American Experience; 1964; Interview with Hodding Carter III, Newspaper Editor, part 5 of 6

and her joy is fired upon. And then on the fourth, supposedly in second destroyer, he's fired upon. And three bodies are discovered under a dam in the city. Was that all simultaneous? There's a fact that there's a lot of causal. Oh, no, no, no. Those things don't really go together. No, it don't. But nonetheless, this interesting, that's a good thing about history books. You finally remember that there were perilous L. universes and things were happening. Not necessarily connected, but a real substance. Time magazine had what is known as a tip talk about the Tonkin Gulf events, which went something like, out of the dark, they came, swato gunboats. They're front guns firing upon the Americans, surprised by their presence, blah, blah, blah. And back into the mist they went, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was the first real recognition in my head that tip talks

like that are handouts by government information people. Because there was nobody there except government people. Time wrote it as though they were eyewitnesses to something which it turned out. As later, Admiral Stockdale was going to say, didn't happen. In the way described. Was it Admiral Stockdale? In any case, Ben Bradley, often at the Washington Post, would say, do we lie? Yes, we do. We lie repeatedly. We repeat what the government tells us. And he said, and he wrote, and that's one of the great examples of that. What did it do? What did the resolution? Stampede, well, stampede, Congress, of course. And wrote the blank check. I mean, the Tonkin Gulf provided a blank check for the war, the expansion, which was, of course, going to come, apparently. Though God knows you didn't know it at the time. I mean, that wasn't what the campaign seemed to be about.

It was supposed to be the other way around. If you vote for goldwater, you're going to get an expanded war. So I voted for goldwater, and we got an expanded war. I mean, it was a very bad joke about all of this that Linda, of course, did it. Yeah, about the iron. There's a terrible iron. He seizes the laboratory. Immediately always could do that. He's so smart about it. And he says the prophetic words, we seek, no. I know, I know, I know. It reassured me. And again, I was gunboat, that speech. I mean, again, I was gunboats Carter. That one, we seek no wider war. I mean, because it didn't matter about being gunboats Carter, I thought we owed it to do certain things. But as I want to say again, I was beginning to have reservations. And in any case, it doesn't really matter. One of the problems with today, we don't seem to have

quite the same reaction when President Obama does something about the expansion of a security state as we would if it were a right-wing Republican. So I knew that no matter what else, if we were going to go to the final confrontation, I wanted a good Democrat's hand on the lever instead of a crazy Republican. And that was a very deep secondary reaction, which was ideological, rather than intellectual, but absolutely there. What about the credibility issue? Is that when the gap begins? Well, you know, it's a funny thing. Again, people forget this, but there are all kinds of credibility issues, which arose from time to time in the previous, I mean, in Jack's time, Kennedy's time. And lying with a smile was not perfected by Lyndon.

And there was a great deal of lying with a smile or a wink or an accommodation. And the press was very accommodating to Jack Kennedy. Some of the press, some of the press thought, of course, he was the agent of Moscow. Did you tell us in the morning news among them? But it was the time at which you were going to discover, though you weren't going to discover it then. And don't think for a minute that we knew everything for quite a while. That the government could do major things without telling us a truth. Back up, if you were a certain kind of Republican after Pearl Harbor, you knew that Roosevelt had deliberately obscured the fact that he knew the attack was coming. And having broken the code as a Brit had, and we knowing a great deal about it of the Japanese,

had accommodated ourselves to Pearl Harbor to force us into the war that FDR had been trying to get us into, as they saw it, for a year. While I've done a lot of work on that particular subject, and don't think it was precise of that, it was easy to believe it. It was very easy to believe it. As I say, it was not the first time that people had reason to believe the government wasn't being quite straight with them about major events in their national security. So here we are. And with that, and with the expansion of the war, and with the expansion of justifications as time went on, begins another great spiral down. In some ways, unbroken ever since of American confidence and the word of the government, it took Johnson and Nixon to really do the whole deed in a significantly large way. But it starts.

But it starts. It starts. So that's both the tragedy and the irony of that time. At a moment in which there are things being offered, which could confirm forever the absolute vitality of government's place in their republic's life. We were doing things in the name of national security, which was called into question government's ability to tell you the plain truth about important issues. Great. Can you eat five? I don't care. OK. Let's pour ahead. I do need to switch me at some point. So let's do it now. And then I want to talk about Atlanta. Georgetown, it worked for the reporter. When I got out of school, but I had to go to the Marines first. And after that, the old man said, I'll tell you what. You're either coming home and telling me you're going to stay or not stay. But I ain't going to be down here dying in the ditch without you telling me, because otherwise, to hell with it, I had about all this I want. OK. Home stretch. Describe Johnson's frame of mind heading into Atlantic City. And why is he so worried about me?

Well, because if Johnson could have made 100% he would. I mean, that is, if he could tie down every loose in, he understood by how he'd understood a long time. But there was no problem, obviously, about him being nominated. The problem was how bad was the reaction going to be across the board to a number of things. And among the things he had to be really sure of, that he could have as quiet a convention as possible. What he really didn't want was a major fight with the South if he could avoid it, though there was much he couldn't avoid. He thought there was something that could be avoided. And he basically wanted to be sure that while presidents do get to name their vice presidents, that nobody was going to get it in his way too much on that. But he also knew who lusted for it and who didn't and how to use that. Lyndon was really, I've often wondered about this. Why was it that they were quite as nervous about the gold

water phenomena as they were? Doesn't matter how primitive we may think our polling was in those days, I'm not sure why. Except that he was, among many other things, a paranoid. And he was running scared and that's how I like to run. He loved to do it. And well, he had had reason to believe in the past things were not tidy or pre-ordained. What about the MFDP? What's the starting about that phenomenon? Where did it come from? Well, it came from the preceding year to begin with when the alternative ballot Mississippi, the leaders of the MFDP Atlantic city were essentially the leaders of the freedom ballot who had been educated in the process and brought into it. Al Lohanstein, strangely enough, it had a major startover. Al Lohanstein had a major role in the play in the Freedom ballot of 63. They, in essence, made a run at participation

in the Democratic primary in some states. We didn't have primaries. They made a run at the Democratic caucuses in some of the counties and then determined that this having men utterly and totally be rebuffed had no possibility. But the thing to do was to take their case straight to the Democratic convention with a delegation representing the excluded to represent all those who would, among other things, strange, given the future of the party, endorse the Democratic party, which was something the Democrats of Mississippi would not do. And they. The Mississippi Democrats were hesitating to endorse Johnson's party. No, they weren't hesitating. At the state convention in Jackson, Mississippi, before this Democratic convention in Atlantic City, by some accident, I was a third alternate

because I was a reporter covering a county convention and they didn't have enough people to make a delegation. So I went down to the, all of a sudden, our delegation was actually Democrats. The only county out of 82 that voted to sign a loyalty oath to the nominee of the Democratic party was my county. The other 81 voted hell no. They weren't going to do any such thing. And they were already preparing for third party participation. That is the white Democrats were. Freedom Democrats come up. They make their case to the credentials committee. They make a dramatic, dramatic, dramatic case. And of course, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer gives now immortalized and they whip me and they whip me and they whip me. What happened to her when she tried to register to vote? And at their rallies, at the end of each day, they were remarkably perfect for television, which had become a major component in the game.

And the white Democrats were remarkable and they're obteriously in every respect and refusal to play by any rules except their own. We have not left the party of our fathers. The party has left us, you know. And while many of the freedom Democrats were in fact shocked to discover that they weren't going to be seated, I'm sorry, I'm just cynical enough to know that some of the others knew damn well they weren't going to be seated as intact. But they had some really major supporters of importance in the Democratic parties left. Who, as time went on, they came to believe that utterly betrayed them by not staying with them in the face of Lyndon's refusal to unseat an entire white delegation from the South. So you're there doing what?

I'm there covering the white delegation because my brother was there with Newsweek. And so he covered the freedom dems and I covered the whites. And then we traded notes. Every now and then I'd go to the freedom dem meeting sometimes he would go to the white. But again, I never ever understood this. But I had access there. And by that time we had long ago in Doris, Lyndon, and all that jazz. But so I mean, who were these people? Who were the freedom Democratic party? Freedom Democratic party. What were they making you feel when you looked at them? It made me feel a rare combination of admiration and concern. And also a sense that they were being set up for a major fall by unknown forces who knew damn well. This was going to be a major disillusionment.

The party, national party had not yet gotten itself in shape despite the Lawrence report, despite many things, to actually reject a whole delegation as they were going to do four years later when we came back up with a somewhat expanded delegation and we replaced the white delegation. But then that wasn't going to happen. That had not happened since the memory of my man ran it not to the contrary. They were eloquent in their presentation of the reality of Mississippi. Because they were so authentic, they touched many nerves. And of course, having done so, they of course made it off a lot of white liberals very uncomfortable when they were also beaten into line or persuaded into line not to go all the way and not to reject the entire Mississippi delegation.

Now, the Mississippi delegation did, of course, the Freedom Democrats, the great favor of refusing, once more, to say that they were Democrats, that they were going to sign a loyalty oath. We don't sign loyalty oath. I mean, we're free men, well, yeah. So we're here as free men to be given a pass and they wouldn't sign it. Ultimately, three guys did sign it, one of whom was from my hometown, whose family was very close to women. Did you look at these MFDP people, maybe weren't there without taking some serious risks? Well, some of them were taking horrible risks, but they had already been taking risks. I mean, these were people who knew what they were about in the sense that many of them had already been beaten, many of them had done alternative running for office. Many of them had been in their counties standing in line countless times to try to register to vote and then turn away because they were black or supposedly failed some test.

These were people who fully understood the nature of their state and, in going to Atlantic City, knew that they were presenting themselves as threats to continued white to Germany. And the absolute definition of white Mississippi was that this is white man's territory. It always has been, it always will be, and this will not change. And what they were saying is, it has to change. What's the irony of who Johnson sends to negotiate with the MFDP? Well, again, I haven't have a book written by one of the Freedom Summer volunteers who are in my town, but more to the point, she was in the delegation. And it's very useful because it's a very passionate account of seeing the stream of people who showed up, who repudiated their labels as liberals or what have you. Well, one of the things, of course,

that Milmoreo doesn't like to concede at all is that he was working very hard to make sure that nothing bad came of this. Fets Mandel, Nice Attorney General, Minnesota was a lead man. And ultimately Hubert Humphrey was sort of used with some of the advisor types, particularly to the Freedom Democrats like Joe Rao and others, to say, come on now, you've got to pull the plug on this thing. They can't go this way. And these were not conservatives that were sent. These were liberals who were used as intermediaries. As with most conventions, in those days, before that became so serious, set around drinking of a night. And Mandel was talking about how he had to do this and blah, blah, blah. And he did. If I'd been the Freedom Democrats, like some of them,

I never would have gotten over it either. I mean, the sense that the people who had been so publicly encouraging to our mission at large, which is to change the nature of the state, were not willing to take the specific step of doing something dramatic about the seeding of non-democrats. And they're not seeding of people who profess to be real Democrats. In this, if you step up a little bit higher view of this whole enterprise, what was really happening? What was really at stake? If this moral issue confronting this political craft, craft, right? It was yet another way station toward the transformation of what was acceptable in American politics on matters of race. Morally, it was a chance for the party to break the lock hold of the South on its deliberations about issues of real importance

to the South, like race. It was a way to finally say there may be states' writers who form alternative parties. But we are now going to say those who say they're a Democrats will be treated as Democrats and those who don't, whoa. And it was good timing. But not quite, and timing is everything. We hadn't gotten there yet. It was infuriating to many that the Democratic party would be turning them away in the summer of the freedom summer and of the extraordinary burnings and killings. Many weren't even known to the general public at that time. Did they feel betrayed? Totally. I don't think I know somebody from that delegation who didn't feel betrayed.

And I don't profess because I didn't know them all, though I came to know them all later. But the ones I did know were betrayed. A man who I respected immensely and the most political of them all was Aaron Henry, but even Aaron. And I say, even Aaron with respect, but even Aaron did not feel that they had been treated right, and was worried about his implications for the future of the attempt to build a Democratic party. What was it about Fannie Lou Hamer that seemed to encapsulate everything that this was about? Because she did. Because she did. Because here she was, a woman not trained like their heroine in Montgomery in what she was doing. Meaning Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks. She was not an apparently spontaneous eruption as Rosa was. She was a force of nature who arose from the most oppressed section of the most

oppressed racial state in America. And she spoke her truth repeatedly to that power. And the rhetoric was not the half of it. She put her life out there on the line for voter registration, for efforts to bring people into schools. And suffered greatly as she was to suffer the rest of her life in the effects of having the hell beat out of her for doing these things. She was, of course, also an almost perfect embodiment of the sort of basic mystical, mythical black soul. She sang my god, she sang, and she sang with lyricism and fervor, she was a charmer in the sense that she was willing to talk to anybody and wanted to talk to everybody. And wanted to believe they were going to do the right thing. And she was not a cynic. There were guys around the delegation who were cynics

and there were, I mean, just to be blunt about it. Some of that delegation who desperately wanted it to fail because it served their notions of how they were going to reshape the country. And, you know, but be that as it may. She was an embodiment of the real, black, Mississippi aspiration for full incorporation into the Republic and into the life of their nation, their state, and their party. She was wonderful. And that's by her address. They had to do lots of things for her. I'm dead to the end. Four years later, she wanted to nominate Ted for president, and I was co-chairman of the delegation by then. She said, I'm going to do it. I said, Ms. Hamer. They won't let us up on the podium. She said, I'm going to force my way up there. I said, Ms. Hamer, can I go with you? Sorry. We go there. I said, this is Ms. Vanilla.

Hamer, I'm hiding Carter. I'm chairman of the delegation. We go through the first door, and we're getting ready to go up where they're going to turn us away. I said, Ms. Hamer, would you mind if I call Teddy and asked him if he wants to be? I couldn't find Teddy, but I found Steve Smith. And I said, Mr. Smith, you don't really know me, but I'm hiding Carter. Oh, yes, I'm scared. I said, there are a number of people here, not least me, but most importantly, Mrs. Fanny Lou Hamer, who would like to see Teddy nominated and are intent on forcing nominations somehow, including mass action. He said, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God. He said, put Mrs. Hamer on, and I'll put Teddy on. So she gets into the booth, which she could bear like that into, and she slumps. And she comes out all ejected. And he says, he's not going to do it. And we walk back out again. God, she was wonderful. All right. She's a wonderful person. Yeah. You're on the boardwalk after the news is coming. Oh, my God.

You were walking the boardwalk. That's funny. Some of what was going on then was anticipation of splits to come. Hang on a second. Meg, we'll just shout down the stairs. We're airing too much. You're okay. Hey, what was downstairs? We hear you. We're filling. Thanks. Continue. The boardwalk, throughout the convention, was sort of the place most likely to have people mix and mingle outside of the caucuses of the various states or factions. It was great fun for a lot of us, and it was illuminating for a reporter and also fun. And as the events moved along, it became increasingly clear that some old alliances were fraying badly. There was the start at that point in the national. And South Insane of a continuing loss of faith, of many blacks, in the solidity of Jewish support for them.

Because by that time, a number of folks were beginning to worry about the, quote, unquote, radical nature of some of the civil rights thing. And there were great debates out there. I had known Stokley. I had known Stokley Carmichael since the early 60s when they opened up SNCC in Mississippi. And we were amiable, wary, participants in the same geography. And I was out there arguing with somebody. I'll never forget it. And pretending I was somebody else other than my name, because of my father once the name was used. I was identified too easily for people to listen to anything I had to say without stereotyping. And I'm arguing. Stokley walks up behind me and says, you know who this honky is? He said, don't believe a word that boy says. He's hiding Carter from grave of Mississippi. And he is a known honky. And I started laughing.

He started laughing. He was still a man of humor. The buzz out there was, you know, antithetical for the large part to what was happening as far as Mississippi was concerned. But you know, the whole deal didn't come down totally, practically, to the last minute. And then suddenly, there appears on the floor a bunch of guys who have been giving floor passes by other delegations from the freedom on the freedom democratic side. And of course, the three guys who had agreed to sign the loyalty oath from the regulars by that time any other kind of deal had been rejected or a ritual token to freedom Democrats being put on the floor or whatever had all been rejected. So there was a fair amount of scuffling down there. And all of a sudden, you realize a lot of guys in blue suits were not belligots, but were security fellas.

Can you see, is the next city kind of another one of those watersheds? I think it has to be seen for the Democratic Party as central to the transformation of its approach to a number of subjects, but most importantly to race. But once that was transformed, there was the sense, okay, that little bit of unfinished business by 68 is much more certain than its outcome, though not certain. And it was also the approach used on that subject was, as we all know, a matter both of encouragement to and reflection of the anti-war movement and its approach to democratic conventions, which by 68 was pretty tumultuous as hot recollect from Chicago. The party was in the midst of what is now,

it's almost total transformation out of the old pattern and to a new alignment, which allows it to win without the solid south or lose without the solid south, but no longer was an integral part of its necessities. It was something you would like to get, but you discovered that there were other ways to get there. It took a while, even so, for white southerners in mass to desert the party, but it was inevitable. And does it split the black community, is it black power in boldness? Well, I know. And of course, Stokeley, I'm driving back from my name and year, 66, I turn on the radio, and God, Meredith has been shot walking into Mississippi, so they pick James Meredith, and they picked up his march, and it was on a monument in one of the towns

on its way down to Jackson that Stokeley gets up and starts chanting black power. And I, of course, am paraphrasing the way it worked. But that's still to come. It empowered an awful lot of black folks. I mean, the failure empowered a lot of black folks because it led to a reform commission, which led to a whole set of restrictions and requirements, which in 68 meant that you had delegations from many places in the South challenging, or being forced into joint ventures with, or otherwise different, from the old, all-white delegations, not least, the Mississippi delegation. So there was sort of a silver lining in the area? Well, silver lining four years later, which is of no solace whatsoever. And also, because, frankly, the alignment of the various forces that eventually prevailed was not all the way where the Freedom Democrats

would have been on many issues. I mean, forget racial issues, a number of others, because they were really honest to God, liberal left. And what was foreign was basically moderate left, you know? Again, by national standards, it looked pretty damn left, but in reality, it wasn't. Do you have any sense of, I mean, Berkeley's free speech movement in November? I know, I'm that whole year is stunning about this. I think, Mario, but in any case, what do you think is going on in Berkeley? How is that interconnected with all the other things that are happening? Look, once you see the effect of young folks on the process about which you had not seen a hell of a lot of effect before, you absolutely either empower or encourage folks to take up the cudgles for whatever seemed to be their civil rights issue.

And Berkeley was an exemplar, but hardly the only one. He was a master of promotion and publicity, but a court. Mario, but the fact of the matter is the forces there behave very much like Mississippi forces in reacting to the civil rights people. They overreached in their put down and thereby empowered those who were speaking on behalf of free speech or whatever. But it wasn't the only place I was going on. That was a nation. I mean, but what's interesting is that some of the people all they were veterans. You know, the people there, as elsewhere, were veterans of the freedom summer. They had had themselves tested. It was almost as though the Spanish Civil War having created an entire group of people not dead, but ready to fight for same principles everywhere else.

And here they were, shock troopers in a way, and certainly aware now of the limits to which conventional America was willing to go on behalf of things. And therefore, don't trust anybody over 30 among other things, but comes a mantra which they think reflects reality. If you're going to bring change, you can't trust the establishment to get it. You worked on the general election? Yes. Fleeing, Mississippi, in the sense that I was, by that time, so determined that the one thing that could not happen was the election, not so much of goldwater, but of the party that he had come to represent. And knowing that there was not a thing to be done about it, Mississippi, that there was no voting base for a democratic anything. I decided to go where I thought I could do some good.

And I went off to work for him as a propagandist and of no consequence, though it was fun to be there. And so I was there through the election after the convention, of course. Right. There's kind of an interesting moment where Johnson doesn't want to campaign in the South, and he sends a lady. I was a brilliant thing, however. What happened? Well, they start off on a plane. I mean, the lady bird special starts off in Alexandria, Virginia. You cannot get a lot of southerners despite the fact that they're tight with London. You can't get them to do public stuff. On the other hand, there's Lady Bird. And she comes on down that train all the way through from Alexandria right on down through the South and cuts across and stopping in all of these places where there are democratic governors and whatever. And stunningly enough, in a few places,

very strange people showed up. That is, you might not have expected them to come out. I'm not sure they would have come for London. I'm confident, however, that among the things a man did not do was a snowball lady who was the first lady of the country and who, after all, wasn't London. It was Lady Bird and more so. And I think they had a great time. And I think they did some good. What does it tell you that Johnson didn't think he could go? Well, I think that London thought that his welcome, his welcome had probably been somewhat overtaxed and that hers hadn't. I don't ever have seen that as an act of cowardice. I thought it was an act of calculation of a matter of common sense that, again, to reverse Barry Goldwater's. It was better to go where the ducks were and to go down and simply sit there and say to Mississippians or South Carolinians or whatever.

Of course, you want me. When you know damn well. And I'm sure that he was advised. Vom number of his old buddies, and I haven't read this, but I'm sure they did, that, you know, then it makes no sense for you to come. Maybe not even safe. Yeah. There was a minor sweeper kind of train that went 15 minutes ahead of me. I'd forgotten that. I was on the lady, it wasn't Lady Bird. A grasshopper special that in 68, except we went in campers. How does the media play the whole campaign? There's the famous Daisy Hat. But there's also this film called The Choice, which Goldwater creates, Jack Cliff White creates it in Goldwater. Yeah. You don't even remember that film? You ever see it? I don't think I ever saw it. But I was thinking about competing films. Because what prefaced a lot of this was the war

over the House on American Activities Committee and events in California. And there were a whole series of things about the rising red tide, which had been a part of the Democratic hegemony and that these kids, these radical kids out here were actually agents of Moscow. And so that there was more than one narrative being offered as to what was happening in the world under whose direction and why. And I think they had major effects, mainly, however, to reconfirm the biases of those who saw them to begin with. They were fairly strongly confirming those who were confirmed, I mean. Yeah. Although it's interesting that Doyle Dane Bernbach is doing Johnson's ads, you know, and Goldwater's ads just look like they're from the 50s. Yeah. And for Johnson, I mean, the red phone blinking? Oh, I know.

All the reminders you wanted, I'll tell you something interesting about that, however, it is almost inconceivable to think about it. But much of the South was not wired for sound. I mean, television was not omnipresent then, so that, again, you know, and there were stations, of course, it refused to run ads. They didn't like to see across the South before we won that battle. Yeah. Interesting. So let's just step back. I mean, we're almost done. So, I guess, see.