American Experience; 1964; Interview with Jon Margolis, Author, The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964, part 4 of 5

from town for John Margolis, 30 seconds. And room done. Let's have lunch. Let's get back to Goldwater. Good ol' Barrett. Some of the signs that he had in his rallies. This is not apropos of anything. We're like the chemical signal for gold. H, yeah, right. A U plus H2O. Right. The gold's victory or something. How did Goldwater see the situation in Vietnam? And what was his solution to the problem? Well, his solution was... I'm not sure we can say exactly how he sized it up.

Being analytical was not very strong suit. His solution was more. Basically, he thought you unleashed the military. He really was part of that Asian... What used to be called the China lobby before, back in the 40s and 50s, who believed that we should have unleashed Chiang Kai Shek. This would have been to retake the Chinese mainland for... One second, Nick. Yep. Can you get some scissors? Yep. I'm going to have to cut one, snip one piece of hair. No, it's a... It's a comedy role. You can leave those there. So, please. And... Barry Goldwater. What was he going to do about it? Well, he was never all that precise or nuanced... nuance was not his strong suit, but he wanted more. As I said, he was out of the old school that kind of always wanted to unleash Chiang Kai Shek,

of the military effectiveness of this. I don't think had ever been carefully tested. But he wanted more troops, more planes, more ships, more aggressive stance. He and many other people felt that it was essentially a military problem. It was a war. And the way you win wars is by winning the war. You know, throw a lot of force in there and win the war. Yeah. What happened on CBS's issues and answers show? This is the one with Goldwater. This is the one where he said, now I'm trying to remember exactly, because defoliation. He didn't have any problem. He said, Okay, we were defoliating. No, I mean, you know, at one point in 64, he decides to go on a CBS show.

Right. So set it up for him if you can't. He is, this was a point where his views, his hawkish views on Vietnam were becoming an issue, were becoming a problem for him. And he went on to discuss, among other things, the tactic we were using of getting rid of the vegetation, defoliation. And he said he was all for it. And he, and he, I can't remember the exact phrase that he used, but he had no problem with it. I don't think it was that we, that there was a defoliation thing. He just felt like we were allowing the communists to hide. To tie. Right. The jungle. Right. And it's so tactic or low yield nuclear weapons. Oh, that's right. Yes, that's right.

Excuse me. He said that we should consider not strategic nuclear weapons like the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but some kind of low yield to defoliate, to open up the territory so that we could see, so that our pilots and other US forces could see the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese troops there. And this caused a bit of a stir. I mean, at that point, the American people were still certainly in favor of what was going on in Vietnam. They didn't want to lose Vietnam, but did not want to start throwing nuclear weapons around. And that, that was, that did not go over well. Yeah. How do goldwater feel about Johnson's domestic agenda? Well, essentially goldwater was, was, was opposed to almost everything that Johnson wanted to do. He was opposed to the civil rights bill.

He was opposed to the Warren poverty. He was, say, I don't, I don't think he ever offered a detailed critique of the, of the great society programs, but he ridiculed them. He thought they were, they were not even, they were pointless and foolish. So essentially there, you know, it was a choice, not an echo. There was no doubt about the, not that Lyndon Johnson was way off to the left. And there was even no doubt there were people and positions to the right of Barry Goldwater's because he was not an extremist in every way. But it was a pretty polarizing choice that people have and it had voters had. And it wasn't very complicated. There weren't very many nuance. There wasn't much nuance. There one guy was for all this stuff and the other was against it and basically on domestic policies to improve the lives of low income people,

the poor, to do away with racial segregation and racial discrimination by law. One candidate was for it and the other candidate was against it. And you didn't have to do a whole lot of complex analysis in 1964. Not that we usually have to do very much of that. But if anything, you, it needed 1964 needed even less. Right, right. What were his views on social security and how did the Johnson campaign respond? Well, so Barry Goldwater had often said that social security should be made voluntary. And the Johnson campaign responded to it by saying that that would kill the program and kept reminding people that Barry Goldwater had often said that it should be transferred into a voluntary program. And how did they choose to do that visually and that they had the famous ad? Well, the famous ad was not so much about social security hardware. Oh, well, that one.

I'm sorry. I'm the thing of the day's yet. Yes, they did. They had a TV ad with not a person just the hands of a person ripping up a social security card and the message was, this would, in fact, do away with the program, by the way, which is true. It would do away with the program because it could not be sustained as a voluntary program. And it was very effective. And it was, again, it was very effective because it was basically true. And then, and indeed, now, most Americans think social security is a good idea. And rather substantial majorities. Did he use the moral state of America as a campaign issue? Well, yes. But he held back a bit. He did talk, excuse me, he did talk about moral issues

and about the decline of certain things that he saw, you know, children rebelling against their parents and such like that. But when some of his supporters put together a movie which really went very strong on riots and on youth rebelling and on showed cars racing through the night, showed urban disturbances, showed all sorts of kind of horror version of what we would now call the counterculture. That movie got made and Barry Goldwater took one look at it and said, we're not going to run that. And so it never ever ran. And he called it racist. And it was. And he was not. And neither, as I said before, neither really was Cliff White who had it made. But White was totally pragmatic and he saw that if Goldwater

was to have any chance, it was by scaring people, mixing the fear that people had of too much, too soon, racial integration, fear that people had of black criminals and mixing that with the fear of all this sort of subversive, non-respectable influence that was having an impact on their children and on their communities. In fact, there was such an impact. This was not exactly a sophisticated portrayal of it. It was pretty blunt and pretty one-sided. And I don't think it would have had much made much difference at all. You know, it would have might have gained Goldwater or a few votes. But it probably would have also lost them a few votes. So I'm not even sure whether I'm balanced, it would have the net gain would have been anything at all.

What was the film called? And what does that tell you? It was called Choice. And that's what it tells you, it was people in the film, the film makes them say, this is the choice. Do you want the America that we have all known and loved? Or do you want to take a chance of going to this threatening world of dangerous people, black and white? Who are in fact trying to change the world? And they were trying to change the world. And did, of course. And we all seem still to be here. But... I think it was called... If you can just tell me again what the title was. Choice. A very evocative title. It was called Choice. And the title was quite evocative and that was the picture the producers were trying to paint. Goldwater does head-to-head

with jumping around a little bit, because that choice is in the general case. It is later, yeah. But in the... The vortex of goldwater, primary campaign is California. Yes. That was the key. What's the different styles between Rockefeller and Goldwater's campaign? Well, Rockefeller ran number one a very well-financed campaign and extraordinarily well-organized. He had never had a money problem. Nelson Rockefeller. And so everything was very professional. He hired all the best professional consultants. They had people going to get on the ballot in California. You have to gather a certain number... A fair number of petition signatures that Rockefeller paid for that. Goldwater didn't have to pay for it. His volunteers were avid. They were very intense. They went door-to-door on their own time without any money. So it was really a... the pros against the amateurs

and the pros, of course, as professionals often do lack conviction. The amateurs had... Well, I wouldn't say they had nothing but conviction, but they had a whole lot of conviction. And Rockefeller was ahead because he'd won the organ primary, just shortly before. And he was ahead in most of the polls. And then... I believe the primary course was on a Tuesday on Sunday morning. Mrs. Rockefeller. This is the second Mrs. Rockefeller. Margarita Fitler Murphy Rockefeller gave birth to Nelson, Jr. since Mrs. Rockefeller had abandoned. That's a little strong, but had left in the custody of her first husband, the rights to primary custodial rights to her other children, which did not... you know, when they had gotten married a year or so earlier,

all this... the birth of Nelson, Jr. brought all that back to people that not only had both Mr. and Mrs. Rockefeller left their first spouses for each other, but she had left her children. And this was all considered scandalous and the birth of Nelson, Jr. reminded everybody and Barry Goldwater won the primary. Why was... her name was... what did they call her? Happy. Happy Rockefeller. Why was... looking back now, but it just seems absurd. But why was this... and it was such a big deal? Well, we were a different society then, and to some extent we were... we were becoming more like we are now, but it was the early stages of becoming more like we are now. With a different attitude and a more...

what some people would call liberal, and others would probably be called decadent, ex-marriage. Divorce was rather unusual in 1964. It wasn't unheard of, especially among movie stars and the jet-setters, but it was pretty unusual, and the assumption of most people was you should be loyal to your spouse and stick with him or her. So... I mean, even today, that aspect of this particular... these particular divorces and remarries, of the children, would be somewhat damaging, but most people these days would probably say, well, it's their business. But it's their business was not really part of the... of the... wasn't on the radar screen in 1964. How was the Goldwater Campaign organized? I mean... I think Lee Edwards said that 50,000 volunteers on the ground are talking about. How many understand

the nature of this revolution? Well, it was... the organizations were already there before the campaign started, to a great extent. Because there had been this concert organization, organization of conservative young people and volunteers, and in California, especially in suburban areas, there had already been organization for the campaign to overturn a housing discrimination law that the legislature passed. In California, still... I've not so much concerned about the mechanics of it, as I am, the quality, the sort of clash of styles, and the types of people that were on one side or so together. You set up the... the Rockefeller people, perfectly, but who are the Goldwaterites? The Goldwaterites were... angry suburbanites, southern California, Orange County, even LA County outside of the city,

and then these... Who knows how many hundreds of subdivisions, which had been created within the last 15 years? So you had... it was an interesting and new way of living for the first time. People had always lived in different neighborhoods, rich neighborhoods, poor middle class, but here you had... but you could walk from one to the other in the city. Here you had... housing developments plopped down in the middle of nowhere. Orange grows in California, potato fields, and Long Island, far what you couldn't walk anywhere. And everybody was the same in each of these developments, because the houses all cost roughly the same, so everybody had sort of the same income, because that's what you could afford to get. And so they were very homogeneous, but they were new... it was all... that people had. Remember, this was...

we're not talking about rich people here. We're talking about middle income people. Their house was their wealth. One of the reasons they were afraid of the open housing law was they thought black families would come in and they'd go their property values. And so they were frightened about that. So, what... I think we Edward sort of said... or maybe it was... Bill said... Grammys in tennis shoes, or whatever they were. But they were... they were definitely more of a grassroots organization. Oh, it was clearly a grassroots. It wasn't that there was no professional leadership. There was professional leadership and there was some money. But it was a grassroots... it was middle-class grassroots uh... authentic anger and concern. Why were his age so contemptuous of polls, sound bites, and scripted messages? Well, in the first place because they were going against them, the polls.

And when they're still happening, we saw it last year here in our presidential race. When the polls are going against you, you say the polls are wrong. I don't trust the polls. Um... Well, I think they were not only somewhat unsophisticated, but they were actually hostile to the to sophistication, to some extent. It's part of the sort of tribal aspect that we mentioned before, that, you know, they didn't like those sophisticated people, so they didn't trust their tactics and their strategies, any more than they believed in their policies. Great. How did Rockefeller attack him? And was he successful? Well, obviously he wasn't successful, because he lost. Oh, we don't know that. Oh, before Rockefeller attacked Goldworth as an extremist, and especially on civil rights. And again, like Lyndon Johnson, Nelson Rockefeller had been brought up. This is funny,

because they... It's hard to think of two men who were brought up differently. Rockefeller, of course, had been brought up as one of the... in the richest family in the world, in the butt, his grandfather had been for all his flaws. He had been a... for his time, a racial equality guy. He was... he was a committed Baptist. As was Nelson, and they... was the Northern Baptist, not the Southern Baptist, the church, and that whole family has always believed in civil rights, and in certain... they have other certain socially liberal views. And just as Lyndon Johnson, who was proud of the fact that his father stood up to the client, Nelson Rockefeller was born to be pro civil rights, and he really kept attacking Goldwater in a rather... not in personally harsh way, it was all rather proper and aboveboard, but he just said, he's wrong on civil rights, and I'm going to keep saying so. What was...

One comment that Goldwater made about his chances to somebody after... after a particularly bad... I think it was... not sure it was... I think it was after California, when you should have been riding on. I'm going to lose probably real big... but on my own terms. Right, and... You can kick that back to me. You know... Right. What is Goldwater? Because that's a very reveal in common. Where did Goldwater think of his chance? Well, deep down, he really knew... almost surely knew he could not win, and at one point, he said so. He said, I'm going to lose... probably by a big margin, but I'm going to lose on my own terms. And he... he was intent on losing... with holding certain standards and not... not caving into... to do things that he would feel uncomfortable doing.

He was always a personally... upright guy with a certain amount of integrity and some standards he held to. Now, he came... he flirted with... with violating some of those in the course of the campaign. And clearly, you can't get up every morning and continue campaigning all September and October. If you don't think there's some chance you might win, he always knew, when everybody always knew that something could happen. Don't ask me what, if they didn't know what, but that maybe something would happen. But basically, he knew he wasn't in a way. What happened when he tried to see if he was to do one more? Oh, okay. What happened on the Steve Allen show? Remember that? The call in Steve Allen tries to sort of sabotage him by playing in an extremist call and go water managers to turn it around. No, I can't remember the details of that. The details... Well, I drug my memory. It's not fresh in your memory.

Basically, Allen set him up to set him up. Allen was a liberal, there's no idea. And he played a kind of a ranting, right wing, complaint against everything and go water says, well, rather than, you know, making fun of people like that, we ought to be figuring out why they're so angry. It's like having a tent and, well, standing outside the tent, while people are inside breaking up the furniture or something like that. And he really got the audience on his side, actually. I started listening to him. But it's, it's best not to do that. Yeah, no, I'd have to force, force a response. Give me an example of one of Goldwater's big rallies, which are always like... Very enthusiastic. But then, I just put my hand in front of the lens, but I'm starting to... Very enthusiastic? Goldwater. Goldwater's rallies are very enthusiastic. There is no doubt that he had true believers, who were, you know, really rallied to his cause, and he could get a...

cried and, you know, his staff, while not always so brilliant, they were competent advancemen, and they did have these organizations, and they knew how to bring out Barry voters to yelling scream and clapping all the appropriate places. For my reading of somebody, like Frosteen, he was greeted, like the second time, sometimes when he walked in in these places. But then his speeches. Oh, he turned right. Yeah. Give me that sense of what happened. Right. Well, you know, Goldwater had a real following, and it wasn't hard to get that following to come to an arena or just an outdoor area where he was going to speak, and when he was introduced, the response would be overwhelming. These people saw him as the person who was going to make life in America great again. The trouble is, Barry wasn't such a great campaigner. He was...

he was not the worst speaker in the world, but he was by no means the best, means the best. He didn't even really try to do the applause lines. He either didn't know or didn't care. I suspect he didn't care. He plotted through his rather work-a-day regular speech. And by the end, the crowd was often somewhat deflated, so they had been very enthusiastic when he walked in, but not when he walked out, and that's always a bad sign for a candidate. You want him to... you want it to be even more enthusiastic at the end than at the beginning. Who was expected to win in California? In the primary? Rockfeller? Well, early on, perhaps, Goldwater, but after the Oregon primary just a week or so earlier, which Rockfeller won just because he went, and people like it when you come in campaign, then he went... the polls changed. He was... he was ahead by... not a huge margin, but by several points, by, you know,

a discernible margin, and it looked like he was going to win until the baby was born. And then? And then he lost. He was just... because it was two days later, or two and a half. But, you know, with the... the birth, as I said, of Nelson Jr. revived everybody's memories of the scandalous divorces and remarriage of both parties, and the fact... both members of the couple, and the fact that she had left... left her children. What... what did that victory in California mean for Goldwater's team? Well, it meant... it showed number one that he could carry some votes. He had... he was ahead in the race for the... he probably would have been nominated in any way or might have been, because, you know, he was getting all these delegates from the South, chosen in these closed processes. But, he had not really won very much in the way of primaries,

and he had not demonstrated that he could win the votes even of rank and file Republicans. Well, here, now he did it, and he did it in... what was still then... what had then just become... or was about to become the biggest state in the union. Those were a whole lot of rank and file Republicans who voted for him. They weren't extremists. They couldn't all be. There aren't that many extremists in California. So, it made him... it not only effectively ended the fight for the nomination, but it kind of gave him a little cred for the general election. And... Well, I just wanted to go someplace, and I was... because it is this sort of... Oh, but if you hadn't been in a lot of primaries, how is he going to get the nomination?

Well, as I say, it was a different system back then. If you got the delegates, well, that's still true. If you get the delegates, you get the nomination. He had lost a new hamster. There weren't that many primaries. He had won a couple of primaries. But what mattered was... What mattered was delegates. But still, if you were winning the primary in a great big state, psychologically, mental-on. Okay. What else just go even politics for a sec? What's happening in the art world in 1964? And what does that tell you about what's going on? Well, what happened in the art world was not too dissimilar to what was happening in the political world. There were a lot of changes, and barriers were being broken, and limits were being overthrown, and standards were being overthrown. I mean, not entirely. There was a whole lot of standard, conventional,

not just representational, but abstract art going on, and a lot of traditional music being played, and a lot of traditional literature being written. But there were also people, you know, knocking over the barriers and knocking over the ash cans, and sometimes just making trouble for the sake of making trouble, or at least so it seemed. There was a folk music revival, which had been going on for a little while, but it was associated with the political movement on the left. The SDS crowd was very big on folk music. There was Bob Dylan, who was, at that time, still primarily a folk musician who was playing an acoustic guitar, and writing his own folk songs, but they were out of that same tradition model, and it consciously, a great follower of Woody Guthrie, in the... What about art? In painting and things like that.

Well, there were... What is the light magazine caused Lichtenstein? Perhaps the worst artist in America. You tell me. Okay. Life magazine called Roy Lichtenstein, perhaps the worst artist in America. And, you know, that whole way of approaching art, not just of accomplishing it, was new and was... And it was deliberately thumbing tweaking, if not just thumbing your nose and ridiculing, the establishment, including kind of the abstract expressionist establishment. It wasn't just that it was taking aim at the Saturday evening post at the Norman Rockwell Types. It was even taking aim at the... what had been the avant-garde 15 or 20 years earlier.

What about Andy Warhol? And as... At the year everything went wrong. Right. How he described that in 16th and what about it? Well, he... Well, he was part of that also, because... And it was part of... Let me understand what you were talking about. Okay. He was part of just doing things differently. You just tell me you got to tell me it's a warhol. That's what I mean. Andy Warhol was part of... Not so much attacking the establishment as ridiculing it and ignoring it, and doing something totally different. Not only was the result different, but the way you went about it was different. And it was quite deliberately non-arty art. He started painting, you know, soup cans and other commercial advertising displays. And things were very, very much part of everyday life and sort of reveling in the everydayness of it. And how this was not like art.

This was just what folks were looking at every day, but he was making art out of it. And, you know, again, there were people who just couldn't understand that and said, what's going on here? And what was going on here was, as in these other fields, a kind of an assertion of the self and a breaking down of the barriers between sort of high culture and low culture and middle culture, which used to be... It wasn't too many years earlier that people were first analyzing these categories and creating the categories and showing, you know, this is high-cult, this is low-cult, this is mid-cult, Warhol and some writers and poets came along and said, we don't take any of that seriously. That's a lot of scholarly clap trap. Here's what we want to do. Great. Forgive me. I can't remember whether we talked about this or we talked about it with Dalek.

The moment when LBJ tell Bobby Kennedy... You're not the guy. No, we didn't tell him about it yet. What happened? Well, the first invite... Invites Robert Kennedy to... So, Lyndon Johnson is petrified to do this, to tell Robert Kennedy. He knows he has to do it. He knows he has to tell Robert Kennedy you are not going to be my running mate from that. There's going to be all this pressure. He's petrified. He's so petrified that he has somebody else right out the statement for him, Clark Clifford. The lawyer he had from whom he had I regard. He invites Kennedy to a meeting in the Oval Office. Kennedy comes in, sits across the desk from Johnson. Johnson sits there behind his desk and reads this short document that Clark Clifford has prepared. And Kennedy is dumbfounded

and says something to the effect that, well, it's your choice. I think I could have been a great help to you. And basically, he leaves very quickly thereafter. And I believe he made a point of leaving without, you know, he turned around and walked out the door. He left with very little ceremony. It was rude. He just left with very little ceremony. Then, of course, Johnson had another problem. How does he announce this without building up Kennedy, in a way? So he comes upon the great fraud of saying I've made the decision that nobody in the cabinet should be my running mate, which prompted Bobby to say, I'm sorry to have pulled so many other, so many good guys over the side with me. And to wonder what, this is what happened to have, to have stymied the Dean Rusk for Vice President, and boom lit, which had not existed, of course. But then, Johnson does nothing. He talks to the press about the meeting. Talk to the press about the meeting, yes.

And he, in which he says, I have to help me out here. What does he say, he says? He just completely implies it. Right, he says Kennedy was horrified. He kept moving his atoms apple up and down or something like that. He was clearly very disturbed and very unhappy and almost cried, and none of which apparently was true. And then, of course, Johnson denied having told anybody that. He didn't tell everybody. He told some selective reporters. Kennedy was upset and said, I thought you weren't going to, because at the first, Johnson said, we're going to keep this confidential. You don't tell anybody, and I won't tell anybody. Then, of course, the next thing LBJ does is leak the story in a false manner. That's why Kennedy didn't, I mean, he, Lyndon Johnson, in some ways, was a great president until he got bogged down in Vietnam.

But he was, well, everybody's a flawed character, but he had a big problem telling the truth. It's not unique in public life to him, but it was a, it was a big problem, especially because of someone like Bobby Kennedy, understood that sometimes politicians have to lie, but you don't lie to, to one of your colleagues that you've pledged, you know, that if you brought it up, then you're, then you're kind of committed. And that was that old, you know, there's that Irish political, we may throw around some Blarney to the public, but when we make commitments to each other, we keep them. And they were serious about that. The Cow Palace, San Francisco. Cow Palace, in... What made the convention there so dramatic? Oh, there were several dramatic events at the convention, the Republican convention in San Francisco and the Cow Palace. It's actually a little south of San Francisco.

One was a Rockefeller trying to, to defend the minority position on the civil rights plank. And he was introduced, he stood up, people yelled and screamed and would not let him talk, booing and booing. He stood there, he said, this is still a free country, ladies and gentlemen. Nelson Rockefeller was not easily pushed around. Finally, they re-lented and he did make, to give his speech. What was he standing there to do? To support a stronger civil rights plank in the party platform. Wasn't denouncing extremism? He was denouncing extremism, yes. And he did. And the even earlier, Eisenhower had gotten the delegates very riled up by talking about sensational seeking columnists and commentators. Ike, of course, there was, out of character for Ike,

who had always been very friendly with the columnists and commentators while he was president. But he was being, he was giving the crowd a little read me. Yo, what's Rockefeller trying to do? Well, in addition to the nominal mission of the civil rights plank, he was trying to remind people that there was still a moderate Republican-wing of the Republican Party that there was a moderate establishment of the Republican Party. And he was trying to remind even these delegates of the dangers of what he called extremism. And was he trying to show the country the sort of red meat, the sort of crazy crowd, the gold water rights? Well, I don't know whether he was trying to do that. That's what happened. That because they booed and screamed when he criticized extremism. But I'm not sure that you can say that that was his motive. That was the result. Right.

What was the Scranton letter? Bill Scranton, governor of Pennsylvania, perhaps the most incompetent presidential candidate. And I have to understand, this was, he was not running in primaries. This was after pretty much after all the primaries or after most of them. He was going to offer himself as an option for the delegates. He had a letter from, now wait a minute, who? It was just his letter to all the delegates. Right. And he went on television to one of the Sunday morning TV shows. And he was, was this where he was going to read it? I'm now getting a little confused. I don't think the mechanics and how it was delivered or that important. But in effect, he had been denied the nomination. Well, this was later, yeah, yeah. Now he was attacking in really harshly. Right, right, right.

He attacked Goldwater really in a harsher terms than rock. Because Rockfeller attacked extremism and spoke in favor of a stronger civil rights fine. He did not attack Goldwater from the podium or anywhere. Scranton in his letter did attack Goldwater and very bluntly called him, if not an extremist, and a better of extremism. And that was pretty tough. And that got people angry also. Right. 15. Yeah. Yeah. What is this convention? Quiet, Liz. What is this convention signifying? Was it the beginning of the meaningless conventions? Yes. It was the beginning of the meaningless conventions. We didn't know it then. Well, there was one more meaningful convention in 1976.

But this sort of started us on the road to a system in which the voters in each party, in one way or another, make the decision before anybody ever gets to the convention. But this, you know, this was not a meaningless convention. But it was on the road to getting us to meaningless conventions. And it clearly signaled a break with the Republican Party outwardly a break from what it had been the last few in under the conventions that nominated Nixon or Eisenhower, or even for that matter, Tom Dewey. One of the big, until almost the end, the old Republican establishment, the corporate leaders, the big publishers like Henry Lewis and the publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, and other people like that, thought, well, we'll take control of this after all this fuel

and we'll make sure that we don't nominate Barry Goldwater. But they no longer had the power to do that. And that was one of the things that was illustrated by this convention. Great. What's the most, what is Barry Goldwater is nominated? And instead of conciliation, he gives a rip order. What does he say? And what was the reaction by Cliff White, by the faithful in the audience, and by the nation as a whole? Well, he gives a stemwinder of a speech which is memorable for a few lines toward the end, or maybe not even toward the end. He said, extremism in defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in defense of freedom is no virtue. And Cliff White heard that, and he knew it was coming because he had the text, but he heard it and he knew that it was all over.

It was written into the text by people who were influenced by some conservative intellectuals from the Midwest who had been very active in conservative causes and believe this. And of course, you know, it's an abstract theoretical way. It's perfectly defensible. Politically, under the circumstances, it was one of the stupidest things, a few sentences any candidate has ever uttered because Goldwater was already fighting the reputation of being, if not an extremist himself, too close to extremists, willing to give extremists some power. And he was running against a candidate who was embracing the center and who was embracing consensus and conciliation with every fiber of his being. And people want conciliation and people still do it, and at that time also people do not want divisiveness

and people don't want, didn't want extremism. But what was the reaction in the cap? Oh, in the cap house, people loved it. Everywhere else, those were the quotes that led the stories in the next day's papers and they were very, very damaging to the candidate. But in the hall, it went over five. How is Goldwater nominated? How is Cliff White rewarded for his work? He wasn't. He Cliff White was thrown over. Not under the bus, but out of the bus. I don't know what he did in many arms. Cliff White was given nothing. Goldwater didn't even make him a Republican National Chairman. I made Dean Birch, I believe, his old Arizona buddy Republican National Chairman and White knew what that meant.

He went back to his hotel and packed his bags and headed home. He had won a great victory and he was not happy in victory. Meg, quick touch up. Just make up this photo. Is the Republican Party shifting at this point after the convention? Is it still recognizable as the party of Lincoln? We sort of talked about this. Well, I don't know whether it's recognizable as so much as the party of Lincoln or even as the party of Eisenhower, although Eisenhower was there and endorsed everything. It was substantially different. It came back to being more the party of Eisenhower in 1968 when it nominated Nixon. It was a centrist Republican.

Some people call Richard Nixon the last liberal president. This was a precursor to what it then became in the 80s. Barry Goldwater would have trouble winning a Republican primary today because he's not far right enough. In those days, it was a consequential and meaningful, a separate difference from what it had been for the previous 20 years or so. What happened in Harlem? A few things, including the shooting and killing of a young black teenage boy by an off-duty police officer, which caused substantial, a small riot, or maybe even not so small, police, and I think maybe the National Guard about a can remember we're called in now.

It finally was put down and, of course, Mayor Wagner and with the agreement of President Johnson and Governor Rockefeller, said that the rioting had been caused by communists. I didn't necessarily use that term, but outside agitators, it's very similar to the southerners whose for years had been saying that if all these outside agitators wouldn't come down here, they'd learn that our Negroes are just perfectly happy where they are. It's not quite the same thing, but everybody always wants to say, we're fine. Everything is great here if it weren't for these troublemakers coming in from elsewhere. So it was left wing, the left wing of the civil rights movement and other radicals and maybe even actual communists were coming in here and riling up the folks to riot. And that's what the trouble was. And the President finally appointed a group to investigate a very prestigious group of law enforcement and other people. And they ultimately concluded that that was a lot of garbage, that there were no outside agitators,

that this was a... people were just angry. They were terribly angry about the teenage boy being killed, but they were angry anyway. What did it represent? I mean, was this the first time a major urban area had been... Well, I was the first time in New York in a long time, and New York was supposed to be different. You know, it was a very liberal state. It had civil rights laws, already statewide laws. And die discrimination laws. It had strong labor unions. It had at least the public sector, a fair amount of hiring of Negro workers. So it was a bit of a surprise there. But it showed that even a lot of people who were not dirt poor were getting impatient. And they were no longer willing to wait. Because it is true. There was, as there is, a substantial black middle class in Harlem. And some of them, especially some of the younger ones, were just as angry and just as impatient.

And perhaps more so than the very poor people. Those riots played into gold waters. They certainly did. Well, because they showed that it wasn't just a southern problem, this racial business. And so, again, the, the message, the subliminal message that some of the gold order people wanted to send was coming soon to a neighborhood near you. No rioting and naughty activity that's going to seduce your daughter and all that sort of stuff. But this in particular was racial rioting. And the established civil rights leadership, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP. And some of the others were very, very upset. And they tried to work together with other people with the president, with, with a law enforcement to tamp down these disturbances.

They called them goldwater rallies. What, what happened on August 4th in the Gulf of Tonkin? Well, that's a, we still don't know exactly what happened on August 4th in the Gulf of Tonkin. An American destroyer, which was off North Vietnam, north of the demarcation line. Not just, didn't just happen to be there. It was monitoring some commando activity that our side, mostly South Vietnamese forces, were undertaking against North Vietnamese islands and facilities they had there. The commander of the destroyer thought that torpedoes had been fired at him. And he may have been right. And took action. He was very calm.

He did not rush to take action. He reported this. But finally, planes from the US Navy planes intercepted some North Vietnamese high speed. A craft. And it didn't destroy them. It turned them back. And this was all reported back to Washington. Washington went into a tizzy. And the next day, or the next night, another destroyer came up to join the first destroyer. And one of them, again, thought that they were being attacked by torpedoes. And this time, we reacted more forcefully. We are still not sure whether there was a single torpedo fire toward either of our ships, because the weather conditions were such that radar was imprecise. Lyndon Johnson himself said it may be that our guys were shooting at some flying fish, but it emboldened and it enabled the administration to get to prepare and get Congress to approve. A resolution authorizing the president to use force to repel.

Basically, authorizing the president to do whatever he wanted to do militarily in Vietnam. And it was the legal authorization for several years of war. Did the LVJ really think that the resolution was giving him real authority to escalate the war? And how did the resolution have to play over the public? The resolution at first, everything that we did, the president went on television late at night, said American ships had been attacked and have responded. And that he was going to prepare this resolution for the Congress. And the tremendous support in the country formed whenever we were attacked, or whenever we might have been attacked. People always rally around the flag and around the president, and we've seen some more recent instances of that.

And I don't, it's hard to say whether he himself thought that this gave him unlimited power, or almost unlimited, but he acted there after as though it gave him substantial power. He never went back to Congress as he escalated more and more and more. He never went back for more authorization. And when asked, he and Anne McNamara and the generals always said, well we have our authorization from the Congress, the Tonkin Gulf resolutions. The dead civil rights workers were discovered right around at the same time. Under them. What happened? What was the national reaction to that? Well, firstly, the FBI may not have been on the job in Mississippi early, but the FBI is not incompetent. And they are not broke. They went in there with skilled investigators and lots of cash to pay essentially rights to people.

And they finally managed to get enough people to provide enough information that they were told that the bodies were probably buried under this dam, and they dug and they found the bodies. And the reaction was, well, you know, people were horrified. You could no longer Senator Eastland's line that they'd gone away and it was all a big fake, was no longer tenable. They'd clearly been murdered. And the American people are not pro-murder and never have been, even most of the hard-line Southern segregationists. Well, the reaction was quite, it was subdued, but it was to be very sympathetic to the families and to want to solve the murders, which, and eventually the FBI did that sort of. Right. What was the MFDP, and how did it move out? All right. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was formed because the Mississippi Democratic Party was entirely segregationist and closed.

The Mississippi Democratic Party, which was not going to, which would elect electors for the presidential election, who would not vote for Lyndon Johnson as they had not voted for John F. Kennedy, at least some of them had not in 1960. It was a totally closed operation. It did not, it chose its delegates in a room, a lot. The Democratic delegation from Mississippi would not vote for the Democratic president. Even the electors chosen on election day would not vote for the Democratic president, and the electors chosen, excuse me, the delegates chosen in the non-process that the official party put on, which was just to get a few guys together in a room and say, okay, you and you, and you know, you're the delegation. They missed the black popular, some of the black activists with some whites in Mississippi decided that they would do something extraordinary.

They would run a real open political process the way the official party was supposed to do. They would, they would actually follow the law, although it didn't apply to them, that the official party was not following. They did, they had, they had public meetings, publicly advertised, come to this place at this time, and we'll choose delegates to, to the next level, the way caucus convention systems work in several states. They did it openly, they, they chose their delegates, they sent them to Atlantic City and said, we are the delegation that should be seated, we are loyal to the Democratic party, we were chosen in an open process, not these guys. And what did that, what did that represent for Johnson and the power structure? A terrible threat because Johnson was still hoping to keep much of the South, loyal to him into the Democratic party and he knew that if he seated those, the MFDP delegates, even some of them, and kicked out the delegates of the established party,

the other deep southern states, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina, that they might walk out of the convention, and they would, and they would turn against him. Now we ended up losing most of those states, all of them in the, in the general election anyway, but he didn't want them to walk out, he didn't want an open schism in the Democratic party, so he kept saying we have to make some kind of a deal that's acceptable to the hardline southerners who are slightly less, who are segregationists, but they're, but they're obeying the civil rights law, but now the law has been passed, and compliance was pretty good, was actually quite good.

It was challenged in court, but in the meanwhile restaurants and hotels and bus stations and et cetera, mostly obeyed the law, even in most of the deep southern states, not so much in Mississippi. But he wanted, he didn't want to have those people feel that they no longer had a home in the Democratic party.