Responder in Chief | The '60s
Whistlestop: Presidential History and Trivia
Slate Podcasts
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 4 October 2017
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Whistlestop is Slate's podcast about presidential history. Hosted by political correspondent and Political Gabfest panelist John Dickerson, each installment will revisit memorable (or even forgotten) moments from America's Presidential carnival.
Join Slate Plus for full, ad-free access to Whistlestop and your other favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe directly from the Whistlestop show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/whistlestopplus to get access wherever you listen.
Podcast production and edit by Jocelyn Frank. Research by Brian Rosenwald.
Email: whistlestop@slate.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Whistle Stop, a podcast of the presidency. |
| 0:04.2 | I'm John Dickerson of Face the Nation. |
| 0:08.9 | When Lyndon Johnson asked his motorcade to stop and walked into Washington High School on St. Claude's Avenue in New Orleans, |
| 0:16.5 | there were no lights on. No lights on anywhere in the Ninth Ward, |
| 0:19.9 | three days after Hurricane Betsy had |
| 0:22.3 | devastated the poorest pocket of New Orleans. A few flashlights prepared the way for the president |
| 0:28.1 | as he walked. A shifting mass of bodies and half-illuminated, anguished faces greeted him. They |
| 0:34.2 | sought shelter in the high school. Almost all of the people there were African-American. |
| 0:39.5 | Water, water, came the cries. I am your president, said Johnson, and I am here to help. |
| 0:46.2 | When Donald Trump stood at the edge of a similar crowd in Puerto Rico on October 2, 2017, |
| 0:53.0 | and distributed rolls of toilet paper like he was shooting three-pointers |
| 0:57.9 | from downtown. He was participating in a tradition that Lyndon Johnson started that desperate |
| 1:04.0 | evening, 52 years earlier. On September 10, 1965, Johnson gave birth to a modern phenomenon |
| 1:10.7 | at Washington High School. |
| 1:13.0 | The president as first responder and consular in chief. |
| 1:16.8 | The role has elevated presidents and crippled some presidents, but it wasn't always a part of the American presidency. |
| 1:23.8 | Our whistle stop today, well, you know what it is. It's September 7, 1965. Please do try to keep up. But our pre-whistlestop framing device is in the fall of 1955. President Dwight Eisenhower is enjoying some peace and quiet with his son David at his Gettysburg retreat. The president spent his days golfing and fishing. The front pages of American newspapers |
| 1:46.1 | in the fall of 1955 were a collection of stories about happy vacationing President Eisenhower. |
| 1:52.0 | Eisenhower is a happy man fishing and eating, read one headline. Mimi waves goodbye, reads a |
| 1:58.2 | caption to a picture of the president flying off in a prop plane. |
| 2:01.8 | He was headed from his farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to Denver, from one vacation spot to another. |
| 2:07.7 | Boy, that Eisenhower was vacationing a lot, and the paper seemed to have no problem with it. |
... |
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