Charles Kaiser talks to Newsweek's Peter Goldman about Obama's historic bid

Peter Goldman is one of the finest journalists of his generation, and the last living tie to the glory days of Newsweek who still contributes to the magazine. After seven years as a reporter at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Goldman joined Newsweek, just after it had been bought by Phil Graham of the Washington Post company, and just before it became the most important news magazine of its era in the '60s and the '70s. By championing original reporting and a liberal point of view, Newsweek finally surpassed archrival Time as the must-read every Monday morning during that explosive period. Goldman wrote dozens of cover stories about the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war, and his smooth writing and subtle insights set a whole new standard for the weekly magazine craft.

Now 75 years old, Goldman remains in charge of Newsweek's special post-election issue, which it produces by staffing the major campaigns with reporters who promise not to reveal anything they've learned until after the November election. He has been doing that since 1984. As an éminence grise of the civil rights movement, Goldman struck me as the perfect person to interview about Barack Obama's triumph. Excerpts follow:

CHARLES KAISER: Tell me about when you got started at Newsweek.
PETER GOLDMAN: I got to Newsweek in 1962 and found myself willy-nilly the civil rights writer. We really didn't have black staff at that time and I was very interested in the subject. My first cover story was the Ole Miss riot in '62. I got into politics sort of accidentally. My first two presidential campaigns, I was doing the candidate who represented the so-called white backlash: Barry Goldwater in 1964 and George Wallace in 1968. It turns out that what we saw in 1964 in some ways is what underlay the success of the Republican party for the next 40 years. It sort of became codified as the Southern strategy by Nixon—and a guy named Harry Dent, a South Carolina Republican pol.

A fundamental document was Kevin Phillips' book, The Emerging Republican Majority, in 1969. It sort of framed the future of the Republican party. In Phillips' analysis, the Sunbelt, stretching across the southern tier of the country to California, was becoming a Republican stronghold. And it turned out to be pretty prophetic. To this day, the white South is the base of the Republican governing coalition—or it has been. I think we may have just seen the end of that.

We may have, but we don't know yet.
No, you don't know. You never put a period; the strongest punctuation I use when I'm talking about politics is a semicolon.

Do you see a straight line from Martin Luther King to Barack Obama?
Not exactly a straight line, but a definite line. Not only Martin Luther King, but the civil rights movement in general, including the more radical Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. They fought and died for this—for what happened on Tuesday.

Obama's campaign really stood on the pillars of it [the civil rights campaign], right?
I think so. There are a lot of pillars under Obama. There's been generational change in America. The old generation, in which it would have been impossible for a black guy to get this far, is fading from the scene. And I think younger people are more open in a variety of ways. First of all, they're used to seeing black faces in their schools, in their workplaces, in their daily lives. Biracial couples are much more prevalent than they were back when I was a pup at Newsweek. I think we're a more open society. We won't know until election day whether we're now grown up enough as a society to elect a black president. I think that's unknowable and unpollable. I don't trust any general election poll this time. So we don't really know the outcome yet, but for one of the two major parties to do this is astonishing. And one of the ironies of it is that a lot of his delegate support came from Southern states and from a black electorate—black voters who were voting because of Dr. King and the movement.

Of course, one of the big questions at the end of last year was whether he would get most of the black vote.
There was a question. I have several Black Nationalist friends in Detroit who belong to a church not unlike Reverend Wright's. And they were talking the middle of last year about how this guy is not an African American, he hasn't shared our experience, he doesn't come from where we come from. And now they're happy.

You know, one of the theories for why the Jews had to be in the desert for 40 years before they reached the promised land is that a whole new generation—or two whole new generations—had to be born into freedom after leaving Egypt before they could reach the promised land. Is there a comparison between those 40 years in the desert and the past 40 years in America?
I think there is. I think on both the black and white sides of the equation we have had a maturation period. And again, we don't know if we're there yet as a society. One that I believe is still in progress—I don't think we've come to the finish line, but Tuesday night was a huge step. If you had told me in the '60s that I would see a black major party candidate, I would have thought you were crazy.

He seems genuinely unflappable. I cannot remember anybody dealing with a campaign crisis as effectively—as intellectually and as effectively—as he dealt with Reverend Wright with that speech about race. I thought that was one of the extraordinary moments in American politics.
I totally agree with that. I'm sort of a professional spectator, and I don't take sides in these races. I also have a feeling, in one way or another, they all turn out to be heartbreak kids. But what finally persuaded me to take Obama very, very seriously was the race speech. And partly because it echoed things in my own past. Newsweek in the '60s was very engaged. We were doing journalism engagé about the civil rights movement and later about the Vietnam war. So, formally, I was chronicler of the civil rights struggle, but actually, I was a champion. And so, for our politics to have reached the point where this guy could make that speech, I think is astonishing. And I think it was an astonishing speech. And it persuaded me this guy's the real goods, in terms of the quality of his intelligence and the quality and the complexity of his intelligence. He is a rare order of beast in political life.

I was interviewed by a Brazilian reporter who said, "Do you feel his nomination is Mission Accomplished for the 1960s?" And I said, "Yes, absolutely."
I agree with that.

It seems to me pretty obvious—of course it's become a cliché to say this—that the past 40 years were largely a backlash to the '60s in general and the events of 1968 in particular. The whole disarray, and insecurity, and the rise of the other, and so on. And maybe, just maybe, we're at the end of that 40-year cycle.
Yeah. Again, I don't bury the dead until they're dead.

We'll know it's the end of the cycle if he wins in November.
Even then we won't be entirely sure, because he's sort of an extraordinary person and an extraordinary politician. But the boomers are beginning to retire, and the echoes of the '60s are fainter and fainter. All that stuff happened 40 to 50 years ago. The culture war had to fade at some point. And when you look at this election structurally, we really have reached a pivotal point, I think, in American politics. I don't trust the word realignment, because real realignments, they're very unusual. But if you look at it structurally, when 80 percent of the country thinks we're going in the wrong direction; when a majority of the country thinks we'll be worse off five years from now than we are now, and that and we're worse off now than we were five years ago; when a majority believes the country is going downhill—now there are a lot of reasons for believing those things. But we live in a very discouraged society right now. And I think it's one very ready to turn the page.

The question that we'll have to wait until November to see is whether we're willing to turn this particular page. We've got an extremely unpopular president waging an extremely unpopular war. And being the steward of an economy that may or may not be technically in a recession, but a huge majority of the people believe it's in recession. This should be made for a Democratic landslide. What will be interesting with Obama is whether a black Democrat can win. And what would have been interesting with Hillary is whether a woman could win. And that will tell us a lot about our development as a country and as a society, and it will tell us a lot about whether the '60s are dead.

Well, or have triumphed.
Or have triumphed. Yeah, the better angels of the '60s.