and survival, the fact that they have survived as separate cultures uniquely on the planet as american indians is, to me, the most noteworthy. they have not melded into the mainstream. by and large, tribes are still operating. some are in better shape than others, some are larger, some are smaller. some have suffered more, some have suffered slightly less, but they are still here, and if i wanted to change one thing, i would like the mainstream of america to realize that american indians, as tribes and tribal people, are still here, still a vibrant part of the economy, a part of the culture, a part of the arts, literature, music, heritage. this is, after all, oklahoma is, after all, an american indian state at its start, and american indians have not disappeared or

vanished into the mainstream with dinosaurs, as some people are prone to ask me sometimes. stay tuned all weekend long as "american history tv" features oklahoma city, oklahoma. learn more about oklahoma city and c-span's local content videos. next month, we'll feature wichita, kansas. you're watching "american history tv" all weekend, every weekend, on cspan3. "history bookshelf" features popular american history writers of the past decade. every saturday at noon eastern. this weekend on "history bookshelf," an interview with alfred regnery about his book, "upstream: the ascendance of american conservatism." it's about the rise of the modern conservative movement in the midwest, led by politicians barry goldwater and reagan.

this interview was conducted in mr. regnery's home in virginia. >> al regnery, the author of "upstream: the ascendance of american conservatism." when did the modern conservative movement get organized? >> well, it started after world war ii, people ask me that question and don't put modern in, and i like to say that it really started in about 1789 when the constitution was ratified, but the modern movement really started up after world war ii, and the reason it did was because -- and people are -- often don't recognize how liberal a country this was at the end of world war ii. there were no conservatives. the republican party, the democratic party were basically the same, there were a few people in congress who -- people like bob taft, who certainly most of them isolationists from the midwest, others who were

anti-communists like joe mccarthy, but they didn't call themselves conservatives or think of themselves as having a cohesive set of principles that they believed in, and the predominant intellectual attitude in the country was toward central planning, big government, government regulation, and the reason for that was because, as we came out of world war ii, big government had extensively gotten us out of the depression, people argue with that nowadays, but won the war, the united nations had been formed, and people said, why change anything? government seems to be the way to solve our problems, the u.n. can sort of handle our foreign policy, central planning will keep the economy going, that sort of thing, and it looked like it was going to be sort of a progression of moves to the left, and initially, there were a couple of economists, fredders hayek was one of them, and they

said, wait a minute, as hayek said in his "road to serfdom," very famous book, it's a road to slavery, we don't want to do that. americans don't really believe that, they believe in free markets, individual freedom, individual liberty, things like that, and his book, "the road to serfdom," had a huge impact, over a million copies were sold, and people who read it said it changed their lives, recognized there was another way besides a trend towards socialism. then the other thing that happened was the attitude toward communism, and again, of course, the soviet union had been our ally in world war ii, there were still a good many people in the government who had a pretty good feeling about the fact of the soviet union helped us win the war, and the attitude starting

pretty soon after the end of the war was that we can be allies with the soviet union, we can contain them, as they said, containment was george kennon's theory about communism, which said you don't confront them, at least militarily, you work with them diplomatically, don't let them get any bigger, but they'll do their thing and we'll do ours, and it didn't take very long before several people, many former communists themselves said no, this is not right. these people are -- have a very different attitude toward us than you think, they want to take us over, they want to bury us, they want to infiltrate our government, and there were, then, a couple of big cases, the rosenburg case, for one, people were spying on mr. and mrs. rosenberg, then alger hiss was another one, a man who testified

against him, subsequently indicted and convicted, as a purgerer but convicted really because he'd been a spy. chambers wrote a book which had a huge impact, number one best seller for months and months and months and with that, people began to recognize what this was what is called an evil empire and their designs on the united states were less than honorable, they were infiltrating things and so on. some time after that, russell kirk came along, published a book called "the conservative mind," which was on the philosophical foundations, and those three pieces of it were really the initial foundation, all really an intellectual movement, all but three different pieces of it, the libertarians or economists, the traditionalists and anti-communists, ultimately those three formed together to

form the conservative movement. >> how did they move, somebody had to sit down and do the grassroots nuts and bolts to get this started. >> that's right, it didn't happen overnight. they initially thought of themselves as three totally separate camps, three different movements. the libertarians would criticize the anti-communists, you want to chew up a lot of money, raise taxes, bad for the economy, you don't need to do that, then anti-communists would criticize the traditionalists and so on and so forth. little by little, they began to realize that they were, in fact, a movement, and there was one person named frank meyer, who was a former communist, very interesting man, had been one of the communist party's best organizers, apparently, and he broke with the communist party, i guess even before world war ii, became a staunch conservative. he worked at national review. buckley had recruited him in

1955 to work in national review right there, and he basically was the one who ultimately brought the three together in what he called fusionism. he said these three do, in fact, have a community of interest, the primary one being that we all hate leftism, libbieralisml communi communism, and we need to work together to fight that, but there were lots of other pieces as well. barry goldwater had a lot to do with it when he ran in 1964, his book, "the conscience of a conservative" talked about all three of those strains and sort of wove it all together in one big ball, and that, i think, a lot of people as they read that book, they realized there were these three different parts, all of which made a lot of sense to come together, then there were other people, other things as well. it never actually came together as one. we're still fighting those

battles between the liberalists and since then you have the christian right who have joined up as another set of it, the right to life people, the anti-immigration people and neo-conservatives who were mostly interested in foreign policy and fighting the soviet union, so they eventually all came together to form this big movement that has lots of different pieces and is sort of messy, i guess, the way it does things. >> in 1958 you quote whittaker chambers as saying if the republican party doesn't stand for anything, it will lose -- it will lose the conservative movement, what was the relationship between the conservatives and the republican party? >> it's always sort of been a marriage of inconvenience, i guess, if you want to say. the most republicans are relatively conservative now, they didn't used to be. most conservatives do their political thing in the republican party, but the two of

them, when you think about it, really have two different, very different, functions. a political party's job is to elect people, and if they come from here or from there, wherever it might be, that's okay, but their job is to raise the money, run the campaigns, win the elections. conservatives are people of principle of ideas, they are generally people who have a somewhat unified interest in things, and their concern is to keep the party people sort of on the straight and narrow, to provide the ideas and the principles, and then when the party people go astray, to try to jerk them back into where they are. and, of course, that's true on the right or the left or anywhere else. that's how the political process works, so it's very alive and well in that relationship between the republican party and conservative movement. >> it's often been said in political jargon that conservatives would rather be right than win.

>> barry goldwater said exactly that when he was running, and that's because of this idea of principle. conservatives think of themselves as being in this fight for the long term, and if you win an election, if you lose an election, that's okay, we're still going to be there. our ideas are still going to be consistent, our ideas are going to be the foundation of what we believe, and we are here to further our ideas, again, limit government, lower taxes, traditional values, strong national defense, things of that nature, and that's our job. it transcends way beyond politics. >> you refer to robert taft earlier as an isolationism, is that a good thing? >> well, it's a good question. i suppose there were a lot of them in the days before world war ii, still a few after world war ii. i think to a great extent, isolationists suited the united states in those days.

my grandfather was an isolationist. i was talking to bill buckley, his father was an isolationist, a lot of people were, and, of course, they formed the american first committee, which has gotten a lot of bad publicity since then, but the idea was there's a way of solving this thing without chewing up the world in a huge war. of course, it was disbanded when the war started, but even jerry ford was a member of it, potter stewart, former supreme court justice, joe kennedy was one of the leaders of it, jack kennedy's father, so there were a lot of isolationists. nowadays in the world of globalism, i don't expect you could find one here or there, i don't think there are many isolationists anymore, but it's a different time and we have different issues. >> back in the 1950s, did the conservative movement feel comfortable with dwight eisenhower as president? >> not particularly. it's interesting, when eisenhower came to the 1952

convention, he and taft both arrived with about the same number of delegates and neither had enough to win. actually, i guess taft had more than eisenhower did, and the consensus was eisenhower can win the election, taft can't. eisenhower got the nomination, conservatives were update, they looked up to him, had a great amount of admiration for. they all came on board, taft joined forces with eisenhower in the post-convention time in the campaign, taft then became the majority leader in the senate, and he and eisenhower worked closely together, but as time went on, conservatives, again, there weren't that many of them and they didn't have much of a national voice, but they became pretty uncomfortable with eisenhower. one of the things that really affected them when the russians invaded booud pest in 1956 and

we didn't do anything, conservatives, anti-communists thought this was a time we needed to react, send troops in there, defend the counter-revolutionaries in budapest and nothing happened. by the time eisenhower left office in 1961, conservatives felt that he hadn't really served them particularly well. >> who is willmore kendall? >> he was a philosopher, political philosopher, yale graduate, bill buckley's, one of his professors at yale. he wrote a number of books on conservatism. he sort of wanted to be the philosopher of the conservative movement, never did, had lots of problems. he was a difficult person. i remember meeting him several times as a child, he and my father were good friends, he'd come to my house and so on, very intense man, wrote a book called

"the conservative affirmation." i guess he would be called a very hard right political philosopher. >> on the cover of your book, "upstream," you have barry goldwater and ronald reagan, who's your hero? >> well, i guess, in a way they both are. we can't all but help have ronald reagan as a hero. i worked for him in his administration, met him a lot of different times and spent some time with him and looked back on him as i wrote the book, i talked to a lot of people that knew him a lot better than i did, read a lot of things about him, and i think he was, in a way, the epitome of what a good conservative politician is. goldwater added a great deal to the movement as well. no question about that, goldwater was a very brave man and when he ran in 1960 and 1964, he took on a project that he didn't want to do, he knew he couldn't win, but he was willing

to do it because he seriously believed in conservative principles and it was laid out in his book, "the conscience of the conservative." he was a true believer and felt running for president would give him the pulpit to make the case to people and help the movement, so you have to admire him for that. >> did he write the book? >> no, it was ghost written by brent bozell. bill buckley's roommate at yale, who was a lawyer, very well-educated man and a wonderful writer, and i think, actually, somebody else suggested to goldwater that we will have this book written for you and goldwater said, fine. bozell had been writing speeches for goldwater, so he knew his thought process, and i guess he talked to goldwater several times as he was writing the book about different points and read what he had written as well, bozell read what goldwater had written, so i think it was a

pretty fair description of what goldwater believed, but it was actually a ghost-written job. and, in fact, an amusing story is that apparently when it was finished, bozell and a couple other people took it into goldwater's office and goldwater looked at it for about 20 minutes and said, looks good for me, let's go for it. >> who was brent bozell? >> he had been buckley's roommate, he was a writer, co-authored a book with buckley in 1954 on joe mccarthy, called "mccarthy and his enemies," and he had done a lot of other writing. he wrote a book on the supreme court, that must have been somewhat after the -- no, i guess it was still probably in the late '50s, actually, and he was -- as i say, he had written speeches for goldwater, so he had a pretty good idea of what

goldwater thought. >> al regnery, why are you a conservative? >> why am i conservative, well, you know, it's one of those things that i never knew that i would be anything else, i guess. my father started his book publishing company in 1947, and he had come from a family that owned a textile business, he'd worked in the textile business for a while. before that, he had gotten -- come very close to getting his ph.d at harvard in economics. he'd studied in germany for awhile before the war and had pretty definite ideas about things, and after world war ii, he got bored with the textile business, and he was very concerned about the way things were happening in the united states, particularly in foreign policy. he had witnessed the rise of hitler, he'd been there for two years in germany and sort of the idea that big government, which, of course, one of hitler's primary things that he was

trying to do everything by the government and what the consequences of that were, and then he was also very concerned about the way our foreign policy was developing, vis-a-vis post-war germany and the soviet union, and he initially started a little newspaper called "human events," which is still going, he and a couple other people, then he started putting out pamphlets, distributing those through human events and other ways, and then in 1947, actually started a book publishing company, because he felt that publishing books was probably the best way to make your voice heard and influence public opinion. >> how did you get involved in the publishing industry? >> initially, i grew up with this. as this was happening, i'm not sure what impact it had on my conservatism, but my father -- we lived in chicago, or outside chicago, and my father's office, i guess, was sort of an outpost

in the midwest for east coast conservatives, most of whom he published, and they would come out to chicago to edit the books or whatever, and he'd bring them out to the house for dinner and spend the night, so there was a veritable parade of people, who to me as a boy, were my father's friends, but people like bill buckley, whittaker chambers, a whole host of others, who would sit around the dinner table and talk about these things, and i guess it had some impact, so as far as i was concerned, i guess that was what you were, a conservative. then, when i was in college, i got involved in young americans for freedom, which had been started a couple years before, i wasn't at the initial convention when it was started, but got into it pretty soon after that, then i got involved in the goldwater campaign when i was in college, and from there, when i got out of college, i actually

worked in the national office of young americans for freedom for awhile, so by this time i was getting to know sort of everybody -- weren't many people in the movement those days, you'd get together for a lunch with 15 or 20 people in washington in 1965 who were conservatives, and that was about it, so it just became sort of second nature for me, and i've done a number of other things, practiced law for awhile, but i've always had my fingers in the conservative movement. >> your brother was killed in a plane crash, right? >> correct, i had a younger brother who became head of the company in the early '70s, and that's when i was in law school and practicing law and he was killed in a plane crash in 1979, and then at that time i was just going into the reagan administration, in 1981 anyway, and did that until 1986, at which time i left and took over the publishing company. it was not in very good shape. my father was running it, and he

was getting old and was unable to really keep it going the way it had been, so i sort of reinstituted it. we moved the office to washington, raised some capital, and started publishing some books that pretty quickly got quite a lot of attention, so we went from there. >> you say you raised some capital, it takes money for a movement, who were some of the money men? >> i have a whole chapter about that in the book. it's actually a very interesting story. initially, it was very difficult to raise money. obviously, buckley needed money to start "national review" in 1955 and he spent about six months going across the country trying to raise several hundred thousands dollars, i think, got a little bit here, little bit there, and so on. the donors were primarily businessmen, mostly who had started and built up their own companies, who had a big interest either in free market economics, maybe in

anti-communism, and they would provide money, and there were a few people that were really quite wealthy who were conservatives early on. this is in the '50s and the '60s. roger milikin was one of them from south carolina, had gotten involved in it, i think, well before the goldwater campaign, was involved in the campaign, and he became one of the primary funders. richard scaffe from the mellon family in pennsylvania has always been a big donor. >> he's still active. >> still is. there were a few others, the big donors were probably eight or ten, 12 people to give money to make a difference, but for the most part, interestingly, the movement has been funded by people sending in $25 and $50 by direct mail. that's been the backbone of the conservative movement and interesting story how that started. in the goldwater campaign,

before 1964, republican politics were mostly funded by a few wealthy new york bankers and other sort of what were known as the east coast establishment, and as a result, they really called the tune. they determined who it was that was going to be nominated and what the issues were going to be and that sort of thing. obviously, that wasn't going to work for goldwater, he'd beaten rockefeller in the primaries, he came from the west instead of the east, what he was saying was to these republicans, so goldwater went about funding his campaign asking people for money by direct mail, and there wasn't really much of a direct mail list, i mean you couldn't go out as you can in these days and buy lists. he'd go on television and ask for money, and by the campaign was over, he had actually gotten money from some 400,000 to 500,000 people, and he had the

list. he had the names of the people that had contributed, so richard vigory, who is still around in the conservative movement went up to the senate office building, which in those days where campaign finance things were filed, i think it was the clerk of the senate or something, and he went up and said do you have these names, yeah, they are in this filing cabinet over there, so there are drawers and drawers with names and addresses and how much they contributed to goldwater, so he asked the guy in charge, is this available, he said, yeah, it's public information, so vigory hired a bunch of women to sit down and copy these names down on yellow pads and after a couple weeks people in the senate said, you can't do this anymore, they said you've done it long enough, get out of here, but in the meantime he collected something like 50,000 names and addresses. now, those 50,000 names became the backbone of conservative finance.

richard realized you could send out an appeal to these people, of course, there were no computers in those days, but he used a machine, and you'd get money back, then you could keep track of where money came from and you'd know who to mail another appeal to or divide the list into this or that or whatever, and, of course, he continually added to the list by getting more names from other campaigns, so that became sort of the investment bank for the conservative movement, and it really still is. >> when you started as publisher as regnery, what were some of the first books you had published, what year was that? >> 1986. >> okay. >> the first big book that i published was a book called "red horizons," and it was written by a fellow who was the head of the foreign intelligence service in romania, and he defected, had debriefed the cia for several

years. i mean, this guy knew more about soviet intelligence than about everybody else. i think he was the highest level intelligence officer who had ever defected, and he had written a book about what life inside romania was like. the book had been to 15 new york publishers, nobody would publish it, they were interested but weren't sure everything was true, so it came to me, i decided well worth publishing. to make sure that things were true, i hired a guy that somebody referred me to at the defense intelligence agency, sent him up to the library of congress and said research everything you can find to find out if this is true. obviously, he couldn't find out a lot of things, but if, for example, one example was he talked about arafat coming to bukarest, i said find out if arafat was actually in bukarest on that day, that kind of thing, so we really verified the book

was true and published it in 1987, it must have been, that book was published. it was just when the soviet union was becoming -- beginning to become unglued, and the book really caused a sensation. it was published in 23 other languages besides here, it was broadcast on radio for europe in romanian into romania, and apparently, when it was broadcast, the entire country listened to it, because this was such a closed society, one of the most brutal of the communist countries. cha chefs ki had a total hold on everything that happened and here this discussion of what went on inside of his palace and his administration, his regime is broadcast to the country. he was incensed, he issued death penalties against the author, against me, anybody who had the

book would have been shot, although interestingly, there was, at the time, the romanians had a once a week plane that came to kennedy airport in new york and the crew would go out and buy books and smuggle them back into romania. anyway, that book had a huge impact. when the next year, cha chefs ki was murdered by the counterrevolutionaries, the first thing the people did the next day was to seize the newspaper, start publishing it, and they published "red horiz horizons" on the front page and said this is the book that told us what was going on. in talking about that book, my throw away line is book publishing is always sort of a tough business to make money in, but if you can bring a government down every now and then, it makes it worth while. >> was it a moneymaker also? >> a little bit, if you have a huge breakawa