August 26, 2025 • 56 mins
Robert sits down with Garrison Davis to discuss the life and times of Lee Atwater, the arch inventor of Republican dirty tricks politics.
(3 Part Series, releasing all this week)
Sources:
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/biography/lee-atwater
https://www.newberryobserver.com/news/10323/notable-newberry-alumnus
https://andrewjazprosehill.substack.com/p/the-death-bed-confession-of-a-boogie
https://www.csmonitor.com/1989/0626/elee.html
https://archive.is/yZ0Hf#selection-553.0-553.173
https://time.com/archive/6702136/saying-no-to-lee-atwater/
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/brady-bad.html
https://nul.org/news/ghost-lee-atwater-haunts-2022-midterm-elections
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Robert Evans here and I just finished committing a light
form of tree genocide on some invasive trees that live
in my sideyard 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
(00:25):
to do to get to that tree, kill it, kill
them all. Garrison Davis, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Hello, thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Do you hate the tree of Paradise? Garrison?
Speaker 3 (00:34):
I remember some struggles years ago, but my problems have escalated.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Yeah, 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.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
No, Luckily there's no trees on the East coast, so
that's problem.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
They got rid of all the trees. Not as much
of a joke as we'd like it to be. Oh,
they've been growing back over the last two hundred 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?
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Billionaires? I guess I don't know, fascists, billionaires, that whole area.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Yeah, I mean billionaires, fascists, and the political party that
they largely use for a lot of their dirty work,
their 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,
(01:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
I've heard of the name. I feel like it's one
of those like Roger Stone types. Yes, probably like a
combined him with a few other people yet, but don't
have a clear idea like who this guy is. But
it's like one of the it's like somewhere like in
that rolodex of guy.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
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 Carl Rove, George W. Bush's
campaign manager. Like, he was the guy who got Carl
Rove his start and taught him everything he knows, the
(02:30):
guy who George W. Bush nicknamed turd Blossom. That's that's
that's a true story, Garrison, And that was a compliment.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
I can't believe our president would pick demeaning names for
his friends, the slash enemies. This is crazy.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
It was not meant to be anyway. That's another story
for another day when we do the Carl 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 not only I'm
going after Atwater. Yes, wow, I see how you feel
about this.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
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 assassin this is
what you know about time travel?
Speaker 2 (03:10):
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 Hill and 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
(03:31):
to go back in time and kill regular Hitler. Someone
already did it.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
I mean, yeah, that is kind of what happens in Terminator, right, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Basically, Yeah, that's the gist of Terminator because.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
I've seen like five different cg like Arnold Schwartzenaker's at
this point, so it's no matter what you take care of,
they're always going to make some deep faked version. Again.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yeah, that's that's really the ultimate message of the Terminator movie.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
My god, deep fake Hitler. When's that going to be
in a blockbuster?
Speaker 2 (03:57):
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.
(04:19):
If you go to donorbox dot org, if you type
in Defense Fund PDX donor box, you'll find their donor
box page and that would help a lot. They could
use the donations and their venmo is at Defense Fund PDX.
So please help them out. All right, that's the end
of the cold open. We're back. So we're talking about
(04:46):
Lee Atwater who was born Harvey Leroy at Water, 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 that I came from
the very middle of the middle He.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
Was a pretty wealthy. Yeah, top we'll say top of
the middle. He wasn't rich, but top of the middle class. Comfortable.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
He and he and both his mom and his dad, know,
like their family origins in the United States going back
two hundred and 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.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
But this is not you know, with like the twenty
three and me stuff where you can like find it.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
But but yeah, no, and it's they know their relatives
because they had famous answer.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
They have like a family lineage, right right.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
His mother was Toddy Page. She got the name Toddy
because she toddled around as a kid, I think, and
she trades. It's a very like fucking middle twentieth century
wife name, Yeah, Todty.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
She traced her family line back to a Revolutionary War
hero named Alexander Craighead. 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 were talking about like reconstruction era.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
Right eighteen eighteen seventies or something.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Yeah, they were talk about like I think, I think
he starts before the Civil War. But yeah, this is
like around the period when like they're definitely the good guys.
He has his son called Leroy, which is where our
Lee Atwater takes his name from, who's born in eighteen
ninety one, and as a teenager, is permanently maimed, has
his leg fucked up forever in a horse drawn wagon accident.
(06:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
This is this is important.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
This is an important wagon accident. I'll tell you why
in a minute now. Like most twenty year olds, in
nineteen eleven, he elopes with a sixteen 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
(07:09):
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 tales from his childhood as a book,
which I mean a guests are like partly true given
his descendants, but he's got the gift of gab and
(07:29):
He's going to like pass this on to his kids,
and it's going to become a thing that the men
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
where there was no Republican party in South Carolina. In
(07:52):
nineteen thirty two, 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 on their hands. Es why the worms turned?
Speaker 4 (08:03):
Why is the book called bad Boy.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Because that's his favorite song, Sophie. We'll be getting to
Lee at Water in a little bit, and his his
love of R and B.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
Don't you worry, oh boy, this is this is the
beginning of the of the little switcheroo. Yes, regard like
not like a real switcheroo, but like with like shifting
shifting politics.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
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 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
(08:45):
communist right, like, things of things have changed. The pages
make sure that all of their children grow up voracious readers,
and they were in the we'd call them helicopter parents today. Right,
They're obsessively concerned with their kids that even their daughter's educations,
they're studying their homework, They're like quizzing them and stuff.
They're unusually involved in their education for parents of this
(09:05):
period of time. And most of Toddy's elders lived to
their nineties, 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 nineties.
That is a little bit of foreshadowing.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
Damn, all these fucking guys just live forever. I swear to.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
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 heart. 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
(09:44):
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 sixteen thirty seven. He and his wife had ten children,
and the Atwater family historian, because they have one of those,
wrote that and quote their children and grand children endured
as many hardships, felled, as many trees, fought as many Indians,
(10:07):
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
sixteen twenty.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
Good, all around great.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
What an incredible sentence.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
So he's They're one of those families. They're one of
those families like Capital Tea.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Those yeah, those families, And it's very funny. They're the
kind of family that because again his David Atwater arrives
in sixteen thirty seven, the Mayflower I's in sixteen twenty,
and the family historing is like, well, I have to
come up with an excuse for they're as good basically
as the people who arrived at sixteen twenty, right, because
that's a big difference to us. Like the fact that
we didn't quite make it onto the Mayflower is something
(10:47):
that our family takes shit for. Oh, you guys got
her seventeen years later.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
They're still trying to make up for it. Yeah, this
has been a stain on our family history four centuries.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Why wasn't he born seventeen years earlier?
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Goddamn it, David, we really did not want the second
generation Pilgrim had.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
No, no, it's even second. But like now daily lace
late lace first, 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, this is the melon guy class the at Waters. Now,
(11:28):
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
(11:48):
in New York State as a potential place for Napoleon
Bonaparte to retire if he escapes, which so cool. What
a wild thing that would be. If there's just like, yeah,
and that's Napoleon's house outside of Schenectady.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
God, that would be fun.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
I don't know if it was Schenectady, worrybot, it was
somewhere in New York State, But yeah, Napoleon was thinking
about retiring to New York, like Lee Pace.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Really two of history's giant.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
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 US 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.
(12:35):
And this is the legacy that Leroy Atwater, our Lee
Atwater was born to inherit when he came into the
world on February twenty seventh, nineteen fifty one, in Atlanta, Georgia.
I A, that's how you guys say it, right.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Yes, that is the pronunciation.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Thank you, thank you, just making sure so the Reddit
doesn't come after me again. So at the time of
his birth, his.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Model it's Atlanta at that like the AT symbol.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Like that's how Yeah. So at the time of his birth,
his mother was a teacher and his father, Harvey, was
an insurance adjuster. Lee was born. Yes, I hardly know
her even we should have done that for Atwater Garrison.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
What I thought about it? I don't I'm off my
game today.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
It's okay. None of this is going as planned. We
had a little mix up before recording. 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 taken to the doctor, and
the doctor I don't know if this is what's actually wrong,
(13:42):
because if we're talking the fifties with the doctor, probably
while smoking a cigarette, it's still drunk from the night before,
is like, oh yeah, it's nervous systems not finished cooking.
Just let him finish, he'll be fine. I don't I
don't know that that's what happened. But he doesn't stop.
Like he always kind of has some of these like nervouses,
some issues, right, Like they'll plague him all of his life.
(14:03):
And as a result, Toddy is like his twenty four
to seven parent, Like she's not able to get like
a sitter because he cries anytime she leaves. He needs
like constant twenty four hour attention. He barely sleeps. He's
a sickly child right for the first couple of years
of his life.
Speaker 4 (14:17):
So he is.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
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 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 callous on the back of
his head. So that's terrible, it's fucked up. He's this kid,
(14:40):
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 it's rough.
Now Toddy is an attentive and devotive brother. His dad
is kind of a fifties dad. He's mainly working. He's
(15:02):
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 fifties dad than his father. Now Lee is again,
he's he's kind of a late bloomer, but once he
starts going, once he starts growing up, he's it's kind
of like a He's kind of like a fucking rocket ship.
(15:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
That's always a bad start when they start acting like this.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
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. People think I can do something,
It doesn't matter if I've done it or not. What
matters as I've tricked them into thinking I've done it, right, Like,
(16:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Sounds like he's born for politics.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
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 is
his memory and his mother's attentiveness. She takes him to
museums and to historic sites constantly, and he files away
everything she in the different museum Docince tell him, which
(16:40):
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
he's 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 a legible.
It never really gets better throughout his life. Some of
(17:03):
this as a result of the nerve. He can't hold
a pin or a pencil properly. He's described as always
holding writing implements like chalk because he's got like these
weird nerve issues.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
Yeah, he has like the big like vice grip thing
right right right, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Which obviously that's not his fault, but that's you know,
a factor in how he comes up the way he does.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
I wonder if 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 like like active understanding.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
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 would be
(18:00):
diagnosed with ADHD so fucking quickly, right, But we had
not invented that yet, And so her mom was just told,
he's got too much energy. You gotta tire about, you know, Meg,
I'm running around the yard a bunch. It being the fifties,
his parents saw him 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
(18:23):
a stereotypical Indian chief on a daily basis, carrying a
real tomahawk wherever he went, because, again, it was the fifties,
and that was fine.
Speaker 5 (18:31):
A little three year old 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 eighteenth,
nineteen fifty three, Lee's little brother, Joe was born.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
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, the
eldest boy, the oldest boy. And he acted well, no,
I think he's the oldest child. The o their daughter's
the youngest.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
Yeah, so he's the older that went right over your head.
It's fine, it's fine, it it's fine.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Okay uh. 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
(19:35):
Atwaters moved around a lot during Lee's early childhood. His
father had studied to become a lawyer, but quit to
work as an insurance suggester, and his change in ambitions
was followed by moving first from Georgia to Charleston, and
then from Charleston finally to Ake in South Carolina. Now,
the year after they moved to South Carolina, their Senator
Strom Thurmond would become famous for launching the longest continuous
(19:56):
fill against guy. This fucking guy. Oh, Strom's a big
part to this story, Garrison, You're not ready for how
involved in all this strom fucking Thermond is, such as
like if you don't know anything, if someone's like, hey,
who do you think strom Thermond was, if they just
tell you he was a syner, he'd be like, well,
I bet he was a racist one. Yes, that's the
racist guy name, Like, that's that's on ontological or a determination.
(20:21):
Where the fuck? What is it? Uh, 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.
So he became famous for launching the longest continuous filibuster
in the history of the United States from eight fifty
four PM at that point, Yeah, until our hero Corey Booker.
(20:44):
Did Corey beat it one secon Yeah, check this out.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
This is in the news this year. We talked about this. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
So up till up until Corey Booker, strom Billy was
the longest continuous filibuster in the history of the United States.
Twenty four hours and eighteen 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. Thurman said
during his filibuster, I'm convinced that this is bad proposed
(21:15):
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 Thurman's going to say
about civil rights in this period of time. Thurman had
previously been governor of South Carolina and had run as
a presidential candidate for the Dixiecrats, which was, you know,
(21:37):
the Southern Democrats. We'll talk about what the Dixiecrats are
in a second in nineteen forty eight, and when he
wasn't up before Congress. His language about these matters was
often a lot less polite. An article in WNYC Studios
that Takeaway summarizes quote. Almost a decade before Thurman's filibuster,
Southern state separatist leaders had revolted in opposition to President
Harry Truman's civil rights platform in nineteen forty eight. Democrats
(22:00):
themselves Dixiecrats and spoke about taking back the country that
was being turned into an unrecognizable dictatorship. And here's Thurmont.
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,
(22:22):
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 are
swimming pools, into our homes. And into our churches, Thurman said,
and he is. It's a hard r every time. Yeah,
we should have oh boy, maybe the butt we should
(22:44):
have sent out the B forty nines.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
Yeah, this is like one of like the last like
gasps of the Southern Democrats right before like the you know,
the the switchover apart the Social Democrats, like the progressive wing,
which gained a lot of success underdr was able to
exert more more influence over the whole party, and the
Southern Democrats kind of like fizzled through it the fifties.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
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 moved to Ake in South Carolina.
And I bring that up not just because he's the
senator in their state, because that Lee might not have
known much about this. They move in down they're like
(23:28):
three doors down from strom Thurman. He is their next
doordon neighbor.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
Right.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
Lee Atwater meets him for the first time in on
Halloween nineteen fifty six. The year before that filibuster.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
Fucking the screenwriters on the nose. Chill out, guys.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Oh 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.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Fucking give out the.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Full sized candy bars. Look, he's a racist, but full
sized candy bars for Halloween. Who's to say if he's bad?
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Nickers satisfies we are. Wow, we are.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
Speaking of things that satisfy.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
So satisfying things. Yeah, that's right, good work, here's ads.
We're back and uh 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 as a kid, my parents
(24:29):
were both into the hole like well, he you know
he was. It was more about states rights for him.
He wasn't like it was about racism for him. That's
what Thurman said when it became unpopular to be racist,
layers that like, well, I was never racist. It was
no hard r every time, every time, like uh. Also,
when he was in his twenties, he impregnates a fifteen
(24:52):
year old house servant and as 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 Thermot.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
That's really bad.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Fun guy. Well maybe we'll cover in one of these days.
Speaker 4 (25:07):
Really glad he's dead.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
Yeah, he lived way too fucking long. Motherfucker lived forever.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
This like a few days ago, like like James Dobson
died at like like a ninety something. It's like, are
we gonna celebrate this? No, not really, like they're all, yeah,
I'm glad they got. He damaged everything he wanted to do.
Like Dobson's were the most successful political actors of the
past fifty years. He he won. I almost feel bad
(25:34):
like sharing memes like because it's it's not it's not good.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
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 a little a little solace,
a quantum of solace to steal from the James Bond books.
So obviously being down the street from Strong Thermont doesn't
make you a bastard, but he's gonna go on to
(25:59):
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 is 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
(26:21):
young Lee's future life even more than strom Thurman. This
is maybe the definitive moment of his life. On the
afternoon of October fifth, Toddy 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 donuts.
You know, Lee is in watching TV. Brother Joe was
(26:41):
kind of toddling around. He's like three. She's struggling with
a migraine, so she's not paying as much attention as
she normally paid 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 fryar on top of this 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
(27:02):
TV and three year old Joe toddles into the kitchen
and gets up on top of a trash can and
it starts like fiddling with the fryer, and she tells
him to get down, and he trips and the trash
can of falls and he pulls the fryer on top
of himself and in an instant, this three year old
boys coated head to toe in boiling oil. Now, this
(27:22):
is an instantly fatal injury, and that the instant it happens,
he's dead. But he doesn't die. It's just there's no
treating this today. You could fix this. He has immediately
ninety degrees like third degree birds over a ninety percent
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,
(27:44):
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 state, 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,
(28:06):
I should it's like saying that I'm just traumatized. It's
like that's not even necessary. Of course they are.
Speaker 3 (28:12):
No matter what your family is, like, this is going
to be a tragic event, like, yeah, that's unfairly bad.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
Yeah, And the people who knew Lee well would say
that he was This changes him forever and it's gonna
My opinion is that I think part of why he
is the way he is is that from this point one,
he is like the world's chaos. It doesn't matter what
I do. It's like it's just all about personal like gratificate,
like fuck it, fuck the world, right, That's just my interpretation.
(28:40):
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's really
you probably hear that forever.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
Yeah, yeah, that's really bad.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
I go just the worst thing I can conceive of
pretty much, that's 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.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
Yeah, this is going to make anyone, no matter who
you are, just just a more broken person.
Speaker 4 (29:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
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,
(29:40):
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 nineteen sixty one, 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 watch boil to death. Yeah yeah.
(30:04):
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 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.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
So now he's no longer like next door neighbors with
Thermon A nice point.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
No, but the family had become friends and they have
a connection that will last the rest of their lives. Right,
Like his parents know how to contact Straw like because
they were.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
Neighbors in more waste than one. The damage is already done.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
The damage is already done. You have to imagine, I
mean strom Thurman probably like reached out and brought up
a cast role after their son boiled to death or something.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
You said, 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.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
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 sized candy bar. Theurmon'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 Yan noted that
he was quote unable to stay focused, always switching channels,
(31:14):
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 Yan, who was too shy to throw a
party even if it was his birthday. It wasn't so like, Okay,
(31:35):
there's a lot of fun moments, because.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
Forbid of kid have a little fun.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
God forbid a child enjoy himself.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
But although I could see how these tactics might become
useful and fallen ticks later down the line.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Right, And it's the point that Brady's 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 composed 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
(32:08):
he's always a lot of fun. And depending on the source,
he's always He's either described as manipulative or a leader.
And I don't think those two things are exclusive.
Speaker 3 (32:18):
No, no, no, no no.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
He's just always in charge.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
You know. I can't believe this. I can't believe this
cult leader was also manipulative.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
Right. His friend in 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 twenty sixteen that
rash articles came out being like wrestling is how you
should understand Donald Trump. Trump thinks about politics in a
(32:46):
wrestling way. The first guy to explicitly say us politics
works the way wrestling does and explain it is lee
atwater in like the seventies. He's talking about like wrestling
is really the way to understand like k faban shit
is the way to understand how politics work.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
Without him, Trump never would have had that that razor
palmed to fake the assassination attempt.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
That's right, that's right. He wouldn't have been able to garrison.
Don't feed the blue and Ons.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
God damn sorry, I'm writing about the assassination conspiracy theories
right now. Is that I couldn't help it.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Yeah, this is just gonna make it worse. An air
fifteen 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
(33:38):
he makes. He is not interested in having money.
Speaker 3 (33:40):
Or the process. It's that process satisfies him. Yes, it's
like you're you're like outsmarting someone like you're you're able
to like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
He likes convincing people to buy things. You know, he
doesn't so much care about money.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
You're winning someone over, and that is that can be
like an exhilarating thing to do.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
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 since right, He's greedy in the influence sense.
That's what motivates him.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
Can I make you do this thing? What will it
take for me to get this result?
Speaker 2 (34:13):
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 shitt even though he's clearly
like the smartest kid in most of his classes. One
(34:34):
of his English teachers described she signed his yearbook by
calling him my first nightmare every morning with an exclamation point.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
That's fun.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
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 taxis seems to snap him out of
this this like thing where he can't pay attention or
focus right like he instantly, she said, he asked better
questions than anyone else in the class. He was totally
(35:05):
focused the whole time. He was excited. They get to
take a picture with his old family friends strom Thurmond,
and he's super psyched.
Speaker 3 (35:12):
You know.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
It's yeah, it's this, it's this. You can see the
fucking shadow of Darth Vader behind Anakin moment thing right like,
oh no.
Speaker 3 (35:21):
Whenever a kid gets too excited in the capitol again,
you got you gotta fixed that early.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
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 just time, you
should prescribe them heroin, right, something to slow him down,
you know, got to knock him out of the running somehow. So, Sophie,
it's fine for you as long as it's pure, you know,
as long as it's uncut, it's safe.
Speaker 3 (35:48):
No comment.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Yeah. Outside of politics, Lee's other primary interest is music,
specifically the music of James Brown. He loves aren't he
loves black music right like he loves R and 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,
(36:10):
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 he like and yeah. He also he prefers
most of the artists he likes, and he will befriend
(36:31):
and play with because he's in the band most of
his life. He'll play with a number of like famous
blues and R and 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
(36:53):
from his favorite musicians, and he'll do them as like
party tricks.
Speaker 3 (36:57):
Yeah, it's putting in inputs to get a certain output, right,
same thing with selling, same thing with your class clown
manipulative high jinks exactly right.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
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. On Basically,
they make him a deal where like, yeah, you can
if you take piano classes for three years, we'll buy
you a guitar. So he takes piano classes for exactly
(37:28):
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
fifty cents each that he can play the same five
notes repeatedly longer than they can stand to listen, and
at around three am they give up and pay him. Right,
like his fingers are bleeding, but he just will not
(37:49):
stop until they like. He loves making wagers and it's
not about the money, it's about the winning.
Speaker 3 (37:56):
You know. That's the other thing to watch out for,
if any kid really likes making bets. Got us top
that quick?
Speaker 2 (38:02):
Yes, now, I was that kind of kid in high school.
And we did get one of our friends to try
to drink an and tighter 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
(38:24):
of twelve. He is a daily heavy smoker from age
twelve on. It's so funny it was easy to get
cigarettes back then.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
A twelve year old in a suit smoking a cigarette.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Hell yeah, yeah, just Shane 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.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
Do you know what his cigarette was?
Speaker 2 (38:49):
No? Actually I don't. I'm gonna guess.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
Paul Mall biographers need to we need to get better
at it. Get there, breaking sure, we know which cigarette
a person smokes. I think it tells you a lot
about a person.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Vonnegut was a pall mall man, you know, okay, And
obviously all the hip kids today smoke American spirits. But
what it matters? What like brand you're smoking?
Speaker 3 (39:10):
Right?
Speaker 2 (39:10):
Like?
Speaker 3 (39:11):
You know? Color? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (39:12):
Yeah, some people, some people like that green bullshit. I'm
more into my into the grays, you know, Okay. I
don't smoke cigarettes. I just always keep a pack of
cigarettes on me in my jacket.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
There you go.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
It's always useful. You never know who's gonna need a cigarette.
Do you need a cigarette? If so, why not take
it while listening to ads?
Speaker 4 (39:31):
Jesus Christ, we're back.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
I hope you've all had a delicious cigarette, A delightful cigarette.
Apologies to anyone who just quits 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 die?
Speaker 3 (40:00):
I smoke aesthetically to complete an outfit, of course, not
like I'm not like a smoker.
Speaker 4 (40:06):
R scare, what.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
Don't cigarettes?
Speaker 4 (40:11):
Don't smoke cigarettes? Thank you.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
I mean it's again, it's it's only for the outfit, Sophie.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
If someone shoots at you, smoke a cigarette, that's what
they're for. They're great.
Speaker 3 (40:20):
Shot at me in a while. That that's the thing.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
I know. Then you can't got to find somebody to
shoot at you. So you can get a smoke in,
go to a waffle house. You'll get shot out of it.
Speaker 3 (40:30):
Outside the Manhattan Hilton.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
Yeah, there you go. So his peers recall him being
very awkward around women and falling back offers 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 He's just bullshitting about it at first,
but he does. He figures it out at a pretty
(40:53):
young age. He has his first serious girlfriend in ninth grade.
John Brady writes quote at school dances, he would get
on stage, dance around, playing air guitar, mugging with his
blues face upstaging act creating God's 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
(41:14):
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 Lee 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
(41:36):
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.
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
(41:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (42:05):
And yeah, 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.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
I relate to a lot of 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.
(42:37):
And Lee Attwater is a performer, right.
Speaker 3 (42:39):
And the important thing is that they stay in wrestling
or entertainment. Whenever they switch over to politics, that's where
it gets bad.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
It's awful, it's the worst and every time. Yeah, yeah,
that's and leads 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 isn't 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
(43:09):
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 he's just got the brain for it.
Speaker 3 (43:21):
And that sucks.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
I'm getting ahead of myself here.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
So he gets Chris want to show Garrison a photo
of leat Water with chick?
Speaker 4 (43:29):
Oh yeah, because because I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Speaker 1 (43:34):
Because he he looks like uh to for Grace from
and then in this phot he looks like to for
Grace when he was on that seventy show.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
That he does look a lot like to for Grace.
Speaker 3 (43:45):
Okay, look at his dork Yeah yeah, yeah, what a medium?
Speaker 2 (43:49):
What the hairs?
Speaker 3 (43:51):
I want James or Banniac to play him in a movie.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
James or Banniac could definitely play Lee. You'd have to
do a Southern accent because oh but you'll you'll hear
Lee and a little bit here.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
He can he can do it.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
He could do it.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
Oh yeah, that would be good casting.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
H 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
(44:27):
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.
(44:48):
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'll
(45:08):
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,
(45:31):
but I was really like, I was self educated, right,
he was an autodid act 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 a signed reading. And so
(45:52):
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 Lee is. He's definitely smart, he's definitely capable
(46:14):
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 in 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
(46:39):
read two or three books a week during this period
of time, like that's what he claims. But he's going
to make this claim again years later when he's starting
to make a name for himself as a Republican Party
campaign strategist. And I want to quote from an article
for The New York Times by Marine Daud writing about
this period of time. And this is later in life,
but I think it's relevant to the claim he makes
(46:59):
while he's in grade school. Quote as a Reagan aid,
he bragged that he read three books a week, everything
from Dostoyevski to Alvin Toffler, and then hired an aide
named James Pinkerton to read the books and give him summaries. Well,
he jogged on the treadmill at the White House. Jim.
It was a good joke about all the reporters who
wrote about his prodigious reading habits, and the lofty quotes
also impressed young women. He really did read The Great Gatsby,
(47:21):
Pinkerton recalls Fogley, so that's good. I think he's doing
that a version of that int highest because basically having
chatchypet summarized books for you, that's what he be doing
it and he gets it's what he was 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.
Speaker 3 (47:36):
This is the same thing he was doing as a kid, right,
like as like as like a little kid, and to
like impress adults. It's this is like even connected to
his like urge to like perform. It's like the deception
of the performances all that matters that overrides any like
actual like substance. Yes, behind this, because no one can
actually truly like understand the substance unless you let them in.
(47:58):
And if you're always putting on this character, then no
one's going to get level close enough to understand that,
right right.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
And I think it also he is he could do
better in school than he does, but not as much
better as he 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 said talking
about how purposefully he fucked up school and about how
much he read and how smart he really was. Those
(48:24):
are both like coping mechanisms to protect his ego to
an extent. His grades are bad enough that in tenth
grade his parents send him away to a military school.
He goes to Fork Union Military School with starting in
the fall of nineteen sixty six. And this is the
kind of place, 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
(48:47):
sizzling pot of adhd. Right every kid there could like
be swallowing riddle in by the fucking pound. John Brady
talks to several of his classmates. One of them later
claimed he was a manipulator, 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
(49:09):
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. Yea, 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 you'd compete with him and
jumping out of their window two floors up and then
(49:31):
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 bully. He's such
a little psycho. He starts drinking. I mean it's kind
(49:53):
of funny, but like it's subjectively shitty.
Speaker 3 (49:56):
Yes, he starts.
Speaker 2 (49:58):
Drinking at age fifteen, and he finds a store that
doesn't check IDs and sells papst blue ribbon that is
his child beer. In his biography of Lee, John the
scribes 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
(50:18):
he changed back into civies and hugged beers and long
extended gulps like a sword swallower. He could consume a
six pack in ten miles, tossing cans out the car window,
then arriving at a rock or soul dance thoroughly blitz
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. Fun kid, I.
Speaker 3 (50:45):
Like that they're measuring drinking by the mile.
Speaker 2 (50:48):
By the mile, that's how you know you're really doing
some underage drinking.
Speaker 3 (50:52):
Six and every ten miles.
Speaker 2 (50:54):
Just hurling the empty beers out the window. Fuck it,
who's gonna stop us? Not a seat belt inside? The
cops are just as drunk as you.
Speaker 1 (51:02):
It was.
Speaker 2 (51:03):
We used to be a proper country garrison.
Speaker 3 (51:06):
Alas his grade, Yeah, alas, until people like this came around.
Speaker 2 (51:11):
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 like methodical plan to convince
his parents to let him go back to high school.
He wants to go to J. C. Flora High which
is where several of his friends had gone and is
like a college campus in size and organization more than
(51:32):
like a traditional high school. Yeah, it's a public school
and it's a big one. It sounds kind of like
where 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. For Jane Mayer's article
in The New Yorker. The first presidential campaign that Atwater
(51:54):
managed was a bid to get a friend of his
elected as student body president. Against the friend's wishes, he
created did a list of false accomplishments, and devised a
fake rating system that ranked his friend first. The poll
was called big Ats Comedy Ratings, and it was distributed
as a flyer listing the funniest boys and girls in school.
To continue with Mayor's quote, he plastered the school with
posters declaring his friend's platform of false promises of free
(52:18):
beer on tap in the cafeteria, free dates, free girls.
The campaign took a darker turn when Atwater's sidekicks 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,
(52:40):
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 in 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.
Speaker 4 (52:59):
Well a lot.
Speaker 2 (53:00):
There.
Speaker 3 (53:01):
Wow, that's horrifying.
Speaker 2 (53:04):
That's nuts. Yet it's so fucking odd.
Speaker 1 (53:06):
I learned how to organize, and I learned.
Speaker 2 (53:10):
Beating kids because he's fucking yeah, like and he's like
and I this mob, Yeah what a cool guy. Yeah
this this kid's gotta be evil.
Speaker 3 (53:23):
Uh that's that's that's wild.
Speaker 2 (53:28):
Right, and it's it's it's something else like that is
sinister as fuck.
Speaker 3 (53:33):
That also sounds like a great like eighties film. That's
like it does so.
Speaker 2 (53:37):
Much of his childhood right, even like an eighties or
early nineties movie.
Speaker 3 (53:41):
Yeah, like, yeah, it would be such such a good
like person running for class president like a movie.
Speaker 2 (53:48):
If he had just written like, if he just become
like John Hughes, you know, we could have been saved
a lot of horror as a 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
(54:09):
on social media? You got anything you want to plug?
Speaker 3 (54:12):
I mean no, just just it could happen here. Are
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 thirty thirty thirty five weeks now?
Speaker 1 (54:26):
Jesus, you changed your handle on the social medis, didn't?
Speaker 2 (54:29):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (54:30):
Yes, I changed my handle for fun to buy shown
in type on all social media platforms. I mean, I'm
still trying to use blue sky.
Speaker 4 (54:38):
But it's a bummer hashtag.
Speaker 3 (54:43):
I don't know that's true. It's all of them are it's.
Speaker 4 (54:46):
A bummer, and then it's a fascist bummer.
Speaker 2 (54:49):
There's you know, I yeah, the other bad there's nothing
good trying, trying, try for.
Speaker 3 (54:55):
The podcasts, but but you know, occasionally occasionally.
Speaker 4 (54:59):
Yeah, uh well, we'll be back with part two.
Speaker 2 (55:04):
Yeah uh yeah. Perhaps.
Speaker 3 (55:07):
Oh this guy didn't just end running for president.
Speaker 2 (55:11):
No, no, this he did not drop.
Speaker 1 (55:13):
Dead after organizing school election.
Speaker 3 (55:17):
And I thought that was that's right, that's a great ending.
Speaker 2 (55:21):
No, we'll we'll hit you with part two. But first
we're gonna 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
(55:46):
black hole if they get charged with a fucking misdemeanor. Generally, yeah,
please help and good out. I love you.
Speaker 1 (55:58):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the
Bastards is now available on YouTube.
Speaker 4 (56:13):
New episodes every.
Speaker 1 (56:15):
Wednesday and Friday.
Speaker 4 (56:16):
Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com. Slash at behind
the bastards
Also media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Robert Evans here and I just finished committing a light
form of tree genocide on some invasive trees that live
in my sideyard 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
(00:25):
to do to get to that tree, kill it, kill
them all. Garrison Davis, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Hello, thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Do you hate the tree of Paradise? Garrison?
Speaker 3 (00:34):
I remember some struggles years ago, but my problems have escalated.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Yeah, 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.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
No, Luckily there's no trees on the East coast, so
that's problem.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
They got rid of all the trees. Not as much
of a joke as we'd like it to be. Oh,
they've been growing back over the last two hundred 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?
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Billionaires? I guess I don't know, fascists, billionaires, that whole area.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Yeah, I mean billionaires, fascists, and the political party that
they largely use for a lot of their dirty work,
their 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,
(01:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
I've heard of the name. I feel like it's one
of those like Roger Stone types. Yes, probably like a
combined him with a few other people yet, but don't
have a clear idea like who this guy is. But
it's like one of the it's like somewhere like in
that rolodex of guy.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
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 Carl Rove, George W. Bush's
campaign manager. Like, he was the guy who got Carl
Rove his start and taught him everything he knows, the
(02:30):
guy who George W. Bush nicknamed turd Blossom. That's that's
that's a true story, Garrison, And that was a compliment.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
I can't believe our president would pick demeaning names for
his friends, the slash enemies. This is crazy.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
It was not meant to be anyway. That's another story
for another day when we do the Carl 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 not only I'm
going after Atwater. Yes, wow, I see how you feel
about this.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
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 assassin this is
what you know about time travel?
Speaker 2 (03:10):
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 Hill and 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
(03:31):
to go back in time and kill regular Hitler. Someone
already did it.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
I mean, yeah, that is kind of what happens in Terminator, right, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Basically, Yeah, that's the gist of Terminator because.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
I've seen like five different cg like Arnold Schwartzenaker's at
this point, so it's no matter what you take care of,
they're always going to make some deep faked version. Again.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yeah, that's that's really the ultimate message of the Terminator movie.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
My god, deep fake Hitler. When's that going to be
in a blockbuster?
Speaker 2 (03:57):
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.
(04:19):
If you go to donorbox dot org, if you type
in Defense Fund PDX donor box, you'll find their donor
box page and that would help a lot. They could
use the donations and their venmo is at Defense Fund PDX.
So please help them out. All right, that's the end
of the cold open. We're back. So we're talking about
(04:46):
Lee Atwater who was born Harvey Leroy at Water, 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 that I came from
the very middle of the middle He.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
Was a pretty wealthy. Yeah, top we'll say top of
the middle. He wasn't rich, but top of the middle class. Comfortable.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
He and he and both his mom and his dad, know,
like their family origins in the United States going back
two hundred and 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.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
But this is not you know, with like the twenty
three and me stuff where you can like find it.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
But but yeah, no, and it's they know their relatives
because they had famous answer.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
They have like a family lineage, right right.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
His mother was Toddy Page. She got the name Toddy
because she toddled around as a kid, I think, and
she trades. It's a very like fucking middle twentieth century
wife name, Yeah, Todty.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
She traced her family line back to a Revolutionary War
hero named Alexander Craighead. 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 were talking about like reconstruction era.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
Right eighteen eighteen seventies or something.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Yeah, they were talk about like I think, I think
he starts before the Civil War. But yeah, this is
like around the period when like they're definitely the good guys.
He has his son called Leroy, which is where our
Lee Atwater takes his name from, who's born in eighteen
ninety one, and as a teenager, is permanently maimed, has
his leg fucked up forever in a horse drawn wagon accident.
(06:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
This is this is important.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
This is an important wagon accident. I'll tell you why
in a minute now. Like most twenty year olds, in
nineteen eleven, he elopes with a sixteen 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
(07:09):
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 tales from his childhood as a book,
which I mean a guests are like partly true given
his descendants, but he's got the gift of gab and
(07:29):
He's going to like pass this on to his kids,
and it's going to become a thing that the men
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
where there was no Republican party in South Carolina. In
(07:52):
nineteen thirty two, 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 on their hands. Es why the worms turned?
Speaker 4 (08:03):
Why is the book called bad Boy.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Because that's his favorite song, Sophie. We'll be getting to
Lee at Water in a little bit, and his his
love of R and B.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
Don't you worry, oh boy, this is this is the
beginning of the of the little switcheroo. Yes, regard like
not like a real switcheroo, but like with like shifting
shifting politics.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
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 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
(08:45):
communist right, like, things of things have changed. The pages
make sure that all of their children grow up voracious readers,
and they were in the we'd call them helicopter parents today. Right,
They're obsessively concerned with their kids that even their daughter's educations,
they're studying their homework, They're like quizzing them and stuff.
They're unusually involved in their education for parents of this
(09:05):
period of time. And most of Toddy's elders lived to
their nineties, 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 nineties.
That is a little bit of foreshadowing.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
Damn, all these fucking guys just live forever. I swear to.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
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 heart. 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
(09:44):
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 sixteen thirty seven. He and his wife had ten children,
and the Atwater family historian, because they have one of those,
wrote that and quote their children and grand children endured
as many hardships, felled, as many trees, fought as many Indians,
(10:07):
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
sixteen twenty.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
Good, all around great.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
What an incredible sentence.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
So he's They're one of those families. They're one of
those families like Capital Tea.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Those yeah, those families, And it's very funny. They're the
kind of family that because again his David Atwater arrives
in sixteen thirty seven, the Mayflower I's in sixteen twenty,
and the family historing is like, well, I have to
come up with an excuse for they're as good basically
as the people who arrived at sixteen twenty, right, because
that's a big difference to us. Like the fact that
we didn't quite make it onto the Mayflower is something
(10:47):
that our family takes shit for. Oh, you guys got
her seventeen years later.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
They're still trying to make up for it. Yeah, this
has been a stain on our family history four centuries.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Why wasn't he born seventeen years earlier?
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Goddamn it, David, we really did not want the second
generation Pilgrim had.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
No, no, it's even second. But like now daily lace
late lace first, 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, this is the melon guy class the at Waters. Now,
(11:28):
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
(11:48):
in New York State as a potential place for Napoleon
Bonaparte to retire if he escapes, which so cool. What
a wild thing that would be. If there's just like, yeah,
and that's Napoleon's house outside of Schenectady.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
God, that would be fun.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
I don't know if it was Schenectady, worrybot, it was
somewhere in New York State, But yeah, Napoleon was thinking
about retiring to New York, like Lee Pace.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Really two of history's giant.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
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 US 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.
(12:35):
And this is the legacy that Leroy Atwater, our Lee
Atwater was born to inherit when he came into the
world on February twenty seventh, nineteen fifty one, in Atlanta, Georgia.
I A, that's how you guys say it, right.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Yes, that is the pronunciation.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Thank you, thank you, just making sure so the Reddit
doesn't come after me again. So at the time of
his birth, his.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Model it's Atlanta at that like the AT symbol.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Like that's how Yeah. So at the time of his birth,
his mother was a teacher and his father, Harvey, was
an insurance adjuster. Lee was born. Yes, I hardly know
her even we should have done that for Atwater Garrison.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
What I thought about it? I don't I'm off my
game today.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
It's okay. None of this is going as planned. We
had a little mix up before recording. 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 taken to the doctor, and
the doctor I don't know if this is what's actually wrong,
(13:42):
because if we're talking the fifties with the doctor, probably
while smoking a cigarette, it's still drunk from the night before,
is like, oh yeah, it's nervous systems not finished cooking.
Just let him finish, he'll be fine. I don't I
don't know that that's what happened. But he doesn't stop.
Like he always kind of has some of these like nervouses,
some issues, right, Like they'll plague him all of his life.
(14:03):
And as a result, Toddy is like his twenty four
to seven parent, Like she's not able to get like
a sitter because he cries anytime she leaves. He needs
like constant twenty four hour attention. He barely sleeps. He's
a sickly child right for the first couple of years
of his life.
Speaker 4 (14:17):
So he is.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
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 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 callous on the back of
his head. So that's terrible, it's fucked up. He's this kid,
(14:40):
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 it's rough.
Now Toddy is an attentive and devotive brother. His dad
is kind of a fifties dad. He's mainly working. He's
(15:02):
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 fifties dad than his father. Now Lee is again,
he's he's kind of a late bloomer, but once he
starts going, once he starts growing up, he's it's kind
of like a He's kind of like a fucking rocket ship.
(15:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
That's always a bad start when they start acting like this.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
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. People think I can do something,
It doesn't matter if I've done it or not. What
matters as I've tricked them into thinking I've done it, right, Like,
(16:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Sounds like he's born for politics.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
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 is
his memory and his mother's attentiveness. She takes him to
museums and to historic sites constantly, and he files away
everything she in the different museum Docince tell him, which
(16:40):
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
he's 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 a legible.
It never really gets better throughout his life. Some of
(17:03):
this as a result of the nerve. He can't hold
a pin or a pencil properly. He's described as always
holding writing implements like chalk because he's got like these
weird nerve issues.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
Yeah, he has like the big like vice grip thing
right right right, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Which obviously that's not his fault, but that's you know,
a factor in how he comes up the way he does.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
I wonder if 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 like like active understanding.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
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 would be
(18:00):
diagnosed with ADHD so fucking quickly, right, But we had
not invented that yet, And so her mom was just told,
he's got too much energy. You gotta tire about, you know, Meg,
I'm running around the yard a bunch. It being the fifties,
his parents saw him 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
(18:23):
a stereotypical Indian chief on a daily basis, carrying a
real tomahawk wherever he went, because, again, it was the fifties,
and that was fine.
Speaker 5 (18:31):
A little three year old 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 eighteenth,
nineteen fifty three, Lee's little brother, Joe was born.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
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, the
eldest boy, the oldest boy. And he acted well, no,
I think he's the oldest child. The o their daughter's
the youngest.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
Yeah, so he's the older that went right over your head.
It's fine, it's fine, it it's fine.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Okay uh. 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
(19:35):
Atwaters moved around a lot during Lee's early childhood. His
father had studied to become a lawyer, but quit to
work as an insurance suggester, and his change in ambitions
was followed by moving first from Georgia to Charleston, and
then from Charleston finally to Ake in South Carolina. Now,
the year after they moved to South Carolina, their Senator
Strom Thurmond would become famous for launching the longest continuous
(19:56):
fill against guy. This fucking guy. Oh, Strom's a big
part to this story, Garrison, You're not ready for how
involved in all this strom fucking Thermond is, such as
like if you don't know anything, if someone's like, hey,
who do you think strom Thermond was, if they just
tell you he was a syner, he'd be like, well,
I bet he was a racist one. Yes, that's the
racist guy name, Like, that's that's on ontological or a determination.
(20:21):
Where the fuck? What is it? Uh, 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.
So he became famous for launching the longest continuous filibuster
in the history of the United States from eight fifty
four PM at that point, Yeah, until our hero Corey Booker.
(20:44):
Did Corey beat it one secon Yeah, check this out.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
This is in the news this year. We talked about this. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
So up till up until Corey Booker, strom Billy was
the longest continuous filibuster in the history of the United States.
Twenty four hours and eighteen 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. Thurman said
during his filibuster, I'm convinced that this is bad proposed
(21:15):
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 Thurman's going to say
about civil rights in this period of time. Thurman had
previously been governor of South Carolina and had run as
a presidential candidate for the Dixiecrats, which was, you know,
(21:37):
the Southern Democrats. We'll talk about what the Dixiecrats are
in a second in nineteen forty eight, and when he
wasn't up before Congress. His language about these matters was
often a lot less polite. An article in WNYC Studios
that Takeaway summarizes quote. Almost a decade before Thurman's filibuster,
Southern state separatist leaders had revolted in opposition to President
Harry Truman's civil rights platform in nineteen forty eight. Democrats
(22:00):
themselves Dixiecrats and spoke about taking back the country that
was being turned into an unrecognizable dictatorship. And here's Thurmont.
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,
(22:22):
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 are
swimming pools, into our homes. And into our churches, Thurman said,
and he is. It's a hard r every time. Yeah,
we should have oh boy, maybe the butt we should
(22:44):
have sent out the B forty nines.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
Yeah, this is like one of like the last like
gasps of the Southern Democrats right before like the you know,
the the switchover apart the Social Democrats, like the progressive wing,
which gained a lot of success underdr was able to
exert more more influence over the whole party, and the
Southern Democrats kind of like fizzled through it the fifties.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
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 moved to Ake in South Carolina.
And I bring that up not just because he's the
senator in their state, because that Lee might not have
known much about this. They move in down they're like
(23:28):
three doors down from strom Thurman. He is their next
doordon neighbor.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
Right.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
Lee Atwater meets him for the first time in on
Halloween nineteen fifty six. The year before that filibuster.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
Fucking the screenwriters on the nose. Chill out, guys.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Oh 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.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Fucking give out the.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Full sized candy bars. Look, he's a racist, but full
sized candy bars for Halloween. Who's to say if he's bad?
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Nickers satisfies we are. Wow, we are.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
Speaking of things that satisfy.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
So satisfying things. Yeah, that's right, good work, here's ads.
We're back and uh 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 as a kid, my parents
(24:29):
were both into the hole like well, he you know
he was. It was more about states rights for him.
He wasn't like it was about racism for him. That's
what Thurman said when it became unpopular to be racist,
layers that like, well, I was never racist. It was
no hard r every time, every time, like uh. Also,
when he was in his twenties, he impregnates a fifteen
(24:52):
year old house servant and as 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 Thermot.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
That's really bad.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Fun guy. Well maybe we'll cover in one of these days.
Speaker 4 (25:07):
Really glad he's dead.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
Yeah, he lived way too fucking long. Motherfucker lived forever.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
This like a few days ago, like like James Dobson
died at like like a ninety something. It's like, are
we gonna celebrate this? No, not really, like they're all, yeah,
I'm glad they got. He damaged everything he wanted to do.
Like Dobson's were the most successful political actors of the
past fifty years. He he won. I almost feel bad
(25:34):
like sharing memes like because it's it's not it's not good.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
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 a little a little solace,
a quantum of solace to steal from the James Bond books.
So obviously being down the street from Strong Thermont doesn't
make you a bastard, but he's gonna go on to
(25:59):
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 is 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
(26:21):
young Lee's future life even more than strom Thurman. This
is maybe the definitive moment of his life. On the
afternoon of October fifth, Toddy 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 donuts.
You know, Lee is in watching TV. Brother Joe was
(26:41):
kind of toddling around. He's like three. She's struggling with
a migraine, so she's not paying as much attention as
she normally paid 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 fryar on top of this 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
(27:02):
TV and three year old Joe toddles into the kitchen
and gets up on top of a trash can and
it starts like fiddling with the fryer, and she tells
him to get down, and he trips and the trash
can of falls and he pulls the fryer on top
of himself and in an instant, this three year old
boys coated head to toe in boiling oil. Now, this
(27:22):
is an instantly fatal injury, and that the instant it happens,
he's dead. But he doesn't die. It's just there's no
treating this today. You could fix this. He has immediately
ninety degrees like third degree birds over a ninety percent
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,
(27:44):
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 state, 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,
(28:06):
I should it's like saying that I'm just traumatized. It's
like that's not even necessary. Of course they are.
Speaker 3 (28:12):
No matter what your family is, like, this is going
to be a tragic event, like, yeah, that's unfairly bad.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
Yeah, And the people who knew Lee well would say
that he was This changes him forever and it's gonna
My opinion is that I think part of why he
is the way he is is that from this point one,
he is like the world's chaos. It doesn't matter what
I do. It's like it's just all about personal like gratificate,
like fuck it, fuck the world, right, That's just my interpretation.
(28:40):
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's really
you probably hear that forever.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
Yeah, yeah, that's really bad.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
I go just the worst thing I can conceive of
pretty much, that's 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.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
Yeah, this is going to make anyone, no matter who
you are, just just a more broken person.
Speaker 4 (29:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
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,
(29:40):
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 nineteen sixty one, 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 watch boil to death. Yeah yeah.
(30:04):
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 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.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
So now he's no longer like next door neighbors with
Thermon A nice point.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
No, but the family had become friends and they have
a connection that will last the rest of their lives. Right,
Like his parents know how to contact Straw like because
they were.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
Neighbors in more waste than one. The damage is already done.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
The damage is already done. You have to imagine, I
mean strom Thurman probably like reached out and brought up
a cast role after their son boiled to death or something.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
You said, 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.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
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 sized candy bar. Theurmon'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 Yan noted that
he was quote unable to stay focused, always switching channels,
(31:14):
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 Yan, who was too shy to throw a
party even if it was his birthday. It wasn't so like, Okay,
(31:35):
there's a lot of fun moments, because.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
Forbid of kid have a little fun.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
God forbid a child enjoy himself.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
But although I could see how these tactics might become
useful and fallen ticks later down the line.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Right, And it's the point that Brady's 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 composed 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
(32:08):
he's always a lot of fun. And depending on the source,
he's always He's either described as manipulative or a leader.
And I don't think those two things are exclusive.
Speaker 3 (32:18):
No, no, no, no no.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
He's just always in charge.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
You know. I can't believe this. I can't believe this
cult leader was also manipulative.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
Right. His friend in 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 twenty sixteen that
rash articles came out being like wrestling is how you
should understand Donald Trump. Trump thinks about politics in a
(32:46):
wrestling way. The first guy to explicitly say us politics
works the way wrestling does and explain it is lee
atwater in like the seventies. He's talking about like wrestling
is really the way to understand like k faban shit
is the way to understand how politics work.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
Without him, Trump never would have had that that razor
palmed to fake the assassination attempt.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
That's right, that's right. He wouldn't have been able to garrison.
Don't feed the blue and Ons.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
God damn sorry, I'm writing about the assassination conspiracy theories
right now. Is that I couldn't help it.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Yeah, this is just gonna make it worse. An air
fifteen 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
(33:38):
he makes. He is not interested in having money.
Speaker 3 (33:40):
Or the process. It's that process satisfies him. Yes, it's
like you're you're like outsmarting someone like you're you're able
to like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
He likes convincing people to buy things. You know, he
doesn't so much care about money.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
You're winning someone over, and that is that can be
like an exhilarating thing to do.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
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 since right, He's greedy in the influence sense.
That's what motivates him.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
Can I make you do this thing? What will it
take for me to get this result?
Speaker 2 (34:13):
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 shitt even though he's clearly
like the smartest kid in most of his classes. One
(34:34):
of his English teachers described she signed his yearbook by
calling him my first nightmare every morning with an exclamation point.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
That's fun.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
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 taxis seems to snap him out of
this this like thing where he can't pay attention or
focus right like he instantly, she said, he asked better
questions than anyone else in the class. He was totally
(35:05):
focused the whole time. He was excited. They get to
take a picture with his old family friends strom Thurmond,
and he's super psyched.
Speaker 3 (35:12):
You know.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
It's yeah, it's this, it's this. You can see the
fucking shadow of Darth Vader behind Anakin moment thing right like,
oh no.
Speaker 3 (35:21):
Whenever a kid gets too excited in the capitol again,
you got you gotta fixed that early.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
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 just time, you
should prescribe them heroin, right, something to slow him down,
you know, got to knock him out of the running somehow. So, Sophie,
it's fine for you as long as it's pure, you know,
as long as it's uncut, it's safe.
Speaker 3 (35:48):
No comment.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Yeah. Outside of politics, Lee's other primary interest is music,
specifically the music of James Brown. He loves aren't he
loves black music right like he loves R and 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,
(36:10):
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 he like and yeah. He also he prefers
most of the artists he likes, and he will befriend
(36:31):
and play with because he's in the band most of
his life. He'll play with a number of like famous
blues and R and 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
(36:53):
from his favorite musicians, and he'll do them as like
party tricks.
Speaker 3 (36:57):
Yeah, it's putting in inputs to get a certain output, right,
same thing with selling, same thing with your class clown
manipulative high jinks exactly right.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
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. On Basically,
they make him a deal where like, yeah, you can
if you take piano classes for three years, we'll buy
you a guitar. So he takes piano classes for exactly
(37:28):
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
fifty cents each that he can play the same five
notes repeatedly longer than they can stand to listen, and
at around three am they give up and pay him. Right,
like his fingers are bleeding, but he just will not
(37:49):
stop until they like. He loves making wagers and it's
not about the money, it's about the winning.
Speaker 3 (37:56):
You know. That's the other thing to watch out for,
if any kid really likes making bets. Got us top
that quick?
Speaker 2 (38:02):
Yes, now, I was that kind of kid in high school.
And we did get one of our friends to try
to drink an and tighter 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
(38:24):
of twelve. He is a daily heavy smoker from age
twelve on. It's so funny it was easy to get
cigarettes back then.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
A twelve year old in a suit smoking a cigarette.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Hell yeah, yeah, just Shane 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.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
Do you know what his cigarette was?
Speaker 2 (38:49):
No? Actually I don't. I'm gonna guess.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
Paul Mall biographers need to we need to get better
at it. Get there, breaking sure, we know which cigarette
a person smokes. I think it tells you a lot
about a person.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Vonnegut was a pall mall man, you know, okay, And
obviously all the hip kids today smoke American spirits. But
what it matters? What like brand you're smoking?
Speaker 3 (39:10):
Right?
Speaker 2 (39:10):
Like?
Speaker 3 (39:11):
You know? Color? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (39:12):
Yeah, some people, some people like that green bullshit. I'm
more into my into the grays, you know, Okay. I
don't smoke cigarettes. I just always keep a pack of
cigarettes on me in my jacket.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
There you go.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
It's always useful. You never know who's gonna need a cigarette.
Do you need a cigarette? If so, why not take
it while listening to ads?
Speaker 4 (39:31):
Jesus Christ, we're back.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
I hope you've all had a delicious cigarette, A delightful cigarette.
Apologies to anyone who just quits 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 die?
Speaker 3 (40:00):
I smoke aesthetically to complete an outfit, of course, not
like I'm not like a smoker.
Speaker 4 (40:06):
R scare, what.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
Don't cigarettes?
Speaker 4 (40:11):
Don't smoke cigarettes? Thank you.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
I mean it's again, it's it's only for the outfit, Sophie.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
If someone shoots at you, smoke a cigarette, that's what
they're for. They're great.
Speaker 3 (40:20):
Shot at me in a while. That that's the thing.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
I know. Then you can't got to find somebody to
shoot at you. So you can get a smoke in,
go to a waffle house. You'll get shot out of it.
Speaker 3 (40:30):
Outside the Manhattan Hilton.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
Yeah, there you go. So his peers recall him being
very awkward around women and falling back offers 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 He's just bullshitting about it at first,
but he does. He figures it out at a pretty
(40:53):
young age. He has his first serious girlfriend in ninth grade.
John Brady writes quote at school dances, he would get
on stage, dance around, playing air guitar, mugging with his
blues face upstaging act creating God's 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
(41:14):
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 Lee 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
(41:36):
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.
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
(41:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (42:05):
And yeah, 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.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
I relate to a lot of 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.
(42:37):
And Lee Attwater is a performer, right.
Speaker 3 (42:39):
And the important thing is that they stay in wrestling
or entertainment. Whenever they switch over to politics, that's where
it gets bad.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
It's awful, it's the worst and every time. Yeah, yeah,
that's and leads 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 isn't 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
(43:09):
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 he's just got the brain for it.
Speaker 3 (43:21):
And that sucks.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
I'm getting ahead of myself here.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
So he gets Chris want to show Garrison a photo
of leat Water with chick?
Speaker 4 (43:29):
Oh yeah, because because I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Speaker 1 (43:34):
Because he he looks like uh to for Grace from
and then in this phot he looks like to for
Grace when he was on that seventy show.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
That he does look a lot like to for Grace.
Speaker 3 (43:45):
Okay, look at his dork Yeah yeah, yeah, what a medium?
Speaker 2 (43:49):
What the hairs?
Speaker 3 (43:51):
I want James or Banniac to play him in a movie.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
James or Banniac could definitely play Lee. You'd have to
do a Southern accent because oh but you'll you'll hear
Lee and a little bit here.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
He can he can do it.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
He could do it.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
Oh yeah, that would be good casting.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
H 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
(44:27):
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.
(44:48):
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'll
(45:08):
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,
(45:31):
but I was really like, I was self educated, right,
he was an autodid act 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 a signed reading. And so
(45:52):
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 Lee is. He's definitely smart, he's definitely capable
(46:14):
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 in 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
(46:39):
read two or three books a week during this period
of time, like that's what he claims. But he's going
to make this claim again years later when he's starting
to make a name for himself as a Republican Party
campaign strategist. And I want to quote from an article
for The New York Times by Marine Daud writing about
this period of time. And this is later in life,
but I think it's relevant to the claim he makes
(46:59):
while he's in grade school. Quote as a Reagan aid,
he bragged that he read three books a week, everything
from Dostoyevski to Alvin Toffler, and then hired an aide
named James Pinkerton to read the books and give him summaries. Well,
he jogged on the treadmill at the White House. Jim.
It was a good joke about all the reporters who
wrote about his prodigious reading habits, and the lofty quotes
also impressed young women. He really did read The Great Gatsby,
(47:21):
Pinkerton recalls Fogley, so that's good. I think he's doing
that a version of that int highest because basically having
chatchypet summarized books for you, that's what he be doing
it and he gets it's what he was 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.
Speaker 3 (47:36):
This is the same thing he was doing as a kid, right,
like as like as like a little kid, and to
like impress adults. It's this is like even connected to
his like urge to like perform. It's like the deception
of the performances all that matters that overrides any like
actual like substance. Yes, behind this, because no one can
actually truly like understand the substance unless you let them in.
(47:58):
And if you're always putting on this character, then no
one's going to get level close enough to understand that,
right right.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
And I think it also he is he could do
better in school than he does, but not as much
better as he 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 said talking
about how purposefully he fucked up school and about how
much he read and how smart he really was. Those
(48:24):
are both like coping mechanisms to protect his ego to
an extent. His grades are bad enough that in tenth
grade his parents send him away to a military school.
He goes to Fork Union Military School with starting in
the fall of nineteen sixty six. And this is the
kind of place, 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
(48:47):
sizzling pot of adhd. Right every kid there could like
be swallowing riddle in by the fucking pound. John Brady
talks to several of his classmates. One of them later
claimed he was a manipulator, 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
(49:09):
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. Yea, 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 you'd compete with him and
jumping out of their window two floors up and then
(49:31):
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 bully. He's such
a little psycho. He starts drinking. I mean it's kind
(49:53):
of funny, but like it's subjectively shitty.
Speaker 3 (49:56):
Yes, he starts.
Speaker 2 (49:58):
Drinking at age fifteen, and he finds a store that
doesn't check IDs and sells papst blue ribbon that is
his child beer. In his biography of Lee, John the
scribes 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
(50:18):
he changed back into civies and hugged beers and long
extended gulps like a sword swallower. He could consume a
six pack in ten miles, tossing cans out the car window,
then arriving at a rock or soul dance thoroughly blitz
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. Fun kid, I.
Speaker 3 (50:45):
Like that they're measuring drinking by the mile.
Speaker 2 (50:48):
By the mile, that's how you know you're really doing
some underage drinking.
Speaker 3 (50:52):
Six and every ten miles.
Speaker 2 (50:54):
Just hurling the empty beers out the window. Fuck it,
who's gonna stop us? Not a seat belt inside? The
cops are just as drunk as you.
Speaker 1 (51:02):
It was.
Speaker 2 (51:03):
We used to be a proper country garrison.
Speaker 3 (51:06):
Alas his grade, Yeah, alas, until people like this came around.
Speaker 2 (51:11):
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 like methodical plan to convince
his parents to let him go back to high school.
He wants to go to J. C. Flora High which
is where several of his friends had gone and is
like a college campus in size and organization more than
(51:32):
like a traditional high school. Yeah, it's a public school
and it's a big one. It sounds kind of like
where 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. For Jane Mayer's article
in The New Yorker. The first presidential campaign that Atwater
(51:54):
managed was a bid to get a friend of his
elected as student body president. Against the friend's wishes, he
created did a list of false accomplishments, and devised a
fake rating system that ranked his friend first. The poll
was called big Ats Comedy Ratings, and it was distributed
as a flyer listing the funniest boys and girls in school.
To continue with Mayor's quote, he plastered the school with
posters declaring his friend's platform of false promises of free
(52:18):
beer on tap in the cafeteria, free dates, free girls.
The campaign took a darker turn when Atwater's sidekicks 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,
(52:40):
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 in 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.
Speaker 4 (52:59):
Well a lot.
Speaker 2 (53:00):
There.
Speaker 3 (53:01):
Wow, that's horrifying.
Speaker 2 (53:04):
That's nuts. Yet it's so fucking odd.
Speaker 1 (53:06):
I learned how to organize, and I learned.
Speaker 2 (53:10):
Beating kids because he's fucking yeah, like and he's like
and I this mob, Yeah what a cool guy. Yeah
this this kid's gotta be evil.
Speaker 3 (53:23):
Uh that's that's that's wild.
Speaker 2 (53:28):
Right, and it's it's it's something else like that is
sinister as fuck.
Speaker 3 (53:33):
That also sounds like a great like eighties film. That's
like it does so.
Speaker 2 (53:37):
Much of his childhood right, even like an eighties or
early nineties movie.
Speaker 3 (53:41):
Yeah, like, yeah, it would be such such a good
like person running for class president like a movie.
Speaker 2 (53:48):
If he had just written like, if he just become
like John Hughes, you know, we could have been saved
a lot of horror as a 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
(54:09):
on social media? You got anything you want to plug?
Speaker 3 (54:12):
I mean no, just just it could happen here. Are
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 thirty thirty thirty five weeks now?
Speaker 1 (54:26):
Jesus, you changed your handle on the social medis, didn't?
Speaker 2 (54:29):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (54:30):
Yes, I changed my handle for fun to buy shown
in type on all social media platforms. I mean, I'm
still trying to use blue sky.
Speaker 4 (54:38):
But it's a bummer hashtag.
Speaker 3 (54:43):
I don't know that's true. It's all of them are it's.
Speaker 4 (54:46):
A bummer, and then it's a fascist bummer.
Speaker 2 (54:49):
There's you know, I yeah, the other bad there's nothing
good trying, trying, try for.
Speaker 3 (54:55):
The podcasts, but but you know, occasionally occasionally.
Speaker 4 (54:59):
Yeah, uh well, we'll be back with part two.
Speaker 2 (55:04):
Yeah uh yeah. Perhaps.
Speaker 3 (55:07):
Oh this guy didn't just end running for president.
Speaker 2 (55:11):
No, no, this he did not drop.
Speaker 1 (55:13):
Dead after organizing school election.
Speaker 3 (55:17):
And I thought that was that's right, that's a great ending.
Speaker 2 (55:21):
No, we'll we'll hit you with part two. But first
we're gonna 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
(55:46):
black hole if they get charged with a fucking misdemeanor. Generally, yeah,
please help and good out. I love you.
Speaker 1 (55:58):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the
Bastards is now available on YouTube.
Speaker 4 (56:13):
New episodes every.
Speaker 1 (56:15):
Wednesday and Friday.
Speaker 4 (56:16):
Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com. Slash at behind
the bastards
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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