American Experience; 1964; Interview with Todd Gitlin, Sociologist, part 2 of 2

So much I want to go over to you. Who's revolutionary about the great society? Johnson gives that speech made 22nd at the University of Michigan wildly well received by the crowd. What's revolutionary about it? In what way did it represent something new that would be proposed? I don't think it's ideologically new. I think it represents the renewal of a tradition of the collective creation of a nation, which is devoted to the general good, which has an ideal, which transcends the individual aspirations of individuals. It propounds that there's not just an American dream of self advancement,

which subsequently has come to seem like the ultimate of all objectives. It propounds that there is a society that operates on social principle that binds people together, that the national destiny is more than the sum of a lot of individual destinies, and that it's destructive, it's not destructive. It has to do with the growth of human relations and human decency, not with the growth of military power. Whatever you want to make, whether you like it or not, I don't think it's brand new. I think that the rhetoric of the great society would have been right at home on the left wing of the New Deal. But after the intervening years, after the Eisenhower years and the kind of tenuous gestures toward liberalism under Kennedy, the idea of actually pouring recent, the idea of a project, the idea that now we have an agenda,

and the agenda is reform governed by adherents to egalitarian ideals and communitarian ideals. It looks new, and it sounds new, and it looks as though it's actually a plausible political future. And why is it possible in 1964? Well, the country is rich. The old order of, you know, sort of enforced feudalism in the deep south is being dug up, it's being battered. It's finished. I mean, the old order is finished. And we're getting educated, and we're, you know, we're reimbunked. We're not only educated, but we also dance. You know, it looks like it's like a national revival meeting for the grand tradition of American liberalism.

It looks like a joyful reunion of the most high-quality ideals about a national destiny, which is more than simple self-agrandism. Great. Great. Thanks. This is probably the biggest moment of the year on some levels is the Civil Rights Bill. Why is it, why is it this time? Why, after all, the Bill of Usters and all the Bill, the graveyard of Civil Rights Bill in the Senate. This time? I'm not a close student of the intricacies of the Bill, but I believe that what happened is that Johnson called in his chips. And the chips were there to be collected. I mean, Johnson had, or was in the process of making between that moment and the Atlantic City Convention.

Johnson had decided to turn the corner and that if that meant that the Democratic Party was going to forego Southern support, the support of what used to be called the Solid South Soviet chips were down. It's an unbelievable ballsy thing to do politically. You bet. Can you imagine presenting something that risky now? No. Now, of course, he had a great wave of sympathy after the assassination. And there was a movement lighting fires. You know, there was the Civil Rights Movement of many different sorts, but many, there were many organizations from the most militant to the most sedate. They were well federated. They had good, pretty good working relations with Johnson. There was a lot of commerce back and forth, a lot of conversation between the Civil Rights leadership,

including some of the Liberal Unionists like Walter Ruther of the Auto Workers Union. There was much conversation and friendly conversation with some suspicions thrown in between the Civil Rights leadership and the White House. And so you had both the fervor of the outside movement. You had the fervor of the outsiders clamoring in a focused and morally compelling way for reform. And the inside political savvy operators who are beginning to work out what a new political landscape is going to look like now that these changes take place. And for while, they're running on parallel tracks. The militants in Mississippi, those who have been organizing for years trying to organize unregistered, oppressed, murdered black people. Conceived of a plan to mobilize northern support, northern aid, in order to put the country on trial.

That is to make Mississippi front burner news. There were civil rights workers and supporters being murdered. This had been going on for years. It was not a huge story. Now the momentum seemed to be there to put this, the reality of Mississippi's barbarism on television, on the front page, and to make it a national cause. And the idea, quite brilliant idea, was to import students, young people, mostly young people, and many were white, most were white, in fact, to put them on the line with stemming from the recognition, which was historically accurate. That when black civil rights workers were murdered, the country could live with that. But okay, other people are in danger. It looks like something else.

So, several hundred people were trained to act non-violently and to do all kinds of supportive work, school work, training in various kinds of skill, all building up to the creation of a vehicle for the mobilization of black voters who had been kept off the books for decades. So, the idea was that the new recruits would do a lot of work and somehow in the national theater, they would be the embodiments of good. Was it a cynical strategy?

I don't think it was cynical. No, nobody knew that white kids were going to get killed. I don't think they were astonished that civil rights workers were killed, and since most of those being brought in were white, they were going to be white. But I don't think it was cynical in the sense that they were courting victimization. I think they wanted the project made sense in its own terms. What happened in Harlem that summer that also sort of shocked the country? The riots. We're going to come back to Atlantic City, right? Yeah, okay. There was anger pent up at police misconduct in Northern cities, Harlem, one of them. It's not the first time there had been a riot in Harlem, but there was something cooking up, and it was, you could say, as sociologists have been saying for 200 years, a revolution of rising expectations.

I think, because of what was going on in the South, that black people were not going to be passive, we're not going to be taking the Billy Club as it for granted. In that atmosphere, especially during the summer, yet one more moment of brutality, one more instance of mistreatment, and there's a lot of Tinder ready to burn up. But it wasn't simply about police misconduct. It was about subordination. It was about low wages. It was about bad schools. It's about, hey, the Brown V Board of Education decision took place 10 years ago. What's going on? It's about poverty. It's about racial subordination. What was the national reaction to? Horror. You know, we don't, we're Americans, we're orderly, we're today.

The Civil Rights leadership was dismayed. It wanted to be nonviolent. It was nonviolent. It tried to cool the riot. I think the Civil Rights leadership at some level recognized that if they didn't actually get big reforms in place, that there was going to be more of this sort of disruption and outrage. Yeah, it's still coming, but this is also a little window into the split. It's gone on in the black room, and I think between, you know, sort of Malcolm X, King, kind of mainstream versus... Well, don't, don't, don't call Malcolm X a civil rights person. He was not. I mean, it's a common mistake. But, you know, he was contemptuous of civil rights. He had spoken of the August 63 march as the farce on Washington. I guess there's any more Ella Baker and those folks in the sneaker who begin to be sort of more militant and start saying, this isn't working.

This is an old story, the tension between the more and less, the more militant and the more gradualist, all movements go through this. You can find it at work in 100 years earlier. You can find that it worked 50 years earlier, and we find it again today. So it was inevitable that there would be strategic differences and also differences of identity. What do you think, what's the story you're enrolled in? Is it a story of rupture toward a new society, or is it a story of incremental change? Right, right. Do I seem to be flagging? No, I don't know. I just mean sometimes. Yeah. Because I know Atlantic City and Tunkin Gulf were kind of bling-pins for you about what happened. Why is what happened in the Tunkin Gulf such as a watershed moment meeting?

But Johnson was running for election as a peace candidate. We seek no wider war. And all of a sudden there's this incandescent war moment. There's a hysteria about our ships being fired upon. Of course, we know now that the story that was coming out of Washington was a massive distortion. This is now acknowledged by the official military history. And suddenly we're involved in a shootout with these diabolical boats that belong to the country whose border we're sailing along. And Johnson avails himself of the moment to cash in on the avalanche of support and rally around the flag moment.

And the upshot is that the suspicion and they unease that was at a loss in the political class was marginalized, was suppressed, self-suppressed. You got unanimous vote in the House of Representatives supporting this. You do anything you want, Mr. President, resolution. And you get two dissents in the Senate. Bless their hearts, Wayne Morrison, Ernst Greening. They deserve a moment in your film. Badly underappreciated figures. And even senators who had some suspicion about what was up in American policies in Vietnam were coaxed with Jay William Fulbright, the main one, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and one of Johnson's Southern colleagues from the fight against civil rights or the ambivalent relation to civil rights. Fulbright, whose support was awfully important, was garnered. He was co-opted.

But I mean, suddenly the possibility of big war is made vivid. We have not just, we have planes, we have a bombardment, we have some conspicuous ostentatious press conferences and all kinds of alarms. There's a sense that renewed apocalypse might be upon us. I mean, remember at this point, the Korean War had ended in 1953. So now we're more than a decade out from any large-scale military action and American forces are involved. And suddenly, well, maybe we're not done with that. How did it play with STS? How did it play with Tom Getland at that year? Did you recognize something that had just gone down or did it take?

I certainly did. I certainly recognized that this was big. STS certainly recognized that this was big. You know, there was a big fight in STS about what to say about Johnson. Not about Tonkin. I don't think anybody in STS approved of the Tonkin raids. But there was a big argument at our National Council meeting in November about whether to endorse Johnson. And the position that prevailed was symbolized by the slogan, part of the way with LBJ, which I opposed by the way I didn't want to go part of the way. And I didn't vote for it. The first year I was eligible to vote, and I didn't vote for LBJ. But the dominant sentiment was, you know, he's a mixed bad. Well, you know, there was fear of gold war. There was fear of the record essence of the right. And there was a part of STS, influential part of STS, that felt more or less comfortable being the left wing of the Democratic Party.

By the way, it was at the end of that year. It was just before New Year's 1965 that STS decided to organize a national demonstration against the war in Vietnam. So we took the escalation seriously enough to decide to thrust ourselves into the national political arena by doing that. Yeah, I was going to get that. But let's talk about now. Was it Tonkin that flipped the switch? It wasn't Tonkin by itself. But, I mean, yeah, Tonkin was, you know, Tonkin was the switch. I mean, it sort of Tonkin was the revelation that Johnson was going to take was had already taken the country onto a war. And that there was something of a hysteria about Vietnam being the symbolic collision point between the forces of good and forces of evil. And we'd better step up to this moment.

Somehow we, I think we smelled very big trouble. I don't know that we could have imagined just how big and bad and long it was going to be. But we, we took it very seriously. I think you were, I mean, that sounds so presumptuous. I mean, we were a tiny organization, a few thousand members, you know, a couple of dozen chapters. But we thought we had to step up. I think you've written that there was a certain more pedestrian reason that you first thought about too, which was if there was a rival organization that was getting ready to deal with Vietnam protest, or was that? No. No, it's not true. I mean, there was no. Nothing else, because I didn't remember that there was anybody else. I mean, there were, there was a group called the Student Peace Union, which was, which had been bigger a couple of years ago, but they weren't doing it. I mean, nobody was, I mean, there was a small, there was a demonstration in New York that somebody organized it.

When Madam New came in, I think it was October, November of 63, there was, there was some protest, but I mean, obviously, we also thought it would sort of heighten our visibility to take on this duty. Turned out to be 25,000 people, which was vastly bigger than we anticipated. So, you know, it sort of felt, we felt that we arrived. Now, August 6th, Johnson's supposed to be going to his coronation. What happened? August 6th. Oh, is that the date? God, I think I'm going to say August 6th, I think of Hiroshima. Well, Johnson was, Johnson had pulled together the strings of power. He had, he had retained the Kennedy High Command, so that he could present himself as the, as the official continuity of Camelot.

And he had a pretty good working relations with the leadership of the Civil Rights Movement, at least the more moderate wing of it, and he was the undisputed chief of the Democratic Party. He was writing on it. He had gotten the Civil Rights Bill passed, the other legislation was cooking. He reigned supreme, and thus his indignation discussed when these rowdy, old dressed, ill mannered, not polished, sharecroppers, and their supporters in the, in SNCC and CORE and other Civil Rights organizations, show up and sort of bust into his party.

The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, yes. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was, was threatening not, not to his actual political power, but to his driven need to be the, the control chief, the control freak and chief. This is our party. It's, it's, it's a coronation. And, you know, so what are, how do these people sneak in? Well, he was always, you know, he saw Kennedy as the, you know, as the masked and rudder, you know, lurking at the gates, and all oppositions sort of collapsed into this, this force, which was both, you know, sort of sexy and, and, and, and, it was both sexy and high class, which meant he was de-classed in relation to it. All kinds of reason for him to be suspicious of it. So, you know, there's this, you know, there's one of the extraordinary moments during the, the Atlantic City Democratic Convention is when, if Fannie Lou Hamer, the, extraordinary force from the Delta Region of Mississippi, testifying before the Credentials Committee about having been,

being savaged by the white racists and who were, in fact, Democrats. And Johnson was evidently so appalled at this intrusion, which was not just politically dissonant, but, but, but somehow de-classay, that in order to get that woman off the air, he summoned the press conference on the spot, live television, just to get the camera away. I mean, imagine, Lyndon Johnson, you know, at this peak moment is quivering because this unlettered, you know, big woman is testifying, you know, in plain speech about doubting America. That unnerved him. No, it somehow, you know, sort of, it made him look petty and it made him look weak.

And the networks turned around that night and played it over and over again. I didn't know that, but, you mean, her test, the testifying, yeah. Yeah, they didn't like being taken advantage of and, you know, they didn't love Johnson. They weren't in his bag. He worked, you know, he sends Longdale and Humphrey to put the fire out. And it's just amazing meeting. I mean, Wilkins, King, Hamer, Rustin, Worther, Moses, Joe Raul. They're all there, trying to figure out what the hell we did here. These people, I mean, you know, give them their due that some of these people had been in the trenches. You know, Humphrey was a civil rights hero in 1948.

The Minnesota Party, the Democratic former Labor Party was as liberal a branch of the Democratic Party as existed. You know, Ruth or Raul, these were, these were liberal heroes. And Johnson was in his fashion committed to the enlargement of rights, the great society and so on. And why won't these people put down their personality, petty, vindictive, distracting notions and sign up. You know, there's one army here. We're marching. I'm the head of the army. What the hell are they doing? You know, his lives measure stay. And in the end, Humphrey, they're trying to compromise. Humphrey has this exchange. He's crying. Well, Humphrey was, you know, Humphrey was felt, you know, engorged by satisfaction and having been tapped by Johnson.

And fearful of Johnson, who of course knew how to play on weaknesses, had him whimpering. And, and here was, you know, here was Humphrey. And not only Humphrey, I mean, here were Roy Wilkins, the head of the NAACP telling Fannie Lou Hamer that she was a fool. She didn't understand politics. I mean, the cleavage between the moral righteousness of the movement and the business's usual approach of Johnson and his supporters could not have been more flagrant. And, and here's Humphrey, who really was a liberal hero. I want to accentuate this. When I, when I had been involved in the early 60s in movement against nuclear weapons, Humphrey was the great exponent of nuclear disarmament in the United States Senate.

He really had a grand reputation with the, you know, sort of the moderate left. So, you know, Johnson made him choose. And Humphrey was willing to, to be Johnson's ventriloquist. It's a, it's a tragic moment. Johnson wins. Humphrey wins. And, and they both lose. How do they force it? There's a compromise. They tried to, the administration and supporters tried to work out a symbolic gesture that would enable the left of the civil rights movement to claim a certain victory because they would have nominal seats at the convention. And, they would be, and the official Democratic Party, which wasn't even willing to endorse Johnson, would be, would be driven out of the next convention in 1968.

So, if you were an incrementalist, a gradualist, and you'd been fighting on these fronts for decades, what Johnson was offering was a deferred victory. If you were Fannie Lou Hamer, who had been through what she had been through, if you were the other people from the Mississippi Delta, the organizers of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, it was an insult. It was an insult, you know. So, thus you get the famous remark from Fannie Lou Hamer, you know, we didn't come here for no two seats because all of us is tired. There was a clash of worldviews. I say everybody lost because Johnson and Humphrey won a parac victory. They held onto their untouchable power, but what they lost was the possibility of the radical liberal alliance, which had already come this far. It was Vietnam and connection with this that spelled the defeat of the radical liberal alliance. And if you were Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi radicals, you know, sort of basically they had nowhere to go but into a cul-de-sac.

The golden achievements of the Civil Rights Movement were going to culminate in the Selma March and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and then that movement was played out. So, lose, lose. You said it was a sort of, if you look back, you'll get what they're going to happen. It's not in our left, which is just great, because we're just about through where I need to be. Great. How many understand what that moment when the radical liberal coalition collapsed? I mean, it's this Vietnam and the Atlantic city seemed to be these moments where the Soviet Union and the fall ones finally were shown to be. The question at stake was this, where are the authorities as then constituted, capable of smoothing the way toward an unfolding improvement?

Was the great society a vital possibility? But fundamentally, the important thing here is, who has authority? If you believe that these forces, the dominant, the leaders of the government, the leaders of the trade unions, the leaders of the liberal organizations, the leaders of Congress, you believe that they are entitled to have the power they have. Then you believe that they are ushering us toward the good. Or you disbelieve in their authority. You think that they have discredited. You think that they are cowards. You think that they are superannuated. You think that they're dinosaurs. Do you then believe that it is only the outsiders who have to go it alone, that the core institutions are so corrupt, so morally unnerved, so morally defunct, so dividealized, so sinister, that they have to forfeit their authority.

The only people we can count on, the outsiders, is ourselves. That's the choice point. That's what's at stake. And that is going, that divide, which is not just a divide about policies. It's really a divide about identity. It's a divide about what the prevailing spirit will be. It's a divide about whether you have confidence that life under the authorities is proceeding well. Or you don't, and you think that the existing authorities are part of the problem. That was happening in 1964.

Coming out of the Atlantic City decision was to the left devastating. We, I was one of them, were furious with the refusal to seek the delegation. And it was imbitering. Especially I think if you were black and you'd been in the South, and where you were their supporters like us in SDS in the North. It was a slap in the face. You'd been on a trajectory. You'd been ambivalent about the political authorities in Washington. You'd been ambivalent about Kennedy, ambivalent about Johnson. But you had clearly made gains. And there had been palpable goods that came of sort of de facto alliance with the liberal leadership. And so it looked as though that path was open and all of a sudden it looked as though it was closed. And so the news, the sort of the quid pro quo, come back in four years kids and you'll get your present.

It just didn't ring right, it rang tinny and insulted. And so it was, it was even I would say humiliating. And then Vietnam said, you know, these, these, the guys who run things are clueless. And it was around this time that, you know, in the civil rights movement as well as in the, the new left came the sense that the war or that American of sort of aggressive military foreign policy in general was, was the wrong response to the era of decolonization. It was, it was, it stood for a different, a wrong America. And so the cultural cleavage becomes intense. You know, you're with, you're with the insiders in which case you're, you know, you're with Napalm.

And or you are with, you know, with the wretched of the earth. It's time to Berkeley and then talk about some final big picture. Where did the free speech movement come from and why in 64? The free speech movement was organized by veterans of Mississippi summer and other southern civil rights activities. They were free spirited. Some of them came out of the old left. Most of them didn't. They confronted intensely racist practices in the Bay Area. Some of them were involved in efforts to integrate employment. And the university administration was telling them that they didn't have the right to recruit for off campus causes, whether it was people going to pick at the Republican convention in San Francisco for the Goldwater nomination. But they couldn't even, you know, they couldn't recruit. They couldn't use university facilities at a launch pad or demonstrations.

I mean, it was infantilizing. And if you had been in Mississippi and you were up against, you know, the, the, the, the bulldogs of the Ku Klux Klan and, and, and the racist leadership. I have some university administrator telling you, oh, boys and girls, you better not go pass out leaflets that didn't go over. So in that sense, the civil rights movement is the foundation for the free speech movement. And what did they do? What happened? Well, when the campus administration started arresting students for setting up political action tables on hallowed ground on ground they felt they owned. And one of them, man named Jack Weinberg was arrested. The police car was driven onto the campus to take him away. And then lo and behold, the, the police car was surrounded by hundreds of people who decided to stay.

They sat down in front of the car, sat down on the car. And they got up on the car and gave speeches. And it was sort of suddenly what crystallized was a sense that what was at stake here was the question of whose university it was. Was it the university of the, you know, of, of police power, or was it a university in which students were, were at liberty to work out their destiny, including their moral destiny. And that was the sort of the crystallizing moment at which the free speech movement came into being. And Mario Savia, who'd been, who'd one of these students who'd been in Mississippi. No. And Mario Savia, who was one of the southern, Mario Savia, who came from New York and had been in Mississippi. And was one of those soulful, indignant supporters of civil rights became a, an incarnation of charisma who sort of stood up on the police car and, and was able to identify the struggle.

I mean, the, one of the powers of political auditors is, is the power to name the struggle. And he named the struggle as a struggle over authority, over whose university it was. That was really what was at stake. And so, and, and lo and behold, the students in general did feel, including right wing students, that it was demeaning for the administration to think it had the right to regulate student speech and student political activity. That was, that was not in their franchise. And then what, what grew was a sense that the larger priorities of the university were off, that they had, that they had become committed to, you know, the greater glory of the dominant institutions of business and the military and, and, and, and this was a distortion of the educational mission. This is not what the university was for. So, so what, what emerged was not simply, let's go support civil rights, but let's have a university that's sort of worthy of our better selves.

And how did what happened in Berkeley reflect on the larger kind of changes that are going on in that year? First of all, you understand that when the free speech movement erupted in Berkeley, this, it caught fire. It, it sent a loud message around the country. The, the free speech movement organizers were in demand to give talks and other campuses, because I think it was, at least subliminally understood that, that what the free speech movement had done is, was, was, was to find a way to dethrone illegitimate authority. It had found a way to, to sort of articulate a collective declaration of independence. And that, and so, SDS chapters were very happy to see the free speech movement erupt and we helped set up talks for some of the leaders and, you know, we, we were thrilled.

I thought I turned my phone off. Hold on a second. Okay, we're, we're, we're, but this is the place, or around here is the place to talk about the, don't trust anybody over 30. Okay. Why can this go away? Yeah. Did a saying come out of the movement and what's the myth and the reality? A reporter came up to Jack Weinberg, who had been arrested for his free speech activities. And, as much of the press was intimating at the time, proposed to him that, Communists were very influential in this movement. And Jack Weinberg's response was, Communists, we don't trust anybody over 30.

He was talking about old Communists, fossilized, narrow-minded, Stalinism, corroded, stodgy, unimaginative, old Communists. He wasn't talking about people over 30 in general. But the way this remark was reported, it became and was treated at least by the press. I'm not clear who actually believed this in the larger society. But into the press, this was the personification. This was the quintessence of what had, was in the process of becoming, or perhaps it was already being called, the Generation Gap. No, it was a statement about political independence. But ironically, it's just so perfect that it gets turned into the rallying crowd.

Yeah. Why is it, deeply, that putting the end, so many of these forces, so many of these movements seem to reach a fork in the world at the same time? The movements that strike up big, let me start again. This with big ideals are proposing that an entrenched set of institutions, even an entrenched way of life, be dismantled and superseded. That's a very large demand. Some people, in particular, who get, who are fired with idealism, are not in a mood to be slowed, not in a mood to be told to wait.

They have their eyes on the prize and they feel themselves to be on the way there. In fact, they're stepping on a lot of toes. And there's a reason why the society has been recalcitrant and why it's unjust. And so when there were a lot of interests at stake, a lot of people who don't particularly want to be told to live differently, to arrange themselves differently, and there's power at stake. So inevitably, the forces that are being infringed upon act with react with indignation, they're just as fired up by feeling as the dissidents, as the opposition, and what they're fired up with is a belief in the righteousness of their own power. That they rule because they deserve to rule. And so here come these Yahoo's, from their point of view, clamoring at the gates, undermining them.

And undermining even when the elites are liberal, the outsiders are undermining the very rationale that the liberal elite believes in, that they deserve to rule because they embody good. So you're getting, you know, not just a political difference. What you're getting is a moral cleavage. You're getting a confrontation between different ways of life. And that gets contentious. What are the legacies of 1964 that you see today? Well, I can't pluck 1964 out of the whole arc of which it was part. The 60s as a whole were liberating and almost stupendously renovating. Not only were these the years of the achievement of so much, not everything of civil rights for black people, there was also the spur to the self-organization of other groups, other minorities.

Both racial and others, I mean, eventually it grows to include gay people and the disabled and ethnic groups and, of course, the non-minority of women. And the country has changed irrevocably. So 1964 represents the bridge from the confident side of that process. I think to a more jangled, more tragic, more haunted version in which the price of dissidents, the price of opposition keeps going off, the stakes keep going off.

There's a lot more death at stake because of the atrocity of the Vietnam War primarily. And there's things get out of hand. So 1964 is a moment of vivid achievement, especially in the civil rights bill. And I should say also the crushing of the right wing, but the price paid is the end of the liberal moment. And that turns out to be momentous in its own way. Why is it the end of the liberal moment?

Because the achievement of the liberal regime has rested on this perverse alliance between liberals and dixie crats between liberals and white supremacists. And the civil rights movement busts up that alliance. It deserves to be busted up. But the power of the liberal block is thereby reduced. And enough of the country is offended by the clamor from the opposition that it decides it really is done with the liberal order. And maybe there were contingencies. You could imagine scenarios in which the liberal order might have survived. I don't think it would have survived the early 70s, the oil embargo, the vicious reaction of big business to the radicalism of the decade, the coming of neo-conservatism, and the triumph of the Goldwater, the Republican Party. And I think those were hard to arrest. You know, can imagine a scenario in which Bobby Kennedy might have perpetuated the liberal moment.

But so, you know, it's 1964 and its sequel years were conveyors of enormous change. And there was a very large sacrifice entailed. Let me put it another way. You don't get the immense changes that took place in the 1960s without a tremendous recoil. You just don't get that. You don't get civil rights and the end of the Vietnam War and the women's upsurge and all the other upsurges without Ronald Reagan. The backlash has got to come. Backlash has got to come. And the left, what you can see is in 1964, but the explosions are happening. The revolutions are happening. But oddly enough, in Goldwater's defeat, the seeds of the backlash are being sold.

Yeah, well, Ronald Reagan becomes a major political figure as a result. And the rest is history. So, one last question. Why is it important to remember 1964? Oh, several reasons come to mind. One is don't overestimate the demographics of the most recent political election. I mean, the conventional wisdom was that Goldwater having been pulverized by the Johnson landslide was now a defeated whimpering remnant of something that was passing. Don't assume that victory comes so easily. It's one lesson. Another lesson is that I think liberals and radicals need each other. And when they are cloven, they can be much more easily defeated.

And we have suffered subsequently from that harsh divorce. The third lesson is that, well, I don't know. I don't know if I have any other lessons. Yeah, well, that's a good one. I think we're done. Good. Let's do room tone, which is 30. Not for talking about 30 seconds. And room tone, thank you so much.