American Experience; 1964; Interview with Rick Perlstein, Writer, part 2 of 3

What's Johnson's ultimate vision? He's a new dealer, right? What's really hoping to do? Yeah, I mean, he is a child of the New Deal. His first job in politics was running the National Youth Administration, which was a New Deal agency. As a senator, as a congressman, he uses New Deal programs to electrify his backwards region. He believes in the power of government to make people's lives better. He's seen it happen. And this is what you do when you're president. Now he's president, and this is what he's going to do. He's going to expand the New Deal. He's going to cure cancer. He literally says that. He is going to expand medical care for the agent. He is going to declare a war on poverty. He is going to harness the great forces of the federal government to spread the blessings of liberty and prosperity to all Americans. The Republican Party doesn't really like Barry Goldwater.

It's summarized for me if you can. And I mean, summarized the stock Goldwater movement. Why are they so determined to try and block this guy? Mm-hmm. If you remember the Republican's establishment, Barry Goldwater literally represents everything you've been fighting for all your life, which is an accommodation with the forces of progress, which are associated with an advancing American state, and an attempt to kind of contain the unruly energies of the electorate. The fact that he's willing to embrace what he, frankly, is willing to admit his extremism is horrifying to you. And you're going to do everything you can to try and stop it. And what do they, how do they do that? Right. Now, they keep it full parade of what's served it. Now, the striking thing about it is, these guys are supposed to be the ones who are in charge. They're supposed to be the ones who, you know, can snap their fingers and the world comes running.

They're the establishment, right? But they're very shocked to discover that they're paper tigers. They're their main guy, Rockefeller, suffers a humiliating loss in the Californian primary, shortly after his wife gives birth to his child after his divorce. And after his loss, they're kind of scrambling around madly to try and get people to run, but they can't find anybody. You know, there's some George Romney, you know, the kind of hot-shot governor of Michigan he refuses. Right? There's Richard Nixon, who's kind of trying to draft himself and kind of, you know, sort of soiling himself in humiliation. And there's this forgotten figure named William Warren Scranton. You know, this kind of yaley handsome. He's called the Republican Kennedy when he enters politics. And he just won't pull the trigger.

He's hamlet. He's brooding around the governor's mansion in Pennsylvania, like it's Elsonore, you know? Finally, he decides he's going to do it. That duty calls, and there's nothing a kind of establishment mandrum and loves more than answering the call of duty. But he turns out to be a paper tiger, too. Let me just hit something. He's undone by his very sense of entitlement. Okay. Why, what happens? Who is Rockefeller and why isn't he unstoppable? Helping someone to have the story. Well, you know, in a nutshell, Nelson Rockefeller is the richest man in the world. You know, it was rather a shocking thing when he announced to his family that he was going to enter politics. I mean, that wasn't really a Rockefeller kind of thing. And surprises everyone by becoming quite a successful governor of New York. And having a bit of a gift for the common touch.

And he's always, you know, kind of belatedly kind of drafting himself president in 1960 and then in 1964. And he's really kind of seen as the shoe in. But then he does something a little unorthodox. Early in the 1960s, he divorces his wife. And very quickly afterwards, Mary is a younger, quite attractive woman who leaves her husband and children. Her name is happy. You know, one of the party jokes of the day is Rockefeller is feeling happy. But that kind of encapsulates the kind of, you know, this was the idea of, you know, kind of leaving your wife for a younger woman. It was kind of a naughty notion in that day. It shows the conservatism of the morays of the time. It was shocking.

It was, people were horrible. It was absolutely shocking. I mean, it was the subject of every Sunday sermon in the land. I think Reinhold Nieber, you know, the great Protestant theologian said, my Baptist housekeeper is absolutely disgusted. You know, this is his way of saying, even my Negro Baptist housekeeper is disgusted. When you're the richest man in the world. Now, when you're the richest man in the world, you kind of have the prerogative usually of being oblivious to the opinions of others. So Nelson Rockefeller doesn't even really see the problem. And very soon afterwards, happy becomes pregnant with little Nelson Jr. And she's due to give birth right before the voting for the crucial California primary in June. Good. Now, let's talk about that primary.

Huge contrast in style. You couldn't get more of a set piece. The difference is gone. What's the Rockefeller campaign like? Yeah. Well, Nelson Rockefeller, you know, being of the richest man in the world, runs a campaign like, you know, the invasion of Normandy. I mean, he scoops up every consultant. He spends tons of money. In fact, when you go to the Rockefeller archives in Terry Town, New York, you can find transcripts of every Barry Goldwater speech, every coffee clutch he holds in New Hampshire, because there'll be 10 people in the room and one of them will be a Rockefeller agent with a tape recorder. And he bars advertising, right? You can't turn on a TV without seeing a Nelson Rockefeller commercial. But Barry Goldwater does something very different. He has this grassroots army. He has people knocking doors. They're the kind of gorilla army kind of working undercover of the night. And they're willing to do anything.

They're willing to knock on doors until their knuckles bleed, fighting for Western civilization itself. And as we'll soon discover in Vietnam, the gorillas have the advantage over the set piece army. What's the goldwater army look like? And where do they come from? Well, for one thing, goldwater's army is white. You know, I mean, the idea that the Republican Party is a tribune of the Civil Rights Revolution is still active in 1964. Nelson Rockefeller is very careful to have people like Jackie Robinson working for him. Actually, that's sure they ought to look that up. Yeah, no, he's not looking back. Well, he definitely is. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, that's true, actually. The goldwater folks are these young, young Americans are freedom activists. They're housewives. You know, this is the convention, excuse me.

This is the movement in which this woman, Phyllis Schlafly, kind of becomes a national figure, right? She kind of self-publishes this book called A Choice Not Neko, which is kind of this fulmination about how the Republican establishment, you know, kind of railroads, conservatives, you know, kind of is involved in all these wicked cabals and backroom conspiracies to thwart the will of the people. Me too, Republicans. Me too, Republicans. And this book is everywhere in California. In fact, by the time of the Republican convention, I think that one delegate claimed he'd received like 50 copies unsolicited in the mail. People are kind of unloading bales these things and kind of passing them out like campaign buttons. They're trying to wake up the population before it's too late. And there's old grandmothers. In fact, one of the old grandmothers happens to be Richard Nixon's mother.

And Richard Nixon is horrified that his mother is going to kind of thwart his attempt to kind of be the broker who kind of can heal all the factions and kind of emerges the consult consensus candidate when the Republican convention threatens to go up in a conflagration. Right? He's going to kind of emerge as the savior of the Republican party and become the nominee. That's his secret plan. So he kind of calls up his mother in a panic, tells her to stop, calls up Barry Goldwater in a panic. They had these radio telephones around the road. And he tells her he promises him that he's not part of any stop-gold water movement. But that's great. And I mean, I interviewed Phyllis Schlafly. I'm sure you did. She's responsible for everything. I know. He's unbelievable. What kind of candidate is Goldwater during the California campaign? I'd love you to draw this back until you have a great life.

He gives overcooked broccoli to a crowd expecting raw meat. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How about the taste like piss thing? That's probably a little too. That's there. Sure. I'll say anything. Yeah. What's he like? He's going up and down the state of California. And he's crowns. Right. Barry Goldwater is facing these crowds. They're chanting. We want Barry. We want Barry, which of course terrifies people who are not part of this movement because, you know, like I say, Hitler is still a living memory for most adult Americans. And then after this kind of this kind of crowd passion, he shows up. He stands at the podium. He says, you shut up, you'll get him. So he starts out by insulting the audience. All right. And then he kind of delivers overcooked broccoli to this crowd that's expecting raw meat. You know, my favorite story is he's in a parking lot in Georgia at a campaign rally. And someone is kind of following the campaign and selling something called Goldwater Soda off the tailgate of his truck. Right.

And you can kind of get a can of it on eBay. He finally, he finally is able to kind of triumphantly hand a can to the stuff to Barry Goldwater. And he cracks it open. Takes a sip. Spits it out and said, this tastes like piss. I wouldn't drink it with gin. Yeah, this is, you know, this is, this is a guy who's, by the way, trying to win people's votes. Right. But this shows this kind of contempt for the niceties of politics. Yeah. So what happens very goes on during the California campaign? He goes on a program in CBS. Oh, right. What was the theme of the host again? I think it was, how do Barry's television appearances go during the campaign? Yeah.

Two things about Barry Goldwater. He wasn't one for self-sensorship. And he had a lot of faith in the power of what he called small low yield nuclear weapons to kind of solve military problems. Now, of course, the assumption is that if you use a nuclear weapon, you create an escalation that may end up, you know, kind of resembling the hit movie of the year Dr. Strangelove. The world will end. No one wants to talk about nuclear weapons except for Barry Goldwater. And Howard Casemith says, well, what are you going to do about Vietnam? And Barry Goldwater says, well, the problem is all this ground cover, all this foliage. But that can be removed with low yield nuclear weapons. And, you know, of course, he's only speaking hypothetically, he can claim. But this absolutely plays into Rockefeller's number one campaign strategy, which is to make him look like this irresponsible, crazy person who you can't trust with his finger on the button. That becomes the absolute centerpiece of Lyndon Johnson's campaign.

There's this great movement down the tapes in which his press secretary, George Reedy says, well, we need to play the kids with two heads angle, which is this fear that nuclear fallout will, you know, you can find that. George Reedy press secretary? He's press secretary. So, more is wasn't? More is was kind of a jack-of-all-trace kind of fact totem. And that's a great clip because Reedy has this great baritone voice, too, so you should get that one. Yeah, great. I like the quick reference you made to Dr. Strangelo, but let me give you more time on that. Sure, that's affecting politics and the issue of nuclear weapons right now. The idea that we have to be afraid of crazy military commanders is in the popular culture. There's a movie from a couple of years before called Seven Days in May about, you know, kind of right-wing military commanders kind of taking over the country, Barry Goldwater plays into that fear.

Just as the New Hampshire campaign is ramping up, Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelo comes out. And like no other film before, it kind of injects into the bloodstream of the country, the absurdity of nuclear war. The absolute insanity that's, you know, again, just beneath the surface. Stanley Kubrick is this brilliant guy who was reading, you know, kind of books of nuclear strategy, and he couldn't believe what he was reading. The way these people fought, you know, when the general and Dr. Strangelo says, well, I'm not saying our hair is not going to get lost, right? But really, we'll lose 20 million, they'll lose 50 million, and we win. This is introduced into a country in which precisely because of this consensus ideology, hadn't wrapped around, hadn't wrapped its mind around the madness in its midst. And Barry Goldwater, by speaking so frankly about something that most politicians just didn't discuss, and to his credit, he was talking about things that were actually official doctrine.

I mean, there's a striking woman in which George Bundy, Lyndon Johnson's national security advisor, I believe, tells him, well, you know, actually this is kind of official policy. We do believe that low yield nuclear weapons can have an important role in preventing the Soviets from taking over Western Germany. Lyndon Johnson's not going to say that. Barry Goldwater will say it. He'll say anything. Meg, can we touch up real quick? Are you okay? We're doing great, right? Thanks, brother. Really, really, I've been really looking forward to trying to talk about all this stuff. Your book was the first one I grabbed because Goldwater was the most interesting figure in this whole year for me, because I didn't know much about it, and I think most Americans have a stereotype idea who he is, was, and the effect he had. People know who he is. People know who he is.

So Lyndon Johnson takes Dick Goodwin and Bill Morris for a swim in the White House pool. I'm in there. I want to talk about a new idea. Powered it? Great society. It's just that when we swim around, it's done the Kennedy program, it's time to start. Lyndon Johnson takes Bill Morris and Dick Goodwin for a swim. Dick Goodwin being, of course, a former Kennedy speechwriter, so that's a significant character point. And he says, you know, I've done the Kennedy program now. It's time for the Johnson program. He sketches out what would later be called the Great Society, and you know, who probably then next kind of dunks one of these guys into the water because he loves humiliating his underlings. And what we're talking about is, this vision he has, that he ends up articulating in a speech at the graduation in the University of Michigan Stadium, which has this kind of aching utopian energy of the sort you can't even imagine a presidential candidate speaking about now.

Right. Success without squalor and all that. I'm doing this, I think, as a great society thing, and then with a little flashback in the middle of it about the Warren poverty. So what have he done? He'd already launched some ambitious programs, right? I mean, the Warren poverty, he does kind of right out of the gate in January, and kind of introduces this unbelievably ambitious legislative program and breakneck speed. Now, one of the striking things about the Warren poverty is his mantra when they're kind of pulling this together as no dolls. He wants this to be a welfare program. He wants this to be a program in which people kind of figure out how they can kind of take control of their own lives. And one of the things that becomes very controversial is this kind of maximum community involvement thing. And this idea that kind of literally empowers the kind of community organizers and kind of rabble rousers, they exist in every city, which gets them into big trouble with urban mayors and things like that.

He, you know, it speaks to that, you know, most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem line, because he really has in mind the notion that America can end poverty. And it's easy to forget, but the poverty rate in the next 10, 15 years is cut in half. Why is it possible? And one of the reasons this is also possible was it's easy to imagine because America has such great power and such great economic prosperity. And it's possible because the idea that America has so much plenty that it can be redistributed in an equitable way without sacrificing the well-being of middle class voters. Now, whether middle class voters will see it that way remains to be seen.

How does Barry Goldwater feel about the great society? Yeah, I mean, I guess it. You know, waving something like the great society in front of Barry Goldwater is like waving the red cape in front of a bowl, he's going to charge. He's horrified. This is exactly the kind of thing he's entered politics to fight. The first thing he does that kind of gets a national attention in politics is give a speech in horror at Dwight David Eisenhower's $100 billion budget. This just reminded me of a thing I wanted to clarify too, which is it's hard these days, I think, for people to understand what a liberal Republican was. But Dwight Eisenhower says that a Republican who fights against Social Security will destroy the Republican Party.

Nelson Rockefeller is a pioneer in doing things like instituting a fair housing law in New York. He, you know, the Rockefeller family literally funded the entire system of black colleges and universities in the south. They were the ones who provided the money that kind of bailed out civil rights workers when they got into jail. And he was kind of smack dab in the middle of this kind of ideology of kind of consensus liberalism in which if you brought enough experts, if you wrote enough studies, if you wrote enough position papers, you could kind of rationally solve problems that be devolved the country. The idea was that you could have the confidence to leverage the power of government to improve ordinary people's lives.

And the idea that government was the problem and not the solution would have been anathema to someone like Nelson Rockefeller. The Civil Rights Bill, it's June right middle of the year. Why was it such a long shot in the spring? And what's different this time? How does LBJ make it happen? The Civil Rights Bill is introduced by Kennedy in the summer of 1963 in this absolutely galvanizing speech in which he kind of introduces civil rights as a moral issue that should concern all Americans, which was in itself a striking notion for Northerners who kind of were used to thinking of civil rights as this kind of southern problem that they didn't have to worry about. What Lyndon Johnson had, that John F. Kennedy didn't, was an unbelievable power to sway legislators.

There was this thing called the Johnson Treatment. He was this big guy. He was physically dominating. He kind of planned his shoes next to you. He tower over you. He literally grabbed your lapels. His hat breath would be six inches in front of your face. And he had this politician's gift for knowing exactly what each person he was trying to persuade, vulnerabilities were. And he would hit them like a jackhammer if it was your ego, if it was your dam that you wanted to build in your district, if it was an enemy or a friend. He would just hammer you until you just aced it to whatever he wanted, probably just to get him to leave you alone. And who's the key to the civil rights? So the key swing vote in all this is, in fact, a conservative Republican. It's Everett McKinley-Durksen, a villanoi, who's famous for his Malif Lewis voice. Luckily, you'll be able to kind of insert his Malif Lewis voice there. He has this rumpled guy. He said his face was so wrinkled that looked like he slept in it.

He was given to high-flown rhetoric. And he was reaching the end of his career. And he knew that, and Lyndon Johnson knew that his greatest vulnerability was how he was going to be seen by history. So that was how he applied Everett McKinley-Durksen. He knew that if Durksen went, a bunch of Republicans would follow. And eventually, he turns Durksen. He announces that he is going to support the civil rights bill is written. And he gives this glorious speech claiming to be quoting Ballsack, I believe it is, but it doesn't. He gives this glorious speech claiming to be quoting Victor Hugo. Actually, he's misquoting Victor Hugo. But he says, nothing has more power than an idea whose time has come. And lo and behold, it works. He brings a parcel of Republicans to his side except for Barry Goldwater, who gives a speech that's utterly passionless arguing that he cannot vote for this because it's unconstitutional for the federal government to intrude into private business in this way. Durksen is so great. Let me just say something. Yeah. This is so important to a kind of those Republicans who go, oh, the Republican Party was the party of civil rights.

So, in nominating Barry Goldwater, the Republican Party has made its choice. It could have chosen to join the civil rights revolution or resist the civil rights revolution. It makes that faithful choice and never turns back. It makes itself the party that opposes civil rights instead of the party that supports civil rights. I hope you use that. Yeah. What in the passage of the, you know, of the acne? The passage of the act means something very simple. It's not complicated at all. It makes it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race in any private accommodation. It makes it illegal not to serve someone because they're black. It makes it illegal not to hire someone because they're black. It creates enforcement mechanisms, which, of course, Barry Goldwater claims will create this vast federal police force, which turns out to be a complete fantasy in his part. And the reason this is so striking is that it completely unravels the entire social system of segregation in the South.

The very foundation upon which the court, unquote, southern way of life is built. It's revolutionary. Great. Great. Suddenly, a southerner, by doing the things that they've been doing for generations as a matter of instinct, become lawbreakers. What's the follow-up? The follow-up is not as great as people think. I mean, it just goes to show that, well, you know, Barry Goldwater used to say, well, the reason these civil rights bills don't work is you can't pass a lot of change what's your in my heart. But it turns out that you can pass a lot of change what's in people's hearts because when something becomes illegal, it becomes harder and harder to justify. And, you know, there are kind of outliers. One of them, most famously, is a restaurant owner in Atlanta, named Lester Maddox.

When black people start coming to his fried chicken restaurant, he chases them away with a heavy axe handle. And in fact, that becomes his symbol. He keeps a bin of axe handles, you know, kind of by the door. And two years later, this becomes the foundation for his campaign to become governor of Georgia. So it's not like it's smooth sailing all the way, but it's much smoother than people imagine. And people can really believe that America's racial ordeal may be on its way to attenuation. Of course, most black people on the South still can't vote. So we have the next crusade already teed up by the time the civil rights bill has passed. Yeah, it's going to say what's coming is hardly, hardly smooth sailing. But people want to believe it's smooth sailing. That's that consensus idea. People in America are always wanting to believe the best of their society.

But turn the corner for me and foreshadow what's coming in Mississippi. It is already happening. Is the struggle over? The struggle is not over. And in fact, in Mississippi, it's reaching a fever pitch. The real prize is making it possible for African Americans to vote in the South. When a black person tries to vote in the South, there are all kinds of illegal and illegal tricanery that they face. The legal chicanery or things like literacy tests. When a black person tries to vote in a place like Alabama or Mississippi, there are all sorts of obstacles, both illegal and illegal they face. You know, you might be organizing to register voters in the church, and the Ku Klukok Klamy burn your church down. Claim it's a, you know, communist training center and they're stockpiling weapons.

And by the way, by casting a lot with the forces that are opposing the Civil Rights Bill, to many Americans, Barry Goldwater is casting a lot with the people who are burning down the churches. And that's why he's such an extremist figure to so many Americans. What makes the 64 convention so dramatic?