Harris Wofford, former senator and civil rights adviser, on Obama’s victory

BARACK OBAMA:

For those Americans who, whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight but I hear your voices. I need your help, and I will be your President too.

[CHEERS, APPLAUSE]

ERNIE:

Hi, this is Ernie calling from East Orange, New Jersey. I think people voted for Barack Obama because the man brings to mind John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. I think Barack Obama’s going to have a ? be very effective as President.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Good morning, everyone. The headline in The Chicago Tribune this morning is ?It’s Obama? and Senator Obama is the first northern Democrat elected president since ? Adaora? Do you know?

ADAORA UDOJI:

Um ?

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Nineteen-sixty. John F. Kennedy. So there’s an amazing generational shift and a kind of an historical arc that’s being drawn here, and to discuss it, we have Harris Wofford, former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, but more importantly, an advisor to JFK on civil rights and someone who worked on the 1960 campaign.

Harris Wofford, thanks so much for joining us. You had a late night last night, I have a feeling.

HARRIS WOFFORD:

Hi. [LAUGHS] Haven’t had much sleep, but that’s fine. I couldn’t be happier for our country and, and for our relationship with the world.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Now, there have been a lot of perhaps superficial easy sort of comparisons drawn between the Barack Obama campaign and what happened in 1960, but you have the perspective that’s really valuable here. What do you think of the comparison?

HARRIS WOFFORD:

Well, I, I campaigned around the country saying that, that John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King lit a torch that Barack Obama has now picked up. I think in fact the most interesting comparison would be for you to think about the comparison with Franklin Roosevelt, who came at a time when the economic crisis superceded everything else, and it enabled him to stir the country and move it for a long time to come.

Now you know when Lyndon Johnson signed the

Civil Rights Act of 1964, he said that this is probably losing the South to the Democratic party for a generation, and it did. He signed it because he knew what race was doing, racial prejudice was doing to corrupt and to destroy the best side of politics in a whole region of our country and it was necessary to do, but that period is over and we’ve grown up.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

You know, the, the interesting thing about reading of your experiences in 1960, working closely with JFK in that campaign, do you see some of the same sorts of scenes and important kind of articulation of a message that Barack Obama was able to do as effectively as John Kennedy, because both Kennedy and Obama were viewed as pretty implausible candidates going in to the race?

HARRIS WOFFORD:

And Kennedy won by 100,000 votes, and that made a tremendous difference in what he could do. He, he made two terrible appointments, because he needed to somehow try to build support when he lost ? when he won so narrowly he reappointed J. Edgar Hoover, who was then the most popular American, who later was a persecutor of Martin Luther King in a terrible way for years, before King was killed, and secondly [LAUGHS] Allen Dulles, who froze the cold war.

We would probably not have had the Bay of Pigs if he hadn’t reappointed Allen Dulles, and he made those two appointments to, to try to build a majority that he didn’t ? he just really didn’t have a governing majority. By the time he was killed, John Kennedy had, was on the way, I think, one, to being a great president, but two, to having a majority and a reelection majority that would have enabled him to do very great things.

I didn’t think [LAUGHS] it would take a generation. I thought that ? I was wrong. I thought that this is – when the vote was given to women, my mother campaigned for in 1920, finally they get the right to vote ? thereafter there was ? there was no more opposition to it. It remained a guess that people wouldn’t vote for a woman president, but ? race is a very deep thing, the racial feeling.

And this, this election I think has [LAUGHS] – on this issue, which has been a great blight on the American body politic of this ? this election has, has put that behind us. This ?

ADAORA UDOJI:

Senator, one ?

HARRIS WOFFORD:

– decisive victory ?

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Go ahead, Adaora.

ADAORA UDOJI:

I was just ? Senator, one criticism that JFK Junior and Barack Obama have shared is that they’re all ? that they are all words and no substance. Eloquence, we found out during the election process, or the, the presidential election campaign, turned out to be a bad word, but isn’t there some great irony when this is a time when someone who is eloquent can inspire the country to try to face the challenges ahead?

HARRIS WOFFORD:

Well, you know, America [LAUGHS] was ? the thing called the United States of America, aside from a standard problem of, of a land wanting to get out from under being run by another land, however good England was ? the challenge here is America was born with words.

The gap between the great words and the reality is the best part of America’s history, in a sense. Closing that gap is our destiny. You know, most countries grow up as England did, out of the soil, for there [?].

We, we said this was a country born in liberty and dedicated to the proposition ? most countries are not dedicated to a proposition. They ?

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Right.

HARRIS WOFFORD:

– they may come to it. So I think we’re going to close that gap between the great words and the reality, and it’ll be his test to see whether he can do it.

But the search for common ground to take the actions we need to take in this country is on and ?

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

It begins now.

HARRIS WOFFORD:

– he, he understand it.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Right. Senator, you know, Adaora also talks about another gap there in her question, this inspiration gap. I mean, a lot of people, and I think this was true in 1960, in their disillusionment over what had gone on in the Fifties in a sense that the World War II, the pre-World War II generation had passed, and it was time for something new, they put their hopes in this vessel called JFK.

And unfortunately JFK didn’t really live to make good on those hopes. He was assassinated. In some way, in a nonpartisan way, this decisive victory is about the broad American electorate putting their hopes in someone named Barack Obama to do something fundamentally different from what’s gone on in the last eight years. Is that too tall an order for any man?

HARRIS WOFFORD:

No, the difference is, and that’s why I think 1968 and Robert Kennedy, who was also killed, of course, is a better touch point. In 1960, the country didn’t ? there wasn’t 80 percent of the people thinking we were on the wrong track. Kennedy had to do his best to try to convince people that however appealing Eisenhower was ? he was still very popular ? we were on a wrong track. But it was a hard job. He had to convince people that we had a missile crisis, which it turned out we didn’t have.

In this case, unlike any time since Roosevelt, 85 percent of the people are saying this country is on the wrong track, and that’s why this is an opportunity to get on a new track. It’s when things are bad like that that you can ?

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Right.

HARRIS WOFFORD:

– when iron is hot, you can shape it.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Well, Obama has until January 20th, I guess, to get his transition in place. Anything you’d put on his to-do list? Is there a book you’d suggest he read? I know he takes your advice.

HARRIS WOFFORD:

Well, I think Jonathan Alter’s ?The Defining Moment? of Roosevelt’s first hundred days is a book to read, and I’m told he has said the most influential book he’s read in the last year has been Doris Kearns’ ?The Team of Rivals?, showing how Lincoln –

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Doris Kearns Goodwin.

HARRIS WOFFORD:

– how Lincoln chose the strongest people he could find from his own rivals, who didn’t even believe in him, to work together. And he said, and conveyed it last night, it’s going to be an administration of national unity from top to bottom.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Right. Well, Harris Wofford, thanks so much for the great history lesson and a look forward there. It’s great to talk to you. And get some sleep now.

HARRIS WOFFORD:

[LAUGHS] Thank you.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Harris Wofford, former U.S. Senator and advisor to JFK on civil rights, with the Obama campaign there in Chicago.

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