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tv   [untitled]    July 7, 2012 9:30pm-10:00pm EDT

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republicans had been in for a long time. one of the reasons we have simple part stisanships, one pa says, things are really terrible, if you elect us, we'll create utopia. it eventually happens. 8 years later, 16 years later, people say, we don't have utopia. the other party comes along, if you elect us, we'll do it. part of that's natural. and candidates on the day before election realize all those things. remember barack obama ran as sort of a centrist with not much of a message other than hope and change and get rid of these people and change it all. and then that works right until the votes are counted then whoever you are when you wake up the next morning, you are convinced they elected you because you are wonderful. and they really want you to do everything that you really wanted to do, even if you didn't talk about it. you remember famously bill clinton and his wife decided to
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reform the health care system in the '90s because they had a mandate. somebody went and looked and found out there had been one sentence about health care in one speech that was never carried. so he had woken up and decided, i know what this election was about, it was about health care. obama did the same thing this time, but he began to think that he really was what his aides told him he was, which is he could do anything and the public really wanted it and then discovered that isn't really the change they wanted. the change they wanted was to fire people that were there and get new people. so when the next one comes around, part of it is anybody but. but in this case, obama represents more than simply a president that some people are tired of, or a president that is not up to the job, as a lot of people feel. but he's a president with a very different vision of the future than the republicans have, or i think than the majority of the
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american people have. so when you say anybody but obama, it isn't anybody. that's a pre-nomination slogan. when you get to the actual general election, it's this guy who believes in this sort of vision of the future and that guy who believes in a different one. and in the case of bush and kerry, it came that way, too, but people said, this guy's not up to this job and he doesn't want to take us where we want to go. and so they re-elected bush. but it's a closely divided country. so if your message is, i am just not him, that's enough to get you to 48%. and then you better have something to get you that other 3%, and that's what -- it's not enough to just say, i don't like him. you have to have your own things as well. >> questions? i'm going to ask one before we
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get back to the cadets. and that is, what do you think the key takeaway should be from buckley that applies to today? i mean, the -- i mean, the libertarians are not exactly considered as conservatives by many. >> they are by many. >> by many. >> buckley considered himself a libertarian. >> a lot of our political leaders today don't consider ron paul a conservative. >> that doesn't mean libertarianism -- >> okay. >> i actually think -- and we always have this. i had -- this was after the last election when ron paul was also a candidate. you've got people in the party establishment. they may be conservatives, denigrating him.
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one fellow, whose name i won't use, was at a meeting. he said, i went to this county party meeting and it was frightening. there were 300 people there and 200 of them were ron paul people and we have to keep them out. i said, wait a minute, the job of the party leader is not to keep people out, it's to bring people in. the reality is, though, a party is like a club. and every time there has been a wave of new people come into a party, there is an attempt to keep them out. and when the -- when pat robertson ran and brought in the evangelicals into the republican party, the national committeemen from michigan, this was an earlier day, famously said going to a robertson affair was like the bar scene in "star wars," that these were all weird people. many of the people socialized into the party and are now party leaders. when goldwater came along, similar things were said about his people. these shopkeepers and people that, you know, are being
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allowed into the parties, southerners. i was asked when i was in the white house in 1972, we ran a campaign in the nixon administration called operation switch. which was designed to get democratic officeholders to switch parties, primarily in the south. and i remember a republican congressman coming to me and screaming at the top of his lungs that this was a terrible, terrible ideas. we don't want those people in our party because one, they're tacky, and secondly, he said -- he finally -- he said, if they come in, they're going to be running against us in primaries. eight years later he got beat in the primary by a former democrat. but the fact is we might like their votes, but we don't want them in the meetings. that's true no matter what the group is. now it's the ron paul people. these people are weird, these people are strange. my position to them was, yeah, and ron paul has gotten almost
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50% of the 30-and-under vote in every single primary he's run in. and if you want to kick that away, feel free. but a party builder's job is not to kick people out, it's to bring people in. so, yes, you're going to get that, yes, you're going to hear it. and are they going to come in and not mature? did the -- did the robertson people come in and, you know, force everybody to go to church or whatever it was they -- you know what i mean? it doesn't work that way. what happens is that they come in, they bring energy. those who were -- if ron paul was gone, the third of them go home, a third of them stay. you know what i mean? that's the way it works. and if you're going to build a movement, what you try to do is you've got people who agree with you on lots of things and you try to get them to agree with you on the other things and make them part of the family. that's what the party has to do with these people. >> i see that our time is up.
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david, you're one of the chief spokesmen for conservative principles and politics and you've also -- you've been central to the buckley legacy. >> i've just been around. >> we thank you so much for being here today and hope you'll come back often. >> thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you, gentlemen. next week on lectures in history, city college of new york history professor judith stein discusses the united states in the 1970s. join us each saturday at 8:00 p.m. and midnight eastern and sundays at 1:00 p.m. for classroom lectures from across the country on different topics and eras of american history. "lectures in history" are also available as pod casts. visit our website at c-span.org/history/podcasts. or download them from itunes.
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up next university of missouri history professor jeffrey pasley, work as an author, teacher and speechwriter. author and editor of several books including "the tyranny of printers" and "beyond the founders." this 12 minute program took place at the organization of american historians meeting in milwaukee. >> american history tv is at the annual meeting of the organization of american historians. meeting in milwaukee. we're talking with jeffrey pasley from the university of missouri. i want to talk a bit about the history of campaign newspapers. >> thank you. >> and your history blog called public occurrences which is on the commonplace site. what can you tell us about your blog? >> well, what i can tell you about the blog is that it started out as a column on there. i mean, that commonplace has been around for, like, ten years and happened to start actually right when i had just finished
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my first book and then during the 2000 election crisis, and i was just in kind of a mode where i had a few things -- i had a few things to say politically and i guess i also had the sort of unique position of, i mean, in some ways it doesn't sound that exciting, but it's like, having been kind of a journalist before, you know, i had a sort of journalism period before i went to grad school, so, like, knowing politics, i started seeing these early republic analogies to things. >> what kind of things are you writing about lately? >> lately, i've actually got some helpers who have been doing a bit more of it. i think the last thing i wrote personally about was actually a statue of rush limbaugh that they put in the missouri state
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capitol. >> you had a posting about a book you co-wrote. >> yep. the other editor was just standing over here. >> i wanted to ask, you wrote that it was meant to showcase ways of thinking about the political history of the early american republic that were different from the warmed over artfully scuffed up but deeply conservative great man approach which had become so prevalent during the era of not so great political leadership and worse political journalism. can you elaborate? >> that was -- i don't know if you remember around 2000, david mccollough's book was out. riding up the bestsellers charts. an era of younger political -- we're not so young right now. that was seven years ago. we're getting older all the time. it was a bunch of younger
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political historians who just weren't as interested in having it be simply about what adams said to jefferson and how washington felt about hamilton. you know, those kind of personal interactions. >> do you think that history still does a lot more of that than it should? >> i think the founder history, history of the founders tends that way because that's what publishers like to publish, you know, publishers like, you know, they want to do things that are about people that readers have heard of, right? and so, in fact, every time you publish anything in this area, you generally get, well, can you have more -- i was just told recently, just finishing this book about the election of 1796, the first contested one, and, you know, they like it, but can we have a little more washington and adams? even though -- >> these are your editors saying -- >> yeah, even though washington and adams actually, they're against parties and actually completely non-involved. really non-involved in the
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actual election campaigns. adams was literally back on his farm feeding cows. you know, so it's partly a matter of the accuracy of it. you know, in the sense that, like, we felt that, like, that when you're actually talking about politics in this period that it's more than just the high level -- it's more than just the famous names talking to each other. there's all kinds of things going on in a more popular level that you sort of never hear about. >> you teach at the university of missouri. >> i do. >> what's the focus in most of your courses? >> i do everything really between the civil war and colonial. so i have the regular period courses. i have a -- actually i have a history of conspiracy theory course. history of conspiracy theory course. >> where does the conspiracy start? what's the most recent conspiracy? >> you know, whenever -- i only teach it every couple years. you know, whatever the most recent thing is. there's always something.
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when i was doing it a lot a few years ago what the students were always into terribly is the moon landing. that fox news moon landing show just had every kid convinced there must be something there. >> you mentioned a minute ago that -- >> the mayans are the new one. >> you've come to this from a journalism background, but you also were a speechwriter, correct? for al gore's campaign in 1988. how did you get from there from that background as a speechwriter, journalist, to teaching? >> fleeing washington. >> why? >> because i -- i guess the word i felt was, the speechwriter thing particularly, it's like you had the campaign to do your job. you know, it's like -- even if it was like -- when they hire speechwriters, it tends to be, you're smart, you can write speeches. >> how old were you when you were writing for gore? >> 22. no, 23, 24.
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>> did you finish undergraduate? >> i finished undergraduate. i was an intern. i was writing a lot for "the new republic" back in '88/'89. then i had this choice, i could either go into journalism, i could either go into real journalism which meant, like, i had a new job -- i'm from missouri, and kansas. i had a job lined up with "the kansas city star" that i in the end decided not to go back. i wasn't ready to go back to kansas city that quickly. >> let's go back into history for a minute. you wrote a book "the tyranny of printers." the early history of partisan newspapers. tell us a bit more about that. what does that cover? >> that covers -- that actually kind of came out of being on a political staff then coming into grad school and needing a first topic to write about and reading about the political history of the rise of political parties in the 1790s. and just kept noticing how for
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how much the press was involved and how differently it's involved that, you know, there was so many struggles over what a certain newspaper was going to say, over whether a newspaper -- then, of course, there's the acts, news to me at the time that that was basically about shutting down this opposition press. the press was such an issue for the federalists that they were willing to sort of have peacetime repression. >> from your perspective as a journalist and a historian, a writer, has the press gotten better, worse, or stayed the same since the 1790s in terms of coverage of presidential and other elections? >> well, it's -- it's -- i don't think you'd necessarily say better or worse. i mean, what i -- what i do think, and i'm not a particular fan of fox news, but fox news is a kind of a return to what it was like back in the early
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republic. you know, where you had a sort of atlas. they did report news and did provide information, but it was always with this point of view. you know, there was no sort of ability -- there's no sort of attempt that never occurred to them to try to pretend that they weren't involved. right? it was -- so it was a press that was directly involved to the point of -- they financed a lot of their newspapers through prettying contracts they would get -- people, friendly officeholders would steer them. there's no government printing office. so they get it by printing contracts. it literally means if they don't win the election, they might lose their newspaper, right? it's like they had a dog in the hunt. >> doesn't that sort of indicate, then, we have a rich history of a partisan press in this country? >> we do, yes. actually it's more of a history of the press than people -- than even you would learn in journalism school.
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i mean, because, in some ways, i can't know what don't know what's going to happen in the future. the modern press, very late 19th, 20th century. if fox news is the indicator of the coming world, then it might go back. >> where does that concept begin in your view? where did the concept begin of an independent press covering elections or whatever it may be? >> it starts in the 1830s with the so-called penny press. where they basically are able to have a business model essentially where the newspapers can pay for themselves. you know, they can have -- they can print enough copies and in turn sell them directly to readers. the old ones were done mostly by subscription. then a lot of the actual sort of funding of them tended to come from these other sources. so that's when it begins, but they're not objective either. like, those are actually the
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more sensationalist papers where, you know, they take positions, too, and take actually more extreme political positions. so it's really -- it's after the civil war then especially after the turn of the century. you know, william randolph hurst. one of the things people -- one of the most unknown incidents, the mckinley assassination, right? >> that year was what year? >> i was afraid you were going to ask me that. it's out of my period. 1901, i think? please edit that. mckinley's assassinated and it's blamed on -- in a lot of the media it's blamed on the hurst press. william randolph hurst's papers tended to be democratic and tended to be rebelroused about rich and poor. >> the other papers were blaming -- >> yes. the more stayed papers -- at
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that time the hurst papers were ultra sensationalistic and there were more sober papers like t"te new york times" and basically discredits -- it's one of the things that really seriously discredits old-style superpartisan journalism when the president got killed because of the way they whipped up the people. >> from your perspective, what are some of the myths or myths on misunderstandings about the political culture in the u.s. between the revolution and the civil war? >> well, i think the main -- i mean, as you will probably bring up in "beyond the founders." the main thing, especially the average reader, is that it was, you know, intellectuals and whigs writing great essays to each other. right? that it was debating, debating political philosophy. the thing, it was a different
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political culture but it was really also one where a lot of things that we think of -- a lot of the kinds of stuff we think of going on in politics now was occurring but actually almost to a more extreme degree. you know, it's things like not just newspapers were all politicized but, like,newspaper banks were politicized. the parties were the democratic republicans and federalists banks. and somebody started a new bank so that the other side could get loans. and there were a number of other politics would have been going on in the streets. to the point where there would be street events while drinking in the streets where you had to devote in many cases. you would have had to be the sort of person who would have
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had to say it out loud or be the kind of person who would push past the six toughs who had been hired to stand by the poll. >> with the university of missouri, thank you for being with us on american history tv. >> the ship like constitution, it is four hours on and four hours off. this weekend, on american history tv. the life of annen lifted man. the sailor lived in fear of being whipped by a cat of nine
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tails. the thing that you never wanted to see was a petty officer getting ready for a flogging. we still use the phrase today don't let the cat out of the bag. >> also this weekend. the contenders. those that changed political history. sunday, candidate, former new york governor al smith. >> all weekend long, american history tv is featuring the history of jefferson city, mississippi. lewis and clark stopped here during their american expedition. hosted by our partner, learn more about jefferson city, mississippi all weekend on american history tv.
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>> we are going into the room where the records are held. we hold records for all branchs of all state government. we have at least 338 million documents, photographs, video and film library and a tremendous amount of material. >> and in these rows here, we are storing the records of the other agencies and corrections. and this is james earl ray. that is what we are boeiw going show you here today. >> for identification purposes, since he escapes from the missouri state pen tenary, that
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is important for identifies him once the authorities determined who they were looking for in the manhunt. this is the criminal identification for him. it gives all of the statistics for him. it lists like his birthday, where he was born, his mother's name and his address. and down on the page further, it talks about what he was charged for and that kind of information. he had stolen a motor vehicle and he was in prison. and we received all of these for
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him. this is the register that contains the information on james earl ray. his number 00416 shows when he was admitted to the state penitentiary it shows all of the information about him. he was a baker and catholic as well. he only went to the tenth grade which is interesting as well.ra school. this column shows where he had been in prison before. he was serving 20 years and i'm sure some of that had to do with being a repeat fellow. it shows how long he was serving and he was convicted in february of 1960. and he was supposed to get out
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of the state penitentiary in 1980 and if he served good time, which he did not because he escaped, he would have gotten out in march of 1975. these last columns are for discharge and violation of ro rules. it shows he had been admitted in the state hospital in fulton in 1966 but then on april in 1967 he escaped. next we are going to look at the record of escapes for the time period when james earl ray left the missouri state penitentiary. you can look at the book her and look at all of the escapes from 1965 through 1967 and he is the next to the last entry on the
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page. he smuggled himself out on the bread truck. he highlighted those that came from the prison themself. there are only five on this page from june of 1965 through may of 196. most of the rest of these were on work release and if you look at the page too, and how they were rerecaptured, he was the oy blank entry on the page. and then went to memphis where he killed dr. king. he escaped to canada and took on an alias and was captured in england. we are looking at the folder of governor herns for james earl
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ray. because he was captured in great britain there were a number of telegrams and core sporespondeo. the extradition was based on his escape from the missouri state penitentiary. this document here is the actual request for extradition hearing that was taken in great britain. if you look on here, too, it says james earl ray but they cite his alias when he fled to canada and that was on his passport when he went to great britain as well. the extradition was in june of 1968 and he was brought back soon there after for prosecution. he eventually pleads guilty to assist nation.
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he was in cars rated in tennessee. and he eventually died in the tennessee state penitentiary. the james earl ray documents are an example of what you would find for anyone, any family that has a family neb in a prison. in that respect it is a general approach. but for historians, it gives you details that you may not know. you may not know that he was at the fulton state hospital. you may not know what he was in prison for here. you remember the register, it gave citations to other arrests. it gives you clues to find other information about him.

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