From Stalinism to Reaganism: Daniel Flynn on Frank Meyer and “Fusion” Conservatism

- It is Friday, October 31st, 2025. And welcome back to Matters of Policy and Politics, a Hoover Institution podcast. I'm Bill Whalen. I'm the Hoover Institutions, Virginia Hobbs Carpenter distinguished policy fellow in journalism. And while I can lay claim to that rather wordy job title, I'm but one of many Hoover fellows who are dabbling in podcasting these days. If you don't believe me, go to our website, which is hoover.org/podcast, and you'll find a whole list of podcasts there for your listing. Great stuff that includes the audio version of the Goodfellows broadcast that I have the great honor of moderating. Today we're gonna talk about a very important figure in the rise of conservatism in America. But if you're guessing Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, if you want to walk, go all the way back to Silent Cal Coolidge. Guess again. Who is this pioneer you're about to find out as they introduce our guest? Daniel Flynn is a Hoover Institution visiting fellow and a senior fellow senior editor at the American Spectator. He's also the author of multiple books. His latest workout since mid-August is titled The Man Who Invented Conservatism, the Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer. Dan, welcome to the podcast and on this day devoted to people who like to carve pumpkins. Thank you for curving on a little of your Halloween to talk about Frank Meyer with us.

- Hey, thank you for having me.

- Alright, so let's get into this man's life. But first, tell me what inspired you to write this. I would note this is a lengthy bio. It's 544 pages, which tells you one of two things, Dan. This is either a labor of love or you just got caught up in this and just found out more than you expected.

- Both I, you know, a lot of people, if you go around in a bookstore, you'll see biographies of Lincoln and Churchill and Frank, you know, of Hitler, right? All to me. I, I don't see why people still write books about that because we, I think we know pretty much everything we need to know about those guys. I don't think there's gonna be much new that's gonna pop up. I take a very different approach, 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 in 1961 on his TV program. 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's probably 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 and white lives, gray lives. There's some of them like Whitaker Chambers, Wilmore, Kendall, they, they, you know, they led Technicolor lives. Frank operated in 3D his life sort 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 of conservatives or think of dialogues as sort of like dry milk toast kind of characters, Frank's life is kind of a, a jolt to the system,

- Right? So he is born in 1909. He dies in 1972. I think he's 62 years of age, time of his death, I believe he dies of cancer, which probably not coincidentally, you see most photos of him, he's got a cigarette in his hand or a cigar. This means he comes of age in the Depression. He lives through World War ii. He then experiences the Cold War, but he doesn't live to see the Reagan revolution. He doesn't live to see the contract with America. He doesn't live to see what is going on today vis-a-vis mega and this current conversation we're having about the future conservatism.

- No, he does not. And I think for people looking back, I mean, I, I don't know that Frank would be shocked by any of this, but I think people, conservatives looking back on his life would be shocked. I mean, when he went to England in the late 1920s, there was zero communist presence at Oxford. He started something called the October Club. And at Oxford they went from zero communists to 300 communists in the student body rather quickly. And as he's doing this, as he is on the board of the Communist Party of Great Britain, he's calling for the violent overthrow of Ramsey McDonald. And at the same time, surreptitiously, he's dating Ramsey McDonald's youngest daughter. I have a letter from Sheila McDonald saying, listen, come by 10 downing the coast's clear. My dad's not around. We'll have dinner seven o'clock. Is that good? So if you're doing that, you're probably not long for Great Britain. And so Frank had MI five and abroad, 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. They, they, they do a put a mail cover on his incoming correspondence. So you know, if unsurprisingly there's deportation hearings for Frank, he becomes a cause Celebr in England. And he has Clement Atley, you know, pleading his case on the floor of the House of Commons, Michael Strait, who was later the publisher of the New Republic. He remembers marching around London saying, free Frank Meyer, free Frank Meyer. So he is really like one of these free Mumia characters, free Angela Davis type characters. But in, in 1934, he's kicked out of the country and he goes to work on peace activism from, for a guy who you may know, Walter Ulrich. Yes. Who at that point had murdered two people. And Ulrich is later the architect, essentially, of the Berlin Wall. And Meyer goes to work on peace activism for Walter Brook. So his time in the Communist Party, he lasts until 1945. And him, Louis Boudin's, Earl Browder, who's the chairman of the Communist Party, they kind of get tossed out, Browder gets tossed out on his face. Myron Boudin's kind of get out of the party, and that begins his road to conservatism at that point.

- Okay. You've talked about 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 his childhood for a second. So he is born, I believe, in Newark, New Jersey. He's raised in Newark. We love to have these romantic narratives of conservative icons. Barry Goldwater rise out of the West, Ronald Reagan, a cowboy, but also part of Reagan is the pathos of growing up, you know, poor in Illinois and having a, a fatherhood, a drinking problem and so forth. William F. Buckley, also his, you know, his upbringing, his, you know, his conversion at Yale would experience at Yale. It's a certain romantic story for conservatives, but we look at Frank Meyer, and this is a childhood that could be described. It's not lyes, but it's not 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 he founded made raincoats, it's still around today. His mother was very much involved in, in Jewish causes. He lived in a hotel, which tells you a little bit about, you know, his upbringing. He went to the Newark Academy at Prep school and he, you know, at 16 he goes on vacation at Belgrade Lakes, which is sort of the inspiration for on Golden Pond. And he meets a boy just like him, precocious, intellectually curious. And that boy was meeting his father basically almost for the first time. And that was Eugene O'Neal. And so he is becomes best friends 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, his son is his grimace creation. And Meyer and him have a very tight friendship. They sort of go into the Communist Party, they come out and in 1950 after drinking Frank Meyer's whiskey, they, they stay up all night drinking. The next day, Elsie Meyer finds Eugene O'Neill at the foot of his steps. You know, he had, he had slashed not only his wrists in his an in his ankle Seneca style, he wanted to go out, not like some of these characters in his father's place, but he was a, a, a classist. And he, he went out like, like, like the Romans did. And so that particular moment 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'Neill being introduced to this guy that had already won two Poller prize prizes, you know, that was validating for Meyer and LA. Later when he goes on to write in Defense of Freedom, the molding of Communists, he writes those books on the same desk that Eugene O'Neal used to write a number of his plays.

- Alright, young Frank ends up at Princeton, and there he discovers a thing called antisemitism.

- Yes. So Princeton more so than the other Ivy's head of reputation for racism and antisemitism and admissions. And there was a guy named Radcliffe Heinz, who was the head of the admissions. He gets a letter from basically Meyers Booster at the Newark Academy, a guy who was affiliated with Princeton. And he said, listen, even though this kid's Jewish features are unmistakable, could, he's a, he's a really good student, could you take 'em? And the director of admissions says, well, you know, we have plenty of fine clean cut Christian Americans. These are his words. It almost sounds like a parody coming to Princeton. I'm afraid that he will take away a spot from one of these guys, and he doesn't even strike me as a Hebrew of the better type. So they reject Frank, he decides to take a second year, a postgraduate year at Newark Academy and try to get in again. He gets into Princeton. But what he finds is sort of a student body that is reflective of the fine clean cut Christian Americans attitude that the director of admissions had. And he has a very rough go of it. A lot has been made that, you know, he, he, he certainly met James Burnham there, and James Burnham becomes his rival later at National Review. They sort of fight for the soul of National Review, and a lot is made of, of Burnham being kind of a symbol to Meyer of all that he hated in, in Princeton. I think that's a little bit overblown, but he had a very rough time. He starts writing poems about Satan, you know, Milton Satan, not, not, not Satan with the hood and, you know, a bunch of candles 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 whole lot of difference be, and you know, at least in the alphabet between Satan and Stalin. And so within a very short period of time of of, of writing those poems, he starts getting caught up in communism.

- Why is he an atheist?

- At 14, I found the earliest evidence of 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, come over the, the holidays, see how many people are celebrating the holidays. You know, he's really a robust defense of his Jewish faith By 16, I have an award-winning essay that I got from the Newark Academy where he's defending Bolsheviks defending atheism. So something happens between the ages of 14 and 16, I would imagine at, at the Newark Academy, because his mother is, and his father, they're heavily involved in Jewish causes, they're heavily involved in the temple. And Frank had been heavily involved 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 that he's clearly an atheist. He's clearly has these sort of bull BOLs sympathies.

- And what does he decide to hop a boat and go study at Oxford?

- Well, he, he, he, he sort of asked to leave Princeton. He, he, and he does a very Frank Meyer thing. If you leave Princeton, your grades 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 wanna go to Cambridge or Oxford. You know, that's, that's a very Frank Meyer thing to do. It's got, you know, you drop out of Princeton, you, you should go lower than Princeton. No, he, he thinks of the, the best two universities in the 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 of intramural sports, hanging out with RW Southern, who later becomes a, you know, famous historian and a a a lot of other players. You know, as I said, he starts to date the Prime Minister's daughter, but he starts to date a lot of other women too. Woman, Sheila Duff, who was a sort of an anti-Nazi journalist. He dates her, he dates all sorts of women over there. So it, it's very much the reverse of what he experienced at, at, at, at Princeton. He comes under the tutelage of a guy named Slinger Erhart, who if you've read Brideshead Revisited, he is so, at least I'm told he's the model of Mr. Sam Grass. He's the first Catholic tutor at, at Oxford since Elizabeth Behan Times. And Frank comes, says to himself, well, I have to make a decision either become a Catholic or a communist. And I think most people look at that and say, well, what kind of 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 Reformed Judaism asked something of me, maybe I would've stayed If, if, if, or if I was an Orthodox Jew 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 the Catholicism choice for later, and he joins the Communist Party. He, he starts this communist group, the Oxford Club, which they still have at Oxford Club, at Oxford, I'm sorry, still October Club at Oxford, and walks into the Communist Party headquarters in London, which I'm sure these guys thought someday there's gonna be a whole bunch of young people 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 fellow students from Oxford. And you have to think, you know, there was a great deal of energy for communism after the Russian Revolution, but it dies down. It, it sort of thought of as like, bism or any number of Frankish ideas 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's skill as an organizer, but it's also the, the, the economic times people are starting to, to, to consider alternatives to capitalism. And it, it just booms. I mean, Frank, Frank starts this movement in England, in, in, in the MI six files, MI five 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 Johnny Appleseed of, of, of communism, at least among the youth in Great Britain. And a lot of things come out 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, a lot 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, a decade, decade and half, decade 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 as an anthropologist would read about them. I mean, he reads about them in Marx, and he, he thinks, well, when he 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. He's just getting an allowance from home. So he really doesn't have a clue 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 he leaves, well, the sort of, the first umra in, in his communism comes when he joins the army, and he finally meets the proletariat that Marx had been talking about. And he meets plumbers and electricians for the first time 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 hardcore Marxist who even, you know, 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 to merit 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?

- Well, what they cite is that in this newspaper that he starts, he starts a newspaper called the Student Vanguard that's distributed out throughout England on campuses. And they, there was a professor at the London School of Economics who had been a policeman in India. And in this publication, my Meyer, they said that this guy was a spy, and he spied on colonial students. Now, when Meyer got to Lenon School of Economics, he quickly became the president of the student body. And he got that way because him and a guy named Christian Menon, who was kind of number two in India under Nero at this point, they're both students obviously, but they fix the election and they fix the election. They get Meyer as the student body president. He's working under Ron Law Malinowski in anthropology. And Malinowski is like, listen, you have to do work. All you're doing is all this communist activism. But they, they basically slander this guy, this, this professor as, as a spy on, on colonial students. And Harold Laskey, the Marxist, the guy who was the head of the Labor Party briefly, he had gotten Meyer into the London School of Economics. He basically got him from the country indirectly. He tells this guy, listen, the, do you know what these guys are talking about saying about you? Very quickly, the, the publication is banned. They don't abide by the band. And the, the president of, of the head, the director of the Lenon School of Economics, he suspends them, he kicks Meyer Outta school, they take away his presidency of the, of the student body. They take away his Rockefeller money, his job, they take away his, his, his assistantship of bar Malinowski and deportation hearings start. And there is this huge tumult in England to, you know, some people are defending him. There's a petition where em, Forrester, the novelist, Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, Clement Atley, a number of Nobel Prize winners, they all signed this petition, essentially say, keep Frank Meyer in the country. This guy's work is indispensable in anthropology. Now that was complete nonsense. He wasn't really doing any work in anthropology. But, you know, for a few months, Frank is a cause celeb. That's the stated reason. I have to think that his relationship with the Prime minister's daughter had some type of effect. Now I have about 160 pages of declassified material on Frank Meyer from the British Archives. And they, they, you know, like I 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 think they 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, and they're talking about the dates they go on that, you know, some of the dates are in public. So, you know, the state is he slandered this professor and, and he had no business in the country. I think the the reason behind the 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 at the time of Pearl Harbor. Does he volunteer for the ward? It's, again, drafted more. How does he serve his country? And he's a communist. So that is not complicating his joining the armed services, or maybe I'm thinking Cold War, not World War ii.

- Well, the, the Frank got confused. He was working for a guy named Morris Childs in Chicago. And Childs is, you know, later becomes 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 everyone to join the military to fight against Nazism. I want to join. And part of the reason he wanted to join is that in England, he had recruited as his understudy a teenager named John Cornford, who was the great grandson of Charles Darwin. When Meyer gets deported, Korn Ford 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 of like the mar the martyr icon of the UK left thereafter. Meyer was very tight with John Cornford so tight, in fact that he named his firstborn son after him. So I have to think a degree of 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 Child says, you want to go, go. And, and so Meyer joins and it's a revelatory experience for him, like I said, because he meets all these guys that aren't communists. It's a very different life 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're trying to keep up with 19 and 20 year olds, it's not gonna go well for you. And he basically washes out of Officer candidate school. And so he has a year and a half to get surgeries to recuperate, and during that time, he starts to question and questioning and communism do not go together. And at that time, he wrote a letter to Earl Browder, who's the head of the Communist Party, a guy he knew but didn't really know well and says to him something that was very important for the history of the communist movement. But I think even more important 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 wanna have bowlers in our party, 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 to have a fusion between Marxism and right, the American founding. And Browder responds and says, you know, I was going down that path anyways. And so the Communist party changes very rapidly. It becomes the communist political association cease being a party. They stopped playing the international at the beginning of their meetings. They play the Star Spangled 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 act in, in, when they're, the Soviet unions aligned with the United States. They act like they're just sort of a, a, a left wing pressure group and not a party. They're not a, a a, you know, a part of the Soviet Union that ironically keeps Meyer in the movement. He had been almost from the start in Great Britain. I mean, he was on the board of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He was a very powerful person at a very young age in the Communist Party in Britain, in the United States. It was different. It took him about 10 years to reach the status that 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.

- Correct. So two things happen. One is, and they both happen 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 Lennon School of Economics. Friedrich Hayak wrote the Road to Serfdom, and he reviewed it in the new masses, which ostensibly you're reading a book review, 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 seeing a man have an epiphany. It's not exactly a positive review, it's sort of like a mixed to positive review. But the, the point there is that, you know, this is communist control publication. You wouldn't have any sort of free market type book being praised in a communist control publication, except at that point in the Communist Party. And Meyer praises it a few days later, something called the OSE letter comes to the United States. And this is ostensibly by a 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 scolds the American Communist says, you know, stop playing nice 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 millions of people around the world. What this guy saying is he wants a waterfall, this war that's crazy. And Meyer, Earl Browder, Louis Nans and others think, you know, they start fighting it. They don't realize, well, at least Meyer didn't realize that at first. He thought this was from the French Communist Party. He thought this was something that 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 of, on his face, out of the Communist party, Meyer kind of uncharacteristically, slinks away his friend Louis, but ends who becomes probably the most, you know, the, the, the witness who testifies more than any other communist against the Communist Party. He leaves in a very dramatic fashion in the morning, I think it, in, in, in October, there was an October morning in, in 1945 when in the morning he's the managing editor of the Daily Worker. He's in effect that the editor of the communist main publication that evening, he was converted to Catholicism in St. Patrick's Cathedral by none other than Fulton Sheen, who's sort of the, the most flamboyant, dramatic priest, maybe in the history of the United States. And so he goes out with a bang Meyer kind of just sneaks away and reassess his ideas for the next few years.

- Alright, so at this point Daniel was thinking, this is an interesting life story, but you know, it, you haven't told 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 involvement with the National Review, which is founded, I believe in 1955 by William F. Buckley.

- Correct. Meyer was president at the creation of that. He, he was president at the 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, 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 thought of it as, as the, the outs, you know, taking on the ends that this would be a veritable conspiracy of friendship. And unfortunately, slam was sort of ill suited to lead that conspiracy of friendship. He was kind of not, people didn't get along with him. He gets booted and Meyer takes his place as the literary editor. He also takes his place as kind of the defacto leader of the anti James Burnham contingent in National Review. Burnham being sort of a more moderate conservative and Meyer being a more, more extreme on, on the right. And the third thing is he, he becomes kind of the master of ceremonies for that veritable conspiracy 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 National Security 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, who won a Pulitzer Prize. You, if you went to Woodstock in the 1960s, and you were conservative, it meant 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 within na within National Review for the soul of the magazine with James Burnham. My sense is he lost that fight, but he won the fight outside of the magazine. He won the fight for the soul of the, of the, the movement by coming up with this, this philosophy fusion, which we talked about as applied to communism. That's where he came up with the 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's philosophy was basically, you know, if, if you're a, if you're a conservative in Great Britain, you're gonna conserve the monarchy, you're gonna conserve the aristocracy, whatever the institutions over there, you're gonna conserve what is unique about us, what is our big tradition? And for Meyer, that was the 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 found themselves on the right. He said, listen, you guys 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 take away thousands of years of tradition from freedom, that freedom's gonna collapse, you know, pretty very shortly. So these two ideas, intention sometimes and cooperation, sometimes they go together. That was ba his basic ideology.

- So this is the invention of conservatism then.

- Well, you know, Frank, the title is, I don't think anyone invented conservatism. I think conservatism develops conservatism.

- Yeah, yeah. I'm curious this, because when you talk about, you know, tradition, liberty and anti-communism, well, liberty, freedom and anti tyranny go back to the roots of the republic. That's why it's been a constant 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 thought conservatism was something to be invented, and that was sort of the remora of his time from Marxism. That's a fundamental sort of misunderstanding of conservatism. Conservatism is not invented. Conservatism is something that develops organically. And Meyer's journey, the last, you know, 20 or so years of his life was a journey figuring out that, you know, conservative is not so, conservatism is not something to be invented. It's something that's to be developed or to be conserved. And, and, you know, he looks backward at the founding. And it, it, you know, this is not not something that, you know, is an idea that came outta someone's head, but just over the centuries is something that develops. So that's, that's where the title comes from. But if you know, as far as if you 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. He did come up with this philosophy that was sort of a defacto philosophy of conservatives, let's say, from Goldwater through Ronald Reagan. And I think it was, I mean, it was so effective and it was so, it took so many people over that most of the people who were fusions probably had never heard of the term fusion. They probably had never heard of the, the term Frank Meyer. Right. But I think that's, that's sometimes a sign of someone's influence that they're so influential that people don't even know who they are.

- Yeah, I think what we're getting at here is the idea of origins of making conservatism a marketable, sellable concept to the American electorate. And for me, this has always been a very much a chicken and egg question with Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Did Barry Gold, was it more important that Barry Goldwater took the hit in 1964, but introduced a set of ideas, picked up and embraced by Ronald Reagan? Or was it more important to have a very likable spokesperson of Ronald Reagan champion those ideas? Chicken in the egg question, if you will, but here right now, Frank Meyer, going back to 1960, in 1960, he talks about what he calls conscious conservatism. What does, what does conscious conservatism mean? Well,

- I think that, that for Meyer, I mean, in, in 1960, he knew that, I mean, well, his friend l Brent Bezel, obviously Ghost writes, right? Goldwater's book, but by, you know, the conscience of a conservative. And at that point, Meyer is very much enthralled with Barry Goldwater. And he writes the seven page memo to Bill Buckley, to, to Jim Burnham and to Bill Rush, 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 had it, he had it, he said, so I

- Back, back up, back up a second. He said, in 1960, it was gonna take 20 years,

- It's gonna take 20 years to elect one of our own president.

- He nailed it and

- He nailed it. And so he, he said, but this guy, Richard Nixon, he's not one of, he's an opportunist. Let's not endorse this guy. Let's use all of our power on congressional candidates and let's make a symbolic endorsement of Barry Goldwater. This is in 1960. Now, they didn't make that symbolic endorsement, but that's how much of a front runner he was on a 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 advisor or anything like that. But he realized that Goldwater is kind of not suited for this role. That he's a cantankerous guy, he's can be rough around the edges. And when we talked about Meyer nailing it 20 years, 20 years ahead of time with Reagan, with Goldwater, he was such a homer that at the, you know, September of, of 1964, he is writing in national youth saying Goldwater may win in a landslide. Well, the landslide happened, it just buried the wrong guy. And so the moment Goldwater loses, 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's the guy, he's a star. Now, of course he was a star. Yes. But almost immediately Meyer pivots and says, this is gonna be our guy, Ronald Reagan. Obviously he doesn't live to see Reagan, you know, it all come to fruition. But he, he pegged Reagan as, as the next guy

- For the record, Ronald Reagan won 44 states in 1980. And Barry Goldwater lost 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 Frank Meyer going from communism to conservatism?

- Well, I think to go from Stalinism to yeah, you know, becoming a Goldwater Republican, Reagan Republican is probably 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 converts to conservatism. You know, Jim Burnham was an advisor to, to, to Leon Trotsky Trotsky said of Burnham, well, Burnham's not stupid, he's not like his friend Dwight McDonald, 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. 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 was an incredibly intelligent man. He was lawyerly very cool. Meyer was excitable and he was not in the office. And I think for these reasons, bill Buckley tended to listen to, to Burnham maybe a little bit more than he listened to Meyer, even if he may have been a little bit more sympathetic politically to Meyer's outlook.

- And how did Frank and Bill Buckley interact? How'd they get along? I, I saw a tribute that Buckley wrote after he passed in 1972. But it's not a terribly personal tribute. He just credits him as being a great thinker. But it's not, not really personal.

- I, I think they got along quite, 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, Frank Meyer, Wilmore Kendall, and, and Brent Bezel, unlike Jim Burnham, these weren't like domesticated 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 thousand letters from Wilmore Kendall between him and Meyer. And in one of the letters he says, listen, I don't have that book review. 'cause Meyer's the literary editor in National Review, I don't have that book review that you asked for. And I'm afraid this time I don't have a very good excuse. Remember that 19-year-old co-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. He goes from being sort of a maite conservative, a freedom loving and conservative to 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? 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 in Woodstock, New York. And it was very rare that he came down to the office. I think Bill Buckley liked him. I think Bill Buckley was influenced by him tremendously in the 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, but they were certainly simpatico on, on what they believed.

- I have a note, by the way, while the buyers were living in Woodstock, they homeschooled their kids, didn't they?

- They did, I think even more so than anti-communism. I think the issue that Frank Meyer 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 Masters or something like that.

- One. I think they're both like a rank, they're both like a ranked below Grand Master.

- Yeah. Okay. So, so at one point Gene was the 19th rank, or the 18th ranked chess player in the United States,

- Right?

- John won the amateur championship 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 Meyer is one of the, you know, he's the president of the Federalist Society for years And, and recently retired from that. So he had a great as well. But you know, at at one point there'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, you know, 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 permission to do anything with my kids. You need my permission to do 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 year in 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.

- Yes. And at that point, Yale had sort of changed. They had a very, you know, they, they, they were, they were focusing more on brains rather than sort of like a well-rounded student. And I think those guys were the kind of the high brains that they were looking for.

- So part of being a Hoover visiting fellow dentist that you get access to our remarkable archives. I'll tell you a funny story. A colleague of mine here, his son interned this summer in the archives. And this kid is just kind of ingenious at building things, constructing things. And he stumbled across a typewriter once owned by William F. Buckley, and he restored the sucker himself. So that's the kind of stuff sitting in our archives. But you discovered that we have Frank Meyer material in archives. Tell tell us what, what we have.

- Okay, so for this book, there were material from James Burnham's papers. There was material from Henry Rey's papers both at the, the Hoover Archives and a number of other papers. There's some Frank Meyer papers there. What happened was, when I looked at the Frank Meyer collection at Hoover, I said, there's something wrong here. There, there, there's no, you know, the rhythm is off. And I've been looking at archival stuff for, you know, 25, 30 years. There's something wrong about this collection. There are no, there was no, 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, maybe he, he, he threw them away or maybe he, 'cause he was a telephone guy, he didn't have them. And I, out of desperation, because COVID happened, and Hoover and all these other places shut down. I said, what am I gonna do? 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, we donated the papers to Hoover. And I said, no, you didn't. And they said, no, we did. 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. I go through all of them. Of those, there are 15 boxes that are Frank Meyer's papers. So Hoover had a small per, had a percentage of Frank Meyer's papers, and then all of a sudden I find the rest of it. I find the letters, the birth, you know, his, his dance cards. I know who he danced with at Thelen School of Economics. I know who he lost his virginity to a rather famous woman. I know what his IQ score was. 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 Christmas cards 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 figures that have these lost letters that I think would've been an incinerator or in a, you know, a landfill within a few years. Thankfully, I think in a matter of months they're gonna be at the Hoover Institution reunited with the Frank Meyer papers that are already there. So I, I had a great time in the archive at Hoover getting all sorts of material about Frank Meyer and others. And now we're gonna have a reunion with, with these papers that I found. And so the collection at Hoover's gonna be even bigger on Frank Meyer.

- Outstanding. Alright, let's shift to obligatory question. What would Frank Myer make of today's conservative movement? Let me read to you something that he wrote in, in its titled, why Freedom. And the following is he says, the goal of conservatism, he says is quote, to help articulate in theoretical and practical terms, the instinctive consensus of the contemporary American conservative movement. A movement which is inspired by no ideological construct, but by devotion to the fundamental understanding of the men and women who made western civilization and the American republic. So Frank Meyer meets Donald Trump. And what would he think?

- Frank Meyer was not a populist. And he, you know, he, he was pro McCarthy, he advised Jim Buckley to go after union votes. So there was some strategic 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 letter to really slam saying, I don't fear this guy winning. I fear some demagogue coming along years later, taking his template without the racist baggage and, you know, winning election and being sort of a conservative imposter. So I think in some ways he would, you know, clash with Donald Trump, I think on foreign policy. Ironically, he would probably like Donald Trump. He, Henry Kissinger wrote him in 1968, Kissinger and Meyer were friends. And he said, listen, I'm gonna be the National Security Advisor under Richard Nixon. What should our foreign policy be? And Meyer said, listen, you know, there's this messianic crusader state in the Soviet Union that, you know, we need to take care of. We, we need to roll them back wherever they go. We need to defeat them minus, minus this disorienting force in our foreign policy. The whole idea of foreign aid, 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 more active in foreign policy, at least in the second term than people thought. Yes. But I think he would 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 trillion debt, all of that stuff. Meyer would be dead set against Trump and the Republicans, the big spending that's going on. I mean, he, I mean obviously the Democrats involved in that too. But he, you know, in in, in his big book in Defensive Freedom, he said that there were three functions of government. One is, is, you know, courts to 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, I think he would look with kind of a side eye on what the Republicans are doing today.

- That's what I'm curious about. Just you take an intellectual like this and how real politic is he when he looks at Washington? In other words, he dies in 1972, he projects that Reagan could win, someone will win by 1980, but he's not around for when republicans actually get their fingers on government when they're running Congress, 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 he watches the Republican Congress struggle, you know, with conservative ideals when he watches Republican presidents, George W. Bush, Donald Trump also kind of decide, frankly, on a daily basis how to be so conservative.

- Yeah, I I think that, I mean, that's an excellent question. Yeah. Frank was probably, ideally suited to be on the outside looking

- In. Yeah,

- He was kind of a pure guy in the 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, some people need that 110 proof stuff. And Frank was one of those guys that needed the strong stuff. And that shows with his life in communism that shows with him being sort of pure than thou as a conservative. And I wonder if the moment conservatives took power, I don't know how he would've looked at, I mean, even even a guy like Reagan, you know, doing all sorts of great things. I think he probably still would've had criticism, although he was a, you know, he, he truly was a huge backer of Ronald Reagan. So much so that 1968, when Hugh Kenner wrote a critical piece of Ronald Reagan national view, he engineered behind the scenes to have a piece attacking Kenner's piece. And this damaged his friendship with Kenner to such an extent that Hugh Kenner, the one of their main literary guys, a guy who Buckley had been his best man at his, his his wedding, Buckley, had paid for his youngest 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, 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 as Donald Trump's president of the United States people, the conservative movement is, you know, kind of lock stuck and barrel his, or people that call themselves conservatives. 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 that he 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. How dare you say. So even making a factual observation, you're gonna, you're gonna hear 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't really have a dog in the fight so much, but the reason I'm optimistic is because it's sort of the natural thing to do. 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 the 1960s, seventies and 1980s.

- Well put. So in 20 28, 70 could run as a non-Trump fusion conservative. But what would you think 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 massive government trying to, to shrink the government. I mean, we have a, a all this discussion over say like Snap and all these programs that are supposedly ending today, last year we paid over a trillion dollars in interest alone on the debt. So we have about one seventh of our budget is going to service the interest. That doesn't make any sense. That's gonna get higher and higher the more deficit spending we do. So I would, I would imagine that the big thing for Frank would be shrinking the size and scope of the federal government. Unfortunately, I don't know that there's a lot of, there should be an appetite for that, but I don't know that there's a 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 for these people about what, you know, the existence of these programs to begin with. They all seem to have bought into the idea that it's a good idea for government 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've been a person that said, well, why are we even in this to be with?

- And what do you think Frank Myer would make of China? Which is fusion in that it's communist, but it also has embraced economic growth.

- Bill Buckley's, one of his last conversations with Frank Meyer, he was in China covering Nixon's sort 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 old anti-communist talking while one of us is in China while Richard Nixon is opening relations with the Chinese. Right. And so, you know, I, I think, I mean obviously he was a anti-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. And so he was extremely anti-communist. I would, I would imagine he would be extremely against the, the Chinese communists.

- So you, Dan, have done a great job of cutting me off in terms of all these little force Gump, like things I wanted to bring up about his life. You, you referenced his intersection with 10 Downing Street and his involvement with the Prime Minister's daughter. You referenced his tie to the Berlin Wall and the gentleman who designed the Berlin Wall, you mentioned Joan Didion. Now, did he know, did, how did he know Didion exactly?

- He was the first editor to publish a freelance article by Joan Didion, according to Joan Gideon. And not just, you know, he, he didn't just know Joan Didian. I mean, he lived next door for the last three years of his life with Bob Dylan. He, early on in Nashville, when he takes over the literary section, he says, you know, this, this guy that's writing the sci-fi reviews, he's not cutting it. I'm gonna get my neighbor to 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 episode in which Leonard Nemo invents this thing. I can't do it. And some people can do it. I can can't do that.

- Listen, Frank is trying to make the Vulcan V with his forefingers.

- Yes. So, and, and he come, the sturgeon comes up with the prime directive and all this time that he's writing 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 of strange, you know, the idea that he would weave in and outta the lives of people like TS Elliot and HG Wells and Eugene O'Neill. 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 have this Forrest Gump quality.

- Okay. HG Wells is an HG Wells connection here as well.

- Yeah. He invited HG Wells to speak at Oxford for the sole purpose of denouncing him and shouting him down, which is a very strange reason to in invite someone to campus. HG Wells had given his liberal fascism speak the speech, the famous speech he gave in 1933. And Meyer, who had left Oxford at that point, had graduated, said, let's get this guy in here. They had him speak and Meyer 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 for about a decade, one of Meyer's closest friends. He's watching this. He writes a letter to his father and says this crazy American screaming at HG Wells saying You're, you know, saying all these nasty things you don't know about the proletariat, you don't know about this and that. And, and Meyer made this big scene with HG Wells at Oxford that was so notable that Wilmore Kendall wrote a whole letter about it to his father without ever recognizing that he had met one of his closest friends all those years ago at Oxford. They would reconvene in the fifties without even knowing they had, they had met in the 1930s

- And this one figure we haven't talked about yet. So let's briefly spend a minute on her. And that's his wife.

- Elsie Meyer was Frank's partner in everything. And, and they were both in the Communist party together. Elsie was at the Flint sit down strike. She was, you know, maybe not as 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 editing the 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, 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 will to 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. 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. Obviously takes 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. And they, you know, that was part of their libertarian philosophy too, 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 the stor 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 we have a wonderful tribute in the form of bi biography of 544 page biography that explains its man's life in just brilliant detail. And this is really a great read. Congratulations. But what else is there in the way, attributes to this matter, institutes named Dr. Frank Meyers statues, is there a Frank Meyer scholar anywhere across America? And those, how does his role carry on?

- Well, I, I know at the Fund for American Studies, you look at one of, I think it's David Jones or one, one of those guys that was a kind of a founder of that group. There's a big painting of him 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's been, been largely forgotten. And that's why I was so excited to write this book because, you know, who is it out there that we should know about, but don't, and Frank Meyer, to me was one of those people. He just has this exciting, pops off the page kind of story. And he also was obviously a very significant person, not only in the history of conservatism, but in the history of communism in England. And as I, you know, as I say in the beginning of the book, you know, the communists were caught on a wiretap erasing Frank Meyer from the history. So we know why he's not in the history of communism. They said it, they, you know, they said, let's, let's rewrite the history. Let's get him outta there once he testified against them. It's a little different for conservatives because what happened with conservatives, if you wanna learn about Jim Burnham, you go to the Hoover Institution, that's where his papers are. If you wanna learn about Bill 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 his papers, I think is part of the reason why he was forgotten. As, as a conservative,

- Dan, I'm thinking I've ever encountered 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 in August. What's next for you?

- Well, I'm coming to the Hoover Institution in a few days, and hopefully what's next is going to be in the archives there. And I hope to, to base whatever I do on, you know, the, the research that I've been doing in that basement, one of my favorite places in the world, the, the Hoover Library, the archives down in that, that ground floor. And, you know, whatever comes of what I do, it's gonna come out of that, it's gonna come out of the research there.

- You know, I, I find the story of the Buckley typewriter just wonderfully quirky. So I'm curious just to what else is sitting in the, in those archives that we don't know about?

- Well, there's, there's, I have a whole bunch of stuff here that's coming. There's so much interesting stuff that's gonna be coming that I, I just think people will, will, will find very ex, I mean, there's, there's hundreds of letters I have here I something like dozens or hundreds of from Barry Goldwater. And a lot of this stuff is, 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 forward to having you out here, Dan, and congratulations again on the book. It's a great lead. I is a fascinating topic.

- Thank you so much, bill. I appreciate it.

- Thank you. You've been listening to matters of Policy and Politics at Hoover Institution podcast. If you've been enjoying this podcast, please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to our show. And if you wouldn't mind, please spread the word, tell your friends about us. I mentioned our website, beginning of the show. It's actually hoover.org. We also are on Facebook, Instagram, and X feeds. Our X handle is at Hoover inst, that's H-O-O-V-E-R-I-N-S-T. By the way, while you're splunking around the Hoover website, why don't you sign up for the Hoover deal where you course it comes to your in inbox weekdays, which means anytime Dan Flynn is in the news, he will find out about it. Dan Flynn's book, by the way, it's, once again, its title is The Man Who Invented Conservatism, the Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer. Dan, where else can we find you?

- I'm, I write for the American Spectator, so spectator.org. I have a newsletter there. I called the Spectator a and you know, next week you're gonna find me at the Hoover Institution. But most days you find me at the, the American Spectators website. But I have, I, one of the great things about this project, I have a million articles out there and you know, I have an article in the Journal of Libertarian studies on the correspondence between Meyer and, and Murray Rothbart about Ay Rand. It sort of settles a few arguments. I have this article about these lost letters of Leo Strauss between him and Frank Meyer at Law and Liberty. So I'm trying my best to use this archival material. I have to put out new information about old, old things.

- Well, I, the old things are fascinating things to me. 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 with the new and stone matters of policy and politics. Till next time, take care. Thanks for joining us today.

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