 Good evening, good evening. I'm Mark up to go over the director of the LBJ Presidential Library. I want to welcome you here tonight for a conversation between Joe Califano and Bob Schieffer. Joe Califano was LBJ's top assistant for domestic affairs from 1965 to 1969 and was responsible for helping to put into place many of the programs of the great society. Prior to that he was a special assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Joe went on to serve as Secretary of Health Education and Welfare for President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1979 and then served as chairman and president at the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. He is the author of nine books including The Triumphant Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson. Originally published in 1992 by Simon Echuster, the book has been re-released and is now back in publication. That's very unusual in the book industry for a book that's 20 plus years to be re-released and speaks to the excellence of this volume. Tonight Joe will talk about the book and his former boss who he describes in it as altruistic and petty, caring and crude, generous and petulant, bluntly honest and calculatingly devious all within the same few minutes. Moderating tonight's conversation is our old friend Bob Schieffer. Bob is the long-time host of Face the Nation, the highest rated Sunday talk show for now the fourth year in a row. Bob has won virtually every major award in the news business and in 2008 was named a living legend by the Library of Congress. While he never had the opportunity to interview LBJ, he has conducted exclusive interviews with every president since LBJ from Richard Nixon through Barack Obama. Put simply, Bob is the very best in a very competitive business. Ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming Joe Califano and Bob Schieffer. Thank you all so much for coming tonight. I hope we're gonna have some fun here. Just full disclosure, Joe Califano and I are old friends. I've interviewed him many times and I will say this, when this book came out, we came out first in 1991. Right, 91. I said at the time that I thought it was the best book about Lyndon Johnson up into that point. To me he just jumped off of the pages. Some time has passed since then and Joe, I think it's still the best of all. In this new forward to this book, which you wrote, which I found just as fascinating as all of the things that you put into the book back then, you say that we live today in Lyndon Johnson's world. Why don't you talk a little bit about that? Well, I think just think about it. In education, 60 percent of the kids in college are there on the basis of his work study grant and loan programs called Pell Grants, but that's really a reauthorization of his original bill. He started bilingual education. We have 70 different languages now for bilingual education in the United States of America. Head start, remember preschool and health, about 70 million people are on Medicaid, about 60 million people are on Medicare. Two-thirds of all the nursing home care in this country are paid for by those bills. Of course, the civil rights bills, the 64 act against prohibiting discrimination in employment and in public accommodations. The Voting Rights Act, which is so controversial even to this day, Supreme Court just yesterday ruling on it, and the Fair Housing Act, which we'll probably talk about later. People forget immigration reform. When LBJ became president, we had something called the National Origins Quoter Act, you remember, Bob, and when that limited basically immigration as country largely to the British Isles in Northern Europe. He got that repealed and he proposed an immigration reform law. At the time he became president, 85% of our immigrants were from the British Isles in Northern Europe. After he opened this country to the world, this year, this past year, 15% of our immigrants were from those places. 85% of immigrants from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Central America, South America, Southern Europe, and Eastern Europe. People don't think about LBJ as the man of the arts. He passed the Kennedy Center, I think it's a wonderful example of how. If those of you familiar with Washington, for decades Washington and wanted to have a cultural center, but it was a black city and Congress just wouldn't do it. And Lyndon Johnson said, let's name it the John F. Kennedy Center and do it for John F. Kennedy. He passed that in a week, the first week of 1964, before he even gave his first day of the Union message because he knew he could get it done that way, that fast. The Hirshhorn Museum, Sculpture Gallery, and the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, which have spawned thousands of opera companies, of theater companies, of dance companies, of orchestras, popular and chamber, and the Freedom of Information Act, which will create its own set of problems for Hillary Clinton and I'm sure other candidates. And the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, where Johnson's great society was. Remember, we now have 300 plus public television stations and almost 900 public radio stations. And the environment, there's just the first clean air, the first clean water, the first solid waste disposal laws, the first motor vehicle pollution laws, the Highway Beautification Act, which was when the crowns of Lady Burns. And lots more, I won't drag it on. You know, I was just listening to you. One of the great stories to me in this book was the naming of the Hirshhorn Museum. And of all things, Claiborne Pell didn't want to name it, the Hirshhorn Museum. Tell us. Claiborne Pell was the chair of the subcommittee. What happened was Lady Bird, Lady Bird went to Connecticut and saw Joseph Hirshhorn, this Latvian Jew, had this enormous field in Connecticut with all the spectacular sculpture and a lot of art. And she came back and she said, Lyndon, this is fantastic. There's nothing like it in the world. He's willing to give it to Washington. The only hitch is he wants the museum named after him. So Johnson's, okay. Claiborne Pell was in charge of the subcommittee that controlled this legislation and he wanted it named the Smithsonian Museum. And there was no way that Hirshhorn was going to give or Johnson. And LBJ sent Harry McPherson me up to see Pell. He was from the Pellum, Lords of Pellum Pells actually. And no give. We can back and report to the president. No. President had this little green office next to the Oval Office, brings Claiborne Pell in, makes the pitch to him about this and Claiborne Pell said, we just can't name this way after this Hirshhorn. We just can't do that. We have to call it the Smithsonian Museum. And finally, Johnson was sort of not leaning over, posture leans over towards Pell. And he says, Claiborne, I want the people of this country to see this sculpture. And so does Lady Bird. And the only way they're going to see the sculpture is if we name this the Hirshhorn Museum. Now, I don't give a damn if we call it the horseshit museum. I want, I want the people of this country to see it. And Pell was kind of shaken and embarrassed. And a couple of days later, he called up Harry McPherson and said, it's fine. We'll go with the Hirshhorn Museum. Well, that's just a little bit of an insight. But you were his closest aide on domestic encounters. You were there from early in the morning until late at night for three and a half years. And I just have this simple question. How did he do this stuff? That's one story you told. But I mean, over and over in so many different ways, he found a way to get it done. He did. Well, one, he wanted the staff there at every moment. I mean, he always wanted you at the other end of the line. And he, I was only there a week or so. I think it was the second week. I had an office down the hall. It was a large office because we used to have all these meetings to plan these programs. And I had my own bathroom. And he called one morning about eight o'clock. And my secretary, it's not only a call from Lyndon Johnson those days. We had a line called a POTUS line. It just rang. Didn't ring intermittently. It rang until it was answered. And you could never pick it up fast enough. He always made you feel like it. And he said, she answered the phone. He said, where is he? And she said, well, he's in the bathroom, Mr. President. He said, isn't there a phone in there? And she said, no. He said, put a phone in there. So I came out and Peggy was there. And she said, President wants a phone in the bathroom. I said, forget about it. We forgot about it. The next morning, same time, I'm in the same place, the same call. And he shouts at Peggy. He says, I told you to put a phone in there. And she said, yes, Mr. President. Yes, Mr. President. By the time I got out of the bathroom, there were two Army Signal Corps guys standing in my office, and the phone was installed. So that was when they wanted you all the time. I mean, I just, and secondly, he saw things, always a way to do something. We needed a law. We need some help. Another sort of trying to get me. One of my kids, I was in Sibley Hospital in Virginia in Washington. My son, Joe, had swallowed a bottle of aspirin. And President called, and of course I didn't, you know, I just ran. I didn't leave a phone number. And finally he got, gets me at the hospital. And he said, what are you doing? What the hell are you doing there? I said, well, my son swallowed a bottle of aspirin. And he's two years old. He said, well, he said, that's terrible, terrible. He said, you know, we shouldn't, we shouldn't have, we should have, make these people have these bottles so that little kids can't open them. And that's why most of us in this room have trouble opening our medicine. It's called the Child Safety Act. But he knew how to take care of you. I mean, just, how do you do it? Elementary and secondary education. For years we'd been trying to, had been on the Democratic platform to have federal aid to elementary and secondary education, poor schools, couldn't get it. The problem was the Catholics were able to block it unless provided aid to parochial schools. And the evangelicals and the urban secular Jews were able to block it if it did provide aid to parochial schools. And it couldn't make any progress. And Johnson started working on it, working on it. And it got more complicated with the Civil Rights Act of 64. Because now then we got this charge that, well, it was going to be more money for blacks. And Adam Clayton Powell, Harlem Congressman, was chairman of the House Education Committee. And President Johnson finally says, Adam, you got to leave town. And you got to turn this over to somebody else. Somebody may remember that's when Adam Clayton Powell went to Bimini. He never quite got back. And he said, he wanted you carry a congressman from Brooklyn to try and put the bill together. Cary was in a district in Brooklyn that had Orthodox Jews, Roman Catholics, this array of evangelicals. It was an incredible Clinton's area. The fact that Johnson knew that was incredible. And Cary came up with the idea of leasing books, that leasing secular books and leasing equipment to parochial schools. Johnson started selling it. There's a wonderful meeting with Cardinal Spellman from New York, Billy Graham, and Arthur Goldberg, standing astride the White House pool. They were in their clothes. That is the hottest room on God's earth, the hottest room. And Johnson, and he's working on them. In the background, I think of Bill Moyers and me in a picture I have in my office. And it was so hot in there that you could see the sweat through Cardinal Spellman's black cassock. I mean, it was just incredible. And he worked on it and worked on it. They finally agreed. It was fantastic. He got the bill passed. And then he said to John McCormick, the Speaker of the House, he said, hold the bill up. If you get a bill and you don't sign it within 10 days, it's a pocket veto. Hold the bill for a month. And McCormick said, why? And Johnson said, because I want to sign it on Eukary's birthday. We wouldn't have this bill without him. And he did sign it on Eukary's birthday. That kind of thing. How did he know so much about so many people? I mean, I'm told that he had the phone number in the name of every member of Congress on his desk in the Oval Office with little notes about what they might need or might want. How did he assemble all this? Where did he get all this information? He accumulated it. I mean, it just was absolutely stunning. And it was invaluable to him. I mean, he loved politicians. He spent time with them. He knew when their wives were sick. He knew when their kids were sick or when they had a problem or didn't. And he knew what would move them. I mean, there were, it wasn't always hugs and kisses, incidentally. We lost, we needed to raise the debt limit once. And in the course of hearing it, we lost the vote. We lost six liberal Democrats voted against raising the debt limit. And we had this meeting, and Johnson used to have these long sheets, Bob probably remembers, of everybody's name. So we'd count votes, four against undecided. And we had the six congressmen and we're going through them. And one of them, Dick Ottinger from Westchester County, very lovely county in New York said, you know, what simply wasn't the war was taking money away from people that needed it, people that needed housing and poor housing. And Johnson says, Joe, call up Ottinger. You tell him, we're going to put the biggest damn public housing project in the history of this country in the middle of his fancy Westchester district. He said, show him there's plenty of money for housing. I did and we did get his vote. He had this tremendous ability to not only explain to people why it was in their interest to be on his side, but he also seemed to have the ability to explain to people why it was not in their interest to be against him. There's a wonderful anecdote in your book. Senator Frank Church was talking to him one day about all the things that Walter Lippmann thought ought to be done. Yeah, he said, Church was saying, he's the chair of the foreign relations. He said, you know, President, Walter Lippmann thinks when you ought to deal with the goal this way or Walter Lippmann thinks you ought to deal with Vietnam this way or that way and what have you. And Johnson listened as long as he could. And he said, Frank, let me tell you something. The next time you need a dam on the Snake River, call up Walter Lippmann. No, he did have that sense. And he also, you know, in almost impossible situations, he'd figure a way to do something. The Federal Reserve Board was chaired by William McChesney Martin, who was the great oracle from Wall Street, very conservative. The board has seven members. McChesney had four. Basically, there were three low interest rate people, as Johnson used to call them. He was for low interest rates all the time. And McChesney was starting to raise interest rates. And one of the conservative members that was with him on high interest rates was leaving the board. And Martin called me up and said, Joe, I just want you to tell the President if he appoints a liberal to the Fed, I'm going to have to resign. So I told the President that. I knew he wouldn't make him happy. And it surely didn't. But it took about two days. And the President says, I think we know what to do about the Fed. He said, we'll appoint Andrew Bremer. Andrew Bremer was a very good resume, Harvard, MIT, Black, and from the Commerce Department. He said, I don't think Bill Martin would want to resign because the President is nominating a Black for the Fed because there'd be so much conversation about his racism and what a terrible person he was. Conversation was quite clear. We were prepared to generate. In any case, but then there was a problem with Bremer. We had to get Bremer through the Senate Finance Committee. The Senate Finance Committee was chaired by Russell Long, a staunch segregationist, very tough from the Center from Louisiana. Andrew Bremer had been born in Louisiana. And the President calls Russell Long over to the White House and says, Russell, I've got the man for the vacancy on the Fed. And Russell said, well, I have some ideas. He said, Johnson, I have the right person. I said, Russell, he describes Bremer's background. And he said, and he's from Louisiana. And Russell says, it's from Louisiana. And Johnson says, yes, Russell, I want you to introduce him to the committee, to your committee. I want you to propose him. And I want you, absolutely, Mr. President, I'll do it. And Johnson shakes hands with Russell. And on this other hand, he's got a white folder, manila folder. And he hands it to him. He said, now, here's some information about him so you'll be right up to date. Russell takes the folder. And the first thing in the folder is a picture of Andrew Bremer. And Russell kind of gagged a little bit, but he did it. Partly, incidentally, as Bob knows, and in those days, a handshake was a contract. Yeah. That was it. But and, you know, John, Johnson loved to do something like that. You know, I wonder sometimes if that it's that zest for politics, the zest for making the deal that somehow seems to be missing in Washington today. Nobody seems to be enjoying. I know, you know, you talk to people in the Obama administration about LBJ and how he did these things. And they're always a little defensive about it. They say, well, you know, you're LBJ had may have had some bad problems, but they would say, but it was a totally different time. The way Johnson operated wouldn't work today. Would it work today? I think a lot of it would. I mean, I have to say, you remember the argument I think of the Obama folks is really the Tea Party. We can't the Tea Party Republicans won't do anything. But people forget the Southern Democrats controlled every committee in the Senate. And most of the committees in the House, they were not with us. It wasn't just on civil rights. It was on the Great Society programs and the government intrusion. It was on on our budgets and funding. And and he, you know, he managed to work, work around it. He had, you know, Medicare may be a good example compared with the affordable health care law. I mean, a Medicare and Medicaid where Democrats, I guess from Harry Truman Roosevelt didn't put healthcare in the Social Security bill because he thought it could never pass. Truman tried to do it and was just clobbered by the American Medical Association. Johnson worked on it, worked on it. The bill we started with was not the bill, was not the ideal bill. The first thing we had to do. And he kept saying, we have to get half the Republicans. To do this, we have to get half the Republicans for two reasons. One, we needed their votes. But two, he said, if we don't get half the Republicans, they'll kill us in the Appropriations Committees. The Republican governors won't want to run Medicaid, which was the way the Medicaid was going to be run. And so we gave, we gave doctors their usual customer and ordinary fees. We gave the hospitals cost plus reimbursement. We, we gave a lot of things, but we did get the bill passed. And I might say that if you'll let me, Bob, the sidelines here. The doctors, even after it passed, the American Medical Association still indicated they were not, they did not think doctors should take part in Medicare. So the president invites the AMA to the White House in the cabinet room, puts the president of the AMA to his right and other members there. And before they can say anything, he says, I have this terrible war in Vietnam. I have an awful problem. I have the doctors in the military, but I need doctors to help take care of the civilian population. I want you to start a program to help take care of the civilian population. Maybe send doctors over for three months or six months on rotation. Your president and your country really need you. Will you do it? And the AMA said, of course, Mr. President, we will do it. We will do it. Call in the press, Johnson says, right away. Press comes in, LBJ announces the program. And the first question from the reporters is, will the AMA support Medicare? Will the doctors support Medicare? And the president looks surprised at the question, puts his hand over the arm of the diet of the AMA, and he says, these men are willing to put their lives on the line for this country. Medicare is the law of the land. Of course they'll support it. Doctor? And the doctor said, yes, Mr. President, we're with you. Now, it took, you know, forgive the expression balls to get something like that done. Do it. But that, he was willing to take chances like that, or he knew people well enough to know how it would turn out. You know, you've talked just a little bit about civil rights, and I want to talk about that. You were one of the first people to criticize the movie so much when it came out. You said it was simply historically inaccurate because they were trying to make LBJ one of the obstacles to passing the voting rights bill, which was simply not the case. Just talk a little bit about that. Well, I got a call from a couple of people in California, actually, two of whom had won Oscars saying they'd seen a screening of the movie, and it was a terrible portrait of LBJ. Wasn't what he was like. He was presented as an obstacle. And it was, you know, looking down on King and meetings. And then I got a call from a couple of people in New York, one of whom was Black, actually. And I, so I was revved up. I went and saw the movie the morning after Christmas. It was furious. One, the meetings with King and Johnson just weren't. Johnson was portrayed as not wanting to do this, as having to be shoved into it. Number two, there's a scene in which Johnson's sitting at his desk, and Jay Gehoover is there, and he says, you know, Mr. President, we can take care of this guy permanently or temporarily, meaning we can knock him off. And a couple of other scenes in which Johnson was really nasty condescending to Dr. King. So I wrote a stinging column about it. And I have to say, Andrew Young, the first meeting in the movie is December 14th, 1964, was at that meeting between the President and Martin Luther King. And he said it was a meeting. They were two respectful people. They were trying to figure out what to do. Neither of them knew about Selma at that point, Andrew Young said. And then Julian Bond, they went on CBS Evening News one night and said that the portrayal of Johnson wasn't correct. Nothing would have happened. And most importantly, on January 15th, 1965, President Johnson called Dr. King. And I urge everybody here to listen to that conversation. It's about a 10, 12 minute conversation. It starts with a discussion of Negroes. Negroes the term then in high positions and Johnson tells King he's going to name the first black Negro cabinet officer. And he tells him who it is, something he didn't tell me until a year later, incidentally. That would be Bob Weaver. They then talk about, and then Johnson says we're going to have millions for health and education. But the most important thing, Dr., is the vote. If we get them the vote, that'll take care of 70% of their problems. And then he says, you can help. You can make a contribution as Johnson's term. If you find the worst place in the South where a Negro has to recite amendments to the Constitution, or this or that, and a white doesn't know what to register to vote, and you go down there and get your leaders down there and get it in the pulpits, get it on the radio, get it on television. And that'll build up the point where a guy that drives a tractor says it ain't fair. It's not fair. And that'll help me shove through Congress what I want to shove through. And King comes back on February 9th and says the place is Selma. And of course they had the horrible march in which the minister Reeves was killed. John Lewis was beaten up. Johnson then calls Governor Wallace of Alabama to the White House. And George Wallace says, he's nothing he can do. And Johnson says, you got to let these people vote. And Wallace says, he has no control over who votes. There's a wonderful Johnson line, which he says, that's bullshit, George. You're able to beat me. It's a lot easier to slip on bullshit than it is on gravel. I'll never hit that line. And then he lets Wallace out to the press corps where he knows, and Wallace also says he can't, he won't be able to protect the marches. He lets him out to the press corps and he recites all his stuff. And then Johnson federalizes the Alabama National Guard. I was in the Pentagon then and was ordered to report every couple of hours to the White House how the Guard was protecting the marches and what is the glorious march that ends it. The movie was just wrong and was terribly unfair. And I think I was right to do that. And I was just wrong about LBJ. You know, the truth is that Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. were both very good politicians. And they used one another. But I think in listening to some of these other stories you have told, it just underlines to me the way Johnson always found a way to use events to get people to see his point of view. He never let anything go. You're right. He was very opportunistic. And there's no better example of that than actually the Fair Housing Act. King was assassinated. It was the worst week in Washington. The night of the assassination, he had me call up the Black leaders. He wanted to get them to the White House the next morning. They came. He talked to them. We were having riots. They left. And he said, Joe, we're going to get something out of this terrible tragedy. We're going to get our Fair Housing Act. Now, we had not been able to get, move the Fair Housing Act, which basically prohibited discrimination so anybody could buy a home anywhere they wanted to if they had the money. What was the most, we got more nasty mail over that piece of legislation than anything else we proposed. We finally, in January of 68, before, well, before King's ascending, we're able to get it through the Senate. I think it was January or February. This is the middle of Tet. We all remember Tet. The president calls up Phil Hart, liberal congressman from Michigan. It had been reported out of the committee and says, Phil, take this to the floor. Take it to the floor this week and we'll get it passed. Gets it passed. No chance in the House because Emanuel Sela, who was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was a congressman from Crown Heights where I grew up in Brooklyn. Crown Heights was a lot, but now a Jewish district and blacks were moving in. And Sela was worried that if he were any part of the Fair Housing Bill, he'd have opposition. He might not get reelected. That day after King's assassination, Johnson sends a letter to the Speaker, McCormick and Jerry Ford, who was the minority leader, asked them to pass the Fair Housing Bill. And the question is how? And Johnson says, take it directly from the Senate to the floor of the House through the Rules Committee. So it never has to go through Sela's committee. Then Sela will never have to say he reported it out and we'll get it passed. And that's exactly what happened. And he was willing to do that. Those things were very important. He also had, as you know, Bob, a terrific sense of humor. I mean, in the worst circumstances, Johnson had a light, he had a good sense of humor. The worst was that week, was that week. We had riots, only riots in 100 cities, we had troops in six cities. And Johnson, and I would bring him every couple of hours, reports from Hoover and the FBI, the mobs here, mobs there. And one night I bring him this report and it says Stokely Carmichael, the black firebrand, organizing a mob at 14th and New Streets in Washington to march on Georgetown and burn it down. And Georgetown was where Bob Schaefer's predecessors lived. All the television people, all the Washington Post people, all the editorialists, all the columnists that drove Johnson crazy. And he reads this message and he reads it aloud. And he says, God damn, I've waited 35 years for this night. What do you think it was that turned Johnson around on civil rights? You know, I don't know. By the time I got to the White House, it was in his blood. And Jack Valenny said he was talking about civil rights the night of Kennedy's assassination. He did use to say, you know, you're going to get a chance, everybody who gets a chance in life to make correct their mistakes. And I got that chance and I'm doing it. And he'd say, you know, you ever get that chance, you do it. I think Coutula, Texas, teaching the Mexican kids in Coutula, Texas, because he always used to say you'd look into their eyes and you'd see their sadness and puzzlement. They knew they were hated because of the color of their skin and they didn't know why people would hate them for that. I think the raw poverty of the Hill country here, you know, Johnson was elected to Congress in 1938. There was no running water and there was no electricity in the Hill country. Hard to believe. I think that had an impact on him. I think he used to talk about his driver and his cook would have to drive from Texas, from Washington to Texas and they couldn't find places to stay and they couldn't find toilets. They'd have to use the side of the road and how awful that was. I think all of that accumulated. And in Bob Caro's book, he writes that in late 63, before the first day of the union, Johnson said, we're going to propose the Civil Rights Act prohibiting discrimination in employment and accommodations in 64. And his aides all said, no, that's an election year, waiting year, and that famous remark of his, what the hell is the presidency for? I think that, and he knew, and he knew we were paying a price for it. I mean, when the Civil Rights Act of 64 was passed, he said, we're turning the south over to the Republican Party for my lifetime and yours to Bill Moyers. He knew the fearful price we were paying on every one of those bills. And he had, I'll tell you how dramatically he had changed. In 66, we lost 47 seats in the house and we lost four or five seats. I can't remember exactly in the Senate. And the Southern governors and the Board of State governors, Democrats came to the ranch to see him. They basically, they wanted, they wanted to end the school desegregation pressures and the enforcement of the 64 Act and the, and the voting rights monitors and what have you. And John Gardner, who was Secretary of HEW was there and explained it. And Gardner said to the president, he didn't think he got through to them. And Johnson said, you'll never get through to these guys. I arrived there the next morning and I will never forget this. I said, you know, how I didn't know anything that happened that I said, how did it go yesterday with the governors? And Johnson said, Nega, nega, nega, nega, nega. That's all they said for four hours. And if I can do anything, I'm going to drive that word out of the English language. So we had really We, we want to take some questions from the audience. So while you're thinking of a question, I will just ask you one more question here. What do you think he would see as the civil rights issue of today? I think he, I think he would certainly see the gutting of the Voting Rights Act as a major civil rights issue. I think he, I think he, I think he felt that we never did enough for Latinos, for Mexicans. We had them up to the White House once, a group of all their leaders. You know, we were so focused on the black problem in the country. I think, I think he'd be pleased with the speed with which society has adjusted on issues like the AIDS crisis. He, he certainly, you know, people who've come and said to me at a conference a couple of weeks ago, you know, he didn't do enough for women. There actually is, I mentioned in the introductory essay, there's a book by a distinguished female historian who points out, he did have, he did hector cabinet officers and others to appoint more women to jobs and he passed a bill to promote equal opportunity for females, female officers in the armed forces. And when he signed that bill, he said someday we'll have female admirals and female generals and maybe even a female commander in chief. That's a direct quote from his message that day. But I think, I think he would still be working very hard on the hard core poverty. I think the education system, and I think this issue which gets some attention periodically, people forget, Lyndon Johnson gave a speech at Howard University about, which is where we're here articulated the concept of affirmative action, which was what the speech is most remembered for, but in that speech is a whole section talking about, in the phrase then, the Negro family and the fact that if you look over history, you know, you start with slavery, so you'd sell a man or the woman whether they were married or not, didn't make any difference, who was stronger, who was better. Then we had the Emancipation Proclamation and then the men moved north because there were better jobs up north, but they left their wives there that they're men. They may have taken on women up north, but they didn't marry them. And then we passed a welfare act, passed in the Roosevelt years in which we said, you can only get welfare, aid for dependent children if there's no man in the house. This is for mothers and children, so we provided this 150 years of incentives to break things up and that he used to say with all the schools, with all the education, with all the opportunity, with all the health care, we have to do something to nourish that family. And I think he would be working hard on that issue because, yeah, very much so. You know, a question I've always had in my mind, do you think he would have gone to Vietnam had not, John Kennedy already planted the flag there? You know, I point out in the book, he was the most reluctant warrior. I mean, the notes of Jack Valenti, there's a chapter in my book called The Decision, which was the decision to, it's the one chapter that is written largely on the basis of Jack Valenti's notes, because I wasn't in the White House for a good part of it. I think it shows you how reluctant he was to get in. Remember, when Eisenhower was president, John Foster Dulles, and the French were in trouble at the NBN food, John Foster Dulles wanted to send troops. And the majority leader of the United States Senate, Lyndon Johnson, was totally opposed to that. Everybody in the administration, well, I have to remember, put the perspective, Ziam and his brother were assassinated in September, late September, with our approval, if not our instigation. Kennedy is then assassinated, 63. Johnson becomes president, chaos in South Vietnam. I was in the Pentagon then, I know that. And the great pressure from Secretary McNamara, and all of us were in the Pentagon, we've got to get seven more troops there. President said no, he wasn't, McNamara would come back from the White House and say, the president is not going to make a decision in the midst of a presidential campaign. The day after the election, McNamara had five alternatives ready, all built up, and thought that Johnson would approve them. Instead, he sent Bundy to Vietnam, I think twice. He did send Bob McNamara twice over the next several months, not always reluctant to do it. Finally, does agree, the only person that opposed it was George Ball in the government. And Clark Clifford, the Washington lawyer, wrote the toughest memoranda about why we shouldn't do it, which are excerpted in the book in that chapter. And then with everybody else pushing, he finally does, much less than was recommended, but 75,000 men was not a few. And then the constant, constant, constant buildup. I think by the end of 67, he was really determined to end the war in his presidency. And in retrospect, what I didn't know about Clifford's really, really vehement opposition at the time, but he decided to make Clark Clifford Secretary of Defense when McNamara left. And McNamara used to say he never knew whether he resigned or was fired. He wasn't the only person that said that when they left Lyndon Johnson. And I think Clifford was put there to stop it. He wanted to, when he pulled out of the race, he thought that would get the North Vietnamese to the table. It actually did, among other things, that in the bombing pause. He got the pope involved. They agreed to go to France. They were negotiating in France. We, hopefully, I think he thought he had every chance. Then the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia, which changed the whole international atmosphere. And then we have, what we now know a lot more about, the tapes, the NSA tapes of Anna Chanel talking to the South Vietnamese on behalf of President Nixon saying to the South Vietnamese, don't agree to the deal Johnson's making with the North Vietnamese. You got a better deal with Richard Nixon. And it just was not to be. The notes of the meeting, all those meetings that took place during those years, Tom Johnson, who was nominally deputy press secretary, but was really, among other things, the note taker. And I've urged and urged and urged that he write and get all those notes out there. I think he was really very, very reluctant. Now, that didn't make him, incidentally, didn't make him think any more highly of people who, in the Senate, who opposed him, although he loved Wayne Morse, even though Wayne Morse voted against it. Fulbright drove him crazy, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, of Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And I must say in all fairness, he said to me, Fulbright just found trouble with him on every issue in the foreign area. And one day, John, the president said to me, he said, you know, Fulbright's a revolving son of a bitch. He said, you know what that is? I didn't know what that was. He said, that's a son of a bitch, no matter how you look at him. We have time for a couple of questions. Is there anybody out there who would like to ask when there's a gentleman right there? Hi. I'm curious, on August 1, 1966, there was a shooting here on campus. And I know that President Johnson responded to that shooting the next day in a press conference. And six weeks later, he wrote a letter to congressional leaders. I'm curious, do you remember that day? And do you remember what his reaction was as the news came in of the shooting? You know, I honestly don't. I do remember that he was really very much for gun control in a very big way. I remember he proposed the licensing of every gun owner and the registration of every gun, along with ending the sales of Saturday night specials, no sales to minors, no interstate sale, no sales across the state lines. We couldn't do anything with it. He did try, Bob was mentioning the opportunistic part of it. When Robert Kennedy was killed, he said, may we get our gun control bill? And it was locked up in the Senate. He said, we have a week to 10 days. We've got to move right away. Or the NRA will roll over us. And there was a senator, Joe Tidings, who thought he had a different kind of bill. It was better. And we urged him not to slow it down, but he did slow it down. As a result, we got the end of the Saturday night specials. We got the no sales to minors. We got the interstate stuff. So we couldn't get the big pieces of it. When he signed that bill, he issued a very, very tough statement about, this is just the beginning. And I and Stanley did a piece on this. You may recall the awful tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut. And urging President Obama to go for gun control immediately in the lame duck session. And they didn't. They went into a commission and they were unable to do it. But I don't remember. I'm sorry. I do remember, Stanley, vis-a-vis the University of Texas. I was telling Governor White about this last night. The president said to me, now one of your jobs is to make sure with all these grants and everything we're doing that you're fair to the University of Texas. And Jackie Jacobson, who was one of the aides, Texas said, you know what he means by fair? You make damn sure. They get plenty of support. We did. We did. I can't. Next question. Good evening. My question is, in the last election, we heard a governor from a southern state propose to eliminate three agencies of government. I don't remember which southern state, but I do remember that he couldn't remember which agencies he wanted to get rid of. But the sentiment of wanting to really eliminate so much of government we've heard a lot of in the last couple of decades. That drives people that maybe would aspire to public service away. How would you comment on that? Well, I don't. I mean, you know, can you make government more efficient? Sure, you can. I mean, there's no question about that. There's a lot of duplication. But I think the real damage comes when you don't respect the commitment of people that are in public service. I mean, I think it's as high a calling as you can have. And, you know, I went down there. I should tell you this, you know, this is an incredible country. I didn't know anybody in Washington. I got a job with Cy Vance, who was general counsel of the Defense Department, and then got one job led to another. I got to be general counsel of the Army. I didn't know President Johnson when I went to work for him. As his chief domestic advisor. And when I went over, and McNamara said to me, he said, you know, you'll do the legislative program and domestic crises and help coordinate economic policy. And I said, my God, what a job. And he said, it's not a job. It's not even a job description. If it doesn't work out with this guy, you'll be gone. But I would, I want to mention one of those that I forgot to mention. You know, and when Bob asked about what those days and these days, I just said, you know, when after President Johnson was sworn in, he gets on the, I was on the plane. The first call he made was to Rose Kennedy, John Kennedy's mother. The second call was to Dwight Eisenhower. And he asked Eisenhower to meet him in Washington the next day and come talk to him because he'd been president. And Eisenhower did come and Eisenhower did a memo which somehow got, you know, was only his copy and one copy for the president. And which is the full text of which is attached in this book. I think it's hard to imagine in this day and age, Obama for example, calling George W. Bush or George W. Bush right off the bat calling Bill Clinton. I mean, it's just, it's a, that part of the world is different. There is a level of partisanship. And I think that's unfortunate. I think it's a purely personal opinion. There's, I think money is, money is a killer, killer problem. And maybe we can forgive me, Mark. There are two. This is in 1967. Johnson proposed public financing of presidential campaigns. And we'll spend what this year? Two, more than two billion? More than two. More than two billion. He said, and I quote, more and more men and women of limited means may refrain from running for public office. Private wealth increasingly becomes an artificial and unrealistic orbit of qualifications. And the source of public leadership is thus severely narrowed. The necessity of acquiring substantial funds to finance campaigns diverts a candidate's attention from public obligations and detracts from his energetic exposition of the issues. And I think we're seeing that. I mean, we all watch it on television. I mean, I think, I think Bob and the rest of Prescott even has, it's the money primary or whatever, I forget what it's being called. It's the money primary for the next several months. The other thing that's in the book I just mentioned, a very warm, I mean, warm and moving letter from Lucy Baines Johnson, who wrote it in Christmas of 1991 when this book was first published. Maybe the best piece of writing in the book. I wouldn't want to end without, I'm always asked, the Johnson treatment. And the best description of the Johnson treatment comes from Hubert Humphrey. Again, I'm quoting from the book, but Hubert Humphrey once described what he felt like being subjected to the Johnson persuasion treatment of argument mimicry, humor, statistics, and analogy with LBJ pulling one support of clipping and memo out after another out of his pocket. It was Humphrey said, and I quote, an almost hypnotic experience. I came out of that session covered with blood, sweat, tears, spit, and sperm. Ladies and gentlemen, don't help me. Bob, thank you. I really thank you.