Title: 100 Years of 100 Things: The US and Foreign Dictators

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things with Thing Number 21, 100 years of the US and foreign dictators. This will mostly be about the American right and foreign dictators because our guest, journalist Jacob Heilbrunn, released a book this year tailor-made for a centennial series, called America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators.

In his day job, Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of the National Interest Magazine, which focuses on national security issues, and a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank, which describes its mission as to galvanize US leadership and engagement in the world. His previous book, which you may know, was called They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons. Interestingly, Jacob Heilbrunn reminds us that he introduced Donald Trump for Trump's first foreign policy speech as a candidate at the Mayflower Hotel in 2016 in DC. We'll get to that. Jacob, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Jacob Heilbrunn: Many thanks.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get to you introducing Donald Trump for his first foreign policy speech and your arc of developing opinions of him that day and for the eight years since and in the context of your book, but you're here for our centennial series. What inspired you to write about The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators?

Jacob Heilbrunn: It was the mounting admiration that I noticed over the past couple of years, particularly with Donald Trump's presidency, where he repeatedly elevated foreign despots like Vladimir Putin above our democratic allies. As I started to research and go back into the past, I realized that what Trump was saying wasn't new at all. It was a return to older conservative traditions that emerged during and after World War I.

Brian Lehrer: Going back a little over 100 years, you cite World War I and the presidential election during it in 2016 as a landmark period or moment for the development of the American rights interest in foreign dictators. What happened in 2016, or around World War I generally?

Jacob Heilbrunn: It was really the rise of Trump rehabilitated a faction on the right that first argued that we should have aided Kaiser Wilhelm in World War I, not Great Britain. In other words, that we should have allied ourselves with Prussian autocracy. People I looked at, like H.L. Mencken, who was a famous journalist at the time, argued that America itself would benefit from being ruled by Prussia, and other conservatives argued that we had it all wrong, that Wilson should never have entered us into World War I, and that the United States and Great Britain were the real aggressors.

Then that morphed into the America First movement before World War II, where you hear the same arguments, which, as people like Charles Lindbergh said, and Herbert Hoover said, that Hitler was a force for stability in central Europe. We shouldn't aid Great Britain, which was a democracy. Instead, we should aid Hitler and the Nazis, who are a bulwark against communist aggression.

Brian Lehrer: In both the World War I and World War II cases, did they just oppose US blood being spilled for a foreign war in opposing entry into these world wars or as you just cited, opposing Stalin and the Soviet Union as the bigger authoritarian threat, or do you argue that they actually somehow supported Hitler and Mussolini because they like their authoritarian styles?

Jacob Heilbrunn: It's the third, and unfortunately, it's the same as with Donald Trump today, who looks to Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin as models for his own rule, which is why he says he wants to be dictator on day one. The figures that I looked at from the 1920s and '30s argued, much as conservatives do today, that Hitler and Mussolini, and Francisco Franco in Spain were models for an authoritarian society in which gay rights were crushed. You didn't have libertine behavior. You excluded immigrants.

All of the arguments that you heard back then, for example, one of the people I look at is named Lothrop Stoddard, who's quite famous. He wrote a bestseller called The Rising Tide of Color, arguing that the West was in danger of being swamped by immigrants from Africa and Asia and that they would pollute the great Anglo-Saxon stock.

Brian Lehrer: The Rising Tide of Color, that's so explicit. They use more coded language these days. Right?

Jacob Heilbrunn: Right. You hear JD Vance when he's-- Now they're targeting these Haitian immigrants who came here legally, some of whom came under Donald Trump, by the way. Now they're saying that they are invaders who threaten us. What you're seeing today, of course, is a mainstreaming of white nationalism. Back then, it was more explicit.

Brian Lehrer: On the anti-immigrant aspect of this 100 years ago, we're going to do a whole separate segment in our 100 Years of 100 Things series on immigration law over the last 100 years, and exactly 100 years ago, 1924 was the year that a very restrictive immigration law passed that basically ended the Ellis Island era and didn't get really liberalized again until the 1960s. Can you talk about the relationship there briefly in the context of this segment? Your angle is the rights affinity with foreign dictators, and it overlaps, you're saying, with the anti-immigrant push of the 1920s. How do they relate?

Jacob Heilbrunn: They relate because in Nazi Germany, for example, you have the exclusion of inferior races. The fellow I talked about, Lothrop Stoddard, who was a graduate of Harvard and testified before Congress and was one of the reasons that Congress passed that restrictive act in 1924, he was also an admirer of Nazi Germany and even traveled there in 1940 and wrote a book about it called Into The Darkness. He argued that the Nazis weren't rigorous enough in weeding out inferior races. In the 1930s, in America, you had people in the American military, there was a lot of opposition to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

They made similar arguments, that we needed to keep out immigrants. There was a lot of antisemitism as well in the 1930s, that the Jews in America were a subversive class of communists who had immigrated here to topple our government. Many conservatives saw themselves as engaged in the same battle that Hitler was waging.

Brian Lehrer: You say William F. Buckley's mentor, Albert Jay Nock, was part of this group that emerged in the '20s and '30s. Many of our listeners know about Buckley or remember him, founder of the conservative magazine National Review. He was a force in the late 20th century, but few probably know about Albert Jay Nock, who you cite as Buckley's mentor. Who was he?

Jacob Heilbrunn: Nock was a famous intellectual who's considered, even down to today, an intellectual founding father of the conservative movement. He talked about the idea of a conservative remnant, which would be an aristocratic elite that would run society. He was also a virulent antisemite. William F. Buckley's father, too, by the way, was a staunch antisemite. The family actually engaged in a cross-burning outside of a Jewish country club when Buckley was a child.

Nock exercised an influence on Buckley as this aristocratic conservatism, that there was a higher order. Again, it gets toward that authoritarian idea that there is a select elite, that democracy, in Nock's view, elevates the common man, and that you don't want to be run by the rabble, that you need a strong leader who can run society.

Brian Lehrer: Your book is called America Last. Obviously a play on America First. When did the term America First first surface in this context?

Jacob Heilbrunn: Interestingly, it was Woodrow Wilson who used it in 1916. Wilson and his opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, also picked it up. Remember, Wilson promised, and I think he meant it sincerely, that America would not become engaged in World War I. As you alluded to earlier, there were legitimate opponents of World War I on the right and left, people who simply on practical grounds, didn't want to get involved in a war in Europe. That was originally pioneered by Wilson.

Wilson himself did engage in some demagoguery during World War I, particularly with his anti-German crusade. Let's face it, he was also engaging in pretty rigorous censorship during World War I.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're in our 100 Years of 100 Things series, our segment for today, Thing Number 21 with Jacob Heilbrunn, the author, who's got a book called America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. We can take your stories, comments, or questions. 212-433 WNYC, 212-433-9692. I will ask you, Jacob, before we finish, about if you think a corollary book could be written about any elements of the American left and their romance with other foreign dictators. Obviously your book is what it is, The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators.

Listeners, if you want in with a comment, a question, or a story, maybe from your own family's past, whatever, 212-433 WNYC, 212-433-9692. By the way, before we move closer to the present, I see you have a Herbert Hoover/Adolf Hitler moment during the 1940 presidential race. What was that?

Jacob Heilbrunn: In 1938, Hoover had visited Hitler on the eve of the annexation of Austria. That was in March 1938. Hoover said it would be a good thing if the Nazis took over Central Europe because they would provide the leadership and stability that the region needed. In 1940, at the republican convention in Philadelphia, he reiterated those themes and explicitly denounced Franklin Roosevelt and his aides for attacking Hitler as a dictator. He said that this was counterproductive language. In Hoover's view, the true dictator, the real menace to America was Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal. That was the totalitarian threat, not the Nazis.

Brian Lehrer: What happened to this group after World War II when Hitler and Mussolini were so globally discredited and the US role in the war was so almost universally celebrated at home?

Jacob Heilbrunn: I talk about this, I had a new piece in Politico over the weekend when I looked at Tucker Carlson's revisionism on World War II. He caused a flap a week ago when he had a guest who said that Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, was the real villain of World War II. What that shows you is after World War II, in fact, I show in this Politico piece, drawing on my book America Last, is that the right actually didn't give up after World War II.

What they did was that they argued that we should have allied ourselves with the Nazis, we let Stalin take over Central Europe and Eastern Europe. They also soft-pedaled Nazi war crimes. The most prominent case being Joseph McCarthy. I note that as a first-term senator, he was elected in 1946, he went after the War Department and said that over 100 American soldiers had been massacred by the Nazis.

An SS division called the Adolf Hitler Division had been massacred at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, in December. What does McCarthy argue? He goes after the military and says that Jewish investigators tortured these innocent Nazis, these SS men, and coerced them into confessions. There was a hearing and a subcommittee in the Senate that investigated this and decided this was rubbish, that the army had acted appropriately in convicting these murderers, but McCarthy never gave up. I felt that that episode was indicative of just how staunchly the far right was willing to go in sanitizing and whitewashing the Nazis.

Brian Lehrer: In pursuit of what, domestically?

Jacob Heilbrunn: In pursuit of arguing that the liberals are the real traitors and they often conflated Jews who tended to be liberal with communists, that this was a subversive force in our society. That's what McCarthy did during the Red Scare as well. It's an attempt to demonize and marginalize your political opposition. Don't think that Donald Trump isn't doing the same thing today when he talks about internal enemies in the United States.

Brian Lehrer: It's one of the perennial facts about antisemitism that Jews get vilified both as the capitalists who are coming to eat you and the communists who are coming to eat you. Right?

Jacob Heilbrunn: Yes. I've actually seen on my Twitter feed a huge amount of antisemitism directed at me for the Politico piece. It is interesting to see that those sentiments simply do not go away.

Brian Lehrer: Tom in Metuchen is going to bring us from the World War II era to the next era in our 100-year history for this segment. Tom, you're on WNYC with Jacob Heilbronn. Hello.

Tom: Hey. Fascinating conversation. I appreciate it. I'd like to hear the guest comment more on GOP support for right-wing dictators in the Cold War era as well, because it leads to a lot of the problems that continue in parts of Central and South America, as well as the Middle East and Africa, that we sometimes even use the CIA to help out those right-wing dictators and really ruined our reputation in those areas for many people for generations to come.

Brian Lehrer: Tom, thank you. That is the next era that you address in the book, going chronologically, right?

Jacob Heilbrunn: I do indeed. I look specifically at Francisco Franco in Spain. I look at Augusto Pinochet in Chile and the case of Jonas Savimbi in Angola. I try to distinguish between Cold War realism, which some people might say, "Well, we need to support these dictators even if we don't like them," but what I do is I look at the right's first fervor for those dictators, in fact, arguing in many instances that they are superior to our own American leaders and our own American democracy.

That is what I think is so fascinating because that, as you noted earlier, parallels the left-wing admiration for communist dictators that emerged. What's so fascinating about this is that the right is no more immune to it. Specifically, under Ronald Reagan, Savimbi was glorified by Jeane Kirkpatrick, who was his ambassador to the United Nations, as some kind of combination of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. It wasn't that she held her nose and embraced this murderer. Instead, she said he was the greatest thing that we could ever have.

The same went for Pinochet. William F. Buckley and many of the writers at the National Review magazine visited Chile. They became propagandists for Pinochet, even trying to whitewash the car bombing that he instigated here in Washington, DC. Then you go back to Franco. Buckley and his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell were both fervent admirers of Spain. Buckley's brother-in-law, Bozell, even saw it as superior to American democracy. That traces down-- Bozell's grandson was arrested and convicted for storming the Capitol on January 6th. It's not like these beliefs don't have actual consequences. They do act on them.

Brian Lehrer: Here is Chanel, I think a truck driver who pulled over to make this call somewhere on I-80. Chanel, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Chanel: Hi. Yes, I'm on mile marker 329. I listen to your show all the time while I'm driving.

Brian Lehrer: That's great. What state is that? Is that Jersey?

Chanel: No, I just crossed over into Nebraska.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, wow. Cool. Cool that you listen as you're driving. Go ahead.

Chanel: Yes, I do. I listen to you every day, actually. I just wanted to say that as a nice companion to your guest's book, Rachel Maddow, the second season of her podcast, Ultra, really drills down into Nazi sympathizers in Congress and the McCarthy era and those that opposed him and some of the results of that. I thought that that would be something that your listeners might be interested in. One of my questions is, we see with the Project 2025 and their interest in dismantling the institutions of democracy. In your study of other dictators, are they doing that, and to what end? If you dismantle everything, then what is left, and what is the proposed outcome that they're striving for?

Brian Lehrer: That's a deep question. Chanel, thank you. Please call us again. Feel free to call us again from anywhere in America. What about her question? It's a great question, Jacob.

Brian Lehrer: It is. At the bottom of it, I think, is corruption. If you look at both the Putin and Orbán regimes, particularly in Russia, is being run by a corrupt mafia that is looting the state for its own purposes. These guys are walking around with $100,000 watches. For example, Putin's press spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, he didn't earn it. He would never earn that kind of money in a democracy. These guys are given villas. They're given all kinds of bribes, in essence, to remain loyal to the regime.

Then you look at Viktor Orbán in Hungary, we see the same phenomenon. He has expropriated businesses on behalf of his cronies. The Hungarian economy is not doing well. I believe they have something close to 15% inflation there, high unemployment, but he has captured both the state institutions and the leading businesses, including the press. What I think Trump would attempt to do is to follow a similar script. He has met frequently with Orbán. I think he would try to crush an independent media.

He would be handing out government contracts to his cronies, witness his promises to make Elon Musk some kind of federal czar. I think that is extremely worrisome and would herald the end, in essence, of the American free enterprise system, ironically enough.

Brian Lehrer: That's why you wrote the book, and that's why you did this 100-year history of the right's relationship with foreign dictators. Thank you for bringing it up to and pinning it very squarely in the present and what's at stake. Let me ask you just two quick questions before we run out of time. One is about your previous book, which was about the neocons. Where do they fit in?

George Bush, when he started the war in Iraq in response to 911 and in Afghanistan, definitely argued we were not just fighting for American national security. We were fighting to spread democracy around the world. The opposite of being in cahoots with foreign dictators. I think your book was critical of the neocons, but was that an exception?

Jacob Heilbrunn: No. Woodrow Wilson attempted the same thing, and it backfired. I think the tragedy of the George W. Bush administration, where there was a good amount of idealism, is that he opened the door to Donald Trump. Trump was able to effectively campaign against the republican establishment, which he argued, and not wrongly, had brought America to grief. I just don't think that Trump's isolationism is the cure to the ailment.

Brian Lehrer: Last question, and I told you I was going to ask you this, your book is about the right and foreign dictators. Is there a corollary that you could write about the left? Castro, the Russian Revolution, Chávez in Venezuela. You ever see a Mao T-shirt? There are others I could list.

Jacob Heilbrunn: There's no doubt. In fact, it's been done. Paul Hollander, he's a professor at the University of Massachusetts, wrote a 700-page book chronicling in exhaustive detail the illusions and credulity of the left, beginning with Stalin's Soviet Union and then ranging through Mao's China and Vietnam. The left had not been immune to this phenomenon, but it never had the kind of power that Donald Trump, in the far right exercised during his first term and would go even further during a second Trump presidency.

Brian Lehrer: That's today's episode of our WNYC and Brian Lehrer Show Centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things, Thing Number 21, 100 years of the US and foreign dictators in particular. Jacob Heilbrunn with his book America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Jacob Heilbrunn: Thank you.

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