American Experience; 1964; Interview with Rick Perlstein, Writer, part 1 of 3

All right. So, choir plays. Fones are all turned off. Fones are off. You should absolutely feel free to move around, just to articulate wildly or whatever you feel like doing. I mean, where were you when you heard about JFK's assassination? You weren't old enough. When I heard about JFK's assassination, I was 60 years from being a gleam in my parents' eyes. There you go. But what did looking back at it from a... I can never forget you. What is death represent? Why was it such a breakthrough in that society? I think the most striking thing I learned about JFK's death in my research was that according to one survey, 50% of American men cried when they heard about it. Lots of people's memories of that from their childhood was their father crying. And in fact, they also did a poll, I think, in which they discovered that 60% of Americans claimed to have voted for JFK

when he only got about 50% of the vote. What is it more broadly speaking that it represents TFD effect? When you think about the context of 1960s before? One of the really striking things about kind of a pundit discourse in the early 1960s was the idea that America had achieved a level of consensus that was kind of unprecedented among nations in the world. Walter Littman, the kind of marquee pundit of the day, said that America was more united and peaceful itself than it ever had been. Now, whether that was true or not is a very interesting question. But it became much, much harder to sustain after an American president was shot down in the street like it was some cerebral country. It really shattered people's sense of what America was, which was a place in which political disputes were not settled through violence. Now, of course, the fascinating thing is if people had been paying attention,

they would have realized that political disputes were being settled by violence all the time, especially in the South. But that was kind of the ideology. It was the story that Americans told themselves about themselves. That America was a different kind of place, and that became harder to entertain after November 22nd. Can you say that 1964 began in 1963 in the late November 1963 in a way? Well, it was the kind of watershed that you very rarely see in history. I'm in a moment like the Russian Revolution, a moment like the firing on Fort Apatamax. Something began. Right. Yeah, who did Americans immediately assume killed it? You have a great description of a scene. I'm like an idiot.

I didn't ask Lee Edwards this question, and he was in the office. Well, I spoke to a conservative activist who was running an office for the Barry Goldwater draft presidential movement. And he said they actually had to barricade themselves inside the office. They had their little portable radio or portable television set, and they were kind of racking their brains about whether they knew the skylea house, however, he was well from any of their young Americans for freedom meetings, any of their conservative movement meetings, because the anger among right wingers and frankly segregationist against Kennedy was so intense that the almost universal presumption was that one of these right wingers must have shot him. It must have been somebody from the John Burke society. It must have been some follower from somebody from the John Burke society. It must have been some follower of George Wallace. And what do they do to the...

What are they saying out on the street when they're banging on the door? I think it was like... Yeah, there was... People were banging on the door saying, you killed Kennedy, you killed Kennedy. It was not a very happy time to be a right wing or an America. For those few days, until they found out that this profess communist had killed John F. Kennedy, or at least allegedly, had killed John F. Kennedy. Any more from... I get the feeling that you're looking a little lower to the middle of that. So just keep on me. You know, one of the things we're trying to set up in this series is... This is the consensus in the war. So black, yeah. The whole year breaks apart. And shout it out. How did they understand what an America looked like and feel like on November? Is he killed on 22nd or 23rd? 22nd.

What did it look like on the before the assassination? You know, intellectuals had a theory about how the American political system worked. It was called pluralism. The idea is both parties had conservatives and liberals. And that basically the American political bizarre had built within it so many kind of ideological checks and balances that no great passions of the sort that were associated with the violent cataclysm in Europe, which are, of course, within the living memory of just about every adult, could possibly be visited on the United States. The memory of sort of the mass frenzies of fascism, the memory of the concentration camps, the memory of Europe consuming itself, was something that so haunted all the people who were trying to figure out how to make a sane, sensible, peaceful society.

And the idea was that America had figured it out. And also America had saved America, saved the world from fascism. And there was an enormous sense of self-congratulation. There was an enormous sense that America had solved all the problems that had be devolved human beings for millennia. I mean, Daniel Bell, the great sociologist, proclaimed the end of ideology. And so, on a sort of more kind of looking around the culture kind of, and looking at this history, this question, looking around politics. Sure. You know, people look at, I think, we're always like about five to ten years off. Good photographs. Right. You look at Hillary Clinton's Europe photo, and she looks like she's in 1954. Right. Right. She's really in 1960s. Right. I mean, a guy walking down the street in November of 1963, whose hair was as long as the Beatles probably would have been locked up. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy. What else?

There is a kind of what we would call an incredible conformity gun. Well, I mean, you know, I mean, another political point is in 1963, you know, Arthur Slesinger, who was supporting John F. Kennedy for president, wrote a book, literally called, Kennedy or Nixon, doesn't make a difference. Wow. Or what's the difference? Right. We can look it up. Let me think here. You know, I mean, culturally, you know, I mean, you guys will be talking about the Beatles, obviously. Yeah. I mean, to understand what the culture was like 1963, compared to the watershed of 1964, watch that Ed Sullivan show, in which the Beatles appear early in 1964. Yeah. The rest of it is, you know, plate spinners, you know, incredibly earnest, bizarre, cheesy comedians who sound like they're shouting, because that was kind of the very uncool style of the day. And then Beatles, the Beatles come on, and suddenly, you know, it's almost like passing through a veil from pre-modern to modern. I heard of this American life episode

that interviewed a comedy duo. There you go. Yeah. And Anna Bielmann, who were on that same show. Mm-hmm. And Bobby Sherman. You know, Bobby Sherman is kind of running through the audience, kind of, mocking the Beatles. And, you know, he was obviously the one who ends up being the butt of the jokes. Yeah. Is it a madman kind of world up there? Well, madman's in 1968 now. So, yeah. I mean, one of the striking things I find in intellectual life is that in that kind of 1961, 1962, 1963 period, the books that kind of people of a critical temper are reading are always implying that they're kind of these seething animosities that kind of just exist beneath the surface. You know, James Baldwin writes The Fire Next Time. You know, Betty Friedan has the best-selling book of the year. And it's called The Feminine Mystique. And it discusses the problem that has no name. You know, the great social-critical Michael Harrington writes

The Other America, you know, this secret world of poverty. You have Tom Hayden in the Port Huron Statement, the kind of manifesto of the New Left, saying that America's plasticity is kind of a glaze over deeply-filled anxieties. So, the people who are really thinking about this, who are really looking deeply at society, which most people aren't doing, because there's so much self-status faction, see this cauldron roiling in it. And it's about to burst. Great. Great. So, the people, it's almost like they're the seismologists. Yeah, they're not the early tremors. They're like the animals in the barnyard, who are kind of acting a little fidgety. But people who are acting a little fidgety in the midst of all this consensus are... Well, on the one level, they're kind of seen as kind of oddballs, but on the other level, people are snapping up these books. I mean, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique,

it's paperback is the number one best-selling book of 1964. Why are most people oblivious of the Earth? Well, that consensus is something that people deeply, deeply, deeply want to believe in. They want to believe in it to the extent of denying the evidence of its senses. I mean, in 1964, when Barry Goldwater wins the election by a million votes in the state of California, and the New York Times runs a headline on the front page, white backlash does not develop. What people are ignoring is there was another item on the ballot that same day, people could choose whether to repeal or keep California's housing discrimination law. Well, the pro-discrimination position also wins by one million votes. No one notices that when they say that this election is a mandate for liberalism. Right. Right. How does America see itself in relation to the rest of the world in January 1, 1964?

And is the political consensus of the time, with the political consensus be surprising to us if we look back on it from today's point of view? I think much like today, America has an enormous measure of confidence that it is a benign hegemon, that it doesn't have an empire, that it is spreading the blessings of liberty to the world. You know, when something happens like in 1959, and Richard Nixon is set upon by mobs of angry, left-wing South American students, that's baffling to Americans. You know, why would someone want to do that to America? You know, this notion that America's role in a place like South America is something under imperialism and is creating deep resentments is something Americans don't understand. The idea that America could, you know, be establishing a military presence in a place like Vietnam

and that might be presented is something people don't understand. The idea that America could introduce troops in a place like Vietnam and they wouldn't be home by Christmas is something that people don't understand. The idea that America could possibly meet any serious resistance to its global designs is something people don't understand. And there's a lot of money and a lot of affluence. Yes. And there's changes in the social fabric going on from cities to suburbia. I mean, we don't really understand that part of the issue. Because it's so, I think, I wanted to figure out a way into the story yet. I want to start the film. Yeah. Really helping people. Yeah, yeah. Just. Yeah, let me go ahead. Whatever you call it, the Aussie and Harriet. Yeah. We're right smack dab in the middle. Yeah. We're right smack dab in the middle during this period of what the economist Paul Krugman calls the great compression. Basically, the gap between the people who have lots of money and the people who don't have a lot of money

is narrower than it ever has been in basically any society, any mass industrial society. I mean, what we're doing, what we're talking about here, is following the new deal. Following the rise of the union movement, we have the world's first mass middle class. People who grew up with outhouses in their backyard are taking their children to vacation houses on the lake. You know, a guy could graduate from high school or even not graduate from high school and luck into a lifetime job at a union wage and suddenly find himself a member of this great mass middle class. His children, only knowing prosperity and hearing about deprivation of the depression, think their parents are from another planet. And that sort of prosperity, that sort of unquestioned plenty, the idea that we've solved all our economic problems, contributes a great deal to the sort of restlessness that young people feel that we're going to later see expressed in the protests in the 1960s. I mean, when you can graduate from college

and walk into an executive job at IBM or Xerox the next day, that creates a certain sense of entitlement, a certain sense of confidence, a certain sense that since America can do everything, maybe America's children can do everything. Let me hit one more point. Yeah, one thing politicians are discovering is, you know, a great sort of traditional political ritual is the Labor Day picnic, the Labor Day rally. They're finding these things are not as well as handed as they used to be, because the folks who belong to these unions are going to their lake houses on Labor Day. And are we living in cities? Of course, one of President Dwight David Eisenhower, this kind of centrist, moderate Republicans,

great contribution to building the American state is this interstate system, you know, created out of this sense of military necessity, but it also is this enormous subsidy to the folks who are building suburbs. It's basically a giant system of middle-class welfare that lets folks move out of the crowded apartment buildings in cities, and move into their own single-family homes. They call it the American Dream. It's great. Or as Betty Friedan called those same single-family homes, the Comfortable Concentration Camp. And then Daniel Horsen called them anywhere, can we, everywhere, communities, or anywhere, communities? Oh, I don't know. What happens on January 3rd in Phoenix, Arizona? It's not your typical kickoff. Right. President, you run. What happened? Yeah, Barry Goldwater is there in his backyard. It was gorgeous, modern desert modernist palace. And he's entertaining the National Press Corps,

announcing for president. He has his giant microphone hanging around his neck. They didn't kind of master the miniaturization technology yet. And he's introducing himself to the nation. And he says that his presidential campaign will be a choice not an echo. That phrase speaks to the sense that very consensus that the rest of the country is celebrating. The idea that there aren't great differences between the Democratic and Republican Party is a moral failing. That he wants the Republican Party to distinguish itself by becoming a vehicle for conservatism. A vehicle for rolling back the very new deal in great society programs that people associate with this great compression in the income inequality in the United States. I guess the great society programs haven't quite started yet. Oh, they have.

January 3rd? Oh, yeah, January 3rd. That's true. That's not quite a little bit. But exactly, right. Does he walk out? He's not completely ambulatory, right? Oh, right, right, right. So what's the point of the significance of the fact that it's in Phoenix fucking Arizona? Right, right, right. Well, you know, Barry Goldwater does things his own way. He said he's not going to run for president unless he can sleep in his own bed at least once a week. I mean, he's probably the least ambitious presidential candidate you've ever seen. He's drafted by this movement of people who believe that they've been anointed to save civilization. And he's looking. Right, he had a bone spur surgery in his ankle or something like that. So he hopped across New Hampshire over the whole month, you know, through the snow drifts. And he said he felt every step of that campaign. He was already a pretty erasible guy. And, you know, I think one time he thought the microphones are off or maybe even he didn't think the microphones off.

And he said hell or damn or something like that. And that became sort of like the news story of the week. This is not the way a disciplined presidential campaign is supposed to run. In terms of the Republican party, what does he represent? And where does he come from, what chase his worldview? Yeah, there's this really striking image at the Republican convention that summer and San Francisco Henry Cabot Lodge, you know, the great sort of grandee of the Republican establishment, the Wall Street establishment, who's, you know, a father and grandfather were great Republicans who was, you know, the vice presidential candidate in 1960. He was the UN ambassador. He was the very model of the establishment character. He's looking over the list of delegates, he says, with thunder in his voice. I don't know any of these people. What it happened was this kind of grassroots right wing

insurgency had taken over the very capital areas of the party. And where does Goldwater come from? Why is he such the perfect sort of insurgent? Yeah, Barry Goldwater was the son of a merchant family. His grandfather was a Jewish pioneer who came to Arizona after escaping conscription the Zara's army. He was Jewish. His father converted to Episcopalians. So Barry Goldwater was half Jewish. And basically, he was part of a class of businessmen who turned this kind of desert outpost, a wide spot in the road into this thriving metropolis. Of course, they did so with help every step along the way from the federal government. A lot of the growth came, for example, from what would later be known as the Hoover Dam. There was a joke that a general in the Indian Wars

in the 19th century made about Arizona. The territory exists to protect the inhabitants from... What is that? Yeah, take some time with it. Can I look it up? No, don't bother. We'll come back. Well, let me try and pull it up. He says the US Army here is to protect the inhabitants from hostilities from the Indians and hostilities exists because the US Army is here. But that's not the way Barry Goldwater and his friends see it. They see themselves as classic individualists, as bootstrapping capitalists. They see themselves as a model for what America at its best is, you know, kind of these pioneer, hearty souls who are kind of building a civilization, you know, like the guy or the sheriff

who brings civilization to the chaotic town, you know, tosses out the outlaws. And in fact, Barry Goldwater's city council that he was a member of kind of cleaned up the gambling in Arizona, cleaned up the gambling in Phoenix. And... What's his feeling about government generally? Right. He, his, his, his basically his first political act as an open letter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in which he says, he likes the old America better, the America that, you know, didn't have the federal government snooping into businessmen's pockets. It was right after the first minimum wage law. He believed that he took care of his employees and that showed that, you know, we didn't need these kinds of regulations. Of course, the regulations are not for the good guys. They're for the bad guys. But he basically identified businessmen as kind of noble stewards of a safe and prosperous civilization. And he ended up despising the federal government who's in the house with him running the gold water.

Right. Now... I love Barry Goldwater. Yeah. Because he's just such a crotchety old son of a bitch. Right. I find it really refreshing. Now the guys who are behind him in the house running the show are not these kind of fancy Washington consultants. There are, there aren't people who have any experience at all running presidential campaigns. They're all his buddies, basically. He says, I'll only run for president if I can do this my way. And his way means drafting, you know, a corporate lawyer named Dennis and Kichel. It means drafting another corporate lawyer named Dean Birch. Dean Birch, he spells it, B-U-R-C-H. Not B-I-R-C-H. Because he wanted to make sure that no one associated him with the John Birch Society, which was the far right group that considered Eisenhower, an agent of the Communist conspiracy. And in which Barry Goldwater, also being erasible in his unique way, refused to have disassociated himself from.

But you know, the kind of one guy in the campaign who really knew what he was doing was a guy named F-Clifton White, you know, just completely cringed when he heard that. Because Barry Goldwater was bringing to the foreground the very thing that they wanted everyone to forget. That this right wing was full of these kind of extremist cooks that had the potential to sink the whole thing. Tell me who, who Clif White is. And what did E.C. happen to his Republican party in the way? Or what did it happen to the Party C Company? F-Clifton White is a once young lawyer who in the 1940s and 1950s became active in the young Republicans and had this kind of cabal or click or faction. That basically worked to take over the young Republicans from the Wall Street establishment and turned into a vehicle for conservative Republicanism. And he was kind of an organizational genius. He was a master at mastering the arcane rules of procedure

at conventions, at caucuses, such that, in fact, he always said he learned the tricks for taking over a meeting from one of his friends who had fought the communists in the 1940s who tried to take over the American Veterans Committee. So what's he doing in the years leading up to 1964 that makes such an important issue? So late in 1961, he gathers together a bunch of these grassroots Republican activists. Of course, conservative grassroots Republican activists often are people who own businesses and meeting country clubs. I mean, it's not like this kind of grubby group of folks and overhauls that we associate with the Mississippi Freedom Summer. He gathers to them together in meetings and they decide that they're going to draft Barry Goldwater for president, whether he likes it or not. And they begin fanning out around the country. They understand that the way the Republican Party works

is that if you can control the precinct meetings, you can control the county meetings. If you can control the county meetings, you can control the state meetings. If you can control the state meetings, you can control the regional meetings. And if you can control the regional meetings, you can control the entire Republican Party. And as a matter of fact, because Dwight David Eisenhower was really just kind of a charismatic figure and not really a party builder, the institutions the Republican Party were completely shallow rooted. And he said taking this organization over was like pushing on an open door. And what's it all leading to? Today, we don't understand how conventions work. What's he trying to do? And by the time Go Water Announces, what has he done? And what he's doing is he is getting elected and appointed the delegates that go to the Republican convention and vote on who is going to be the nominee. And he has these massive banks of file cabinets in this office, Suite 3505, right next to Grand Central Station in Midtown, Manhattan.

And it's full of information on every delegate, how to persuade them, what their black maleable points are, who owes the money, who they owe money to. And by the time they get to San Francisco, they have this whole phalanx of people ready to lean on these people and make sure that they're loyal to Barry Go Water. In fact, they didn't have to pull this trigger because the people they chose were willing almost to literally lay down their lives to save the Republican Party from these Wall Street establishment people that they considered the cat's paws of the very forces they were fighting against. The irony is, how does Barry Go Water feel about Cliff White? Barry Go Water thinks Cliff White is this annoyance. First of all, he's reluctant about running for president in the first place. So he has this kind of natural, barely-contained resentment for the guy. As a matter of fact, Cliff and White thought that it was only his due, that after he delivered Barry Go Water,

the greatest prize in politics, a presidential nomination, that of course he would be anointed as the Republican National Committee. And in his memoir, he writes quite poignantly about the day he gives the job to this guy, Dean Birch, who was basically Cliff White's lieutenant, and had never been involved in a national campaign in his life. And he packs his bag and goes to Hawaii and he has tears in his eyes. Why was that such a huge miscalculation on Barry Go Water? Well, it wasn't a huge calculation if he didn't really want to win the presidency, whether consciously or unconsciously. Did he think he was going to win? He knew he wasn't going to win. By the middle of the campaign, he was all but telling his associates that. But he saw a certain victory in that. Because if you're not going to win and you know you're not going to win, you can say whatever you want. And he saw it as a vehicle for delivering his conservative message.

He was literally shouting on the campaign trail. He was trying to, as he saw wake America up, he saw America losing its freedom. He saw the Soviet Union as advancing, blanketing the map with a sea of red. And he saw the guy he was running against, Lyndon Johnson, who he had utter contempt for, as basically a faker, a hustler, a fraud. In fact, at the Republican convention, he was in the kitchen, making his way through the inner-dust of the building, and a reporter asked him how he expected to deal with the issue of civil rights since he had voted against the Civil Rights Act against Lyndon Johnson, who was the architect of the act. And he said after that faker, you know, voted against every Civil Rights Act that came around. And of course there's a story in that. Who are the young Americans for freedom?

And what's Goldwater's core Army? How do you understand that? Yeah. One of the counterintuitive things about this conservative movement, one of the things that became this kind of perennial man-by-its-dog story, and still is, in many sense, is the fact that the cadre is that kind of formed the muscle of this movement where young people, the college students, young people are supposed to be liberals, right? But one of the things that was so striking about what Barry Goldwater was able to achieve was he was able to articulate conservatism as speaking to the kind of vitality and vibrancy and kind of anti-bureaucratic energies of a student generation that felt like conformity, that felt like bureaucracy, that felt like the kind of routine conformist

and shallowness of American society was the biggest problem. He spoke about that quite eloquently and conscience of a conservative. And so who are there and how do they support it? So kind of starting in 1960, early in the year, a bunch of students get together and form this conservative youth organization very much under the sponsorship of William F. Buckley and William Russia at the National Review. Right-wing youth movements do not suffer the problem of a generation gap. And they gather, of course, these grassroots conservative activists at the sumptuous Connecticut estate of the Buckley family, complete with its expropriated Mexican tiles from when Buckley's dad, the oil magnate, had kind of left Mexico one step ahead of the revolutionary mob. And they actually, I'll back up, you can splice this together.

So they put together a, yeah, that's right. Did you send me a little encapsulated Sharon Statement thing? Yeah, yeah. Right. Now I'm going to do the Sharon Statement, and then I'm going to go back and kind of say why there was a group which has to do with the Republican Convention. And they come up with this manifesto of the Sharon Statement in which they articulate basically all the sort of ideological principles that today we associate with the conservative movement, the notion that our liberties come from God, that government has to be limited, and that the Soviet Union is on the march and has to be defeated, not contained. Basically, young Americans for freedom comes from a movement, kind of really cheeky, kind of, balsy movement, comes from young Americans for freedom, comes from this kind of cheeky, brassy movement of a bunch of kids who come to the Republican Convention in Chicago in 1960 and decide that they're going to lead a movement to draft Barry Goldwater as vice president,

as Richard Nixon's vice president. Behind the scenes, that convention got very dramatic. That's not good either. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah. That's good enough. Yeah. And then basically, of course, Barry Goldwater does not become the vice president, but later after the convention, he gathers these kids in a room and says, look, what you guys have created here is a very powerful thing. You should turn it into a formal organization. That is the organization that becomes young Americans for freedom. And then it becomes the backbone of his activist army when he runs for president in 1964. Perfect. Who are the, who are the, besides the birchers, who are the kind of, who is the lunatic fringe that he has to worry about? It's a multi, multi-tugeness group, right? Well, I mean, Lyndon Johnson actually made a TV commercial that never ran quoting the Grand Wizard of the Klux Klan in Dorsen, Barry Goldwater, you know, over the scenes of a cross burning.

He doesn't show it because it doesn't fit into that consensus story he's trying to tell. And also, he's afraid that if he puts his advocacy of civil rights too much in the forefront, that they'll be a backlash. You know, one problem, Barry Goldwater, has to face is a big part of his activist constituency. It's the same people who are burning down churches in Mississippi. You know, he gets 87% of the vote in Mississippi. And it's not because those voters were all in study carols, you know, studying conservative philosophers. It was because he voted against the Civil Rights Act. Great. LBJ. What's his greatest challenge as the new president? Well, it's going to say, you know, LBJ's greatest challenge as president is LBJ. I mean, he's this incredible, mercurial figure. He's always insisting to his wife that he's going to quit. You know, he insisted to his wife he was going to quit. I think at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City,

there's a famous Nochi right, so I'm telling you the nation needs him. He was probably an undagnosed manic depressive. And he suffered from the most extraordinary bouts of self-pity. And he's haunted by 1948. And he's got an election coming up. Oh, 1950. It's after 11 months after he takes office basically. Right. I'm going for a landslide, Linda. Right, right, right, right. Oh, he's haunted by 1948. You're, you know, you're winning the Senate by 12 votes. Oh, oh, okay. That's where he gets the answer. That's where he gets the answer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, exactly. You know, I mean, this is the guy with self-esteem problems. Right. I mean, you know, this is the guy with self-esteem problems. Guys with that level of grandiosity, of course, are trying to cover something up. One haunting image that he can never really shake is this Senate election in 1948 that he lost by 12 votes.

I'm sorry. I'm not sure as well, either. Yeah, yeah. 5, 10, 12 votes. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, one image that he can never really shake is this Senate election that he won in 1948 by what? It was like, you know, 10 or 20 votes. And those 10 or 20 votes were stolen. And he gets this really humiliating nickname, a landslide, Linda. Right. And so that's probably in the back of his mind. And when he decides, he's not going to just win this presidential election. He's going to run up the score. You know, he's going to try and win all 50 states. He's going to try and win 60% of the popular vote. And he's going to do so by campaigning with a mania and an energy that probably hadn't been seen in decades. And it's great. Let me hit something else. You know, he's also haunted by the Senate election of 1950 in which lots of Democrats are running out of office on the cry of the Democrats lost China. You know, this idea that unless you hold the line against the communist in Asia, that the electorate is going to comment by you.

And that has an enormous amount to do with his absolute terror, which is completely driven by domestic politics, that unless he holds the line in Vietnam, he is not going to run up this landslide. Great. But what's the country craving at the moment that he takes off? And why does that fit so beautifully into his basic of trying to form a leadership? Yeah. I mean, as kind of at this cost of the 60s chaos, America is still craving this consensus. He speaks to it constantly. That's his entire electoral message. And then after he wins, he's basically announcing America. No Americans have never seen the world so alike on Decision Day as they have today. And then the next month he's lighting the Christmas tree. And he says, these are the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem. This is that consensus ideology in its very essence.

He's lighting the tree in 63 now. 64. Yeah. That's a Nixon land. Great scene. Yeah. What a great line. Yeah, you can cut it in. And we're not jumping through there, but thinking still back to January when he takes off. Five days after the assassination, he makes critical critics. Right, right, right. Yeah. So he's standing there before a joint session of Congress. And everyone is still grieving. You know, this is the 50% of American men crying. And he stands there. And what he says is, let us continue. And that means something very specific. In fact, we don't remember it this way, but Jennifer Kennedy was not a successful president politically. He announces all these ambitious domestic agendas, things like raising the minimum wage,

things like expanding the social security program to pay for medical care for the elderly. We now call it Medicare. These things all founder and the conservatism of Congress. And the fact that Congress is run by these old bull Southern conservatives who have no interest in expanding the welfare stage. Lyndon Johnson says, let us continue. He says, John F. Kennedy has laid forth a agenda for us. And it's our duty as Americans to transcend our trauma by passing this agenda. And so he does. I mean, 1964 is when we see the beginnings of what would later be called the Great Society. Great, great. What's the significance of the fact that he, the central thing that he embraces in that speech in his first days in office is civil rights.

There's a boldness to that. Double down. Yeah. Yeah. That is almost inconceivable today. Yeah. As you could say that Obama doubling down on health care was pretty much a pretty great thing to do, too. But I mean, it's easy for us to forget because we know now lionized LBJ as the greatest president for civil rights. But when he was nominated as... Keep running. Yeah, it's easy to forget today. But when Johnson was chosen by Kennedy as his running bait in 1960, liberals were apoplectic because he was seen as a Southern segregationist. Right. Yeah. But what's the significance of what he does? He's making a huge decision. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to imagine. Yeah. Right. We need to remember

the strange Jerry Rigg nature of the Democratic Party. I mean, Will Rogers famously says, I'm not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat. So we literally have this coalition made of people who believe opposite things. We have Northern liberals and we have Southern segregationists. How could a president possibly be elected without the electoral votes of the South? How could a Democrat be elected without the electoral votes of the South? It's the very base of the Democratic Party. And Southerners basically look at the Republicans as the carpetbaggers who burned down Atlanta. Right. By embracing the most sweeping civil rights bill in 100 years, he's basically saying, I'm willing to risk losing all that. And in fact, after signing that bill, he turns to Bill Moyers. And he says, I believe that I might have just signed away the South for a generation.

Now there's a corollary to that. He wins the loyalty of Northern blacks for a generation. Black people used to be considered the swing vote in American elections, because so many of them voted for the Republican Party of vestigial loyalty to Lincoln for freeing the slaves. Great. Because that's only he never think about.