Part One: Lee Atwater: The Political Dirty Tricks Artist Who Gave us President(s) George Bush

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Robert Evans here, and I just finished committing a light form of tree genocide on some invasive trees that live in my side yard called the Trees of Paradise.

If you've ever encountered one of these trees, go murder it right now.

Stop your podcast.

Kill that tree.

If it's on your neighbor's property, knock down their fence.

Do whatever you have to do to get to that tree.

Kill it.

Kill them all.

Garrison Davis, welcome to the show hello thank you so violent do you hate the tree of paradise garrison i remember some struggles years ago but my my problems have uh have escalated yeah the it's this it's the tree that smells like yeast when you cut it down and grows forever and very quickly it's the devil it's the evil tree no luckily there's no trees on the east coast so not much problem they got rid of all the trees

not as much of a joke as we'd like it to be um

they've been growing back over the last 200 years, but yeah, they did kill all the old growth a while ago.

Garrison, speaking of killing the planet, you know who loves to kill the planet?

Billionaires, I guess.

I don't know.

Fascists, billionaires, that whole area.

Yeah, I mean, billionaires, fascists, and the political party that they largely use for a lot of their dirty work, the Republican Party.

This week, we're talking about a guy who is responsible for kind of breaking politics in a major way in the United States.

He played a huge role in getting Ronald Reagan and George H.W.

Bush elected.

And he pioneered a kind of polling called push-polling.

That's like one of the most toxic methods of doing, you know, dirty tricks campaign ads to this day.

This is kind of the guy who invented the way modern presidential elections work.

He's a fella named Lee Atwater, and he was a strategist for the Republican Party.

Have you heard of this guy?

I've heard of the name.

I feel like it's one of those like Roger Stone types.

They've probably like combined him with a few other people,

but don't have a clear idea on like who this guy is.

But it's like one of the, it's like somewhere in like in that Rolodex of guy.

Yes, he's very close to Roger Stone.

He was much smarter and better at his job.

Like Roger Stone kind of drafted a lot off of Lee's accomplishments.

The thing Lee is, one of the things Lee is most known for is his protege was Karl Rove.

George W.

Bush's campaign manager.

Like he was the guy who got Karl Rove his start and taught him everything he knows.

The guy who George W.

Bush nicknamed Turd Blossom.

That's a true story, Garrison.

And that was a compliment.

I can't believe our president would pick demeaning names for his friends to slash enemies.

This is crazy.

It was not meant to be.

Anyway,

that's another story for another day when we do the Karl Rove episodes.

But this guy, Lee Atwater, is one of my slept on.

Like, if you had a time machine, who would you go back and assassinate guys?

Like, no, no, no.

Really?

I'm going after Atwater.

Yes.

Wow.

We'll We'll see how you feel about this.

What do you think the trickle-down effects of that are going to be?

Well, you know, you never know when you go back in time and assassinate.

This is what we know about time travel.

Yes.

Like, I went back in time and assassinated, you know, super Hitler, and we just got regular Hitler.

And now everybody thinks regular Hitler was just as bad as Super Hitler.

Trust me, Super Hitler was much worse than regular Hitler.

But, you know, it turns out it's Hitler's all the way down.

If you keep killing Hitler's, you just get different versions of Hitler's.

Anyway, a little bit of time travel information for those of you out there looking to go back in time and kill regular Hitler.

Someone already did it.

Wow.

I mean, yeah, that is kind of what happens in Terminator, right?

Yes.

Yeah.

Basically, yeah, that's the gist of Terminator.

Because I've seen like five different CG, like Arnold Schwarzeneggers at this point.

So

no matter what you take care of, they're always going to make some deep-faked version again.

Yeah, that's really the ultimate message of the Terminator movie.

Oh my God, deep fake Hitler?

When's that going to be in a blockbuster?

That's already the Hitler we've got, Garrison.

Keep up.

It's not the original one.

Before we close out the cold open, I would like to do a plug for a fundraiser we're doing for the Portland Defense Fund.

They bail people out of jail and provide support to people in custody.

Most of the people they help are houseless folks who don't have any resources to fight the cases against them.

If you go to donorbox.org,

if you type in Defense Fund PDX DonorBox, you'll find their donor box page.

And that would help a lot.

They could use the donations

and their Venmo is at DefenseFund PDX.

So please help them out.

All right, that's the end of the cold open.

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So we're talking about Lee Atwater, who was born Harvey Leroy Atwater.

And he would always describe his upbringing, his family background, as the middle of the middle class.

Now, whenever a high-ranking political strategist kind of guy says that I came from the very middle of the middle, he was a pretty wealthy guy.

Yeah.

Top, we'll say top of the middle.

He wasn't rich, but top of the middle class, right?

Comfortable.

He and his, he and both his mom and his dad know like their family origins in the United States going back 200 something years, which is not like the norm for an American, right?

It's a little more normal in these kind of like Carolina families than it is in, say, Oregon, but this is not.

You know, with like the 23andMe stuff where you can, like, find it, but, but, yeah.

No,

they know their relatives because they had famous ancestors.

They have like a family lineage.

Right, right.

Uh, his mother was Totty Page.

She got the name Totty because she toddled around as a kid, I think.

Um, and he, she, it's a very like fucking middle 20th century wife name.

Yeah, Toddy.

Uh, she traced her family line back to a revolutionary war hero named Alexander Craighead.

Uh, his descendants married into a North Carolina family and migrated down to South Carolina, where they ultimately produced Gabriel Cannon Page, who became postmaster for the state and was the first Republican politician in the family.

And this is back when the Republicans were unequivocally the good guys.

We are talking about like Reconstruction era.

This is like 1870s or something.

Yeah, yeah, we're talking about like, I think pre, I think he starts before the Civil War, but yeah, this is this is like around the period when like they're definitely the good guys.

He has a son called Leroy, which is where R.

Lee Atwater takes his name from, who's born in 1891, and as a teenager, he is permanently maimed, has his leg fucked up forever in a horse-drawn wagon accident.

You know it's going to be a good episode when we get a wagon accident right off the bat, like a load-bearing wagon accident.

This is important.

This is an important wagon accident.

I'll tell you why in a minute.

Now, like most 20-year-olds in 1911, he elopes with a 16-year-old named Irene.

He moves, I don't know, like a town over.

It's not hard to elope back then.

And he becomes a mailman like his father.

He's able to support his siblings through the depression because he's the only page with a stable job.

And his family recalls that because he's got this busted leg, he used to be a very active guy and he can't be physically active after his leg gets fucked up.

And he compensates by becoming a really good storyteller.

He's just spellbinding.

He's so good that he publishes a volume of like tales from his childhood as a book,

which I'm going to guess are like partly true given his descendants, but he's got the gift of gab and he's going to like pass pass this on to his kids and it's going to become a thing that the men in the in the page family are known for as being like really smooth talkers, right?

Really good at telling stories.

Like his father, he grows up to be an extreme partisan Republican.

In the book Bad Boy, a biography of Lee Atwater, John Brady writes, the Pages were Republicans in an era when there was no Republican Party in South Carolina.

In 1932, when the framed portrait of FDR replaced the picture of Herbert Hoover in the classrooms of Spartanburg, there was enthusiastic applause from all but the Page children who sat sat on their hands.

Question.

The worms turned.

Why is the book called Bad Boy?

Because that's his favorite song, Sophie.

We'll be getting to Lee Atwater in a little bit and his love of R and B.

Don't you worry.

Oh, boy.

This is the beginning of the little switcheroo.

Yes.

Not like a real switcheroo, but like shifting,

shifting politics, I guess.

Right.

Right.

And you're seeing also shifting racial politics.

Like this is around the time when black voters stop voting for Republicans and start voting for Democrats.

And you can kind of see the party has, this is now, the party has gone from like the party of Lincoln, violently opposed to slavery and supporting at least more equality than the other party, when they're like, FDR, that fucking communist, right?

Like things have changed.

The pages make sure that all of their children grow up voracious readers.

And they were,

we'd call them helicopter parents today, right?

They're obsessively concerned with their kids, even their daughters' educations.

They're studying their homework.

They're like quizzing them and stuff.

They're unusually involved in their education for parents of this period of time.

And most of Toddi's elders live to their 90s.

So she raises her kids with the expectation that you guys are going to live long lives, right?

It's traditional for her relatives to make it into their 90s.

That is a little bit of foreshadowing.

Damn.

All these fucking guys just live forever, I swear to God.

Garrison, I'm so happy about where this story ends.

Not where it middles, but where it ends

for that reason.

So Lee's father is Hart.

We talked about his mom, which is the Page family.

His father, obviously, is where he gets the Atwater name.

His dad's name is Harvey Atwater.

And like the Pages, the Atwaters are one of those families who can trace their lineage back to the birth of the country, and in fact, beyond.

David Atwater was the first member of the family to flee England for the New World, and he landed in New Haven, Connecticut in 1637.

He and his wife had 10 children, and the Atwater family historian, because they have one of those, wrote that they and quote, their children and grandchildren endured as many hardships, felled as many trees, fought as many Indians, burned as many witches, and tossed over as much tea, and were as good all-round pilgrim fathers and mothers as if Grandfather David had arrived in the Mayflower in 1620.

Good all-around.

Great.

What an incredible sentence.

So he's, they're one of those families.

They're one of those families.

Like, right.

Capital T, those.

Yeah, those families.

And it's very funny.

They're the kind of family that, because again, his David Atwater arrives in 1637.

The Mayflower arrives in 1620.

And the family historian is like, well, I have to come up with an excuse for why they're as good, basically, as the people who arrived in 1620, right?

Because that's a big difference to us.

Like, the fact that we didn't quite make it onto the Mayflower is something that our family takes shit for.

Oh, you guys got here 17 years later, huh?

They're still trying to make up for it.

Yeah.

This has been a stain on our family history for centuries.

Why wasn't he born 17 years earlier?

God damn it, David.

We really did not want the second generation pilgrim hat.

No, no, it's not even second, but like, now David was first.

Late generation.

And to be fair, David does do something to kind of make up for not making it onto the Mayflower, which is that he helps to found Yale.

So again,

the middle of the middle class, the Atwaters.

Now, his great-grandson, Russell, is wounded during the Revolutionary War and years later this is one of the weirdest stories related to his family so Russell is a revolutionary war veteran and then years later when Napoleon Bonaparte goes into exile Napoleon's like I think I can escape from this island and I might make it to the new world and for whatever reason he contracts with Russell to buy land in New York State as a potential place for Napoleon Bonaparte to retire if he escapes which That would have been so cool.

What a wild thing that would be if they're just like, yeah, and that's Napoleon's house outside of Schenectady.

God, that would be fun.

I don't know if it was Schenectady where he bought the, it was somewhere in New York State.

But yeah, Napoleon was thinking about retiring to New York, like Lee Pace.

Really, two of history's giants?

Two of history's giants.

Only one of them in the literal sense.

So again, we're not talking about super rich old money, but we are talking about both families are about as close as the U.S.

gets to aristocracy, right?

They have proud histories and they've got connections that go back generations to local politics and government in the Carolinas.

And this is the legacy that Leroy Atwater, our Lee Atwater, was born to inherit when he came into the world on February 27th, 1951 in Atlanta, Georgia.

That's how you guys say it, right?

Yes, that is.

That's the official pronunciation.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Just making sure so the Reddit doesn't come after me again.

So at the time of his birth, his mom.

It's Atlanta.

atlanta like like like the at symbol like that's how he's those t's yeah

uh so at the time of his birth his mother was a teacher and his father harvey was an insurance adjuster uh lee was born yes i hardly know her um

garrison

we should have done that for at water garrison what's wrong i thought about it i don't i'm off my game today it's okay none of this is going as planned we had a little mix-up before recording um so lee is born like three weeks premature and as a result, he's got like nervous twitches.

He spasms constantly, right?

As like a little kid.

He like shakes and his legs are constantly twitching.

And his parents take him to the doctor.

And the doctor, I don't know if this is what's actually wrong, because we're talking the 50s, but the doctor, probably while smoking a cigarette and still drunk from the night before, is like, oh yeah, his nervous system's not finished cooking.

Just let him finish.

He'll be fine.

I don't know that that's what happened.

But he doesn't stop.

Like, he always kind of has some of these like nervous system issues, right?

Uh, they're like, they'll plague him all of his life.

And as a result, Toddi is like his 24-7 parent.

Like, she's unable to get like a sitter because he cries anytime she leaves.

He needs like constant 24-hour attention.

He barely sleeps.

He's a sickly child, right?

For the first couple years of his life.

So he is, he's, he's attached to his mom.

And she is, by all accounts, an extremely dedicated mother.

He has trouble sleeping.

He can't stand being alone.

One of the stories I've read about him as a baby is that he develops a habit of banging his head on his crib to rock himself to sleep.

And he does it so often that he gets like a bald spot callus on the back of his head.

So that's terrible.

That's it's fucked up.

He's this kid.

This kid's childhood is a nightmare, actually.

It's about to get a lot worse.

He has one of the worst childhoods I've ever heard of in one of these bastards.

For a kid who's got both of his parents and has like a comfortable standard of living.

It's rough.

Now, Toddy is an attentive and devotive mother.

His dad is kind of a 50s dad.

He's mainly working.

He's not super emotionally available, but there's nothing, I don't get any sort of allegations that he was like abusive or anything like that either.

So you could do worse for a 50s dad than his father.

Now, Lee is, again, he's kind of a late bloomer, but once he starts going, once he starts growing up,

he's kind of like a fucking rocket ship.

John Brady, his biographer, writes, Lee walked at one year, but then he ran.

He talked early and often.

By two, onlookers thought he could read, but he had memorized books his mother read to him on her lap.

At age two and a half, he could recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the Charleston commencement program in nursery school.

Proud Toddy made him say it for company.

Not great.

Not great.

That's always a bad start when they start acting like this.

And it's he, the fact that from he gets praise as a little kid for tricking adults into thinking he can read is a lifelong pattern with Lee, right?

And he seems to be come up with the understanding that like, all that matters is perception.

If If people think I can do something, it doesn't matter if I've done it or not.

What matters is I've tricked them into thinking I've done it, right?

Like

that's going to be the core of how this guy relates to other people for his entire life.

That like lying and misleading someone into thinking that you did something is as good as doing the thing.

Sounds like he's born for politics.

Sounds like he is born for politics.

No one has ever been more born for politics than Lee Atwater.

It's remarkable.

Wow.

Now,

as I kind of insinuated here, his greatest asset asset is his memory and his mother's attentiveness.

She takes him to museums and to historic sites constantly, and he files away everything she and the different museum docents tell him, which gives his first teachers the impression that he's super well-read for a little boy.

By the time he started preschool, he had memorized all the presidents, and he's kind of

obscuring the fact that he can't read and he doesn't learn how to read or write for, you know, until later than would otherwise have been normal because he's kind of able to trick them.

His handwriting is illegible.

It never really gets better throughout his life.

Some of this is a result of the nerve.

He can't hold a pen or a pencil properly.

He's described as always holding writing implements like chalk because he's got like these weird nerve issues.

Yeah, he has like the big like vice grip thing.

Right, right, right.

Yeah.

Which obviously that's not his fault, but that's, you know, a factor in how he comes up the way he does.

I wonder if that caused him to like overcompensate by working on his memory because he had these like fine motor issues, because he had issues with reading.

It basically trained his brain that the best way for him to process and hold information is just through sheer memorization.

I think not this like actual like act of understanding.

Yeah, and I think that is what happens.

And it's a major factor in why he's good at the things he's doing because he's very fast on his feet.

He's very mentally fast on his feet, right?

But he's not a guy who really thinks through the consequences of his actions or cares all that much.

His bad coordination and spasms are joined by a tendency to shake his legs and work his mouth constantly.

And today, this kid would be diagnosed with ADHD so fucking quickly, right?

Sure.

But we had not invented that yet.

And so her mom was just told, he's got too much energy.

You got to tire him out.

You know, make him run around the yard a bunch.

It being the 50s, his parents saw no issue in letting him work that energy out by wandering around town or in the woods on his own.

As a three-year-old, he became obsessed with Native American mythology and began dressing as a stereotypical Indian chief on a daily basis, carrying a real tomahawk wherever he went, because again, it was the 50s and that was fine.

Little three-year-old, look at him.

He's got a little axe.

Isn't that cute?

He's just swinging it around.

Blade, razor sharp.

You could shave with it.

On November 18th, 1953, Lee's little brother, Joe, was born.

Later family recollections would remember that Lee was frustrated by the fact that his parents now had less attention to shower on him.

And he acted out.

He's the oldest.

He's the oldest, yes.

Eldest child.

The oldest child.

Not the eldest boy.

The eldest boy.

And he acted out.

Thank you, Sophie.

Well, no, I think he's the oldest child.

Yeah, their daughter is the youngest.

Yeah, so he's the oldest.

That went right over your head.

It's fine.

It's fine.

It's fine.

Okay.

He acted out, tearing down curtains and causing other messes to get her attention, which Toddy handled by convincing Lee to play with his younger brother.

In time, he became as devoted to Joe as his mom had been to him.

And he told his parents proudly, I've got me a playmate for the rest of my life.

That is again foreshadowing.

Oh, so sweet.

Yeah, sweet.

The Edwaters moved around a lot during Lee's early childhood.

His father had studied to become a lawyer, but quit to work as an insurance adjuster, and his change in ambitions was followed by moving first from Georgia to Charleston, and then from Charleston, finally to Aiken, South Carolina.

Now, the year after they moved to South Carolina, their senator, Strom Thurmond, would become famous for launching the longest continuous Philadelphia.

This fucking guy.

Oh, Strom's a big part of the story, Garrison.

We're not ready for how involved in all this Strom fucking Thurmond is.

That's so funny.

Which is like, if you don't know anything, if someone's like, hey, who do you think Strom Thurmond was?

If they just tell you he was a sinner, you'd be like, well, I bet he was a racist one.

He's the perfect name for who he is.

That's the racist guy name.

Like, that's ontological or determination, whatever the fuck.

What is it?

Nominative determinism, right?

Yeah, that's it.

That's it.

His name made him a racist.

That's what I'm blaming on it not his inherent characteristics um so he became famous for launching the longest continuous filibuster in the history of the united states from 8 54 p.m at that point yeah until our hero corey booker did corey beat it one sec yeah i gotta check this out

this is in the news this year we talked about this yeah

So

up until Corey Booker, Strom Thurman was the longest continuous filibuster in the history of the United States, 24 hours and 18 minutes.

Strom held forth a nonstop tirade against what he saw as the most evil piece of legislation in his lifetime, the Civil Rights Act.

That is what he is trying to stop.

Thurmond said during his filibuster, I'm convinced that this is bad proposed legislation, which never should have been introduced, which never should have been approved by the Senate.

I urge every member of this body to consider this bill most carefully.

I hope the Senate will see fit to kill it.

Now, that's the most polite thing Strom Thurmond's going to say about civil rights in this period of time.

Thurmond had previously been governor of South Carolina and had run as a presidential candidate for the Dixiecrats, which was, you know, the Southern Democrats.

We'll talk about what the Dixiecrats are in a second, in 1948.

And when he wasn't up before Congress, his language about these matters was often a lot less polite.

An article in WNYC Studios, The Takeaway, summarizes, quote, almost a decade before Thurmond's filibuster, Southern state separatist leaders had revolted in opposition to President Harry Truman's civil rights platform in 1948.

Democrats dubbed themselves Dixiecrats and spoke about taking back the country that was being turned into an unrecognizable dictatorship.

And here's Thurmond.

The Civil Rights Act simply means it's another means, that it's another effort on the part of this president to dominate the country by force and to put into effect these uncalled for and the damnable proposals he has recommended under the guise of so-called civil rights.

And I tell you, the American people, from one side to the other, had better wake up and oppose such a program.

And if they don't, the next thing will be a totalitarian state in these United States.

There's not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the inward race into our theaters, our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches, Thurman said.

And he is a

hard R every time.

Yeah, we should, oh boy, maybe the butt, we should have sent out the B-49s

to

carpet bombing.

This is like one of the last gasps of the Southern Democrats

before like the, you know, the time.

The Social Democrats, like the progressive wing, which gained a lot of success under FDR, was able to exert more influence over the whole party.

And then the Southern Democrats kind of like fizzled throughout the 50s then.

Well, and they switched over.

Thurmond is going to become a Republican, right?

A lot of these Southern Democrats become Republicans.

That's actually part of the story that we're going to be telling this week.

So Strom Thurmond is their senator when they move to Aiken, South Carolina.

And I bring that up not just because he's the senator in their state, because Lee might not have known much about this.

They move in down, they're like three doors down from Strom Thurmond.

He's their next door neighbor, right?

Okay, Lee Atwater meets him for the first time

on Halloween, 1956, the year before that filibuster.

Fucking screenwriters on the nose.

Chill out, guys.

I know, I know.

It's amazing.

He later recalled he came out and gave me a Snickers candy bar.

That was the best thing I got that year.

So I liked Senator Thurmond, but I didn't know anything about politics.

It's fucking bad.

Give out the full-size candy bars.

Look,

he's a racist, but full-size candy bars for Halloween.

Who's to say if he's he's bad?

Snickers satisfies.

We are.

Wow.

We are.

Speaking of things that satisfy,

satisfying things.

Yeah, that's right.

Good work.

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We're back.

And yeah, it's a, if you want to just look up Strom Thurmond, you can find a lot of quotes of him using a lot of slurs.

This is the kind,

as a kid, my parents were both into the whole like, well, he, you know, he was, it was, it was more about states' rights for him.

He wasn't like, it was about racism for him.

And that's what Thurmond said when it became unpopular to be racist later.

Is that like, well, I was never racist.

It was

no hard r every time every time like

uh also when he was in his 20s uh he impregnates a 15 year old house servant and has an interracial kid so he is constantly as he's preaching racism preaching against his own illegitimate child that he raped a child to have Strom Thermon.

That's really bad.

Fun guy.

Well, maybe we'll cover it one of these days.

Really glad he's dead.

Yeah, he lived way too fucking long.

This motherfucker lived forever.

A few days ago, like James Dobson died at 90 something.

It's like,

are we going to celebrate this?

No, not really.

Kissinger, they're all fucking immortal.

Yeah, I'm glad he's dead.

They got the damage.

Everything he wanted to do.

Dobson's one of the most successful political actors of the past 50 years.

He won.

I almost feel bad

sharing memes.

It's not good.

And that's what I'll tell you about this.

Lee Atwater's tactics win.

He doesn't personally get to win.

So there's a little bit of satisfaction in these episodes from that.

A little solace, a quantum of solace to steal from the James Bond books.

So obviously, being down the street from Strom Thurmond doesn't make you a bastard, but Lee's going to go on to have a strong relationship with him throughout his life.

And while at this point his parents are Republicans and Thurmond was a Democrat, Strom is going to change his political affiliation in the not-too-distant future as it becomes clear that the Republican Party is now the party of segregation.

Just a few weeks before that fateful Halloween happened where he gets the full-size Snickers bar, something else would happen that was a lot less pleasant and would influence young Lee's future life even more than Strom Thurmond.

This is maybe the definitive moment of his life.

On the afternoon of October 5th, Toddi decides to cook a batch of donuts.

Her husband's coming home from work, but he's like late to dinner and she's trying to pass the time.

So she's like, why don't we make a batch of doughnuts?

You know, Lee is in watching TV.

Brother Joe is kind of toddling around.

He's like three.

She's struggling with a migraine.

So she's like, she's not paying as much attention as she'd normally pay to the task.

And this becomes a problem because cooking donuts, at least at that point, the only real way to do it is you're putting a deep fat fryer on top of the stove and you're filling it with oil.

So you've got this huge thing filled with oil.

Now again, Lee, who's six, is watching TV and three-year-old Joe toddles into the kitchen and gets up on top of a trash can and starts like fiddling with the fryer and she tells him to get down and he trips and the trash can falls and he pulls the fryer on top of himself.

And in an instant, this three-year-old boy is coated head to toe in boiling oil.

Now, this is an instantly fatal injury in that the instant it happens, he's dead.

But he doesn't die instantly.

It's just, there's no treating this.

Today, you couldn't fix this.

He has immediately 90 degree, like 30 degree burns over 90% of his body.

This could not be fixed today.

This is simply an unsurvivable accident.

And Lee runs into the room to see the skin melting off of his baby brother, who is screeching.

His mom is screaming.

Their dad comes home right after this, starts panicking and like throwing rice on the ground at the kid.

Just, I don't think he knows what to do.

Everybody's like, this is, I can't imagine a more traumatic thing, right?

Than watching your little brother melt to death.

They get him to the hospital.

He dies several hours later.

The entire family, I mean, I should, it's like saying the family is traumatized.

It's like, that's not even necessary.

Of course they are.

No matter like what your family is, like, this is going to be a tragic event.

Like, this is that's

unfortunately bad.

Yeah.

And the people who knew Lee well would say that he was, this changes him forever.

And I think that's going to fuck up a sister.

My opinion is that I think part of why he is the way he is is that from this point on, he's like, the world's chaos.

It doesn't matter what I do.

It's like, it's just all about personal like gratification.

Like, fuck it.

Fuck the world.

Right.

That's just my interpretation.

Jane Mayer, the journalist writing for The New Yorker, knew Lee when he was an adult and would write years later, quote, he said that he heard the sounds of his brother's screams every day of his life.

And I have no reason to doubt that.

Lee Atwater lies about a lot.

I have no reason to doubt that.

That's really you probably hear that forever.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's really bad.

Just the worst thing I can conceive of, pretty much.

No, that's kind of, yeah.

Yes.

Jesus.

So this is going to be a formative experience for young Lee.

And again, I think this jerks him out of what you might call normal life, normal society.

Yeah, this is going to make anyone, no matter who you are, just a more broken person.

Yeah, I think it gives him a sense of separation from the rest of humanity, right?

Like, he's going to see himself as subject to different rules and as a different kind.

And I think this is part of it.

I think this just almost plucks him out of...

the regular world.

It's like so disorienting and dissociating, this horror of this.

Anyway, that's my opinion.

We'll see what you think.

The next year, Lee starts first grade and he gravitates towards the performing arts.

In 1961, his father is promoted and they move one last time.

They'd stayed in the house for a few years because his dad had been like, if we move, it's just hiding from what happened.

We should face it.

His mom really wanted to get out of the house where she wants her baby spoiled to death.

Yeah, yeah.

When they move, though, Lee begs his parents never to make him change schools again, and they don't.

He later in life would express that moving around around where they did and ending up ultimately in Colombia gave him a good ground level view of like the critical political points in their state, which would be crucial in his political future.

So now he's no longer like next door neighbors with Thurman.

No, but the family have become friends and they have a connection that will last the rest of their lives, right?

Like his parents know how to contact Strom like because they were neighbors.

In more ways than one, the damage is already done.

The damage is already done.

You have to imagine.

I mean, Strom Thurmond probably like reached out and brought up a casserole after their sun boiled to death or something.

You said this.

You said this was a few weeks before the, before the Snickers.

Yeah, yeah.

So I guess he like meets Thurman like a few weeks later.

Honestly, that might have been why Thurman gave them, they may have known it.

I mean, because the family had moved in a while, but that may have been why he got a full-size candy bar.

Thurman's like, fuck, the least I could do is give this kid a lot of candy.

So Lee's classmates and teachers recall him as a bad student.

His friend David Yon noted that he was, quote, unable to stay focused, always switching channels.

And John Brady writes in his biography, Lee learned early how to have his way with other kids, not physically, but through other means of manipulation and control that left him clearly in charge of relationships.

Lee became a prankster, sending birthday invitations to all of the girls in class from David Yon, who was too shy to throw a party, even if it was his birthday.

It wasn't.

So like, okay.

There's a lot of fun moments in this kid is.

God forbid a kid have a little fun.

God forbid a child enjoy himself.

Although I can see how these tactics might become useful in politics later down the line.

Right.

And the point that Brady is making is like he can't have like an equal relationship with you.

Like that's kind of why he's always got to be pulling pranks is there has to be he has to know something you don't.

He has to have some degree of like power, right?

That seems to be almost compulsive for him.

Now that said, he's a lot of fun to be around.

He has a lot of friends and they recall him.

He's always fucking around.

His pranks can be pretty mean sometimes, but he's always a lot of fun.

And depending depending on the source,

he's either described as manipulative or a leader.

And I don't think those two things are exclusive.

No.

No, no, no, no.

He's just always in charge, you know?

I can't believe this cult leader was also manipulative.

Right.

His friend and future South Carolina governor Carol Campbell recalled him being good at organizing people.

He would get people to go to all-star pro wrestling in the sixth grade.

And by the way, Atwater is a huge wrestling fan.

You know how like in 2016 that Rasha articles came out being like wrestling is how you should understand Donald Trump.

Trump thinks about politics in a wrestling way.

The first guy to explicitly say U.S.

politics works the way wrestling does and explain it, is Lee Atwater.

In like the 70s, he's talking about like wrestling is really the way to understand like Kayfabe and shit is the way to understand how politics works.

Without him, Trump never would have had that razor palmed to fake the assassination attempt.

That's right, that's right.

He wouldn't have been able to.

Garrison, don't feed the blue and ons.

God damn it.

I'm writing about the assassination conspiracy theorist right now, so I couldn't help it.

Yeah, this is just going to make it worse.

An AR-15 would have blown his head off if it struck his ear.

That's right.

Damn it.

That's right.

In fifth grade, he got a job selling eggs door to door.

Now, as would be the case his entire life, he proved to be an incredible salesman, and he gets promoted rapidly to manager.

His mother is frustrated by the fact that he loves selling stuff, but he'll like lose the money he makes.

He is not interested in having money.

It's more the process.

It's the process that satisfies him.

Yes.

It's like you're like outsmarting someone.

Like you're able to like...

Yeah.

Yeah.

He likes convincing people to buy things.

You know, he doesn't so much care about money.

You're winning someone over and that is, that can be like an exhilarating thing to do.

Yes.

And even as an adult, he makes good money, but he's never greedy in the financial sense.

He's greedy in the power sense, right?

He's greedy in the influence sense.

That's what motivates him more than can I make you do this thing?

Yeah.

Right.

What will it take for me to get this result?

Now, his teachers, as you might expect, have profoundly mixed opinions about him.

He is obviously very intelligent, and they will all say, in terms of what he would say during class, he's really smart.

He participates in classroom discussions.

He's great at those.

He just won't do any work.

Period.

So his grades are always shit, even though he's clearly like the smartest kid in most of his classes.

One of his English teachers described, she signed his yearbook

by calling him my first nightmare every morning with an exclamation point.

That's fun.

That's fun.

That's fun.

So in eighth grade, when the class takes a trip to Washington, D.C., his teacher, the teacher who's like their chaperone, is shocked at how being around the nation's political nexus seems to snap him out of this

like thing where he can't pay attention or focus, right?

Like he's instantly, she said, he asked better questions than anyone else in the class.

He was totally focused the whole time.

He was excited.

No, no, no.

They get to take a picture with his old family friend, Strom Thurmond, and he's super psyched, you know?

Yeah, it's this, it's this, you can see the fucking shadow of Darth Vader behind the Anakin moment thing, right?

Like, oh, no.

Whenever a kid gets too excited in the Capitol, again, you got, you got to fix that early.

Look, we can talk about, you know, the ethics of giving kids drugs for like ADHD, but if you get a kid who's into politics, like, it's, it's just time you should prescribe them heroin, right?

Something to slow them down, you know?

Got to knock them out of the running somehow.

No.

so Sophie, it's fine for you.

If as long as it's pure, you know, as long as it's uncut, it's safe.

No comment.

No comment.

Outside of politics, Lee's other primary interest is music, specifically the music of James Brown.

He loves R and he loves black music, right?

Like he loves R B.

He listens to James Brown for the first time in his dad's car, and he's just, that's it for him.

He has found his true love in life.

And this is the thing he is passionate about, right?

The thing, the actual thing he's deeply passionate about, right?

He's passionate about winning in politics.

His friends will always say he could have been a Republican or a Democrat.

Republican was just easier.

Like he's not passionate about conservatism.

He likes the process and he loves fucking blues and rock and roll, right?

And yeah, he also, he prefers most of the artists he likes and he will befriend and play with because he's in a band most of his life.

He'll play with a number of like famous blues and R ⁇ B, like artists.

He also develops a love for Elvis Presley.

And from the time he's a little kid, one of his go-to entertaining tricks is to like shake his hips and ass like the king or do a slide like James Brown would do.

Like he gets really good at mimicking all of these movements from his favorite musicians.

And he'll do them as like party tricks.

Yeah, it's putting in inputs to get a certain output, which is the same thing with selling, same thing with your class clown manipulative hijinks.

Exactly right.

And his parents, you know, this being a kind of blue-bloody family, they try to get him interested in a respectable instrument, the piano, but they give up on that pretty quickly.

And by the time he's an adolescent forward, his favorite hobby is playing the guitar.

Basically, they make him a deal where, like, yeah, if you can, if you'll take piano classes for three years, we'll buy you a guitar.

So he takes piano classes for exactly three years and then never plays piano again.

Like as soon as he gets a guitar, that's it for him.

On one occasion, his friends told a story about like they had a sleepover with him and he bets them 50 cents each that he can play the same five notes repeatedly longer than they can stand to listen.

And at around 3 a.m., they give up and pay him, right?

Like his fingers are bleeding, but he just will not stop until they like he, he loves making wagers.

And it's not about the money.

It's about the winning, you know?

That's the other thing to watch out for.

If any kid really likes making bets and wagers, you gotta stop that quick.

Yes.

Now, I was that kind of kid in high school, and we did get one of our friends to try to drink an entire gallon of milk, and he vomited everywhere.

It was very funny.

Lee's health issues persist as he becomes a teenager.

He's never good at sports.

To get girls interested in him, he starts a band and he starts smoking cigarettes at the ripe old age of 12.

He is a highly heavy smoker from age 12 on.

It's so funny.

It was easy to get cigarettes back then.

A 12-year-old in a suit smoking a cigarette.

Hell yeah.

Yeah, just chain smoking, lighting one with the other.

Yeah, waking up with his hand shaking if he can't immediately burn a couple of camels before he gets out of bed.

Do you know what his cigarette was?

No, actually, I don't.

I'm going to guess Paul Maul.

Biographers need to ⁇ we need to get better at it.

Making sure

we know which cigarette a person smokes.

I think it tells you a lot about a person.

Vonnegut was a Paul Maul man, you know?

Okay.

And obviously all the hip kids today smoke American spirits.

But what it matters what like brand you're smoking, right?

Like, you know.

the color, yeah, yeah.

Some people, some people like that green bullshit.

I'm more into my uh, into the grays, you know.

Okay, oh, you're on the cigarette.

I don't smoke cigarettes, I just always keep a pack of cigarettes on me in my jacket.

There you go.

It's always useful.

You never know who's going to need a cigarette.

Do you need a cigarette?

If so, why not take it while listening to ads?

Jesus Christ.

We're back.

I hope you've all had a delicious cigarette, a delightful cigarette.

Apologies to anyone who just quit smoking and is finding themselves triggered.

I don't have an issue with cigarettes.

I just like to tempt people into smoking them.

It's good for you.

Try it.

Garrison, are you still smoking?

Are you having enough cigarettes in your diet?

I smoke aesthetically to complete an outfit.

Of course,

I'm not like a smoker price, Garrett.

What?

Don't

cigarettes.

Don't smoke cigarettes.

Thank you.

I mean, it's again, it's only for the outfit, Sophie.

If someone shoots at you, smoke a cigarette.

That's what they're for.

They're great.

They haven't shot at me in a while.

That's the thing.

I know.

Then you can't get the cigarettes.

You got to go find someone to shoot at you so you can get a smoke at.

Go to a waffle house.

You'll get shot at events.

I'll stand outside the Manhattan Hilton.

Yeah, there you go.

So his peers recall him being very awkward around women and falling back on his first talent, lying to try and convince them that he knew what sex was and that he was totally dating girls, right?

Oh, yeah, this is really believing.

He's just bullshitting about it at first.

But he does, he figures it out at a pretty young age.

He has his first serious girlfriend in ninth grade.

John Brady writes, quote, at school dances, he would get on stage and dance around, playing air guitar, mugging with his blues face, upstaging acts, reading dance contests in the area right in front of the stage.

Afterward, he would apologize to Debbie, his girlfriend, for behavior that must have struck her as being compulsive.

I know I acted badly, he would say on the phone the next day.

I hope you'll still go out with me.

And she did for a while, but she starts being like, I don't know, this is a little much for me.

And Leah is eventually like, what's wrong here?

And she explains, like, you know, girls like it when a guy is like honest and open and

she could tell that they really like her.

And I can't tell what you think.

Like, you're just such a liar.

Like, I can't tell if you like me or what you're doing here.

She tells him, I'm just tired of being the second half of the show.

I feel like I've got to be part of a stunt routine.

Um, I think that tells you a lot about the kind of kid he is.

He can't honestly connect with people very easily.

They've got to be a part of the show for him.

That's kind of the only way he's able to have a relationship with someone.

Yeah.

Almost by turning it into a performance.

And yeah, he's like, I can oddly relate to that in some ways.

And it's, it's, yeah, no, it's, I

kind of understand that that disconnection.

I relate to a lot about him because he is a class clown and so was I and so are like a lot of people who wind up in entertainment.

And we all have that like piece of us that I think other people aren't missing that makes that makes you want to perform.

Like, I think there's fundamentally a difference between people who become performers and people who don't.

And Lee Atwater is a performer, right?

And the important thing is that they stay in wrestling or entertainment.

Whenever they switch over to politics, that's where it gets bad.

It's awful.

It's the worst.

Every time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's, and Lee's that kind of figure, right?

Where he he would probably have preferred to be a professional musician.

He might have been able to make it happen.

He's pretty good.

And he, like, is in a band most of his life.

He actually is nominated for a Grammy.

What the fuck?

Like, he's okay.

And I think it's one of those things where he could have been really good if he'd had the courage to commit, but it's just too much of a long shot for him.

And politics, there's no risk of failure, he can tell, right?

Like, because he's just got the brain for it.

And that sucks.

I'm getting ahead of myself here.

So maybe gets together.

I just want to show Garrison a photo of Le Atwater with Chase Crowd.

Oh, I got to.

Because

I thoroughly enjoyed it because he looks like

Topher Grace from

in this photo.

He looks like Topher Grace when he was on that 70s show.

He does look a lot like Topher Grace.

Okay.

Look at this Dork.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What a meeting.

You know what?

The hairs.

I want James Urbaniak to play him in a movie.

James Urbaniak could definitely play Lee.

I'm calling him.

Do you have to do a southern accent?

Oh, but you'll hear Lee in a little bit here.

He can do it.

He could do it.

Oh, yeah.

That would be good casting.

So,

yeah,

it's interesting to me that Debbie is the first person to realize what Lee Atwater is and call him out while they're in like ninth grade, because this is going to be a devastatingly accurate description of the man until the last chapter of his life.

And Debbie summarized her opinion on him this way.

There were sides of Lee that I certainly adored, but the opportunist in him, the person seeking popularity in a stage, would almost always overrule the nice guy, the more genuine part of him.

I don't think he could stop it.

Right?

Yeah.

And that's that's what you get from people who knew him and were appropriately critical of him, but cared about him, where there's almost this, I don't know how much, I feel like he was partly out of control of himself.

Not that that like mitigates his culpability and the evil he does, but like he almost can't stop himself from

being

from being a false, like he can't be the real version of himself.

He has to play a role, right?

Like, and maybe that's some protective thing.

Maybe it's, I don't know fully what's going on, but this is something you get expressed that like it's he's almost incapable of being himself.

He has to put on an act.

In interviews about his own early life, Lee would claim to be a, have been a voracious reader as a kid, going through two or three books a week while in grade school.

And he always makes this claim in the context of being explaining why his grades were shitty, right?

Because he has to like, he always acknowledges I did terribly in school.

But I was really like, I was self-educated, right?

He was an autodidact.

And so like, he would always say the only reason he got bad grades is he thought getting good grades was uncool and that refusing to do well in class when you're smart enough to do well in class is cool.

He would say, quote, the only thing that would keep me from reading a book was if it was assigned reading.

And so it's interesting to me, that's very important to him.

The fact that, you know, he got bad grades because he chose to, but he was really smart.

His mother later recalled he decided that since he wasn't the smartest in the room, he would be the dumbest.

He had to be different.

And I don't think she's fully accurate there.

And I don't think Lee is being fully honest here.

I think think Lee is, he's definitely smart.

He was definitely capable of doing better in school than he did.

He chose to fuck up in school, but I also think he's deeply insecure because of these issues he has reading as a kid.

He's never as well read or educated as he wants to be.

And as his charisma and his gift of gab lets him mimic being, right?

He's able to pretend to have the depth of education that he doesn't have.

And he doesn't, I don't think he actually read two or three books a week during this period of time.

Like, that's what he claims, but he's gonna make this claim again years later when he's starting to make a name for himself as a Republican Party campaign strategist.

And I wanna quote from an article for the New York Times by Maureen Dowd writing about this period of time.

And this is later in life, but I think it's relevant to the claim he makes while he's in grade school.

Quote, as a Reagan aide, he bragged that he read three books a week, everything from Dostoevsky to Alvin Toffler, and then hired an aide named James Pinkerton to read the books and give him summaries while he jogged on the treadmill at the White House gym.

It was a good joke about all the Ivy League reporters who wrote about his prodigious reading habits and the lofty quotes also impressed young women.

He really did read the Great Gatsby, Pinkerton recalls fondly.

So that's good.

I think he's doing that, a version of that in high school, he's basically having chat GPTs summarize books for you.

That's what he'd be doing.

And he gets this is what he'd be doing now.

Yeah.

And he memorizes a couple of quotes so that he can drop a quote from the book and seem like he knows what he's talking about.

This is the same thing he was doing as a kid, right?

Like as like as like a little kid and like to like impress adults.

Yeah.

It's this is like even connected to his like urge to like perform.

It's like the deception, the performance is all that matters.

That overrides any like actual like substance

behind this.

Because no one can actually truly like understand the substance unless you let them in.

And if you're always putting on this character, then no one's going to get close enough to like understand that.

Right, right.

And I think it also he is he could do better in school than he does, but not as much better as, again, like his mom said, he wouldn't have been the best.

He wasn't that smart.

And so he's, he has to kind of

he both talking about how purposefully he fucked up school and about how much he read and how smart he really was.

Those are both like coping mechanisms to protect his ego to an extent.

His grades are bad enough that in 10th grade, his parents send him away to a military school.

He goes to Fork Union Military School starting in the fall of 1966.

And this is the kind of split, like all the kids there are kids who are misbehaving and not doing well in class.

And you have to think about this academy as one big sizzling pot of ADHD, right?

Every kid there could like be swallowing Riddlin by the fucking pound.

John Brady talks to several of his classmates, one of whom later claimed he was a manipulator.

He could get you to agree to anything.

And this is a sentiment basically everyone who knew him during this period of time would agree with.

One of his hobbies is collecting record albums.

And early on at Fork Union, he started convincing his other classmates.

There was this like record club that if you got someone else to join, they'd send you a free album.

And so he'd do this to get a bunch of free albums.

Yeah.

And then he bribed a friend.

He gave him a bunch of albums if he would jump out of their window two floors up.

If he'd compete with him and jumping out of their window two floors up and then sneaking back in without being caught.

And so Lee does it first.

He jumps out and he sneaks back in and he's fine.

And then when his roommate jumps out, Lee blocks the door to their room with a locker to ensure that his friend gets caught and loses the bet.

Like,

that's the kind of shit he's pulling.

He's such a little psycho.

He starts drinking.

I mean, it's kind of funny, but like, it's objectively shitty.

Yes.

He starts drinking at age 15 when he finds a store that doesn't check IDs and sells Pap's blue ribbon.

That is his child beer.

In his biography of Lee, John Brady

ahead of his times.

He grew a little pencil mustache, too.

John Brady describes the parties he went to with his bunk mates in incredible terms.

In the car, he changed back into civvies and chugged beers in long extended gulps like a sword swallower.

He could consume a six-pack in 10 miles, tossing cans out the car window, then arriving at a rock or soul dance, thoroughly blitzed.

On the dance floor, he did James Brown splits and pirouettes.

He picked up girls who were impressed at first by his wildness and wit, but who slowly froze on the unbearable ride home.

Jesus.

Fun kid.

I like that they're measuring drinking by the mile.

By the mile?

That's how you know you're really doing some underage drinking.

A six snack every 10 miles.

It's really

just hurling the empty beers out the window.

Fuck it.

Who's going to stop us?

Not a seat belt in sight.

The cops are just as drunk as you.

It was a, we used to be a proper country garrison.

Alas.

His grades.

Yeah, alas, until people like this came around.

Until people like this came around and ruined it.

That's right.

His grades improve a little at Fork Union.

And so in his second semester there, he starts begging his parents.

He has this like very

methodical plan to convince his parents to let him go back to high school.

He wants to go to JC Flora High, which is where several of his friends had gone, and is like a college campus in size and organization, more than like a traditional high school.

Yeah, it's a public school and it's a big one.

It sounds kind of like where I, my high school, where it's like a college-size campus.

His parents agree, and yeah, he's able to go back to public school.

And as soon as he is, Lee gets back to his old tricks.

Per Jane Mayer's article in The New Yorker, the first presidential campaign that Natwater managed was a bid to get a friend of his elected as student body president against the friend's wishes.

He created a list of false accomplishments and devised a fake rating system that ranked his friend first.

The poll was called Big At's Comedy Ratings, and it was distributed as a flyer listing the funniest boys and girls in school.

To continue with Mayer's quote, he plastered the school with posters declaring his friend's platform of false promises of free beer on tap in the cafeteria, free dates, free girls.

The campaign took a darker turn when Atwater's sidekick stomped on the bare feet of a hippie-like student until his feet bled profusely.

Afterward, the group threatened to do the same to younger students unless they voted for Atwater's candidate.

Atwater recalls thinking that he privately reveled in the tactics and was proud he could participate in intimidating his fellow students.

But publicly, he feigned concern.

Or, as he writes, I was acting like Eddie Haskell, saying, Oh my gosh, young people, you could be next.

His candidate won an upset victory, but the school declared it void owing to a technicality.

I learned a lot, he writes.

I learned how to organize and I learned how to polarize.

Wow.

A lot there.

Wow.

That's horrifying.

That's nuts.

Yeah, that's so fucking awful.

I learned how to organize and I learned how to polarize.

They're beating kids because he's fucking, yeah, like and he's like, and I reviewed it, getting this mob to beat, yeah.

What a cool guy.

Uh-oh.

Jesus Christ.

Yeah, this, this kid's got to be evil.

That's, that's, that's wild.

Right.

And it's, it's, I don't.

It's something else.

Like, that is sinister as fuck.

That also sounds like a great, like, 80s film.

That's like.

It does.

So much of his childhood.

Might have been like an 80s or early 90s movie.

Yeah.

Like, yeah.

that would be

such a good person running for class president

movie.

If he had just written like, if he'd just become like John Hughes, you know, we could have been saved a lot of horror as a species, if only, if only.

Wow.

But you know who won't be saved from the horrors, Garrison?

Us?

The people who listen to your podcasting on It Could Happen Here or follow you on social media.

You got anything you want to plug?

um i mean no just just it could happen here our our weekly news show executive disorder where we where we talk about the news every week the horrors for what like how bad things is 30 30 35 weeks now jesus yeah you you changed you changed your handle on the social media's didn't you yes yes i changed my handle for fun to by shonen type on all social media platforms i'm i'm still trying to use blue sky but

it's a bummer

hashtag

i don't know that's true it's all of them are it's it's a bummer and then it's a fascist bummer there's you know i yeah i'm there's nothing good so trying try

for these podcasts

but but you know occasionally occasionally yeah uh

well we'll be back with uh part two yeah

uh yeah perhaps oh this guy didn't just end running for class president or no no, he did not drop dead after school.

No,

after organizing and polarizing.

School election and old.

Yeah.

See, I thought that was

a great ending.

No, we'll hit you with part two.

But first, we're going to roll out for the day.

But you can, everybody, please go to Defense Fund PDX Donor Box.

Type that into Google, Defense Fund PDX Donor Box, and donate to the Portland Defense Fund to help people who have literally no one else looking out for them get bailed out and, you know, get some help not falling into a black hole if they get charged with a fucking misdemeanor generally.

Yeah,

please help and go to.

I love you.

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