 Good afternoon, and welcome to this edition of The American Presence, a series of conversations with noted historians, scholars, and journalists. Today is the second of six programs in our third year. A program is brought to you by the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, the University of Texas Osher Loughlock Learning Institute, and Humanities Texas. I am Phillip Barnes, and it is my privilege to chair the UT All It's Sage Enrichment Committee. In this year, 2024, we will hold our sixth presidential election since the first election in 1788, and many observers believe this election may be one of the most consequential in our history. And of course, this is not the first presidential election thought to be especially consequential or pivotal. In this series on the American presidency, we will look back at six of these important pivotal elections from Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan. Mark Lawrence, the director of the LBJ Presidential Library, and himself, a widely respected historian is the host of our conversations. As a member of the audience, you may participate in the Q&A segment of our program by using the chat function to write and submit questions. Our Q&A host today is Mark's colleague and our friend, Sarah McCracken, of the LBJ Library. Our guest historian today is Luke A. Dichter, a professor of history at Chapman University, having escaped the barren landscape of Texas A&M from the balmy skies of Southern California. Luke is the author of eight or editor of eight books, including The Year That Broke Politics, Collision and Chaos in the presidential election, presidential election in 1968. That election was between Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, and George Wallace. However, as Professor Dichter shows, President Johnson was also an important force in the campaign. Texans, perhaps especially, have long lived in the long shadow of the towering London B. Johnson. I'm among many who remember well the evening of March 31, 1968, the moment when President Johnson announced that he would not seek nor accept the nomination of his party for another term as our president. A critical moment in what was to become a pivotal election. And thanks to the work of Luke Dichter, we have a better understanding of the forces at work that shaped that election. He writes of the complex relationships between and among Johnson, Humphrey, and Nixon, as well as the role of notable intermediaries in the campaign, including the Reverend Billy Graham and the famous Socialite Anna Sheldt. Challenging much of the conventional wisdom about the campaign, his work draws from extensive research of archival searches and interviews of people who were close to the candidates themselves. So to discuss the pivotal election of 1968, we welcome for today's conversation Luke A. Nichter, author of the year that broke politics, collusion and chaos in the presidential election of 1968, a book with a particularly intriguing title. And now to Mark Lawrence. Well thank you, Phil, and welcome everyone. It's great to be with you all for the second installment of our series on pivotal presidential elections. And welcome especially to Luke Nichter, an old friend, but much more importantly than that for our purposes today, truly the person who I would want to be talking to about one of the most consequential elections surely in the 20th century, the election of 1968. Luke, congratulations on the new book, and thanks for being with us. Oh, thanks, Mark. It's a pleasure to be here. Luke, let me start with the title that Phil just mentioned as being especially intriguing, the year that broke politics. What do you mean by that? Well, you know, we went through a lot of titles. Titles are sometimes chosen by attorneys and the exuberance of marketing officials. But I think it captured a certain theme from that year, certainly not the only time that I think a lot of Americans would suggest that politics didn't seem to be working the way that it was intended. Perhaps they've said something similar in recent years. And certainly, you know, we could look at some of the other years and the elections that you're looking at in the series. But I think that the basic idea is as follows. You know, I think all presidents govern during a time of crisis, whether it be political, economic, social, military, foreign policy, whatever it is. Something about 68, though, where I think you just about check all of those boxes in terms of the crises. I think even in more recent years, we check perhaps all those boxes once again. That doesn't happen very often, I would argue. I think secondly, I would say something about these crises for Americans, for voters who have lost faith in so many institutions in our country, whether it be political parties, whether it be much of the federal government, whether it be the national media, higher education, organized religion, you know, with an emphasis on organized. And so I think that's again, another parallel between that year and this year. And I think in the midst of the these challenges, so many in the political establishment on both sides of the aisle didn't seem to have the answers to the challenges that confront the country. And so many voters seem to be voting against something rather than for something, surely something we've heard about in recent years again. So I think that's, I could go further, but I think that kind of captures the idea. Yeah, the connections to the present moment obviously are fascinating and something I want to come to in a few minutes. But let me go here next. You suggest early on in the book that it's taken in your view more than half a century to be able to see the 1968 race clearly enough to offer an authoritative, dispassionate assessment. What did you discover in your research? What do you write about in your book that does most to change the commonly accepted version of the 1968 race? Well, you know, it's been a number of years. There haven't been as many books about 68 recently and during my many trips to the LBJ Library and other archives across the country. But especially LBJ, I think what really caught my eye was how many records have been released in recent years. You have, you know, not to mention Johnson tapes, you know, and other things, you know, whole bodies of records have been opened up. And I think, you know, if it used to take about 30 years for records to be declassified, I think the American system was set up as similar to the British system. And they still have what they call the 30 year rule in the UK. Now it seems like it takes more like 50 years. Intelligence agencies now have 75 year exemptions, as opposed to the latest EOs, you know, in the Obama administration. And so it's taking longer. And also, I was struck by, you know, this book, I had cooperation from all four major sides. So I interviewed about 85 staffers and family from the Johnson, Humphrey, Nixon and Wallisides. And I was also struck by how many said they'd never been asked to do an interview or that they felt it wasn't appropriate to do so before now, because not perhaps not enough time had passed or issues were still personal or sensitive. And so I think that these kinds of things become red flags to a researcher. But I think the biggest thing that I really add, I mean, there's a number of things that we can get into in the book. But I think probably the most controversial argument in the book, and I say this with a great deal of nuance, and I'm choosing my words very carefully here, is that outgoing President Lyndon Johnson came to prefer Richard Nixon as his successor in 1968. And that was not an argument that I plan to make. I mean, there's much more in the book besides that. And I, you know, I wish I could say that I was so brilliant to anticipate this direction in the book. But it really wasn't, you know, one of the things I do and we're trying to work hard at is to make friends with archivists. And I mean this sincerely to any of my archivist friends, you know, without you, history stops. It's not possible to write history without the records that we need to drive the outer boundary of what we know about subjects. You know, too often much of what passes for political history is really not rigorously researched. It might be written well. It might be the latest synthesis. But but rarely do you have a book that really tries to break new ground, which takes years and years of effort. And in this case, I had befriended an archivist at Whedon College outside of Chicago, which happened to be the Reverend Billy Graham's alma mater, and it's where he met his future wife Ruth. And the archivist said, you know, we're opening some new material. I had no one about it. You know, not really a major stop for me in terms of research. They have Chuck Colson's papers, the Nixon official, and they have some other related collections, but it's not really a major stop as compared to, say, a presidential library. And what they open there, and this is a few months before COVID set in in 2019, were the very first tranche of Billy Graham's diaries or what he called his VIP notebooks. And these are just incredible. And for viewers interested, we are going to hear much more about this record collection in the future. It's something like 53 volumes because he lived to be 99 years old, he died in February of 2018. And they contain, I say they're kind of a hybrid diary scrapbook. They document contact with presidents, first families and staff, sometimes verbatim contact. It might be quotes, it might, some of it's dictated, some of it's handwritten. It might be a White House lunch menu with his handwriting scratched on the back, something the president might have said to him. And it's, I think it's 53 volumes running from Truman in 1950 to Barack Obama in 2014, an incredible resource that simply contains a lot of content that's not in presidential libraries. And in 1968, Graham operated as a liaison between Johnson, Nixon, even Humphrey, even California Governor Ronald Reagan, even former President Dwight Eisenhower. I think I calculated Graham knew almost all the major figures of that year about an average of 20 years, he was reaching the peak of his profession as they were reaching theirs. And there's quite a bit of verbatim content between Johnson and Nixon and the others that ultimately helped me to make that conclusion in the book. Your use of those sources undeniably is one of the most fascinating parts of this book. And of course, the conclusion that you come to about that relationship between LBJ and Nixon is really quite striking. Tell us a little more, though, Luke, about that, about the trajectory of the LBJ-Nixon relationship. That really is a core part, it seems to me, of what you're doing that's quite different from what most people will have read before. Well, you know, I see LBJ and Nixon. And, you know, I try to write without an agenda. I don't really have favorites. You know, a bit of the cynic in me when they see a new political book, I think there's often a voice in my head that wonders, you know, what's the off, does the author have an agenda or a take or something? You know, sometimes it seems political books start with the conclusion and then go in search of shards of evidence to prove that conclusion. And once and really ignoring evidence to the contrary, you know, I think that Johnson-Nixon relationship was complicated. These were the ultimate politicians of their generation, one a Democrat, one a Republican, each kind of moderate in their own way. I think Johnson, Nixon wrote at one point, he felt that Johnson had sort of moderately conservative instincts as a Democrat. Nixon, while much has been written about that he was a partisan conservative extremist, don't forget, although this is not in the literature really, that Nixon came out of Earl Warren's Republican Party in California. This wasn't Robert Taft. This wasn't Barry Goldwater's Arizona. Nixon was on the liberal internationalist side of the Republican Party. But still, I mean, he was clearly on that side, not as far as Lodge, Henry Cabot Lodge is running Matein 60, probably pretty similar to Eisenhower, but more or less a moderate. And I think part of the reason both of these politicians operated as moderates is because they wanted to win elections. When you're a moderate, you have the widest possible road usually to victory. And if you concede the wide road to your opponent, usually you'll show me the winner in that election. And so I think LBJ and Nixon were absolutely antagonistic toward each other because they faced each other on the ballot so many times. Nixon was on the ballot from 1952 to 1972 on every national election except 64. And he was almost done in 64. I think if New Hampshire had gone a little differently, he might have, he might, he tested the waters. And Johnson likewise, coming to Washington as a result of a special election in the spring of 1937. Of course, he'd been a congressional staffer prior to that, really never left. And he loved the Texas Hill Country, a place that I came to love during the 13 years that I lived in Texas myself. But he was there until 1968 and 69. And so Johnson and Nixon very much, they really were the American 20th century. And it had they run against each other in 1968. That would have been truly the Battle of the Titans. I mean, I couldn't tell you another election in modern US history that you had such powerful forces directly opposed to each other. Nixon had gotten wind from Graham that Johnson might not run in advance because Graham was one of the only ones that had that knowledge from Johnson. And Nixon didn't believe him, said, no way, no way. Lyndon Johnson is going to give up political power or any politician, you know, before he absolutely has to, before it's taken from you by force. And so Nixon was prepared for Mortal Kombat in 1968, which obviously didn't happen. Luke, let me pick right up where you left off there. Why didn't LBJ run? This is complicated. And I'm not afraid to say to people that I don't know, or, you know, I could answer these questions. But, you know, at the end of a book, you try to answer your initial questions. But a lot of times you actually end up with more questions than you started with. And I think in this book, there's a lot of questions. I mean, I leave a lot on the table. And I try to be clear about what I think I know and what I don't. You know, I come away with LBJ. It's, you know, it's conflicting. On the one hand, you have the question, could he have been nominated? Could he have won in 1968? I think so. You know, some people say, especially Robert Kennedy supporters, there's no chance Johnson could have been, could have been nominated. Even Hubert Humphrey couldn't have been nominated if Robert Kennedy had lived through the convention. You have to understand in 1968 terms, not in 2024 terms, the rules for nominating in a Democratic party back then were very different. The McGovern Commission didn't exist yet and didn't begin to modify the rules until 1972. Back in 68, I mean, virtually all of the states, states chairman, county chairman owed all their loyalty to Johnson and then thus Humphrey. I mean, Johnson had control. Back then you didn't need to enter primaries. They usually weren't necessarily binding on the delegate counts. I mean, it was much more, I don't want to dismiss it by calling it a back room deal, but it wasn't nearly as kind of directly Democratic as the rules that would come into say in 72 and 76, you know, and more recently in the Democratic party. So that's one issue. Did Johnson have doubts whether he could win? I don't know, maybe. How about his health? I think his health played an important role. Now health records of public officials are some of the hardest records to get our hands on because they're private. You know, most of our rights of privacy are waived after we die, but not everything. Health records, IRS records, 1040s, anything attorney client privilege, grand jury records. I mean, there's certain records as a researcher you still can't lay hands on. And plus not everything is documented in a piece of paper. I mean, our process as thorough as we try to make it, it still has flaws. But I think Johnson's health was probably a bigger factor. His own father died when he was 60 years old. And you know, Johnson turned 60 that exact same age in 1968. And I think that that was that, you know, he always said, and I'm not the first one to say this, that Johnson men die young. And so I think he did worry about that. He didn't want to have a short post presidency, which he did have. He knew his Democratic heroes Woodrow Wilson and FDR, both of whom he would have had living memory of died in office and did not have a controlled exit to use that term from the White House. And I think finally, I would say, you know, one of the best sources that I used in this book is Lady Bird, Lady Bird's diary. It's incredible. And I know it's gotten a little attention documentaries and a book or two in recent, in recent years. But there's still so much more of it that hasn't because it's rich and it's vast. And what she said is that leading up to March 31, there's one entry where she says something like in the months leading up to President Johnson's or he should have said Lyndon's decision on March 31st not to run. I heard him say on more than one occasion that he doubted whether he could unite the country anymore. And what does that mean? I don't know. It's open to interpretation. I mean, she was a very astute smart woman ahead of her time in many ways. And in many ways, she was a politician. And his number one advisor, editor, cheerleader and critic, all at the same time on some days. And so, you know, you put that together, it was complex. But whatever the actual straw that broke the camel's back, Lyndon Johnson didn't leave that in a record for us to know for sure. You point out, Luke, as some other historians have that LBJ didn't do as much as he might have to support Hubert Humphrey's campaign. What difference did that make? Or to turn it around, could more support from Lyndon Johnson have, in fact, resulted in a different outcome of the race? You know, as historians, we're not supposed to talk about what if questions. But what if questions? I mean, they're so fascinating for 1968. And one of the key ones is what could have Humphrey have done differently to one, to two of one and to get across the finish line. And, you know, I think there are a couple options. I think John, his relationship with Johnson was complicated. I think it's at one point I say in the book, it was more so than sort of president to vice president. It was almost like a sort of wayward son who was desperate for the attention of an abusive father at times. And, you know, that president vice president relationship with Johnson and Humphrey, that wasn't unique. I don't know whether Humphrey had it worse than Johnson had it as vice president, or whether Johnson had it worse than Nixon had as vice president under Eisenhower. But I think they all understood why it was a pretty difficult job and probably still is to have in Washington. It's so constitutionally awkward that your only real job is to open the Senate and anything, any other table scraps you feast on, it's because you're able to negotiate them with the president. You know, I think more so than navigating the Johnson relationship, because I'll tell you why I start that way more so. There was one other person in this race who understood how difficult Humphrey had it in 1968, and that was Richard Nixon. You know, I tell my students, I spent a lot of time around 18, 19 and 20-year-olds, and I say, if you show me an election where the current vice president is running for president, or someone very close to the outgoing president, and I'll show you the candidate who has the toughest time in organizing that race. Because imagine how awkward this is. So you're the sitting vice president. You desperately want the endorsement of your president, who has been your boss, and maybe even your friend over the last four or eight years. But you realize there are some parts of the country where your boss is more of a liability than an asset. So how then do you frame a national message that both utilizes and distances yourself from your boss? It's really tough. And Nixon had this problem in 1960, and Humphrey had it in 1968. And plus the Senate could say, of course, campaigns make all these promises. And so the Senate right away raises their hand and say, if you've got all these great ideas, then why didn't you do them in the last four years or eight years? And so you both have to argue that everything we've done is great, yet somehow there's more in the tank. And we're going to do even better things that we couldn't do before. I think that really the thing that Humphrey needed in 1968, and I don't know whether it's possible, he needed to make peace with the conservatives in his own party. If he had had, say, John Connolly, outgoing Texas governor as his running mate, and this was briefly flirted with at the convention in Chicago in 1968, that's the sort of thing that would have divided the conservative vote, otherwise inclined to go more toward Nixon or Wallace, Humphrey would have retained more for himself. And that could have flipped several states for Humphrey. So that's one thing I think he could have done. Interestingly, the Graham diary sheds light on that, that the Graham diary suggests that Connolly got a message from Graham, which came from Nixon. And what Graham said to Connolly is if you stay away from Hubert Humphrey at the Chicago convention, now I don't know the likelihood they might have formed a political marriage or not. This is just what the diary says. Then a future Nixon administration will offer you a top cabinet post. And that's exactly what happened in 71 when Nixon appointed Connolly Secretary of Treasury, which again, is a fascinating rabbit hole to go down. You picture that Nixon cabinet room, the cabinet table, that's like having LBJ in your government. I mean, very close to you. I mean, Connolly, I think in 68 is as close to Johnson and the flesh as you can be and not have a last name Johnson. So there's all kinds of fascinating twists and turns this year. I simply think, though, that Johnson-Humphrey relationship probably wasn't going to be salvageable. But there are things that Humphrey could have done to put more of the odds on his side. But again, this is all hindsight. Let me ask you, Luke, one more totally unfair counterfactual. Bobby Kennedy gets in the race in March of 1968. He is, of course, tragically assassinated in the summer of that year. Could he have secured the nomination, won the presidency had he lived? Well, there's no question that at the time of his tragic assassination in early June, that was the moment he was surging. I mean, he lit the campaign trail on fire. Young people were getting energized. I mean, he just brought an energy to that campaign that I think initially McCarthy supporters hoped he would have. But Eugene McCarthy just didn't turn out to be that kind of back slapping politician that would energize young people as much as Kennedy. Humphrey, Nixon, Wallace had a bit of that magic, campaign magic. But Kennedy just had it. Plus, he had a great last name. And a lot of people who really thought the Kennedy family and the nation deserve redemption with another Kennedy in the white. I mean, you see even a bit of that today with RFK Jr. There's a lot of people who are nostalgic, you know, of a certain age. I grew up in a Catholic family where the Kennedys were absolutely saints. And I can feel a little of that nostalgia. I don't know how they're actually going to vote. But there's just something about these political dynasties, especially the Kennedys, having so many tragedies in that family. But I would answer your question this way. To go back to the rules the Democrats used in 1968 to nominate a candidate, the rules in 68, I would think, are much more designed to coordinate Lyndon Johnson for another four years than to reward an insurgent like Robert Kennedy, which is really what he was. I mean, his campaign really upset the establishment. And you could look at, you know, the Carter campaign in 1976 is another example, where Carter was really, even though he doesn't seem threatening, I think history has treated him well and it's going to treat him even better in the future. You know, McGovern was threatened by Carter. Humphrey was threatened by Carter. It's that idea that, you know, this fresh upstart haven't earned their time yet in rank, and they're going to upset the establishment and bring in their own people and topple the establishment of the party. So I think Kennedy would have made it awfully interesting. He was surging at the right time. He would have made that chaotic convention in Chicago probably even more chaotic. And you know, here the Democrats are going back to Chicago this year for another crazy convention, another parallel. But I just don't see it. I don't see that the rules would have permitted the kind of candidate that he was, you know, in 68. I'm just not seeing the political lane that he would have had. Yeah. The way the parties functioned, the way the nominating process worked in that era was so different, exactly as you say, that there were a lot of things going against RFK, despite that grounds. Well, I quite agree. But let's turn to Richard Nixon. And you know, what may strike us with the benefit of hindsight is that in 1964, the Republicans, of course, nominated Barry Goldwater, the Arch-Conservative. In 1980, Ronald Reagan would be the man, another conservative. In between, you get this moderate, as you've described him, which may require some explaining. How was it that the Republican party in that moment landed on Richard Nixon as their candidate? Oh, I think it was a long time. And really, I would say that it probably went back to a long period of soul-searching. Republicans had 20 years with FDR and the White House to figure out what they were. I mean, I remember doing my last book, a biography of Henry Cabot Lodge, who was the only Republican in a statewide national election in 36, his first election for the Senate to flip a Democratic seat. Similarly in 72, young Joe Biden was the only Democrat in his nationwide election, a national election, to flip a seat held by Republicans. So those are the talents you want to watch for the future. And Lodge came to the Senate in 1937. Imagine this with 17 Republicans in the Senate. Now, there weren't 50 states yet in 36, but still that's pretty lopsided. And about five or six of those were really old sort of Robert Lafellette, very progressives. And so Republicans had to figure out how to be something other than party of no, meaning saying no to every part of FDR's new deal. And I think where they came out of that was they became a party of kind of, you know, within the Republican continuum, primarily nominating, what I would call kind of liberal internationalists. So you had, you know, Wendell Wilkie wasn't really a, wasn't really a real Republican. He switched sides. You know, then you had Thomas Dewey, who was kind of a New York Republican, again, on the liberal international side. Eisenhower, they didn't know what he was when he ran in 52. They had to go back to his speeches made as a young man before the army and figure out, you know, did he lean one way or the other? And they thought he was probably a Democrat. Truman had offered to run with Eisenhower. President Truman offered to be General Eisenhower's vice presidential candidate to take a demotion in 48 and even a second offer in 52. And then you have this great shift to the right. I skipped Nixon. Nixon in 60 ran as basically a mere image of Eisenhower. And Lodge was even further to the left in the party. So the liberal internationalists dominated in the post war. Goldwater was the strange aberration, which is a rabble who I don't want to quite go down. We could be there for an hour there. Goldwater wasn't, if you talk to a Goldwater conservative today, because there are still a few around and they get this twinkle in their eye, you know, they act like they won in 64. You know, they got wiped out by LBJ and one of the four great landslides of the 20th century. And the reason is twofold. One, they finally beat those liberal internationalists and nominated a conservative. And two, it sent a signal to conservatives who back then were split between the two major parties. We forget that. There weren't a lot of conservatives who were Democrats and conservatives who were Republicans for different reasons sometimes. And what Goldwater did was send a signal through his nomination that conservatives pool your resources. The Republican party is the more natural one for you. You'd be stronger together in the party. So in a way, Goldwater is so much more important than being on the wrong end of a lopsided loss in 64. And so in 68, imagine Nixon. How do you run? How do you build the staff around you? What kind of messaging do you have? Now, I think a lot of this gets overtaken after March 31st, because there's before March 31st and after March 31st. After March 31st, Nixon's policies are, don't say a single word that will cross Lyndon Johnson, because he's not hurting us right now, because he's not really helping home for you. But prior to that, I think I would describe Nixon as trying to occupy that center lane of the Republican party. I would say a shade to the right of his 1960 self, not conservative, certainly, like Goldwater in 64 or Reagan, who had won the governorship in 66, not as left-wing as Rockefeller or Romney. I think he really tried, I think Nixon's instincts were naturally liberal. He probably would have been a college professor in another lifetime, in another career choice. He really didn't think like a conservative. He didn't spend time around many conservatives. He liked kind of academics and kind of people of ideas. And so I think Nixon's idea was to end up in a political lane in the Republican party, somewhere between the 1960 version of himself and the 64 version of Goldwater. Both of those were losses. Those were examples of what not to do. And so I think Nixon was, again, I would say just to a shade to the right of 60 and of Eisenhower, that way what that would allow, it would allow Humphrey to occupy to his left, Wallace to be to his right. And Nixon gambled on the idea that if Johnson wasn't going to cross him, and he may try not to say anything to irritate Johnson, that it would cede as much of that middle road as possible, because Republicans consistently are greatly outnumbered on party registration advantage that Democrats always have. If you're a Republican in 68, you need basically, and this is a little bit true today, you need basically every Republican, you need a nice chunk of independence, and you need some crossovers from the Democratic Party or people who don't typically vote or didn't vote in recent cycles. And so Nixon needed a formula that got him across the finish line, whether that worked out or not. And so I think that's what he constructed. Another big factor, of course, Luke in the 68 race was George Wallace, the third party candidate that you whom you write about in really insightful ways, I think, in the book. Wallace, of course, ultimately carries five states, 13% of the vote. What was the source of Wallace's appeal? Well, Wallace, in a way, is sort of the most fascinating one, because at least in our current times, I mean, you can kind of almost draw a line from Wallace to a little bit Nixon's silent majority, and then you get into kind of Jerry Falwell, moral majority, and then kind of up through like Ross Perot. And I think probably, you know, every candidate since Wallace has tried to borrow a little bit from his playbook. So what was that playbook? Well, I mean, this is something that as Americans, we don't see very often. I mentioned Perot. Perot, I think, pulled as high as 39% back in kind of 92, and then a little less than 96. But he didn't win any electoral college votes. Wallace, I think, pulled as high as about 23%. But as you indicated, he did. So, you know, it's about once in a generation, you know, where we have a third party candidate who actually makes a difference. If you're like me, I usually at the top of the ballot, I see the major parties and the candidates, and I at least scan my eye lower on the ballot. And usually there's a bunch of names and parties I've never heard of before in some cases. But Wallace was one that made a difference. What was exceptional about Wallace was that he ran as an independent. He did that because he wanted to be free to criticize both major parties. He was a lifelong Democrat up to that point, becomes a Republican later, but really wants to criticize. He's not really happy with either party. I think he kind of feels he's without a national political home. He gets on the ballot in all 50 states. That is incredible. I mean, anybody running for office going forward needs to appreciate what it's like to navigate 50 sets of state laws and barriers. I would say there's not a lot that brings together both major parties in an instant. But one of those is third party challenges. I mean, you will become the enemy of each in that state. And some of them like California required not just X number of signatures, but actually you had to fill out a two page application to pledge your support towards the political vehicle Wallace was using was called the American Independent Party. Ohio went all the way to the court, was litigated in the courts. He could not get on the ballot in the District of Columbia. That was the only place, but that was fairly inconsequential, you know, in the big picture. I think what Wallace really stirred up, I mean, Wallace is so often dismissed in history as racist. That's all we ever know about racist about Wallace. And there's no question in 62. And in 63, he made statements that we would obviously categorize as racist, whether it be in 62, a pledge, if elected as governor, he would stand in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama block integration. In 63, he stood very close during his inaugural addresses to the same steps Jefferson Davis stood at outside the Capitol in Montgomery, and he pledged segregation today, tomorrow and forever. But by 64, he begins to shift because he gets a taste of national politics. He enters three carefully chosen Democratic primaries in 64, intentionally chosen out of the South to see how he do and to test a national political message that obviously had to resonate beyond Alabama and beyond the South. He does better than expected. And of his several presidential runs, 68 is really his first full bore effort. As I said, he got on the ballot in all 50 states. And for our purposes today, I would argue it was really in modern US history, the first major kind of anti Lee, anti establishment, anti, you know, media, anti everything. I mean, I don't think the phrase drain the swamp ever occurred to George Wallace. But if it had, I'm pretty sure he would have used it. And his campaign rallies were sort of part circus, they were entertainment. I mean, I've never been to a Trump rally. But the descriptions I hear from some people part concert. I can't imagine waiting out in frigid temperatures in Iowa or other old places this time of year, the people describe it almost like a carnival or a concert kind of atmosphere. And that's what people said about Wallace. He just captured something. And I think he did capture the votes of people who were concerned that civil rights move, you know, too far too fast. And probably a certain, you know, percentage of his voters were people we would call racists. But also a lot of working class people who didn't felt that people were were talking about their values. You know, the last the working class, the blue collar, blue collar were traditionally Democrats. These are FDR Democrats. And Lyndon Johnson in 1964 is the last Democrat to this day to win them as a voting block. And that their votes have largely been up for grabs ever since. And I never would have imagined in my lifetime that a populist billionaire Republican named Donald Trump has made greater inroads into this voting block than certainly any Republican and maybe any Democrat in the last 50 years. And so Wallace just just Wallace was just running so against as much as he was running for. And I would argue that every candidate since Wallace, who positions himself as a populist, which it seems like almost everybody almost everybody is an outsider to Washington and running against the establishment in some way, even though they spent their whole career in Washington, I think every candidate since has borrowed at least something from that Wallace playbook. Yeah, Wallace is certainly someone who deserves a lot of attention these days. And you certainly do a lot to really probe his career in ways, I think, as exactly as you suggest that have sometimes been missed because of the easy ways in which he can be dismissed, which is not to say those aren't accurate descriptions of his political message. But Luke, let me take you to the closing stages of the campaign and pose a couple of questions really about those final days. One of the questions has to do with the so-called Chinalt affair, something that you and a handful of other scholars have delved into in great depth. And this is probably something that could keep us going for an hour or two here. But in a nutshell, tell us where you stand on this fascinating suggestion that in the closing days of the campaign, the Nixon campaign communicated through a woman named Anna Chinalt to the South Vietnamese government that that government should refuse to enter into any kind of peace deal to end the war, which would have given Humphrey a big bump. So the idea here is that there was this kind of behind the scenes conspiracy facilitated by Anna Chinalt. You have a very distinctive and, I think, fresh take on this whole issue. Please tell us about that. Yeah, I think you set it up pretty nicely there. Anna Chinalt was a socialite. She hosted the best parties in Washington, D.C. And when I interviewed her, and of all, I think all the recent writers who've written about this subject, I don't think any attempted to interview her. Some didn't even know she was, she was alive. And, you know, when I saw her, she still occupied that same penthouse place at the Watergate on the Potomac side. And it's just, you can just imagine what that place was like, you know, during the 1960s, these sort of buy, because she was sort of what we would call today, one half of a power couple with Tommy, the cork cork, and an FDR new dealer. And so she sort of handled the Republican side, and he handled the other side of the aisle, the Democratic side. And together, this was the place to be seen all across Washington. And so, you know, this has been on the public record, the story, the Chinalt affair, that she was an intermediary, and that through Nixon's, through her colluded, some have said interrupted a peace agreement, some have said peace talks, it's been written up in different ways. This has been on the public record since January of 1969. And actually, the Christian Science Monitor planned to run a peace in late October, right before the election. But the Johnson White House completely knocked down the story. And so they ran it, they ran a story, but they removed this part of it. But it's been on the record with, you know, naming Chanel, naming Nixon, these allegations to 69. So, you know, I come down after interviewing Chanel, and being the, I think the first of these authors to do it, I interviewed all of the remaining members of the Paris peace talks delegation, because after all, if the talks were interfered with, that was an important perspective. I talked to all the living staffers on all four sides. Nixon had one Dick Allen, who was still around. And I guess we're where I come, oh, and that no one had interviewed the South Vietnamese, up until recently, the South Vietnamese ambassador, who's a key part of the story. Boyd Zm, no one had ever interviewed him. And he's a little hard to get to. I think it took me about two or three years and about six intermediaries. But he's just outside DC in Rockville, he's gone now. And also to use personal assistant was was still is still around today. And I was able to see him outside of Chicago, after I figured out which Buddhist temple he went to. And I found out a way to get where I knew he would be for a couple hours. And I guess this is my bottom line. There's still a lot of records closed. Chanel clearly had contacts at the CIA. I mean, she ran a shipping business that sort of became Air America, the CIA kind of proprietary shipping company. It was shipping men, material. I've been told at some point, bars of gold to Vietnam. And she was involved in this. I mean, you don't have audiences at Langley, unless you have business to do there. So, you know, I say right up front, there's a lot of records that aren't open yet. And I think that when I look at all the evidence, I've been talking to everybody, I can't prove a negative. I can't prove that Chanel didn't try something. I can't prove that Nixon didn't want her to do something. But I conclude that it really doesn't add up to anything conclusive at all. Because if you look at the basic chain of custody, the argument is that Chanel passed a message to the South Vietnamese that had Nixon's blessing that somehow that message modified their behavior that Saigon to the South Vietnamese then stayed away from the Paris peace talks, which by the way, they weren't even part of at that point. Saigon didn't join the talks till after this point. And then therefore, keeping Saigon out of the talks in Paris eliminated the chance of peace, which obviously is something Johnson desperately wanted in his final months in the presidency. So, if you break down what I just described into the individual components, what is the message that Chanel passed to Tew? We don't really have, I can't point you to a document or a message. It's just everyone refers to you'll get a better term, better terms under President Nixon. The Vietnamese archives where I spent almost a month, there's nothing there. So you would think that if a message was received or Tew acted on it or sent a response back, there'd be some record. That's not to say there won't be. They're still opening a lot of records in Ho Chi Minh City that aren't open yet. So there's not really a message. How do we know that she did it in Nixon's name and that Nixon wanted her to do this? We don't really have that peace either. And then finally, how do we know that it would have modified Saigon's behavior, that they wouldn't have gone to the talks, if not for this interference? Well, I mean, one, they weren't in the talks yet at that point. So there were no talks to go to. They weren't part of the talks. And secondly, Humphrey, I think was taking a moderate position on Vietnam. Both Humphrey and Nixon were pledged they'd get out of the war. We would disengage in slightly different ways. Some of the people around Humphrey, I think we're actually suggesting that within about six months, the United States would get out of Vietnam. And I think Johnson feared he would be blamed for being the first president to lose a war. And so I would say whether you look overall at the totality of the evidence or break it down into the individual elements of what the Chanel De Faire was, we just we're just not there. But I admit there are shards of evidence. I admit that Chanel wanted Nixon to win. Probably Nixon wasn't unhappy to have the help, even if she would have been an unusual medium to have. So that's where I come down. I can't prove a negative. I can't prove that things weren't going on. But the available evidence to me, after talking to everyone, and I think seeing more evidence than anyone to date has, it doesn't add up to anything conclusive. No smoking gun. Luke, let me ask you one other question about those closing stages of the race. It is often claimed that if only the campaign went on for another few days, Humphrey might have won. He was closing the gap. What do you make of that kind of claim about the ultimate outcome? It's another fascinating what if because obviously that what if right there would have changed everything. So I discussed that. I tracked down somebody who I don't think any author has ever tracked down. What a Humphrey's top campaign strategist was a man named Vic Fingerhut, who's still around today. And he tends to nominate, he tends to help a campaign consultant for moderate Democrats, usually pro labor candidates in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, all the English speaking countries. And what he said to me was exactly the opposite right there. He said, he said, I was the one who advised Humphrey in the second week of October, and I feature some memos in the book that because so much has been written in the literature that it was Humphrey becoming independent from Johnson on the issue of Vietnam after a famous famous speech he gave in Salt Lake City on September 30 declaring his independence that really turned the campaign around. And what I show is for two or three weeks, the polls didn't change. And what Fingerhut told me, he said, I know now and I knew them. He said, I wrote a memo to Humphrey, I think it was on October 12th. And he said, your campaign is going down the tubes. Your issues are not natural democratic issues. You need to look at Harry Truman's model in 1948 and get back to traditional, friendly democratic issues, education, social security, jobs, the economy, that when Democrats are in office, you have more money in your pocketbook. And Republicans do you wonder why you don't have a job. And Fingerhut said, you need to switch to more traditional democratic issues, bread and butter issues, that even if you don't have current things you can talk about, that you can remind voters what Democrats have done for them historically, going back to Truman and to FDR. And Fingerhut said, Humphrey did that. And that's what closed the gap because Republicans were weaker on those domestic issues. Democrats are traditionally stronger. That's not a surprise to anybody. And what Fingerhut told me and that actually the Chanel stuff, the bombing halt, he said was bad for Democrats, the bombing halt. He said because it reminded voters that it was a democratic war, that Republicans weren't responsible for the major escalation into Vietnam. And that Nixon, that voters tended to think that Republicans not being tied to the current Vietnam policy might be able to get the nation out of Vietnam more quickly because they had no prestige wrapped up in it. Fingerhut told me that in that closing weekend, going into Tuesday, the polls were moving away from us. They were moving more toward Nixon. So Fingerhut said, actually, it's not that we should have had election day three or four days later. We should have had it three or four days sooner because maybe Humphrey had he switched to those traditional democratic domestic issues a little bit earlier. To me, this is one of these other what ifs that would have gotten Hubert Humphrey across the finish line, along with maybe having someone like a Connolly as a running mate, switch back to those issues. And what Fingerhut told me is Humphrey was advised by too many kind of policy elites like a George Ball, internationalist foreign policy guys, and he needed more people who would remind him of what Truman and FDR did for Democrats, even a little Kennedy. So Fingerhut actually said the opposite, that we saw things after the bombing hall, things began to shift more toward Nixon. Luke, let me ask you about the overall significance of the outcome in 1968. The outcome was so close that we might be tempted to say, well, you know, Humphrey really had a good chance. If only this or that had been different. And yet in parts of your book, you do call attention to some data that suggests that the outcome was more of a repudiation of the Johnson record of the great society than sometimes has been suggested. Tell us how you think about, you know, kind of the overall significance of the Nixon victory if you sort of fly at a high altitude and think about where we've come since then? Well, like you, I mean, I grew up learning that 1968 was one of our closest elections in modern US history. I mean, 60 was obviously another one. But I think, you know, a bit of that luster has been lost on the younger generation because all of our elections are close now. Probably since 2000 with Gore and Bush, you know, we've had more than once where actually the winner of the Electoral College is the loser of the popular vote. So I think this idea that 68 was so close is just, that argument doesn't work the same way that it used to work a generation ago. I think also because you have Wallace and winning about 10 million votes in those five states, you know, when you add up Wallace's total with Nixon's total, I wouldn't call it a landslide, but it's a decisive victory. It's more like an Eisenhower victory over Stevenson, not a landslide, but a clear cut victory. And so I look at it this way. I think it was still close, 500,000 votes in the popular vote. Again, not as close in the Electoral College, especially when you add in the Wallace total to the Nixon total. But I think it gave Nixon a very unclear mandate. I think a lot of Republicans and a lot of Democrats were voting against someone rather than for someone. I think a lot of voters back then wish they had another choice. They'd had a lot of Nixon, maybe home for his best chance to become President was in 1960 before, you know, in a time of more domestic tranquility, without the Vietnam War that he would have been blamed for in 68. We could really focus on domestic issues, which he was clearly a master at the process of legislation, almost as much as Lyndon Johnson, and the way government worked. So I think voters learned an alternative. And so I think that I would look at the the combination of factors is really what I take away from 68. Historically divisive in this country, but also around the world. We haven't talked at all around the world. A half million soldiers in Southeast Asia, a Chinese cultural revolution apartheid in South Africa, student movements all across Europe in a near revolution situation. I mean, Ray Price, Nixon's longtime speechwriter always said to me, if the 1860s was an actual civil war, the 1960s in many ways was a proxy civil war. I think it's probably about the closest that we got. So I take away from and what I think about today, most of all, it's it's it's there's not a this is a dystopian year. There's not really a lot of hope or optimism, but we got through it. We got through it. And I think ultimately Americans came together. And in the 70s, you know, which is a history that that I think really hasn't been written yet, because a lot of records aren't out, we return to in many ways more moderate leaders. I think people across the aisle a little more. And I think many people today are eager for bipartisanship. They're eager for compromise, maybe as long as it's not their side doing the compromising. But I, you know, I think there's a message of hope and optimism that many people back then said the sky is falling, that democracy doesn't seem to be working the way it's supposed to, that politics was broken. And a lot of people are saying those same things today. And if history repeats itself, and I'm not sure it does, you know, we'll get through today too. Well, Luke, you anticipated where I was going to take you with my final question about lessons and implications for today. I think you just handled that really, really eloquently. So I'm going to stand aside. Luke, thank you so much for spending time with me today. Congratulations again on the year that broke politics, collusion and chaos in the presidential election of 1968. It's been a real pleasure. And now I'm going to turn things over to my colleague, Sarah McCracken. Hi, Luke. That's a terrific conversation. And I am going to pose a few questions on behalf of our audience here. In your book, you talk about how Lyndon Johnson represented the rise of the new South, kind of changing the way people thought about the South. And then four of the next seven presidents were from the South. Tell us a little bit more about that and how Johnson's presidency and then this election in 1968 changed American politics. Yeah, first of all, I should say I have a fascination with LBJ, maybe an unhealthy fascination. When the ranch first opened and they opened it in sections and first they opened his office before beginning to open the home. And they opened it on his 100th birthday for the first time to the public on August 27th of 2008. And so being newlywed, I took my wife into the opening, which of course is what you do as a historian in Central Texas. So I want to be clear that Texas to me was as familiar as Mars. When we moved as newlyweds earlier that year, when we really only had two things, love and student loans. But no, I really came to love that part of the country and would not be unhappy to return to it at some point. But I think Johnson is fascinating. And I don't think he's deserved as much attention as he's gotten. I think he deserves more because I see Johnson a little differently. You know, when you're born in Gillespie County in 1908, that's about I see Johnson as more southwestern, not southern. And that's about as far southwest as you can go in the country. In 1908, of course, New Mexico and Arizona were not states yet. California and Northern Southern kind of has a different history, kind of different animal. Even the area where Johnson grew up is different because of German immigration was always not as sympathetic with the Confederacy or slavery as you might find elsewhere in the south. Really Lady Bird was the true southerner in the relationship being far east Texas, almost Louisiana border. Sometimes the president would send her to the south to make talks because, you know, she could do it more convincingly talking sort of southerner to southerner. And so I think Johnson is richly fascinating. I think I say in the book at one, everyone always says Johnson's biggest legacy. And on a multiple choice example, there's only one choice to choose from it's Civil Rights Act of 1964. I think that's true. But and you know, it takes time to figure this out in the long term. One of Johnson's other great legacies was to show Americans that a respectable southerner could be a national leader. And not just as I say in the book, not just a gadfly with an unhealthy focus on race and civil rights. And Johnson really sort of established, I mean, previous presidents had elements of southerness to them. Woodrow Wilson from Stanton, Virginia. FDR spent a lot of time in Warm Springs, Georgia. But Johnson also wasn't quite truly southern. I mean, 100%. I see him more southwestern, but he created that mold. I think with Johnson came even, you know, an acceptance for Ford, who was really from Nebraska, Carter, certainly Clinton, you know, you could go forward from there. But I think Johnson, in many ways, that might even be a longer term influence impact than civil rights, which started before Johnson. And I think would have happened no matter who was president, even if it ultimately came to pass in a unique Johnson style. So again, I could go further on it. But I think there's lots of fascinating layers to LBJ that probably deserve even more attention than what I've done in the book. Thank you. You just mentioned the Civil Rights Act of 64. So I'll pose this question from one of our audience members, Carla. She asks, how would America be different if Nixon had endorsed the Civil Rights Act of 64, instead of adopting his Southern strategy? Well, Nixon did endorse Civil Rights Act of 64. I mean, he was, I mean, I should be clear, he wasn't in office. He was out of office, out of government in what's been described as his wilderness years. He lost narrowly in 60 to Kennedy and Johnson for the presidency. In 62, he lost more decisively, really humiliating to Pat Brown for the California governorship. So he was out of office from 60, January 61 until his next race for the presidency in 68. But Nixon had always been pro-civil rights. He was pro-civil rights in 57. And it was really Republicans who were pressing for a bolder civil rights program in 57 with Nixon as vice president. And a lot of that had to be deluded to get the votes of Southern Democrats. So I mean, both parties have an anti-civil rights portion of their party in those days. But Nixon was always consistently for civil rights. He ran, this is one of the stunning things and then I will not give any more examples. But in 60, a Nixon Lodge on the Republican side of the ticket made a bold pledge that under a Nixon Lodge government, they would appoint the first African-American to the cabinet. That was an incredibly bold proclamation in 1960. Nothing like that was coming out on the other side of the aisle or even anywhere else on the Republican side. And in fact, that haunted Nixon when he just made a tour of the Carolinas shortly after that pledge had been made and probably hurt him in parts of the country. So I would say Nixon was cautious, but he was always pro-civil rights. Another question, in your opinion, what had the greater effect on the election outcome, the divisions and the Democratic Party or the votes that George Wallace pulled in the Southern states that might have otherwise gone to the Democratic nominee? Yeah, it's another great question. I go back to Vic Fingerhut, because the strategist who worked with the Humphrey campaign, and that was his first campaign he worked on, presidential campaign. And in many of the books about 68, the conventional wisdom is that Wallace actually stole, well, there's some to say he stole from Nixon, some to say he stole from Humphrey. But what Fingerhut said, when Humphrey closed the gap in the final days of that campaign in 68, Fingerhut said, we estimated eight out of 10 votes we picked up came directly from Wallace. Think about that for a minute. So if Wallace was the racist, who was the only one who was really of the three campaigning to fight Vietnam, turn it over to our commanders and fight to victory, whatever that meant. And yet eight out of 10 of the late switchers, as Fingerhut calls it in the political polling industry, came from Wallace to Humphrey. You know, that's a fascinating movement. I'll give you one more. The same millions of people who put Johnson over the top in 64, I would argue weren't quite sure what to do in 68. Many of them were the same millions who put Nixon over the top in 72. And many of them became Reagan Democrats beginning in 1980. So this is another thing that we haven't talked about today. There's an enormous political shift taking place. Conservatives moving out of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, voting patterns, suburbs, the rise of suburbs around cities. Suburbs were a whole new animal to be measured in terms of political polling that would change the dynamics of the campaign. I would argue actually that what made the most in 68, Humphrey just didn't, as I say in the book, a very decent person, liked by everyone on both sides of the aisle, but the American people are fickle. Nothing's changed. After four years or eight years, it doesn't matter the party. It's throw the bums out or time for a change, even if we go back to someone we didn't like before sometimes. And so I think that's what Humphrey had going against him. After eight years of the Democratic Party and running as the vice president, there are natural political shifts and cycles in American history. You can go back and look at it. It's very difficult to be the one asked to continue a political dynasty as Humphrey was. It was very difficult to be Al Gore in 2000. Bush pulled it off in 88, but that was because I think he did his opposition and Reagan was very popular personally. But it's very difficult to go against the historical grains that Humphrey would need to have accomplished in order to win in 68. So I don't know that I would say it was one factor, but he had a lot of things going against him. Otherwise, I think he would have been a pretty good president. There are a couple of questions about your research in preparation for the book. So Jack asked, when did you begin researching the book? Over what period of time did you conduct interviews? And Phil asked, who among those close to LBJ were helpful in documenting the history? I try to be really transparent with the reader in the back of the book. It lists all the people broken down by side, the names, even the dates and the places. I try to always do in-person interviews, but the tail end of the research was during the pandemic, so that wasn't possible. It's a great question. And as an author, I think every author really can't tell you. You don't wake up one day and say to yourself, today is the first day I'm working on this new book. It takes a long time to come together. I mean, I'm somebody who I have a lot of ideas for books. That doesn't mean any of them are ever going to happen, or I'm ever going to seriously work on them. I was always interested in the Chenald affair. I was interested in Lyndon Johnson for all the reasons I've already said. I felt like, you know, and I think a lot of it was 2018 came and went, and I thought there was going to be a big 50th anniversary for 68. Maybe because it was such a difficult year, it wasn't, we wanted to forget rather than remember. But I expected a bunch of books that came out and it really didn't happen. And as I'm making regular trips to archives, none more so than the LBJ Library, I saw how so many new records and LBJ tapes were being released in recent years. And it just seemed to be crying out for a fresh take, you know, after the passage of time where we can begin to look back. Look, I was born in the late 70s, which means I have a lot to learn. These weren't household names or events for me. I had to learn them. But I also wasn't seared by the events of that time. I wasn't on a college campus. I certainly wasn't serving in Southeast Asia, like my uncles. And so, you know, I had a lot of work to do, but I think I could approach it with a little more professional distance. I would say it was sometime in 2017. I couldn't tell you an exact date or a month. I really started to do interviews and work on this. When the pandemic hit, I came back from the worst possible place on Friday, March 13, 2020, from a cruise ship in Fort Lauderdale. And we were clear I came home, and I was supposed to leave that next Monday on 10 more days of research to do a final swing of interviews in Alabama with the wall of sight. And so, I had to put that off until a couple years, until people were comfortable meeting again, things like vaccines were available. And so, I had this odd gap. But in the end, the pandemic was good for me because it forced me to stay home. I couldn't go anywhere. So, I stayed home, I wrote, and then once I could finish up those interviews, I did that. So, I would say 2017-ish until, and the book came out last August. So, I probably spent about five years working on it. Great. And did you find most of the characters in the book, the people that knew them, receptive to interviews and helpful? Yeah. I mean, there was almost everybody done. I mean, every once in a while, you'll come across someone who will say, you know, I'd like to write my own book one day. And I'd like to save some of these stories for my own book. And so, you know, I talked to you, but you know, I'd really rather not be quoted. And certainly, you know, I abide by that. You know, the second part of your question on the LBJ side, they were all great. It's interesting. It's almost like the stereotypes of the four sides. You know, with the Nixon crowd, it was almost, it was often sort of private club, you know, business lunches. With the Johnson side, it was kind of, you know, informal conversations. Any question I had from the Johnson daughters, I've got to give them credit. They were great. Lucy especially gave me a lot of time, told me some great stories. You know, of those still around who were close to Johnson, especially Tom Johnson's great. Larry Temple was a big help. Jim Jones, big help. Joe Califano, he was great. At 85 years old, back then, he was just running around in his office in New York City working on like, he's dictating a book. He's trying to finish like three different memos and dictating to his staff. I mean, they're all great. You know, there's no bad ones in the bunch, as far as I'm concerned. They all gave time. You know, fortunately, it took me five years to do it. A number of them didn't make it to see the book. And so actually, I dedicated the book to a whole list of names from all sides who helped me and didn't ultimately live to see it. But no, I had a lot of fun. I am really lucky. I'm blessed to wake up every day and just have fun. I get to learn, I get to share knowledge and tell stories that either need to be told or haven't been told the right way. Or we take a fresh look at things we thought we knew and talk and go look at new things in archives. That might be 50 years old to everybody else, but you know, they're really exciting to me because it's got that stamp from the National Archives that it was just released. And that's what keeps me going. Great. Thank you. And with that, I'll turn it over to Phil Barnes to conclude us this evening. Well, thank you very much, Luke Nectar. This was a very special activity. And of course, to Mark Lawrence and to Sarah McCracken as well. Many of us in the audience are supporters of Humanities Texas and are members of UT Alley or Friends of the Unveg Library. If not, please check us out. Each of these organizations offers a wide variety of outstanding in-person and virtual programs. Information about these organizations and how to contact them is highlighted on our closing slides. And thank you for tuning in. We will be back next Thursday, January the 25th at 4 p.m. for a conversation with journalist Edward Acquorn, the author of The Lincoln Miracle Inside the Republican Convention That Changed History. I hope to see you then. Thank you and goodbye.