The Man in the Arena – The Life and Times of U.S. Senator Gale McGee by author Rodger McDaniel

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member or an annual member. It’s easy and secure, thank you. (light upbeat music) – I thought Gale McGee
deserved to be remembered. He was in many ways a
transitional figure. McGee was the last
Democrat Wyoming elected to the U.S. Senate. – Wyoming author Rodger McDaniel and his latest book
The Man in the Arena, The Life and Times of United
States Senator Gale McGee next on Wyoming Chronicle. (dramatic music) – [Announcer] Funding
for this program was provided in part by the Wyoming Public
Television Endowment and viewers like you. – And it’s our pleasure
now to be joined by Rodger McDaniel in
your second appearance on Wyoming Chronicle Rodger. – It is, yes. – Welcome. – Thank you. Good to be here. – Roger you first came
on Wyoming Chronicle with your first book with
the late Richard Eghart – [Rodger] Yes. – The suicide of Wyoming’s
Senator Lester Hunt and now you’ve
written a new book. – Right. – The Life and Times of Gale
McGee, The Man in the Arena. Why this book? – Well I thought
Gale McGee deserved to be remembered. He was in many ways a
transitional figure. You know before, McGee
was the last Democrat Wyoming elected
to the U.S. Senate when he won a third term in
1970, half a century ago. And then he was defeated in ’76. Before McGee there was never
a time in Wyoming history when at least one of our
senators wasn’t a Democrat, with the exception
of the six months after Lester Hunt’s suicide when a Republican was
appointed to fill in and before Joe O’Mahoney was
reelected to take that seat. So Wyoming always before figured that it was in
the state’s interest to have a balanced
Congressional delegation. But that changed
in the mid 1970s and as I said there hasn’t been, well since Teno served
and retired in 1978 from the U.S. House there
hasn’t been a Democrat elected to either house
of Congress from Wyoming. – This book is
meticulously researched. How long have you been
thinking about the book and how long really did
it take you to write it? – Well it took a couple
of years to write it. I started
thinking about McGee because I ran into people
who had no idea who he was. – [Craig] Even in Wyoming. – In Wyoming and one woman
asked me what I was working on I told her I was writing
a biography of Gale McGee. She said who was she? (laughing) And so you know he
accomplished a great deal and he was in, the
man in the arena, as I use that Teddy
Roosevelt speech on issues that were very
significant at the time. The war in Vietnam, the
environmental movement, the civil rights movement. – And we’ll get
into more of that as we talk more about his life. What has been wonderful for me, and this is a grand read Rodger for those of us who
grew up here in Wyoming it really talks about a time
that has passed Wyoming by in my eyes, would
you agree with that? – Well and it’s a time that, it talks about a time that
has passed the country by and throughout the book
you see the ability of politicians to discuss
very divisive issues and yet remain friends and
respectful of one another, have a debate based on facts. – And maybe negotiate some. – [Rodger] And compromise. – And compromise, sure. – Right, it was a different time and McGee was a part of that and when the end came
that was the beginning of that change in America. – You really write well
about his campaigns. Let’s go back
though even farther. This was a school
teacher from Nebraska. – Yes. – Originally who liked
to hunt and fish. – Yeah, he was and he grew
up in Norfolk Nebraska, a small community. Then after he got his
degree he started teaching at small schools. – High school first, then
smaller universities. – Right and then
he was recruited to be the debate coach
at Nebraska Wesleyan whose debate coach had
a national reputation. Her teams won national
titles routinely and she recruited Gale
McGee to take her place because of his reputation
as a public speaker, which followed him
his whole career. – Boy did it ever and
we’ll get into that too. – You know he taught
at Notre Dame later. – [Brian] University of Chicago. – And he studied at the
University of Chicago. He was recruited to come
to Laramie after the war because there was
this huge influx of veterans who were using
the G.I. Bill to go to college and the university, like all
universities around the country had a real struggle
trying to find enough room and enough faculty and so
a recruiter from Laramie ended up at Notre Dame
and found Gale McGee and he thought
he’d be interested in coming to the
University of Wyoming. They had a fellow
professor there who had been at
Laramie and went to him and said what do you think, should I take this
job in Laramie? The fellow said no, no you
would not like Laramie Wyoming. And Gale said why not? He said because there’s
not a decent supper club within 50 miles and there’s
not a theater within 100 miles. And Gale said well
what do those folks do? And he said all they
do is hunt and fish. – [Brian] Sold. – McGee said I’m in, I’ll go and that’s what
brought him here. – And he was brought to
the University of Wyoming to teach history. – [Rodger] Yes. – Classes were very popular. – Yes, yeah his
classes were packed. As I worked on the book I
talked to so many people who had either been in his class or had tried to get into
his class and it was filled every semester to the
point where the university had to restrict
enrollment in the class. People from the
community would line up in the back of the room and
peer in to listen to him. Al Simpson jokes
that the only reason he’d get up before 8:00
o’clock in the morning was for that 8:00
o’clock history class. – Who wrote the
forward for the book. – [Rodger] Who wrote
the forward, yes. – Very nice, then there
was the red scare– – [Rodger] Yes. – At the University of Wyoming and Gale McGee was in
the middle of that. – He was and he was an
untenured professor. – Of 15 on the panel
he was the only one who was really at risk. – Yeah, took great risk
and it cost him a lot because he earned some enemies among some of the
board of trustees who spent a good deal of
the rest of his tenure at Laramie trying to
figure out how to fire him. – And let’s tell our viewers
what the red scare was. – Well what happened in
the height of the red scare is that some of the
trustees went to a seminar at Ann Arbor Michigan and one
of the sessions was entitled the little red schoolhouse
is redder than you think. And the pitch was that
university trustees needed to be aware
that in their libraries and in their classrooms
there were subversive texts being used by liberal professors to teach communist principles. And so the trustees came
back quite alarmed at that and passed a resolution
to review the textbooks and it exploded with criticism. Laramie was the first
university to do that and the criticism was everywhere
throughout the country. People like Arthur
Schlesinger and others were writing op-eds
criticizing the university for taking that step. And McGee joined a group of
professors to fight against it. Eventually the
trustees figured out that they had made
the wrong move and they got out of it
by asking Gale McGee and Doc Larson, T. A. Larson, to review some books
and report back to them and they did them
and reported back that they couldn’t find
any subversive texts and it went away. But it didn’t go away for McGee. As a result of that a
couple of the trustees actually hired students to spy
on Professor McGee’s classes to see what he was teaching. And of course they reported back that his classes
were very popular and they enjoyed them and
they found nothing subversive. – Gale McGee actually became
one of the first Americans to go behind the Iron Curtain. – He was, Russia had
always intrigued him and he led the first group
of non-government people to go behind the Red Curtain and spent several weeks touring much of the old Soviet Union. He came back and during
the time of Sputnik and then the great
scare in America that the Russians had
beat us into space and he found that
people in Wyoming really wanted to know
more about Russia and he became a very
popular speaker. In every community he spoke, at almost every church in
the state and civic clubs. – That struck me, that’s where
he spoke often at churches. – [Rodger] Yeah. – And sometimes wasn’t
initially welcomed. – Right, you know this idea
that he was a little bit pink, maybe too far red followed
him his whole life although he was the
leading spokesman for fighting communism
in southeast Asia, but there was
something about him that caused some people, you
know the John Birch Society had a big place in Wyoming. – They did not like Gale McGee. – They did not like him. They didn’t like Richard Nixon, who was the great red
hunter of the Congress, but they didn’t trust him and that sort of attitude
prevailed against McGee. In fact his FBI file
which I obtained is about six inches thick. – He made J. Edgar
Hoover’s list. – He made J. Edgar
Hoover’s list, although there were
people in Wyoming writing Hoover saying you
need to investigate Gale McGee and making wild
claims about him. When the FBI looked at
that they found nothing and McGee was a big
supporter of the FBI. – There was always in
the back of his mind a desire to run for
political office. – There was. – You made the comment that no
candidate in American history may have been more
prepared to run for the U.S. Senate
than Gale McGee. – Yeah I think that’s true. It actually started in 1950 and McGee had only been in
the state about four years, but the Laramie Boomerang
and the Cheyenne newspaper started writing editorials
about this young professor at Laramie who was so
eloquent and so bright and ought to be
running for Congress and he got the itch. Friends from around
Wyoming and elsewhere were excited about the
prospect and joined the chorus. Letters filled McGee’s mailbox. They came from new
friends in Wyoming and from old friends
on the many campuses where he had either
studied or taught. Party activist and
fellow professor John
Hinckley of Powell urged him to run
with a starkly candid but characteristically
humorous assessment of what was at stake. Quote I say give us a chance
to stand and be counted. Hell, you’ve nothing
to lose but your shirt and perhaps a
little self-respect and both can be recovered. (laughing) At the beginning of 1950 McGee
started looking to the future and during those years
he prepared himself not only by traveling the state and getting to know people,
but he did an internship at the Council on
Foreign Relations which was very significant
because there he was asked to study what would
happen to the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death. And what he concluded
was that China and Russia would not be able to
maintain their alliance, that while they
were both communist they were different
kinds of communists and McGee said, this
was in the mid 1950s, that China was the most
dangerous country on the planet endangering world peace. And that began to
develop his sense that the Chinese would
take over southeast Asia if the United States didn’t
stop them in Vietnam. And in that process
he got to know people like Eleanor Roosevelt and Dean Rusk and Henry
Kissinger and so many others, many of whom later
would help him in 1958 when he decided
to run for Senate. – And then he did decide to run and ran against Senator Barrett. – [Rodger] Yes. – How much in your view did Barrett’s supposedly
unethical intervention in the Robertson’s
sale of the ranch to H.L. Hunt and then the
900,000 dollar tax bill, how much did that influence the ultimate outcome
of that election? – Well when you win an election
by less than 2,000 votes everything, you can point
at everything as being– – [Craig] Right. – Having an impact, but
that did have an impact. It was printed in the papers within just a few
weeks of the election. Denied by former
Senator Robertson and by Barrett and so Drew
Pearson ran a second story on election day about it. I think it cannot but have
been a big difference maker. In the last few
days of the campaign it all looked pretty close and
something was going to happen to break it loose and
that was one event and Lyndon Johnson’s
promise to put McGee on the Appropriations
Committee as the first freshman ever on that
committee also was a big deal in the last week
of the campaign. – As I was reading
through your wonderful recount of his campaign the
influence of Wyoming newspapers was just big. – Yes. – Back then and it seems
to be very different today. – Well it was, you
think back to those days and of course there
was no internet, there was no 24/7 news
on television constantly, radio you know if
you missed the, if you’re a farmer or a rancher and you missed the 6:00
a.m. news you didn’t know, you didn’t hear these things, but newspapers were always there and they were well read
and had a circulation was large and they
were very influential. – Influential in their opinion. – [Rodger] They were. – That’s changed
certainly somewhat today. He won, he moved to Washington. You write that it was
earth shakingly emotionally and personally when the
family made the move. – Yeah, well you know the
McGees never had much money and when he ran
that ’58 campaign he had to cash in a small
life insurance policy and take a loan from his in-laws and from his parents and he had to go on a leave without pay in June of 1958 so by January of ’59 when
he gets to Washington he hasn’t had a
paycheck for six months. – On leave from the university. – Right.
– Sure. – And so you know
the funny story is he’s anxious to see if
he can get an advance on his first month’s salary and Joe O’Mahoney takes him
to see the clerk of the Senate and he explains to him the
benefits you get as a Senator, you get free haircuts
and there’s a doctor available for healthcare
and you get free postage and two trips a year back home, but no you can’t have an
advance on your paycheck. – His first speech done earlier
than most freshman Senators. He was introduced by JFK. – Yeah, he was. John Kennedy had
been a friend of his from those earlier days at the
Council on Foreign Relations, that was a friendship
he established then and with Lyndon Johnson. One of the first campaign
contributions that McGee got was from John Kennedy when he
personally landed his plane people remember
the airplane named after his daughter the Caroline, landed at the Laramie airport, handed Gale McGee five
crisp 100 dollar bills, which in 1958 was
a load of money, but they were friends and
when he went to Washington that friendship continued. – Oh boy did it ever. One of the most fascinating
parts of the book for me was JFK’s campaign
and Wyoming’s role– – [Rodger] Yes. – In his election to become
the Democratic candidate. – Yeah it’s a big piece
of Wyoming history. Back in those days they
called the roll alphabetically and so Wyoming was
the last to vote. Both Lyndon Johnson
and Senator Kennedy thought all along that
McGee was with them for a variety of reasons. – And he held it close
to the vest, didn’t he? – He would not endorse
during the campaign and so it came down
to the last state. When it got to Wyoming
Kennedy was still short by 11 votes, Wyoming
had 15 votes, and only seven were
committed to Kennedy and so the book tells the story of somebody’s voice screaming
at the Wyoming delegation get me four more votes. And suddenly Tracy McCracken
grabs the microphone and says all 15
of Wyoming’s votes will go to the next president
of the United States John Kennedy and
the crowd bursts and the band started playing and what’s odd is that
one of those 15 votes was of Governor Hickey
who had moments later given a seconding
nomination for LBJ. So it’s kind of, maybe
those 15 votes got hijacked. – There’s some thought had he
not won on the first ballot. – [Rodger] Yeah. – That he wouldn’t have won. – Yeah, the Kennedy
team was convinced and so was the Johnson team. Johnson thought if they could
get it past that first ballot that there were
enough people who then would not be committed
on a second ballot that Johnson instead of Kennedy
would have been the nominee. – Through his
tenure in the Senate he became a tremendous influence to Kennedy, to
Johnson and to Nixon, relative to foreign policy
issues of the country, this guy from Wyoming. – Well that’s one of the reasons
I wanted to write the book is that Gale McGee
always played down his role in foreign policy
because his staff said the folks back home
won’t like that. They want to know that you’re
working on Wyoming issues and not spending a lot
of time on foreign policy and he did work
on Wyoming issues. But he was heavily
involved in so many of the foreign policy decisions, that had been his love and
you know it was wonderful that the majority
leader Lyndon Johnson put him on the
Appropriations Committee because he could funnel
millions of dollars back to Wyoming
for water projects and schools and all kinds
of public improvements, but he really wanted on the
Foreign Relations Committee and LBJ said look young man I think I’ve given
you enough favors. So he couldn’t initially get on the Foreign Relations
Committee but later he did, which is a story in itself
particularly around Vietnam. But he was involved
in issues ranging from the Middle East to the
creation of the Peace Corps, the Kennedy initiative
in South America and so much other of
America’s foreign policy and then he’s
probably best known as being the leading
Congressional proponent for the war in Vietnam. – We’ll get to that
in just a minute. Also about the boarding
of the U.S.S. Pueblo. He played a significant role
in urging his colleagues to exercise restraint and
when many from Wyoming didn’t necessarily agree
that exercising restraint was the right thing to do. – Yeah, his mailbox
was filled with letters from people all over
the state urging that he support a military
attack on North Korea. And he and others tried
to calm that situation and it cost Gale McGee a lot
of support back in Wyoming. But he gave a
speech on that issue on the floor of the Senate at
the height of the controversy when the Americans were
still being held as hostages. – For nine months or so? – For nine months in North Korea and being badly treated. A cause to go to war,
but a war was just not the right option
and McGee said you know you can
start a war these days but you can’t finish
it given the armaments that are available to people like the leaders of North Korea. So he gave this really
marvelous speech that Robert Bird called one
of the greatest speeches delivered on the floor of
the United States Senate. – And then there was Vietnam
and he was a supporter for the United State’s
involvement in Vietnam. Again to the chagrin
of many Wyomingites especially as the war raged on. – You know in the beginning,
back before McGee was involved in politics and in
the early days of teaching he was an isolationist. He voted for Norman
Thomas for president. He attended Charles Lindbergh’s
America First rallies. He petitioned his draftboard
to be a contentious objector and was given contentious
objector status, which I suspect some of his
later political opponents would have liked to have known. But then came Pearl Harbor and that changed everything and McGee then
tried to volunteer. He wanted to be a Navy pilot, but he was teaching a
military program at Notre Dame which rushed young
Second Lieutenants to
a bachelor’s degree so they could be commissioned
and sent to the front. So Notre Dame would
not release him. But his draftboard
changed his status to 1A and he was drafted and
went for his physical and that’s where he found
that he was a diabetic and had diabetes severely
enough that he couldn’t serve. So then he goes to the
University of Chicago where he studies
international affairs and you can read his
scholarly writings during that period of his life concluding with his dissertation on the question of
the founding fathers’ views about foreign
entanglements and you can watch as
you read that him move from being an
isolationist to believing that America had no choice
but to involve itself in the foreign
affairs of the world. That that, because it
was our own security which was at stake. So that’s where he
developed this sense, what people would later
call the domino theory. His firm belief that if
we didn’t stop communism in Vietnam the Chinese
would take over all of southeast Asia. So that led him to
support Kennedy first and Johnson later on
the war in Vietnam. The epilogue of
the book imagines Gale McGee coming
back today and seeing what the Senate is like
and how different it is technologically, how
different it is politically, the polarization that
he would not recognize, the mount of money
that is involved in running for the Senate. And I conclude the book
with these sentences. McGee was a college professor
at Nebraska Wesleyan where he taught tolerance
for Japanese Americans during World War II and at the University of Wyoming where his history
classes inspired thousands of young people. He was a United States
Senator who taught that the most divisive issues
can be discussed honestly and with respect,
and an ambassador who believed America
was strongest when it was serving
the hopes of smaller, less advantaged nations. Perhaps Gale McGee’s
greatest legacy is leaving us with an
idea of what we once were, what politicians once were and how to get back there again. – Lot of people
talk about civility and his ability to
have these difficult and hard discussions, it
just doesn’t happen anymore. – It doesn’t and you know
there was nothing more divisive in our history than
the war on Vietnam and he and George
McGovern debated Vietnam on 700 college campuses and remained the
closest of friends. McGovern came to Laramie
to campaign for Gale when he had an anti-war
opponent in the 1970 election. They had that
ability to get along and to respect one another
on very difficult issues and we’ve lost that. – And before we end
we should talk about his wife Loraine’s
role in his life. At his side, managing
his diabetic issues. – Yeah, she was a full partner
from the very beginning. You know interesting story, her parents didn’t
like Gale McGee and they didn’t like this
young man coming around, but Loraine did and
eventually they married and had this
wonderful partnership
throughout their life. She was involved in all
ways in his campaigns and later when he
was an ambassador. And one of her big
roles was his health because he was diabetic
and she could sense the body changing at
night while he slept and that he would be
having a diabetic episode and her ability to do that saved
his life on many occasions. But they were the
best of friends. You know not just
husband and wife, but full partners in life. – In my eyes The
Man in the Arena, The Life and Times
of Senator Gale McGee for anyone who wants to
understand Wyoming’s history in the 1940s, 1950s,
1960s and 1970s and United States’
history at that time and a gentleman from
Wyoming’s influence there couldn’t be a
better researched book that tells the story. – Well thank you. He does deserve to be remembered and those times were significant so I hope people enjoy the book. – Currently you’re the pastor at the Highlands Presbyterian
Church in Cheyenne. – I am. – You also continue
to write a column for the Wyoming Tribune Eagle
and the Laramie Boomerang. – [Rodger] Yes sir. – And a committed
grandfather and Rockies fan. – Oh all of that,
all of the above. – Congratulation on the book. – Thank you. – Rodger it’s been a
pleasure as always. – Thanks for having me. (light upbeat music) (dramatic music) – [Announcer] Funding
for this program was provided in part by the Wyoming Public
Television Endowment and viewers like you.