Miller center here at the university of virginia, who president says is broad, long term in perspective, balanced, and of course expressed in words, the written word. The other culture is represented in this room in one sense by the presence of pat oliphant. So please breeds path oliphant. I applause even more so by the work of them path oliphant, which you see displayed on the screen. The culture he represents is not broad, it had a 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. In the denver post for several years. Washington star for several years. Along the way, pat oliphant became the first 21st cartoonist to be featured in newspapers all across the country, he was indicated in newspapers for the country. Far from being balanced, they were opinionated. That was part of their virtue. Obviously, not so much inwards, though there are words, especially in pictures, and the work of pot oliphant not just confined to cartoons, but also paintings and sculpture. Before i introduce our panel, let me speak some words of thinks on behalf of those who were instrumental in helping this program to come around. Beth turner, cocurators. Please take the time to visit the exhibition not only at the miller center, but also at the special collections library. Thanks to the entire staff, a Small Special Collections Library for all their hard work. Processing and im preparing this amazing exhibition. Thanks to john hams worth, dean of the libraries, University Librarian who has led the effort throughout. Finally, susan conway, and Daniel Conway for donating their extraordinary collection to the university. Making this possible. Im going to introduce the panel and tell you a little bit about how we will proceed from now until the end of her first session. The second session will follow the same format. Can germany introducing this on the right. By the way, these introductions will be insultingly brief. You can read more about these individuals on your programs. Learn more about them. Can germany, a senior fellow, works expansively on the london be johnson reporting, as part of the president ial accord project at the miller center. He worked famously and extensively on the lbj and the especially return nixon recording. His research and work has encompassed Ronald Reagan, strong, the assistant director when miller was conducting its oral histories. Im nick johnson, i havent affiliation with the mueller. Center a road scholar. Our format will be essentially this. There are no prepared presentations, no remarks. We will be fashion over the course of the session 15 cartoons. Tiny curated size of what we could do, and probably should do if we had more time, it unfolds chronologically from Johnson Administration through the reagan administration. And basically, i will open the floor to brief comments from these panelists. Their perspective on what they are seeing, and how that relates to what they now know about what is going on with the administration that the. Time if we could have the first cartoon, all right, have added. Im going to start by saying this was done by three of the four artists. A little bit of background. This is 1966. Linda johnson has just undergone surgery. He is getting teasing reviews from the press because he refuses to convalesce. He got something removed from his throat, had a hernia operated on. As soon as the anesthetic were off, he started calling cabinet secretaries, white house aides, he invited reporters into observed him recovering. His doctors had said for two or three weeks you are not allowed to drive. Less president s dont drive because they dont have. To johnson liked to drive around his rage in johnson city. Johnson was johnson and decided that four days out of surgery he would drive around the ranch in johnson city, and so this cartoon is making fun of him. Its a reference most of us will get. Thinking of Lyndon Johnson, he loved the newspaper, he loved seeing things about him and the newspaper. Not everything he saw he liked. He like to be the center of attention. If you look at the very things in the cartoon, its a snapshot of Lyndon Johnson in the white house reporting. There is a lot of johnson in the cartoons. He loved cars. He loved to stand on cars. He liked doubles. If you know anything about johnson he has a lot of bull stories. Stories about different body parts on balls. How it compares to other parts of people. Its a perfect johnson cartoon. My dark there is here. She is a high school senior, im not sure if she would know who popeye, is most of us probably would know by. Is coming back with crossfit and eating spinach. Maybe theres a come back with a cartoon. I have trouble thinking of Lyndon Johnson as bought by. I keep thinking of her as olive oil. It didnt work as well. The notion that he would recover quickly, and then do damage, seems to fit. I would think about the time. Late 66, imagine the depiction of johnson just six months later when he looks so forceful, given the award from vietnam, it represents him as a powerful figure. There would be a decline afterwards. The other thing that struck me in relation to the convalescence, he was in and notably and private man. He would take reporters to the bathroom as he answered questions. He would take reporters into his bedroom and change his pajamas. He did that in the hospital, he didnt overall. In some ways that reflected the johnson personality, its not in the cartoon, its in the convalescence bell. I will invoke pop i prespinach, post spinach as we see him here, although the curtain is from 1966, dont forget, writing something from doctor greenberg Historical Records describing johnson on the day of the kennedy sets a nation, till that day he had been unhappy Vice President , he let himself go physically and other, ways greenberg says as soon as he got word that he would be president it was like popeye after he ate the cant of spillage. Three years later, the image once again seemed appropriate. I think we need a little bit about hubert humphrey. He is the little baby calling there. He is asking about tapioca and barbecue spinach. Lets think a little bit about hubert. One thing in terms of johnson surgeries, he had cancer two years before this, a major moment in humphreys life. I want to put that out there. In a few minutes we will see hubert in different forms. All right, lets move to the next one. Whoops, it gets its the white house guy. This is a good depiction of Lyndon Johnsons life. He was constantly through the phone. You see how many people he talked about, the number of things he talked, about he talked about these things with a dazzling amount of expertise. He got frustrated with people taking up his time. Theres a clip of him talking about these bad appointments that he has to take. He breaks his life into two days as professor pat was talking. About somehow johnson was able to adjust enough calories to handle these crises. This is during the detroit riots, johnson makes the decision to send in the army into detroit. That is part of the context of what is going on here. Just to take off of that, we are all familiar with thinking of Franklin Roosevelt of the master of radio. Kennedy television. Trump as the master of whatever his twitter. Is Lyndon Johnson is the master of the telephone. That is a private form of communication, not public, in washington everything leaks out a semi form of communication, its a very helpful tool for thinking of his presidency to imagine those conversations and because of the work the center has done listen to a number of them. When you spend time listening to johnson on the phone you know a lot about the type of president he was. Can i piggyback on that, i teach at ohio university. I usually teach class on wednesday. What are my students doing today . They have an assignment where they have to listen to three of johnsons tapes. One were just to speak to kennedy one day after the assassination. The infamous one where he orders pants. I urge you to listen to those tapes if you can. The two or late years apart. Even on the phone we can have very different personalities. In terms of the circumstances, this was in the summer of 1967. Johnson at this time i think was still expecting to run for president in 1968. His main rival for the republican nomination it appeared at the time would be republican George Romney of michigan. Its a subtext of here potentially contributing to why it turned out to be so complicated is rodney did not want to say why, he insisted that he say why. You couldnt take that sort of political component out of it. To individuals the thought they would be running against each other the funnel going year. They wanted the situation to reflect poorly on the other one as opposed to themselves. I wanted to point at the artistry and how johnson is repressed scented. Johnson had parts of his body pressed, there is this growing knows that johnson has in many of these political cartoons, if you pay tension to his body, shape the one will look at after this is a distinctly different version of johnson that i have ever seen. Not this one, the next one we will look at. Okay. Lets move on. That is baby hubert. He is running for president. I cant tell if those are flies coming off of johnsons feet. Johnson loved to go look at the, dear he went to the river, he went to great lakes to acquire hundreds and hundreds of property, this was Lyndon Johnsons favorite place to. B you have hubert wearing a feminist boot here. Johnson with his bad socks, and he is skinny. Most images of johnson are not of him being skinny, this reflects, this is towards the end of his presidency. He really wasnt that old. One thing to think of Lyndon Johnson is that he died before he was eligible for medicare. He is in his early sixties. Hes in his fifties for most of his presidency. He had a heart attack, his body is deteriorating, but hes still relatively a young person in this. I love the image of the horse in the background, this is an image, growing up in texas, people love courses, drawings of horses on their wall. I sat immediately in texas, looking at a nice wall with the picture on the wall. Johnson had chosen humphrey as his Vice President in 1964. He needed a liberal running mate last name wasnt kennedy. Humphrey was the choice. It seems like the best move humphrey could make at a time. It was probably the most deleterious what in the long run. Thats for his president ial and visions because he had to subvert himself to Lyndon Johnson. This was done in the month of the democratic election in chicago, were humphrey tried to get a piece point in britain. Calling for a halt of bombing in the afternoon, as a gesture to get negotiations started to end the war johnson threatened to threaten the lives of soldiers in the world. While humphrey was becoming a leader of the party, he was still very much under johnsons control, and i think this captures this almost cruelly. I was the generation that was in college when this was going. Gone i cant breathe, and feel a draft the way it was attended. If it was supposed to be about johnson being drafted for the nomination, i cant see the word without thinking something else. I think it reflects the contemporary reflections of the Johnson Humphrey relationship. I want to push back and say i think its a tad unfair to humphrey. I think humphrey tried hard to carve out some space. The overwhelming personality of johnson made it different. To see humphrey as the child in the adult boots, i think it diminishes humphreys stature, even in the shadow of johnson. Johnson wanted to be president for a long time. He came up in politics in texas at a time when being a senator from texas meant you are so seated in the minds of fellow senators, also the minds of press, American People, you are associated with the south. The southerners were nominated for president since 1848, even, wilson discovered in new jersey, despite being virginian. He was going to move on to the National Stage as a president ial nominee we. He was good to rebrand himself as a westerner. This was important to us efforts to carve out a new identity. He was inviting people from washington out there all the time so they would see him and associate him with the west that had no political baggage attached to it, rather than the south which did. I love this cartoons. 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 get peace with vietnam. He is rebranding himself as a dove, after having supported every escalation of the war up until that point. I think this captures that the commentary at the time and for years afterwards didnt capture, 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 would win the war because he knew he couldnt do that. He really didnt have much of a plan for ending it, are running the peace, as we will get into a little later. Its so the idea of him trying to scramble to pull a rabbit out of a hat is perfect i think. I want to draw everyones attention to the facial expression on the rabbit. I read it as jaded, others might read it in a different way. Since i found this one very curious. When i thought of the freeze tricky dick nixon, i never thought of a magician. I thought of someone who did other kinds of tricks. The problem with Richard Nixon i always assumed was not that he was an incompetent trick stir, but that he was way too good at it. I guess my reaction to tricky dick was eisenhower, i know an awful lot about Eisenhower Nixon relationship. Eisenhower always thought that nixon was too partisan. Also amateur. Nixon tried to brad himself when he ran a second time for president 1967 68, new nixon, could poke fun at himself. You might remember seeing him in his campaign saying stuck to. Me only the new extent do. That we got a new version of a trick. Stir this one in a magician suit. Calls back to him as tricky deck. To tie it with johnson and opinion polls at the time, survey respondents were asked do you trust the government to do the right thing and most cases. Its popping up at about 80 . Once you get to nixon it drops well below the fifties and into the 20s. We see this precipitous drop, the noses in the cartoons are indicated in the public, the faith in the government, the sense that these leaders are lying to us has become great in the american culture. Nixons great advantage when it came to the vietnam issue in 1968 was that he was able to say i am not this, i am not to that, i will not be the president who got us into a war, deeper and deeper into a war, now cant find a way out of it. But i also wont be one of these politicians who cuts and runs as he puts it. I dont know if nixon ever spoke the word secret plan, but in effect what he was offering voters was im not either one of those guys. Either one of those sets of guys. You can do a lot worse than that. A good bit of his branding of himself as Vice President , moving on to the revived candidacy of 1968, he spent a lot of time during the, world establishing a general reputation as someone who was deeply familiar with foreign affairs. When he said in effect you can trust me to handle this, that resonated in some way, with a selection of voters that that we cant do any worse. This is a guy who seems to know his right way around the world. He was able to get away with being brought and general, not specific in a way that other candidates may not have been. This is actually 1962. You all remember george wallace, the former governor of alabama who ran as a independent candidate 1968 when nixon was a republican nominee, oxford was democratic. For a good bit of the campaign, it appeared that wallace might carry enough states to throw the election into the house of representatives, to deny nixon and humphrey as the majority. As it turned out he did, not though he carried 45 electoral votes, in a close reelection mightve done the trick. It couldve thrown into the house. Along the way, he got over 13 of the vote. He established himself as a national figure. In 1972 is when he decided that he would pursue his president ial ambitions. As a democrat, which of course was his party, during his career in alabama, having won the florida primary here you see him kissing his on again off again political girlfriend, democratic donkey. Its i cant stop thinking of this phrase, he would say pseudointellectual. He was the kind of candidate that we used to say could not possibly the elected president of United States. Its worth noting he didnt just win the florida primary also michigan, maryland, and tennessee. I had a similar thought. You can draw an updated version of this with donald trump kissing an elephant, but the difference would be you would also have to draw a cartoon of the elephant kissing him back. Yes. Let me say a word about the donkey. You have to think about the context as well. Its the democratic south was starting to crumble, at least on president ial terms. White southern voters were supporting republicans. How the democrats would maintain strength in the south became a difficult question. Certainly, as much as the Democratic Party wanted to keep the base in the south, if the base matt wallace or wallace type candidate symbolizes a difficult relationship. It is a good thing jimmy carter came along. I was going to make note of the tapes more which will come up in a. Second this is the time where it was said it was three georgia wide. George was on the right wing of the party. The george meanie, at the center of the party. George mcgovern left and of the party. Wallace was clearly when it primaries in a way that frightened both of the other two wings of the parties, of course it was on the day that he won the maryland primary that he was shot in maryland. Shot with such disabling wood that he had to end his candidacy. There no chance at all that he would become the democratic nominee. Its hard to see how he could have made things worse for democrats that. Year they ended up losing every state but won when nixon read for reelection. For a time, reminiscent of huey long in the 1930s, the less permanency, being forced off the nationa