American Experience; 1964; Interview with Dan T. Carter, Historian, part 2 of 2

on and meets with civil rights leaders and, you know, Wilkins and former and young and they all come in to the right for January 18th. Yeah, yeah. And he surprises the hell out of him, I think. What happens? I don't remember this now. She says I'm going to put the civil rights bill through it. Oh, I thought you were talking to the girl for talking there. Yes, right. Yeah, there was in back up. When Lyndon Johnson took over as president, for the most part, there was a great uneasiness on the part of civil rights leaders. It is true that he had pushed through the 57 civil rights bill, but it was pretty toothless. And he was seen, rightly, as even though he called himself a westener, he was from Texas. And there was, despite his record, his vice president, trying to improve civil rights, there wasn't a lot of confidence on the part of civil rights leaders. So when he brings civil rights leaders into the White House, and he does so incidentally much more than John Kennedy did, and used them in a way to support his program

in a way that Kennedy didn't do, they were stunned. For example, a farmer said later on that this didn't seem like the Lyndon Johnson he thought he knew because he at least convinced farmer and most of the people who were there with a passion that he showed that he was going to get the bill through. And several members who were present at the time said for the first time they felt pretty optimistic that this actually might happen. Because he actually could do it. Yes, yeah. And that was part of their ambivalent field. Here's this Wheeler dealer. But on the other hand, that's what we need right now is a good Wheeler dealer. And they think Lyndon Johnson will crack a few knuckles and maybe get it through. What was the war on poverty? And what does it tell you about Johnson's sort of non-fidigial country and the way in which things in the economic have been changing? Yeah.

You know, we think of the 1950s as by this time the 40s, the 50s, the prosperity decade. But by the late 50s, we were beginning to discover that there was poverty in America, that despite the fact that we had developed this broad middle class, there were many groups that were completely left out. And in the case of Lyndon Johnson, I think he'd always known this. I mean, he talked about it. And it's part of his biography, growing up, teaching Latino kids in a very poor school when he was a schoolteacher. But despite his role in Washington, he was aware that there was this deep-seated poverty. So I think that's his awareness was there and his commitment was there. He also wanted to be a great president. And I think he understood that if he could do something that had never been done before in America, and that was actually attacked the root causes of poverty,

transformed America, it would be a legacy that no other president would have had, even beyond his much beloved mentor in Franklin Roosevelt, back up here, even beyond his mentor, Franklin Roosevelt, who he worshipped. But he saw himself as an heir to that, taking it on to the next stage. Why is Schreiber such a good choice for that role? And what is it? It's part of the sort of economic vision for the country. Johnson seems to be saying we can have it all. Yeah. Yeah. But that's new, too. Yeah. Johnson genuinely believed, until the war proved him wrong, that we had the economic resources, that we had the economy, we had the wealth,

that would allow us to undertake these programs. And I think it's clear that he and other liberals, as well, who were advocates of this, underestimated the difficulty, underestimated the challenge that this posed. But at the time, at least, he thought he grasped how this could be done. And a large part of it was education, a large part of it was economic development through jobs. But his vision was really, you might even describe it as grandiose. He talked about the way in which, at one point, to talking to some of his friends in the White House, some of his advisors in the White House, he talked about literally transforming America, in which it was a kind of strange vision of anti-urbanism. He talked about creating new cities, breaking people out of the ghettos of inner cities, and creating new cities, in which people would have economic opportunity, education that wasn't what they had at the time,

and also civic opportunities. And he really did see the connection between the political challenge of ending segregation, ending racial discrimination, as being a critical part of that process of economic development. Great. You could say the same things about the great society. Yeah. But you ask about Schreiber. And I do think it's him. Schreiber was an extraordinarily good choice for that. In the sense that he's a link back to the Kennedy administration, gives a confidence in that respect. He's also a very skilled politician, works well with Congress, is committed, but is politically astute. I mean, what Lyndon Johnson discovers very quickly, when he tries to undertake some of the programs later on, is they're pretty messy.

It works out well if you're planning them, but when you actually put them in the process, you get into the same kinds of political conflicts you always do when resources are being challenged, and power is being challenged. Then all of a sudden, it's a lot mercier and a lot more difficult. In June, the civil rights bill is moved through that. And it's at the 7th. What does Johnson have to do to make this happen? How do Humphrey inducing play at all? The problem for Johnson in pushing through the civil rights bill was the same problem it had been for Kennedy, and for anyone who wanted to promote civil rights. And that is the filibuster. And the fact that you had this solid, deep south core of senators, solidly democratic, solidly opposed to any federal action on civil rights,

and a handful of other conservative Republicans outside the region, which made it impossible to move forward. How do you break that lawgen? Pardon? How do you break that lawgen? Well, what Johnson realized, and it grew out of his own experience in moving legislation through, was that he had to establish support from Everett Dirksen, the Republican minority leader. And in the case, he had a good conduit to him. Hubert Humphrey is vice president, and Dirksen got along extremely well and so did Johnson. And I don't think you can attribute it purely to personal contacts, but if you go back and look, there was a tremendous amount of interaction between Johnson and Dirksen in meetings and telephone conversations that two of them had in which they talked this through.

And Johnson did his usual selling process, and it was hard for Dirksen. Dirksen was a conservative Republican. Very revered property rights was very respectful of the wing, the most conservative wing of his party. But I don't, you can't sell something to somebody who doesn't want to buy it. And in the end, I think Everett Dirksen really did decide, as he said at one point, the time has come. This is something we, maybe not five years ago, maybe not ten years ago, but now the time has come. And he got up and exhausted after all this time in the summer of 1964 and gave a speech in which he passionately and very articulately argued for why the time had come to pass civil rights bill. And as a result, I think only five or six Republican senators ended up voting against the civil rights bill.

So Dirksen becomes a kind of hero in this process, along with Lyndon Johnson. And Johnson is willing to give him all kinds of praise. I mean, and a lot of bourbon. And a lot of bourbon. Johnson gives him a lot of hospitality, a lot of bourbon, and a lot of praise. And so that when he signs the civil rights bill, there is Everett Dirksen right by his side. And it's an example of a masterful politician pulling all the strings, personal, political, in every way to get what he wants. Yeah, I think Dirksen paraphrases Victor Hugo, right? That's right, I forgot. No, nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. That's right. Give me that one. Yeah, yeah, that he said in his speech to the Senate to paraphrasing Victor Hugo, nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. And he said the time is here. Goldwater on the other hand also makes a speech in that debate.

Yes, yes. Not an easy speech to make. No. And it's because he's a really conflict to make about it. I think so. What do you think deep down in his heart, Barry Goldwater wanted to do? If he hadn't been... Well, Goldwater was, of course, there were two considerations here. One was his own personal belief. No one has ever... He may have been insensitive on issues of race at times, as many Americans were, but no wherever accused Barry Goldwater being a racist. There's no evidence that he was. To the contrary. Yeah, yes, yes. So it clearly wasn't a matter of racism on the part of Barry Goldwater, but he did genuinely believe that the federal government should not take a role in this. This change had to come from people's hearts. It had to come naturally and not by coercion. And that was a standard position. And the other reality is the politics.

Excuse me, it's worse than I am. And you can cough too now. Oh, correct. Okay. Okay. So you've got a personal feeling and a political ideology, which says the federal government should not be coercing people into these states' rights. He believes in states' rights. There's also the political factor. I mean, he said at one point, when he began looking at the politics of 1964 and trying to get elected, we go hunting where the ducks are. Well, the ducks were in the South to begin with. That's going to be the foundation of what he believes can be his electoral victory. And he knows that if he comes out in any way

supporting federal intervention on civil rights, he's not going to care the South. I was just about to ask you something on that. I looked down at my next topic, and I flew right out of my brand. You're too young for this term. I know. Because his position is such a really difficult one. Yeah. Goater is aware, of course, that all the Americans may be, sort of middle of the road, Americans. He talks about extremism and the pursuit of liberty is no vice. But he knows that he's got to get the support

of middle Americans in the moderate wing of the Republican Party. And even though they may be ambivalent about civil rights, there's an awful lot that's happened in 1963 and 1964. I mean, in summer of 1964, you have the Schwerner-Goodman-Chainy murders in which three civil rights workers are doing nothing but trying to get people to vote and get them the right to vote. They're taken out by a bunch of clansmen murdered, buried in a earthen dam, and then dug up, and at least the stories were beaten to death before they were killed. So Americans are conflicted. On the one hand, they think it may be too radical. On the other hand, clearly, people have the right to vote. Clearly, there are aspects of Southern race relations that need to change, and so how are you going to do it? And so he has to walk this very delicate balancing act

and not think in the end it's an impossible one. I don't see how anybody could balance appealing to impassioned angry white southerners. At the same time, I'm appealing to moderate Republicans and even independent voters. Good. What is the missing Mississippi three? What is that due to the debate? What is it due to Johnson's situation? And in the end, I think they're found the week before the Republican National Party. I cast a shadow over the... Oh gosh, I wish there was a somewhere I could get there to work in that great story about them. When they're trying to find their... You probably know this when they were dredging the Pearl River trying to find the three civil rights workers who had been killed in the summer of 1964. The whites gathered on the bank

and several of them began yelling to the FBI men. Just got a welfare check and wave it over the water and they'll come to the top. So that there was... I don't know why I got off on that, but that was just such a... But the three civil rights workers who went down, Shorner Goodman and Cheney, Johnson could have downplayed it somewhat. Quite the contrary. He called up J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, who was not terribly enthusiastic about civil rights. He said, you do what you need to do, what you have to do. I don't care how much you spend. I don't care who you've been, but you find out who killed these three young men. And then he makes it a big issue, which particularly when their bodies are found about a week before the Republican convention, it's really embarrassing. Because here are the headlines about the murders of these three young men who were simply trying to improve

the condition, one black, two white, of Mississippi, African Americans. And there is the Republican convention with Barry Goldwater accepting the nomination, talking about extremism, and coming out against the Civil Rights Act. It's not good timing. I'm sure that's not the way that Goldwater would have described it, but it wasn't good timing. Isn't the critical issue, the fact that there's one black and two white? Yes, yes. There had been, I mean, that was summer 64. The Civil Rights Movement, the whole purpose was not only to work in Mississippi, to try to register people to vote. It was to bring white kids there, because not cynically, but realistically, Civil Rights advocates knew that blacks had been killed in Mississippi for a generation. Young blacks, older blacks,

and it would get three paragraphs in the New York Times. But when you bring young middle-class white college kids from well-connected families, no one at the time thought, we're going to use them as kind of sacrificial lambs. But when it happened, that's exactly what it was. All of a sudden, instead of the three paragraphs on page 19A of the New York Times, it was front page. It was every news story was dominated by it for several weeks. And the whole freedom summer became a kind of national exposure for what was going on in the deep south, and Mississippi was not the rest of the south, but to television, and to the media, and to many Americans, that's what it became, the south. Right, right, really good. Yeah, again, Bob Moses,

in Oxford, Ohio, was freedom projects, people doing this. I think it's one of those forks. He's saying, choose. Yeah. And he's saying, when they announced that they were going to have this freedom summer, they of course set up in Ohio, this training school, some of my friends went. And it was pretty tough because they were told quite frankly. You know, you're not going down to carry some placards down the street in even Birmingham or Atlanta. You're going to be going to rural Mississippi, in many cases, rural Alabama, the deep south, but particularly, Mississippi is where they were going to focus. The deepest, the most southern place of the south, and you're going to be in danger. And there were some, some of the participants didn't stay. But in a sense, Moses,

Bob Moses, who was speaking to them, said, you have to choose now. If you're willing to do this, in a sense, I'm sure it seemed melodramatic, but didn't seem melodramatic to the people at the time, you've got to lay your body on the line. You've got to be willing to risk this if you really care about what we're trying to do, which is to end that system of segregation and total racial repression in Mississippi and the south. That was fantastic. I believe Wallace, till the end, in case you got that. The one thing that I think might be interesting about Wallace is the impact on the Democratic Party, the fact that he draws, when he runs from, in primaries, he gets over a third to a half of the vote in northern states. It's just a blip. It's right. It's interesting from, yeah. And it's 68 is when it's, yeah, when it's critical. Yeah. So, Goldwater wins California.

Yeah. About 3% of these points, I think, if our memory is correct, yeah. That's, you want to just give me an overview moment about California, I was kind of just move on. Yeah, well, just very quickly, because I think, but up until the Republican primary in California, it's one of the biggest states as the most delegates. And up until then, certainly, a month or two before, everyone assumed that Governor Rockefeller would be the candidate, certainly the establishment supported to Rockefeller. But by this time, he had a number of strikes against him. He was divorced. And that 1964, a divorced person running for president, wasn't a good idea, even though Stevenson had been divorced, that was different. The main thing though was that he represented this traditional, not even the moderate,

but the liberal wing of the Republican Party. Another tweet will be, tweet will dumb Republican, very much like the Democrats. And the assumption was that in California, which was the big state and wasn't a southern state, it wasn't a small conservative rural state that Rockefeller would win. Instead, the goldwater people, they organized, and you talk about organizing in California, they did from the grassroots and hit the streets. And air goldwater, one by three percentage points. And that was it. And I think, well, we know that goldwater felt confident at that point, and that Rockefeller felt he had lost. And that sets the foundation then for his victory, along with the southern delegates that come in in the San Francisco Convention in 1964. Didn't help that happy, had a happy moment on the Sunday. I mean, the baby?

Yes, yes. We have had, in the case, for example, in the 1950s, we've had, sorry, back up here, forget that. It's one thing to have a divorce candidate. It's one thing else to have your new wife, forget about the old, your new wife having a baby just before the convention. Just as it's normally good luck to have a, for a politician to have a baby, this was not a perfect time to have a new child with your second wife. All the way? Well, as I made corrections, I had to back up. I'm trying to look between the, you and the ten, yeah, yeah. Right, baby. So, Goldwater on the one hand is this insurgent. But there's a great quote of a guy who said,

you know, watching Goldwater campaign, it was hard to believe sometimes that he actually was a man trying to become president. Right, right, right. What about that? Yeah, he has, I mean, he, Barry Goldwater wasn't the first person to choose close friends and close associates. But for the most part, other candidates came from larger states who had operated on the national stage more. But he surrounded himself with essentially Arizona friends. And Arizona friends who were political, but were zealots too. And believed as strongly as Barry Goldwater. Did sure they wanted to win. But more than most political candidates, Goldwater was driven by ideas. And unlike a lot of people who are so obsessed, it's one of the more attractive things about Barry Goldwater. He wanted to be president,

but not so much that he was willing to make the kind of compromises every president, to a successful presidential candidate has to make. And as a result, he went out and seemed to make a, seemed to have a pattern of going to audiences and saying things they didn't want to hear. I mean, he would go to groups of old people and talk about the dangers of Social Security or he would go to groups that were interested in civil rights or sympathetic to civil rights. And he would say he believed in civil rights, but not the federal government to do anything about it. And just down the line, are people particularly were concerned about his rather aggressive attitude toward the Soviet Union. And rather than try to reassure them that he wasn't going to take any precipitous action, he would get out with audiences and with this fire and brimstone kind of speeches that essentially, as someone said,

emphasized his willingness to push the button if he was really rattled a little bit or if someone really pushed him on it. He refused to- What was the line about the Kremlin? Yeah, well, at one point he was concerned. Goldwater was concerned about our ICBMs and that they weren't being kept up to date and they didn't have enough of them and what he wanted was to be sure that we had an ICBM that could be lobbed into the men's room of the Kremlin without any difficulty. Well, as you can imagine, for a master politician like Lyndon Johnson, I mean, this is like taking candy from a baby. All you had to do was emphasize, in his case, my steadiness, I'm not going to take any precipitous action. Remember, we've just come from a frightening kind of confrontation with the Soviet Union over Cuba in which we did seem to be on the verge of a nuclear war. And now you've got a candidate who's out rattling the bombs.

And so Lyndon Johnson, I'm calm. I'm not going to take any precipitous action. You need a steady hand on the wheel here. And at the same time, he turns around and does some things until it is quite shocking. Well, of course, 1964 is the year of the famous, what's commercial? Daisy. Right, yeah. 1964 is the year of the Famine Daisy commercial in which the little girl, yeah, 1964 is the year of the famous Daisy commercial in which the little girl sits there and pulls off the Daisy petals. And at the end, looks up, and then you see this mushroom cloud. Well, the irony is that that commercial wasn't really shown very much. And was shown a few times and then pulled. But it had such an extraordinary kind of resonance that as has become more common today, it has a kind of life which goes beyond the initial kind

of use of that, because it encapsulates so many of the fears that Americans have. They're visceral fears about gold. And Stanley Kubrick's got to get moving. Right? I'm not sure how I see how I learn to... How I... I was going to love the bomb. That's right. I learned to stop working. Yeah, try to... That's right, Dr. Strangelove, yeah. Oh, yes, I went to see Dr. Strangelove when it came out. Stanley Kubrick's film about the blackest black comedy, I think, Dr. Strangelove, which came out at the time, at least for sophisticated Americans, reinforced the notion that goldwater really was a kind of loose cannon who was ready to push the button and send us all fall into a nuclear fireball around the country, I think. And then in the convention, what does he say? What is... What's... I mean, what do you...

It is... It is finally... It's as though... One of my... One of my more left-wing friends said this all. But a critic said that it's as though you've finally been released from the asylum into public and you get to say exactly what you've always wanted to say. And what he wanted to say was, I'm an extremist. I'm a radical. Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And that extremism to many Americans, even those who were upset and angry in 1964, is how we want extremism, the word stuck. And when you actually sit down and read his speech, it's not that radical. But clearly, goldwater had not learned how much power, a single phrase, a certain element of a speech could have in terms of reinforcing ideas that had already existed about him, I think.

And the problem with Scram and his letter of convention had already kind of raised the issue. Yes, yes. So to be fair, there was a certain kind of calculus on the half of goldwater, right? They had a problem that wasn't going the way. So all was going on again. Yeah. And there was also... I mean, there was generally... You understand that. I'm not sure I can explain it. But there was within the Republican Party, what we have to remember about 1964, was that the Republican Party that conservatives won in nominating goldwater, but there was still a very large, moderate, even some liberal members of the party. And goldwater had to, in effect, show that he was the big dog here, and Scranton, goldwater, he put them in their place. This is what this campaign is going to be about. And it's interesting that the campaign... Did Scranton and goldwater... I'm sorry. Yeah. Go back. He realized that he had figures like Scranton and Rockefeller who continued to support

this very moderate liberal policies of the past Republican Party, and he wanted to put his imprint on the party and to make sure that this campaign was about a choice, not simply a continuation of what had gone before it. And that's what, in his speech, that's what he's really setting out to do, is to make sure that the American people see this as a kind of choice between the politics of the past and what he sees as the politics of the future. And at one point, he says to some guy that I'm going to lose this election, probably real big, but I'm going to lose it on my own terms. That's right. That's right. That's right. And I think one of the reasons that this is not relevant to this, but one of the reasons that John Kennedy liked, they liked each other very much, was that he said, he was so much of us the word that Kennedy used to describe it. He was so direct. You didn't have to worry about him squirming away from you

because he was going to be right in your face there. And that was true. Barry Goldwater simply never wanted to be president enough to renounce his police. And that's what makes him years later, such an attractive figure. I think even for liberals who disagreed with him profoundly, you can truthfully say, a gold war. This is a man who by and large stood by his principles. After the convention, there's a little altercation, there's a street in Harlem, a police officer kills a boy, and something utterly unprecedented happens. What happened? Well, you have the first 1964. It seems so pale in comparison with later years, but you had the first of the race riots. Riots.

Some people see them as the beginnings of uprisings. But at that point, it was still just riots. Some people call them goldwater rallies. Yeah, right. Goldwater rallies, because clearly, even though these disturbance in Patterson, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, in New York, these were relatively minor in 1964. They frighten Americans. The last time we'd had major race riots was in World War II. That was the generation earlier. And as a number of pundits pointed out, they were in effect goldwater rallies, in which it mobilized people who saw this as the future. And in a sense, they were, because 64 ushers in, what begins to be a series of long-hot summers of racial disturbances in America. But it begins in 1964.

Why is it the goldwater rally? Because television in 1964, it's difficult to think about. You got three major networks. It's not like today, where you have hundreds of channels or whatever. And just as the television networks are going to bring home the war in Vietnam, they bring home the war in the streets. There's nothing more exciting than conflict. And sending the television film cameras out to these relatively modest riots on the screen, nationwide, three major networks. They become magnified. And they create just as the fear of crime, local television begins to emphasize, if it bleeds, it leads. All of these things, I think, contribute to a deep sense of insecurity. And the riots, even more than the generalized kinds of issue of crime,

it seems to bring up in ways that Americans would never admit to themselves, I think, a particularly deep racial component. I mean, these rioters are black. And even though they may be sympathetic to the civil rights, some aspects of the civil rights movement, nobody's sympathetic to the riots. And I'm sorry, back that up. Even though white Americans are outside the South, they're generally sympathetic to many of the goals of the civil rights movement. No white Americans are sympathetic to what's going on and the cities when they erupt into violence. Right. Sorry about the Democratic Convention, per se. Oh, God. Nightmare. Well, I mean, it was such a crime, but things are...

Well, what a contrast. Yeah. But it's so interesting that both parties this year are just being, in a year when Johnson should have been, I mean, ultimately, yeah, but he should have been, coasting. Yeah. What happened in the Atlantic city? And what's the N.F.B.P.? Well, Lyndon Johnson, no one was going to challenge Lyndon Johnson in 1964. I mean, he had had a few bumps along the way, but like any politician, but particularly the case of landslide, Lyndon. He always operated on the assumption that he didn't have enough votes. And moreover, as he is, even though all of his advisors were telling him, and I think he knew deep down, he was going to win the election in 1964, absent some catastrophe, he wanted it to be a landslide, and he didn't want any blips along the way. And what happened was he ran up against this problem

in that the Democratic Party in the South was still dominated by white segregationists. And that meant many of these delegations that came were all white. They were totally segregationists. They might be willing to vote eventually for Lyndon Johnson, but very reluctantly, excuse me just a sec. But the very grass roots movement that Lyndon Johnson had encouraged now comes back to biting. And in Mississippi, in particular, you have a group that forms some Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. And it's a biracial group, but the main stream Democratic Party is all white segregationists, and a group of, that's not quite true, a backup here.

In Mississippi, the mainline Democratic Party is certainly not that sympathetic for the most part to the civil rights movement. And so the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party is formed, it's biracial, but heavily black, to demand that they be seated, not the segregationist Mississippi Democratic Party. Well, by rights, they should have been, because they were a much more democratic party, open to everyone. But the last thing that Lyndon Johnson wanted was to have a disturbance on the floor. And so he sends poor, half-less Hubert Humphrey out there to try to negotiate a deal. And what he comes to realize is, Hubert Humphrey comes to realize that these people are passionate, and they're not traditional politicians who are used to accepting half a loaf. Their God is on their side,

right is on their side, and they're not going to take a compromise, and they find this charismatic Fannie Lou Hamer, who is essentially a self-taught activist, who is incredibly eloquent, who gets to the convention, and speaks out in a way that mesmerizes advocates of civil rights, calling for the seating of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and the end, they're not seated. But it does give Lyndon Johnson a lot of headaches along the way. Yeah. Oh, of course he cried pretty easily. But no, but sincerely always there. His speech during the civil rights debate is three and a half hour, and I'll see you before we can jump in. It was a pretty great line. Don't remember that. Yeah.

I should have looked at her. There's a new biography. It's very good that this came out. Yeah. There's a new biography. It's not published yet. I had a student from the Netherlands, who's actually written a very good biography. I taught it in the Netherlands one year. Anyway, he's written a biography of Eastland. I read a part of Eastland, I think I might have read it a while back. Yeah. It describes Eastland's grandfather who's killed by black men. Yeah. Eastland's father supervises the twin lynching of the man and his girlfriend. And the disemboweling of them in the lawn in front of the black church in sunflower. Yeah. Yeah. It's in St. C. Yeah. It's a book. It's a book. It's a book. But, Fannie Lehamer. Why was her performance so electrifying? And ultimately,

what happens with her and comforts? Everyone's there. It's like, it's a guy that's King, Hamer, Rustin, Luther, Joe Rao. Everyone's there. Yeah. Yeah. What? It's just like people are saying, we got it. It's a great moment. Yeah. To me, the confrontation is a confrontation between Fannie Lehamer and in a sense, on behalf of the movement, and she's this grassroots figure speaking not through the men, as they usually do, not through Martin Luther King, not through farmer, not through all, but speaking on behalf of the grassroots movement to the establishment, civil rights establishment, Joe Rao, and Hubert Humphrey, and these people who passionately care about it, but what Fannie Lehamer is saying is, you can't direct this anymore. We're taking charge now. We're the ones that are going to decide the direction to take. And that is a very painful process, I think,

even for people who believe in civil rights, they usually believe they had better ideas about how to do this, and how to compromise, and how to twist in term, and to Hamer, and I think the movement she represented, this was of course political, and instead it was political, but it was fundamentally a moral issue, and they felt that they had this great morality on their side, this moral crusade that they were leading, and it made it extremely difficult and painful within the Democratic Party. I mean, Hubert Humphrey breaks down and cries in the middle of these, the meeting, and others are clearly distressed. You go back and look, Joe Rao talks about it later on, about how torn he was. On the one hand, he was moved deeply by what she had to say.

On the other hand, he was Todd Dilland and Johnson tried to the establishment, and he wasn't sure that this was going to help them get over the next hump. You had to be unified, you had to work together. And these people, yeah, they wanted to work with you, but they marched to their own drummer, and that was, I think, a difficult moment for the movement at that point. Did it represent a kind of a pivotal moment in the story of the Democratic Party? Yes, yeah. Kind of a part of this. I think the conflict that takes place in 64 with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party doesn't lead African Americans to a band of the Democratic Party, but it does expose this deep tension within the party between black Americans who were impatient, they waited a long time,

and white Americans who may be sympathetic, but are not nearly as much of a hurry, and see this as a process which has to take time and requires a lot of compromises and as a result, it exposes that kind of tension that is going to exist within the Democratic Party, but particularly in the South. I mean, Lyndon Johnson makes his famous statement that with the passage of the Civil Rights Bill that goes to South, he tells Bill Moyers that. And in a sense, he's right. And because even as Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and black governors are now taking their place in the civic process, it's exactly what some Republican strategists see as the future, because what's going to happen is the Democratic Party and the South is going to become increasingly black, and whites are then going to move

from the former Democratic Party into the Republican Party. And so that angry confrontation within the Democratic Party in a sense kind of acts as a foreshadowing for what's going to be coming in the years ahead. Great. They felt, the MFDP felt that they'd lost. Yeah. But there's a sort of a silver line. Yeah. They believe it. No future. The accomplishment which was overshadowed at the time when the convention, Johnson's coronation, which he intended it for it to be. They refused to see the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, but they did draw a set of guidelines and rules that meant it was going to be the last convention in which you would have these white delegations representing the South.

And of course what that means is many of these people are then going to leave the Democratic Party and move into the Republican Party. But it does amount to a kind of victory that wasn't noticed so much at the time. But in the long run it's going to be extremely important. What happens to the South? The Goldwater, two people go down South and campaign during 64. One is Barry Goldwater. And the other is Lady Bird Johnson. Lady Bird Johnson. That's right. Yeah. Victory train there. What's going on in the South? That's 64 campaign was... We remember the Goldwater speeches because he traveled throughout much of the South. And Johnson pretty much stayed out of the region. And I think it was because he knew perfectly well

that he had become a lightning rod for white southerners and virtually any speech, even under the most carefully controlled circumstances. Unless it was to a overwhelming black audience was going to lead to things you don't want to see on television. On the other hand, he assumed, and I think with some reason, that he could send Lady Bird, who was a sweet Texas lady, and that there'd be enough southern chivalry that she wouldn't be shouted down, and no one would throw anything at her. And actually, you know, Miss Johnson was quite intelligent, capable, smart, knowledgeable about politics, and really did have a kind of... not a steel hand, but the velvet globe was always on it. And so she travels through the South on a train, picks up those brave white southern Democrats who were willing to go with them. There weren't very many of them, but they did.

Some of them did. And then it's very effective. I think mainly in mobilizing the beginnings of the black boat in the region, and keeping the Democratic Party essentially alive in the South, which is on the verge of collapsing, and as a result, I don't think it's just because of Lady Bird's trip, but actually, you know, only five southern states end up going for a Barry Goldwater. And the assumption was that he was going to sweep the... not only the entire South, but the border South as well. And instead, he only gets the deepest part of the deep South. Goldwater's down there. And Strom Thurman does something pretty dramatic. Yes. Strom Thurman, in a sense, this is the beginning of... 64 is like this in so many different ways. You can see it as the break begins. Strom Thurman has been a Democrat all his life.

He was a Democratic governor, elected as a Democratic senator from South Carolina. And in 64, he begins talking to his advisors about switching to the Republican Party. No one does this. And they tell him he's crazy. He can't get elected if he switches to the Democratic Party. He'll be finished. I'm sorry. Yeah. They tell him he's great. Yeah. Thurman keeps talking about switching from the Democratic to the Republican Party. And his advisors, all of them, because I've talked to some of them, said, no, this is a disaster. You cannot do this. Well, he does. And he switches to the Republican Party. Now, there's not a landslide of politicians, but he is one of the foremost figures of white southerners in the political process. And his willingness to go to the Republican Party I think opens the gates for what's going to happen

over the next decade. Is it unprecedented what happens in 64 to the Democratic and Republican parties in the South? There have been earlier convulsions in the political process, but you have to go back into the 19th century to see them. There's certainly not nothing like that in the 20th century. I mean, the Democratic Party after the disenfranchisement of African American in the late 19th century was a one-party region. I can't remember the exact percentage of votes, but it seems to me in the 1930s that great liberal Franklin Roosevelt got about 90% of the vote in South Carolina, for example. So the notion that you could suddenly go from that history to 1964 in which South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, now vote for a Republican

is pretty extraordinary. One of my favorite to 1920, I think it was, the state to 19, sorry, in 1924, the Republicans candidate for president of the South Carolina got 2,000 votes. That was it, 1924. When someone asked Cottonhead Smith, the senator about those 2,000, sort of horrified that he only got 2,000 votes. And he said, I'm shocked to learn that 2,000 people voted for a Republican president and horrified to discover they were counted, he said. So by this time, the assumption right or up into the 50s was, yeah, it was a Democratic state, Democratic region. So 64 is a massive turnaround. One thing that comes out of the Goldwater campaign is a young and very good, not young, but a charismatic actor, ex-actor,

makes speech a time for choosing. Tell me about that. It is, excuse me. We'll cover it here. Just tell me, do you like that? If someone going back, how do I say this? Let me think about it just a minute, Steve. In 1964, Ronald Reagan was an actor, kind of a husband actor, television, introducer of television show. Mainly on the talk circuit, a representative general electric and going around and giving his famous free enterprise speech. But what I think no one ever even thought about in 1964 was Ronald Reagan, the former actor, former divorced actor, as a political candidate. But he changed all that in 1964. Push it back.

What was it about what he did that was so... Well, what the American people saw, if they saw it on television, and what was the name of the speech he... A time for choosing. That's right, yeah. He gave this speech a time for choosing, as though it were the first time he had ever given it. In fact, it was a variation on a speech he'd been giving for years. But he had refined it. He was a good actor. And he looked presidential. And what he did in a time for choosing was take many of the themes that Goldwater had espoused and packaged them so much more successfully, not only in terms of his own personality, but in taking some of the harsh ages off of them. And where's Goldwater always sounded a bit scolding? What Ronald Reagan did in a time for choosing is he would do in the future.

Was to take, yes, things are going bad in America. Here's how we can fix it. And describing in these remarkably eloquent terms with a beautiful delivery, here's what we can become if we make the right choices in the future. And I think from that moment on, people may not have thought about him as a political candidate, but he was from 64 on a serious political figure, as we discovered when he later gets elected as governor of California. The election's over. It's the landslide that everyone predicts it's going to be. The pundits, what do they say about great water and conservatism in America? And what are they miss? Well, it's interesting to go back and look, I'm sure the publishers of time in Newsweek and most of the editorial writers on the mainline newspapers would be embarrassed to go back and look now. Because pretty much they said, this is a referendum. We chose.

Goldwater represents the past. London Johnson represents the future. Conservatism was an interesting, this conservative movement was an interesting upsurge, but it's gone. And of course, that was not the case at all. Yes, people were disappointed. But the very passion which had driven them to support goldwater now simply spreads and moves out in a broader political way, I think, after 64. Up until 63, 64 particularly leading up to the campaign. It was very much focused on goldwater and very much focused on the presidential campaign. But after 1964, it's as though that presidential campaign creates the foundations for a much broader kind of political movement that will rebound pretty quickly after 64. Circumstances help them, but it's not over in 64.

What is it about the multiple crossroads of this year? Well, 1964, if you lived in it, you certainly weren't aware that a political choice had been made in the political campaign, but you were not aware of the extent to which we were beginning to turn not only politically, into a different kind of political system, a political America, one which we're still seeing the fruits of today. But it's also culturally, socially, in every other way, beginning to change and changing so rapidly that it's just amazing to me that no one living through the time, not no one, but most people weren't. It was lived day to day, and it's only when you get a little bit of perspective, you see what is happening in 1964 and how great that change is.

Everything from teenagers and their relationships with their parents. I mean, it's from the sort of bottom families up to the political process from top to bottom. Was there one underlying force you think that drove the radical change in 1961? Yes. People argue money and other things. No, I don't agree with that. I think money is important. In 1964, even though... Let me stop here just a second. Is it going to matter if it's going to be... Yeah, it's somewhere in the back. Go ahead. If I had to... Sorry. Social movement, social change, never comes from one, two, three, four, five things. It's always, but if I had to choose to, I would say it's the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam. Both of them challenge even beginning in 1964 as we increase our involvement in a land war in Asia.

As the civil rights movement reaches the kind of crescendo, it challenges much of what has gone on before. First, this notion that we are the great preeminent world power, where the Rome of the middle of the 19th century, we can do whatever we want to as all of a sudden these people, these little yellow people in Vietnam are not doing what we want them to do anymore, just like they didn't do in China. And at home, even though you may have sympathy, Americans got pretty used to a social, racial system in which is pretty stable. There was a stable stability of the grave in some ways, but it was stable. And now that racial system is turning upside down. And it leads to movements in culture and music

and in the way in which people think about authority. I mean, all of these things challenge authority. So you end up with a kind of stage one of transformation of America. That's not very good. I like that. Are there legacies of that period that we're living with today? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Oh, it's just, to me, the great legacy of 1964 is in some ways that turning point in which we look back with nostalgia. Think about it. The steep nostalgia that Americans have for a past that really didn't exist, but we want to think it did. I bet if you were to ask Americans, they would put it just before 1964.

There may be 1960, but back before 1964, that was the good America for many of us today. It was when there wasn't the kind of turmoil that we have. There wasn't the kind of bitterness you could be a Republican and a Democrat. You could actually belong to the same else club and not sit down and shout at each other. So politically, yeah. Socially, culturally. It seems, again, it's nostalgia, but it seems like one America before 1964. Not anymore. So that Goldwater and Johnson weren't just too bad? No. And the campaign, the presidential campaign of 1964, we can overemphasize politics, but it clearly, it does create a kind of political choice, but more than a political choice.

It's a choice between that America the past. And it was the America the past that Goldwater was trying to recreate, I think. And in America that was becoming, that Lyndon Johnson thought he could shape and create, even though he couldn't. But it is that moment in which we turn, grudgingly and hesitantly, I think, away from that past, even as we look back on it with nostalgia. Why is it important to remember 1964? I think for all the reasons that we've talked about, and I'm mainly a political historian, and if you care about politics, you don't see them as a be-all and end-all of society, but you do see them as a very important kind of litmus test of what's important and what's not important. In 1964, the irony is that,

even though Barry Goldwater lost and lost badly, he did create this choice, at least one set of choices that will continue on in the future. And by creating that start choice between himself, the Republican Party, he tried to create then, and Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic Party, he, in effect, forces Americans to make choices that they hadn't had to make in the past. Great. I think we're done. That was great. Let's get room-toned. We need 30 seconds to sign. This will be room-toned for Dan Carter, 30 seconds. And room-toned.

Dan, that was...