This stage who are scholars associated with the Miller Center at the university of virginia and to study the presidency who as broad, longterm in perspective and expressed in written word. The other culture in this room is the presence of pat oliphant. Please greet pat oliphant. In this neighborhood or might be a lot open yeah like meeting like restaurant wiser just like i know the privilege open but even more so by the work of i bet yet pat, which you will see but i i bet you some of the Grocery Stores around like the smaller ones on that gentleman displayed on this screen. The probably this culture he represents is not sort of broad gauge and long but highly specific. Daily prospective over the course of more than 60 years as a cartoonist producing more than 10,000 individual cartoons five days a week for the denver post for several years, for the washington star for several years, and then along the way, pat oliphant the first 20thcentury cartoonist to work independently. Thates how popular it was, it was syndicated through newspapers across the country out of his studio. So a specific, daily comment on events as they were occurring. Far from being balanced, they were opinionated. That was part of their virtue. Obviously, not so much in words, although there are word, but especially in pictures. Not just confined to cartoons, but also to paintings and sculpture. Before i introduce our panel, let me speak some words of thanks on behalf of those who were instrumental in helping this program come about. Best turner and beth turner. Please do take time to visit the exhibition not only at the Miller Center but also at the special collections library. Thanks to the entire staff of the albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library for all their artwork, not only processing and preserving the collection but also preparing for this amazing excavation. Thanks to john unsworth, the dean of the libraries, and university librarian, who has led the universitys oliphant effort throughout. And finally, susan conway and Patrick Oliphant for donating their collection to the university and making this event possible. I will introduce the panel now and then tell you a little bit about how were going to proceed from now until the end of our first session, and the second session will follow the same format. Kent germany, and i am introducing these in the order to which they are sitting on your right. By the way, these introductions are going to be insultingly brief. You can read more about these individuals in your programs and certainly you can go to the website and learn even more about them. Kent germany, a senior fellow with the Miller Center who worked extensively on a john f. Kennedy and lyndon b. Johnson recording as part of the president ial recordings project at the Miller Center. Ken hughes, also with the Miller Center, who worked extensively and famously in some ways on the lbj and especially the Richard Nixon recording project. Chester patch, a historian Whose Research interests and product has encompassed johnson and Ronald Reagan. Robert strong. Bob strong was assistant director when the Miller Center was conducting its jimmy carter oral histories. Im mike nelson. I have an affiliation with the Miller Center but my day job is at Rhodes College in memphis, tennessee. Our format will be essentially this. There are no prepared presentations, no prepared remarks. Were going to be flashing over the course of this session 15 cartoons. Just a tiny, curated, but tiny slice of what we could do and probably should do if we had world enough and time. It will unfold chronologically from the Johnson Administration through the reagan administration. And then basically, i am going to throw the floor open to brief comments from these panelists, their perspective on what they are seeing and how that relates to what they knew about and now know about what was going on in these administrations at the time. So if we could have that first cartoon. All right. Have at it. I will start by saying this one stymied three out of four. So a little bit of background. This is 1966. Lyndon johnson has just undergone surgery. Hes getting teasing reviews from the class because he refuses to convalesce. He had gotten a polyp removed from his throat and had a hernia operated on. As soon as the anesthetic wore off, he started calling cabinet secretaries and white house aides, and he invited reporters in to observe him recovering. So his doctors had said, for two or three weeks, you are not allowed to drive. Most president s dont drive because they dont have to. But johnson liked driving around his ranch in johnson city. Johnson, being johnson, decided that four days out of surgery, he would drive around the lbj ranch in johnson city. So this cartoon is making fun of him. I think there is one reference most of us will get. Thinking of Lyndon Johnson, he loved the newspaper. He loved seeing things about himself in the newspaper. Maybe not everything he felt like he liked, but he liked to be the center of attention, and if you look at the various things in this cartoon, its a little snapshot of Lyndon Johnson. And in the white house recordings, theres a lot of johnson in the cartoons that shows up in those recordings. He loved to stand on cars. He loved to get gold horns to stand on cars and do politicking that way. He liked bulls. If you know anything about johnson, he has a lot of bull stories and different body parts and how those compared to human being body parts and other things. Cows quivering in pastures, waiting for bulls, that sort of thing. My daughter is here, an 18yearold high school senior. I am not sure she would know who popeye is, but i think the rest of us might know. Popeye might make a, comeback, eating spinach and doing crossfit so theres a chance with this cartoon. I have trouble imagining Lyndon Johnson as popeye. I kept thinking about ladybird as olive oyl, and that did not seem to work quite as well. And the notion that he would recover quickly and then do damage seems to fit. I would just think about the timing. This is late 1966. Imagine the depiction of johnson only six months or eight months later. Would he look so forceful given that the war in vietnam deteriorated considerably . This represents johnson as a powerful figure. Id imaine it is something about zenith or at least it would be a decline afterwards. The other thing that struck me in relation to the convalescence, johnson was a notably unprivate man. Ive heard from journalists how he would take them into the bathroom as he answered their questions, even an afternoon nap, he would shepherd them into the bedroom and change into his pajamas. He did that in the hospital. He did that overall. So in some ways, that reflected the johnson personality. Its not in the cartoon, but its certainly that convalescence. I am going to invoke popeye, not only prespinach but postspinach. I will never forget reading something by David Greenberg describing johnson on the day of kennedys assassination. Johnson, up until that time, had been a very unhappy Vice President. He had let himself go physically and in other ways, and greenberg said once he got the word he was going to be president , he was like popeye after he ate a can of spinach. And so three years later, occasionally, that image seemed appropriate. I think we need to say a Little Something about Hubert Humphrey, who you might not see, but he is the baby crawling there. Asking about tapioca and barbecued spinach. So lets think a little bit about hubert. On thing, in terms of johnsons surgeries, Hubert Humphreys son had cancer two years before this so this was a major moment in the humphrey families life, so i want to put that out there about little baby hubert. We will see hubert in different forms that mr. Oliphant created. All right. Lets move to to next one. Ill take this one. This is a pretty good depiction of Lyndon Johnsons life. He was constantly on the phone. You can go through the daily diary and see how many people he talked about. He talked about them with a level of expertise that is dazzling. He would get upset with people taking up his time. Theres an early conversation where johnson is talking about all of these appointments he has to do as president when he is trying to think. Johnson spends his life, breaks his life into two days. He takes a nap in the middle of the day. Somehow, johnson was able to ingest enough calories to handle all of these crises. This is from 1967, if you remember the detroit riots and johnson maks the decision to send in the army into detroit. That is part of what is going on here. Just to take off from that, we are all familiar with thinking about Franklin Roosevelt as a master of radio. Kennedy, the first president who masters television. Trump is the first master of whatever it is twitter is. Lyndon johnson is the master of the telephone. That is a private form of communication, not a public one. But in washington, everything leaks, so its a semipublic form of communication, and it is a helpful tool for thinking about his presidency to imagine those conversations because of the work the Miller Center has done, listen to a number of them. When you spend time listening to johnson on the phone, you know a lot about what kind of president he was. Can i piggyback on that can i piggyback on that . And thank the Miller Center . One whatever my students doing today . They have to listen to three of johnsons telephone tapes on the Miller Center site. One way he speaks to Jackie Kennedy 10 days after the assassination, one to Richard Russell where he bludgeons him into serving on the warren commission, and the infamous one in which he orders hager pants. And i urge you all to listen to those tapes if you have not. They compared the public and private johnson and the two are just light years apart. He can have very different personalities even on the phone. And just in terms of the circumstances of that detroit riot, this was summer of 1967. Johnson at this time, i think, was still expecting to run for president again in 1968. His main rival for the republican nomination, it appeared at that time, was going to be governor george romney. Of michigan. When the riots took place in michigan, the subtext here maybe contributing to why it turned out to be so complicated, was that romney did not want to say he could not handle this situation, and therefore needed federal troops did and johnson insisted that romney say he could not handle the situation. Even in the midst of a catastrophic set of events that resulted in a thousand deaths, hundreds of billions of dollars in destroyed property, it could not take that sort of political component out of it as two individuals who thought they might be running against each other the following year, wanting to make the situation reflect bad on the other one rather than on himself. I do want to point out some of the artistry and how johnson gets presented. Johnson had very large parts that he imposed on other people. Think about the johnson treatment. But the way mr. Oliphant has presented his nose here. There is this growing those that johnson has nose that johnson has paid if you Pay Attention to johnsons body shape, the one well look at after this is a distinctly different version of johnson than what we have seen. Not this one, but the next one we are going to look at. Lets move on. Thats baby hubert. And hes running for president. So, johnson i cannot tell if those are flies coming off of his feet. The ranch is obviously an important part of Lyndon Johnsons life. He loved to go and look at the deer and look at the river and he went to Great Lengths to acquire hundreds and hundreds of acres of property around him, so this was Lyndon Johnsons favorite place to be. And you have got Hubert Humphrey wearing his boots, which look like ladies bids. They have a very high heel to them, not texas boots. He is wearing kind of a feminized boot. He is skinny. Most images of johnson are not of him being skinny, but i think that reflects the end of his presidency. He really was not that old. One thing to think about Lyndon Johnson is, he died before he was eligible for medicare. He was in his early 60s. He was in his 50s during most of his presidency. He had had a heart attack in the mid1950s and he would have two more after his presidency so his body is deteriorating, but he is relatively a young person here in this, and i love the image of the horse in the background. This is an image i grew up a little bit in texas, and people love horses and love drawings of horses on wall wall, so when i saw this i was immediately back into texas in the 1970s looking at somebodys house with a picture on the wall. This is a painfully accurate depiction of the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey. Johnson had chosen humphrey as his Vice President in 1964 because he needed to have a liberal running mate whose last name wasnt kennedy. Humphrey was the choice. It seemed like the best move humphrey could make at the time and it was probably most deleterious one in the long run for his own president ial ambitions because he had to completely subordinate himself to Lyndon Johnson, especially on the vietnam war. This cartoon was done in the month of the Democratic National convention in chicago, when humphrey tried to get a piece plank in britain. It would call for a halt to American Bombing of North Vietnam. A return for or as a gesture to get negotiations started to end the war. Johnson threatened to denounce humphrey as jeopardizing the lives of american soldiers if he came out for a bombing halt, so while humphrey was becoming the leader of the party, he was still very much under johnsons control, and i think this captures this almost cruelly. I belong to the generation that was in college when all of this was going on. I cant read i feel a draft the way it was intended. If it was supposed to be about johnson being drafted for the nomination, i cant see that word without thinking something else. I think it reflects the contemporary perceptions of the Johnson Humphrey relationship, but i guess i want to push back a little bit and say i think it is a tad unfair to Hubert Humphrey. He really did try hard to carve out some independent space. The overwhelming personality of johnson made it very difficult, but just to see humphrey as the child in the adult boots i think diminishes humphreys stature, even in the shadow of johnson. I will just add this. Johnson wanted to be president for a very long time, but he came up in politics in texas at a time when being a senator from texas meant you were associated in the minds of your fellow senators but also in the minds of the national press, the American People, when you were associated with the south. Note 7 are note 7 or had been nominated for president since that retailer. Even Woodrow Wilson was governor of new jersey at the time, despite his being a virginian. For johnson, it was very important that he was going to move on to the National Stage as a president ial level politician to rebrand himself as a westerner. So this ranch was terribly important to his effort to carve out a new identity. He was inviting people from washington down there all the time so that they would see him and associate him with the west, which had no political baggage attached to it. Rather than the south, which did. I love this cartoon. Moving onto the nixon campaign, this is right after Richard Nixon has announced, as a republican candidate for president , that he will end the war and win the peace in vietnam. He is rebranding himself as a dove after having supported every hawkish escalation of the war up until that point. And i think with this, it captures that the commentary at the time, and for years afterwards did not capture, was just how impossible it would be for any of the candidates to come up with a satisfactory outcome in vietnam. Nixon was trying to avoid saying he was going to win the war because he knew he could not do that and it would not be credible, and he really did not have much planned for ending it or winning the peace, as we will get into a little bit later. So the idea of him scrambling to pull a rabbit out of the hat is perfect, i think. I do want to draw everyones attention to the facial expression on the rabbit, which i read as cheated. Others might take it a different way. I found this one really curious. When i thought of the phrase tricky dick, i thought of someone who did other kinds of tricks. The problem with Richard Nixon was not that he was an incompetent trickster but that he was way too good at it. I guess my reaction was tricky dick, too. Eisenhower thought nixon was to partisan and amateur. Nixon did try and immature. Nixon did try to rebrand himself as the guy who was more mature, who could poke fun at himself. Some of you may remember seeing him during the campaign saying sock it to me . Only the new nixon could do that. What we got was another version of the trickster. This one in a magician suit. But still, i think