 Well, thank you so much and good afternoon. It is a truly great pleasure and honor to welcome all of you to this afternoon session of this landmark event. This summit, as you know, celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. I'm so gratified that we are holding it here at the University of Texas and in the LBJ Library. As most of you know, the University of Texas has been an actor in the civil rights struggle and not always on the right side. In 1950, we were the defendant in the Supreme Court case of sweat v. Painter. Happily, we lost that case. The decision spelled the death of separate but equal, at least as a legal matter. And therefore paved the way to Brown v. The Board of Education. Only two days after that historic decision, we integrated our graduate school. And we became one of the first flagship universities in the South to enroll African-American students. In the years that followed, progress was slow. And at times, halting. We still have challenges to overcome. Yet here we are. Just more than a half century later, and we're in a very different world. And that's due to the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and to the legacy of the Civil Rights Act and to the legacy of President Johnson. And we're not through, of course. The progress must continue. In 2012, UT Austin returned to the Supreme Court to defend our admissions policy that includes race as one of many factors and to argue for the critical educational importance and educational value of a diverse student body. The Supreme Court remanded Fisher to the Fifth Circuit. And that decision may come down at any time. We stand ready to defend diversity. The University of Texas takes great pride in hosting this national conversation on civil rights. And we take great pride in the son of Texas, President Johnson, with the help and sacrifice of many thousands of others, finally enshrined civil rights into our laws. This campus has been tied to the Johnson family and the Johnson administration for a long time and at a very deep level. The strongest tie, of course, was also its earliest, when Mrs. Johnson earned not one, but two degrees here in the 1930s. Her involvement with her alma mater never waned and still lives on through her daughters, Linda and Lucy and their families. And of course, through the LBJ Foundation, the LBJ School of Public Affairs, the LBJ Library, and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildlife Center. And as LBJ began to draw talent from Texas, other UT alumni reported to the White House, like Larry Temple and George Christian and Bill Moyers. And in later years, veterans of the Johnson administration often found their home on our campus. And in 1971, UT became the first university in America to be the home of a presidential library. I daresay that experiment has been successful. And that success has never been more evident than on this day. When the president's legacy and a university's mission have come together to celebrate a high achievement of our civilization and to help ensure its future. So to mark up to Grove and everyone at the LBJ Library, to the Johnson family, I say congratulations. And to all of you, I say welcome and thank you for helping us with this important and historic event. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, the following is a phone conversation between President Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr. that took place on November 25, 1963, three days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I haven't seen you, but I want to tell you how grateful I am and how worthy I'm going to try to be of all your hopes. Well, thank you very much. I'm so happy to hear that. And I knew that you had just that great spirit. And you know you have our support and backing. Well, we know what a difficult period this is. It's just an impossible period. It's so imperative. I think one of the great tributes that we can pay in memory of President Kennedy is to try to enact some of the great progressive policies that he sought to initiate. Well, I'm going to support him all and you can count on that. And I'm going to do my best to get other men to do likewise. And I'll have to have y'all's help. I never needed more than I do now. Well, you know you have it. And just feel free to call on us, man. Please welcome Mr. Tom Johnson. Good afternoon. I had the great honor of chairing the Lyndon B. Johnson Foundation for 30 years. Among the finest achievements that current chairman, Larry Temple, and I claim is that we recruited Mark up to grove as the director of this LBJ library. And this three-day program is a terrific tribute to Mark and his wonderful staff. Mark Stan, please. From 1965 until the end of his term, I served as an aide to President Johnson. On April 4, 1968, I had the sad duty of taking a flash associated press message into the Oval Office and handed it to President Johnson that read, Dr. Martin Luther King has been shot in Memphis. Our world changed that tragic day. President Johnson had enormous respect for Dr. King. They worked closely together to pass the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, what we are celebrating this week, 50 years later. Our panelists to discuss the relationship between these two men is about as good as it gets. First, Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a former member of the LBJ White House staff, and one of the first members of the White House Fellows program that was created by President Johnson and by John Gardner. Joe Califano, who served as domestic affairs advisor, better put, domestic affairs czar, for President Johnson from 1965 to 1969. Ambassador Andrew Young, one of Dr. King's very closest aides, the first African-American United States congressman elected from the Deep South since Reconstruction, appointed by President Carter as United States Ambassador to the United Nations. And mayor of my city of Atlanta from 1982 until 1990. Taylor Branch, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, best known for his writings on civil rights, his book, Parting the Waters, America in the King Years, won the Pulitzer in 1989. Our moderator today is Todd Purtham, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, a senior editor at Politico. He recently published a book, an idea whose time has come, two presidents, two parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Todd Purtham, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Drew Young, Joe Califano, and Taylor Branch. Thank you very much, Tom. And Mark and the entire staff of the Johnson Library and Johnson Foundation, it's wonderful to be here. I want this to be a conversation. And today, of all days, I have only one exhortation for my fellow discussants, no fellow busters. So with that being said, I think it's fair to say that Lyndon Baines Johnson and Martin Luther King were two of the most colossal consequential figures of the 20th century. Bill Moyers, Johnson's longtime aide, said that the president was 13 of the most complex and interesting and difficult many had ever met. Stan Levison, Dr. King's close aide, said that he was anything but the plaster saint that white America so desperately wanted him to be. So I thought that we might begin our discussion today, not at the beginning of the Civil Rights Bill, but at the end, on July 4th, 1964, because I think this exchange offers a little bit of a window into the complexity of their personalities and their relationship. It was the 4th of July President Johnson had come home to Texas after signing the bill two days before, and he seized on a quote from his press secretary, George Reedy, that he'd been in continual touch with Dr. King. Why do you say that? Johnson said, that's the last thing the president has been in continual touch with Dr. King. Reedy said, I've said from time to time he's seen Martin Luther King is what I said. Well, why do you say that? Johnson demanded. Well, Reedy said, you saw him at the ceremony. Well, I say, why do you say it? Because I was asked, because they'd seen you there. I'm sorry he was there, Johnson said. It was very unfortunate he was there, and don't you get hung in on it. So I was struck by listening to that tape and reading those words that on the moment of the President's Greatest Triumph, he would have such complex feelings about Dr. King. All of you, too, Andrew and other, have explored this question. Could I start with you, Ambassador Young? What was the nature of President Johnson's intense and, let's say, brief partnership with Dr. King? Well, I don't think it was that brief, but it was very intense. And I think it was very warm and personal. Whenever I went with him, there was never an argument or no tension. There was gentlemen's disagreement. Dr. King saw himself as having to keep the pressure on. And let me just end with the story that when we left before the voting rights, right after the Nobel Prize, President Johnson talked for an hour about why he didn't have the power to introduce voting rights legislation in 1965 and gave very good reasons. But he kept saying, I just don't have the power. I wish I did. When we left, I asked Dr. King, well, what did you think? He said, I think we got to figure out a way to get this President some power. And I thought at the time that it was awful arrogant of him to say that, except that we had not been back in Atlanta for three days before Amelia Boynton came over from Selma with a report on the voting atrocities in Selma and pleading with Dr. King, you got to come help us in Selma. And this was not anything we were aware of, a plan. It was thrust upon us. And we went to Selma on the 2nd of January. And by the end of March, the President had all the power he needed to get that voting rights act introduced. I want to get to Selma in a minute. I know Joe has something to say about that. But if I could just start by asking you, Taylor, Lyndon Johnson's views on race evolved over time. And I think when he became president in the wake of the tragedy of the assassination, a lot of civil rights groups were not so sure of his record. After all, he was most known to many people at that point for having watered down the 57 and 60 bills to get them passed, the first law since Reconstruction. But what was the arc of his consciousness on the question of race and the necessity of comprehensive civil rights law? I don't think I know him well enough to say that. And I certainly wouldn't presume that the arc is measured by his voting record. His voting record is a practical thing. I think you might even be able to argue that his views on race were fixed when he was teaching in Catullo. Or even before that, when he taught drama in the 1920s by teaching people, first of all, to make animal noises and be comfortable exposing themselves in front of other people and getting out of their self-consciousness about being around other people and getting a sense of exposing yourself to different kinds of people. I think Johnson had an enormous empathy as whole lifetime. And practical politics made it impossible for that to express itself until he got close to the White House, well, certainly in the 57 bill. So I think that's a mystery with a man in public life as long as he was. It presents a mystery looking back on it. Did he suddenly have a conversion, which I think is the common view of it, to take his earlier votes as reflecting his inner feelings? And that's really hard to reconcile with the sustained, nominating Thurgood Marshall in the middle of the Vietnam War. I think that that tends to show the longevity of that record through the upheavals. And the backlash against civil rights shows that those were probably his sincere views. And my guess is that they were formed long before it is popular to believe they were there. Taurus, one of the revelations to me in doing this book, and you know both families, both men, is that John Kennedy's acquaintance with Black people was basically limited to his two valets and to the leaders of the movement itself. Lyndon Johnson, in contrast, had known personal privation. He had known, as he said, what hate can do to the eyes of a child in Catella. What was your experience with him and his own discussions about these questions and how they came to us? I have no doubt, I only knew him, really, in the last years of his life, in 1967 until he died. But there was no question, the time I spent with him in the White House and then on the ranch, he was proudest of civil rights of anything he had ever done. And he knew that it would stand the test of time. And my sense is that once he became president, he had the power. And he had always wanted to do more than he could do. Just as Taylor said, he was stuck. And it was right to represent the state of Texas. He's a Texas senator. He's a Texas congressman. But once he moved in, I don't think it was just John Kennedy's death, although that gave him an opening. I don't think it was just the movement was out there, although that's huge. I mean, I think what you said, Mr. Ambassador, and what you pointed out in this tension between Martin Luther King and LBJ is an inevitable tension between a movement from the outside that's pushing in at the government from the outside in. And there's a president who knows that he needs that movement, but there's going to be tension. No president wants to be pressured from the outside. The same tension existed between Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass was constantly telling him, you're not doing everything I want you to do. And eventually, they became really good friends. And Lincoln understood that he needed Frederick Douglass and the abolitionists just as LBJ needed the civil rights movement. And together, Martin Luther King and LBJ produced something. Thank God they were there at that moment in history that changed our country forever. Secretary Califano, what would your perspective be on their relationship? You had the good or bad luck to be there when the relationship dissolved, essentially, in a way. Well, I think at both ends of it, too. It dissolved in the sense that Martin Luther King made a decision about the Vietnam War. And this was the greatest hair-shirt that Johnson had to wear during all those years. I think he admired King. I think they were both quite good at politics. I mean, I just said I wanted to mention Selma and Andrew did. In January of 65, 64 rather, in a phone conversation, one of these wonderful tape phone conversations between King and the President Johnson, Johnson starts talking about 65, I'm sorry, about the Voting Rights Act. And King reminds him that the five southern states he didn't carry had the lowest voting record. And then Johnson says to King, if you can find the worst condition, this is January 15, the worst condition you run into in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, where people had denied the right to vote, to cast a vote. If you just take that one illustration, get it on the radio, get it on television, get it in the pulpits, get it in the meetings, every place you can, then pretty soon, the fellow who didn't do anything but drive a tractor would say, well, that's not right. That's not fair. That will help us for what we're going to shove through in the end. And King says, that's right. And if we do that, Johnson said, we'll break through. It will be the greatest breakthrough of anything, is the Voting Rights Act, not even accepting the 64 Act. I think the greatest achievement of my administration, the greatest achievement of foreign policy was the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But I think this will be bigger because we'll do things that even the 64 Act couldn't do. Incredible, a partnership between these two guys that was wonderful and idealistic and what have you, but very practical. King, I think, as you indicated, knew what he was doing. Johnson wanted him to do it. There's always the, you don't like the pressure. And Johnson knew, and the other wonderful change here is Johnson says, you know, talk about the right to vote. Don't talk about the right to vote for Negroes. Talk about the right to vote for everybody because it affects every single American. He had another marvelous thing he said on the weekend the bill was signed. He called John Connolly and said, don't talk about enforcing it. That makes people's hackles go up. Talk about obeying it because everybody thinks it's right to obey. And the meat in the coconut, that was one of his great metaphors. LBJ had these incredible metaphors. The meat in the coconut, that's what the voting rights would be. Ambassador Young, I would like you to contrast President Kennedy's relationship with Dr. King and President Johnson's. Harris Wofford has said that Kennedy and King had a kind of prickly relationship that Kennedy thought he was preachy and starchy and they didn't relate at the level of sort of human discourse so much. It seems to me that the sort of mutual earthiness of Dr. King and President Johnson might have served them well, in a way. It's just being Southern. Is that the earthiness? Yeah, sure. But President Kennedy, as you say, really did not understand the South or race. And President Johnson understood it all too well. And Dr. King would say when I talked to President Kennedy, he asked questions for an hour. But when I go to see President Johnson, he talks for an hour. He said he knows what he wants to do and he knows what wants. He said I don't have to convince him of anything but well, I think their only tension was I think Johnson would have liked to have taken the poverty program, aid to education, all of those issues first and then come back to voting. And that was one point of tension. We didn't really have that choice. I mean, we didn't like the sit-ins. We didn't like the back of the bus. There would have been much more relevant issues but we were subject to the pressures of the people. And there was so, I mean, so much going on. I mean, well, we saw it on Bloody Sunday. Yes. That was a Nazi-like community. You have said that the movement in the streets and the grassroots effort that was so widespread across the country was drafting the 64 bill as surely as the all-white lawyers in the Justice Department and the White House and the Congress were doing that. But the truth is, the people in the end who did the legislative scut work on the bill were all overwhelmingly white men at a time when there were five black members of Congress. Doris, could you, so, go on. Well, except that there'd been 30, 40 years of work at Howard University with Yale and Pennsylvania and the law schools had basically patterned, fashioned the path to freedom. And there was probably more tension between Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall. Exactly. Than there was between Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson because Thurgood Marshall did not, he felt very uncomfortable with us breaking the law. The concept of civil disobedience was not something he adhered to. But actually the only, the first time I read an article about civil disobedience was written by Harris Warford in the Howard University Law Review. And I always thought he was black. You know, but it's that famous exchange between Roy Wilkins and Dr. King about Wilkins demanding to know just what have you desegregated Martin and Dr. King famously replied, I guess only a few human hearts. And the truth is, Taylor, one of the hearts was apparently John Kennedys in that spring of 1963. He was moved to... Well, I would like to say that it was, he was moved by Dr. King's words and example in the movement, but the fact of the matter is that after Birmingham, demonstrations spread to over 200 cities. Cambridge. Like wildfire, all over. President Kennedy said there were even demonstrations on military basis overseas. And we're either gonna put it out one at a time risking something that makes us look bad in the world or we're gonna have to bite the bullet. So I think that it was the movement, the sympathetic demonstrations that spread from Birmingham created the pressure that pushed Kennedy to give that speech. On the other hand, that speech ought to be much more iconic than it is. Right now it ranks way behind Ask Not What You Can Do For Your Country and Ben Ein Berliner. But to say we are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the US Constitution was just what Dr. King had been asking him to say. And that was a shining moment in the night Medgar Evers was killed and introducing this bill. But that was the peak, that was an isolated moment and I think it was a combination of, it was not written. He decided to do it that afternoon and was still writing it. Exactly, exactly. I mean, it was impromptu. And in some senses it came from the heart and that's one of the best things you can say about that, that his highest speech came from the heart under the pressures of the moment but the pressures were severe. And he was cutting loose from the Democratic Southern base that had anchored Democrats in the White House for a century and he knew that but he did it with very fine words. I think, I was general counsel of the Army at the time of the 63 March and initially Robert Kennedy, who John Douglas was his representative and Sy Vance, who was the Secretary of the Army. We met, John Douglas and I met with Bayard Rustin and Walter Fort, right, planning them. Bobby Kennedy did not want the march to take place. Vance did not want the march to take place. The Kennedys just saw this as a political issue. There was no, I mean, Bobby Kennedy was really tough on this but we came back from that meeting and said, this march is gonna happen. And at that point, there was terrible concern about the march. I mean, just to give you a sense, I mean, we had military people in Mufti and the crowd. We closed all the liquor stores in Washington. We literally called hotels to tell them to, neither Kennedy nor Vance wanted anybody to stay overnight. Come in and go out the same day. Come and go in and out. We couldn't, we can't take the chance. We asked the hotels to impose outrageous prices for their rooms. I got an argument with the Cardinal in Washington because the Catholic church was providing cots. We didn't want any cots in the gyms. I mean, it really gave you a sense of that. I watched the march with Vance in the Army War Room, filmed. We had people on top of the Lincoln Memorial. It was all really scared about violence, violence, violence and sort of something nobody really wanted. If only these guys, if only King wouldn't do this. If only these guys wouldn't, we even had a, John Lewis will be here this afternoon, had a stinging speech attacking Kennedy and we did everything we could to put the heat on Lewis to tone it down. Well, because the Archbishop was gonna get up and go. Yeah, and I think that march had a profound impact on everybody in the government. I mean, I began to see things change dramatically, but I will say, and I'm still sitting in the Pentagon then, within a month after Johnson became president, the government changed. I mean, the pressure to do civil rights, I mean, you know better than I do, Taylor, but it was in his gut. It was really in his gut. Doris, if I could ask you about that, because here in this wonderful institution, with no disrespect to President Johnson's colossal role in this bill, it's fair to say that many other people in Congress had a hand in it too, and we forget, and probably President Johnson will be eager to remind us what a crucial role the Republicans played, for example. But I think it's less well known that in the Senate, particularly, the President was chafing, you can read in those transcripts and hear in the tapes, he was chomping at the bit at Mike Mansfield and Hubert Humphrey, wanting them to hold the Senate round the clock, wanting them to go into overdrive, and they thought the best strategy was to let the Southerners talk and exhaust themselves. What discipline must it have taken him to restrain himself, to control himself, and to not apply the Johnson treatment willy-nilly as part of getting the bill done? No, I mean, that shows an extraordinary understanding of the Congress, which was his home. He knew when to apply that pressure and when to let up, and he knew for a certain period of time that he had to trust his leaders there, particularly Hubert Humphrey, who I think did an extraordinary job during all of this, but he would call when he needed to. I mean, the discussions with Dirksen are just fabulous, right? I mean, Dirksen, you come with me on this bill in 200 years from now, school children will know only two names, Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen. How can Dirksen resist, right? And then the NAACP will be flying your banner. But just to go back to what we were just saying before, I think that tension between a social movement pushing at a president is the best moment in our American history. I mean, the progressive movement pushed at Teddy Roosevelt, the abolitionists pushed at Abraham Lincoln, and the civil rights movement pushed at Kennedy and Johnson. And that's where change takes place, the women's movement, the environmental movement, the abolitionist movement, the civil rights movement. And you need, however, a president who's open to that. And I think that even though JFK had started to be open to it after that march, what you needed was somebody who was going to put it at the top of his agenda. And that's what LBJ did. He was able to understand that he could say in his first speech to Congress, no memorial would matter to JFK more than the passage of the Civil Rights Bill. So he used that whole feeling toward LBJ, I mean toward Joe JFK and his death to help him, but then it became his thing. And when you have a leader, the stature of Martin Luther King, when you have an Andrew Young, we were lucky to have those moments, as I said before, in history. Those generations don't only exist. God almighty, we need one now. A generation of those kind of leaders. I think these two men knew each other even the week before the president declined to run again. I heard them on the phone talking like brothers, like pastor and member. And yet in the midst of this, you had two alien forces, I think, dividing them. One was J. Edgar Hoover. And the other was what I call a Harvard mafia. That, you know. I thought you were gonna say Vietnam. Well that's the Harvard mafia. The best and the brightest. That's where it came from. That's where it came from. You know, it was, in fact, I think that, I didn't realize through Nick Cutts book that right about Bloody Sunday was the overthrow of one of the governments in Vietnam. And Johnson was not focused on Vietnam at all. He was trying to deal with Selma and McNamara said why don't we send in two battalions. And Johnson said we cannot win this war. And McNamara's answer was nobody will know. Everybody's concerned about we'll at least fly the flag. But he was lured into Vietnam. And one of the reasons why Dr. King stood up against the war in Vietnam was he thought he was standing with President Johnson. Because President Johnson would say to him over the phone, look, they're trying to get me to bomb this. They're trying to get me to do that. You don't know the job I have standing up against the generals. They want more troops. They want, and so he felt that plus the meeting with Triknot Han who explained to him the Buddhist position of the tension between the Vietnamese and the Chinese. And ironically the one war I had to mediate at the UN was between China and Vietnam. And so they were wrong about Vietnam. And we knew it and nobody would admit it. And that I think plus, and I still don't understand what Hoover's motivation was. But he had a sick envy, a hatred of Martin Luther King. Yeah, let me just comment on two points. On Hoover, yes. I remember I was then Bob McNamara's assistant in the Pentagon, Selma, and Hoover sent this memo out describing Dr. King to all the cabinet officers. Unbelievable. But you're right about the Selma thing. After Bloody Sunday, when the march resumed, Johnson sent troops, we nationalized the guards so that we could protect the marches. My instruction was to send memos to the White House every two hours about those marches. And they're actually. You can read them. You can read them. You can read them. And actually on the LBJ Library takes every two hours where they were, how far they'd gotten because, and I sent them to Jack Valenny who would bring them into the present. Questions would come back. He just didn't, he was so focused on Selma and on that march working, it was really quite remarkable. Well, I think one of the things that people forget if they are not familiar with the period is how many things were cheek by jowl. As Taylor pointed out, the assassination of Medgravers happened just hours after President Kennedy's speech. Cheney Goodman and Schwerner went missing just as the bill was coming to final passage. Senator Kennedy was in the terrible plane crash on the night the Senate passed the bill. Your head spins at all the things that President is dealing with. But it was remarkable how unwilling President Johnson was for such a famous wheeler dealer to wheel and deal. Everett Dirksen came to the White House thinking he was gonna get a grand bargain, a compromise, and he didn't. He was sent away in 20 minutes, empty handed. There's a marvelous exchange on the tapes where Johnson tells Humphrey, I'm against these amendments. I'm gonna be against them right up till I sign them. And he never did have to sign them. But the other sort of poignant part, Taylor, is that the signing of the bill and the passage of the 64 Act, together with 65, but it really represents a kind of hot watermark of consensus. And just weeks later, with the nomination of Barry Goldwater in San Francisco, the Republicans begin their long transformation of identity. And in Atlantic City, the conflict between the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the regular Democratic Party give President Johnson incredible heartburn and heartache. And talk a little bit about how just even in the wake of the signing of the bill, the good feeling and consensus that had made it possible began to dissipate. Well, I think we have to look at this period with a sense of history that is rare. 50 years ago, there wasn't a Republican in Congress from Texas to the Atlantic Ocean. It was the solid South. And 80% of Republicans in both houses of Congress voted for the Civil Rights Act in 1964. But at the same time, with Goldwater announcing his opposition to the bill and Johnson pushing the bill forward, you had something unprecedented in history, which is that the parties reversed abruptly their 100-year-old position on race, which has always been the litmus test of democracy in America. And it switched, nothing but race. Try to imagine something today that could happen in politics that next year would have Republicans voting Democrat and Democrats voting Republican. I grew up in Atlanta. We didn't even know any Republicans. They were from Philadelphia. They were polar bears. They were Yankees. Not true. Not true. Well, there was a black and tan. Actually, when I went to Georgia in 1954, they asked me to run a voter registration drive to support Eisenhower. Yes. And I said, but I'm a Stevenson supporter. They said, not here. They said, in Georgia, if Stevenson wins, Richard Russell appoints the federal judges. If Eisenhower wins, we get to nominate the judges. And the whole bevy of southern judges that really saved the nation were all Republican appointees. But what I'm saying is there's this amazing content as a historian, and I'm so glad the LBJ Library has all those amazing tapes of Johnson. Because I guarantee you, if those tapes didn't exist, people would be pushing a consensus that Johnson never had his heart in any of those things. Because if there's one thing that overshadows the tendency of race to determine how we perform, it's our tendency to misremember race. I was brought up, taught that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. People want to misremember it. And those tapes preserve the intimacy of Johnson's feelings in ways that I think will resist that. And we really need to balance, again, about how I think Johnson shows that race was the gateway, the civil rights bill, to broader freedoms for lots of other people. It opened the door for the women's movement, for all kinds of disability movement, things that are hard to imagine that back then women couldn't serve on juries and women couldn't dream of going to the Ivy League schools, let alone West Point. And all those doors opened in the wake of going through the Gate of Race. But at the same time, people started wanting to misremember it and say that this was a bad time. President Clinton told me once in one of our interview sessions that he could predict how people were gonna vote with 85% accuracy by asking one question, do you think the 60s on balance were good or bad for America? And that's the reinterpretation of all this, when in fact, I think Andy and Johnson, but the civil rights leaders were in the role of modern founding fathers. They were confronting subjugation and they were setting in motion equal citizenship. But we don't remember it that way always. That's why I think this 50th anniversary is such a great opportunity to get the memory more in balance of what really happened. And I think there's no question, oh, there you go. There's no question that I think for historians 200 years from now, those tapes will still be the gold star. Oh, unbelievable. Because you understand where the president's coming from and you understand where the people he's talking to are coming from. I'll never forget, years later, I met this man named Don Kendall, who was the CEO of Pepsi-Cola. And he told me that, no, I knew you knew Johnson when you were a young girl, but I bet you don't know the following story. And I'm about to tell you, he told me that when Nixon was first made president, he, Kendall, was asked to go to the ranch to talk to Johnson about some private matter for Nixon. And Johnson's working on his memoirs, he's grumpy, saying, how am I supposed to remember anything? He said, the only chapters that are any good at all, I had these little tape machines and I pressed it on my Oval Office and I had verbatim conversations. Those chapters are coming out great. So you go back and tell you a good friend, Nixon, as he starts his presidency, there's nothing more important than a taping system. And thereby, he contributes to the downfall of his good friend, Richard Nixon. That lapsed in historical judgment now with standing. President Johnson was pressured on the night of July 2nd, telling Bill Moyers, he feared just the change you talked about was coming. But Doris, you've also written about how he said that he felt he had to get civil rights to establish his credibility, his bona fides, so that he could then do the things, the great society that were so important to him, to push the freedom envelope further, to push opportunity even further. And I wondered, Joe, if you could talk a little bit about how did Dr. King give him credit for that and you too, Mr. Ambassador, for doing that and they were obviously on the same page, they were divided later by Vietnam and as you say by Hoover, but did Dr. King give him credit for that? I think Andy can answer that better than I can. He certainly did. I don't think he was, relevant is the wrong word, but he certainly wasn't involved when you look at everything from Head Start to elementary and secondary education, higher education, the food stamp program, all Medicare, Medicaid and what have you. And I think it's important to know, race was an issue in those great society programs because something may remember, Adam played in power. We couldn't get the elementary and secondary education act through, there were two problems. One was, the Catholics wanted help for parochial schools and the evangelicals and the secular, urban Jews didn't want any help for parochial schools and both had the power to block it, but Johnson saw it as a killer problem. The Congress would be in to look at this as a black bill, the poor schools. That incidentally, for those of you who go back that far, is why he told Adam, Clay and Powell, you have to get out of town, Powell went to Bimini, never recovered from that little joint. But, and then moved to Eukary. Irish governor, Irish, some congressman from New York, passed, Johnson did not want black involvement in that legislation in any public way. Kerry came up with the idea of leasing books and things. The bill passes the house, Johnson says, call Speaker McCormick, tell him not to send the bill here for another month because I wanna sign it on Eukary's birthday. He figured this out and he had the bill come over. So I don't think it was that, I guess, Todd, I don't think it was that King wasn't interested, you can answer that part of it, but I surely know that we were constantly worried that people would see these great society programs as the poor on a race basis. And we didn't want that either and I think the last gathering we had, Dr. King brought together 23 different minority groups, four or five different Hispanic groups, poor whites from Appalachia and from the cities and the welfare rights movement. And the whole idea of the poor people's campaign was, we didn't think, we knew segregation was about race and we knew, but we didn't even think voting rights was just a racial issue. And I, to this day, think that President Johnson knew poverty and knew the poor and he had taught kids who came to school hungry and those were the people he was most concerned. He was probably, and I think Dr. King thought he was more concerned about the poor than the vote. And I think that he was probably wrong, he was right in saying that we'd lose the South, but we've had four Southern presidents since the Voting Rights Act. Clinton, Carter, Bush, and of course Johnson himself, but it, we haven't lost the South and the South's gonna rise again. Yay! On November 4th, we're gonna see another new South. All right, all right. We tend to forget how intertwined the question of economic fairness and economic justice always was in the civil rights movement. The March of Washington was the March for Jobs and Freedom. When President Kenny proposed the bill, he cited this sobering set of statistics that Harris Wofford had first worked up for him in 1960 about the differential prospects of a black and white baby born on the same place the same day. And on questions like access to opportunity, life expectancy, blacks are doing much better today than they did in 1963, but on questions of lifetime earning power, economic power, it's distressingly almost identical. And what do you think both Dr. King and President Johnson would have made of this enduring gap and what do you think we as a country today can do about it? We didn't finish all, but I just wanna point out on the life expectancy, the real promoter of that was Medicaid, not Medicare, not high tech medicine, giving the poor people a health care dramatically. I mean, the black life expectancy went from just over 40 to 60 plus over, you know, in a few years. So they are entwined, I'm sorry. No, I think that now I'm holding this social security card with my picture on it. Oh, you look cute. Because there are things that we need to do. We need to make the vote more accessible and a social security card with your picture on it is something that you need to get in a hotel, you need to get on an airplane, you need a government issued ID and the Social Security Administration could do it for nine cents a piece. And it would do a lot to save money if the government began to send its money through banking channels. It would put a lot more money in the banking. I mean, if we really wanted to make government efficient. And I think those are the kinds of things that Dr. King and President Johnson were interested in. They weren't interested in just the show, they were interested in the delivery. And how do you wipe out poverty? You can't just, Dr. King at one point said, a guaranteed annual income. Just give people money and give them a chance. That wouldn't fly too well in today's work. But we still have to have a way to make democracy and free enterprise work for poor people of all colors. Taylor and Doris, I'd like to ask you both. Tomorrow morning, a young fellow who received the nomination for president on August 27th, 2008 in Denver on what would have been President Johnson's 100th birthday and an occasion where, as I remember it, President Johnson's name was not mentioned. White House aides tend to tell me that President Obama's general reaction to comparisons between his situation and President Johnson's is yada, yada, yada. So, since you are professional historians and I'm just a journalist writing about history who can easily be ignored. I wonder, first Taylor and then you Doris, what you think President Obama could profitably take away from President Johnson and his relationship with Dr. King and the world that they faced? And is there anything that could be comparable? Any instruction we could take in the present day from President Johnson about how to get something done? Well, I think he could say first off, he needs to get 67 senators. He only needs 60 now, and you know so. Yeah, which he doesn't have, in that sense. And to change the mood of the country from cynicism to optimism is not something that is totally within the purview of the president. So, in that sense, I think President Obama is fair to say it's a totally different environment and atmosphere. On the other hand, I wish he talked more about race and how it contributed when we deal honestly with it, not to become the issue that dwarfs all others, but is a way that helps inform all the others. We go nuts whenever he even mentions anything. There was a quote in the New York Times saying that his comment about Trayvon Martin betrayed the great promise of America which is never to discuss race. Never to discuss race turns American history and politics into a fairy tale. And I do think Obama's a little too captive in that. But he is facing a gridlock that is not comparable to what President Johnson had. And that was because of two things, World War II and the great optimism that came out of that. We're gonna go to the moon, we're gonna lick polio, we were optimistic, and the civil rights movement had been building up an optimistic, patriotic sense of sacrifice from the Brown decision for years into the 60s that made people say, well, maybe something good happened, can happen when we confront these intractable problems. So Obama has neither of those major advantages and so I think that it's unfair to look to the president to do all of it. The great moment for Dr. King to me was President Johnson was after Selma, they had a phone conversation where Johnson says to Dr. King, I couldn't have done anything until you got down there and mobilized the people and there were nuns flying in from everywhere into Selma and the whole mood of the country changed, your movement aroused them so that I could go before Congress in that night session. He said that was about the greatest thing that ever happened and King is saying absolutely right. An aroused responsible citizenry with an optimistic patriotic agenda, getting responsive government, that's what America is about. So it's not all up just to President Obama, it's up to us too, I think. I think there's two major changes in our political culture today that make it much harder for President Obama than it was for President Johnson. One is that in the old days, they used to stay in Washington together on the weekends, they formed friendships over party lines, they weren't rushing home to raise money for these escalating campaign costs which I still are convinced are the poison in the system today. How much time these stupid people, I shouldn't say stupid people, how much time our congressmen and senators spend raising money and going back to do it rather than doing the business of the country. And television exacerbates it, they want people on either sides distrusting, exacerbates it, they look at each other with tribal alliances now rather than friendships and that makes it harder. I also think the bully pulpit makes it harder today that if a president gives a speech, it used to be covered on all three networks, everybody watched it. Now you have the pundits like us sometimes tearing it apart before it's even begun and you've got people watching their own cable networks only seeing a part of the speech. So all of those things are true but I think the one thing that President Obama can do now which goes to the heart of LBJ and what you were talking about with the mixture between poverty and race, when he talks about the defining issue of our time being the gap between the rich and the poor and the lack of mobility. President Johnson and his Howard University speech talked about you can't just bring people to the starting race and think they're gonna have an equal chance for the race. That opportunity has to be deeply built into the society. When we see now that in our country, the people born in the bottom fifth have a less chance of getting up beyond that than people in Europe. This was the promise of America that if you worked hard you would be able to mobilize through the society. And I think Obama's recognized that, he's talked about that and it should be the defining issue and in the end Dr. King was talking about poverty. That was the whole movement that was economic opportunity was the next step after civil rights and boy do we need that now. You know, it's very hard though as mayor I could never talk about race in Atlanta but looking back everything I did to help people help black and white together. Now you don't see that at the time but I don't think I ever cast a vote in all of my political career that just helped black people. That every vote I cast helped 10 times as many blacks as whites. And we've gotta deracialize these issues to get people to look at them a bit more objectively. Cause the stabbing in the schools today just before we got here, 19 kids stabbed. That's not race. That's a culture of violence. It's a sickness that's pervading our society that's far more complicated than anything Dr. King and President Johnson had to deal with. Bernice King is dealing with it in the school name for her mother where she went into a rough neighborhood and declared got the girls there in this middle school to say we're going to try 100 days of non-violence and she made it work. But this was a rough school that the teachers could not handle. But going in talking about non-violence in a public school that was all black is something we've gotta deal with the culture of violence. The things that President Carter talked about is the fact that they're more spousal abuses, murders, than they are in the wars nowadays. More domestic violence than military killings. I mean, that's a sickness in society that we've gotta somehow find a way to face. It's not what it used to be. Mr. Secretary, your last ups. I'm last up. I wanna just say one thing about violence. I cannot resist the fact. Remember, alcohol and drugs, but particularly alcohol, is involved in about three fourths of the rapes in this country and of the incidents of domestic violence. So we gotta have a lot to do about that problem to deal with it, nothing to do with race. I think there are some lessons for President Obama. I guess I disagree a little bit here. I think one is it's important to recognize, which Johnson did, that when you sign the law, that's the beginning, that's not the end. When he signed the Voting Rights Act, he announced that the Justice Department was filing suit the next morning to have the Mississippi Poll Tax declared unconstitutional. We sent scores of monitors into the other Southern states. Secondly, I think there are opportunities of various kinds, and I'd say I think, and maybe this is something to mention, especially with Dr. King, Johnson was very opportunistic in the best way. He was opportunistic in using the Kennedy assassination as part of his ability to get the 64 Act passed. When Martin Luther King was assassinated, that night, that night, he said to me, we're gonna get one good thing out of this horrible act. We're gonna get the fair housing bill. We've been trying for four years to get it. He wanted a draft letter the next morning, which he sent to the Speaker of the House. He sent a handwritten note to Jerry Ford, the minority leader of the House, to get that bill passed. When Robert Kennedy was killed, he said, we're gonna get our gun control bill. We didn't get all of it. We got about half of it, but we're gonna get it. We're gonna get something good out of this. I think there is, there should be some use of this in a much more opportunistic way. I mean, and in a much more immediate way, that's the last point I would make. You have to go fast. I know, thank God we have President Obama in the White House. I wish he had moved on gun control with that lame duck session. He would have gotten a gun control bill. He waited a couple of months to look at it. You can't. And if we had instant problems then, I mean, we're in a world, I mean, you live in it more than any of us, I guess, with your reporting. You know, we have 30 second attention spans. And lastly, and I just, I think Obama, one of the problems he has is because he is black. I think there's a lot of people, let's be realistic about this. I think there still is a lot of resentment about that among people in Congress, among people all over this country. And we gotta get over that. We really gotta get over that. In that context, it does seem worth remembering in this room that President Johnson's last public appearance was on this stage, in this room, at a conference on civil rights, marking the opening of some of the civil rights papers here in this library. And on that day, he said nothing was more close to his heart, nothing was more essentially him. And he also famously said that whites stand on history's mountain and blacks in history's hollow. And the challenge for America was to stand blacks and whites on level ground. And I'm honored to be part of this discussion today, but I think your discussion has shown that the work President Johnson so nobly began 50 years ago is not over. And thank you all for all you do to keep the ball. Thank you.