Ronnie Dugger. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / May 29, 2025
(On Friday, May 30, 2-3 p.m., Rag Radio is rebroadcasting our June 8, 2012 interview with the late Ronnie Dugger. It is broadcast on KPFT 90.1-FM, Austin, and streamed on KOOP.org. The interview can be heard anytime on the Internet Archive.)
On May 27, 2025, Robert D. McFadden wrote in the New York Times:
“Ronnie Dugger, the crusading editor of a small but influential Texas journal who challenged presidents, corporations and America’s privileged classes to face their responsibility for racism, poverty and the perils of nuclear war, died on Tuesday at an assisted living facility in Austin, Texas. He was 95.
“His daughter, Celia Dugger, the health and science editor of The New York Times, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
“Inspired by Thomas Paine’s treatises on independence and human rights, Mr. Dugger was the founding editor, the publisher and an owner of The Texas Observer, a widely respected publication, based in Austin, that with few resources and a tiny staff took on powerful interests, exposed injustices with investigative reports and offered an urbane mix of political dissent, narrative storytelling and cultural criticism.”
On June 8, 2012, we interviewed Ronnie Dugger on Rag Radio. Below is an article as it appeared on June 15, 2012, and after that the full transcript of the interview that was published in the book Making Waves: The Rag Radio Interviews by Thorne Dreyer (Briscoe Center for American History, UT Press (2022)
Rag Radio:
Crusading journalist Ronnie Dugger,
founding editor of The Texas Observer
By Thorne Webb Dreyer | The Rag Blog | June 15, 2012
Legendary Texas journalist Ronnie Dugger, the founding editor of The Texas Observer, was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, June 8, 2012, on KOOP-FM, Austin’s cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station; Rag Radio is also streamed live to a worldwide Internet audience.
You can listen to the show here.
Brad Buchholz of the Austin American-Statesman called Ronnie Dugger “the godfather of progressive journalism in Texas.” Dugger was the founding editor of The Texas Observer from 1954 to 1961, and later served as the Observer’s publisher, spending more than 40 years with the crusading Texas tabloid.
The Texas Observer is a muckraking journal that has broken stories on major scandals and played an influential role in Texas politics. Based in Austin, the Observer, in its own words, “specializes in investigative, political and social-justice reporting from the strangest state in the Union.” The New York Review of Books referred to the Observer as an “outpost of reason in the Southwest.”
In 1966, Dugger also proposed and co-founded the Alliance for Democracy, a national grassroots anti-big-corporate organization.
Ronnie Dugger, who won the 2011 George Polk Award for his career in journalism, has influenced and/or mentored such progressive Texas journalists as Willie Morris, Molly Ivins, Billy Lee Brammer, Lawrence Goodwyn, Kaye Northcott, and Jim Hightower. He recently moved back to Austin from Cambridge, Mass.
Dugger is the author of Dark Star, Hiroshima Reconsidered (World, 1967), Our Invaded Universities (W.W. Norton, 1973), The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson (W.W. Norton, 1982), and On Reagan (McGraw Hill, 1983), and edited Three Men in Texas: Bedichek, Webb, and Dobie for UT Press. He has also written for Harper’s, Atlantic, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The Progressive.
Dugger has taught at the University of Virginia, Hampshire College, and the University of Illinois, and has held fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School, Harvard.
Dugger shared with host Thorne Dreyer some of the rich history of the Observer and of Texas progressive politics and journalism, marked by such seminal — and colorful — figures as Frankie Carter Randolph, U.S. Rep. Bob Eckhardt, John Henry Faulk, Willie Morris, and Molly Ivins.
Once, when Molly Ivins — who would become widely recognized as a national treasure for her special brand of populist Texas wit — was editing the Observer, Dugger asked her, “Molly, when are you gonna get serious?” Ivins replied (“quick as a whip”): “When we have a chance to win.”
On the show, Dugger discussed the legacy of the McCarthy era, the looming (both then and now) threat of nuclear war — an issue that he has always considered preeminent — and the Johnson presidency, which, he points out, made history with its courageous progressive domestic agenda. “Of course,” Dugger says, “the Vietnam War not only ruined that, but killed two million people.”
We discussed the way Lyndon’s unique saga was variously treated by the erudite Willie Morris in his heralded memoir North Toward Home and by Billy Lee Brammer, whose pre-gonzo novel, The Gay Place, Dugger called “one of the best novels written by anybody in Texas.” Brammer was Dugger’s first associate editor at the Observer, and Morris would later edit the Observer and then gain more fame as the editor of Harper’s.
And Dugger recounted a remarkable incident in 1955 that he later wrote about in an article titled, “LBJ, The Texas Observer & Me.” Then-Senator Lyndon Johnson summoned Ronnie to the LBJ Ranch with an offer — “something of a quid pro quo.” After inquiring about the Observer‘s circulation (“Oh, about 6,000,” Dugger told him), Johnson made his proposal: “Stick with me and we’ll make it 60,000.”
“Johnson was trying to bribe me, basically,” Dugger remembers. “Sing my praises, and we’ll make the Observer a whamdinger.” Of course Dugger, who according to Willie Morris became “one of Johnson’s main public antagonists,” chose to decline the deal. According to Morris, Ronnie Dugger “distrusted the compromises of political power and saw his own role in Texas as that of the social critic, the journalistic conscience, the polemicist.”
Ronnie Dugger also shared with the Rag Radio audience his not-so-optimistic take on the current political scene. “I think both political parties have descended pretty low,” he said. And the Supreme Court “has opened huge corporate money vaults,” with “the scandalous idea that corporations have the same rights as persons.” Dugger fears that “we’re now an imitation democracy governed by a corporate oligarchy… and a bought Congress.”
“Congress, with honorable exceptions, is now a whorehouse,” he said.
Following is the full transcript of the interview:
Ronnie Dugger: The Reporter
Ronnie talks about Texas Observer history, the continuing threat of the bomb, and when LBJ tried to bribe him.
Willie Morris called Ronnie Dugger “one of the great reporters of our time.” Dugger, who was 81 at the time of our interview, was the founding editor of The Texas Observer from 1954 to 1961 and later served as the Observer’s publisher, spending more than 40 years with the crusading Texas tabloid. At the Observer, Dugger mentored an all-star roster of writers and editors.
<!–more–>
Dugger was born in Chicago and educated at UT-Austin — where he edited The Daily Texan — and at Oxford. His books include biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, and he also edited Three Men in Texas: Bedichek, Webb, and Dobie for UT Press. Dugger, who has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, received the George Polk career award in journalism in 2012.
The Full Transcript
Thorne Dreyer: My guest today is Ronnie Dugger. Old friend and colleague and former editor and publisher of The Texas Observer. Brad Buchholz of the Austin American-Statesman called Ronnie, “the godfather of progressive journalism in Texas.” He influenced and mentored such progressive journalists as Willie Morris, Molly Ivins, Billy Lee Brammer, Bill Moyers, Lawrence Goodwyn, Kaye Northcott, and Jim Hightower.
Ronnie Dugger: Actually, I didn’t mentor Moyers; Moyers made a remark — when he was on a radio station here — that he used to read The Texas Observer, but it was like “having to read a book under the covers with a flashlight.”
Dreyer: But he did say that you were a major influence.
Dugger: Well, okay.
Dreyer: So, you’ll accept that?
Dugger: I mean, if I’m going to be a godfather I might as well be a major influence.
Dreyer: You recently moved back to Austin from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where you were hanging out for the last — how long were you there?
Dugger: I was gone for 30 years.
Dreyer: You wrote biographies of Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson and you have a lot of wonderful stories to tell about Lyndon. There’s an article you wrote titled, “LBJ, The Texas Observer & Me,” which was originally run in the Texas Observer in 2008, and then the next day at The Rag Blog.
Dugger: By the way, you never can control headlines when you write for any place, and they changed it from “I” to “me” and made it ungrammatical. The subject was “I” wasn’t it, not “me”? But anyway, it’s uncorrectable.
Dreyer: There’s no accounting for editors, right?
Dugger: That’s right.
Dreyer: In North Toward Home, Willie Morris’ wonderful memoir of his life and times, he wrote that Ronnie Dugger “is not only one of the great reporters of our time in America; more than that, he had imbued an entire group of young and inexperienced colleagues with a feel for Texas, for commitment in the most human sense, and for writing.”
Tell me how The Texas Observer came about. It came out of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Frankie Randolph actually initiated it, right?
Dugger: She was actually the first publisher, although we had a group who were publishing it.
I was alienated. I was particularly alienated by McCarthyism at that time and I was headed for a shrimp boat to go down to Mexico. And one weekend the liberals, that were then called “National Democrats” — they were the people who would be for Kefauver or somebody for president — decided they wanted to take over the State Observer that Paul Holcomb was running, which was more like an opinion newsletter. But good. And start a paper.
Well they asked me to do it and we met that weekend. And I told them I would do it but I would do it only if they gave me total control of the content, exclusive control of the content. It was fine to have a party newspaper, but I wasn’t going to work for it. And they agreed.
After I left — according to Bob Eckhardt, who was in the room when it happened — Mark Adams, who would become our printer, said, “If ever a rattlesnake rattled before he struck, Dugger rattled.” Mark, incidentally, denied he ever said it.
Dreyer: You did strike.
Dugger: Yeah, I did. I did. And I didn’t give a damn whether I took the job or not. I was sort of plus or minus. So that’s how it started. And by the way, every editor that I appointed when I was publisher had the same right. That was the deal. You are free and I can fire you.
That was the deal I had with Frankie Randolph. She did fire me once. She was mad, I think, because I was for either Maury Maverick or Henry Gonzales for the Senate race. I don’t remember which one I endorsed, but they were for the other, and she fired me. She was drunk, I think. And she called me two hours later, she changed her mind. That’s the way it goes.
Dreyer: Tell me more about Frankie Randolph. Mrs. Randolph.
Dugger: Well, she was one of four heirs of the Kirby Lumber fortune. One day, Mrs. Randolph — in 1952 — walked into the Harris County Democratic Party office and laid down a thousand-dollar check and said, “Put me to work.” And she went to work on the precincts.
She believed that the way to help the country and move it left and toward welfare programs and helping the poor was to organize the precincts, especially the precincts in the minority areas. And then form the liberal Harris County Democrats and take Houston. And that’s what she did, and furthermore — in imitation and admiration of her — they did the same thing in San Antonio and they were trying to in Dallas and Fort Worth. That’s what was challenging the national impression of Johnson’s control of Texas.
Dreyer: Creating a grassroots footprint.
Dugger: The idea was populism in political organization.
Dreyer: Right.
Dugger: And Mrs. Randolph was a radical, a liberal, she was — I don’t know where she got her ideas — and she made the bargain with me that I’d have absolute control. We drank very high-quality Scotch when I called on her in Houston.
She was a fine woman. They did not have a pretentious house, though they were multi-millionaires, I guess. I never knew how much money they had, but they had this low quiet house in a better section, but not a big Turtle Creek kind of house like they have in Dallas. And she was a very quiet and modest person. Politicians got to where they were coming to her for support and she would try to figure out “whether” — as she said – “they were our alligators or theirs.” That’s the way she looked at politics. She was a great influence.
Dreyer: There’s been some greats — so many incredible characters, personalities, figures — involved in the Observer over the years.
Dugger: Still are. They’ve got a bunch of characters left, I think, I’m happy to say.
Dreyer: Why don’t you tell us about some of the people who edited and worked for the Observer; there’s just a rogue’s gallery of wonderful journalists.
Dugger: I wonder if you could repair that metaphor?
Dreyer: Repair that metaphor. Rogues can’t be wonderful?
Molly Ivins and Kaye Northcott, of course, were an editorial tandem and, I think — as Bill Minutaglio wrote in his book about Molly — probably the only two-woman editorial leadership team in the country.
Dugger: I thought so. I couldn’t think of anybody else who had two women running the paper, but now Mother Jones does.
Dreyer: And Molly Ivins was like — I don’t know how tall she was.
Dugger: Eight and a half feet or something.
Dreyer: Eight and a half feet tall. Well, then, Kaye Northcutt seemed about four and a half. Anyway, they were such a contrast. Tell me about that first meeting with Molly Ivins, your interview with her.
Dugger: There were two — we had 30 or 40 applicants for editor at the time — and there was Billy Porterfield and Molly Ivins who were, in my opinion, about equal. Billy was a wonderful writer, but when I interviewed him, he said he didn’t like politics. Well, that’s all right. I don’t either. But if you don’t like politics it might affect what kind of an editor you are.
And Molly was at least equally as qualified and she had all these fine reports, front-page stuff out of the Minneapolis Star.
Dreyer: And you thought that Ivins had more political grounding than Porterfield, who was more kind of cultural?
Dugger: Molly didn’t have a reputation as a writer yet — which she of course earned. She was a reporter, a good tough liberal reporter who was exactly right for the Observer model that was developing. So, finally I went with Molly.
Dreyer: There was a wonderful exchange at one point, where you said to Molly, “When are you going to get serious?”
Dugger: Well, at first, when I appointed an editor, they were in complete charge.
Dreyer: Right.
Dugger: And so, I wasn’t going around criticizing them or saying I don’t agree with that or you should have written it this way. I never said anything to Molly. Gosh, she was good, and she was covering the legislature.
But one day at Spanish Village restaurant, the only time in her years at The Observer that I asked her anything critical, I said, “Molly, when are you going to get serious?”
And she said — quick as a whip — “When we have a chance to win.” And it was such a good answer, I didn’t retort. I mean, that closed the discussion: “When we have a chance to win.”
Dreyer: Willie Morris wrote in North Toward Home, “When I had been in my third year at the University in 1955, the year the paper started, I recall Ronnie Dugger, then 24-years-old, sitting in a small dark office in the old frame building on West 24th Street in Austin, surrounded by newspapers and magazines.”
He said, “Brammer,” — Billy Lee Brammer – “his associate, was out getting drunk with the lieutenant governor, and Dugger was writing the whole paper by himself in less than 24 hours.” He said, “Once an issue was put to bed he would take out for somewhere in a woebegone 1948 Chevrolet, crowded with camping equipment, six-packs, notebooks, galley proofs, old loaves of bread, and sardine cans.”
Dugger: Willie could write.
Dreyer: What an image. When you finally left The Observer, or maybe left as editor, he wrote that you took off to go camping and stayed for a while.
Dugger: Well, I figured out when I was there eight years — and because I wasn’t home with my family too much — like about four hours a night. I counted how many hours I was working: 120 hours and there are 168 in a week. Well, I think I lost my thyroid for it. I would have died in my 40s if a smart doctor hadn’t figured out that I had stopped putting out thyroid, but then for two cents a day I was able to survive.
Dreyer: The Observer was an amazing phenomenon, but I don’t think that it was always put together by you in 24 hours, writing everything.
Dugger: No, of course not.
Dreyer: But you did — or the editor always did — an awful lot of work. He or she wrote a whole lot of it.
Dugger: Oh, yeah. Actually, what happened, I started alone on the editorial side and we had one business person, Bill Sackett. And I was putting it out alone for maybe a year — or half a year — something like that. Then Billy Lee Brammer, whose novel, The Gay Place is one of the best novels ever written by anybody in Texas, I think. There was Katherine Ann Porter and maybe some others, although I haven’t read enough of those novels to say, reliably.
I would have a long row of all the Texas newspapers stacked by days, and one night Billy Lee came in — though he was on the staff of the Austin American-Statesman — and started clipping the papers for me. And of course, we’d have a little beer and talk. And then he quit the Statesman and he was our first associate editor.
Dreyer: His novel, The Gay Place, was actually three interconnected novellas.
Dugger: It was about Governor Fenstemaker.
Dreyer: About Governor Fenstemaker.
Dugger: But it was actually Lyndon.
Dreyer: It’s a great book.
Dugger: Yeah.
Dreyer: David Halberstam said there are two classic American political novels: One is All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren and the other is The Gay Place. Billy Lee was in awe, and in some ways loved Lyndon Johnson. Unlike Willie Morris, who was elegant and erudite, Billy Lee Brammer was kind of a gonzo journalist in his own way.
Dugger: There’s a picture, there’s a scene in The Gay Place where Governor Fenstemaker is in bed with his arms around two women, one on each side of him, and that, of course, reflects scandalously on President Johnson. And furthermore, there was this crusading editor of a liberal paper in Texas who used to go out and bed down with an English teacher in West Texas.
Dreyer: Willie England. That was the name he used, and we thought it was a composite of Willie Morris and Ronnie Dugger.
Dugger: Well, I asked Billy one time, I asked, “Did you say that the person who looks like me went out to West Texas and was making love with this English teacher?” And he says, “No, of course not. I wouldn’t put you in my book, you’re too inscrutable.”
Dreyer: Too inscrutable.
Dugger: Absolutely a true story.
Dreyer: Okay, so the irony is that he writes this book that paints this incredibly larger-than-life picture of a larger-than-life character to start out with, Lyndon Johnson. Brammer, who worked on Johnson’s staff, kind of loved him in many ways and admired him greatly. Even though Lyndon was, of course, on one hand a charmer and on the other hand a giant bully.
Dugger: That’s right.
Dreyer: And an incredible manipulator. And I understand that Johnson hated the book.
Dugger: I wouldn’t say he was larger than life, I’d say, “included everything in life.”
Dreyer: Okay.
Dugger: He encompassed life.
Dreyer: Johnson hated the book and wouldn’t have anything to do with Billy Lee afterwards. And I understand that Billy Lee was just crushed.
Dugger: That’s right. I didn’t know he was crushed.
Dreyer: A lot of people thought it was one of the things that led to his downfall.
Dugger: Well, he didn’t have a downfall, exactly. He died of an overdose.
Dreyer: Yes. But he died of an overdose that was kind of an extended overdose.
Dugger: And it wasn’t fair to Johnson because the last time I saw Billy Lee — I had to go see him in some house on West 29th Street and it was early in the morning, about nine o’clock — and he came out of the bedroom and then a young lady came out of the bedroom and about five minutes later a second young lady came out. So maybe his imagination was fed by his own life. I wouldn’t call that coming apart; I’d say that he just lived in the time.
Dreyer: I believe he got terminal writer’s block, too. I think was one of the problems. He couldn’t write that second novel.
Dugger: I didn’t know that, either.
Dreyer: The irony I was going to bring up about that is that you, on the other hand, turned down Lyndon’s — and I want you to talk about this next — his sort of proposed quid pro quo for The Observer. I think he said, “Well, The Observer has, how big a circulation do you have?” and you said, “6,000.” And he said, “Well, you want to make it 60 thousand?”
Dugger: “Stick with me and make it 60 thousand.”
Dreyer: “And I’ll take you there.” And you basically said, “No.” And I want you to tell us about that incident. But you, on the other hand, ended up having continual interaction with him and wrote a biography of Johnson. So, tell me about how that all happened.
Dugger: Well, the reason I wrote it finally was because the editor asked me 50 years later to write about that relationship. And the reason I hadn’t written it is because it’s sort of self-serving.
But Johnson was trying to bribe me, basically. “I’m getting ready to run for president and you need to back me. You’re trouble for me when the journalists come in from the Northeast. Sing my praises and we’ll make The Observer a whamdinger.”
Well, that’s just a dime away from a bribe. But I didn’t want to offend him. I was very shy in person — well, I’m not shy, but I mean I was polite. So, I just needed to get away from there. We were out at the ranch, and he said, “No, no, stay for dinner. Bird will have plenty.”
So, I was trapped and I stayed for dinner and there was Bird and there was Mary Margaret Wiley, the managing editor of the Breckenridge Times in San Antonio, a high school paper that I was once editor of. And neither one of them said a word all night, I don’t think. Johnson told his theory of what a young reporter like me ought to do, which is that you ought to pick out who you want to be president and then you make a book with him and go all out for him, as a journalist.
Well, of course he didn’t believe that, he knew better than that. That’s just the way he sucked a number of journalists in to write pieces about him — for example, in the Saturday Evening Post — about why he should be president. And so, I had to argue as though I believed he believed what he said he believed — and of course, we didn’t get anywhere.
By the time I got away that night, we were at the ranch, out in front of his house. And maybe up to the knees — or just a little above the knees — was a very low fence, I mean a low fence. And he was leaning at me so much that I remember I had to move back a step or two to avoid contact.
Dreyer: Yeah. You said that he put that “long face” right in yours.
Dugger: Yeah.
Dreyer: And he was hands on, too.
Dugger: Yeah, he was. And when the Observer ran that story about it, they had a photograph of Johnson leaning over Abe Fortas. And Fortas was literally leaning back like a bow. That was the way you had to do with Johnson. He was something else.
Dreyer: One of the things, I guess, that led to all of this was that you and the Observer were on the other side of a major split within the Democratic Party — or an insurgency within the Democratic Party.
Dugger: And what Johnson was doing was siding with the conservatives because we weren’t going to take orders from Sam Rayburn and Johnson like the Democratic Party did in Texas. And therefore, he started calling us the “Red Hots.” And that’s why I got crosswise with him right away. Now that’s kind of ironic when he turns out to be the best liberal policy president since Roosevelt.
But the fact is in that context he was fighting for Price Daniel and the segregationists, and hell — excuse me — heck, he got Ben Ramsey appointed Democratic National Committeeman from Texas. And Ramsey was — I won’t say Ramsey was corrupt, I don’t know — but he was certainly the godfather of corruption in the Texas Senate, which he presided over. So, we had to fight him. Had to.
Dreyer: Well, he was such a mixed signal, it seemed like. I mean he was a supporter of Civil Rights, but he was also an ultimate Machiavellian.
Dugger: He wasn’t always a supporter of Civil Rights. In the ‘40s he even voted against the bill to prohibit lynching Negroes in the South, like they were called at that time.
But I think deep down he was. I mean, when he said in a speech that “We Shall Overcome,” I think deep down he was deeply satisfied to help Hispanics and Blacks. That’s who he was, but I think it was Caro who said at one point that he always put his ambition first.
Well I don’t know about always, but certainly he was driven to be president. It was a dangerous and uncorrectable obsession. And therefore, I think he would do almost anything to sound like whoever he was talking to, that he was on his side.
Dreyer: And then he was brought down by Vietnam.
Dugger: Definitely.
Dreyer: And how did he struggle with all of that? Was the path just obvious to him?
Dugger: I don’t know. I did a lot of interviewing of him in the White House and he’d walk up and down. One thing is, he saw Vietnam as a contest between Ho Chi Minh and himself, and it was a macho thing. Another thing that he talked about was, “We’ll make him” — he used the verb “make” him, “make” them do this, “make” them do that. In other words, “force.”
Also, when he was walking up and down, was he worrying about the two million Vietnamese who were dying or the 58,000 Americans? Well, yes, I guess, but what he talked about was “my boys.” He was talking about the pilots doing the bombing; he wanted to be sure they’d get back. No, I’d say he was a very old-fashioned president. His job was to win the war and not imagine the opposition dying.
Dreyer: Just sort of block that out.
Dugger: Oh, sure. That’s what presidents are supposed to do, isn’t it? They’re supposed to be nationally loyal and to heck with the rest of the world. Well, that’s the way he was, in my impression.
You know, it took me a while to more or less realize and acknowledge it, but if you look at Lyndon’s presidency, I think it’s perfectly and objectively true that it was the most progressive domestic policy presidency since Roosevelt. After all, Truman was just following Clark Clifford on National Health Insurance, to get the minorities out and get elected. But Johnson really did a whole lot in domestic policy which is exactly what you would want the liberal to do.
And then, of course, the Vietnam War not only ruined that but killed two million people in Vietnam. I heard Robert McNamara admit to a Vietnamese general in a documentary that three million were killed. I guess he was including the French. So that was, of course, ruinous. And that was the problem with Johnson.
Kennedy came along, though, and he sounded like a lot more moderate man, domestically, than Johnson. Not nearly as liberal.
But in the longer run, I regard Kennedy and Khrushchev as two heroes of the human race. They saved us from nuclear war. Of course, Khrushchev knew very well that we were way ahead of them in our nuclear weapons buildup. They knew that we could first strike and they couldn’t retaliate strong enough to deter us.
In that case they put all their weapons — half their weapons — in Cuba. In retrospect, we realized they were loaded to fire. I just finished Sergei Khrushchev’s memoir where he says his father told him that if they had fired their weapons it would have killed 80 million of us. Well, imagine what we would have done then, to the whole Communist orbit. Half the world would have been wiped out. It was that close. It was very close.
I remember Curtis LeMay, the member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was sitting there and he told Kennedy to his face — it’s in the dialogues, in their transcripts — that what he was doing by refusing to bomb and invade at once, which the Joint Chiefs were unanimously for, was worse than what Chamberlain did at Munich.
Well, see, you can get me to talking about that and I won’t quit. In other words, Khrushchev and Kennedy actually saved the human race. And history will show that in the long run. Just like it will show Truman as a mass murderer in the long run.
Dreyer: You wrote that when you were at the White House, and you were talking to Johnson about the bomb and about Hiroshima, he said, “I’m the one who has to hit this button.”
Dugger: Yeah. There’s a little more to it. I mean it was impermissible to ask the president about nuclear weapons and nobody ever did it, I don’t think. But I had asked Harry Truman why we didn’t have a “no first-use” policy and — as I recall it — he sputtered with anger. I was about 20 or 21, and his face went red and he didn’t answer.
So later, I asked Johnson. I was interviewing him while we were at dinner with two other journalists over in Lafayette Square. You couldn’t ask him, “Would you push the button, would you retaliate?” You just couldn’t ask that question. I think you would have been thrown out of the White House, like I almost was at the press conference with Truman.
I asked him, “What are people like me supposed to say to our citizens out there when you tell us that in the first 30 minutes of a nuclear exchange 400 million people will die?” And then he got mad at me because, of course, he and I were adversarial, more or less, and he didn’t like me much, although I don’t know why he was letting me in the White House then.
And he got into a work-up against “you liberals.” He said, “I’m the one who has to know all the facts and I’m the one” — and he put his hand up and then ducked his thumb down in the air — “I’m the one who has to mash the button.” That’s what he said.
Dreyer: Were you afraid that he would actually mash it?
Dugger: I’ve been thinking about that for 40 years. What does that mean? I think it meant he was psychologically prepared to mash the button. He would be the one who would have to do it and he would have done it.
The question is, would we retaliate if we were struck. And the issue there — it’s the one hidden in the deterrence theory — is that if we are the victims, we’ve got five or 10 minutes that we know we are going to be committing mass murder. We’re all going to die, or 80 million of us are going to die. Would we commit mass murder before it occurred?
And the answer is, “Yes.” That’s what the deterrence doctrine means. That’s why the president — in my opinion, no, in my guess — meant that he was prepared to commit mass murder if somebody was going to mass murder us. That’s where we are now, instead of abolishing the damned thing — dern things.
Dreyer: Ronnie, you wrote a book called Dark Star: Hiroshima Reconsidered, about a Texas pilot who helped bomb Hiroshima. I think he actually flew a reconnaissance mission.
Dugger: He flew the weather mission over Hiroshima and sent back the word — “bomb primary” — for which he was guilty the rest of his life.
Dreyer: A fascinating story and I know that the nuclear bomb was a moving issue for you throughout much of your life.
Dugger: Still is.
Dreyer: At that time, the bomb was on everybody’s mind. Children would have nightmares. It was a great cause for all kinds of mental health problems among young people in this country. There was a sense of imminence about it.
Dugger: And they were right.
Dreyer: And they were right. Now it’s receded as an issue. How much safer are we?
Dugger: Worse off. We’re worse off.
First, the thing about the Cold War, it was predictable. They knew we were going for first strike. But it nevertheless almost blew up three times. There was the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was just by a whisker. Then in 1979, when Brzezinski was national security adviser to Carter, he was being told by NORAD that 20 thousand Soviet missiles were in the air against us. And he’s testified himself that he was five minutes from calling Carter to say we’re about to be mass murdered. What would Carter have done?
And then in the early ‘80s we were so strong and Reagan was calling the Soviet Union the Evil Empire. And Andropov and the Soviets — according to Khrushchev and other sources, especially from Richard Rhodes’ book, Arsenals of Folly, about the illusion of our armaments — Andropov was getting ready to hit us first so we wouldn’t hit him first. And then along came Gorbachev, thank God.
Gorbachev and Reagan. Reagan wanted to disarm, wanted to abandon nuclears. I think somebody lied to him at Reykjavik — we don’t know who lied to him about Gorbachev’s position — but then, of course Star Wars became the hang-up that kept Reagan from going along with Gorbachev.
So that certainly makes Gorbachev one of the three great people on this issue, and I give Reagan a lot of credit. He just thought his way through it and said, “Hey, we can’t kill all these people,” and he was trying to prevent it. But it’s still on the table.
Now we’re getting nine nuclear nations, each one with a military secrecy policy keeping us from knowing what they’re doing. There’s a guy named Rosenbaum who wrote a book where he basically says that the Israelis have five German-made submarines in the Mediterranean, armed with nuclear weapons, ready to retaliate if Iran strikes them. Who knows when they’re going to use them? If they have them. I mean we don’t know. It’s much more dangerous than it was in the Cold War.
Dreyer: There also must be weapons out there that are unaccounted for, warheads that are unaccounted for, and who knows whose hands they’re in.
Dugger: Some of the guys have waken up — and one of those was McNamara before he died. But the fact is we’ve got to abolish them.
Dreyer: Okay. Brad Buchholtz, in a feature story for the Austin American-Statesman, called Ronnie Dugger the “godfather of progressive journalism in Texas.”
Dugger: That piece was so complimentary. Brad did a really careful job. The trouble is it read like an obituary and I’m not dead yet.
Dreyer: In that story, you said, “I see myself as an 81-year old man with his life’s work ahead of him.”
Dugger: That’s right. That’s right.
Dreyer: So, you’re just getting started and you’ve got a lot of stuff going.
Dugger: I figure on 10 years if I’m lucky.
Dreyer: Our friend David McBryde just wrote in from Berlin. He said, “Why don’t you ask him if he would tell some Texas Observer tales about courageous journalism in Texas and the fights about the oil depletion allowance?” And he also wrote that he remembers that The Daily Texan once ran a blank front page to protest the censorship of the report on the oil depletion allowance.
Dugger: Actually, that was Willie Morris. Willie was the editor of The Daily Texan and he was raising all kinds of cane.
Dreyer: It was Willie Morris who did that, yes.
Dugger: Yeah, he was the editor there — and I needed an associate editor at the Observer and when he graduated, I hired him. But it wasn’t on the front page, it was on the editorial page. They had put censors over him, the Regents had, the Texas Board of Student Publications, at least temporarily, had. So, when they wouldn’t let him run this editorial, he just ran a blank space — which is why I thought, “Hey, I’d better hire him over here.”
Dreyer: What was the issue about the oil depletion allowance?
Dugger: I was just writing editorials about it — against the oil depletion allowance — and it’s a complicated story. But it cost me, personally, like these things tend to. I was the University’s nominee for the Rhodes Scholarship one year and I got to the two judges who were in the regional — and it was a particular professor of law who hated my guts because of my editorials on the oil depletion allowance — and that’s all we talked about. So, I had to get to Oxford some other way.
Dreyer: And you got there.
Dugger: Yeah.
Dreyer: And I think Willie Morris got there, too.
Dugger: Thanks to the Austin Rotary Club which sent me there. When I got back, though, I made a speech to the Austin Rotary Club. About a thousand people were there and I got a standing ovation — except from the doctors present who passed a resolution that the Rotary Club should stop sending students abroad because they were coming back infected with foreign ideologies. I was for national health insurance.
Dreyer: You were for national health insurance way back when.
Dugger: Oh, yeah, about ’51, ’52.
Dreyer: What do you think about what’s going on now?
Dugger: Well I think both political parties have descended pretty low. The Republican Party — which used to have honorable conservatives of conspicuous power in it — seems to me has turned into a military phalanx to destroy government except for war, police, and enriching the rich. You just don’t want any government for anything but that. And to commit wars around the world whenever we please.
Whereas the Democratic Party seems to have been hollowed out, I guess by the power of money that has now become uncontrollable. So, we’re in a vacuum situation. It begins to be comparable in my mind to the Weimar Republic.
So along comes the Supreme Court and becomes a five-person dictatorship, first prohibiting the election of Albert Gore as president, but beyond that, opening corporate money vaults. Huge. We’re talking Exxon, we’re talking General Electric, we’re talking all the banks; they can spend any amount of money for any candidate they want to because they’re “persons.”
Corporate personhood. Long history of absolute scandalous evolution into the idea that corporations have the full rights of citizens. I don’t think the country can last five or 10 years with open corporate vaults pouring into every election they choose. Now, you can still win some elections when you don’t have as much money as your opponent. But in 10 years? I don’t know. I don’t think so.
We used to have a guy at the Observer who went down to Mexico a lot — and used to call Mexico an “imitation democracy.” That’s what we are now. We’re now an imitation democracy governed by a corporate oligarchy in league with the billionaires, and a bought Congress. I think the Congress, with honorable exceptions, is now a whorehouse — pardon me, can I say that?
Dreyer: You can say it again if you want to.
Dugger: All right, so, you’ve got a whorehouse Congress, you’ve got presidents chosen by open corporate money vaults. And the other way you can look at it is that we’re headed toward fascism. Now continue all the appearances of being a democracy, we’ll continue to have elections, which – and I’m happy to have had a hand in establishing this fact — can now be stolen by counting them in computers.
Dreyer: That was an issue that you’ve dealt with a lot.
Dugger: Since 1988 in The New Yorker.
But Congress has not passed a bill yet because both Democrats and Republicans are elected by the same system. And you don’t fix a system like you don’t fix the corporate money in politics in the system which elected most of the members.
Maybe we should take some deep breaths and start thinking about a Social Democratic Party in the United States that isn’t afraid of the word “socialism,” that is willing to go into a much more active program of public ownership, that will not be segued or finessed out of facing corporate power. In other words, following the European model.
Now the question is — and I’m not an optimist, but I think you have to continue to try — is American politics now so dominated by the rot-gut imagery that has been promulgated? I always remember George Bush the First, running his presidency about how horrible the “L” word is, the word “liberal.” Well, that was just a sort of symbol of what’s happened to the whole political discourse.
I don’t have any answers, but I think we ought to realize that we’re in a very deep hole and may not get out. That our country may be ending as a free and a good place.
Dreyer: There’s a lot of people who believe, for one thing, that we should start building alternative institutions, cooperatives, you know, that sort of thing.
Dugger: Gar Alperovitz is a wonderful advocate of this, and he is arguing that we need a larger public sector — not so large as to jeopardize liberties like they did in the Communist countries. But he wrote a piece called “Not So Wild a Dream” published in The Nation, which I recommend to you. Alperovitz is saying that, in some sectors, we need more public ownership.
And in that connection, let me give you an example of how it gets lost. John Kenneth Galbraith advocated Democratic Socialism for the United States, but only in one book, in the ‘70s. And it was — it’s a passage in this book, maybe eight or 10 pages — that’s very similar to what Alperovitz has written in The Nation.
Furthermore, both of them turned to Europe for all the models. I mean, my heavens — you remember Adlai Stevenson ran for president and he had a son who was a senator named Adlai Stevenson. He advocated a public oil company. We’ve got all this oil, why don’t we produce it ourselves and find out how much it costs to produce it — then you can compare it to what you’re having to pay at the pump. Yardstick corporations, they’re called.
Plenty of democratic nations have percentages, for example, of their airlines. Well then, the public airlines, they don’t get tax advantages, if they’re better than the private airlines — the private airlines have to get better.
What’s actually happened, if I may say so, is the whole theme of free enterprise has been replaced as a reality by what I think of as a second system which is essentially gigantic corporations that are transnational.
First, if you can’t get the banks, the big banks that are “too big to fail,” to break down as Alperovitz says — then the logic is the country should take them over. Because then you can go back to a competitive banking system.
Dreyer: But the public sector has been so demonized.
Dugger: I know it has. That’s what I’m asking. Have we gotten so propagandized that we can’t think any more in our own interest?
