David Butts

What we talked about

Hearing about Kennedy in an eighth-grade classroom

He opens the episode with it. He was sitting in class reading a Life magazine story about the Congo when a janitor said he thought the president had been shot. His first reaction was that it was absurd, that it could not happen here.

There was a football game that night. He was in the band. They won it, and he describes the evening as bleak anyway.

A 1960 campaign, hand-made signs, and a fight after school

He describes himself as a Kennedy devotee in 1960, putting out literature and making signs by hand, and getting into fights with classmates who had been told Kennedy would bring the pope to the White House. He was a child at the time, which is the detail that sets up everything after it.

The telegram from Ralph Yarborough

He says he did not want to go to college, because he did not think he was ready for it. Then a telegram arrived from Senator Ralph Yarborough telling him not to count on getting into VISTA, and that if he was not enrolled somewhere he would be sent to Vietnam. He went, to East Texas State in Commerce, on the grounds that it was a place he could get into easily.

Yarborough, he notes, was the only senator from a former Confederate state to vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That vote is also why he says he never forgave the Bushes, and it comes back later in the episode.

Commerce, Texas, and the sign over the highway

He describes the black-land cotton country around Hunt County and a sign that stood over the main road into town before the interstate was built. He says John Connally refused to speak locally until it came down, that it did come down, and that a plaque with the same wording stayed in the courthouse.

He is careful about it. The last time he looked, he says, was decades ago.

How the United States ended up on the wrong side in Indochina

This is the longest stretch of the episode and the most detailed. He walks through European colonization, the Japanese occupation of French Indochina, the OSS arming the Viet Minh against the Japanese, Ho Chi Minh reading from the American Declaration of Independence in Hanoi and writing to President Truman for support, and the State Department choosing to prop up the French instead. Then Dien Bien Phu, the partition, and a plebiscite that never decided anything.

His argument is that Ho Chi Minh was at least as much a nationalist as a communist, and that Vietnam’s real fear was China rather than the United States. His evidence is the border war between the two countries shortly after Saigon fell.

Why he thinks every president needs historians in the room

His conclusion from all of that is procedural rather than partisan. A president needs people who can lay the history out before a decision gets made, so that somebody in the room is able to say whether the plan runs with the grain of history or against it.

The Bush rally at UT, and the sailor who stood up

He tells the story of a George H. W. Bush Senate campaign event at the University of Texas in 1970: a speech about how retreating from Vietnam would dishonor the country, then the mistake, as he puts it, of opening the floor to questions.

The first man to stand up had just come off an aircraft carrier launching air strikes in the Gulf of Tonkin. He was trim, neatly dressed, and short-haired, which was not the crowd anyone expected the question to come from. He asked what American sailors on shore leave in Manila had done for the country’s reputation, and whether that was the honor being discussed. There was no answer, and questions ended shortly afterward.

In the same breath, and without being asked to, he credits Bush for voting for the federal open housing bill and taking death threats for it in Houston.

Kent State, and twenty-five thousand people on the main mall

He describes the bombing of Cambodia becoming public, the shootings at Kent State, and campuses going up across the country like a fuse. His figure for the UT crowd is twenty-five thousand on the main mall, most of them there to be peaceful.

He also remembers an earlier march to the Capitol with at least five thousand people, some of them wearing carved-out pumpkins on their heads.

The fair housing ordinance and the council it cost

He narrates an Austin City Council that passed a fair housing ordinance barring discrimination in the sale and rental of property, a repeal petition organized partly out of a church near campus, the repeal landing on the same ballot as the council’s own reelection, and the members who voted for it losing their seats.

His account includes the council expanding from five seats to seven, with the mayor still chosen by the members rather than elected directly. He flags his own uncertainty about the sequence while telling it, which is worth preserving rather than editing out.

Fifty years of Austin campaigns

He spends almost none of the episode on his own record, so here it is from the reporting. The Austin Chronicle calls him the granddaddy of political consulting in Central Texas across a fifty-year career, and lists Lloyd Doggett, Gonzalo Barrientos, and Ann Richards among the candidates he has worked for.

The Statesman reported in 2014 that he had helped elect three mayors and twelve council members over the previous fifteen years, and that the losses in that December runoff were his first in twenty years. He led the 2016 campaign that defeated Proposition 1, the ride-hailing measure, after which he said that Uber had decided to make Austin an example to the nation, and Austin made Uber an example to the nation.