American Experience; 1964; Interview with Jon Margolis, Author, The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964, part 5 of 5

a sort of emotional leader of the MFDP and who did she appear in front of and what quote to describe that? Fannie Lou Hamer, a woman who worked as a sharecropper on a big plantation in Mississippi. She had tried to vote. She had been kicked off the plantation. She had been beaten. And she appeared before the committee, the credentials committee, to explain what had happened to her how she'd been beaten for trying to vote and on the back and on the bottoms of her feet. And she said if the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegates are not seated, she said, I question America. Which was quite a radical statement for anyone to make. But it was a poignant statement. It struck a nerve. The committee worked out a compromise, tried to indeed work out a compromise. She went through a series of compromises which were rejected and finally accepted a compromise in which some of the MFDP parties delegates would be seated along with the so-called regulars.

She never accepted that. Neither did Dr. King in the meeting with Fannie Lou Hamer, Hubert Humphrey and some other people. He opted out. He wouldn't say, he said, I would accept it, but I'm not one of them. So I'm not going to tell them to accept it. And they continued to be angry. But it didn't, in a way it didn't really make any difference. It was dramatic. And it was, you know, they were very devoted people and they had done a great thing because they had shown up what a fraud, the official party process was. And they had done, as I said, they had gone about the process as though they had obeyed the law, which did not technically apply to them. But nobody else obeyed the law. And they lost. But they had an impact.

Oh, they lost. And the impact was really emotional and psychological on the delegates who were there and on the country to some extent. People saw this and had to admire them. The actual impact on the presidential election was not great. Well, that was big. They extracted a pledge saying that no delegation from any state, which chose its delegates in a racially segregated process, would ever again be seated at a Democratic Convention. And the fact not has. Did the compromise further kind of show up a split within the black government? Yes. Quite a group of people in the room. Wilkins, Hayner, Bayard Rustin, Walter Luther. They're all there. They're all trying to figure out how to fix this problem. There was a split not only within the civil rights community, but within what you might call the left, the liberal community in general, that there were some, there were the pragmatists, the political, they were generally older, the political, the practical politicians.

And then on the other side, there were more of the dreamers, the personal strivers, they had a different attitude. Johnson comes out of the convention, been overwhelmingly nominated. And what's his state of mind? Terrible. The convention is over. The president has been nominated. He was still petrified. You remember, he had rearranged the schedule to make sure that Robert Kennedy introduced a memorial film to JFK the day after Johnson and Uber Dompran, his running mate were, were nominated because he was still afraid that Bobby Kennedy was going to try to stampede the convention and take the nomination away from him.

And shortly before the convention, Johnson had seriously contemplated withdrawing, not running again. He had talked to one of his closest aides, George Reed, his press secretary. He had talked to Mrs. Johnson about not being a candidate. And Mrs. Johnson handled it brilliantly. She didn't say, what are you? How do you mind? She listened to him. She talked to him and she ended up writing him a letter. Saying, you know, you're the only one who knows what to do, but here's why I think you have to keep stays in office and run again for president. But it's up to you. And of course, that's what he needed. And he did. But George Reed, he was convinced that Johnson was not kidding.

And in a very low mood, I wouldn't be surprised if a psychologist would call it depression. But even after the convention went that, that part was over. Then he was a little more vibrant. Well, I think we're just, again, I'm not a psychologist and I'm a little reluctant to make these diagnoses. But certainly he was low in those days before the convention. Then he snapped out of it. Of course, I'm running again. But he was still, then you get into another term, psychological term, people throw around and I can't really say that this is what it was. But he evidenced signs of what might be called paranoia. He had the FBI follow people around during the convention in Atlantic City, including the FBI's boss. Attorney General Robert Kennedy. There were FBI agents assigned to tell the attorney general of the United States because Lyndon Johnson was petrified about what Robert Kennedy would do.

And wasn't he even convinced that Kennedy was responsible for the MFDP? And was, oh, absolutely, for which there's no evidence. He thought that Kennedy, because Kennedy was very big for civil rights and Kennedy probably was somewhat sympathetic. And Kennedy had friends, people like Allard Lowenstein, who were working with the MF Freedom Democratic Party. So Johnson was convinced, I mean, that was the extent of the evidence that Bobby Kennedy had concocted this whole thing, not just that he had concocted it, but that he had done so to embarrass and perhaps even somehow scuttle the nomination of Lyndon Johnson. No evidence for any of this at all, and would have been absurd for Bobby Kennedy to have tried to do that. What happened when Bobby Kennedy tried to introduce the film?

And he himself was introduced, and there was this extraordinary reaction to week-a-word. There was an extraordinary quiet upheaval. Everybody stood and applauded, not enthusiastically, just sort of but steadily, almost quietly, if you're going to applaud quietly, and it wasn't for him. And he knew what it was, and it was something that probably never quite happened, nothing quite like it has ever happened before, or since. Here were people who knew that something had been taken from them, and they were just expressing that both internal and external loss. They were expressing it to themselves, they were expressing it individually, but also collectively, as the Democratic Party, to each other and to the country that was listening on television, and went on for, I believe, 22 minutes. A couple of times Kennedy tried to stop it, and then scoop Jackson, Senator Jackson of Washington, at some point, went up there and said, it's okay, Bob, just let them do it. They have to do this.

And finally, they did, and he was able to make a very, very short little introduction to the film, which was memorable for, not for anything, for any words of his, but for some of William Shakespeare's, which apparently Jackie Kennedy had found, or heard of, and suggested him. Jackie Kennedy was having a big influence on Robert Kennedy's emotional and intellectual recovery from the assassination, not only urging him to read some Shakespeare and some poetry, which he was always wanted to do anyway. Specifically, urging him to read a book called The Greek Way in Western Civilization, Edith Hamilton's Study of Greek Civilization, and it influenced his thinking about many things, including the Vietnam War. There's a new black singing group that gets a number one hit on the charts in August.

Was this the Supreme? Oh, the Supreme. Who were they, and what did they say? Well, they were from Detroit. They were, again, kind of a non-establishment. There was, of course, there had been a separate Negro blues, rock, whatever you want, rhythm and blues, musical tradition, and their own radio stations and clubs all around the country. This kind of grew out of that, but it was also somewhat more mainstream, and it was another example of people sort of breaking old barriers and traditional dividing lines, and they were from Detroit. The label was called Motown, and that was the start of it. I think they were the very first Motown artists.

Yeah, I can't remember. What made them so? What was the balancing act that Barry Gordy was trying to dress up in ball gowns, but sing about passionate sex? Well, that was part of it. They always sang about passionate sex, but they used to not be dressed up in ball gowns. He was trying to intermingle the genres to cross the line. Was he trying to do something with black women in the culture as well, make them respectable or make them less threatening? Did I say that? You may have them, but Claire Potter certainly did this. Oh, I see. That could be. There are people who followed that aspect of the thing more than I did, so she may be right. General election.

How did Goldwater perform on the national stage? Well, Goldwater was an OK candidate in November. Of course, there were no debates then. We didn't have the sort of periods or segments of the campaign that you have now are waiting for the debates and then the debate period and then over. Oh, he wanted debates. Yes. Of course, when you're behind, you always want debates because that puts you on an equal footing, at least potentially with the incumbent who's ahead of you or with the candidate who's ahead of you, but Johnson was not going to debate him. Goldwater, I mean, it was a standard campaign. He traveled the country, flew from here there, went to the various media markets, made his speeches. They were still not great speeches, but they were not bad. And they had the they did they did appeal to the to the already committed, but they didn't really there was nothing he he did that had much potential to expand his base to go beyond his base.

Right. What was his what was the significance of his success in the South? What a strong thermo. OK, that's it. Well, strong thermo had been a Democrat. Of course, you had to be a Democrat to get elected in South Carolina. Of course, in 1948, he himself. He left temporarily left the Democratic Party to run against Harry Truman as the state's rights candidate, so-called Dixie Cratt party. But then he became a he went back to the Senate as a Democrat, and it was a and was a new Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird was kind of friendly with them. Shortly after the convention, Lady Bird is planning a trip to the South, a whistle stop campaign trip to the South. She starts calling all these Southern senators that she's known who've literally sucked at her table.

And she at theirs and she gets a lot of well, I don't know Lady Bird. And the most the first one was Strom Thurman who said, I'm not going to be there and I have some very important decisions to make. And he soon announces his very important decision that he is now a Republican. And of course, he stayed a Republican until he just not that long ago. He stayed in the Senate until did he die in the Senate or had he left before that? Yeah, but a what? A Republican, which, you know, since the Civil War, which was foisted by that Republican party on the South, Southerners just had not voted Republican. Eisenhower did do pretty well there for a Republican, one of few Southern states, including Texas. But not the Carolinas, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, they were Arkansas, they were firmly Democratic states. There had been no Republican senators since Reconstruction.

Tennessee had voted and had a couple of Republicans, but that's that's almost a border state, although it had seceded. But yeah, he became or he announced that he was a Republican and he was going to campaign for Barry Goldwater. And he did. And did Goldwater do less and less to separate himself from the extreme fringe of the party as he's campaigning in the South? He starts to share the stage with some pretty. He was sharing the stage with not only segregationist because they were all segregationist, but some pretty out and out racist people who have been associated with the White Citizens Councils and other groups that were maybe just a touch short of being out and of being terrorist organizations or maybe not a touch short in some cases. And he never endorsed them. And when asked about it, he said, well, I don't know who these guys were, you know, but he didn't bother him to share the stage with them.

And he knew that his only chance of a respectable showing, much less whatever slim chance he had at victory, he needed the South and he needed the segregationist South. And he remembered, and there were still lots and lots of black voters in those states. He wasn't going to get them. He needed almost all the white voters of all those states and that many needed the segregationist and he needed the racist. It's a pretty brutal campaign, dirty tricks on both sides, right? Kind of brass knuckles all the way. And it culminates in the daisy energy mentioned, but also leads to Cliff White's cinematic adventure, which we talked about. What's the significance of the Doyle-Dane Burnback ads for Johnson and the degree that TV begins to play a role? And this is another aspect that I think in which 64 begins to sort of mark a kind of a bellwether.

Well, although it's a progression and an evolution, you know, a TV ad started, Eisenhower started using them both Nixon and Kennedy used them, but they weren't, they weren't all that sophisticated and they weren't all that important. I don't think in 64, in addition to the famous daisy ad, which was not Doyle-Dane Burnback, that was Tony Schwartz, that was a whole separate thing. These ads were, if not the first, maybe the first that were clearly discernible as some of them were feel good ads, some of them were, they were, they were very mainstream. They were not actually dirty trick ads. They were, they, some of them were critical of gold water, but they were not personal. They were not harsh. They were, they were, they were mainstream political advertising. Where did the free speech movement come from? The free speech movement came from the Berkeley, California, University, California, Berkeley student movement.

And where that came from is something of a mystery, but it's again related to the other things we've mentioned that we had all these young people. They were, they were numerous, they were, they had money, and many of them were, they were from suburbia, many of them. They were dissatisfied with the sort of apparently designated pattern of their lives or what they, what they saw as that. They rebelled against, they rebelled against bureaucracy as much as any specific political or, or government policy. And in, in Berkeley, they rebelled against not being allowed to vent their spleen where and when they wanted to, because the university had some sort of rule that you couldn't, you couldn't discuss partisan politics on this, but here on campus, or at least on this section of campus, which was the beginning of campus, really, where the, where the town of Berkeley, the city of Berkeley, and the university met.

And that's what, that would be where you'd want to, want to fly your banners and make your speeches. And the university said, no, and they said, what do you mean no? And the university kept saying no, and then the university administration kept retreating a little bit. And then they retreated a little bit more, and then they basically retreated, but they said these six people who have violated the rules we put down earlier, which were no longer enforcing, but still we, we designated, we, we fingered them as six offenders, so they're going to be punished. Which, of course, led to another massive demonstration of students now, when I say massive, I don't mean that it was most of the campus, most of the campus was not involved. You know, kids were playing football and going to class and all that sort of stuff, but it was, it was a lot of kids who were rebelling. And eventually, they began to designate themselves as the free speech movement, for obvious reasons, we want to be able to say what we want to say.

And then it was also, we want to be able to say what we want to say the way we want to say it, because sometimes the way they wanted to say it, included words you're not supposed to use in front of your grandmother. And that, and the university said, oh, you may not use those words, and they said, well, I'm not going to repeat exactly what they said, but they said, basically, yes, we can. So people started denigrating it as the dirty speech movement, but it was a free speech movement, and of course, it succeeded. And, well, it's bankrupt way, I think, is the street there, and it's the spool gate, or so I can't remember exactly which designation is what now. But they had these tables, the cops were there, and these were absolutely left and right.

But, well, the YAF was there, the SDS was there, the civil rights groups, goldwater groups, everything. But clearly it was the kids on the left who were the most serious about their rebellion, with some assistance from the other side of the spectrum. But, at this one point, there are all these people there, and campus police, and the campus police, nobody's getting hurt. And they decide they're going to arrest Jack Weinberg, who's not even a student anymore. He's from the Chicago area, no, actually he's from Buffalo originally. He's there, he had dropped out, he was a math student, and he was maybe going to go back to school, but he was a political activist. No, Mario Savio had been in Mississippi, Jack had not.

He's sitting in this car, and the cops want desperately, they would let him go. He said, you can't let me go, he's having a wonderful time. He's sort of the object of all this turmoil around him. What do the protesters do when they arrest him? Oh, they say you can't leave here, you have to let him go. And the police were, as I say, would have been happy to let him go, but he didn't want to be left, and then it would have been humiliating. Savio gets up on the, asks permission to get on top of the car, did, it caused some damage, which he and his friends later paid for. It was a very civilized, they were all sort of intellectuals, let's remember. And finally, really nothing happened, the whole thing. People started making speeches, and at some point, while on top, and then when the roof started to cave in, they got down. And we're just making speeches from elsewhere.

And really, it all just ended and nothing much happened. Of course, what has lasted to this day from that is that a few days later, Weinberg being interviewed, and said, on about his third or fourth interview, when he was getting sort of tired of the same old questions, when once a reporter said, you know, what keeps you going and animates you, and why, and why don't you pay more attention to what your teachers and administrators say, well, we in the movement have a saying, never trust anybody over 30. Now, the movement had no such saying, Weinberg was making that up, sort of being funny, but the phrase has lasted. It prevailed, it survives. But the only reason it, the protests ended was because the administration caved. Well, because the administration finally said, okay, we're not going to punish these six people.

And I mean, why they were going to punish the, well, it's look, it's people who are in charge don't like to be, not to be in charge. And when they are, and when their rules are violated, they feel they have to enforce them. Otherwise, everybody will always violate the rules is what they think. But in this case, it actually made no sense. Great. And they kind of knew that it made no sense. How did the election of 1964 turn out? Lyndon Johnson, one 60% of the, actually I think was close to 61% of the popular vote, Barry Goldwater got a little less than 40. Robert Kennedy was elected to the Senate from New York defeating incumbent Kenneth Keating. Johnson carried all, all but six states, Arizona, which he probably could have carried any campaign there, but he didn't have courtesy to Goldwater. Hope he didn't dislike personally, you know, they knew each other and didn't dislike one or at least he didn't dislike Goldwater.

And five southern states, five of the five deep southern states, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, and South Carolina. What happened to Georgia? Now I'm forgetting, maybe there was another one we have to check that. And a few southern states, everything else, including such rock rib Republican states as both Dakotas, Nebraska, then very Republican main New Hampshire and Vermont, Kansas, right? All, I mean, basically everything except Arizona and part of the deep South. And carried Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, even even even the near southern states. And even the international, not internationally, even the New York Carol Tribune ended up. Oh, absolutely, much of the Republican establishment, corporate executives, people like Henry Ford. So the big Republican newspaper, such as led by the Harold Tribune, not the Chicago Tribune, it stayed with Barry Goldwater.

But many of the centrist, Northeastern and West Coast, the LA Times, I believe, endorsed Johnson. And it had been a really Republican paper. And so Johnson sorted. What about the Arizona papers? They both endorsed Johnson, right? The big papers endorsed Johnson, that's right. But so in a way, Johnson sort of got that big broad coalition he wanted. He got some of the business establishment, a fair amount of the, especially the big business establishment. And he got, at least that day, he got the votes of sort of the middle of the road, middle of the country. All those Kansas, Nebraska, Dakota, Indiana, you know, Iowa, many of them who were Republicans came over and voted Democratic enough so that he won all those states. Was it a landslide?

Why do you have to call it a landslide? 60-40 is a landslide. Was it what Lyndon Johnson had always needed? Help me. Yes, it was one lemma where we started. Right, we started with this very insecure man. Election night, he's still a little insecure. He wants to know, did Bobby Kennedy say anything about me in his victory statement? And the answer is no, Bobby Kennedy had not said anything about Johnson and his victory statement, which was very ungracious of him, because he wouldn't have won. He won by a few hundred thousand votes. LBJ took, took New York by more than a million, but he didn't say anything about him. And Lyndon was still concerned about that. But he got his landslide. He got his landslide. Now you, now you could call him landslide Lyndon without irony. Right. How did the pundits see the future for the Republican Party? So it might be dead. That's okay.

How did I see it? A lot of the commentariat, the centrist commentariat in Washington said that the Republican Party might not recover. This turned out not to be correct, but it's neither the first nor the last time the Washington commentariat. I used to be part of it, so I can say this have not been correct. What was the story that they missed? The story they missed was that this not very good candidate who espoused policies that were substantially outside the national consensus of the last previous 20 years at least had gotten 40% of the vote. A very good candidate espousing those same policies might have gotten say 45% of the vote. So how established and how much of a consensus?

How established was the establishment and how much of a consensus was the consensus to begin with? Maybe it was a house built on a weak foundation. And that sort of turned out to be the case we learned a decade and a half later. Who was the one sort of star that did emerge in the campaign? Well, not quite down at the heels, but not in a very successful segment of his career actor named Ronald Reagan, who taped a speech for a televised speech for Goldwater. If anything, even more politically, if not extreme, politically hard line than Goldwater, because it was unadorned. Unadorned conservatism, saying that things like medical care for everyone would be like socialism and attacking social security and attacking almost everything that government does as a threat to individual liberty and to the traditional American way of life.

It was very well delivered and a rather powerfully crafted speech. And what was the reaction and how it had done? Well, the reaction was so favorable that it was run again. It was originally scheduled to run once. It ran again. It obviously didn't win the election for Goldwater. I don't even think we can say that it won him very many votes, but it established Ronald Reagan as a political factor to be reckoned with in the future. Did it not? What's happening to Vietnam at the end of the year? How is that story played out over there? Well, I think there was yet another government change before the year ended. And the war continued to go badly, and our military there continued to say that everything was fine because we were killing a lot of enemy.

And we were killing a lot of the enemy. And there was in fact no light at the end of the tunnel. That was one of the phrases that people kept using. And if the situation continued to deteriorate and we were still in denial about it, basically. Think about America where we started on January 1st, and imagine it on December 31st, 1904, in terms of January and Reducing Culture and Public. Well, a great deal happened in the course of the year, and some very positive. The passage of the Civil Rights Bill, clearly one of the great events in American history, and it had a positive outcome and results.

And there were other positive developments that year. But at the end of the year, the country was not as happy or as secure. Americans were not as secure about themselves in their country as they were at the beginning of the year because that consensus and that sort of sense of ourselves as a good country that was going to get better had been shaken. And there were even a few people, not very many, who said, not only are we not better, but we don't even deserve to get better. That was a sliver. But the fact that it could be enunciated and was enunciated and heard and enraged people was significant. And for the first time, at least for the first time in that century, people began to question a lot of basic assumptions that had sort of held the country together, at least since the end of the war, if not longer. What if you look back on Goldwater and Johnson and the whole sort of intense split that they represent? What changed in American politics over the course of that year? What fundamental shift occurred?

I'm not really sure there was a fundamental shift as much as a hardening of the lines on both sides and a digging a little deeper. The Goldwater people, despite the fact that they knew they were going to lose, did not change. They were true to their cause. Johnson and his people didn't have to change, they thought, so they just also pretty much held the line. So I'm not sure that there was a kind of an ideological shift. What seemed to be the case is that liberalism had dominated, and that conservatism had suffered a defeat from which it would not recover for years. In a way it didn't recover for years because Nixon who came in in 68 and Ford who succeeded in were not particularly conservative.

Now they were more conservative than Johnson, but they were not all that conservative. It wasn't until Reagan came back, came in in 1980 that we really had a revival of conservatism making it much closer to the mainstream. Anyone underlying force that drove the radical change in 64? Well, I'm not sure you can ever say there was one radical force. There were a couple of common aspects, there was a common aspect, an aspect that was common to the various changes. And that was what I mentioned before, the personalization of both cultural and political movements. People were saying, I don't want to be told what to do, I don't want to be told what slot I'm in. I don't want to be told how I have to behave, how I have to draw pictures, how I have to write poetry, how I have to think about politics.

I and we, because this was to a great extent, a youth movement, I and we, the new generation, are going to be, we're in shock, we're here now and we're going to do things our way. Money was part of it because they could afford to do that. It wasn't that they were, it wasn't even that money was the big motivator, but the general affluence was the big enabler. And of course, these young people had money for the first time, not only because everybody had money, but because their parents were much more generous toward them than their parents had been to them when they were kids, because there was this partly because of the war, I think, the depression. And then the war and America's general forward-lookingness, you want your kids to do better and it wasn't just you want them to do better later, you wanted them to have things now. So people bought houses, everybody had, every kid had his or her own bedroom and the parents began to be much more generous with kids as far as, as far as not just the necessities like clothing, but, you know, buying records and going places.

And travel got less expensive, although the big drop in airfares came later, but, but giving kids money so that they could go out so that they could do a little traveling. So they had some money. What are the legacies of this fear? I mean, you look back, the red-state, blue-state world that we live in today. You look at the cultural wars that are part of life in 2020. Is 1964 the year that the world we live in today first began to take shape? To the extent that you can say that about any year, the answer is yes, that this was the year 1964 was the year that so many, obviously not every, but so many of the social and political changes that we're still feeling became evident. Obviously nothing, nothing is born out of nothing. So things had origins before, but this was the year when a lot of this stuff became visible and almost respectable.

When it became respectable to say, I'm going to do things my way and I don't care what's proper and what's common and what, I don't care how my, whether my parents want me to cut my hair, or whether the college president wants me to shut up or anything like that, I'm going to do things my way. Now, I don't think the red-state, blue-state thing of today really owes as much to that as the more general cultural and political phenomena that we now have. That's different. That owes, there are different causes to that particular malaise. Or if it's a, just situation. I don't even know that it's a malaise. It's a situation. We're on page 18.

Hooray! I just thought we'd take a few potshots and a couple things. Sure. Let's keep them short. Timothy Leary in the Mary Frankster. What does that tell you about? Well, again, it tells you that people were breaking the boundaries. At first, what they were doing was not against the law. In fact, Timothy Leary and his associate, Mr. Albert, started experimenting with mind-expanding drugs when they were on the faculty at Harvard. That was not against law at that time, but if they got them kicked out of Harvard, pretty good. And they continued to do this, and they attracted mostly young adherents. They finally got sort of given to them by a wealthy heir to some fortune, an estate in upstate New York, where they gathered some like-minded people, and continued ingesting various mind-expanding substances, and practicing, rather, what's the word I'm looking for, not to finicky sex, and listening to music and writing poetry and stuff like that.

And they thought that they were the shock troops to a new way of consciousness and a new way of life that would improve mankind. Popular culture has, on TV, is interesting. You've got the witch and the monsters and the Adams family and gunsmith group. Let me understand what's going on as reflected through the small screen at that moment. Well, what we were seeing on television was actually pretty establishment with a little subversive undercurrent. The family in the Beverly Hillbillies, it was very hokey, almost sophomore, but there was this little undercurrent of these unsophisticated people who had moved to California from wherever they'd been,

where they discovered the oil, almost every week in some way outfoxed the sophisticated smarties of Beverly Hills. So, you know, how much of that was going on elsewhere in television? I'm not sure, but there were some other cases where television programs showed the- This is perhaps not new, the establishment getting its comeuppance from the- from the- from the- the rank of file folks. Margaret Chase Smith. She runs for president. Margaret Chase Smith, Senator for Maine, becomes the first woman to seek the presidential nomination of a major party. Everybody including Senator Smith knew that she was not going to be the nominee, but it was kind of symbolically an important move anyway. She attracted a certain amount of support, mostly from other women, and of course there was the other famous woman-related incident when in the course of debating the Civil Rights Bill on the floor of the House, Congressman Smith, Judge Smith of Virginia, I don't remember his first name even,

as a joke to make fun of the Civil Rights Bill says, well, why not also say that you can't discriminate on the basis of sex in employment, and everybody laughs, except the women in the House, they didn't laugh, they said, yeah, you know what, that's not a bad idea. Any seller, the Brooklyn Congressman who was head of the- head of the Judiciary Committee said, in my house, we have any, you know, I always- any disagreement between me and my wife always ends up with me saying, yes, dear, and everybody laughed. But as I say, the women didn't laugh, and after a couple of days, people realized that the women everywhere weren't laughing, and people kind of shamed into accepting this amendment, and putting it into the bill, and sort of as a result of a joke, sex discrimination in employment became illegal. And it has remained so.

Margaret Chase Smith resembled another conservative woman in politics, like Phyllis. Well, they were both- no, I don't, I would have to think about that. The war in commission. Why was- why was it so important? What was Johnson trying to do? Right after the assassination, there were- first place there were fears that it was part of a conspiracy, and maybe some people- more people were going to be killed that day or the day next day. When that became- it came clear that that wasn't true. There was a great- and then you had the bizarre situation of the murder or being murdered on national television live, and it was a tremendous skepticism around the country that this one person had killed the president. And so Johnson was very much afraid that people would think that the Russians had done, the Soviets had done it, or that Castro had done it, and he would be forced to go to war against Cuba, or maybe even to threaten war against the Soviet Union.

He himself wondered whether those- those things might be true. So he decided to have a very, very established and establishment commission investigate and- and come up with the- with the true story, and he appointed the chief- he got the Chief Justice to agree to- Chief Justice Warren to agree to head it. He got a whole lot of other people who didn't want to be on it to be on it, including Senator Russell, because he called him up and said, I just announced that you're on the commission. And they went to work, and of course did not entirely by any means do away with the skepticism from then until now, although I have to say I think there are some flaws in the investigation. But it's- the findings hold up pretty well.

And- and ultimately it was a attempt to sort of keep this consensus from- It was to keep the consensus from unraveling- that's right, exactly. It was an attempt, and it was an attempt to- to shore up the- it used the establishment, and it really, you know, as I say it was Gerald Ford, it was then a Republican- a leading Republican congressman. It was- and- and- and also, and of course, you know, there's- nothing is more established- establishment than the Chief Justice of the United States. And they put together a very highly regarded professional staff, and it was to calm everybody down. The fact that it didn't entirely work doesn't mean that it didn't sort of work. It did sort of work. Most- most again of the established opinion leaders accepted the findings when they came out toward the end of the year. And actually most have continued to accept them, although not everybody. I think we're done. Let's get- you want room tone 42?

No, true. Stand by for room tone number two. 30 seconds. And ribbed it. John, thank you so much.