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.