The Sudden Need To Run

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The Sudden Need To Run

By: Sam Zeff and Matt Hodapp

If 2016 is the most tumultuous presidential election year you’ve ever seen that simply means you weren’t alive or paying attention in 1968. 

The year was marked by assassinations, a war in Vietnam that went from awful to worse, and bitter fights for the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations. But the political craziness really took off in March of that year.

President Lyndon Johnson was wildly unpopular, and he was being challenged from the left by Sen. Eugene McCarthy from Minnesota. On March 12, the two battled to a tie in New Hampshire. A week later, Robert F. Kennedy suddenly and unexpectedly entered the race.

Then, LBJ surprised the country during a nationally televised speech.

“With America's sons in the fields far away, with America's future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world's hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office--the Presidency of your country,” Johnson said at the very end of his speech. Then he said one of the most quoted sentences ever from an American president: “Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” 

With a sitting president out of the race, the Democratic and Republican fields were wide open. And for a couple of days in mid-March, most political eyes settled on Kansas when Robert F. Kennedy, the young senator from New York, showed up.

First, a little about why Bobby got into the race and what drove LBJ out. Johnson won in a landslide in 1964, the biggest landslide since Kansas Governor Alf Landon got pasted by FDR in 1936.

In 1964, Johnson had pushed through the most significant civil rights bill since the Civil War, and he was pushing his Great Society package of social reforms: Medicaid, Medicare, and federal funding for education.

As high as Johnson was riding in 1964 and 1965, that’s how low his presidency had sunk by 1968. His approval rating was 35 percent. The last shreds of hope for Vietnam disappeared in late January with the Tet offensive. 

Students held hunger strikes in Boston in February, protesting the war. The Black Panther Party was gaining prominence. LBJ was weak but no big name Democrat would step up to run against him. Then Sen. Eugene McCarthy from Minnesota got in the race as the anti-war candidate.

LBJ ran in the New Hampshire primary, getting 49 percent of the vote. But McCarthy shocked everyone and got 43 percent. Johnson knew he was done. Then, in a move that would be inconceivable today, Bobby Kennedy announced on March 16th, just five months before the convention in Chicago, that he was running for president. And two days later RFK lands in one of the lest likely places a brand new presidential candidate could go right out of the gate, Manhattan, Kansas.

It wasn’t a mistake or bad staff work that Bobby started his campaign in Ahearn Field House on the K-State campus. He had already agreed to do a Landon Lecture, the series is venerable now but only a couple of years old in 1968. It was titled “Conflict in Vietnam and at Home.”

He would make a day of it Kansas, addressing a packed Allen Fieldhouse at KU and making a stop at Haskell Indian Institute, as it was known at the time. Kennedy would talk about very serious topics and we’ll get to the politics behind his trip, but who introduced him at K-State is important. 

Bobby was introduced by Republican Sen. Jim Pearson. Also on hand was Democratic Gov. Robert Docking. A presidential candidate was in the state and back then, that called for a little bi-partianship.

But most everyone wanted to hear RFK speak about Vietnam. That was the reason he was in the race and LBJ was on his way out. Here’s part of what he had to say at K-State:

“I do not want – as I believe most Americans do not want – to sell out American interests, to simply withdraw, to raise the white flag of surrender. That would be unacceptable to us as a country and as a people. But I am concerned – as I believe most Americans are concerned – that the course we are following at the present time is deeply wrong. I am concerned – as I believe most Americans are concerned – that we are acting as if no other nations existed, against the judgment and desires of neutrals and our historic allies alike. I am concerned – as I believe most Americans are concerned – that our present course will not bring victory; will not bring peace; will not stop the bloodshed; and will not advance the interests of the United States or the cause of peace in the world. I am concerned that, at the end of it all, there will only be more Americans killed; more of our treasure spilled out; and because of the bitterness and hatred on every side of this war, more hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese slaughtered; so that they may say, as Tacitus said of Rome: 'They made a desert, and called it peace.'"

Kennedy would make some of the same remarks in Lawrence, where they let kids out of school to attend the speech. But he also talked about other issues, issues that we still hear about today. Here he is in Allen Fieldhouse:

“And if we seem powerless to stop this growing division between Americans, who at least confront one another, there are millions more living in the hidden places, whose names and faces are completely unknown but I have seen these other Americans. I have seen children in Mississippi starving, their bodies so crippled from hunger and their minds have been so destroyed for their whole life that they will have no future.

I have seen children in Mississippi here in the United States with a gross national product of $800 billion dollars I have seen children in the Delta area of Mississippi with distended stomachs, whose faces are covered with sores from starvation, and we haven't developed a policy so we can get enough food so that they can live, so that their children, so that their lives are not destroyed, I don't think that's acceptable in the United States of America and I think we need a change. I have seen Indians living on their bare and meager reservations, with no jobs, with an unemployment rate of 80 percent, and with so little hope for them future, so little hope for the future that for young people, for young men and women in their teens, the greatest cause of death amongst them is suicide.”

If you read or listen to either of Robert Kennedy’s speeches in Kansas on March 18th, 1968, you’ll be struck by how the themes resonate today. But you’ll also be struck by the writing: it’s both clear and scholarly. Sometimes he even sounds like his brother. This is a passage from his K-State speech. It comes pretty early and he’s just starting to talk about Vietnam:

“Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live. Now as ever, we do ourselves best justice when we measure ourselves against ancient tests.” Kennedy goes go to quote the Greek play, the Antigone of Sophocles: "All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only sin is pride'."

Our theme music is used in this episode is Shy Touches by Nameless Dancers. The other music used in this episode is Slow Motion Strut Version Two by Dexter Britain, and What is Whispered in Your Ear Proclaim It From The Rooftops by James Joshua Otto. Both have been edited.

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TV, The Triple Play, and the Man from Dodge

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TV, The Triple Play, and the Man from Dodge

By: Sam Zeff and Matt Hodapp

I want to tell you about a scandal. It's the only scandal in the history of the Kansas court system. It’s the story of an ambitious politician that tainted both the governorship and the state’s highest court.

The story starts on September 23, 1952 at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles. There Richard Nixon would deliver his famous “Checkers” speech.

At the time he had just been nominated as Dwight Eisenhower’s running mate, but the press got wind of a secret fund Nixon’s supporters created for him to pay political expenses. Not surprisingly, charges of improprieties surfaced followed by calls for him to resign from the ticket.

So, Nixon did something that’s never been done, he went directly to the people on television.

Going straight to the people seems so easy now, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter. But 60 years ago it was unheard of to go around the media was revolutionary. 

We can’t know for sure, but it’s a pretty good bet that a 36 year old Dodge City Republican name Fred Lee Hall was watching.

The night of the Nixon speech, Hall was Kansas Lieutenant Governor. Hall was ambitious, but unpopular among the GOP elite in Kansas. He would go on to be elected governor, but find himself on the outskirts of the party. 

Hall, like Nixon, would go directly to the people on TV, and he would change politics and the legal system in Kansas in a way we that we are still feeling right this minute.

There’s two things that strike people about Fred Hall. First, there’s a bit of Bernie Sanders in his politics, he’s way more liberal than most Republicans in Kansas at the time. He was for pumping more money into public education and prisons. And, he was pro union. While most Republicans in the state weren’t as conservative as they are now, they certainly were not pro union. That, more than anything, would drive the Fred Hall story.

After two terms as Lieutenant Governor, he won the Republican nomination for governor in 1954, albeit with little enthusiasm from the party. It was pretty clear the GOP wouldn't tolerate another Hall term in 1956, and that was especially true after he battled the Legislature. 

In 1956, he had a tough GOP primary ahead, and without party backing he did what virtually no politician had done before; he went on television to speak directly to the people. 

The first of his 30 minute television specials aired in January, 1956. These half hour shows aired on WIBW in Topeka, KAKE in Wichita, and WDAF in Kansas City. And the TV shows may have added to Hall’s trouble with the party.

In one show, he talked about pumping more money into prisons. He wanted to not just incarcerate people but try to rehabilitate them with education and psychological help. In another, he went on about how important public schools are, and how Kansas not only needed more teachers but to pay them more money. And in all of them, he talked about the cabal of men running the state and how he was elected to “throw the rascals out”.

But nothing helped, Hall became the only sitting governor in Kansas history to lose the Republican primary. He was the lamest of lame ducks. But Hall wasn't done. He had a reputation for being aggressive and pugnacious. But nobody could have predicted his next move.

His next move was a conspiracy that was both sleazy and genius. Fred Hall had no plans to move back to Dodge City as a loser, as a one-term governor. He concocted the only judicial scandal in Kansas history. It even has a cool name: the Triple Play. 

In addition to Hall, there were two other actors in the Triple Play. First, there was the chief justice of the Kansas Supreme Court, William Smith, a long time Republican party stalwart. Remember, Kansas was electing judges back then.

How long had Smith been a player in GOP politics? Remember the Archiver episode on John Brinkley, the goat gland doctors who ran a write-in campaign for governor in 1930? Well, many believed Brinkley might have won had not so many ballots been disallowed. The man in charge of deciding which ballots were legal? William Smith, who was state attorney general at the time. 

The other player was Lt. Governor John McCuish. He was a newspaperman by trade, he owned the Harvey County Times in his hometown of Newton. 

So, here’s the triple play: 

On December 31st, 1956, Smith sent a letter to the Secretary of State resigning as Chief Justice. Smith was ill and wanted to resign, but being a good Republican, he didn’t want to quit and let the newly elected Democratic Governor George Docking pick his replacement. Then on January 3, 1957 Hall sent a similar letter, quitting just 11 days before his term ended. McCuish was in the hospital in Newton and Hall dispatched a Highway Patrolman to bring him back to Topeka. McCuish was automatically elevated to Governor and he immediately appointed Hall to the state’s highest court and The Triple Play was done. Hall was on the supreme court where he hoped to launch a future bid for governor.

But Kansas wasn’t used to that kind of back room deal and the backlash was immediate and severe. This is what the Kansas City Times had to say in January 1957, The headline was “A Brazen, Raw Deal for Kansas Justice”: 

“The deal was cloaked in deepest secrecy. This indicated the participants were fearful of public reaction and did not believe it could stand the light of day. Involved was not merely a political appointment. It was an appointment to the highest court in the state.”

In the 1957 session, the Legislature would pass a constitutional amendment requiring justices to be chosen with a merit system. The next year, the amendment passed with 70 percent of the vote. And everyone was happy at least until a few years ago.

Fred Hall had no way of knowing that The Triple Play would directly affect one of the hottest issues in Kansas politics today, how the state funds public education. 

Up until the 1990's, nobody thought much about how Kansas picked supreme court justices and judges for the court of appeals. Except for The Triple Play, there had never been a scandal, Kansas courts generally had a good reputation. But, in 1992, a lawsuit now known as Montoy v. Kansas was filed alleging the state wasn’t putting enough money in the school system and that violated article six of the state constitution.

The case gets to the supreme court and the justices agree, Kansas lawmakers needed to find more money for schools. The state also lost a case called Gannon, the case that is now causing conservatives in the Legislature and Governor Brownback to desperately want to dump the merit system that was born from the triple play.

For all the turmoil and trouble Fred Hall would cause, his stint on the Kansas political stage was pretty brief. He spent just two years as a justice, resigning in 1958 to make another run at the Republican nomination for governor, where he was trounced by 60 points by Clyde Reed, Junior who spent most of his life as the editor of the Parsons Sun.

Hall would go on to a successful career as a lawyer in California in the booming aeronautics business. He eventually returned to Dodge to practice law. But in his fairly brief political career he introduced television to Kansas politics and a scandal to the court system. He would be responsible for radically changing the way judges are picked and for the political battle over the same thing today.

Hall died in 1970. He was only 53.

Our theme music is used in this episode is Shy Touches by Nameless Dancers. Other music used in this episode is Ladybirds Theme by David Szesztay, Cocek by The Underscore Orchestra, and Sweet Georgia Brown by Latche Swing; all three have been edited.

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Goat Glands, Radio Waves, and the Governorship

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Goat Glands, Radio Waves, and the Governorship

By: Sam Zeff and Matt Hodapp

If I were to tell you about a millionaire running for high political office that found his fame in the media, and financed himself through somewhat sketchy endeavors, a man who worked outside of the regular political channels and who seemed to be constantly battling the establishment, you would probably say, I know who that is, Donald Trump.

But long before Trump, or Ross Perot, or Michael Bloomberg for that matter, there was Dr. John R. Brinkley. The R stands for Romulus, but by the time Doc Brinkley moved to Kansas in 1916 he changed his middle name to Richard. Nobody knows why except that Doc had mightily transformed himself when he settled in tiny Milford, Kansas, about 20 miles west of Manhattan and just north of Fort Riley.

From Milford, Doc Brinkley would create a medical empire on questionable patent medicines and, of all things, goat glands. He would battle everyone from the American Medical Association to William Rockhill Nelson, the powerful editor of the Kansas City Star. And Doc, that’s what everyone called him, would perhaps have the most colorful political career of anyone in Kansas.

Doc was born in 1885 in North Carolina to a country doctor, but he was orphaned by age 10 and raised by an aunt. Not surprisingly, he bounced between just shady and criminal behavior. He and a partner opened a storefront medical clinic in North Carolina where he racked up debts he never payed. He was charged with practicing medicine without a license, and he had a failed marriage. 

Finally, he found himself at the Eclectic Medical College in Kansas City, Kansas. Eclectic med schools were private and popped up mostly in the midwest and taught the use of botanical remedies, an extension of herbal remedies. This training seems to play into exactly the kind of medicine Brinkley practiced: out on the edge but with some basis in science.

Doc never graduated from Eclectic, but it was 1916 and it really doesn’t take much to become a doctor. Brinkley then married his second wife Minnie. They set up shop in Milford and start to spread the good word about...goat glands. 

If you’ve ever been to a state fair, you might have noticed the size of the gonads on some goats. Doc figured if you transplanted those into men, virility would go through the roof. Not everyone agreed, but he certainly had a following. 

Brinkley really took off after a 1922 trip to California to do some goat gland surgery, a trip promoted by the powerful publisher of the Los Angeles Times, Harry Chandler. 

Brinkley was already a bit infamous in the medical world, but Chandler pulled some strings and landed Brinkley a 30 day license to practice in California. People seemed to think the transplanted goat glands were doing the sexual trick, and the Times promoted Doc’s business. And it’s while in L.A. that Doc toured KHJ, the Chandler radio station. 

It’s at that point that Doc apparently puts the whole scheme together in his head: medical advice broadcast over a radio station that will drive people to pharmacies to buy Doc’s remedies, and lure them to rural Kansas for a goat gland transplant that in current dollars would set you back about $10,000. 

By 1930, Doc Brinkley was rich and famous. His radio station KFKB, most believe it stands for Kansas First, Kansas Best, was heard over a wide swath of the country. But he had also made powerful enemies. The American Medical Association was after him as well as the Kansas City Star and Emporia Gazette, both had national influence at the time.

With opponents closing in from all sides Doc Brinkley made a huge decision. He decided he wasn't going to flee, but he was going to run...for Kansas governor. 

Doc got in late and had to run a write-in campaign. It was a close election, much closer than it should be for a candidate who got in so late and wasn’t even on the ballot. Doc got about 30 percent of the vote, losing to Harry Hines Woodring, who would become Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of war.

Doc ran for Kansas governor two more times, losing as an independent against Alf Landon in 1932, again with about 30 percent of the vote and to Landon again in 1934, this time in the Republican primary. 

Brinkley ran as a populist. It was the depression, parts of Kansas were plagued by the Dust Bowl, and Doc was out there campaigning for what we would now call a social safety net.

By the 1934 campaign, Brinkley is mostly out of Kansas. He has had enough, and he moved most of his operation to Del Rio, Texas, right across the Rio Grande from Mexico. But Doc was not done in medicine or radio, and not nearly done in politics. 

Doc did for Del Rio what he did for Milford; paved the streets and brought business to town. The radio operation had become even more important since the move south. Doc not only left Kansas to get away from the medical establishment, but KFKB was also causing him headaches.

By moving the transmitter to Mexico, he escaped regulations, at least for a time, and at one point he had a million watt signal that could be heard in Kansas, Canada and, some locals say, in their dentures. By comparison, the most powerful AM radio stations in America today top out at 50,000 watts.

He was still doing medical proceeders, of course, but not as many goat gland operations and his speciality was now an early version of a vasectomy at $1,000 a pop. By the late 30's, his obsession with FDR was growing as was his isolationist views.

Brinkley's anti-Roosevelt broadcasts dominated Doc’s radio appearances, and did so as World War II breaks out in Europe and the isolationists in America fought any notion that the U.S. should get involved. Those views fade after Pearl Harbor as does the whole Brinkley empire.

He mounted a run for senate from Texas in 1941 after an incumbant dies, but it didn't go anywhere. The American Medical Association went after him again, as did the US State Department and the IRS. He’s charged with mail fraud by the Post Office.

By 1941, after a disastrous venture in Arkansas he went bankrupt, had three heart attacks and died pennieless in 1942. He was 57 years old.

There’s really no John R. Brinkley legacy, just a tragic end. The mansion in Del Rio is a historic site, but that’s about it. 

His son, Johnny Boy, gave an interview about his father in the middle 70's for a documentary film, but he killed himself a few months later.

Doc’s goat gland procedure for male sexual virility is just another thing in a long line of things men do for sexual virility. 

But if there is a legacy, maybe it’s a political one. It’s hard to know how much of Doc’s politics were simply aimed at protecting a million dollar business. Did Milford, Kansas make him a populist or was populism just a craven attempt at high political office? Was he truly an isolationist with an anti-Semitic bent or did he think that’s what his huge radio audience wanted to hear?

We’ll never really know, but William Allen White had something to say about it. Here’s what he wrote in the Emporia Gazette after White learned Doc was vying for that Texas senate seat. 

This appeared in May 15th, 1941 editions:

“He will appeal to the hill billy mind as It has never been lured before. He is Irresistible to the moron mind and Texas has plenty of such. Perhaps that is unfair. Very likely Texas has no more morons than Kansas. So while pointing with pride to the fact that Kansas escaped the doctor's clutches, we view with alarm for the United States the danger which Impends in Texas. If this republic ever totters to its fall it will be because the moron minority shall sometime, somewhere, somehow, gain a party majority by unscrupulous leadership."

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Our theme music used in this episode is Shy Touches by Nameless Dancers .

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