American Experience; 1964; Interview with Robert Caro, Author, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, part 4 of 4

It's this very fraught moment in the history of the country and Johnson is the man of the hour. Well, you know, in the beginning of 1964 is not that far beyond November 22nd. That was only like six weeks. So the country, you know, what Johnson has accomplished and what he's still doing at the beginning of 1964 is he is taking this country. It's hit by the assassination of a president. In a moment, power, in a moment, this great power passes from one individual to another. With no preparation, you know, we political scientists today, political scientists today say that 11 weeks, the time between election and inauguration day is much too short a time for a president to get ready for a transition. You know how Longland and Johnson's transition was two hours and six minutes. He takes that's the length of the flight from Dallas to Washington.

He raises his hand. He takes the oath, two hours and six minutes later, he's got to get off that plane and be ready to be president. And he does. He shows the country that the government is on course, that someone's in charge. He calm. I mean, we forget all the fears that, you know, Oswald visited this Soviet embassy. We're only 11 months from the Cuban, only 13 months from the Cuban Missile Crisis. The threat of nuclear war is always there. But he has really calmed the nation and shown them that someone's in charge. As 1964 begins, he has succeeded in showing people continuity with his theme from November 22 until January, totally beginning of 1964. He had to continue the Kennedy programs, let us continue. Then right at the end of the year, he says to it as his voice is, that's been the theme. We had to continue his legacy, but now I have to put my own mark on the presidency.

I have to have my own program. I have to do things in my own right to show America I can be a president. And right after the beginning of the year, in the first week after the beginning of the year, that's what he does with a program that's really revolutionary in scope, a war on poverty, a saying that this great rich nation is going to the first time to vote a significant portion of its resources to helping the dispossessed of that nation, the poor of that nation. So at the beginning of this year, he lays out a goal that is monumental in American history. If you look at the end of this year, you say what happened in 1964, Lyndon Johnson seems well on the way to accomplishing that goal. I'm not ready to talk about it yet.

Well, I mean, you can talk. It's fascinating. You're going to have such a great time with it. Yeah, I'm thinking, you know, how are you not going to have Robert Kennedy standing there with that incredible ovation? Well, that's up to you. I'm sorry I put it that way, but you think of the moments of that year, which are the greatest moments. I guess that's a great moment, but I don't know what you can do with Bobby Kennedy without going into a new scene, it's the unforgettable moment, the most unforgettable moment I've ever seen, you know. So if you could, you know, I could say, I mean, I'm sure you have someone else to say this. I mean, I could say, but I don't want to go into any more details that, you know, Johnson

managed every detail of it, two giants, you know, I could say that, two giant pictures of him hung over the hole, you know, he was a, you know, but that's not what I can't do anymore than that. I'm so curious about the challenge of the MFDP represents to him and all of those things, which, if you know, if you know a way to get through that in any reasonable length of time, let me know, you know, it's really, yeah, you're, you're, I don't envy you trying to sort that out, you know, you talked about the, you know, you talked about the, you know, the way he prepared to step out in the, let us continue speech. The State of the Union, I know we talked about poverty as being the dominant thing that he's thinking about, but he's also thinking about an overall vision of what he's going

to lay out for the country. How does he prepare himself? What do you think is gone through his mind the night before that speech? Well, I think, well, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, I, I, I couldn't, I don't think I can answer it that way. I mean, maybe I, the other way, I mean, what was he thinking about when he was writing the speech? Well, that's down on the ranch, and I tried to talk to you about how this was the setting he knew what poverty was. So he would totally cover it. Yes, yes. I'm wondering if there's another element of thinking of the civil rights component of it. Well I said that in all his life, he, I said that I have the speech, all my, when I was teacher, I swore that if I ever had the power, and now I have the power, so that, I think it covers that unless there's something else, and I was just getting, I'm struggling in

my own mind a little bit with his link between, his, his concerns about poverty and his concerns about equality and civil rights, and they are, they are really willing to get it. Yes. And he understood that. In the big picture, help me understand. Okay. Are you now? Well, to Johnson, because he had, maybe an understanding, you know, that you could only have if you grow up poor, you know, very poor, you know, to use a phrase that, when he was once talking about, to his cousin, Aver, what kind of work he had to do as a child. He said, nigger work, nigger work. He meant picking the cotton. He meant doing manual labor on other people's forms, meant driving that Fresno. I mean, think of the youth where what you do in this broiling hill country son, which it's nothing to be over 100 degrees all day, out in the middle of nowhere with this little road gang, building a road in these empty, isolated hills, and he's, in effect, yoked into

harness with the mules, pushing this heavy thing through the, through the earth. To Johnson, civil rights and poverty are linked together. He knows, he seems to always have a feeling, and black leaders said, well, I can't think of one at the, just, is this instant, that he talks, yes, in, in fact, in my book, if I could, if I had it here, he said, that speech, someone said, Roy Wilkins, that speech could have been written by a, I think they've used as the word, by a negro speechwriter. I mean, it, Johnson understands what it is to go beyond the word poverty, to, I use the phrase, the dispossessed of the earth, the people who are excluded. That's why he lumps them together, that, to talk to the governor.

I, you know, we have to be able to say that to the negroes in the south and the Mexicans in Texas, and the Orientals on the west coast, and the Johnson's of Johnson's city, America is for you, you know, he feels like he's one of them. It's not so much a question of black and white, although, of course, it comes down, he's always saying to civil rights leaders, you know, you ought to help me, and they do help them, on the poverty programs, because your people are going to be helped to a disproportionate extent. The programs are going to help you, you know, your people, so it's all, he has a vision of America. There's no question that he had, Lyndon Johnson has evolved a vision of America. Now, political scientists are always saying, you know, he was inheriting the New Deal, he was, you know, if we see him in this liberal tradition, well, that is, that is correct on one level. It does not explain the passion with which he is determined to pay us this war on poverty.

I'm not passionate to repeat something I said before, you, in my view, you can actually see it in his face, when he says, you know, too often Americans, too many, I mean, think of these phrases that he has, you know, no one gives Johnson credit for the fact that he has great phrases, you know. And you listen to that speech, and I talk to Ted Sorensen, who was the speech writer on it, trying to find out where these great phrases come from, and you trace back the drapes of the speech, and you really come to the conclusion that a lot of these great phrases are nobody's phrases, but Lyndon Johnson. Too many Americans live on the outskirts of hope, and it's not their fault, he says. It's because they didn't have a good education, they didn't have a fair chance. It's our job to help them escape from squalor and misery and unemployment.

I do not feel that a political science analysis of Lyndon Johnson in the liberal tradition, well, that is, it is correct, that is what is, and in explains the passion with which he pushes these, that came out of his boyhood. Great, great, thank you. You know that Christmas, well, you have me here, I might as well do this stuff. That new, which is really new years, what are we talking about? I mean, he's at the ranch from December 24th, 1963, to January 5th, 1964. During that time, he visits his cousin Aver, who was in the cotton fields with him. You know, in IAS Day, do you remember, you know, he goes to give her a point-setter plant for Christmas or something? And I said, do you remember what you talked about over that Christmas and New Year's? And she said to me, you know, I don't really remember, but I know we talked about picking the cotton because we never were together without talking about picking the cotton.

He couldn't stop talking about it. He hated it so much. I mean, so when you think of Lyndon Johnson's and you think of the passion, it's a passion for what we call civil rights, it's a passion for helping the poor. It's a passion for equality, for justice, for social justice. And he finds these things in himself to, you know, the black leaders who come into that oval office, whoever the fifth one is. Wilkinson, and young, and farmer, and King, and whoever the other one is. You know, it's really, they're all saying, we didn't really know if we could trust them, but after talking with him, we knew he could trust him. And I wrote in the book what he was really talking to these men about were things of color. When it came to things of color, these were very hard men to fool. And they came out of there knowing that he was on their side.

Great, yeah, remember that phrase, and it's a terrific, they were hard to fool. Yeah. Yeah. Meg, quick, two, two hairs. I mean, that you, that you ask of them being tied in together. So what do we see was Lyndon Johnson's college experiences, taking, no having no money. He used to say, you know, I always wanted the Ham and Egg sandwich, and I always just got the egg sandwich, because I couldn't afford the Ham and Egg. And he goes down to Coutulur and teaches the Mexican children and develops this, and the janitor and develops this passion to help them, to him. It's one thing, poverty and race are inextricably mixed. It's the great, in, in, in the great injustice in, in America. And he, you can almost say that in his speeches in 1964, he's saying, we're going to fix them both.

And he is, at the end of 1964, as I say, you say, boy, he started this on the path, you know. You don't know what's, what is about to come. Great. Let's think about, because I know you don't have any, you press for time. So let's, let's sort of step back and just think a little bit about, I mean, you're really good at jumping up to the, to the big picture, but let's, let's live there for just a little while at the end. If I said to you, you know, imagine, summing up the year by beginning by saying 1964 was the year that, and then you just tried to, tried to distill down what, 64 and then, what would you say? Well, I'll, I'll think out loud again. So 1964 was the year that America started, that America made some real progress on the

road to social justice and equality of the races, 1964 was the year of the first really strong civil rights legislation since reconstruction, 1964 was the start of the war on poverty, 1964 was the start of the, really, the horror that was to be Vietnam because of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. But more than anything else in my view, you have to talk about Lyndon, 64 in the terms of Lyndon Johnson because all the things we're talking about, Lyndon Johnson played a leading role in. Are you, 1964 was the year of Lyndon Johnson? I, I believe it was, that's, but I say you don't want to, you know, you don't want to do it that way. I think it's part of, you can make that.

I mean, how does this year, how does this, in terms of what I'm saying, how does this year start? There's a new president of the United States. And as this year starts, he's down on his ranch in Texas. What does he see when he opens the front door of his ranch every morning, a stretch of the highway that he worked on as a boy? What's to the left, we didn't view a couple of hundred yards or maybe a hundred yards down the road, a little frame house, it's not the same frame house, but a little frame house, just like the horrible little frame house, he grew up in as a boy while his father was losing this very ranch that he's back on. And what does he go back to Washington and do, declare a war on the things that put him in this situation as a young man? So if you look at it that way, you say, this is clearly the year of Lyndon Johnson. What is he else does he do in this first year? He calls, he has the civil rights leaders in there, he tells them how to pay us a civil

rights bill, the techniques that we don't want to go into, but the techniques that will alone make the technique, the Senate has killed by filibuster or killed by the threat of filibuster every strong civil rights bill since reconstruction. He lays out the tactics, the strategy by which the filibuster can be rendered can be defeated. Okay, they fill of us to, but he's going to bring it, how are you going to be able to end it? He lays all these things out. He flies back to Washington with this all laid out in his mind. So to me, if you say, what is the shape of 1964, politically and governmentally, it's all laid out at that ranch, and of course there's this dramatic incident where he takes, where he goes to the club with a black secretary and physically desegregates anything.

So he flies back to Washington with this landscape laid out. The same time 1964, when you look at 1964, you say 1964 is a time of a great fight on many levels for social justice. Black and white students are coming from the north to the south, they're getting beaten on the streets of the south, some of them are tortured on the streets of the south, some of them are murdered on the streets of the south. They are fighting for social justice in a great fight. The same time 1964 is the year in which these people have a champion in Washington who can transform their sacrifices into legislation, into law, into writing it in the books of

law. So to me, in that way, 1964 is where America is in a way coming to a climax of a fight for social justice, and it seems to be on the road to making real progress there. The same time 1964, when you read to things that Johnson is not letting surface, that are being tamped down about Vietnam, you sort of feel something is coming here, you know, you don't know what it is, Vietnam hasn't really started to come. You don't really know that Johnson is going to send almost 600,000 men to the jungles of Asia. He's saying that he will never do that. So. Is there a moment when you look at this great way to think about it? Is there a moment then that you could see 1964 as this kind of, this hinge, this continental

American divide between something that's, that the Gen Johnson is at the peak of this moment is for him, 64 really is the top of the mountain, and it's all going to start to fall. Yes, I'm very quickly. But the country is the same, for the 60s, are we about to go through the same experience? Well, absolutely. I would say 1964 is the watershed year, and I'll use the word watershed in the exact meaning of that term. watershed is a mountain divide, a divide, watershed is a mountain divide, on one side, a watershed is a divide in the mountain range, the continental divide, you can edit this. On one side, the waters run this way, on the other side of the watershed, the waters run this way. 1964 is like the moment when the waters are at the very peak, and they're going to very

almost immediately start to run in the other direction, until the 1960s is going to become a symbol of something very different from 1964. But in 1964, there it all is, glorious. If you just sort of look at, well, we've been so focused on Johnson, but is there a moment when, during this year, the genies are kind of let out of the ball on a lot of levels. The coach that certainly would be a nun, who began to feel that, with, with, with the, Well, you have the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Exactly. You have Freedom Summer. Yes. You have this moment in the Atlantic City where the left truly feels betrayed by the Democratic Party in a profound way. You've got the rise of white, young white students and their radicalization. You've got the conservative explosion of Barack Obama. I'm just, again, I love where you are in this sort of 30,000 feet out from. Is it a year where all of these forces are first, for the first time unleashed? I think you'd have a hard time tagging too much. Yeah, because certainly the civil rights stuff had been boiling up in the South in 60, in since 60. You know, I think you'd have a hard time doing that. I, at least I can't do that. Why do you think, well, you could say, this isn't an answer to the overall thing, you

say 1964 was the year, the moment in which the liberal, so many of the highest liberal aspirations of the century were turned into law, were realized. You can say it was 1964 was the year in which so many of the highest liberal, the highest liberal dreams, 1964 was the year in which so many of the highest liberal, most glorious liberal dreams were realized. But it also was a year, which in a way, no, I don't want to go into that. I don't believe that, so I'm not going to go into that. Because you feel the seeds of another term too. Why do you think it's so important for us to remember and look back in 1964?

I think it's important for us to look back on 1964 on one level, because you can see what government is capable of, the promise of what government is capable of doing. It is striking to see someone like Johnson articulating such a, well, not just articulating, passing. Right. I mean, writing it into the books of law, you know, I mean, yeah. Can I just say I sort of have to leave, and I hope someone's, there's a car or someone's

getting their car, just because I have another point that I have to be to, okay. I want my last two questions, sure, no, that's, that's, if you think about the beginning of 1964, what's the condition of the civil rights movement? It's a big question, but not so much the specific leaders, but I know what you're talking about. That's a good, that's a good question. In 1964, you have this long pent-up fight for civil rights, reaching sort of a crescendo in the south, it's the year of the fire hoses, the police dogs, and you say in the history of America, what's going to happen if there is no outlet for these passions, meaning what's

going to happen if no Congress will not pay us a law, that you will still be in the same situation, that when you go into a movie theater, blacks still have to sit in the balcony, they can't sit in the rest of the theater. What's going to happen if that situation, if government does not do something to resolve that situation, at the beginning of 1964, you really feel unsure that government is going to be able to do it, because government has never been able, as it happens, Johnson has already set in motion the only way, you don't want to go, it's hard to do it, I mean Johnson has, at the beginning of the year, you can't imagine this is going to happen, the south in the center has, through the filibuster and the threat of the filibuster, defeated

every strong civil rights bill for almost a century. There is no sign on the surface that this is going to change, but you have a president sitting in the Oval Office, or you want me to go back, there is no sign that this is going to change, and you really have to say, if this doesn't change, if after all this sacrifice, all this heroism on the streets of the south, I mean the very image of these college students from the north, men, young men and young women going, and they're taught, this is the position you have to get into to best protect yourself if you've been knocked down and they're kicking you, this is how you protect your kidneys, this is what young women and young men had to learn going to the south, and as I say people were tortured there, they were murdered there, they were certainly beaten there, they had fire hoses turned on them and police dogs turned on them, what was going to happen to America, if

this portion of the population, which also in many parts could hardly vote, so they didn't have the power to change even local things, what was going to happen if they couldn't find a governmental outlet, and at the start of this year, because they don't know, even the press doesn't understand, that Lyndon Johnson has found the lever that he's going to move Congress by, he found it not looing after Ken in a stroke of legislative genius, that they were ready, started to move, to end this situation, to beat the south, he's already started that, but that's not really known, so if you look at, I mean the word inconceivable is being used still by college, it's inconceivable that a civil rights bill, they could have all this heroism on the streets of the south, but these still need 67 votes in the center, and the liberals don't have them, that was what America was in respect to civil rights.

And ultimately, it's the hammer gloves that make it. Yes, yes, it's Johnson's, it's both the hammer gloves and his genius, you know, in finding a way to get the civil rights bill over to the center early enough so a filibuster can be defeated, so the south will have to hold out for too long, and they can't. Last question, if you look back at this year, what's the legacy of 1964? Are we living still with that year? I don't think I have an answer to that question, I'm sorry. That's all right, it's sort of a tricky twist, I think we're done, I think we're done. Okay, thank you.

We'll call room talents. Can you move? Robert? Yes.