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

Cool Zone Media

Schumer, I hardly know her.

Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that just started.

The worst way a podcast can start.

I think we can all agree.

I didn't like that.

It was unenjoyable.

It's compulsive.

Like Lee Atwater, I can't control it, you know?

So you can't be angry at me for it, you know?

Just like we can't be angry at Lee Atwater for all the people he hurt.

That's the way it works.

Anyway, I'm Robert Evans.

Evans.

This is Behind the Bastards, part two of our series on Republican strategist Lee Atwater, the guy who invented modern presidential elections.

My guest today, as with the last episode, Garrison D-A-V-I-S.

That's so that if there are any two-year-olds in the audience, they can't spell your last name, Garrison.

They don't know what I'm saying.

I was going to do this whole episode as another extremely successful political operator, Chuck Schumer.

But then I realized I don't know what Chuck Schumer sounds like.

So now I'm just stuck with these glasses falling off my nose.

I think it's something like,

that's basically it.

I do not think that is how he sounds.

I think that's pretty close.

I've certainly heard him speak before.

Yeah, I think it sounds like that.

It's however you imagine

if somebody was made of stone trying to speak.

Yes, like that's that's what I exactly what I did.

You're right, Sophie.

Thank you for the praise.

I appreciate it.

I live off of it.

We'll return to this topic later, I guess.

Yeah.

Sure.

This is an iHeart podcast.

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Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

Just like my parents talk about they knew where they were when John F.

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Now, last episode, we closed out with our friend Lee Atwater.

Go friend.

Friend of the pod, Lee Atwater, has just done a fucking fake school election for his friend, who, depending on the source, some say his buddy didn't even know that he was like putting him up for election until like this magazine comes out where he's like raiding, he like mimeographs this fucking zine basically being like, he won this calm.

He's the funniest kid in school based on, you know, this, it's unclear like how this ranking was done.

And, you know, promising free beer on tap.

He's got his little fucking student SS out kicking people, right?

And the first part of this, the fact that he starts it with like this fake poll basically, that he's handing results to people is noteworthy because fake polls are going to be key to Lee Atwater's adult political style.

Now, today we call a fake poll conducted by an independent pollster funded by a campaign or a dark money operation, not legally connected to a campaign, for the purpose of pushing a political agenda a push-poll.

And what Lee's done here isn't quite a push-poll yet, because the goal of a push-poll is to propagandize a voter under the guise of polling them.

So you call them and say, hey, we're doing a poll.

If you were to find out that candidate X was a pedophile, would you still vote for them, right?

And you're not accusing them of being a pedophile, but also it makes people think about them that way, right?

And it's usually, you can get a little more direct than that, but that's the basic idea, right?

Is it's a poll where you don't actually care about the result.

What matters is you're trying to subtly propagandize to people when their defenses aren't up because they don't think they're they're being subjected to a political ad, right?

Um, and that's it's not exactly what he does in high school with his friend because again, he just releases the poll, but this is going to like this is going to work so well that it kind of gets him.

He's always, he's always a guy who's going to do a lot of what he does through different kinds of bullshit polls.

And part of the reason why is that after this election happens, he notices that like kids that he didn't even know keep coming up to him and telling him jokes or like cutting up in class and then looking at him to gauge his reaction.

One kid even wore a plastic display bottle of soap for an entire day.

And they're trying to, they want Lee to see them because they realize that he is the guy publishing this list of the funniest kids in school.

And they want to get on the list.

They don't realize that it's a completely bullshit list, right?

Lee writes, quote, it took me about an hour to realize they all wanted to get into the comedy ratings.

So he keeps publishing the flyer and he expands it.

He adds a Bad Breath of the Week award and he adds fake ads for a dial-a-slut service, which he claims is run by one of his female classmates.

So as a kid, he's learned how to use the media to manipulate his classmates, to hurt people, to help a campaign.

He's already figured this out, and he's like not yet 18 or just about turning 18.

Dial a slut service?

He's a prodigy in the evil arts of politics.

Yeah.

Sir.

He would later recall, nothing taught me more cleanly and clearly that people like to see their names in the paper and people like to be number one at something.

I always remembered that lesson.

I mean, he also has discovered the inherent charm of the DIY magazine, which

everyone, usually around 18, falls victim to.

Right, of course.

Everyone.

Yes, absolutely, Garrison.

Kids love DIY magazines.

Some kids do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, the Cool Kids and the Lee Atwaters.

It's a real mixed bag.

If you're mimeographing, you're going to go one of two ways.

Lee himself was never featured in the paper that he put out.

He wrote, by not being involved, I could have a lot more fun with it.

I learned back then that I was just going to cool it and stay out of the scene.

So he's also figured out, I don't want to be in politics.

I don't want the spotlight on me.

He wants to be behind it.

But I want to be focused.

Yeah, I want to be behind the spotlight, right?

Focusing it on people.

He's like the Lauren Michael.

Yeah, he's of his.

He's like a less evil Lauren Michael.

That's right.

Yeah.

So the one area where Lee was weirdly positive and like weirdly ahead of his time was when it came to black musicians.

When black bands would play at his all-white school, he would use all of his manipulative prowess to ensure that his peers weren't shitty towards them.

His friend Debbie Carlson recalled, he showed sensitivity toward blacks that he didn't always show to his good friends.

And yeah, I think it's worth noting this is black musicians, right, that he likes.

It's not like a general

behavior trait, but he is noted by his white classmates as like he was like the non-racist one.

right or at least the one who was most aggressively anti-racist when there was something he wanted to get out of it right I think that is like an important thing to add, that this is not just happening in a vacuum.

He's not like seeing someone be racist and confronting them outside of this.

It's specifically because I like this band.

They're going to be playing at our school and I don't want them to get embarrassed.

Yeah.

No, it does seem to be like

one of the few things that keeps him from being like...

at the most evil that he could be is his like love of music and how that alters his like perception of like racial politics slightly, I guess.

What's interesting is it alters his perception of racial politics, but his politics are always very racial, and he gets really angry.

The one thing that seems to bother him is when people call him out for being racist for the racist things he does, because some of his best friends genuinely are black musicians, and he doesn't want to be seen as racist, but he wants to be allowed to campaign as one.

And that's really it.

The fact that he does seem legitimately offended when people accuse him of being racist while consciously using racial politics in a way way that is undeniably conscious is really interesting to me.

But we'll see more of that later.

Yeah, I would like to hear about that in the context in which it exists in.

It's a comment.

So he'd gotten his parents to agree to let him go back to public school by laying out an ambitious plan for his future.

He'd written them, I think I would like to be a lawyer and maybe someday go into politics.

He told them he intended to apply after graduating to the University of South Carolina, the Citadel, North Carolina State, and Wofford University.

And that last one, he didn't really want to go to, but it was his dad's alma mater.

And so he adds it.

Again, it's part of this like manipulation thing,

right?

He just can't turn that off.

As I noted in the last episode, as soon as he's out of military school, he gets back to his old tricks.

And in fact, he is more out of control than ever.

His high school.

Really?

Dial a sled service?

The dial-a slider?

That's not even like his high school has an unofficial fraternity system, and he joins a fraternity who call themselves the Dark Horseman.

No, and I think you can tell how what these kids, these dudes are like from that.

Like, no, no, no, I, I, I, I want to hear more about these.

I'm covering my drink even though he's dead.

Yeah, oh, you know, you don't you want to cover your drink when they're mentioned.

It's like fucking you see it three times into a Zoom call, they appear behind you, right?

Yeah, yeah, they'll fucking roofie you.

Yeah,

oh my gosh, they viciously haze their members.

Uh, when Lee is admitted he has to rub icy hot on his balls and then be paddled for hours he has to get into like an hours-long slap fight with a friend where they're like really hurting each other uh and like he apologizes afterwards they both do but like they're willing to do it to get into this club and it's this is going to be this is not uncommon for fraternities back then although the fact that it's a high school fraternity is kind of weird and an example of like who Lee is.

So they would pool all of their money to rent dance halls or warehouses and throw these massive parties for their high school.

And when they couldn't afford liquor, Lee has a great idea for how they get booze, which is there's this stretch of road outside of town that's like the dating spot where like people will pull over to make out slash fuck with their girlfriends, right?

And, you know, periodically the cops will come by.

And so you'll like toss your liquor out of your car to like get away so they don't realize that you're like drunk and trying to have sex in a car.

So he has his friends, they all go out to this spot and they start searching in like the the brush around the makeout point and they pull out all these half full bottles of like beer and liquor and they mix it together in a barrel and then they fill the barrel the rest of the way with what is only described in my sources as purple juice.

This sounds, this sounds rancid.

It sounds awful.

The resulting beverage is called Purple Jesus and it did a spectacular job of giving teenagers alcohol poisoning.

It just sounds like hell.

Boy howdy.

That's awful.

Oh my God.

You love to see it.

I mean, I didn't, I'm not going to pretend I did much better.

Yeah, because we would, we would just.

I do feel very alien to this sort of stuff.

Like I enjoy a cocktail every once in a while, but I'm not rummaging around.

Like this, this is, this is completely foreign to me.

No, there was a period when I was like 19 or 20 where we got one of those like big things of just the raw Dr.

Pepper syrup and we would just add that straight to Everclear.

Don't do that.

Bad idea.

That hurt.

hurts awful.

My stomach immediately hurts.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

What a nightmare.

So you won't be surprised when I tell you that Lee's GPA was not impressive by the end of Christian.

Prince Jesus isn't really pulling through in the grades.

No,

he's not doing great.

Now, it's kind of an open question whether or not he's even going to graduate until the last possible moment.

His psychology teacher comes close to failing him.

And his psych teacher actually calls Lee's mom Toddi because she teaches Spanish at the same school.

And as a fun aside, she gave her own son a D once and like wrote on the report card.

What about her?

She wrote on the report card, you need more discipline at home.

Like on her son's report card.

So this teacher goes to Todd.

But also,

take accountability, my girl.

What?

Yeah, I mean, I think it was a bit, but yeah.

So this teacher goes to Toddi and he's like, I don't know if I i can pass your kid and she's like yeah you should just do what's best and he's like yeah i'll do what i think is best for the boy and ultimately he passes lee even though the grades weren't there he decides that lee when he would talk in class he was better he participated more than anyone else in terms of like classroom discussion sure he just again refused to study or do homework ever right and it's this this is the fateful decision that will allow him to go to college so i mean really

never show mercy to a student who's struggling teachers out there.

You know,

that's the lesson of this podcast.

No mercy to children.

They'll turn into Lee Atwater if you give them a second's grace.

So, Toddy had resigned herself, you know, partway through this year, 12th grade year, to the likelihood that her son would not go to college at all and would wind up working a menial job despite his obvious intelligence.

Lee himself wanted to leave from graduation and immediately travel around the South with a friend of his who was a professional musician.

And like, this would be like a vacation, but I think it was also the idea was he was going to explore maybe whether or not he could make it as a musician.

This sounds like a positive development for a kid.

If only, if only.

Now, again, it looks likely that this is going to be his path forward because he applies to the University of South Carolina and he gets rejected.

And that's like not, no offense, University of South Carolina, but it's not like an Ivy League school, right?

Like

his grades are not good.

He's getting rejected from like the state school.

And Lee keeps this rejection letter in his office for the rest of his life.

The fact that he gets this is something he's got this weird sense of pride towards.

But before he can start his trip, his mom pulls some strings and she gets him an interview with the Dean of Admissions to Newberry College because she knows the guy.

And she knows her son.

She's well aware of the fact that if he gets face to face with someone, he can charm them, right?

Face to face, he's going to do well, even though his like grades and admissions would get easily discarded.

But he would be compelling in like an actual meeting.

Yes.

And she knows this, and she gets him the face-to-face meeting.

And obviously, Toddy's right.

And the dean also seems to have understood Lee pretty well.

And he kind of plays hard to get.

right?

He repeatedly says, I don't think you have what it takes to handle this college, to be a Newberry man, right?

And this flips a switch in Atwater's head.

And so he becomes obsessed with proving the dean wrong.

And so they make a deal.

It's a gamified thing, yeah.

Right, right.

Now it's a deal.

Now I've been challenged.

So the deal is: if he can take two summer classes at Newberry and do well, he'll get admitted to the fall.

And Lee takes an aces both classes, which proves that the only way to get him to actually work hard is to trigger his oppositional defiant disorder.

That's the entirety of how this guy works, right?

What a brat.

He's like the Republican Party distilled into one man.

It's just pure oppositional defiance.

So

Lee enters Newberry in 1969.

Nice.

This is a tense year for America, for students in America, at colleges in general.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A lot is going on this year, but not for Lee.

Newberry is not kind of in, it's off the beaten path a little bit.

It's not one of the schools that's going to be the center of things happening.

Lee later described it as a pretty laid-back environment.

The anti-war movement and the attendant protests had mostly skipped the campus over, and Lee doesn't find himself pushed into political activism immediately.

Instead, he gets very into Greek life.

And I'm going to quote from an article by Eric Alterman in the New York Times.

Atwater and his fraternity brothers used to rent black and white pornographic movies and charge 50 cents admission.

You can bet nobody asked for their damn money back on those flicks, he volunteers, sitting with his wife and parents in the family living room.

We weren't like the guys who took your money and then showed a bunch of people horsing around in leotards.

Sorry.

he's just talking in front of his wife and kids yeah we showed the best porno in college sir we didn't rip you off by showing you fake porno no nothing but real naked people in our fraternity he opened a diy porn theater he opens a diy porn theater that's how his fraternity makes beer money it's pretty funny uh now his frat is alpha tau omega And just for shits and giggles, I was like, I want to see what kind of reputation ATO has.

Oh, I'm sure it's great.

I'm sure I'm going to learn some lovely things here.

It would be fair to say in many schools, they are regarded as a party house.

Just from stories in the last decade, I found an article about a chapter, the ATO chapter.

Yes, just from that, the last decade.

Because there's not a lot recorded from the 60s, right?

A lot of stuff.

Sexual assaults not getting reported generally.

Sure, sure.

Within the last decade, an ATO chapter in Muhlenberg College was suspended for hazing and life safety violations due to out-of-control drinking.

UMC's chapter got suspended earlier this year for alcohol violations and financial malfeasance.

The Ohio State chapter was likewise suspended this year for hazing and alcohol violations.

I've also found multiple stories of brothers in different states being investigated for sexual assault over the years.

Now, Lee's in college decades before these things go down, but cursory examinations suggest that ATO just got a long reputation as like this is a party house, right?

That's the case in Lee's day, and that's kind of the legacy of this fraternity up to the present day.

This is a party house.

I feel like they got shut down at my college when I was in school.

They get, I found a lot of stories of them getting shut down.

This was literally just seconds of Googling, right?

Sure.

Just like a lot of ATO chapters get in trouble.

And the fact that this would be a party fraternity is consistent with the stories Lee and his brothers would later tell reporters.

He was known for staying up all night drinking, dancing, and singing, and then in his words, would quote, be the guy to wake up the day shift with a flip-top at 6 a.m.

So he's like still awake, waking his friends up with a beer at 6 in the morning, you know, to keep the party going.

Never let the party die.

Never let the party die.

Garrison, you remember when I showed you PCU, the classic 90s college film?

It's a special movie starring Parliament Funkadelic.

It ends with a P-Funk concert.

Great film.

Yes, I do remember this.

Yes.

I found an article in the Newberry Observer that interviewed Carlos Evans, who is another ATO member and like

future executive at no relation, because he winds up as an executive at Wells Fargo.

And Carlos's recollections make Lee's life in this period sound identical to the plot of PCU.

Quote: Lee was always joking around and entertaining his fraternity brothers by improving crazy songs on his guitar, Evans said, which made him an ideal social chair for his frat.

One slow weekend on campus, no football or planned parties, Atwater came across a band whose trailer had broken down on the side of the road.

Already running too late to make it to their gig in the upstate, Atwater convinced them just to stay in Newberry and play there, thus creating an impromptu party.

It's just literally the plot of PCU.

This just happened to him.

Yeah, but his life feels like a lot of different movie plots.

Yes, his life is written by John Hughes.

Like, I almost feel like there's a stranger-than-fiction situation here.

He's like Will Farrell in that movie, but written by John Hughes.

I also wonder what his thoughts on Wild at Heart are.

Oh, yeah.

In terms of like the Elvis blues, like dancing, performance, deception.

Like Nick Cage's whole character in that has a slightly similar vibe.

Unfortunately, we'll never get to ask him, Garrison.

Spoilers for where this episode ends.

Speaking of spoilers, you know what can't be spoiled?

These ads?

Quality.

Yeah, the quality of our sponsors.

There's no spoiling that.

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That's right, still really bothered by that.

Yeah, 1-800 dial-a-slut.

Ah, you know,

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Sophie, sex work is work, actually.

I was gonna say, if somebody, I know, I just don't like that he did it.

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I couldn't even believe it was real.

Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

Just like my parents talk about they knew where they were when John F.

Kennedy was killed.

Pretty much everyone I know knows exactly where they were when River died.

Featuring new interviews with Samantha Mathis, Dr.

Drew Pinski, Corey Feldman, and more.

Listen to Variety Confidential on on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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So Lee's been interested, you know, since high school in the political process, but previously it had been a game for him, purely a way to amuse himself.

College is where he gets interested in and involved in real politics for the first time.

And there are two stories about how this happened, right?

And they're kind of divergent.

I think there's a way to reconcile them.

His frat brother, Carlos, says that, like, basically, in his first year, his grades were so shitty that he had to go to summer school in order to not get expelled.

And then, per an article in the Newberry Observer, while in summer school, Atwater secured an internship with a young senator named Strom Thurmond, who was 67 at the time.

Oh, this

fucking guy.

He came back that fall and he was a totally different person, Evans recalled.

His hair was short and his dress conservative.

Gone were the remnants of the hippie-saturated 1960s, Evans said.

Atwater went from coming dangerously close to flunking out the previous semester to a straight A student, and Evans said he became highly engaged in his political studies.

That was the point when we started to believe that Lee had possibilities beyond being just a jokester and a fun guy, he said.

So Strom started like politically grooming this guy.

Yeah, yeah, that's that is every version of the story has that part.

The question is what leads up to it?

Because Lee and his mom will later tell a different story.

Like instead of his, it happening in his freshman year, because he had to get summer credits because he was failing.

In the summer of his sophomore year, his mom says she convinced Shrom Thurmond to take her son as an intern and that this ignites his love of politics and gives him direction for the first time in his life.

So he claimed, I decided that summer was time to get serious.

And yeah,

Thurmond was by this point a Republican and in a Congress that was still full of white supremacists, he was the one who was famous for being a white supremacist.

The most supremacist of the whites.

The whitest of the supremacists and the supremacist of the whites.

He and Lee got along very well, per the New York Times.

Thurman remembers a bright young boy of extraordinary energy and charm who, in seven years, progressed from college intern to political director of Thurmond's re-election campaign.

Atwater remembers listening to a man who embodied for him the virtues of Southern conservatism, economic libertarianism, a strong military, opposition to federal interference.

Both men insist that the historical identification of Thurmond with the segregation is unfair.

The issue, then as now, Thurman insists, was states' rights.

And there's a couple of things about that.

First off, the discrepancy between his frat brother's story, I mean, his mom's story, I think is easy to reconcile.

I think his frat brother got the year wrong, which is easy to do decades later.

I think his grades were shitty, probably in a sophomore year.

And I think his mom got him this internship because he needed summer credit to not get kicked out of school.

And she pulled another favor.

That's kind of my way of reconciling this.

But also, there's a good documentary about Lee Atwater, and it interviews a lot of his friends at the time.

And a couple of different people who knew him will say variations of the same thing, which is that he didn't believe in conservatism.

He was not ideologically, he could have done work for either party and been just as happy, but he saw there was more of a place for him in the Republican Party, in part because the Republican Party at the start of the 70s is a party in massive transition.

One of the things that has happened is that they have bled young people, and Lee has an idea for getting young people to join the party.

And there's just more of an opportunity because the party is in flux, because

they're realigning, he can find a place for himself there.

And the Democratic Party, he can't find as much of a place for himself there.

It would be harder to insert himself and make a name for himself.

And so some of the people who knew Lee will argue that's the only reason why he gets involved in the Republican Party is that this is where he can make a name for himself.

And that's that's the only thing he actually cares about, right?

Whatever the case, you know, because in that version of events, he doesn't give a shit that Strom Thurmond is an economic libertarian and loves a strong military.

He just, again, this is a guy he can, because he's kind of disgraced and whatnot, I can get involved in it.

And I've got an N.

This is where my N is.

It'll be easiest for me to succeed here.

I mean, yeah, he seems more interested in music and performance, like on a personal level than like politics, even though he enjoys the process of it.

And it seemed like he had saw more opportunity for innovative work and

having fun with the process in the Republican Party at the time compared to the Democratic Party.

Right.

And the process is what he cares about.

So who gives a shit what the politics he's fighting for are, you know?

We need, we,

we need him.

We, we need one of him for the left.

We sure, we sure do.

Uh, you get that from some of his friends who are like,

can you, if only he had picked a different, the other party, you know, we might have all been better off.

We're going to be looking for a Lee Atwater of the left.

Yeah.

Uh, that's what we need.

Not a fucking Joe Rogan, a Lee Atwater.

Somebody who can fucking play hardball.

At any rate, every version of the Lee Atwater story is consistent that at this time, Strom Thurman causes, you know, his time with Thurman causes him to take his life seriously, right?

And he's a different guy when he comes back to school.

1972, the year after his internship, is an election year, and Atwater is determined to do his part to get Richard Nixon re-elected.

He realized that frat boys are Nixon's natural candidacy, and he starts using frat parties and events to sign up other young men to register as Republicans and support Nixon.

And this expands to he runs a large get out the vote effort in South Carolina and signs up 12,000 people.

This is a feat no one gets close to equaling.

No single person gets close to equaling in this period of time.

Like Lee is head and shoulders above anyone else in terms of like their ability to do that for Republicans.

That's a lot of people for an election at this time.

Yeah.

Yes, that's a big deal.

And this is what drives Lee to do it in the first place, right?

It's not dedication to Nixon.

It's a desire to prove himself the best, to get the most, to be, to break the record, right?

I've signed up the most people.

That's what is appealing to him, is it's a way he can win and set himself up as special.

His frat brother, Carlos Evans, claimed, I would say the thing that really made him different was that he was incredibly competitive.

He was very much focused on winning at every level.

Lee's performance was so shocking and noteworthy that he earned the attention of the Republican Party itself.

In 1973, the next year, as a result of this feat, he is appointed National Director of the College Republicans by party chairman George H.W.

Bush.

This fucking guy.

Yeah, yeah.

And this is, unfortunately, H.W.

Bush has picked his man well because Lee is really good at this.

Like the number of registered, like college-age Republicans increases massively.

He's organizing and polarizing.

After this period of time, he is really good at this.

He's He's going all around different campuses.

He's giving speeches.

He is very good at getting young men.

And again,

he's this very modern figure of, it's this mix of like crude humor and misogyny and kind of veiled racism that he's using to like get these young men be like, no, no, no, you don't want to like

do this hippie bullshit and vote for the left.

Like you want to, like your interests are being served by the Republican Party as like a young man, right?

Like that's who you need to be with.

And he's very good at this.

And that's the first couple of years of Lee's political career: like reforming and turning college Republicans into a major force, right?

And there's a lot of budding heads.

He has a lot of direct competition and winds up in a lot of like ugly fights with other people.

And he always wins.

Anyone who kind of challenges him for power, he beats the absolute piss out of, um, because he's just, he's just extraordinarily good at this sort of thing.

Um,

which is

it's just great.

You love to see this kind of shit.

So, yeah, before we discuss Lee's meteoric rise and what happens after this point, I should peel back and give you all a little refresher on how Republican Party politics evolved from the 50s to the start of the 70s, which is due to the course of Lee's life to date, right?

This is during the period of time from when he is born to when he starts being a political actor himself.

Traditionally, Republicans, the party of Lincoln, held the North, and the South was a Democratic stronghold.

And that had started changing dramatically in the early 20th century, which is often summarized as the two parties basically switching platforms.

The reality is a lot more complex, but by the time FDR comes around, this realignment is well underway, right?

And this leaves Republicans in a bind.

Southern Democrats now felt alienated from the rest of the party, but the main way to reach them was with racism.

And every year it got harder to just say, I hate black people and win an election.

Enter the Southern Strategy.

The gist of the Southern Strategy is that you advertise policies that hurt black people and maybe help white people.

That part's not actually necessary, without saying that's why you're doing it.

And there's a lot of debate over how much of a role the Southern Strategy, in particular, plays in this post-Civil Rights Act realignment, because this starts in the earliest 20th century, but it's after the 57 Civil Rights Act that the realignment really speeds up and that, like, the Democratic Party really loses the South.

Like, that's that's when all that really happens.

And so it's, you know, there's debate and valid debate by political historians over like how much credit do we give this the Southern strategy as opposed to these other things that are going on at the time.

The phrase itself, the Southern strategy, gets popular after 1970 when Nixon political strategist Kevin Phillips gives an interview for the New York Times in which he says, among other things, from now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20% of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that.

The party's political future, he argued, was in making sure Southern whites saw Democrats as the party of black people.

This would convince them to switch parties and vote Republican, right?

And again, we can debate how much of a factor this is in the realignment and, you know,

what happens to the South and it becoming a Republican stronghold, but it's certainly a big part of it, right?

Totally.

And Lee Atwater is going to, he's going to come, start getting into politics literally like a year or two after this, this Nixon strategist has laid out the whole strategy on like in this interview.

And this is always going to be a part of his understanding of how politics works, right?

Now, one of his early political triumphs is when he's still like with the college Republicans.

There's a contest, there's an election to see who's going to be chairman of the college Republicans between Karl Rove and a guy named Robert Edgeworth.

Carl Rove,

a lot of you millennials will know he was George Bush's campaign manager during Bush's campaigns.

Like he's the guy who got W elected.

He's famous as being a slime.

Just look at a picture of Carl Rove.

He looks like he's slithered in on a slime trail.

No man has ever looked more like a snail than Carl fucking Rove.

Like touching him, his skin has the consistency of wet Play-Doh.

You can just tell it by looking at a picture.

Sophie, pull the fucker up.

I see him.

You see him?

You see him?

Yeah, I got him.

He's beautiful.

He's beautiful, isn't he?

I got a face full of Rove right now.

Yeah, he's just a majestic animal.

Very smooth, very smooth skinny.

Incredibly smooth guy, incredibly smooth guy, just in terms of his actual

texture.

And to quote from an article in PBS's website,

quote, Rove lost, but Atwater mounted an appeal of Edgeworth's victory.

The contest was ultimately decided by then-Republican National Committee Chairman George H.W.

Bush, who gave the election to Rove.

That was a pretty early lesson for Karl Rove from Lee, says Joe Connison of the Nation and Salon.com, that you could play the hardest of hardball and get away with it.

And what Rove is doing, or what Atwater is doing here is he just starts challenging individual votes and he just keeps coming up with, and they're bullshit challenges.

Like the other guy had won, but he creates enough doubt that he's able to create space for Bush to come in and just decide the election.

It's kind of a version of what the Supreme Court will do for W in 2000.

Yeah, that's what I was just thinking.

The fact that this is how Carl Rove gets his start in politics, and this is a lot, very similar to what happens to W in 2000.

Not a coincidence.

It's cool stuff.

I'm glad

that that started, right?

Yeah,

it's really depressing.

So, Lee Atwater, in the early to mid-70s, is an early, a chief acolyte and practitioner of the Southern Strategy.

You know, he's this huge figure in getting the college Republicans organized, and he graduates from that to being a campaign, like he's like a, he's like a mercenary campaign campaign strategist and, you know, aid or whatnot.

Like, you'll bring him on if you need a dirty tricks guy.

And he proved himself incredibly good at that.

One of his first big jobs in 1978 is working as an advisor to Strom Thurmond's re-election campaign.

It's here he would notch his first major victory.

The guy that Thurmond is running against is Charles Ravenel, who the Times described as the then-rising young star of Charleston politics.

Lee set himself to the task of strangling Ravenel's career in in the cradle.

Through relentless digging, he came across a quote from Ravenel in a small, this is how he describes it.

He finds like an interview in a small weekly newspaper called Manhattan East quoting Charles Ravenel as having told a Park Avenue fundraiser that if elected, he'd be the third senator from New York.

Now, you see what he's, the quote is him basically saying like, I know I'm running, you know, in South Carolina, but if I get elected, you know, if you if you donate and help me get elected, I'll vote like a senator from New York, right?

This shouldn't be legal.

Right.

Now, Ravenel denies ever saying this.

There's no actual evidence that he says this.

And the rumor is that Atwater planted the story.

He either bribed a reporter or an editor to put an article in this tiny paper with minimal circulation because it didn't need to get read by people.

There just needed to be something he could grab and then like read out and have put in attack ads, right?

Yeah, he can turn it into a problem.

Right.

And this quote becomes the single most repeated claim in Thurman's attack ads against Ravenel.

And again, I can't tell you to a point of certainty that he planted that story.

But if he did, it wasn't the only time he did that in a 1978 election.

Because that same year, he also consulted on a House of Representatives race for his old friend, Carol Campbell.

We talked about their friendship.

They were buddies in high school.

And their competition of soup fame.

Yeah, of soup fame, of the Campbells fortune.

Their competition is a guy named Max Heller.

At the time, Max Heller was the mayor of Greenville.

He was also Jewish and the literal Holocaust survivor, right?

He had like,

oh yeah, this is going in such a dark direction.

Per the New York Times, Atwater's accusers claim that as an informal

advisor to Campbell, he passed secret polling information to Don Sprauss, a third-party candidate, who then used the information to undermine Heller's campaign.

Political analyst Alan Barron has revealed that Campbell's pollster in 1978, Arthur J.

Finkelstein of Irvington, New York, told him that his data showed South Carolina voters would reject a foreign-born Jew who did not believe in Jesus Christ as the Savior.

Marvin Chernoff, a Democratic consultant in Columbia, claims that Atwater specifically told him of passing Finkelstein's secret poll to Sprauss.

And Atwater denies this, but Spraus is literally going up to Max Heller and being like, Do you believe in Jesus as our Lord and Savior?

And like saying like, I think at one point you basically asked, like, do you, did the Jews crucify Jesus?

Like, it's really anti-Semitic shit.

And this is not, this is not Campbell.

That's not the guy that Atwater is working for.

It's this third party who he is using to be, to put this racist stuff out so that voters are thinking, well, this guy's not really a Christian, right?

And they're also, they're not tying Campbell to the anti-Semitism.

So he gets the best of both worlds.

It comes from a different origin.

Yeah.

Right, right.

And he's, this is the way Atwater works, right?

And, you know, he denies this.

There's significant evidence in a number of people who tie him to this happening.

Finkelstein and all of the Campbell campaign staffers deny the accusations too.

But Campbell's campaign manager has since admitted to a late-night meeting with Sprouse representatives in a Greenville parking lot before the election.

And the Finkelstein poll released by Campbell did ask voters to compare how they would feel about a race between a Jewish immigrant and a native South Carolinian.

Oh, that's good.

That's expert stuff.

It's all, this is all very, very Lee Atwater shit, right?

And if true, these allegations are just entirely consistent with what we've already seen from Lee.

In high school, this is the guy who's making up fake polls to swing elections.

Atwater is also engaging during the 78 election in more skullduggery on Thurmond's behalf, right?

To help the segregationist senators shake off some of the bad PR from his constant public racism.

And this really shows you how smart Atwater is.

His solution to the problem of Thurman being a famous racist is very innovative.

He has campaign representatives announce that they're throwing all of their efforts into getting out the black vote.

Thurmond goes so far as to send his six-year-old daughter to an integrated public school.

So it looks like Thurman's really trying to reform his image and get black people to vote for him, but they know that's not going to work.

This is a feint, right?

Black people are not going to vote for Strom Thurmond and Atwater knows it.

But Ravenel's campaign, he knows, is going to panic when they see Thurman going out for this vote, and they're going to redouble their efforts to get the black vote.

To get the black vote, which is already already going to go to them.

And that's that's number one, they're not focusing then on the other votes they need to get.

And also, it's going to convince the white voters, who is really who the primary amount of Atwater's PR is going out towards.

That, well, this other guy is campaigning for black people.

He only cares about that.

He doesn't care about white people, right?

That's the strategy, and it works perfectly.

A Democratic Party operative at the time summarized the result.

The Ravenel campaign looked like it spent all its time going after black voters.

Well, swing voters are turned off, they vote for Thurmond and he retains his seat.

So yeah,

that's where we are at 1978.

Lee's gotten his political career off to a rousing start.

Yeah,

that's a smart operation.

It's a smart operation.

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And we're back.

So by 1980, Lee Adwater's got himself a reputation, not as a great political thinker or even as like the best campaign strategist, but as a connoisseur of dirty tricks.

And so wherever a Republican is in trouble, he is increasingly the guy they call for, or increasingly the guy the RNC sends their way to set off a couple of bombs, right?

He is their secret weapon.

Like we can deploy Lee anywhere we need, we need some extra help and we're willing to be unethical with it, right?

They just like, they just like airdrop him in with a pair of shoes.

He's the 82nd airborne of being a scummy political campaign manager.

Takes off his flight suit, has a black suit underneath, briefcase, ready to go.

Ready to go.

For example, in the 1980s South Carolina congressional race, he was brought in to do push polling for Representative Floyd Spence.

Spence was running against former state senator Tom Turnipseed.

That is a real name.

Wow.

I just really got to focus on that.

I have heard of Tom Turnipseed before.

Yes, Tom Turnipseed.

It's a name you can't forget.

It's impossible to forget Tom Turnipseed.

Now, as a child, when he's like a teenage boy, Tom has depression and he has to undergo shock therapy, like electroshock therapy for his depression.

Which is, I think, probably was unnecessary at the time, but it's also a not uncommon treatment at the time.

And obviously not something he has any choice in because he's a child.

Not that this should be stigmatizing, but I don't think it's often unnecessary when it's given in this period of time for stuff like this.

Tom had discussed this in public.

He had been open about the fact that as a kid, he struggled with mental health and he went through this kind of treatment.

This is the thing he talked about because he admirably, I think, wanted to destigmatize mental health treatment.

And unfortunately, this is going to make him incredibly vulnerable to Lee Atwater.

So at the same time that lee picks up on the fact that tom's gone undergone electro shock therapy he finds out that tom is a member of the naacp and has been a civil rights activist so he uh

started off as a segregationist and and then saw the light i guess yeah he he he's been he's been he's been good for a while on it and lee is going to frame this as he's a radical leftist black supremacist, right?

He gets anonymous guys to do push calls, you know, where they're they're or push polls where they're saying, are you, are you comfortable voting for like a man with ties to the NAACP, um, who's like a radical civil rights activist?

And at the same time, are you comfortable voting for a man who received electroshock therapy for his severe mental illness?

Yeah, okay.

All right, buddy.

On its own, that's not enough to spin the election because push polls only reach so many people.

So he's got a question of how do I launder the electroshock therapy thing into becoming a central campaign issue without looking evil, looking like I'm trying to do it.

And Atwater finds a solution.

He finds a couple of reporters.

He's giving a press conference and he's talking with a couple of reporters before the press conference and he brings up the electroshock therapy thing in order to be like, basically say, you should ask me about this, right?

He's planting the question in their heads, right?

So they ask him about this

and, you know, he gives an answer and they ask him something else about Tom Turnip seed and he responds being like, I'm not going to respond to allegations made by someone who's been hooked up to jumper cables, right?

Like that's the way he frames this.

Like he gets this brought up so that he can say, I don't have to answer questions from a man who got hooked up to jumper cables.

He has this retort pre-planned and this was all a scheme just to say that.

He sets up the questions so that he can give that answer.

Right.

So turnip seed loses and Lee's dirty tricks are often given some of the blame.

Now, when I was doing my research, I was curious as to how Atwater planted questions with the press, and it seems like he had a few different ways of doing this.

But what surprised me was that he would openly acknowledge to the journalists that he used this way after doing so.

This is a quote from an article by Eleanor Randolph in the New York Times.

Lee Bandy, a respected political journalist for the state newspaper in South Carolina, recalled the time he accidentally helped one of Mr.

Atwater's candidates, the former Governor Ronald Reagan of California.

Later, Mr.

Bandy recalled that Lee laughed and said, Bandy, you got used.

He celebrates this.

He likes being, like,

he wants you to know when he's done this, for one thing.

He's proud of it, right?

It's like he can't help himself.

No.

Now, Lee's main gig in 1980 was working as the Southern Regional Coordinator for Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign.

At this point, the Southern strategy had been named for at least a decade and practiced for much longer.

But Lee had notes, and he suggested a revision to his bosses.

After getting nominated, he urged, Reagan should start his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

And before this, by the way, he does like a fuck job on Bush.

Like he's helping Reagan kind of win the primary against Bush, which is going to like piss off Bush a bit, but it's just not as interesting as his crimes against less deserving people.

Yeah, I mean, it makes sense because like Reagan's Reagan's Reagan's a performer.

So Reagan's a performer, right?

So after getting nominated, he urges Reagan to start his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

And if you look at videos from this, it's just white people in the crowd, right?

And his point to doing this is to, like,

he's basically got a revamped version of the Southern Strategy.

Writing for the nation, Antonio D'Ambrosio describes this as a not-so-subtle attempt to make race a central part of Reagan's presidential bid.

It worked.

In an article for the Othering and Belonging Institute at Berkeley, John Powell goes into more detail.

They did so, revamped the Southern Strategy, but not only by criticizing federal civil rights legislation and impugning federal desegregation orders, but by railing against busing, government dependency, and welfare, or by espousing such seemingly race-neutral ideas as states' rights and local control as signals to preserve Jim Crow from federal intrusion.

Even without making explicitly racist comments, the dog whistle was clearly heard by those who were its intended recipients.

These strategies, combined called the Southern Strategy, was designed to create a national Republican majority, built in part on white resentment.

The dog whistle worked because it was heard and understood by the conservative white base, yet not by more moderate and northern whites.

It meant activating racial resentment for one part of the population while denying that fact to the rest.

The Southern Strategy married the conservative politics' antipathy to marginal tax rates and civil rights, labor, and environmental regulations, to corporate entities with culturally conservative antipathy towards civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights.

And we've been stuck here ever since.

Yeah, this is a huge success.

And to be clear, I'm not giving Lee Atwater all of the credit for Reagan winning.

He doesn't deserve it.

He's not the main guy leading the campaign, but he has a significant role in the South.

And

he's a big part of, he likes to convince him to do his, you know, to do that, that first big meeting in Mississippi.

He has a major role in shaping how Reagan campaigns, right?

And it's worth debating how integral was he to Reagan's ultimate victory in his first term.

But people within the party certainly saw him as having played a significant role because he gets a job in the White House, right?

And he basically has to have one created for him.

And there is fighting against this because a lot of people don't trust him because he's the dirty tricks guy.

Yeah, why would you want the dirty tricks guy in the White House?

Right.

But they created basically an entry-level position for him where he's like White House deputy political director, right?

That's the job that he gets under Reagan.

Now, in 1981, he's one of like the one of like the supporting characters in Veep.

Yes,

but

he's also

kind of a mastermind behind the scenes because he starts scheming as soon as he gets into this job.

We'll talk about that.

But in 1981, just as he's settling into the White House, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University named Alex Lamis reaches out to Lee.

Lamis is one of the first people outside of the Republican Party who noticed that Atwater is not just another consultant willing to get his hands dirty, but he's someone who's who's changing the way the game is played.

He's someone with like a generational understanding of how politics works that is shifting the way politics is done.

Yeah, by playing the game the way he does, he's actually changing the fundamental rules of the game.

Yes, yes, exactly.

And this, this, this guy, Lammis, is one of the first people to realize it.

And he interviews Lee.

And it's kind of part on and part off the record, but all of it's recorded.

And this recording gives us a fascinating insight.

This is the thing that's famous about Lee is this quote of him explaining the southern strategy in this interview.

If you've ever read about it, you've read that quote of Lee Atwater.

And for a long time, people didn't know.

Is this really Lee or not?

Because like the

name kind of was out there.

This interviewer had basically claimed it, but like no one was proof.

There was no proof until fairly recently when the audio got released.

And now you can hear him, which we're going to hear in a little bit.

But the interview gives like a really fascinating insight into Lee's expectations on the future of progress and how he talked about stuff like racism in politics.

He asserts in the interview, my generation will be the first generation of Southerners that won't be prejudiced.

And this seems rich coming from a guy who repeatedly campaigned on race, right?

Yeah.

But Atwater's argument is that, no, no, no, I got, I did a lot to get guys like Thurman to shut up about the Civil Rights and Voting Act and just focus on fiscal conservatism and cutting social programs and

stuff that's there.

Right.

Yeah.

yeah his argument is that the southern strategy is actually a step forward because you're hiding the racism right

and there's a degree of i don't know if it's shame or guilt that he has when talking about how the southern strategy works because lamis basically asks him like howard how do you square this belief that southerners aren't racist with this whole strategy based on racism and lee gives this answer that's going to become super famous one of the most famous quotes in the history of u.s politics and he prefaces it by saying now y'all aren't going to quote me on this, right?

She says so, and they assure him they aren't, and they kind of don't.

But anyway, here's what he says.

We're going to play you the famous quote.

This is the actual audio of Lee saying it.

There's a good chance you've read this.

But yeah.

Yeah, now y'all aren't quoting me.

I don't know.

I won't read it.

You start out in 1954 by saying nigger, nigger, nigger.

By 1968, you can't say nigger.

That hurts your backfire.

So you say stuff like horse bus and

states rights and all that stuff and you're getting so abstract now you're talking about cutting taxes and all of these things you're talking about are totally economic things and the byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites and subconsciously maybe that is part of it I'm not saying that but I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract and that coded that we we're doing away with the racial problem one way or the other.

You follow me?

I don't know if that's truly.

It's interesting, though, that he kind of seems like he has to believe that.

That, like, this awful racist strategy is justified because, like, we're doing away with more racism than we're embracing, right?

Yeah, I mean, like, does he view this as like a form of like progress in a way?

I mean, I guess he kind of does.

That's part of what he's outly in the clip.

Yeah.

But

the effect is still the same.

Right.

And that's the, and the, you know, it's an open question.

Does he really think that he's actually reduced racism at all?

Does he really think that this is better in that way?

Or is this just what he wants this academic to believe?

Because he doesn't want to have the, he doesn't want to have the legacy of a racist, right?

Well, at least he wasn't quoted on that.

At least he wasn't quoted on that until now.

And yeah, I think that's a good point to end.

We'll be doing three parts this week.

So you'll get them all this week, folks.

A new next episode on Thursday.

Garrison, anything you want to plug before

we close out for the day?

Well, our show It Could Happen Here, which you're also on, Robert, and our weekly news roundup on It Could Happen Here called Executive Disorder, which now has its own special feed, which we've been working on for a long time.

A whole bunch of different series that myself, James, Stout, and Robert has put together have their own feeds on It Could Happen Here now.

So it's easier to find episodes all in the same in following the same story like uh myanmar cop city and also executive disorder so yeah that's that's the main thing um also i occasionally tell

tell a mix of of humor and and jokes based on uh terrorism at a at a at a bar in brooklyn that you can if you know you know if you're if you're a gay person in brooklyn you can figure it out oh there you go go find garrison in brooklyn or maybe don't do that jesus robert you know, do something.

Do something.

Yeah.

Even if it's bad, as long as you're taking action, that's all that matters.

It's okay if it's evil.

I feel like you're really internalizing

Lee's Lee's life.

The Lee Atwater strategy.

Hurt as many people as you want, as long as you're doing something.

Anything to quiet the sound of your brother screaming as he boils alive in oil.

Christ.

You do have to keep remembering that every, every one of these things he's doing, like whenever you look at Lee, he's just like smiling blankly at you.

You have to imagine in his head, the only sound going on instead of static, it's just his brother screaming as he dies.

This sucks.

Good stuff.

I am excited that at the bottom of this page in the script, where we're going to get some, we're going to get some black Manafort and Stone.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

You did call it, Garrison.

Roger Stone is a key part of this story.

Yes, yes, all that and more.

Things to look forward to, my friends.

Part Trace.

All right, everybody, get off the internet now.

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