CHARLIE ROSE: Sam Tanenhaus is here. He is editor of both the "New York Times Book Review" and the "Weekend Review" section of the newspaper. When he is not appraising books, he writes some of his own. His biography of Whitaker Chambers was a finalist for the National Nook Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book is called "The Death of Conservatism." In it he argues that today’s Republicans have lost their way and need to return to their intellectual roots. I am pleased to have him back at this table. Welcome. SAM TANENHAUS, AUTHOR: Great to be here, Charlie. CHARLIE ROSE: And did this grow out of that "New Republic" piece that you wrote? SAM TANENHAUS: It did. I wrote a story, an essay during the first month of the Obama administration, and the Republicans and the conservative intellectuals, because the book is really about both, seemed totally lost. And also it builds on a lot of thinking and writing I’ve done ever since I started writing about conservatism some 20 years ago. CHARLIE ROSE: So what space would a conservative that you think has ideas and capacity to be elected, what’s the space? What’s the candidate look like? What’s the ideas look like? SAM TANENHAUS: Well, we’re talking about two different things. The candidates come from who knows where. If you look back over the history of the movement and the various tribunes the right had, Barry Goldwater in ‘60s, Reagan in the ‘70s, ‘80s, they were kind of self-created figures. What they did that was so essential and what this book addresses is find the people with ideas. There’s a great story, Bill Buckley, whose biography I’m writing, told me a few years ago, and it’s just one line. I asked him, "Bill, how did you find Goldwater and then Reagan?" He said, "I didn’t find them. They came to me." Partly that was Bill being the intellectual aristocrat. CHARLIE ROSE: Meaning what? SAM TANENHAUS: Meaning that they needed a vocabulary, a language, that would reach outside this very cloistered sect of movement conservatism which is kind of anti-government, opposed to many of the institutions in our society, which doesn’t feel very conservative at all. It seems like a kind of radicalism. They had to find the instruments, the language, and the ideas, the proposals that might resonate with the broader public. So they went to intellectuals to get them. And liberalism is now suffering because there are not great conservative opponents. And I say in this book that you could argue that the nearest thing to a classical conservative in contemporary politics is our president, who’s a die-hard liberal. He’s conservative temperamentally. CHARLIE ROSE: Because of civility, because of listening, because he understands your point of view? SAM TANENHAUS: And also because he believes in revitalizing the core institutions of government and society. He’s tamped down the imperial presidency, which we all began to worry about. CHARLIE ROSE: How has he tamped it down? SAM TANENHAUS: Well, through a foreign policy that really emphasizes multilateralism. CHARLIE ROSE: But that’s not the imperial presidency, is it? That by -- foreign policy that wants to engage, an Arab engagement, is not tamping down the imperial nature of the -- it has nothing do with it, does it? SAM TANENHAUS: Oh, I think it does. CHARLIE ROSE: The imperial nature is that you’re reflecting a policy of imperialism? SAM TANENHAUS: Well, the imperial presidency... SAM TANENHAUS: For a president, you think of somebody who sit there is and believes that the executive branch rules everything? SAM TANENHAUS: That’s right. And it dates back really, as I say in the book, it really dates back to the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, who was a Democratic idea originally. And the first great critics of it were conservatives. Another great conservative philosopher I write about is James Burnham, another mentor to Buckley. And he was one of the first strong critics as what he called "Caesarism," the presidency that grows so overweaning in its power that it violates the strength of the other branches. It was conservatives who first made that criticism. But then once their own politicians got in office, they reversed course. With Nixon, with Reagan, and with George W. Bush, they decided there should be no constraints on the presidency at all. And we had three presidents in those three instances -- Nixon, Reagan, and Bush -- who committed impeachable offenses probably. And we had Democratic presidents who seemed to understand the limitations of power, and we had moderate Republicans who understood that -- Gerald Ford, Dwight Eisenhower, the elder Bush. They worked within the constraints of the government even if the other branches wanted to overpower them, they understood the constitutional system required them to go along. CHARLIE ROSE: I think an imperial president has to do within the consolidation of power within the White House and your arrogance about that power, rather than a kind of foreign policy that had to do with engagement or something else. SAM TANENHAUS: That’s a fair point. But the two are not easily detached. If we look at the presidency of George Bush, the younger Bush, look at how the war in Iraq was prosecuted. That’s not simply a matter of consolidating power internally, consolidating power really to make a foreign policy move that the rest of the world would essentially have to just observe and watch if the sidelines. CHARLIE ROSE: Tell me what the conservative movement was about, and what called it to that. SAM TANENHAUS: What this book describes is two strands of conservatism that have always been at war with one another, OK? One is what I think of as the classical conservative movement, and that really goes all the way back to the greatest of all conservative thinkers, Edmund Burke. And what he was reacting to... CHARLIE ROSE: An Irishman who went to London. SAM TANENHAUS: Yes. And he was very pro-Ireland, pro-American revolution. CHARLIE ROSE: Anti-French revolution. SAM TANENHAUS: Anti-French revolution. Why? Because Robespierre and Danton wanted to destroy the society they opposed rather than reform it. And Burke said "Conserve and correct, that is the goal of the statesman." Now, what happened in American politics was when FDR took power and really did revolutionize our government to some extent, the reaction on the right -- that is, the massive enlargement of the federal government, the creation of the alphabet soup of agencies to enact laws... CHARLIE ROSE: Beyond that, he wanted to enlarge the court. SAM TANENHAUS: He did, and that’s really what brought him down is he did overstep his bounds. But what the right did was to decide it wasn’t simply Roosevelt himself who was responsible for all of this, it was that secret army of mandarins and bureaucrats, the managerial elite of Burnham’s brilliant phrase. And that gave birth to an idea that government itself and the intellectual forces that feed it, because where do these New Deal intellectuals come from? They come from the Ivy League, they come from the top law firms. They constitute a class that is at war with America itself. CHARLIE ROSE: The same people who Jack Kennedy hired. SAM TANENHAUS: That’s exactly right. And that’s why if you look at Ronald Reagan’s correspondence, which I’ve done, you’ll see a letter he wrote to Nixon in 1960s, and he said "Well, JFK may have tousled hair, but he’s still a Marxist." CHARLIE ROSE: He actually thought that? Was that part of Reagan’s belief, that someone like JRK was a Marxist, or was it a turn of phrase to create a laugh? SAM TANENHAUS: Well, see this is not necessarily a laugh. Also maybe to send a shiver of anxiety, is what we’re hearing now. This is the problem the right has. CHARLIE ROSE: Because you are saying you believe he’s a classical conservative because he wants to preserve and change? SAM TANENHAUS: Yes, that’s right. CHARLIE ROSE: Come back to that. But stay with this sort of evolution of conservatism. So there it was, a certain kind of conservatism. What was it? Beyond Burke and beyond conserve and change, who represented it? Did Ronald Reagan represent it? Or was Ronald Reagan a new conservatism that in a sense marked the end of an old conservatism and marked a group of people within a party taking over a party? SAM TANENHAUS: Well, a lot of this is hard to untangle, though I try to do it in the book. I’ll lay it out as best I can. If you look at that period when the modern conservative movement took shape, which was after World War II, that is, the ideas were percolating during the Roosevelt years. Here was a man also who ran for president four times. CHARLIE ROSE: Right. SAM TANENHAUS: Something unthinkable and, in fact, illegal now. And we look back at him and say "This is someone who overreached." On the other hand, he did it through the democratic process. So the right sets itself up in opposition to him. They get their first chance in 1952. Remember, in the decades of the 1930s and 1940s, this country did not elect a single Republican president, five Democratic presidents in a row. And 1952 the opportunity comes, Dwight Eisenhower. CHARLIE ROSE: They have a national hero. SAM TANENHAUS: They have a national hero. In fact, both parties pursued him. No one knew what his politics were. Which meant... CHARLIE ROSE: No one would have cared. SAM TANENHAUS: That’s right, except the ideological right did. They were very nervous about him, because... CHARLIE ROSE: This was Taft or this was someone else? SAM TANENHAUS: Well, Taft was his opponent, but also the young Bill Buckley and others were very suspicious of him, because look at Eisenhower’s connections. He’s an internationalist when many of the right had been isolationists. He was a president of Columbia University. CHARLIE ROSE: And he’d been in Europe. SAM TANENHAUS: He’d been in Europe with many contacts with foreign leaders. He seemed a middle-of-the-road guy, which he was. So this was the concern the right had. If we elect as Republicans a president who is not going to undo, to roll back all the radical changes that happened under Roosevelt and then the steward Truman, our conservatism will have failed and there will have been a left wing revolution that’s overtaken the country. And, of course, that’s what happened with Eisenhower. Eisenhower kept the New Deal in place. In my scheme, Eisenhower and Bill Clinton stand as the two great modern conservative presidents because they followed presidents who had been radical to some extent, and rather than try to undo everything, just moderate it and tempered it. CHARLIE ROSE: That’s Tony Blair. He did not try to undo everything Margaret Thatcher had done. SAM TANENHAUS: No, he did not at all, and he was despised on the left part of the Labour Party for that. So we’re back in the 1950s now, and Eisenhower looks suspiciously like a moderate. So Buckley starts to organize a magazine, "National Review," partly, quote, "to read Dwight Eisenhower out of the conservative movement." It sounds crazy today, but that’s what he did. CHARLIE ROSE: Because Buckley’s man was Taft or because Buckley’s man was... SAM TANENHAUS: I think it was Joe McCarthy. CHARLIE ROSE: Yes, exactly. SAM TANENHAUS: Joe McCarthy is the key figure. CHARLIE ROSE: Because of anti-communism, which was so central to Buckley? SAM TANENHAUS: Because he gave the right a populist voice. Joe McCarthy -- Sarah Palin does it today. What the right has the most difficulty establishing to the country at large is a connection with the ordinary man. Buckley and company were quite elitist. You know, Buckley was going to write a book called "The Revolt against the Masses." He was going do this -- as far as the middle ‘60s. They were essentially elitists. But what they saw McCarthy could do -- no one ever wanted McCarthy to be president. Buckley would never have said that. What they heard in what exactly (INAUDIBLE) McCarthy was the voice of an aggressive oppositionism, somebody who would... CHARLIE ROSE: Take it to them? SAM TANENHAUS: Take it to them in the most aggressive way with some political sophistication. So Buckley and company lined up behind him. CHARLIE ROSE: And he never denounced him until the end, did he? SAM TANENHAUS: He never really did, though he regretted it. At one point he said, I wish, he might have even said it on this show, he said, "I wish Joe McCarthy would have never lived." CHARLIE ROSE: Most of the things he is said were on this show. (LAUGHTER) SAM TANENHAUS: But here’s another thing, Charlie. What’s interesting about that moment, which I describe in the book, is Buckley now starting his magazine wants all the leading conservative intellectuals, the philosophers, on his side. He’s a man of ideas. So Burnham was happy to do it. In fact, Burnham was one of the leaders. Buckley’s very brilliant and strange mentor, Wilmore Kendall, another mentor from Yale, who is also, to show you how brilliant he was, later a mentor to Gary Wills. Kendell, a fascinating figure, Saul Bellow wrote a short story about him, a very unusual guy. So Buckley has got these guys on the side. But the prize is the most fame anti-communist intellectual in America, Whitaker Chambers, the subject of my previous book. And he goes to Chambers and he says "Come Aboard." And Chambers says, "No." He said, "You all sound a bit like crackpots to me. You’ve gone from someone like Chambers himself..." Chambers, Burnham, and Kendall had all been communists at one time or another. That’s really important to remember, because that tradition carries through the late Irving Kristol, who was a Trotskyist. CHARLIE ROSE: The people who became the neo-conservatives. SAM TANENHAUS: Yes. They have the idea that you’re living in a time of perpetual warfare and the only way you win is through a counterrevolution, which is not a conservative idea at all. It’s a radical idea. So Chambers says, enough with the extremism left and right, because he’d been through all of that. And he says no. He says, in fact, what we have to do is find a different model. And his model was, of all people, the 19th century British conservative Benjamin Disraeli, Beckonsfield, and Chambers calls himself a Beckonsfieldian. And he says what we have to do if we’re going survive as conservatives is give things up. Give up the things you have to give up. For instance, don’t preach the evils of socialism, Chambers says, to my neighbors, the right wing farmers who like Joe McCarthy, because they’re standing in line to get the price supports handout. You have to be realistic about what you can do. And it took Buckley awhile to absorb that lesson. But the key period came, I think, and as I described it, in the next decade, the 1960s when the Great Society was in place. And the pragmatism of the Democratic Party and its leading liberals, architects like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, turned into something different. It turned into its own ideology of improving the quality of life for all citizens. You have this boundlessly rich country and you have some people who are being excluded. Let’s remake society and government to make everyone’s life better. And at that point, they overreached. And Moynihan himself, who had been the architect of the war on poverty, some of his great programs, said, "Well, what have we done here? We’ve created these massive programs, we have these wonderful civil rights laws which should have been passed a generation ago and are now in place, and what do we see? We see riots in Watts." CHARLIE ROSE: We see -- what he also said is we see the destruction of the family structure. SAM TANENHAUS: That’s exactly right. Why? Because if you were a virtuous liberal in that period, you thought it was unseemly to question the social arrangements that any family might have, particularly if people living in the inner city with all the obstacles Moynihan knew very well, and Moynihan sympathized with all that. What was shocking to him was when he created this extraordinary idea of a family-centered policy -- and it was Richard Nixon who actually wanted to put in the place. CHARLIE ROSE: When he was in the White House. SAM TANENHAUS: When he was in the White House -- what did Moynihan find? CHARLIE ROSE: Moynihan was in the White House. SAM TANENHAUS: Well, yes, and Nixon brought him in later. But when he did in the 1965 with Lyndon Johnson, what does Moynihan find? He’s called a racist. He’s attacked by the right for wanting to make the government too big, by the left for not respecting the -- sort of the mores and culture of the people he says he wants to help. And suddenly this liberal center, this pragmatic consensus center, which has really been like the glory of our politics in the ‘50s and ‘60s, that’s really where the Eisenhowers and Kennedys and Johnsons fit in is their belief in consensus politics. CHARLIE ROSE: And that’s where you think -- just moving it forward, Bill Clinton was? SAM TANENHAUS: Yes, he was. CHARLIE ROSE: And Barack Obama? SAM TANENHAUS: Yes, I do. I think he’s a consensus figure. CHARLIE ROSE: So if the lineage goes forward from Eisenhower to Clinton, the next stop is Obama? SAM TANENHAUS: I think it’s an open question with him, Charlie. Here’s why -- I think Obama has absorbed two liberal strains that may actually be in opposition. CHARLIE ROSE: Two big a centrist conservative? SAM TANENHAUS: Well, in opposition with one another that he may not be able to reconcile. The first is the New Deal legacy. The New Deal is really best seen as a kind of massive government intervention at a time of emergency. So the TARP, the Temporary Assets Relief Program, these policies, right? These are New Deal types of policies. They’re done in a time of emergency. You have to prop up the banks. CHARLIE ROSE: But he inherited them from. SAM TANENHAUS: From George Bush. Well, just the way Franklin Roosevelt inherited them from Herbert Hoover. The Great Society... CHARLIE ROSE: But isn’t there a difference there? I mean, Franklin Roosevelt didn’t inherit -- what he inherited was an economic condition -- he inherited an economic condition, he didn’t inherit the New Deal. What Barack Obama has inherited was programs that had been done -- TARP programs and things like that that had been initiated by a previous administration, programs. SAM TANENHAUS: Oh, yes, I see the distinction. And it’s even more complicated than that, because what Obama is doing that’s quite risky is saying we’re going to do Great Society-like programs, improve the quality of health care, reform the system at the same time when we don’t have very much money. That’s a real gamble. If anybody can, he can. He’s an enormously skilled politician. And we forget now some who’ve reacted to this book say well, Tanenhaus misses the boat because Barack Obama’s sinking in the polls. He’s been president for what, eight months? CHARLIE ROSE: And he’s still above 50 percent. SAM TANENHAUS: And he’s still above 50 percent. And if some kind of health care goes through, he’ll have two of the largest initiatives in American political history. CHARLIE ROSE: And I’m not sure it is about his policies than it is about him. He has one of those contradictions that Ronald Reagan had, where people like him more than they like his policies. SAM TANENHAUS: Yes. CHARLIE ROSE: But the difference here is, it seems to me, is Obama’s policies are in part a reaction to a crisis. Reagan’s policies were not so much that. They were much more in terms of the putting in place ideas that would -- of a very different magnitude that the country had seen. CHARLIE ROSE: Although, you will remember what the ‘70s felt like at the very end. CHARLIE ROSE: Malaise and all that. Nobody ever used the word. Inflation was high. SAM TANENHAUS: A very, very bad economy. Inflation was beyond anything we’d seen. CHARLIE ROSE: I want to come back to Obama. So the tension for him is, on the one hand, he feels the need to do stuff, on the other hand, there’s not stuff to do, and he has no resources to do it, he doesn’t have the kind of money to do it because we’re looking at a financial discipline and a -- I mean a financial situation that has huge deficit down the road, has structural deficits coming in because of Medicare and Social Security and things like that? SAM TANENHAUS: Yes. That’s his sort of philosophical, ideological problem is can he persuade the country at this moment that we can make these radical changes? He also has a political problem, which is that something the conservative movement succeeded in doing was purging all the moderates from the Republican Party. CHARLIE ROSE: Stay with this in terms of Obama. Where do you think his instincts are? Do you think they still think -- having said all that you have, having said the necessity of reacting to an emergency, that he is at the end of the day a centrist conserver? SAM TANENHAUS: Yes, because I think in his mind -- here I am reading his mind -- some of the really prized institutions in government and society, which may explain, by the way, this odd battle he’s having with FOX News, to him they seem under siege. And he will have to take fairly drastic measures to rescue them. CHARLIE ROSE: Say they again. I want to make sure I understand. SAM TANENHAUS: I think for someone like Obama, who’s the ultimate rationalist in the sort of JFK mold -- you know, JFK has this famous press conference I quote in the book where he said "The differences between liberals and conservatives, Republicans and the Democrats, these don’t matter anymore. What we face are technological administrative problems." CHARLIE ROSE: There was also this powerful -- the new frontier, had a powerful belief that if only enough brain power, which we have, is applied to a problem, we could solve it. SAM TANENHAUS: Right. Now that could be a little dangerous, too, because then you create the cult of the expert, which is part of what Burnham was about. When politics is really -- partly about emotion and passion, and also there are aspects of this huge 300 million person society that are beyond rational governance. We really don’t know what the economy is going to do. The brilliant economists who are surrounding Obama now, Larry Summers, for instance, Geithner, these are people who are all implicated in some of the failures of our economy, too. I think that’s actually one of their strengths is the difference between his brain trust and Kennedy’s is that his actually has some experience in actual politics and life. But I think where Obama still seems conservative is in his belief that the extremes don’t really count for so much. And what we forget is, especially during these very fraught moments, the tea parties and the anti-tax marches in Washington, which were significant, by the way, not simply because of the vulgar attacks on the president, but because they were denunciations of both parties and all of government by these people. They reminded me of the radicals in the late ‘60s who opposed... CHARLIE ROSE: Exactly, right, radicals from the left. SAM TANENHAUS: Radicals from the left. And they had taken over some of their tactics, some of their language, and all the rest. Now, when Obama stands up against that, I think you’re right that to some extent it’s valuable to say, well, the closest thing they seem to have to an intellectual or thinker these days is Rush Limbaugh. He may be right. What this book partly tries to show is how the era of the Whitaker Chamberses and Buckleys and James Burnhams, people who really did think through in philosophical terms, what the great questions and answers might be have been replaced by the shouters and screamers. They are directing the Republican Party to a large extent. CHARLIE ROSE: What voice that you can either hear or read, whether it’s a David Brooks or whether it is someone on radio or television or whether someone with a developing political career, represents a group of ideas that you think could gather a kind of gravitas and be an attractive opposition to the governing narrative of our time? SAM TANENHAUS: I don’t see it. It’s one reason I wrote in the book. CHARLIE ROSE: Is that what you’re saying, that there is no growing narrative in opposition to the majority narrative of our time? SAM TANENHAUS: It’s not there. The idea of a conservative governing philosophy, a philosophy of governance -- we hear a great deal about hatred of government and the evils of government, but you hear very few in the right talk about governance, the arts of governance. So there are very smart and thoughtful conservatives among us. David Brooks is one, George Will is another. They are there, but I’m not sure whether what influence they have on the party. Now, there are not the Goldwaters and Reagans who are going to them. CHARLIE ROSE: But what you would expect to see is some politician be able to -- if there is a market out there, some politician be able to take some of those kinds of ideas, which are kind of enlightened sense of conservatives or centrists -- in the end it’s a centrist philosophy directed certainly by David, less so by George, who I assume to be a little bit to the right. On the other hand, George has been -- George is saying "Get out of Afghanistan." Now, I don’t know whether that’s left or right, but that’s sort of... SAM TANENHAUS: Well, it’s pragmatic. And he also wrote a great book in the 1980s which I cite in my book called "Statecraft is Soul craft." What’s interesting about that book, Charlie, is it was written by someone, George Will, who was a great admirer of Ronald Reagan. That book was published in 1983 and what does Will say? He says "Conservatives should not too wedded, they should not make a fetish of free marketism, because there is no moral value in the market." And so we have to impose higher values. And one of them he calls in a lovely phrase "the ethic of common provision," which is a nice way of saying we need welfare. You have to look out for the poor. Those are conservative values. CHARLIE ROSE: But what you have about Nixon is he was open to those kinds of ideas. I mean, he was this dark character. You agree that. SAM TANENHAUS: Yes, he was. Nixon, I think, was the most gifted, intellectually and politically, president of the modern age. He was also crazy. CHARLIE ROSE: Because he had demons of paranoia? SAM TANENHAUS: His paranoia was so extreme. And he embodied the two strains of conservatism. Nixon is a central figure this book because you see what I call revanchism, movement conservatism, and classical conservatism fused in Nixon. Nixon’s policies were more liberal than any Democrat who’s followed him. Remember when the late Edward Kennedy died, and we were all looking at a postmortem, and everyone was looking at his record. And what was Kennedy’s regret? That he hadn’t cut a deal with Nixon on health care that’s better than anything we’re seeing now! So as a policy guy, he was... CHARLIE ROSE: But take me through Obama. You’re willing to argue now that Richard Nixon was more gifted and the rest of it, even including Barack Obama? SAM TANENHAUS: Well, I think we’re leaving out a figure who intellectually -- here we are ranking them all does surpass Obama. I think Clinton was -- Bill Clinton was an extraordinarily gifted political figure. CHARLIE ROSE: Gifted in terms of -- in what way? Gifted in what way? SAM TANENHAUS: In he combined a skill at retail politics with a conceptual grasp of policy I don’t think we’ve seen. Did you ever meet Richard Neustadt, the presidential historian? CHARLIE ROSE: I interviewed him. SAM TANENHAUS: I asked him once about ten years ago, right before the impeachment I met him, the one time I met him, and I said "How good is this guy? Is this guy as good as Roosevelt?" Because you remember Roosevelt was the model. He said "Better. Better. More sheer talent." He said, "character flaws, but better." So when we -- I say Nixon is more gifted than Obama, he’s lacking an essential component Obama has. CHARLIE ROSE: Emotional intelligence. SAM TANENHAUS: Yes. CHARLIE ROSE: Emotional intelligence. SAM TANENHAUS: Emotional intelligence and a sense of self-identity. Nixon never really fit in anywhere. The interesting thing about Obama is that he seems to have a sort of rootless upbringing, and yet he’s situated really at the center of American identity, a tremendous patriotism. You kind of forget the acceptance speech in Denver and then the inauguration address and then the victory speech, a tremendous patriotism, sense of American history, of hope. Nixon never really felt that. The resentments and angers coursed very darkly through him. CHARLIE ROSE: He never adopted the politics of optimism. SAM TANENHAUS: No, he didn’t, or the true temperament of it, which makes him fascinating. Here is a man who’s a total introvert, chooses the most extraverted of professions. CHARLIE ROSE: The book is called "The Death of Conservatism." Sam Tanenhaus, thank you. I enjoyed it. SAM TANENHAUS: Thank you, Charlie.