Liberty and Leadership
TFAS has reached 53,000 students and professionals through their academic programs, fellowships and seminars. Representing more than 140 countries, TFAS alumni are courageous leaders throughout the world – forging careers in politics, government, public policy, business, philanthropy, law and the media. Join TFAS President, Roger Ream, as he reconnects with these outstanding alumni to share experiences, swap career stories, and find out what makes their leadership journey unique. The Liberty and Leadership podcast is produced at Podville Media in Washington, D.C. If you have a comment or question for the show, please drop us an email at podcast@TFAS.org.
Liberty and Leadership
The Man Who Invented Conservatism: Daniel J. Flynn on Frank Meyer’s Life and Legacy
Roger welcomes Daniel J. Flynn, senior editor at the American Spectator and visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, for a conversation about his new biography, “The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer.” Flynn explores the fascinating journey of Meyer, a former communist who became one of the most influential conservative thinkers of the 20th century and whose ideas still shape conservative thought today.
They discuss Meyer’s early years as a communist organizer at Oxford, his dramatic break with the party, and his later role as literary editor of National Review. Flynn highlights Meyer’s enduring contribution to American conservatism through his philosophy of “fusionism,” the idea that freedom and virtue must coexist for a society to thrive. Additional topics include Meyer’s clashes and friendships with figures such as William F. Buckley Jr., Brent Bozell and Rose Wilder Lane; his mentorship of emerging writers; and the extraordinary archival discoveries that made this biography possible.
Daniel J. Flynn is the author of seven books, including his most recent title, “The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer.” His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and City Journal. He also served as a reservist in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1994 to 2002 and was honorably discharged with the rank of sergeant.
The Liberty + Leadership Podcast is hosted by TFAS president Roger Ream and produced by Podville Media. If you have a comment or question for the show, please email us at podcast@TFAS.org. To support TFAS and its mission, please visit TFAS.org/support.
Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty, and friends who are making an impact today. I'm your host, Roger Reed. It's a pleasure to welcome Daniel J. Flynn to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast today. Daniel is a senior editor at the American Spectator and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He's the author of seven books. His most recent, The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer. If you don't know who Frank Meyer is, you'll want to listen to this podcast because this is a fascinating biography of someone who's had a tremendous influence on the conservative movement. Dan's writings have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, City Journal, and elsewhere. Thank you for joining me today, Dan. Thank you for having me, Roger. Well, as I said, I think this is a fascinating book about someone not many people know about, Frank Meyer. And uh you've written a biography of this man uh that's detailed, that is obviously the work of a lot of research you've done over a number of years, and you've uncovered a lot of interesting things about his life, not only his childhood, but his time as a communist and his time as a leader of the conservative movement. So we have a lot to talk about today. But my first question for you is what motivated you to write this book?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I think there's two motivations. I think there's a lot of writers that want to write about subjects that have uh, you know, kind of well-worn. Like there's a lot of books on Hitler and Churchill and Lincoln. I wouldn't want to write a book like that because it's very difficult to turn up new material. And so why not write about someone whose story should be told, but isn't? I think Frank has one of the last great untold stories of the 20th century, and it was just a pleasure telling it. The other reason, you know, when I first started out as an author, I wrote a number of books on the American left. What jumped out at me is how many books there are on rather obscure events and figures in the left. They really document their history. And I think conservatives really fail to do that. You see what happens when we allow left-wingers to write our own history. I think it's great if liberals want to write about conservatives, but I think it's really bad if conservatives neglect their own history. And I hope that there's more of that. I mean, there's been guys like Lee Edwards and George Nash that certainly don't fall into that category. But we, I think, have had a difficult time documenting the importance of some of the events, you know, the post-war conservative movement, and even before that.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, and uh Lee Edwards and George Nash, who I consider two of the great historians of the conservative movement, and now you've added a book on Frank Meyer to this. Could you, in a nutshell, kind of give us a summary of why Frank Meyer is important?
SPEAKER_00:One of the reasons I wrote the book is that people ceased to think of Frank Meyer as a person, and they started to think of him as a personification of an idea that Frank Meyer meant fusionism. And so, in a nutshell, pre-this book, I think people thought of Frank as the father of fusionism. In other words, the marriage of traditionalism and freedom, that Frank didn't think these were ideas that were in conflict. He thought they were in cooperation. Stan Evans, an acolyte of Frank, he wrote a book called The Theme is Freedom. And in that book, it's called a sort of applied fusionism, where he said, listen, there's thousands of years of Western civilization that freedom rests upon. You take away that heritage, freedom's gonna fall pretty quickly. And on the other side of it, that if you take away freedom from things like virtue and other things that are valued by traditionalists, then, you know, what do you have? Virtue without freedom isn't virtue. It's just compulsory virtue. I mean, that's phony. And so they both rely on one another. And Frank was the guy in the conservative movement that really pushed that idea. I think people accepted it because, A, it was very simple. That's sort of its distilled version that I gave. It's simple. It's true that if you're a conservative, if you're an American conservative, what are you going to conserve? Well, if you're British conservative, maybe you conserve the monarchy, you conserve the aristocracy. If you're an American conservative, the tradition that's important for us is the founding. And what does the founding mean? The founding means freedom. And so an American conservative, the tradition that you're conserving is freedom. And that's why you have those things go together. It's simple, it's true. And I think it also has political utility. And some of its critics will point to that as a reason to criticize. I don't think that's a reason to criticize. I don't think that's the reason Frank pushed it, but happy accident, it does have political utility in a way that, say, Richard Weaver's ideas have consequences, maybe does not, or Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, which is a beautiful book, but it doesn't have a lot of political application. I think Frank's book did in defense of freedom, Frank's theory, Frank's ideas did as well. That's sort of the pre-man who invented conservatism, Frank Meyer. And I think the post-one is more of the person, is more of the interesting guy, that this is a fascinating figure, a guy who pops off the page. Frank Meyer, you know, if you think about post-war conservatives and the founding fathers of our movement, a lot of them led kind of black and white lives. A guy like James Burnham, you know, Managerial Revolution is like prophecy. It's a fascinating book, but I don't know that he was a fascinating man. I think he was living a kind of a boring black and white existence. There are other guys like Whitaker Chambers or Wilmore Kendall that lived in technicolor. They did lead exciting lives. Frank, he is someone who operated in 3D. And I think the book, I hope the book shows that.
SPEAKER_01:Well, we'll get into that because a lot of people listening may not know about that dimension yet, at least. But you referenced Stan Evans, M. Stanton Evans, a journalist who wrote the theme is freedom. I appreciate you mentioning that because it was at a luncheon at TFAS where David Jones, one of our founders and a friend of Frank's, said to Stan, Stan, we need a book for young conservatives to read to come to understand what conservatism's all about. He said, The conscience of a conservative by Barry Goldwater's dated. So we'll put our pool money together, Stan, so you'll write the book. And he wrote the theme is freedom, which I thought was an excellent book. But it builds, as you said, on Frank Meyer, because Stan talks about biblical truths that led to the founding of this country and our American ideas. But before we get into that, a little deeper into fusionism, Daniel, could you talk more about Frank's early life, not growing up as much, but when he got to Princeton and Oxford and his time as a communist?
SPEAKER_00:When Frank applied to Princeton, he was rejected and unbeknownst to him. His booster at the Newark Academy said, Well, listen, his Hebrew features are undeniable, but he would make a good addition to the student body. And the director of admissions wrote back and said, you know, we have a limited number of spots for fine, clean-cut Christian Americans. I mean, he actually wrote that. It sounds like a parody. And this Frank Meyer, he doesn't strike me even as a Jew of the better type. Can you please steer him somewhere else? His grades are good enough, and his scores, of course, are good, but I don't think he's going to fit in with the college. Frank didn't take the no for an answer. He did a second postgrad year at Newark, and then he they finally let him in the next year. But he found the student population populated by those fine, clean-cut Christian Americans, and he had a rough go of it at Princeton. He started writing poems about Satan and real kind of racy poems about women. And there was this philosophy that said, all that stuff is good. That's good. Indulge all that kind of thing. And it was Marxism. He goes to Oxford. After not being admitted to Cambridge. Yeah. He basically washes out of Princeton. He did a very Frank Meyer thing, which is, you know, people said, Well, why don't you go to the University of Wisconsin or why don't you go to the school? He said, No, I want to go to either Oxford or Cambridge. A better school than Princeton. And so he goes, he gets into Bailey College at Oxford. These are probably the best years of Frank's life. I mean, he is engaged in all sorts of extracurricular activities. He's called the life and soul of the college. He has a million friends. And in late 1931, he starts something called the October Club. When Frank got to Oxford, there were zero communists on the student body. By the time he graduated, there were over 300. And that was because of Frank Meyer, his charisma, his abilities as an organizer. It was also because the Great Depression was starting. So he came along at the right time. The amazing thing about all this is that Frank, during this time, was being watched. There's about 160 pages of MI5 and MI6 documents on Frank. They did a black bag job on his apartment. They put a mail cover on his correspondence. They knew what bars he drank at, they knew what tweed coats he wore. They knew what girls he hung around with. They knew where his mother did her banking. The one thing that they don't mention in all these 160 pages is when Frank, who's calling for the violent overthrow of the government of Ramsey McDonald, the prime minister of Great Britain, that he is dating the prime minister's youngest daughter, Sheila McDonald. In fact, I have a letter that I found from Sheila McDonald to Frank Meyer. It says, listen, the coast is clear. My dad's not around. Come over to 10 Downing. We'll have dinner. Take whatever romantic figure you can think of in the history of the Communist Party, like Che Guevara or John Reed. They never had the skull to, you know, on the one hand, call for the overthrow of the government and then secretly, on the other, date the youngest daughter of the leader of the government. So it shouldn't be surprising to anyone that Frank was not long for the United Kingdom. There were reasons that they gave for his deportation, and maybe those reasons were the real reasons. But it jumps out at me that if you mess around with, you know, the prime minister's daughter, bad things are going to happen. Frank becomes a cause celeb in England. And that's part of the book, you know, part of his history that I think I rescued because in these MI6, MI5 files, they tapped the phones of British communists. And in 1949, when Frank testified in the United States against his comrades, this was the longest, most expensive trial in U.S. history. Frank was called a star witness, a mystery witness. And he got a lot of attention. And so this got back across the pond and they said, Did you hear about Frank? Well, yeah, I always was suspicious of him and, you know, irrationalizing things. They said, Well, what are we going to do about the history? And the fellow who was the Communist Party historian says, It's okay, I'm already rewriting it. Do you mean the student's history? Yes, I'm already writing it. If you look at those MI6, MI5 files, they repeatedly refer to Frank Meyer as the founder of the student communist party movement in England, that he was the founder. This American was the founder of that movement over there. He was the Johnny Appleseed of communism in England, at least for the young people. So it's amazing to me that that same guy who pulled off this organizational miracle as a communist did much of the same as a conservative years later.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I love how you opened the book with that conversation among those communists about Frank and what to do with him and to rewrite the history. And I got to ask you, you know, what's so impressive with this book is the research you did and what came out of it. You made a Herculean effort to track down his papers, right? And all of his materials, some of which had been donated to an archives, but a lot of which had been disappeared. Talk about that a little bit.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, if you want to research Bill Buckley, you go to Yale, Sterling Library. If you want to research Bill Rusher, you go to Library of Congress. Where do you go if you want to research Frank Meyer? Well, the Hoover Institution, which they had a Frank Meyer collection, but the rhythm was off. You know, I've been doing archival work for like 25 years. There's usually certain things that are in an archive, like letters or tax returns, things that you would keep. None of that was there. And I said, Well, where's Frank Meyer's papers? And I started searching, and unfortunately, all of the archives closed down in 2020 because of COVID. And so right at the moment, I was to go to these archives, they all closed. The other thing that happened is they did a four-year request, Freedom of Information Act, and the federal government, the efficiency of the federal government, they get back to me a year later in 2022, and they said, Well, listen, we're now processing requests from 2014, but yours is going to take a little longer because of COVID. Check back with basically checkback with us in the 2030s, is what they're saying. And so I was in a desperate spot. Like, how can I write a quality book with all these things against me? So I started wishing into existence Frank's papers, and I started calling around, and I got scraps of things that were somewhat valuable. I got some letters from Wilmore Kendall. I got some property material for the Woodstock House of Frank Meyer, some other things involving in defense of freedom. But they weren't, you know, it wasn't the mother load. And so about a year and a half, two years into this, John Meyer said, Well, we did sell the house.
SPEAKER_01:His son.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, John Meyer, his son, his oldest son. We did sell the house and all of its contents to this couple that we went to Yale with. I said, John, why don't you tell me about that? And so I get in touch with this couple. They insist, or at least the male partner insists, that they had donated it to Hoover. And I said, You didn't. And they said, No, we did. And I said, Well, you think you did, but you kept some of it. You just don't know it. And they said, No, we and went back and forth like that. Finally, the fellow says, Well, we do have a warehouse in Altoona. And I said, Well, take me to your warehouse. He said, Well, it's not there. And even if it were there, there's a thousand boxes. You can go through it. And I said, No, I can do it. So in August of 2022, I went through 663 boxes in that warehouse. It took three days, and I found 15 that were the life's papers of Frank Meyer. This included letters from Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Joan Diddian, Barry Goldwater. There's a thousand letters that nobody's seen between Wilmore Kendall and Frank Meyer. There's a thousand letters that nobody's seen between El Brent Bazell and Frank Meyer. There is an amazing amount of material in this archive, probably 100,000 letters or something. I don't know, something close to that. I didn't count them. I counted the Kendall letters, but there's a lot of letters, is the point. That enabled me to write the book. Some reviewer did a count and said, well, 43% of his source citations rely on this archive in the um tuna. Yeah. So the rest of it, I went over to England, found some good stuff. There were a lot of archives in the United States. I found an essay that Frank wrote when he was 14 from a Jewish archive in in New York. So it's very thorough biography. But if you want to know about Frank's life, it's very detailed.
SPEAKER_01:And well footnoted, too. A little too well. No, no, no. For people who weren't familiar with Frank Meyer, all right, we've touched on the fact that he was a leading communist recruiter and communist believer. And later he went to work, as some people may not know, for Nash Review as the book editor and as a close associate of William F. Buckley's. Tell me now, what led to that transformation from communist to conservative?
SPEAKER_00:Frank tried to join the fight against Hitler in the Second World War. The communists were exhorting Americans, go fight against Hitler. But when it came to leading communists, when they tried to join, the party said, no, no, no, you stay here. And Frank thought this was a little bit odd. They're saying one thing but doing another. About eight months in, six months in, they say, okay, you want to go in? Go in. You can join. Frank meets for the first time in these squad bays the carpenters, the electricians, all these people that Marx was talking about, except they were not the proletariat that Marx had described. I mean, Frank led a socially insulated life. He grew up in a real fancy hotel in Newark, New Jersey. He went to an expensive prep school in the Newark Academy, went to Balliol College, his family was wealthy. He made this is a revelation for him. Oh, they don't, they're not sort of like budding revolutionists? What is this all about? He gets injured, and in that year and a half away from the party, he starts to question. Questioning and communism, they don't go together. He writes Earl Browder, who's the head of the Communist Party, a letter and says, listen, if you want to attract bowlers instead of just these hardcore Marxists, we need to do something. We need to fuse the Marxist tradition, Marxism with the American tradition, with the American founding. And we need to do this not just on the 4th of July, we need to do this every day of the year. Browder takes his advice, and maybe he's going in that direction anyway. But because of this, Frank becomes close with Browder. And prior to that, for his first 10 years in the American Party, he was more of a mid-level manager. He was a rock star in England. He was a high-level communist in England. He was on the board of the Communist Party. He was a big deal. In the United States, he was a big deal maybe the last year and a half as a communist. And so he gets under Browder's wing and they start going in that direction. There is a time of freedom within the party where the Soviets ostensibly dissolved the common turn. They said, well, you know, the parties can do their own nationalistic thing. Frank, during this time, writes a book review of Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. And he does this in publication called The New Masses, which was communist-controlled. And probably for the first time in the history of that publication, a free market thinker gets a fair hearing. It's not exactly a positive review. And in a way, it's a review of Hayek ostensibly, but really what you're reading is a man having an epiphany over the course of several pages. A man dropping 14 years of his political commitments and his ideas, and Hayek sort of stripping bare all of his assumptions, and Frank Meyer saying, gee, what if I were wrong this whole time? And around that time, something came to the United States from France called the Duclos Letter. It was basically a letter that said, listen, Americans, you need to stop cooperating with the capitalist communists. You need to stop venerating Roosevelt. You need to fight these people. And so Frank thought, well, this is just coming from some goofball over in France. Why do I have to pay attention to this? In reality, this is coming from the Kremlin. Frank and Earl Browder say no, and they essentially get shuffled out of the party. Frank kind of slinks his way out. Browder gets unceremoniously dumped. But before Frank leaves, the party goes to his wife, Elsie, and they have a very close relationship. They say, listen, your husband is no good. He's unsalvageable. But we still think you're a pretty good communist. We need you to divorce him, and you can stay in the party that way. And so that facilitated their exit. And they were like, no, we don't want to have any part of this. Frank goes on sort of a retreat up in Woodstock for, you know, five years or so and rethinks all of his assumptions. By 1950, he is a right-winger. You read stuff by him in 1950, unmistakably, he has the language of a conservative, of a right winger, whatever you want to call it.
SPEAKER_01:It's fascinating. I'm so glad you wrote this book because Frank Meyer died in what, 1974? 72. 72. I never, certainly never met him. One of our founders at the Fund for American Studies, David Jones, was close to Frank, and they would talk on the phone a lot. And of course, William F. Buckley helped found TFAS as well, and he was close to Frank. And we have a portrait in our building of David Jones, our founder, and he's holding a copy of Frank's book in Defense of Freedom. Very influential book. He was a very influential writer. So he goes on, and how does he connect with William F. Buckley in Nashville Review?
SPEAKER_00:He's present at the creation of Nash Review, but he's a contributor. He's not an editor initially. The guy who started National Review, Willy Schlam, he wears thin on Buckley. He wears thin on James Burnham. And very soon he's kind of exiled up to Vermont. And Schlam was the literary editor at that point. More importantly, he was the sort of the anti-James Burnham at National Review. He was the leader of the right-wing faction within the magazine. When he goes up to Vermont, Meyer takes his place not only as the literary editor of National Review, but as the leader of the anti-James Burnham faction. When Schlam, whose idea National Review was, he came up with the whole idea. He said, When I dreamed this magazine, I dreamed of a veritable conspiracy of friendship. In other words, he thought of them as the outs. These are the people that had the sand kicked in their face. And now they were going to all band together in a veritable conspiracy of friendship and take on the ends to crash their party. Frank was better at that role than Schlam could ever be. Frank was sort of the leader of the veritable conspiracy of friendship, and he was the sort of the focus around all of these strange and interesting personalities, people like Wilmore Kendall, L. Brent Bazell. A lot of these people would come up to Woodstock where he lived, and they would make kind of a pilgrimage, they'd spend the weekend or they'd spend a holiday, and they would smoke, they would drink, they would eat, they would uh quote Shakespeare, and most importantly, they would talk about politics, culture, current events, that kind of thing. David Brudnoy, the great radio host, he said, I've never had as taxing or as fulfilling weekend as I spent in Woodstock with you guys. And so it was, it started to be younger people started going up to Woodstock. It meant something different for a conservative to say, I went up to Woodstock in the 1960s than it did for liberals. And of course, at the end of the decade, irony of upon irony is Frank, who's sort of an Archiebunker figure and has less to do with the 60s than anyone else, at least as we know the decade, next door to him moves Bob Dylan, the personification of the decade, and they have a conversation. And Frank said, Well, he had reasonable enough sense. And of course, if you read Dylan's autobiography, he says about the hippies, I wanted to set fire to these people, harsher than anything Frank Meyer ever said because they were harassing him. And if you wanted to get away from hippies and people bothering you, where are you going to move? You're going to move next to Frank Meyer.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. He lands at Nash Review as the literary editor. He then develops this political philosophy, which come to be known as fusionism. And he ends up in heated debates with some of these people there over that idea, which was rejected, I know, by L. Brent Bozell and some of these Murray Rothbard got into arguments with Frank and other prominent libertarians and conservatives who took issue with it. But again, kind of give me your explanation of this philosophy that Frank developed, this idea that you need to bring both freedom and virtue and tradition together. You can't solely favor freedom without the other, and you can't solely favor tradition and virtue without freedom.
SPEAKER_00:I think that the notion that they go together sucker punched a lot of people. And they thought, well, these things don't go together, of course. But where did our freedom come from? I mean, his best debate about these questions happened in the early 1950s with Rose Wilder Lane. And her point was that we are not the inheritors of Western civilization. Those people on the other side of the ocean, they're a bunch of socialists. We should be glad that we have this ocean between us because their ideas can infect us. And the settler mentality, that's what created this individualist strain in American society. And Frank thought, no, our freedoms rest upon Athens and Jerusalem and the church and so much else that comes from there. And I agree with you that, you know, they're all doing stupid stuff now, but this is where we get this. And they go back and forth over the course of many years debating this subject. Now, he would have the same debate with Brent Bizzell. The interesting thing about Bazell is that his views were essentially Meyerite prior to going to Spain. And he goes to Spain in 1960, and his letters to Frank reflect a very different man. And these are some of the best letters in the collection are from Brent Bizzell. He says to Frank, listen, the United States is no longer the country fit to save the West. Come to Spain. Move to Spain. This is the only country that can save the West. And Frank thought, you know, listen, uh I don't see things the way you see them. How am I going to make a living? Have you thought about money? How are we going to run Nashville Review? We're going to have like an auxiliary office in Kent, Connecticut, where uh Jim Burnham's going to be our American correspondent. Nothing that you're saying is making a whole lot of sense to me, but maybe I'll visit at some point. He doesn't visit. But they have a debate within Nash Review, Bazell and Meyer, which is really, I think, probably the high water mark of Nash Review, this debate that they have in 1962 about libertarianism or fusionism. Traditional conservatism. Yeah, or more theocratic view of things from Bazell. What's interesting about the letters and how it shines a new light on this whole conversation is that they're laughing about this. They're the best of friends. Bazell said, if Buckley doesn't print this, I'm going to resign from the magazine. Or let's wait till he goes to Switzerland and we'll sneak it in at that point. And I'm going to excommunicate you from the conservative movement and I'm going to make the biggest stink this movement has ever seen or smelt. And they're laughing about this. And they're saying, well, you know, when can you come over? When can we have one of those weekend-long debates? And so you might get the sense from reading National Review that these guys were at each other's throats. They were not. There were other people that Meyer was at their throats and did, and some of the debates did lead to acrimony, but not Brent Bazell.
SPEAKER_01:As literary editor, he had quite an impact as well, as I understand from your book. Who are some of the people that he kind of introduced to the world of literature through his work at Nashville Review?
SPEAKER_00:Well, he discovered, in a sense, Joan Didion. And Joan Didion was being pushed by her booster boyfriend, a guy named Noel Parmentel. I used to call him my oldest friend. I met him when he was 96. And Noel saw talent in her, was pushing him on all the editors, on her, on all the editors in New York, and they were just balking. And Frank said, Well, this lady has talent. So Frank publishes the first freelance work of Joan Didion in 1959. They have a science fiction editor at Nash Review, and Frank says, now this guy's not going to do. My neighbor is a good science fiction writer. And so he has this guy, Theodore Sturgeon, review science fiction books for Nash Review. You may recall, do you know this symbol in Star Trek? I can't do it. You can do it. He wrote the episode in Star Trek where Nimoy invents that. He wrote Live Long and Prosper. He came up with the prime directive from Star Trek. And all the time he was writing for Star Trek, he was writing for National Review. Edited by Frank. Edited by Frank, recruited by Frank. Gary Wills, who later won a Pulitzer Prize, really came under Frank's wing. And, you know, he said in his autobiography, I spent more time with Frank and Elsie Meyer in the late 1950s and early 1960s than anybody outside of my immediate family. There were all sorts of people that Frank brought into the magazine or mentored to really create the best literary section of any magazine in the country at that time.
SPEAKER_01:People that went on to great careers.
SPEAKER_00:Those are heavy hitters. I mean, when they were writing for National Review, they were nobodies. But the second they start writing for like The New Yorker or, oh, there we go, they're great talents. You know, that's kind of how that works. They recognize their talents once they sort of leave the conservative milieu.
SPEAKER_01:Can you speculate at all? Are you willing to speculate what Frank Meyer would make of the conservative movement today?
SPEAKER_00:That kind of a question, although it's the most asked, is a little bit science fiction because you do have to speculate. Frank was not a populist. That sort of populist term, I think, in some ways would alienate him. One of the most interesting letters that Frank wrote in 1968, Henry Kissinger, who he had known for many years, said, Listen, I'm going to be the national security advisor under Richard Nixon when the incoming administration, what should we do with foreign policy? And Frank said, Well, there's this messianic crusader state, and that's the big problem, and we need to roll them back wherever they go. But absent this country, the idea of getting involved in permanent alliances, the United Nations, foreign aid, even the idea of the Vietnam War would be a complete farce because what some other country's social system is is of no business to us. I have a hunch that Frank would be very comfortable with the foreign policy of Donald Trump. And I have a sense that on things like government spending, the way that the movement has gone, he would be very uncomfortable. I mean, would we have a$7 trillion deficit or something like that? Not seven trillion. Well, we have a I'm sorry,$7 trillion budget. Budget. Yeah, and we have a$37 trillion debt. Yeah. And I don't know what the maybe the deficit's two trillion, but it's too big. Whatever it is, it's too big.
SPEAKER_01:You got it.
SPEAKER_00:I have trouble thinking that the guy in defense of freedom who wrote that government has three legitimate functions, which is to preserve the defense, to adjudicate disputes through courts, and maybe for a police force to sort of get the bad guys, he thought anything else was illegitimate. How much of our government today would he think was legitimate? It would probably be a very small percentage.
SPEAKER_01:In addition to this book, you write columns, you write for the spectator and other outlets. In your career, has that writing changed given the rise of social media and sound bites? And how do you navigate that as a writer who, you know, in the the way young people's habits are today, they don't even read books much less, probably long columns?
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Ross Powell Depending upon where I'm writing, there's usually some art in what I'm writing. If I'm reporting something, maybe not. But if I'm writing a column, you want to have a little bit of snap in what you're writing, not too much, but to make it distracting, but you want to have a little bit. People now, particularly younger people, they've almost imitated search engines in the sense that they are looking to mine information and not really reading the column for a piece of work that it is. And so I think you see the publications that are having success are the ones that are presenting information. Even if it's not information that they've dug up, even if they're just aggregating stories from somewhere else, people tend to gravitate towards that now. And I think they've become imitative of the search engines and of the computers and all that kind of thing. And that's bad news, I think, for people that like the art of writing. I think as far as research, it has benefited me because most people nowadays think research means doing a Google search. Yeah. And as you see with this book, I mean, I dug up, you know, probably a few hundred thousand documents from a warehouse that would have been in a landfill or an incinerator, very short period of time. I went to England to find documents you couldn't find here. I think there were 50 different archival collections. There were about a hundred different interviews that I did. To me, that's real research. You're going to get information you can't find anywhere else. And if you do a Google search, you're getting information that anyone can find at any time.
SPEAKER_01:Now, the boxes you found in El Toona, are they now at Hoover?
SPEAKER_00:No, they're in my house. They're going to go to Hoover. Oh. Unfortunately, I brought those boxes back. They're almost in every room of my house, and all the bugs and critters that were living there came into my house with them.
SPEAKER_01:And so it's worth the sacrifice to save those boxes.
SPEAKER_00:I think so. My kids uh may think otherwise, but yeah, I'd messed up my House pretty bad.
SPEAKER_01:And what about your uh FOIA request with the government you filed in 2022? Has that been responded to yet?
SPEAKER_00:No. And I think it's going to cost me$1,000 or something like that. And in fact, I weaned it down because there are three different files on Frank with the federal government. And I said, okay, just give me the two.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um now I want the third one too. But are these FBI? They're yeah, they're mostly FBI files that the National Archives has. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:You may get them and be able to write a sequel or or at least a new edition of this book and contain some interesting new information.
SPEAKER_00:That could happen. I suspect some of the documents that I have are probably documents I'm going to get. From MI5 or MI6? Yeah, and also there's some other ones that Frank retained that I think they probably have as well. Who knows? There may be some information that I don't know that are in those files.
SPEAKER_01:How long did it take from start to finish to write this one? It's I didn't even look at the it's like 500 pages, right? Something like that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. It's it took six years. And it was an intense six years. There was a book years ago I wrote called Cult City.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, Jim Jones.
SPEAKER_00:Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and the Ten Days That Shook San Francisco. That book, I messed around with it for 10 years, but it was a hobby. It was something after I did my normal work, I would go up back then. I smoked cigars, I'd I'd dabble with it. This book was an intense six years where it was an obsession. It was ahab-like. And so certainly I spent more time on this than any book that I've I've written, but it didn't take as long as some of the other books.
SPEAKER_01:Well, you got your whale.
SPEAKER_00:I got my whale, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:You also wrote a book on the NFL.
SPEAKER_00:I did. Well, it was really a book about football. The war on football. The point of that was that, you know, the war on football doesn't hurt the NFL. It's hurting all these smaller leagues, particularly the Pee-Wee leagues. And you have so much it's disappearing, really, youth football, or it was disappearing for a while. I think based on a myth, which is that football is on the whole bad for you. And in fact, when they looked at the NFL players, the federal government did a health study on them. And in 17 of 19 categories, they did better than average Joe's. And so a lot of what was being said about football players was false. They live longer than the guys in the stands, their peers.
SPEAKER_01:Well, this has been terrific. I'm glad we had time to talk about this book. I highly recommend it. It's a riveting biography, The Man Who Invented Conservatism, The Unlikely Life of Frank Meyer, communist, turned conservative intellectual, and someone whose influence continues to this day, and not only because of the work he did when he was alive, but your book will continue. It's been reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, the Free Press, the Spectator World, a number of other places. So congratulations, Dan. Thank you for writing this. And uh thank you for appearing on the Liberty and Leadership Podcast today. Had a blast. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast. If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast at TFAS.org. And be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five star review. Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media. I'm your host, Roger Reim, and until next time, show courage in things large and small.
