a table just reading a book. You could not believe what you would see back then. And those were the days, you know, they dig the stuff out of the archive. They send a tube. They bring up the book. That is where I first read Bill Buckley’s magnificent essay on Whitaker Chambers was in the New York Public Library. Nothing was digitized. It was in Esquire Magazine.
And I will tell you something. You are asking me, why do I do this stuff. I grew up in a household that did not think a lot of Bill Buckley. And then a couple of things turned me around on him. And one was when I was working on Chambers. I went to the New York Public Library and I read an essay in Esquire Magazine. It was actually the first piece Bill Buckley published there, though I did not learn that until much later, called The End of Whitaker Chambers. It was a memoir about him, interspersed with letters. And I realized, this guy is like an exquisite writer. Why did nobody tell me this. And you sort of get mad in retrospect. There is nobody in front of a classroom who was going to say, by the way, you might want to look at Bill Buckley’s memoir Cruising Speed to see what great journalism is like. Nobody says this. You have to find it yourself.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): But he… We are going to take a short break here. We are going to have to extend this a couple hours. So what we are going to do is have you back. This is our weekend show. We are going to have you back. We will figure it out. Because Buckley, that is why he wrote God and Man at Yale. Because he saw even then the professors, how they were trying to twist things, which was a traditional… You know, I have given this book as a gift to some of the most senior people in this administration who went to Yale, to say how shocking it is, because right now, they are taking the names off buildings and transgenderism is so big and they are doing pronouns. I go, guys, back in the old days, and I am talking the 1950s, 1940s, 1950s, it was a different place. It is amazing.
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