Mitch Daniels (00:01)

Greetings, friends, and welcome to the latest chapter of the Future of Liberty, a product of the Liberty Fund, an organization committed to individual freedom, free minds, and free markets. We are graced today by a founding father of what is usually referred to as the conservative movement in this country, or modern conservatism. If he’s not Washington or Jefferson, he’s at least Hamilton, the once young and dashing lieutenant who helped make so much of this particular revolution happen. Neil Freeman is more complicated than that. He has not only been a tremendous writer in his own right with the National Review, maybe the founding publication of modern conservatism for decades, but also a successful broadcaster, and we’ll talk about that, as well as a very successful businessman. Neil Freeman, thank you for all you have done and for sharing some time with us this morning.

Neal Freeman (01:12)

My pleasure, Mitch.

Mitch Daniels (01:16)

would like to begin with the early days. You quit a job, a good job. And another great figure from our history, Bill Rusher. I read in one of your books, quit a job on the same day to go to work for William F. Buckley. I’m sure much less pay. What struck you even in that first encounter that motivated you to do that?

Neal Freeman (01:52)

Well, I had graduated from Yale, went to New York to get a job, on with Doubleday & Company, which at the time was the biggest, arguably the best book publisher in the country, and thought that I would do what my father had done. My father was a member of the Greatest Generation. His parents had not gone to college. He did. Outstanding student, graduated from Harvard, got a job in New York, married his dream girl, my mother, had a couple of kids. And except for three years in the Pacific fighting the Japanese, he stayed at the same company until the stroke of midnight on his 65th birthday, at which time he retired and didn’t look back.

So my model was, OK, you get a steady job. That was the [Great] Depression paradigm, the regular paycheck. So I went to New York, and you could measure your progress at Doubleday by which floor you were on. And after a year, I moved up a floor and looked like I was about to move up another floor. And I got a call from a fellow named William F. Buckley, and I had heard of him. He was a generation before me at Yale, his presence lingered on the campus. He was one of those golden boys of the World War II generation, George H.W. Bush, Potter Stewart, Sergeant Shriver, and so on.

Mitch Daniels (03:45)

He had published God and Man at Yale at that point?

Neal Freeman (03:48)

He certainly had, and he had already started National Review. And he and I had written an article critical of Governor Rockefeller, the permanent governor of New York. I think he got elected four times and would have been elected forever, but Jerry Ford named him Vice President, as you may recall. So Buckley said, I found your…piece on Rockefeller, uh…arresting. Perhaps we could have dinner to discuss it. I was living in a studio apartment in New York. He had me to dinner, so I show up for dinner at the appointed hour, and there are four of us- Bill’s wife, Patsy, and Bill Rusher, as you mentioned, the new publisher of National Review. And I was exhilarated by the conversation. Bill Rusher, a man of iron habit, got up at 10 o’clock and went home. Patsy, a young mother with things to do in the morning, excused herself about one in the morning and went upstairs to bed. I stayed all night talking to Bill Buckley. And I left his place, I walked down Fifth Avenue to the Doubleday building, went to the man’s room and shaved, walked into the boss’s office and said, I’m out of here. I was going to work at National Review and it was a young man’s imperative. Bill said he was gonna change the world.

Rusher and I and a few others thought he might just do it and we wanted to help. And Bogorá, as my Irish ancestors would say, he changed it. And some of us like to think we helped. So that’s how that happened.

Mitch Daniels (06:08)

Well, you stayed more than the night. You stayed, guess, the next 39 years or something at National Review. And there’s a lot to ask you about that happened in those days. in those early days, this is 1950x, was it lonely or exciting or a mix of both?

Neal Freeman (06:37)

A mix of both. It was lonely in the sense in the early days, Buckley is creating conservatism. You remember we have two parties in those days, a centrist Republican party after the Eisenhower people crushed the Taft people and a tendentiously left Democratic party. And that was the debate between the middle and the left.

So this little revolutionary core, the beginning of the conservative movement was tiny. We knew each other by first name. Every conservative, self-avowed, self-announced was known to each of the other 50 people. And why it was so thrilling was that we were making it up as we published the magazine. I mean, week by week, we’d be setting out the doctrine, having arrived at the doctrine after a brutally long editorial meeting that week. So it was not flawless. It was not a smooth surface. It was a rough and tumble process. And of course, the debates were led by people a generation older than Buckley. Jim Burnham, who had made his reputation elsewhere as a best-selling author, Princeton graduate like you, and Frank Meyer, another Princeton graduate, also a PhD scholar, but a generation older than Buckley. And they kind of were the two poles representing conventional Republicanism, sort of in Burnham’s case, and revolutionary conservatism with a libertarian cast in Meyers’ case. Those editorial meetings were called agonized reappraisals. And over time, they became, for shorthand, agonies. I mean, they were just brutal knockdown drag outs. Wonderfully inspiring.

Mitch Daniels (09:04)

I’m gonna ask you about one of those in particular in a minute. First, I’m prompted to ask, did you ever meet Lionel Trilling? I didn’t bring his highly disparaging quote along with me, but basically he had written shortly before the time you’re talking about that there wasn’t any such thing as a conservative idea. This was a mental twitch or some, you know, some barb like that.

It’s small- as you say New York intellectual circles were pretty tight then did you ever know him did Buckley know him and what was that relationship like if so?

Neal Freeman (09:40)

We didn’t know him. I don’t think I ever met him, but the quote that lingers acidly in mind is conservative politics in America amounts to no more than a series of irritable mental gestures. And that was Trilling’s take on conservatism. And that was about right. That was about right.

Mitch Daniels (10:09)

Until your group came along, you wrote in a book, which I’m going to wave around two or three times to make sure our audience takes note [Skirmishes], that Buckley created American conservatism. It was what he said it was. That’s a pretty bold statement, but I think you can back it up.

Neal Freeman (10:24)

Wave on! I think so because he was a leader, a thinker, a conspirer. He was a man of many parts. He always said of Burnham, his elder and his wiser, that Burnham was the prime intellectual force at National Review. And Burnham always swelled with pride over that comment. But what you had to do with Buckley was listen carefully to what he said, because he never thought National Review was an intellectual magazine. He very specifically did not go the academic quarterly route. He wanted it to be a fighting faith. He wanted it to be a political success. And ultimately, of course, it was.

I think I make the claim somewhere, maybe in that book, maybe somewhere else that his political achievement, Buckley’s, was that from 1964, when Buckley is 38, until 2012, four years after his death at the age of 82, every Republican nominee for president was either a Buckley conservative or somebody who pretended to be one.

Mitch Daniels (12:23)

Yeah. One of the most arresting sections of the book, which in case anybody missed it the first time I displayed it, of your book Skirmishes, you describe one of those debates, one of those executive committee debates or editorial board debates over Iraq. At the time the nation was

considering or had just and had maybe had just gone into that conflict, the second one, and that you found yourself in an isolated position from all your friends and colleagues. And sounds like it got pretty contentious. You say that you had described at the front end of that conflict that you thought it was, quote, stupid, dangerous, and hubristic. And so, first of all, I’m interested in what it was like to find yourself on the outs with dear friends and longtime collaborators. But then I also, I’m interested in those three adjectives. The first two express to me a practical concern, stupid and dangerous. The hubristic sounds like more philosophical assessment. Talk about that, I’m sure difficult moment and what were your thoughts about it and how did it resolve ultimately with your pals at the magazine?

Neal Freeman (14:05)

It was difficult. I should go back. The first time I was in and around government, I worked for Nixon. And I was a munchkin. And I heard, caught wind of the fact that he was about to impose wage and price controls. Well, I had done some academic paper at Yale on that subject. I knew it would be a disaster economically, followed by adverse political consequences, just a bad idea from one end to the other. So I did what eager-beaver young people did. I wrote a memo, brilliant memo, persuasive, compelling memo, which of course got, maybe got read by somebody three levels below Nixon. So, I had in mind when Iraq came into focus after 9-11, I wouldn’t make that same mistake. So I made a different mistake. I went public, spoke at every think tank that would have me, wrote op-eds, waved my arms and legs, because I knew I was on the boards of a couple of defense contractors that was providing the intelligence to the White House upon which they were saying Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons. Well, I knew what the evidence was and that’s not what the evidence said. As you know, we’re very good at detection, not very good at nonproliferation, but we’re good at detection. We know exactly which countries have nukes. And we’ll know within two days when Iran actually has one. So I tried to stop it. I will tell you this here, we’re breaking some news here. The Iraq war might never have happened but for this. Even the White House was looking in early 2003, late 2002 to National Review to see if we were on board with the discretionary war, as it was called. And that premise alarmed me because the rationale for democracies at one level is that they don’t attack other countries. They defend themselves with great vigor, but totalitarian countries attack their neighbors. So I thought the evidence bar ought to be pretty high. And I had two other directors of National Review primed to speak against the magazine at that decisive board meeting. That would have made three of us out of 15 and enough to make Bill Buckley sort of pause on the race to war. Well, I agreed to go first and I’d make a pitch to the board on why National Review should not support this discretionary war.

And the second guy comes, gets up and supports the invasion. Well, the third guy and I make eye contact and he’s going, what’s this? And I say, I don’t know. So the board voted, I think. 12 to 1, 14 to 1, something, me being the one. And they then not only supported the Iraq War, but went around shooting the prisoners. The next issue had a picture of Bob Novak with a headline, unpatriotic conservative, because he didn’t support the Iraq War. It was a rough time. It was a rough time.

Mitch Daniels (18:32)

Yeah. I bet it was. Talk about hubristic because we have lively discussions right now about how interventionist or not the country should be. This is a classic argument back through our history. And people who would probably describe themselves as conservatives and believers in liberty sometimes come to very different conclusions just as you did back at, in 03. When you saw Hubris there, what did it mean at the time and what does it mean today?

Neal Freeman (19:19)

I think at that time, hubris…meant American hegemonic arbitrary action was OK. If we felt we should attack another country, we should. It was hubristic militarily. We thought we could clean out Iraq in three weeks, I think, at one point. Our mutual friend Ken Adelman said it would be a cakewalk.

Well, a decade later, it didn’t look like a cakewalk. so it was a hubris not only of a grandiosity of American supremacy, but it was overstating American military competence. The idea that we could persuade a medieval society to adopt modern democratic norms.This was all overdone.

Mitch Daniels (20:28)

I mean, that latter point, I think, is very hard to argue with. Militarily, initially, at least, it was cakewalk, you know, and there was great success. But that’s where the success stopped. And the idea that somehow people would rally to who had never tasted freedom, had no concept of the institutions, let alone maybe, maybe decades of institution building, would simply leap to the conclusion Americans reached along the way. That, it seems to me, clearly deserves the term hubristic.

Neal Freeman (21:10)

Yes, where I got what little I knew about Iraq from was reading T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence in Arabia, Britain’s man in Iraq, reporting back to his colonial secretary, who happened to be Winston Churchill at that time, saying Iraq’s not a country. It is three countries, capitals in Mosul, Basra, and Baghdad. Sunni Shiites Kurds, and it can be held together only at the point of a gun. So the idea that we were gonna decapitate the Iraq regime and suddenly an American Tocquevillean democracy would emerge was the essence of hubris in my view.

Mitch Daniels (21:48):

Neil, among the many things you’ve done to advance freedom in the country, you were the innovator, the producer of Firing Line, I believe still the longest running show in the history, public television. And of those however many hundred or more shows, can you pick out one or two that you thought were especially memorable?

Neal Freeman (22:14):

The most memorable one I remember occurred after I went back to my corporate life. I got the show up and running, produced it for the first year and a half or so. But after that, the most stunning show I remember was one with Christopher Hitchens because I probably produced live or on television, maybe a hundred debates with Buckley over the years. He only lost, to my knowledge three. One was to Christopher Hitchens, the British journalist. Another was to James Baldwin at the Oxford Forum in Britain. And the third one was to Ronald Reagan on the subject of the Panama Canal.

(23:13):

But the Hitchens one fascinated me because Hitchens was a journalist, but he was fascinated by America and ultimately moved here late in his life, we became close friends. I debated him three times, lost twice, but when he was a committed leftist, is that fair to say? I committed leftist, but moved right in his later years, the two debates I lost to him were on the subject, does God exist? And I knew God existed, but Hitch persuaded the audience that he didn’t, and it was pretty tough. I would say a couple of hundred of ’em were churchgoing Christians. But the third one I won, and that was on the Iraq War because all of his lefty Peacenik friends voted for me. I was against the war, and he was for Hitchen’s unique reasoning. He was in favor of it.

(24:37):

What Buckley did with that show, and it was always an argument between him and Johnny Carson as to who had had the longest running TV show, but they both ran 30 years plus. And as you know, people grown men would make a good living doing impressions of Buckley on Johnny Carson. He got that well established as a TV personality. But wait, let me read one line. I was reading Hitchens last night, and I think this was on the subject of Firing Line. Yeah, my glasses would be where? There they are. I’ll have to do that for another day. But as long as we’re flashing book covers, I don’t know whether you’ve read this classic, it’s about a young man thinking of whether he ought to run for President. [Run, Mitch, Run, by Don V. Cogman] A couple of people were urging him to do so. I was one of them. Actually, the gist of what Hitchens said about Firing Line was unlike debate shows that were tilted this way in that ideologically or stylistically, if you didn’t do well on firing line, it was your own damn fault because Bill would give all the rope you needed to hang yourself. And a lot of people did race hustlers and phony solution providers and the whole roster of charlatans, he would defrock them basically.

Mitch Daniels (26:35):

Lemme jump to a question I was going to ask you a little bit later. You point out that Buckley and you and his lieutenants, you say weeded out. This is, I have a guess in still back in the fifties or late fifties, racists, antisemites, Randians and 24 hour nut bars from the ranks of people who could be said to speak for conservatism. So I’ve actually got two questions. First of all, what was so wrong with the Randians, but after you answer that, who are the friends of liberty today? Is there some weeding that still needs to go on? Or are you reasonably satisfied that those who advocate for principles of freedom have got about the right teammate assembled

Neal Freeman (27:37):

The Randians? I always had a soft spot for the Randians. Bill Buckley did not for two reasons. First Ayn Rand was dyspeptic- the least agreeable human being I think I ever met. Bill took that more seriously than I did. I’ve met a lot of disagreeable people. And second, what really drove Bill up the wall was Ayn put right up front her atheism. And for Bill, that was a deal breaker. So I was always more libertarian than he, but it was really on a personal basis that he ostracized Ayn rand. Now the condition of freedom today, I worried about it terribly until through last summer. I was at a meeting where there was a debate between a bunch of Democrats, intellectuals, writers and such like and national conservatives. I don’t know whether you’ve focused on this latest factional development, but it reminded me of that great line [Friedrich] Hayek used in the dedication to The Road to Serfdom dedicated to the socialists of all parties. And that was the Nat Cons who have just discovered this great new public policy tool called industrial policy where we’re going to put government bureaucrats in charge of making huge economic investments. How that differs from Elizabeth Warren and her approach, I’m not quite sure, but I was despairing because if the Nat Cons had run off with the conservative movement and the Republican party, liberty might be squeezed out.

Mitch Daniels (29:57):

So let me ask you as let’s bridge to the current events, and you’re uniquely positioned by your own track record success in this area, should public broadcasting be defunded? The both the public television and radio?

Neal Freeman (30:19):

When I got into it, there were three and a half broadcasting networks, CBS, NBC, ABC, and in far distant fourth place, PBS. There was an argument for public broadcasting because the oligopoly of the three big three commercial broadcasters left a lot of material in American society uncovered. There was an argument for it. I think you could say if the Corporation for Public Broadcasting survives the DOGE initiative that that initiative has failed. There is no argument now that we have 500 channels for a subsidized federal broadcasting service, no.

Mitch Daniels (31:14):

Yeah, you don’t even have to reach the question of bias or not don’t have to debate that. It’s not really much to debate, but some people still would. But you’re making a very, I think, dispositive argument just on the commercial aspects of it. So a very interesting part of your book, you said the best Christmas present you ever got was when your lovely wife Jane, secured your FBI file, and this is a Freemanism. If I ever read one, you said it was colonoscopic. But anyway, you don’t have to disclose the contents of your file, although I do want you to quote what Buckley apparently said, but then the question beyond that is how bothered or not many people are very bothered about today’s FBI and related agencies, whether they’re serving us or looking to oppress us. So a quick word about your own file, but then any thoughts you have about those agencies today and whether they’re behaving themselves in accord with ordered liberty or not.

Neal Freeman (32:39):

Well, I urge everybody to get a copy of their FBI file if you can. The regs keep changing under FOIA, and at one point there was a little opening and my wife, bless her heart, ran through the open door and got a copy of the file. It’s a great read because if you’ve ever wondered what people really think about you, it’s in there because they’ve been told two things. First they’ve got to tell the truth or they’re up for perjury charge, and two, whatever they say will never reach the ears of the subject, which they won’t unless you happen to be married to Jane Freeman.

(33:32):

So you get, well, anyway, I’m reading my file on Christmas morning, and I come across the testimony of William F. Buckley Jr. And his name is redacted, but I know immediately who it is because he drops the phrase mutatis mutandis into the first paragraph, Latin being his third language, his first two being Spanish and French. English comes along sometime later. But the last question in an FBI interview, as you probably know you’ve been interviewed many times, is a fanny covering question. Would Mitch Daniels be likely to do anything that would embarrass the administration? And Buckley still under oath says, I should think the reverse would be much more likely. That was Bill Buckley. Yeah.

Mitch Daniels (34:43):

Well, lemme then move to this, and it was interesting you brought up Hitchens who was a phenomenally imaginative writer. Even when I couldn’t find a s sellable to agree with, I had to admire his thought, his power of thought and his expression and all that. So in praising our mutual friend, Ed Feulner, who gave birth to the Heritage Foundation and has been a leader in many dimensions in the effort to defend liberty, you quoted Hitchens and I thought it was very interesting as we near the end here. He said that in his earlier years, I guess the sixties and seventies, that people on the left felt they were yoked to the steam engine of history, that they were riding along with it. And my question is then later you said, no, no, no. Later it became the likes of Freeman and Feulner who felt that history was carrying them or they were riding with history. Now, who’s yoked to the steam engine today, if anyone, and how should friends of liberty feel about it?

Neal Freeman (36:03):

Yeah, that’s a great quote. I think he says that if you have not been yoked to the steam engine of history, I can assure you it’s an intoxicating experience or something like that. And that’s what kept us going. When the Goldwater election, the last true deluge, it was more than a landslide. There were no votes out there anywhere. What kept us going was that intoxicating feeling. We’re on the right side. It may take a while for the rest of the world to figure that out, but we’re getting there now on the state of freedom. As you know, better than most, freedom is not the default position of the human race. You have to work for it. And you and I were blessed. We won the demographic lottery. We get born in around the middle of the 20th century in America, out in Bangladesh, and freedom was everywhere, and we both were blessed by it. I draw some confidence about the future from young people. They’re rediscovering freedom, which is always a fresh new idea because we’re all surrounded by status, rhetoric, status, presumption of one kind or another. But it’s going to be hard. We got to build it all over again because the natural tendency is to slide into the embrace of the state.

Mitch Daniels (38:06):

Yeah. You raised a classic- the classic maybe question, but I think it’s your coinage, the golden oxymoron, meaning the tension between order and liberty. We say some of us believe what we’re seeking is ordered liberty- can’t have all one, not the other. Where do you think the balance point is today? We’ve got some serious disorder problems in the country, which at the border and within that have preoccupied rightfully a lot of Americans. But then as you say, there are also those who are ready to reassert their individual freedom too. Where do you think the balance stands?

Neal Freeman (38:56):

Well, I had the pessimism of the old man. Things look bleak, but I have the optimism of memory, which is that there will be young people like you and me when we were young, newly exhilarated by the idea of freedom, and I hope they do what we did, which was say to hell with working for the insurance company for 50 years until I get a gold watch, let’s go out there and make a difference. And I sometimes think it may be coming together, this hopeful new development called Free Cons. Have you heard of that? Freedom Conservatives a little bit. Very hopeful. Very hopeful. What we need to do, of course, is get the confidence back to take personal responsibility. We need faith. You can’t have a virtuous people without faith, and American freedom requires a virtuous public.

Mitch Daniels (40:06):

Yes, it does. And the trends lately have been secular and not encouraging to those who think as the founders clearly did, and as most of our leadership has until recently, that faith of some kind is essential to virtue and virtue to freedom. Well, as sometimes it’s necessary to point out hope. Hopefulness is not optimism. But let me ask you, as we always do, in closing with our guests, weighing it all together, what do you think will be the case in 30 years? Will in 2050, will Americans be more or less free than today?

Neal Freeman (40:57):

Good question. I would never bet against America working for Reagan. I got hardened in that posture and I’m comfortable with it today. Don’t bet against America and America is defined by its freedom. I’m there.

Mitch Daniels (41:23):

Well, you’ve been there, Neil Freeman. We’re as free as we are today in no small measure, thanks to you and people with whom you were associated. We seek in this little program to try to see the future of liberty, but no better way than to see where it’s come from. And you were a large part of that. You joke about being an old man, but you’re young in spirit and young, certainly intellectually, and we look forward to your continued contributions. We thank you for all you’ve done, and we thank you for spending this time with us, and we thank the audience. We’ll see you next time on Future of Liberty.

Neal Freeman (42:09):
Thank you, Mitch.

Outro (42:09):

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