75 minutes, a kind of meeting of two cultures. One culture is represented by the people on this stage, who are scholars associate the with the Miller Center here at the university of virginia and whose studie of the presidency is broad, longterm in perspective, balanced, and of course expressed in words in the written word. The other culture is represented in this room in one sense by the presence of pat oliphant, so please, greet pat oliphant with a [ applause ] but even nmore so by the work o pat oliphant which youll see displayed on this screen. The culture that he represents is not sort of broad gauged and long range by highly specific, daily perspective 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, the washington star for several years. And along the way pat ol fant became the first to work independently of any newspaper. Thats how popular his work was, and it was syndicated through newspapers all across the country out of his studio. So specific daily comments on events as they were occurring. Far from being balanced, they were opinionated. That was part of their virtue. And obviously not so much in words, although there are words, but especially in pictures and the work of the art of pat ol fant not just confined to cartoons but also to paintings and sculpture. Now before i introduce our panel, let me speak some words of thanks on behalf of those who were instrumental in helping this program to come about. Beth turner and molly squatsberg, cocuators of it, unpacking the archive. Please take the time to visit the exhibition not only at the Miller Center but also at the special collections. Thanks to the entire staff of the albert and shirley small special collections library, for all their hard work processing, preserving the collection, and preparing for this amazing exhibition. Thanks to john unz worth, the dean of the libraries and university librarian, who has led the oliphant effort throughout. And finally Suzanne Conway and Patrick Oliphant for donating their extraordinary collection to the university and making this event possible. Im going to introduce the panel now and tell you 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, im introducing these in the order to which theyre sitting on your right. And by the way, these introductions are going to be insultingly brief. You can read more in your programs and certainly you can go to the website and learn even more about them. Kent generally, a senior fellow with the Miller Center who worked extensively on the john f. Kennedy and lynn don b. Johnson recordings as part of the recording 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 interest and products has encompassed johnson and Ronald Reagan, and bob strahm who was assistant when the Miller Center was conducting the jimmy carter oral histories. Im mike nelson, i have an afigiation but my day job is in Rhodes College in memphis, tennessee. There are no prepared present asians, no prepared remarks. Were going to be flashing over the course of this session 15 cartoons, just a tiny, curiated but tiny slice of what we could do if we had enough time. Theyll unfold chron logically from the Johnson Administration through the reagan administration. And then basically im going to throw the floor open to brief comments from these panelist, their perspective on what theyre 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. Start by saying, this one stymied three out of the four analysts. So a little bit of background. This is 1966, Lindon Johnson has just undergone surgery. Hes getting sort of teasing reviews from the press because he refuses to convalesce. Had he had a polyp removed from his throat and had a hernia operated on. As soon as the anesthetic wroer off, he started calling cabinet secretaries and white house aides, and he invited the reporters in to observe him recovering. His doctors had said for two or three weeks you are not allowed to drive. Most just dont drive because they dont have to. But johnson liked driving around his ranch in johnson city. But johnson being johnson decided that four days out of the surgery, he would drive around the lbj ranch in johnson city, and so this cartoon is making fun of him. And i think theres one reference most of us will get. So thinking of Lyndon Johnson, he loved the newspaper, he loved seeing things about him in the newspaper, maybe not everything he saw he liked, but he liked to be the center of the 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 this cartoon that shows up in these recordings. He loved to stand on cars, get bull horns and stand on cars and do politicking that way. He liked bulls. Hes got a lot of bulls stories about different body parts on bulls and how those compare to human being body parts and other things, and to cows quivering in pastur pastures waiting for bulls and that sort of thing, so this is a perfect cartoon. Im not sure my daughter here, 18 years old, would know who popeye is but i think the west of us would know. Popeye might make a comeback eating spinach and doing crossfit. So maybe theres a chance with this cartoon. I didnt have trouble imaging Lyndon Johnsons popeye. I kept thinking of lady bird as olive oil. That deidnt seem to work quite as well. The notion that he would recover quickly and then do damage seems to fit. [ laughter ] i would just think about the timing. This is late 1966. Image the depiction of johnson only six or eight months later, would he look so forceful . Given that the war in vietnam had deteriorated considerably. This represents a sense of johnson as a powerful figure. But i imagine its something of eye zine ikt or at least a decliner afterwards. The other thing that struck me in relation to the con va lensence, he was a notably unprivate man. Ive heard from journalists how he would take them into the bathroom as he answered their questions. Even he took an afternoon nap and he would shepherd them into the bead room and change into his pajamas. He did that in the hospital and overall. So in some ways that reflected the johnson personality. Its not in the cartoon, but its certainly in that convalescence. Im going to invoke popeye, not only prespinach but postspinach, where we see him here. Although this cartoon is from 1966, ill never forget reading something by david greenburg, a historian at rutgers, 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 says 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 once again seemed appropriate. I think we need to say a Little Something about hubert fum free, who you might not see, but hes the little baby crawling there, asking about tap yoka and barbecued spinach. Lets think a little bit about hubert. One thing to return, humphreys son had had cancer before this. This was a Major Movement in their life. I want to put that out there. Because in a few minutes well see hubert in some different forms that mr. Oliphant created. Lets move to the next one. I guess its in the white house takes guy. Ill take this one. This is a preyed good depiction of lyndons life. He was zoontly on the phone. You can go through his daily diary and see how many people and things he talked about and 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 i should ask, apoumts that he has to do as he is trying to think. Johnson spins his life, breaks his life into two days, as professor patch was talking about, 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 makes the decision to send in the army into dezroit. So thats part of the context of whats going on here. And just to take off of that, were all familiar about thinking about Franklin Roosevelt as the 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. Now, thats a private form of communication, not a public one. But in washington everything leaks, so its a semipublic form of communication. And it really is a helpful tool for thinking about his presidency, to imagine those conversations and 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 . Thank the Miller Center. I teach at ohio university. What are my students doing today . They have to listen to three of johnsons telephone tapes that are on the miller site, one where he speaks to jackie after the assassination, and one in which he orders hager pants from the hager pants company. I urge you all to listen to those tapes if you havent. They compared the public and private. And the two are just light years apart. Even on the phone he can have very different personalities. And just in terms of the circumstances of that detroit riot, this was in the 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. And when the riots took place in michigan, a subtext of here, maybe contributing to some of what it turned out to be so complicated, was that romney didnt want to say he couldnt handle this situation and therefore needed federal troops. And johnson insisted that romney say he couldnt handle the situation. So even in the midst of a sat trosk set of events that resulted in dozens of deaths, hundreds of millions of dollars in destroyed property, you could not take that sort of political component out of it as two individuals who thought they might well be running against each other the following year, wanting to make this situation reflect bad on the other one rather than on themselves. Before we move off, i do want to point out some of the artistry in how johnson gets projected. He has very large parts of himself as he imposed on other people, the johnson treatment. The way mr. Oliphant has presented his nose, there is this growing nose that johnson has in many of these political cartoons. If you Pay Attention to the body shape, one well look at after this, its a dinctly different than any, not this one but the next one were going to look at. Okay. Lets move on. Well, thats bay bby hubert,d hes running for johnson. I cant tell if those are flies coming off of his feet. The ranch is a big part of his life. He lobbed to look at the dear and the river. And he went to Great Lengths to acquire hundreds and hundreds of acres of property around him. And this was lyndons johnsons favorite place to be. Youve got Hubert Humphrey wearing boots which look like ladys boots. Theyre not texas. Hes wearing kind of a femnized boots here. Johnson with his bad hes skinny. This is toward the end of his presidency. He really was not that old. So one thing to think about Lyndon Johnson, he died before he was eligible for medicare. Hes in his 50s during most of his presidency. He had had a heart attack, would have two more after his presidency. He is still relatively a young person here in this. I love the image of the horse in the background. I grew up a little bit in texas and people love horses and love drawings of horses on their wall. When i said that i was immediately back in the texas in the 1970s looking at somebodys house with a picture on the wall. This is a painfully accurate depicts of johnson and humphrey. He had chosen him in 1964 because he needed to have a liberal running mate whos last name wasnt kennedy and humphrey was the choice. And it was it seemed like the best move humphrey comake at the time and it probably was the most deliterrious one in the long run 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 peace plank written into the platform, when that would call for a halt to American Bombing of North Vietnam in return for negotiations or as a gesture to get negotiations started to end the war. Johnson tlaerchted to denounce humphrey as jeopardizing the lives of americans. While humphrey was becoming the leader of the party, he was still very, very much under johnsons control. I think this captures this almost cruelly. I 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 else. I think it reflects the contemporary perceptions of the Johnson Humphrey relationship. But i think its a tad unfair to Hubert Humphrey. I think humphrey 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 did i minishes humphreys stature even in the shadow of johnson. Johnson wanted to be president for a very, 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 it 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. And no southerner had been nominated for president since zackary taylor. Even Woodrow Wilson was govern. Johnson was going to move on to the president ial state to rebrand himself, no pun intended, as a westerner. And 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 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 on to 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. So he is rebranding himself as a dove after having supported every hawkish escalation of the war up until that point. I think what this captures that the commentary at the time, and for years afterwards, didnt 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 didnt have much of a plan for ending it or winning the peace, as well get into a little bit later. So the idea of him scrambling to sort of pull a rabbit out of a hat is perfect, i think. And i do want to draw everyones attention to the facial expression on the rabbit, which i read as jaded. But others might take a different way. I found this one really curious. When i thought of the phrase tricky dick nixon, i never thought of a magician. I thought of someone who did other kinds of tricks. And the problem with Richard Nixon, i had always assumed, was not that he was an incompetent trixster but that he was way too good at it. Yeah. I guess my reaction was tricky d dick too. I study eyes hour and know a lot about that. Eisenhower always thought that nixon was too partisan and also immature. And so nixon did try to rebrand himself when he ran that second time for president in 1967, 68. Was there the new nixon, the guy who was more mature, who could poke fun at himself. Some of you may remember seeing him during the campaign during laughin saying, sock it to me. Only the new nixon could do that. But what we got was another version of the trickster. But still i think it still called back that image of nixon as the tricky dick. So ill be the nose guy to point out Richard Nixon and his nose. And to tie it with johnson and to tie it with some opinion polls that were done at the time, it basically asks the survey respondents, do you trust the government to do the right thing in most cases . And so that number at the john kennedy Lyndon Johnson level is bumping up at about 80 . By the time we get through Richard Nixon, its dropping down well below the 50s and into the 20s. The noses in these cartoons are indicating in the American Public that the fact in the government, faith in the presidency, the sense that these author taitive leaders are lying to us, has become engained in american cul toou. Its the political cartoonists that let us know this ahead of time. We should listen more, i guess. Nixons great add vvantage w it came to vietnam was he was able to say, im not this, and im not that. Im not going to be the president who got us i