RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Father-Daughter! Newsman Dan Rather & Environmental Activist Robin Rather

Dan Rather and Robin Rather on Rag Radio, Friday, September 27, 2013, in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas. Photos by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
Legendary newsman Dan Rather
and environmental activist Robin Rather

Their first ever father-daughter interview is a funny, far-ranging discussion spiced with lively anecdotes, sharp political insights, and touching family memories.

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / October 21, 2013

Legendary newsman Dan Rather and Austin-based environmental activist Robin Rather join Thorne Dreyer for their first-ever father-daughter interview. The incisive, far-ranging, and frequently funny session was originally broadcast live on Rag Radio, Friday, September 27, 2013.

Rag Radio is a weekly syndicated radio program produced and hosted by long-time alternative journalist Dreyer and recorded at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download the podcast of Rag Radio's interview with Dan Rather and Robin Rather here:


Texas-born newsman and former CBS News anchor Dan Rather, who was recently honored with the prestigious Trustees Award of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and his daughter, Robin Rather, an Austin-based environmental activist and sustainability advocate who chaired the city's historic Save Our Springs Alliance, join us in a lively discussion, spiced with oft-funny anecdotes and personal reflections.

Dan talks about his early career in Houston, including his stint as a play-by-play announcer for the minor league Houston Buffs (in road games they "recreated" the on-field action in the studio by reading from a telegraph ticker tape) and his dramatic and innovative coverage of Hurricane Carla in Galveston in 1961 that led to his hiring by CBS News.

He also discusses his controversial exit from CBS; his blogging about Aaron Sorkin's HBO series, The Newsroom; and his take on larger contemporary issues including the increasing corporatization and concentration of ownership in the news business and what he considers to be an endemic lack of courage in today's news reporting.

Robin talks about growing up as the daughter of a famous reporter and media star; about her seminal work in the movement to protect and sustain Austin’s unique environment; and about the daunting challenges -- especially to the region's fragile ecosystem -- caused by the city’s current unprecedented growth spurt. And they each reflect on the other's accomplishments and their close relationship over the decades.

Rag Radio's Thorne Dreyer with Dan Rather and Robin Rather in the KOOP studios.

Dan Rather, now managing editor and anchor of Dan Rather Reports on AXS TV, went to work at CBS News in 1962 and was anchor of the CBS Evening News for 24 years, from 1981-2005. Born in Wharton, Texas, in 1931, he began his career as a full-time journalist with Houston's KTRH radio and KHOU-TV.

The recipient of numerous Emmy and Peabody awards, Dan joined the illustrious company of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite when he was honored with the prestigious Trustees Award of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in New York City on October 18, 2013. Rather's new book is Rather Outspoken: My Life in the News. Dan and his wife, Jean Goebel, to whom he’s been married since 1957, maintain homes in New York City and Austin, Texas.

Robin Rather is an Austin-based environmental activist and sustainability consultant. She is the CEO of Collective Strength where she consults on projects involving renewable energy, water conservation, health care, and community values. Robin was chair of the board of the historic Save Our Springs Alliance, established in 1992 to advocate for Austin's iconic Barton Springs and the Edwards Aquifer ecosystem. Robin was also co-founder of Liveable City, Hill Country Conservancy, and Envision Central Texas, and serves on the advisory board of the Sustainable Food Center.

Born in Houston in 1958, she is the daughter of Dan Rather and Jean Goebel.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is also aired on KPFT-HD3 90.1 -- Pacifica radio in Houston -- on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. (CDT).

The show is streamed live on the web and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

[Thorne Dreyer edits The Rag Blog, hosts Rag Radio, and is a director of the New Journalism Project. Dreyer was a founding editor of The Rag in Austin in 1966 and Space City! in Houston in 1969. He was on the editorial collective of Liberation News Service (LNS) in New York, was general manager of Pacifica's KPFT-FM in Houston, and was a correspondent for the early Texas Monthly magazine. Dreyer can be contacted at editor@theragblog.com]

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, October 25, 2013: Feminist pioneer and Houston Area NOW president Frances "Poppy" Northcutt, veteran of NASA's Mission Control and first Houston Women's Advocate (1972).
Friday, November 1, 2013: Singer-Songwriter Slaid Cleaves.

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Steve Russell : Will Rogers and the Jokes of Partisan Politics

Will Rogers. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
The jokes of partisan politics:
Will Rogers 'chews to run'

'I’m not a member of any organized political party,' he famously confessed, 'I’m a Democrat.'

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / December 7, 2012

Will Rogers, the Paint Clan Cherokee cowboy turned entertainer turned political pundit, used to say he did not make jokes. “I just watch the government and report the facts.” Like any intelligent man, he could be viewed as a bundle of contradictions, but most of his contradictions came from wearing his heart on his sleeve.

From at least 1916, when he faced the reputedly dour and humorless President Woodrow Wilson, nobody was safe from his barbs. Before that performance, his political comments had been topical humor pulled out of the latest newspapers. Having the President in the audience, for Will, took topical comedy to another level bordering on what he never intended, personal attack.

Characteristically, he started with the truth: “I am kinder nervous here tonight.” Writing years later, he admitted, “that is not an especially bright remark, ...but it was so apparent to the audience that I was speaking the truth that they laughed heartily at it.”

Encouraged, Rogers let fly with his usual routine, and the President wound up laughing at himself. According to Rogers biographer Ben Yagoda, Will was invited into the presidential box after the show. Still a bit nervous, he parked his omnipresent wad of chewing gum in his hat, forgot he had done so, and suffered the consequences when he put the hat back on later. (His chewing gum habit would come up again in his choice of slogans for his Anti-Bunk Party, “He chews to run!” This was a gentle parody of Calvin Coolidge, who did not “choose” to run.)

Wilson, a Democrat, was the first President to be roasted face to face by Will Rogers, but hardly the last. There was plenty to go around for both parties. Will never hid his biases. He was more worried about the welfare of farmers than that of city folks, and working stiffs more than bankers. “I’m not a member of any organized political party,” he famously confessed, “I’m a Democrat.”

Of course, in our time we can laugh at that remark as ancient history... unless we think about the 1968 Democratic Convention, when the delegates pledged to the anti-Vietnam War candidate Eugene McCarthy were physically ejected, adding to the chaos in the streets of Chicago that year. Or the 1972 Democratic Convention, when the anti-war outsiders became insiders and spent so much time wrangling among themselves that George McGovern gave the speech that was supposed to end the war at a time when the television audience had gone to bed.

Having admitted to identifying with the disorganized party of the workingman, he still seldom bestirred himself to vote. It’s not clear that he ever voted. It’s safe to say, though, that he would be disgusted with the wave of voter suppression laws and would have had plenty to say about the Republican Party pushing them.

Rogers himself would not be allowed to vote under many of these laws. He wrote of his difficulties getting a passport for lack of a birth certificate:

In the early days of Indian Territory, where I was born there was no such things as birth certificates. You being there was certificate enough. We generally took it for granted that if you were there, you must have at some time been born... Having a certificate of being born was like wearing a raincoat in the water over a bathing suit.

Informed in the passport office that they knew him, but still needed proof he was an American citizen, Rogers was still puzzled:

That was the first time I had ever been called on to prove that. Here my Father and Mother were both ….Cherokee Indians and I have been on the Cherokee rolls since I was named, and my family had lived on one ranch for 75 years.

The argument that you have to have a picture identification to get on an airplane would not have impressed this early and enthusiastic endorser of civil aviation, because the voter suppression laws are not aimed at people who normally get on airplanes.

Rogers was plain about his working class bias, but in the world of electoral politics, he practiced equal opportunity ridicule. “Both parties have their good and bad times,” he observed, “only they have them at different times. They are each good when they are out, and each bad when they are in.”

His personal friendships, like his jokes, were bipartisan. Among presidents, he was probably closest to the Roosevelts, the Republican Teddy and the Democrat Franklin D. “America,” he claimed, “has the best politicians money can buy.”

It’s not hard to picture what he might have said about the tradition of presidential candidates releasing multiple years of tax returns begun by the Republican George Romney and ended by the Republican Mitt Romney. We would be hearing a lot about Swiss bank accounts, in between wisecracks about President Obama’s adventures with the Chicago political machines.

Will Rogers reported for both parties’ nominating conventions starting in 1920 and ending in 1932. Like most of Rogers’ career moves, his convention coverage started out slow, because he did not in fact attend the 1920 conventions. His reportage was disrupted by the tragic death of his son Freddie in June of 1920, the very month both conventions were scheduled. Characteristically, the grieving Rogers honored his contract, taking newspapers as his information, the same information his readers had.

The Democratic Convention was held in San Francisco, where Rogers was when he heard that his children’s “sore throats” were in fact diphtheria. He drove all night to get home, but Freddie died at 4 a.m. on June 17. His first comment on the convention was dated the same day.

“Our National Conventions,” Rogers observed, “are nothing but glorified Mickey Mouse cartoons, and are solely for amusement purposes.” Will was writing about the tendency for the real business of the conventions to be settled in back room horse-trading rather than in public.

In fact, the “cartoons” were not as scripted in advance as they are in our times. The last time a candidate was “drafted” at a convention was the Democrat Adlai Stevenson in 1952. The last “floor fight” for a major party nomination was in 1976, between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan for the Republican nod. It was not that long ago that the political parties did real business at their conventions, although Rogers was correct to be skeptical how much of it happened in public.

Will Rogers practiced "equal opportunity ridicule." Image from New Hampshire Commentary.

1920 Democratic Convention, San Francisco 

In the 1920 Democratic Convention, for example, there were 1,092 delegates and only 336 of them were “pledged,” meaning that they had promised their vote to a candidate on the first ballot. Of those 336, most were pledged to “favorite sons,” a mechanism for party bosses in a state to capture the delegation after the first ballot, since a “favorite son” was not going to win the first ballot.

There were, of course, no “favorite daughters,” since women only got the vote nationwide with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in August of 1920, although they had the franchise in most western states much earlier.

The wide-open nature of the race for the Democratic nomination was a result of the country in general being ignorant of President Woodrow Wilson’s health problems, and as a result uncertain whether he would stand for re-election. In fact, Wilson had been incapacitated beginning in 1919 -- the government effectively run by his wife and the cabinet -- because there was no 25th Amendment providing for disability of the president until 1967.

The only candidate in 1920 who had dared to enter primaries while his party held the White House was Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, whose legacy in history is primarily the “Palmer raids,” roundups of immigrants thought to harbor radical ideas. Neither the Palmer raids nor his run for the Democratic nomination produced any lasting results, although Palmer’s name comes to mind more easily than that of the man actually nominated, Gov. James Cox of Ohio.


1920 Republican Convention, Chicago

The 1920 Republican Convention was held in Chicago, which, Rogers reported, “holds the record for murders and robberies and Republican conventions.” He alleged, “California’s 26 delegates to the Chicago convention were accompanied by 60 bootleggers.”

Will Rogers, bylined as “Famous Oklahoma Cowboy Wit and Goldwyn Motion Picture Star,” did his best from a distance to report the convention that launched the ill-fated presidency of Warren G. Harding. It was Harding’s selection by party bosses behind closed doors in the Blackstone Hotel that contributed the phrase “smoke-filled room” to our political lexicon.

Rogers “reported” an imagined dialogue between himself and one of the party bosses, Pennsylvania Sen. Boies Penrose, who, in spite of serious illness, kept his hand in from Philadelphia with both telephone and telegraph wires in his sick room. Rogers asked “Penrose":

“What makes the delegates change? Don’t they stay with their man?”

“The delegates vote the way their people told them the first ballot. But after that they sell to the highest bidder.”

“But that’s not honest, is it?”

“No, just politics.”

While Harding went on to be elected, his administration was quickly engulfed by the Teapot Dome Scandal, in which Secretary of the Interior (and political Indian fighter) Albert Fall went to prison for bribery and against which all other political scandals were measured before the Watergate scandal.

Harding was saved from further humiliation by his death in 1923, but since the incumbent President Calvin Coolidge was untainted by Teapot Dome, all the drama was gone from the 1924 Republican Convention. The slogan “Keep Cool with Coolidge” said it all.

This time, Rogers reported the conventions on the scenes. By 1924, Rogers was better known than most of the people who were the subjects of his dispatches. His byline had become, simply, “Will Rogers.”


1924 Republican Convention, Cleveland

Admitting to the cut and dry nature of the Coolidge nomination, Rogers reported, “This is the first Vice Presidential convention ever held in the history of politics.”

“The city is opening up the churches now... so the delegates and visitors can go and hear... excitement of some kind.”

“Now I want this distinctly understood, that I have nothing against Cleveland. I love Cleveland because I knew them before this catastrophe struck them. She will arise... and some day be greater than ever.”


1924 Democratic Convention, New York City

The Democrats had a more exciting show at Madison Square Garden. Rogers had progressed from the one-liners that dominated his reportage in 1920. It was a measure of the relative excitement that he produced five articles on the Republicans keeping cool with Coolidge and 18 on the Democratic Party’s circus. By the end of the Democratic Convention, he was reporting as “Will Rogers, Jr.,” because it had lasted so long that his son had supposedly taken over the task.

I suggested to them that if I was them I would adjourn before they nominated somebody and spoiled it all.

We heard nothing from 10 o’clock in the morning until six at night but "The man I am going to name." Then they talk for another thirty minutes and then, "The man I am going to name." There have been guys going to name men all day, and all we ever got named were about six out of a possible 200.

They all kept the names until the last word. It was safer.

Safety was indeed an issue at this convention, where the Democratic Party split wide open over the influence of the Ku Klux Klan, and the number of cross-burnings and hooded marches outside the proceedings led some wags to refer to 1924 as the “Klanbake.”

Inside Madison Square Garden, the main issue became a choice in the platform between a vague call for religious toleration and racial harmony versus a full-throated denunciation of lynchings in general and the KKK in particular.

“They have been five days working on a plank on the Ku Klux and finally brought in the same one the Republicans used,” observed Rogers.

Some guy from Maine offered an amendment naming the Klan... There were 12,000 civilians and at least a hundred thousand cops in and around the building. There were 10 policemen standing in the aisle by the side of each Texas delegate.

Will’s description was comic hyperbole, but the debate did rend the party.

When North Carolina announced to the Chairman that three and eighty-five one-hundredths of a delegate were in favor of the Klan amendment, and that twenty and fifteen one-hundredths of a delegate were against it, why, there was a round of laughter that broke up what was the most tense moment ever witnessed in a convention hall.

Rogers went on at length about the anatomical improbability of fractional delegates. “If a delegate is three-seventeenths of one vote, what would that make an alternate?” The silliness subsided but the KKK prevailed in the floor fight.

Today they start balloting, and I suppose some man will win the nomination by the narrow margin of a left forearm of a North Carolinian.

After a record 103 ballots, the Democrats finally settled on John W. Davis for president. Davis comes down to us in history as the lawyer who argued the segregationist and losing side of Brown v. Board of Education.


1928 Republican Convention, Kansas City

One of the things Will Rogers’ biographers cannot agree upon is how many airplane crashes he survived before the one that took his life. Because of his devotion to the cause of civil aviation (and military aviation before that), Will always minimized mishaps and covered them up when he could.

Flying from his home in California to the Republican Convention in Kansas City, Rogers survived two of what he called “incidents, not accidents.” The first was a wheel breaking on landing in Las Vegas, which ended with the plane on its back. Just a few hours later, in a different plane, Rogers survived a hard emergency landing in Cherokee, Wyoming. He complained that he had lost his overcoat in the confusion around the “incidents,” but vowed to keep his bloodstained shirt for a souvenir.

Once more in 1928, the Republicans put up no serious fights. Herbert Hoover, in a workmanlike march toward nomination, had done enough advance work to be nominated on the first ballot. “The whole show,” Will complained, “has degenerated into nothing but a dog fight for Vice President.”

Rogers did note one thing that has changed in our time, when no Democrat holds statewide office in Texas:

They had a time seating the Texas delegation, as there was no law in Texas to apply to a Republican primary. Texas never thought they would come to a point where there would ever be any Republicans there. They also have no laws against the shooting out of season of reindeers or musk ox.

There was a rare hint of foreign policy debate when one of the speakers alluded to U.S. intervention in Nicaragua, where the U.S. had sent Marines in 1926. The U.S. had pressured the Nicaraguan congress to elect Adolfo Diaz president, something that Will commented on at the time:

We say that Diaz is the properly elected president of Nicaragua, but Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Mexico, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala, Colombia, Uruguay, Paraguay -- all those say that the other fellow is the properly elected president. It’s funny how we are the only ones that get everything right. I’d rather be right than Republican.

Two years later, Will had not changed his mind:

[The speaker] brought up Nicaragua, but he left the marines down there. He said that he would protect American lives down there, even if we had to send some there to protect.

This was vintage Will Rogers, who never hid his opinion that other countries in general, and Latin American countries in particular, ought to be allowed to govern themselves without U.S. meddling.

Rogers could not let the convention pass without ribbing the first American Indian to appear on a presidential ticket, Charles Curtis. While he was also Osage and Potawatomi by blood, Curtis was enrolled Kaw and grew up on the Kaw Reservation in Kansas Territory. Curtis was, like Will Rogers, a pre-statehood Indian who had watched Indian governments get shoved aside.

Rogers said of Curtis getting the nod for Vice President:

The Republican Party owed him something, but I didn’t think they would be so low down as to pay him that way.

1928 Democratic Convention, Houston

From Houston, Rogers anticipated the major issue of the Convention:

Since prohibition was unearthed nine years ago, there has only been one argument invented that a politician when he is cornered can duck behind... "I am for law enforcement." It don’t mean anything, never meant anything, and never will mean anything.

It would take practically a lunatic to announce: "I am against law enforcement."

Now the Republicans held their convention first, and naturally they grabbed this lone tree to hide behind. Now that leaves the Democrats out in the open.

Days later, he continued:

The whole talk down here is wet and dry; the delegates just can’t wait till the next bottle is opened to discuss it. Prohibition is running about a quart to the argument here now.

It was plain that the Democrats would “straddle,” as Will put it, with a “balanced ticket,” which in the context of the times meant a wet and a dry. When the convention settled on a wet, and the first Catholic, Alfred E. Smith, to lead the ticket, the way was open to put the first Southerner on a major party ticket since the Civil War.

This was critical because Smith (and Catholics generally) had been subject to almost as much animosity from the Ku Klux Klan as African-Americans and Jews. This was the very next convention after the one that splintered over the KKK.

The second spot on the ticket went to Arkansas Sen. Joseph Robinson, about whom Will Rogers opined:

They got a great fellow in Joe. He is a real, two-fisted he-candidate. He comes from the wilds of Arkansaw, where they are hard to tame. I have had one in my house for 20 years and there is just no managing ‘em.

Will was referring to his wife, Betty Blake, whom he had courted across the Arkansas line from Indian Territory.

The Smith-Robinson ticket was decisively defeated by Hoover-Curtis, but within a year the “Roaring Twenties” would quit roaring.

Will Rogers: "Never a slave to objectivity." Image from MovieFanFare.

1932 Republican and Democratic Conventions, Chicago

In retrospect, it’s fitting that both parties convened in the same city in the depths of the Great Depression, since neither party had done much to prevent it. The Progressive reforms championed by Will Rogers’ friend Theodore Roosevelt were a distant memory, and the anti-trust laws Roosevelt pioneered were honored in the breech.

Wall Street speculation was rampant at a time when the margin requirement was only 10%. That is, to buy $1,000 worth of stock, a trader only needed $100 in his account. The common belief was that the stock market would always rise, and a rising tide would lift all boats. Politicians were either unaware of or ignored a degree of income inequality in the U.S. that would not be seen again until current times, when we once more choose to assume that the key to prosperity is that the rich do well.

The conventional wisdom came crashing down on Black Tuesday: October 29, 1929. A stock market that had been volatile for some time took a dive. Thirty billion dollars in paper wealth disappeared in two days.

When a similar crash began in September of 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank responded with major liquidity injections, “loose money.” This could not happen in 1929, when the Federal Reserve was bound by the gold standard and private gold hoarding was common.

Speculation in a perpetually rising stock market was not anything that appeared to need regulating in 1929, so when investment banking collapsed, so did commercial banking. Crop loans and inventory loans dried up. When banks failed in those times, the depositors simply lost their money. A rumor became enough to set off a “run” on a bank.

President Hoover’s major policy response was the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Will Rogers was opposed to tariffs in general and that bill in particular, because he felt that it hurt farmers and helped bankers, a view that may have sounded simplistic but was vindicated by events.

Rogers steadfastly refused to kick Hoover while he was down or encourage those who did. When asked by Hoover to write something to discourage hoarding, Will complied by claiming that

A Jewish farmer at Claremore named Morris Haas hid $500 in bills in a barrel of bran and a cow ate it up. He has just been able to get $18 of it back, up to now.

This hoarding don’t pay.

In a speech titled “Bacon, Beans, and Limousines,” Will cut though the rhetorical smoke about the need to balance the budget and the transgressions of other countries:

There’s not really but one problem before the whole country at this time. It’s not the balancing of Mr. Mellon’s budget. That’s his worry. That ain’t ours. And it’s not the League of Nations that we read so much about. It’s not the silver question. The only problem that confronts this country today is at least 7,000,000 people are out of work. That’s our only problem. There is no other one before us at all. It’s to see that every man that wants to is able to work, and also to arrange some way of getting more equal distribution of the wealth in the country.

In those dark days, the two major parties met in Chicago to debate how to get out of the hole and who would be put forward to lead the country out.

The Republicans met first, and started a little slow, according to Will:

I couldn’t find out a thing about politics, and I guess that’s just about the way the whole country looks at it. Nobody here knows they are holding a convention. There is lots of flags out, but Tuesday is Al Capone’s birthday, so who knows?

The next day, Rogers found a political story he cared about:

Well, got some scandal for you today, for it wouldn’t be a Republican convention without some sort of undercover "finagling." They are out now to throw poor old Injun Charley Curtis off and get another Vice President... Their alibi is that he is too old... Well, they knew a few months ago how old he would be about now.

Will went on to suggest that the people out for Curtis’ head say it this way:

We are in the hole and we got to try and dig up somebody that will help us swing some votes. It’s not your age, Charley... You got to be the goat, not us. So any one we can think of that can carry the most votes we are going to nominate ‘em, be it Charley Chaplin or Amelia Earhart. You been a good Injun, but its votes not sentiment we are after this year. So long, Charley, take care of yourself.

Two days later, Will complained again “Poor Charley is to be tomahawked in the back... just like they took the country from the Indians...” When the movement to dump Curtis failed, Rogers claimed credit, probably correctly:

I saved my "Injun" Charley Curtis for vice presidency. The rascals was just ready to stab him when we caught ‘em.

So it’s the same old vaudeville team of Hoover and Curtis.

When the Democrats came to town, Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to replicate Hoover’s first nomination battle. He had entered and won every primary where he would not offend a local “favorite son.” This being the Democratic Party, it was not that simple.

Al Smith was nominated again, as was the Speaker of the House, John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner. There was even a boomlet for Oklahoma Gov. William “Alfalfa Bill” Murray. Will Rogers was friendly with all the contenders. Never a slave to objectivity, Will actually addressed the crowd during a recess:

Now, you rascals, I want you to promise me one thing. No matter who is nominated, and of course some of you are going home disappointed that it was not your man, no matter who is nominated, don’t go home and act like Democrats. Go home and act like he was the man you came to see nominated. Don’t say he is the weakest man you could have nominated; don’t say he can’t win. You don’t know what he can do, or how weak he is until next November. I don’t see how he could ever be weak enough not to win. If he lives until November he’s in.

This time, the Democratic platform managed to advocate repeal of Prohibition, to Will’s delight:

Did the Democrats go wet? No, they just layed right down and wallowed in it. They left all their clothes on the bank and dived in without even a bathing suit. They are wetter than an organdie dress at a rainy day picnic.

Will went on to lament that the Democratic platform had no plan “to get some bread with the beer.” The truth was nobody in either party had a clue. The economist John Maynard Keynes was an academic in Great Britain and Roosevelt would find the magic of the aggregate demand curve by trial and error.

When Alfalfa Bill Murray’s candidacy did not catch fire, Oklahoma’s favorite son votes went to Will Rogers, a development Will took in good humor.

Roosevelt broke though by offering the vice presidency to Cactus Jack Garner, who accepted for reasons unclear in light of his later comment that the office was not worth “a bucket of warm piss."

The Great Depression had, as Rogers predicted, set the stage for a rout of the Hoover administration. It’s hard now, even in economic times challenging by the standards we know, to picture the situation President Roosevelt would face. Unemployment was over twice what it is now, without unemployment insurance or Social Security or Medicaid. Armies of unemployed lived in shantytowns, dubbed “Hoovervilles” by the Democrats.

Will Rogers wrote from Claremore, Oklahoma, on July 4, 1932, looking back on what would be his last convention coverage and, characteristically, forward:

Heard a mule braying a while ago at the farm and for a minute I couldn’t tell who he was nominating.

Steve Russell gratefully acknowledges the research assistance of Steve Gragert, Director of the Will Rogers Memorial Museum in Claremore, Oklahoma. A shorter version of this article appeared in Indian Country Today. 

[Steve Russell lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin. He is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. Steve was an activist in Austin in the sixties and seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. Steve, who belongs to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is also a columnist for Indian Country Today. He can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu. Read more articles by Steve Russell on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Webb Dreyer : Texas Observer Founding Editor Ronnie Dugger

Pioneering Texas journalist Ronnie Dugger in the KOOP studios in Austin, Texas, Friday, June 8, 2012, during broadcast of Rag Radio. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
Rag Radio:
Crusading journalist Ronnie Dugger,
founding editor of The Texas Observer

By Thorne Webb Dreyer / The Rag Blog / June 15, 2012

Legendary Texas journalist Ronnie Dugger, the founding editor of The Texas Observer, was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, June 8, 2012, on KOOP-FM, Austin's cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station; Rag Radio is also streamed live to a worldwide Internet audience and is rebroadcast Sunday mornings on WFTE-FM in Scranton and Mt. Cobb, PA.

You can listen to the show here:


Brad Buchholz of the Austin American-Statesman called Ronnie Dugger “the godfather of progressive journalism in Texas.” Dugger was the founding editor of The Texas Observer from 1954 to 1961, and later served as the Observer’s publisher, spending more than 40 years with the crusading Texas tabloid.

The Texas Observer is a muckraking journal that has broken stories on major scandals and played an influential role in Texas politics. Based in Austin, the Observer, in its own words, “specializes in investigative, political and social-justice reporting from the strangest state in the Union.” The New York Review of Books referred to the Observer as an "outpost of reason in the Southwest."

In 1966, Dugger also proposed and co-founded the Alliance for Democracy, a national grassroots anti-big-corporate organization.

Ronnie Dugger, who won the 2011 George Polk Award for his career in journalism, has influenced and mentored such progressive Texas journalists as Willie Morris, Molly Ivins, Billy Lee Brammer, Lawrence Goodwyn, Kaye Northcott, and Jim Hightower. He recently moved back to Austin from Cambridge, Mass.

Dugger is the author of Dark Star, Hiroshima Reconsidered (World, 1967), Our Invaded Universities (W.W. Norton, 1973), The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson (W.W. Norton, 1982), and On Reagan (McGraw Hill, 1983), and edited Three Men in Texas: Bedichek, Webb, and Dobie for UT Press. He has also written for Harper's, Atlantic, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The Progressive.

Dugger has taught at the University of Virginia, Hampshire College, and the University of Illinois, and has held fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School, Harvard.

Dugger shared with host Thorne Dreyer some of the rich history of the Observer and of Texas progressive politics and journalism, marked by such seminal -- and colorful -- figures as Frankie Carter Randolph, U.S. Rep. Bob Eckhardt, John Henry Faulk, Willie Morris, and Molly Ivins.

Once, when Molly Ivins -- who would become widely recognized as a national treasure for her special brand of populist Texas wit -- was editing the Observer, Dugger asked her, “Molly, when are you gonna get serious?” Ivins replied ("quick as a whip"): "When we have a chance to win."

On the show, Dugger discussed the legacy of the McCarthy era, the looming (both then and now) threat of nuclear war -- an issue that he has always considered preeminent -- and the Johnson presidency, which, he points out, made history with its courageous progressive domestic agenda. “Of course," Dugger says, "the Vietnam War not only ruined that, but killed two million people."

We discussed the way Lyndon’s unique saga was variously treated by the erudite Willie Morris in his heralded memoir North Toward Home and by Billy Lee Brammer, whose pre-gonzo novel, The Gay Place, Dugger called “one of the best novels written by anybody in Texas.” Brammer was Dugger’s first associate editor at the Observer, and Morris would later edit the Observer and then gain more fame as the editor of Harper’s.

And Dugger recounted a remarkable incident in 1955 that he later wrote about in an article titled, “LBJ, The Texas Observer & Me.” Then-Senator Lyndon Johnson summoned Ronnie to the LBJ Ranch with an offer -- “something of a quid pro quo.” After inquiring about the Observer's circulation (“Oh, about 6,000,” Dugger told him), Johnson made his proposal: “Stick with me and we’ll make it 60,000.”

“Johnson was trying to bribe me, basically,” Dugger remembers. “Sing my praises, and we’ll make the Observer a whamdinger.” Of course Dugger, who according to Willie Morris became “one of Johnson’s main public antagonists,” chose to decline the deal. According to Morris, Ronnie Dugger “distrusted the compromises of political power and saw his own role in Texas as that of the social critic, the journalistic conscience, the polemicist.”

Ronnie Dugger also shared with the Rag Radio audience his not-so-optimistic take on the current political scene. “I think both political parties have descended pretty low,” he said. And the Supreme Court “has opened huge corporate money vaults,” with “the scandalous idea that corporations have the same rights as persons.” Dugger fears that “we’re now an imitation democracy governed by a corporate oligarchy… and a bought Congress.”

“Congress, with honorable exceptions, is now a whorehouse,” he said.

Above (and in inset photo): Thorne Dreyer, left, and Ronnie Dugger at the KOOP studios. Behind Dugger is Grace Alfar of ZGraphix. Photos by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio, which has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history.

Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP and streamed live on the web. Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. After broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.


Coming up on Rag Radio:

THIS FRIDAY, June 15, 2012: American Botanical Council Director Mark Blumenthal on Herbal and Alternative Medicine.
June 22, 2012: Gay Marriage in America with Gail Leondar-Wright and Betsy Leondar-Wright.

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Ronnie Dugger : LBJ, The Texas Observer & Me

Former Texas Observer editor Ronnie Dugger with President Lyndon Johnson. Photo by Yoichi Yokamoto / Courtesy LBJ Library / Texas Observer.
LBJ, The Texas Observer & Me

None of us knew it yet, but we Americans were about to be trapped in the history that Lyndon Johnson would make.

By Ronnie Dugger / The Texas Observer / June 6, 2012

Ronnie Dugger, founding editor of The Texas Observer, will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, June 8, from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the web. The show will be rebroadcast on WFTE in Scranton and Mt. Cobb, PA, Sunday, June 10, at 10 a.m. (EDT). After broadcast, all Rag Radio interviews are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

[This article was originally published by The Texas Observer on August 21, 2008, and was reposted at The Rag Blog the next day.]

The confrontation between Lyndon Johnson on one side and The Texas Observer and me on the other arrived on its own terms at his ranch in the Hill Country in 1955.

He was the senior United States senator from Texas and the new majority leader of the Democrats in the Senate. He had developed his concept of journalism as the editor of his college paper sucking up to the college president, and by 1955 he was hell-bent on the presidency.

A group of national liberal Democrats and I, chosen as editor, had launched the Observer the preceding December. I had been editor of my high school and college newspapers, a sportswriter, columnist, an occasional correspondent for the San Antonio Express-News, and a hanger-out with Edward R. Murrow’s boys at CBS News in London when I was studying in England. Johnson was 47; I was 25.

None of us knew it yet, but we Americans were about to be trapped in the history that Lyndon Johnson would make, and I was about to be trapped in his persona and career. He was not an idealist, but he served ideals when it suited and expressed him. He was not a reactionary, but he fanned reaction when it helped him advance himself.

As I wrote in my 1982 book about him, “Lyndon Johnson was rude, intelligent, shrewd, charming, compassionate, vindictive, maudlin, selfish, passionate, volcanic and cold, vicious and generous. He played every part, he left out no emotion; in him one saw one’s self and all the others. I think he was everything that is human. The pulsing within him, his energy, will, daring, guile, and greed for power and money, were altogether phenomenal, a continuous astonishment.”

Ahead of us lay his ascension to the presidency after the assassination of John Kennedy and his calamitous Vietnam presidency, but also his presidency of Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, Head Start, federal aid for the education of the poor, bilingual education, affirmative action, and the establishment of public radio and television.


Lyndon was the driven son of an ambitious, all-empowering mother and a failed liberal politician who made it no higher than elected membership in the Texas House of Representatives. After a lot of hell-raising, Lyndon, following his mother’s lead, took $100 from his folks and enrolled at Southwest Texas State Teachers’ College in San Marcos. The 700 students there came from the farms and towns in the area. They were almost all white, only a few Mexican-American.

Already aiming to be president, Lyndon was set on getting power even in school, and having watched his father, he knew how to try and how not to try for it. Since he got not another nickel from his parents, he had to work his way through Southwest Texas, but after a stint janitoring around the campus, he simply strode into the office of Cecil Evans, the president of the school, and talked his way into a slightly better job.

Walking on campus with his cousin Ava, Lyndon divulged to her his theory of how to get ahead. “The first thing you want to do,” he told her, “is to know people -- and don’t play sandlot ball; play in the big leagues ...get to know the first team.”

“Why, Lyndon,” she exclaimed, “I wouldn’t dare to go up to President Evans’ office.”

“That’s where you want to start,” he told her.

“I knew there was only one way to get to know him, and that was to work for him directly,” Johnson told me later in the White House. For most of his time at Southwest Texas, he was special assistant to the president’s secretary, with his desk next to the secretary’s. This paid him $37.50 a month, but he wanted to be editor of the student paper because that would pay him another $30.

In his first signed editorial in the student paper, the College Star, Lyndon rebuked fellow students-- “celebrities,” he called them -- who were using the college bulletin board for personal messages. The board “must be kept free for school matters,” he wrote, of course thereby pleasing Cecil Evans. Lyndon “knew how to ingratiate himself,” as one of the English teachers there said, and when the student council made him editor of the Star, he demonstrated further that he would use the paper as a tool for personal advancement. Profiling his own boss, Lyndon wrote: “Dr. Evans is greatest as a man,” what with “his depth of human sympathy... unfailing cheerfulness, geniality, kind firmness,” and so on.

Throughout his career on the make, Johnson cottoned up to selected powerful political leaders, both accommodating and abetting them, and thus predictably becoming a favored protégé. He did this, for example, with House Speaker Sam Rayburn, President Roosevelt, and Sen. Richard Russell, as well as with business leaders such as contractors George and Herman Brown. In flattering Dr. Evans in the college paper that he edited, he was just warming up his game of protegeship through the opportunities provided him by his temporary status as a journalist.



In 1955, Rayburn and Johnson, the Democratic Party’s bosses over the two branches of the distant Congress, were gigantic figures in one-party Texas politics. The Democrats in Texas were venomously divided between the “loyal Democrats” -- also called national Democrats, who generally favored the policies advanced by Roosevelt and Truman -- and the reactionary governor, Allan Shivers, and his fellow segregationists and conservatives, who had total control of the state Democratic Party.

The previous October, a group of about 100 “loyal,” that is, national, Democrats in Texas, sensing that Shivers and his followers would go for Eisenhower for president in 1956 (as they did), gathered in Austin to found a liberal journal and asked me to edit it.

They knew, of course, that my views were liberal. They had some knowledge of my years of reporting on the thoroughly corrupt Texas Legislature in The Daily Texan, the student paper at the University of Texas in Austin, and my year as editor there championing racial integration, repeal of the oil depletion allowance, and other liberal causes. For a year my columns from abroad, laced with some of my policy opinions, had run in the San Antonio daily. A speech I had given to the Houston Rotary Club advocating, among other things, national health insurance, had provoked the physicians in the club to issue an outraged written objection.

Most of the liberals who had assembled in the hotel downtown, however, appeared to want a party organ, its editorial voice subordinated to the calculations of the national Democrats in Texas. My models for reporting were: the great muckrakers; Ed Murrow; James Reston. My idea of journalism included standing enough apart from government and political parties to report independently of them and to criticize any institution when that was called for. Although party organs have their place, I did not want to work on one.

Acting through Jack Strong, a lawyer in East Texas, the liberals offered me the editorship on the Friday before the Monday when I was leaving for Corpus Christi to work on a shrimp boat and jump ship in Mexico, eventually to write a novel about the Mexicans who (then as now) were wading, swimming, and drowning in the Rio Grande in search of work.

That night I batted out a long letter to the group addressed to Mrs. R.D. Randolph, one of the group’s leaders who was an heiress to the Kirby lumber fortune in East Texas, outlining what sorts of stories I would want the Observer to investigate and what sorts of editorial crusades we likely would launch, but also my position on a party organ. Addressing the group in the hotel downtown, I told them I was not interested in editing a party organ, but I would stay and edit the new journal, provided I had exclusive control of all the editorial content. The paper’s publisher could fire me at any time for any reason, but as long as I was the editor, I would determine the editorial content.

This arrangement, which protects the journalists and the journalism from politics or the business of publishing, I later, as Observer publisher until 1994, explicitly ceded to every editor who succeeded me.

Bob Eckhardt, the great legislator of my generation in Texas and soon to become one of my closest friends, told me later that a fierce debate occurred after I left the hotel. He said that Mark Adams, a New Dealer and a yeoman printer, said that “if ever a rattlesnake rattled before he struck, Dugger has.” Mark, who became my first printer at the Observer, denied saying it.

But they accepted my terms, and as we prepared to begin, I settled on a motto for the front-page masthead, Thoreau’s “The one great rule of composition is to speak the truth,” and wrote a policy credo that contained the sentence, “We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it.”


I had no sting out for Johnson, far from it. While a student at UT, I had worked downtown in Austin as a reporter and news announcer for his and Lady Bird’s radio station, KTBC. His senatorial office, that is, he, had helped me get a job in Washington one summer in the division of international organizations at the Department of State. Returning from abroad, I had applied unsuccessfully for a job on his Senate staff. I learned that Horace Busby, one of his top advisers, had said to him something like, “Ronnie’s not our kind of guy,” but I didn’t know that for many years.

The first year or so at the Observer, I was the only reporter and editor, and we had one subscription person. The founding group watched quietly as I did my best to begin to wreak havoc on racism, corruption, poverty, discrimination, and the rancidness of the plutocratic ideals blatted forth by the allegedly Democratic Gov. Allan Shivers.

When I reported the racial murders of two black children in Mayflower, Texas, near Tyler, I was told that one of the Observer founders, Franklin Jones Sr., a very successful plaintiff’s lawyer in Marshall, exploded profanely on seeing my photograph of the body of one of the dead children on the front page: “Here I am working my ass off getting subscriptions for the Observer, and Dugger sends us pictures of dead Negroes all over the front page.” But if Franklin did say that, or something like it, he said nothing to me.

A new Democratic National Committee member from Texas had to be chosen, and it became known that Sen. Johnson had exerted his power to achieve the selection for that honor of the reactionary and racist Lt. Gov. Ben Ramsey, who presided as the dictator over the Texas Senate to the purring pleasure, protection, and profit of every corporate fat cat in the state, the oilmen most of all. In editorials, I damned Johnson to hell and back for it.

Johnson had been opposing the Texas liberals -- on Ben Ramsey, by effectively favoring conservative Price Daniel over the liberal Ralph Yarborough for governor, and in other ways -- to get Texas reactionaries behind him, or at least to quiet them down, for his candidacy for president, which Rayburn and he would soon make public.

Nearly all of us at the Observer and all our readers were in agreement on a new drive to build a grassroots uprising of the liberal and populist Democrats to throw Ramsey and his ilk -- Shivers, Sen. Daniel, the lot of them -- into the Republican Party where they belonged. Obviously a Democratic Party answering to well-organized Democrats in the cities directly challenged and would at least diminish the boss-rule powers that Rayburn and Johnson exercised and enjoyed, and Johnson went to calling all of us involved in this organizing effort “the redhots.”


At some point that fall, with the Ramsey controversy smoking, I received a phone call that Sen. Johnson would like to see me, and would I call on him at the ranch at a certain hour on a certain afternoon. I had never been out there. After wheeling my family’s 1948 Chevrolet, which we called the Green Hornet, through the Pedernales River muscling itself shallowly over Johnson’s low-water bridge, I pulled up in front of his grand spread and saw that he was swimming in the pool, off to the right there. We greeted, nodding, and for some time I shifted from one foot to the other by the pool, feeling rather high in the air, as he continued his swim and, desultorily, we talked.


Toweling off and sitting us down on the pool furniture, cocking his long face toward me, Sen. Johnson asked me:

“Ronnie, what’s the circulation of your paper?”

“Oh, about 6,000.”

“Stick with me and we’ll make it 60,000,” Johnson said.

I knew at once what he meant. “Stick with me” meant support his policies and decisions, about Ben Ramsey and anything else, celebrate his sagacity and wisdom in all that I wrote about him, and support his presidential ambitions; “and we’ll make it 60,000” meant that in return, he would employ his standing, power, and connections to build up the Observer. The one great rule of composition would be to promote Lyndon Johnson. The Observer would be not a party organ, but a Johnson pipe organ that his nod could cause to bellow forth with Wagnerian splendor

The senior senator from Texas and the Democratic majority leader of the U.S. Senate had called me out here to propose straightforwardly that the Observer and I replace journalistic integrity with loyalty to him. He was trying to bribe me and The Texas Observer, or, if this was not to be a bribe, the deal -- the secret understanding -- the quid pro quo, obedient loyalty and feigned adulation in return for the other’s use of his power on your behalf, would have been not different from a bribe by a dime.

Johnson’s problem was, he would soon make public his campaign for the presidency. He knew the Observer was a novelty, conspicuous in reactionary Texas, reporting long-covered-up events and expressing unpredictable opinions; he knew that national newspeople, traipsing to and from his ranch from Austin, would often drop by the Observer offices for inside dope or just for the devilment of it, as in fact they were to do for the rest of the decade; and he knew that if his sellouts to the Texas yahoos and rednecks on the way to the White House became clear to the national Democrats, they might not nominate him for president.

My problem was how to get out of there. I could have just said, “I’m sorry, senator, no deal,” but this was not my style while practicing rebellious journalism in Texas. I extended myself and taxed my fellow Observer reporters to be fair and accurate, both in order to be fair and accurate and in self-defense, although, that done, in editorials I let miscreants and villains have it straight on.

In person, in my life day after day, I was carefully polite and civil with all parties. If I was formally polite to a fault, well, it was a kind of protective coloration. On this afternoon with Johnson, I realized that the Observer and I had been misgauged and underestimated, but that for the rest of the occasion my part was to avoid any accusative remarks or implications, any incautious, offensive, or popinjay responses, and to graciously take my leave as soon as that might appear mannerly.

Sitting there side by side on plastic chaise lounges -- someone brought us cold drinks, I believe lemonades -- we talked along gingerly for maybe an hour. Well, senator, it’s an honor to have met you, and I appreciate your having me out -- don’t want to overstay, I’d better be getting back to town -- I said something like this, starting to rise to head back to my Green Hornet.

No, he said, why don’t you stay to dinner. No trouble, Bird’ll have plenty.

Although I had nothing more to say to him, I had not said no, and he had something more to say to me.

After an interim during which nothing happened, I sat down to dinner in a half-dark chamber at the center of the Johnsons’ well-staged home with Lady Bird Johnson and Johnson’s personal secretary, Mary Margaret Wiley, who had been my managing editor in high school in San Antonio when I had edited the Brackenridge Times. Mary Margaret is a beautiful person. While I had perceived no romantic flash in our friendship and work together in high school, we admired and respected each other; I was glad she was there.

As Johnson sat down at my left at the head of his table, though, I realized, silently appalled, “My God, the subject is at hand, all I can do is explain journalism to him as if he actually doesn’t know what it is.” If the situation had not been unbelievable, it would have been incredible.

I struck forth uncertainly, as if we were dining on a pitching log, addressing only Johnson to describe, as best I could, the role of journalism, the Fourth Estate, separation from government, providing facts and explanations, democracy’s inexpendable need for an independently informed electorate. I may even have quoted Jefferson.&

I might as well have been talking to the log I was riding. Johnson said to me, No, the thing a smart young reporter does, and should do, is survey the field of candidates, pick the best one, and enter into a deal to help that one win whatever office and prevail in whatever controversy, subordinating his reporting and comment to the interests of the candidate.

Johnson was far too smart to really think that is what journalism is or should be. He was feigning adherence to a theory of journalism, a blend of his own practice on his college paper and his political strategy of protegeship upended for the advance of his juniors, that might work somewhat, with me and others, as a disguise for his use of journalists to serve his will to power.

Later it became embarrassingly clear that he had induced some of the leading reporters and columnists in Texas and the nation to make some such a deal with him or assent to some such understanding: Leslie Carpenter, William S. White, Joseph Alsop, some of the authors of those surprising articles in the big magazines in the late 1950s promoting the lanky Lyndon Johnson of Texas for president of the United States.

I remember (I am not referring, for this essay, to my notes on all of this) that neither Lady Bird nor Mary Margaret said one word all evening. Oh, perhaps one or two, but I don’t remember even one. They sat silent and still as good women of old were supposed to during an argument among the men. Yet both Bird and Mary Margaret were highly intelligent.

How strange the evening must have seemed to them, their guy trying to turn a journalist into his secretly bought public promoter, their senator and this younger guy battling over irreconcilable opinions, completely missing each other, reaching no agreement.

Many’s the time since that evening there has replayed on the stage in my mind a vivid re-seeing of what happened upon my departure that evening. I am five or six feet away from Lyndon and me, watching the two of us illuminated by the ranch-house lighting locked in animated argument in front of his house at his low wire fence, he inside the fence, I outside, our knees braced against it and each other, intensely disputing directly into each other’s faces a few inches apart, he leaning first a little into my face, and then a little more, and then so much my head is bent back, and I shift my heels backward to be able to stand up straight to him again.


My first associate editor at the Observer, Billy Lee Brammer, a reporter on the Austin daily (and later the author of the classic Texas novel The Gay Place), started showing up unbidden evenings and helping me clip the 3-foot-high mounds of the rotgut Texas daily newspapers of that era, then quit downtown and came on staff. He flourished in reporting Texas politics for us, most memorably “the Port Arthur story” and the Austin lobby’s junket for Texas legislators to the Kentucky Derby, until Johnson hired him onto his Washington staff.

The liberal Democratic organizing of the ’50s caught hold in the cities, especially in Houston and San Antonio. In the 1956 Democratic state convention, over the furious objections of Johnson and his operatives there, the delegates elected Mrs. Randolph, who had become the de facto publisher of the Observer, to the Democratic National Committee.

Four years later, favorite son Johnson trounced his opponents in Texas and swept into that year’s state convention, where he had Mrs. Randolph replaced. In one of these conventions, Mrs. Randolph told me, Johnson sent her word asking her to call on him, and when she did he asked expansively, “Well, Mrs. Randolph, what can I do for you?” She replied: “Nothing.”

Texas labor leaders Fred Schmidt and Hank Brown told me that, when they lobbied the Democrats’ Senate leader in Washington, he railed against the Observer and me, on some specified occasion with a copy of the journal on his desk. Mrs. Randolph said that when he asked her to get me to do something or other she replied, “Talk to him.” At least I could think, when for example I wrote a series of columns on the horrors of nuclear weapons, or during the Vietnam war when I ran a headline across the front page, “Will Johnson Bomb China?” that the man himself might be reading it.

During one state Democratic convention, I was running tandem some with Mark Sullivan, the Southwest bureau chief for Time-Life, for which I was a stringer. Mark and I approached Johnson on the convention floor for an interview. Johnson barked out that he wouldn’t talk to us with me there because “that boy prints lies about me.” We left him -- or at least I did; I am not sure what Mark did.

That was the first and has been the only time in my life when I have directly experienced from another person the will to ruin me. The Time-Life connection was enabling me to hold up my financial end with my wife and children despite my annual Observer salary of $6,500. With this one ferocious remark to my boss at Time-Life, Johnson surely meant to kill me professionally. Deep in my convention story in the Observer, I reported the scene and what Johnson had said about me. I was deeply offended, and a year or two had to pass before my anger about it subsided. But Time-Life stood by me (in fact in 1961, after a lunch with Henry Luce, I was invited to join the staff of Time, which I did not).

In 1959, preparing a special focus for the Observer on Johnson’s candidacy for president, I asked him for an interview in Washington, and he granted it. I remember that on my way into his regal office as majority leader, I saw Mary Margaret at her desk, and we exchanged cautious smiles and slight nods when my eyes briefly met hers as I passed. The interview went well enough. This time I got the full Johnson treatment of persuasion, charm, raillery, and menace -- stories, brags, ridicules of his colleagues, jokes, hands on my knees -- again and again the leaning into my face.

Perhaps I should also record that, in the early 1960s when Johnson was vice president, I became a correspondent in Texas for the then-liberal Washington Post, and I intuitively suspect on the basis of the facts and context of what happened, but I have no evidence, that Johnson used his extremely close ties to that newspaper’s executives to have them eventually drop me.

The Observer never endorsed Johnson for president except in his contest with Barry Goldwater in 1964. In columns, I was for Estes Kefauver in 1956, Averell Harriman in 1960.

Except for an oblique column in the Observer full of obscurities after the confrontation at the ranch, this is the first report I have written about these events since they occurred half a century ago. Initially there was the off-the-record problem, but that’s gone now. I have not wanted to write about it, too, because how could I without being perceived as possibly self-serving? I relate them here now because the Observer editor asked me to.


In November 1965, I was one of the eight speakers who addressed the first massive demonstration against Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam war, and afterward I typed out a copy of my speech and sent it to President Johnson (the Observer ran the text of it). Johnson had George Reedy, then his press secretary, send me a note that “the President asked me to tell you he seeks no wider war,” the first time I saw or heard him hide behind that lying bromide.

In 1967, having signed a contract with W.W. Norton for a book on Johnson, I wrote him asking him for biographical interviews and telling him that I intended a fair and accurate book worthy of the attention of serious people, and he gave me extensive interviews in the White House in late 1967 and 1968. He introduced me around the White House as “the leading liberal in the Southwest.” Discounting that as the Texas blarney it was, he had given off accusing me, or the Observer, of printing lies about him.

He tried to bring you into his field of overmastering personal power; that failing, he tried to ruin you; that failing, well, OK, he would deal with you again. In my last interview with him in the White House, on March 23, 1968, we were carrying along merrily. He was telling me a story when he suddenly interrupted himself and said, “Now, Ronnie, I’m giving you all these great stories, I want a friendly book!” I leaned forward and began, “Well, now, Mr. President -- ” but he shut me off and continued with the story.

He was so charming, engaging, such an engrossing person, funny, fun to be with, such a good raconteur, I did not remember that he had said that until I was outside the White House that night. I went on back in and spoke with his press secretary then, my old friend George Christian, whom I had reported alongside years earlier in the offices of the International News Service in the Texas Capitol.

I reminded George I had told Johnson I intended to write a fair and accurate book worthy of the interest of serious people, but that during our interview that evening he had said he wanted “a friendly book.” Oh, hell, George said, you know Lyndon, he didn’t mean anything by it. Maybe George was right, but “Yes, he did,” I said, “and please tell him from me, on that point, no deal.”

The next day, I suspected pro forma in light of what had occurred, I asked that my next interview with the president be scheduled, and then I waited some days in the Hay-Adams Hotel across Lafayette Park from the White House, where I was staying. No call came. A week later Johnson quit the presidency. Another week later, he began his interviews with Doris Kearns.


The Observer maintained its integrity and its independence of Lyndon Johnson before and during his presidency. He was who and what he was, the Observer and I were what and who we were and are, and this is the story of Lyndon Johnson, The Texas Observer, and me.


[Ronnie Dugger, founding editor of the Texas Observer and, later its publisher, was also co-founder of the Alliance for Democracy. Dugger is the author of Dark Star, Hiroshima Reconsidered (World, 1967), Our Invaded Universities (W.W. Norton, 1973), The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson (W.W. Norton, 1982), and On Reagan (McGraw Hill, 1983), and has written for Harper's Magazine, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Progressive, and other periodicals.]

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BOOKS / Leslie Griffith : Dan Rather's 'Rather Outspoken'

Dan Rather is Rather Outspoken

Reporters had best be careful when they set about the business of digging up news. Dan Rather's unsettling 'push under the bus' is an instructive case in point.

By Leslie Griffith / Reader Supported News / May 21, 2012

[Rather Outspoken by Dan Rather (2012: Grand Central Publishing); Hardcover; 320 pp.; $27.99.]

In Rather Outspoken, one of broadcast journalism's elder statesmen reflects on the state of the news business, and a career that spans from the glory days to what many of us see as the bitter end.
Soaking up his life's worth of wisdom compels the reader to ask a familiar question posed to those in power during America's infancy -- a question just as pertinent today.

"What will be the old age of this government (including the fourth branch) if it's so early decrepit?"

Sadly, Rather's latest book reminds us that reporters had best be careful when they set about the business of digging up news. And they damn-well better make sure the media corporations for which they work are ready and willing to stand by them. Of course, Rather's unsettling "push under the bus," as he describes it, is an instructive case in point.

It's hard to believe CBS was once the network of the "Murrow Boys" who exposed the fear-mongering of Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn. The same network that sent a young Rather into the middle of firefights in Vietnam, and managed to make 60 Minutes the most successful news program in history.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. And I don't mean Dan Rather.

He has proven that he is and will always be a reporter... no matter the venue. Keep in mind, I am not saying he has always been right; however, in my humble opinion, he has always been earnest, tireless, and willing to put his life on the line if it meant delivering news and much-needed context to the American people.

While newsrooms have drastically (and dangerously) cut staff during this era of mega-media conglomerates, the mighty managers have fallen upwards. Upwards of $70 million is what CBS President Les Moonves made in 2011. That would be okay by me if most of that money were put back into the newsrooms, but it's not. And Moonves is not likely sitting up at night worried about what the people of America are not being told.

Regarding property, privilege, and abuse of power, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "Let our countrymen know, that the people alone can protect us against these evils, and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose, is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles, who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance."

Without saying it flat out, or even having to, Rather Outspoken reminds us that there are precious few reporters still working to fight the powerful and privileged who profit from harming our democracy, our planet, our food supply, our water, our air, our institutions of learning. (This list could go on for quite some time.) And Moonves' stunning salary reminds us exactly what is valued by the few powerful corporations currently controlling the news.

Those blessed few reporters left standing are not naive. They can't afford to be. We all know that the louder the warning to the American people, the stronger the "push-back." Today, corporate media minders harbor an unimaginable ambition for wealth and power while maintaining meager ambitions when it comes to informing American citizens.

Mostly, they want to protect and keep those corporate commercial dollars flowing. Journalism, as it functions today, certainly is not designed to keep America honest, or democracy working as Thomas Jefferson intended.

In Rather Outspoken, we get a not-so-shining example of how this era of corporatized news works to the detriment of democracy.

The key story takes us back to the 2004 election. That's when Dan Rather was first betrayed by Viacom/CBS. Just two months before the presidential election, Sumner Redstone -- Viacom's ultimate corporate master -- was quoted as saying: "From a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on... I vote for Viacom. Viacom is my life, and I do believe that a Republican administration is better for media companies than a Democratic one."

That statement reads like a warning to any and all of CBS' reporters who might be digging into anything critical of George W. Bush or his administration. And, at the time, that was exactly what Mr. Rather and his ace producer Mary Mapes were doing. They had a story that reflected badly on George W. One that, if accepted by the American people, most certainly would have scuttled George W Bush's disastrous second term.

In retrospect, the mind boggles to think what might have been different had Viacom/CBS backed Rather and Mapes instead of backing away from them.

The chronicle of Rather's take-down reeks of Cassius cunning... so Shakespearean is the plot.

Rather and Mapes went running into a house on fire, only to turn around and find those carrying the fire hoses had deserted them. From Rather's account, it is clear his beloved CBS network had, by the time they'd left him twisting in the wind, devolved into nothing more than a money-grubbing entertainment machine seeking favored status with the powerful. A recent Texas Monthly story backs him up .

Rather Outspoken is a cautionary tale on many levels. And it's a story that finally explains why Rather and Mapes fought so hard to run their story. And why, in the end, the story ultimately fell flat after a strangely convenient information snafu.

To fully grasp the implications of this sordid tale, you have to put yourself into the "Black Op" line of thinking: If Cassius cannot discredit the story, then he must discredit the storyteller.

Think Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson. Luckily for the "Black Operator," documents are malleable and always open to question and to opinion. Fame-seeking and often mediocre but ambitious "experts" are readily available to discredit them, too. Think Obama and the interminable birth certificate debate. If the Black Op works -- the story gets thrown under the bus along with the reporter brave enough to tell it.

Oh, how convenient it must have been to have a former CIA chief watching over his presidential son. The CIA building in Langley is not named after Poppy Bush for nothing.

Like any reporter worth his or her salt, Rather has stepped on a lot of toes over the years. The list of people who wanted to see him blackballed and blacklisted stretched all the way from Pennsylvania Avenue to Langley, Virginia. And there were plenty of well-heeled spin-doctors and PR people ready and willing to aid and abet the process.

As Rather points out, and as many reporters know, there are now huge public relations firms regularly hiring Rovian characters who make their coin leaking false stories. By the time the spin-doctors get finished, the real story is as twisted as a pretzel, completely unrecognizable and, more times than not, the wagging finger gets pointed right back at the reporters. The messenger becomes the story, not the message. Oh, how Cassius smiles.

When Rather and Mapes were ready to wrap up and air their story of George W. going AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard -- George W. was two months away from the 2004 election.

It's important to note here that Rather and the Bushes had butted heads for years. The Bush-AWOL story was the culmination of a long, acrimonious history between Rather and the Bush clan. You see, reporters who hail from Texas, like Dan Rather, cut their teeth on the duplicitous-outrageous-red-dirt-throwing, go-for-the-jugular-style of politics that made Texas famous.

Lee Atwater, who worked for G.H.W. Bush, was the first to say out loud that in Texas politics... the end justifies the means. (Cheney and Rove both come from Texas politics too.)

Love it or hate it, Texas politics is unique in both its homespun punditry and slaughterhouse savagery. The late Texas governor Ann Richards, who was eventually unseated by George W., stood at the Democratic National convention in 1988 and said, "Poor George. He can't help it -- he was born with a silver foot in his mouth." Jim Hightower, then-Texas agricultural commissioner, said of George W., "He was born on third base and thought he had hit a triple."

These were the politics that helped define Rather's bare-knuckle style. He knew the hidden secrets and where the skeletons were long buried. But he was not about to bury the story of George W. running away from a war while telling America's young men and women to run toward one.

Rather quotes a "highly decorated retired Army colonel" who says soldiers who had risked their lives in Vietnam had long known about George W. Bush going AWOL. It was no secret. A solider who goes AWOL can be court-marshaled and tried for treason, particularly those unlucky enough to not have a former president and former CIA director as a father.

Rather writes,

For a journalist, the truth always matters and that should be reason enough [to do a story]. The arrogant hypocrisy of it makes this story much more disturbing. A young man born of privilege whose family secured him a spot in the National Guard to avoid military service in Vietnam, and who then walked away for more than a year from even that safe level of obligation, eventually became the commander in chief who ordered tens of thousands of our young men and women, including those in the National Guard, into harm's way in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Rather continues,

This same young man who gamed the system to evade deployment to Vietnam became a president who did nothing to prevent, halt or disavow the distorted character assassination of his opponent, John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam Veteran.

Remember the Swift Boat controversy? It all follows the same CIA Black Op pattern. Instead of ignoring the lack of George W's service in Vietnam, make the opponent appear to be what your candidate really is. Remember the Swift Boat controversy. It implied Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was a coward.

Back at CBS News, Rather and Mapes' story was cut up and shortened without Rather's permission. He felt crucial back-up information was eliminated. Then the story was relegated to "60 Minutes Wednesday." An explosive, history-altering story like this one got no real promotion, no real back up and was relegated to the second-string broadcast. It is telling.

Plus, no one cared enough to push it beyond a bevy of entertainment lawyers and frightened middle-management ladder-climbers who put up roadblocks every which way.

Finally, the story aired. It got some traction. And then, as if according to a playbook, the documents were attacked. The same technique was used on Mr. Obama (the birth certificate was forged!?). After reading Rather's book, it's clear the proof of Bush W.'s AWOL was well established. Rather and Mapes didn't even need the documents.

But the document began the undoing. First, the message was lost, and then came a full-blown attack on the messengers. In the middle of the black storm at Black Rock, Rather was directed to issue an on-air apology. And he did, basically saying he and Mapes could have always done more. Viacom/CBS followed-up with an "independent" investigation. Heading the "independent investigation" was a well-known Republican and long- time friend of Bush's daddy. "Beware, yon Cassius has a mean and hungry look."

This is how our politicized and corporate media works today. It has become so common to shoot the messenger, other reporters just fall in line and keep quiet. If Dan Rather can get set up... who are we to think we won't be targeted too? Better to play it safe and avoid investigative reporting. Trouble is, as Thomas Jefferson pointed out, "ignorant citizens" cannot support a democracy.

It should also be pointed out that while living in the bubble of big media, it's hard to see and understand how all this plays out. Now, that Rather is "outside" the mainstream, it has certainly made him wiser and more contemplative about what goes on "inside."

He is now an elder statesman with much to teach. He's seen all sides of the corporate-political news game and lived through its development. He knows how we got here. We need to listen to him about how best to get out.


Full Disclosure

Final note: Since "failure to disclose" has become an epidemic by reporters in this country... here is my disclosure.

I sent Dan Rather a book I'd written two years ago. He read it and endorsed it. I'd never met him, but he called to ask what he could do to help the book get published. "Forget that," I said, "Would you just call my dad in Texas and tell him I've not been sitting here doing nothing?"

Rather asked for the number. But, truthfully, even though I'd heard from friends who interned at 60 Minutes that Rather was kind and generous... and still wrote his own stories! I never really expected him to phone home for me.

Sure enough, about 20 minutes later, my father called me.

"You little shit," he said. "Next time you have Dan Rather call me, at least give me a heads up first."

While writing Rather Outspoken and endlessly traveling for HDNet, Rather has done some fine reporting. His reports from Gaza come to mind. Nothing like a reporter who has actually been to the places he is talking about.

Stretched so thin with a weekly hour broadcast, traveling and doing most of his own interviews, Rather later asked if I could help with two outside projects. I did. It was an honor.

Hopefully, after reading his book, the skeptics who refused to see the set-ups and betrayals, finally will.

[Leslie Griffith has been a television anchor, foreign correspondent, and an investigative reporter in newspaper, radio and television for over 25 years. Among her many achievements are two Edward R Murrow Awards, nine Emmys, 37 Emmy Nominations, a national Emmy nomination for writing, and more than a dozen other awards for journalism. She is currently working on a documentary, giving speeches on "Reforming the Media," and writing for many online publications, as well as writing a book called Shut Up and Read. To contact Leslie, go to lesliegriffithproductions.com. This article was first published at and was distributed by Reader Supported News.]

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