Weekly Republican Address 4/12/14: Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA)

House Republican Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers delivered the Weekly Republican Address on Saturday, April 12. Chair McMorris Rodgers discusses how Republicans’ long-term plan for jobs and economic growth will help build an America that works.

“For women across America, it’s not just about equal pay. It’s about achieving a better life,” Chair McMorris Rodgers said. “Republicans are acting on solutions to make that happen — solutions that will empower women and eliminate barriers they face to better jobs, better paychecks, and better lives.”

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L.B.J.’s Gettysburg Address

In American history, 1963 was a year rich in speeches. But of all the signature speeches that year, it’s the one that has been all but forgotten that might have transformed the country the most.

Fifty years ago, on Memorial Day in 1963, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a speech in Gettysburg, Pa., that foreshadowed profound changes that would be achieved in only 13 months and that mark us still.

The occasion was a speech that almost wasn’t given at all, for an anniversary that was still a month off, delivered by a man who had grown weary of his apparent uselessness in an office that neither interested him nor engaged his capacious gifts. It is a reminder that the titanic events of history sometimes occur away from the main stage — and proof of the power of a great idea, even if it is delivered ahead of its time.

“One hundred years ago, the slave was freed,” Johnson said at the cemetery in a ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. “One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin.”

With those two sentences, Johnson accomplished two things. He answered King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” And he signaled where the later Johnson administration might lead, which was to the legislation now known as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Six months later, after Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson became president and vowed to press ahead on civil rights, saying that was what the presidency was for — even though he was a Southern Democrat and many of his Congressional allies were devout segregationists.

And yet Johnson nearly didn’t give his Gettysburg speech at all. He dismissed the invitation with a shrug when it arrived in the vice president’s office. He was distracted, distressed and depressed. Almost nothing interested him.

He was moping too much, “and it was becoming obvious,” George E. Reedy, a Johnson press secretary, said in an oral history recorded for the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Tex. “He just looked lugubrious. He reminded me of one of those Tennessee bloodhounds, you know, with the drooping ears.”

His closest aides never sent Johnson’s regrets to the Gettysburg invitation, leaving the option open, hoping to lure the vice president to use the occasion to break out of his funk. Juanita Roberts, Johnson’s personal secretary, saw special appeal in the opportunity, and she dashed off a note to Horace Busby, who was Johnson’s head speechwriter.

“Do you think something good could be made here?” she wondered. “The distinguished son of distinguished confederates on the 100th anniv. of the battle —.”

Then she wrote Johnson directly, saying, “I can’t regret this one yet — I am excited by the possibilities it could offer.” She told the vice president that this was a chance to deliver “a masterpiece to be remembered by” and suggested that Dwight D. Eisenhower, living in Gettysburg in retirement from the presidency, might be drawn to the event.

By then the idea had gained momentum, all except the Eisenhower element. “Bringing in nationally prominent Republicans, however, could reduce the advantage of this situation,” a top Johnson aide, probably Busby, wrote in an unsigned internal memo that now rests in the files of the Johnson Library.

All politics, in L.B.J.’s time as in ours, is personal.

So Busby drove over to the Elms, Johnson’s house in the Spring Valley section of Northwest Washington, and sat by the pool as the vice president, who was deeply affected by his experience as a young man teaching Mexican-American children, thought aloud about race. Busby was so startled by how fluent and articulate Johnson was that on the way home he pulled his car over to the curb and recorded what Johnson had said.

The final product, shaped by Busby and Harry C. McPherson Jr., another close adviser, thus was more stenography than speech craftsmanship — and it was all the more powerful if you looked carefully at Johnson’s remarks and saw how they grew out of King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” in which the civil-rights leader spoke of his frustration with the pace of change:

“For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’ ”

Johnson’s speech directly addressed King: “The Negro today asks justice. We do not answer him — we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil — when we reply to the Negro by asking, ‘Patience.’ It is empty to plead that the solution to the dilemmas of the present rests on the hands of the clock.”

The speech was given on Memorial Day, May 30, 1963, not on the anniversary of a battle now regarded as a turning point in the Civil War. Johnson’s visit to Gettysburg was a helicopter trip that took but 2 hours and 34 minutes, start to finish, but it was indicative of the bigger journey he would take as president.

David M. Shribman is the executive editor of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and a former Washington correspondent for The New York Times and for The Boston Globe, where he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for his coverage of politics.

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Feminist Steinem to address YWCA

After more than 40 years as an advocate for gender equality, Gloria Steinem in conversation is a living op-ed column.

Gloria Steinem, Presented by the YWCA

When: Tuesday, Oct. 30. VIP reception at 11-11:45 a.m. Registration at 11:30 a.m, luncheon and presentation at noon.

Where: Ritz-Carlton Phoenix, 2401 E. Camelback Road.

Admission: $145, including luncheon and presentation, $250 with VIP reception, luncheon and presentation, $75 for students; student scholarships are available.

Details: 602-258-0990, ywcaaz.org.

She name-drops international human-rights advocates, quotes just-published research statistics on equality and offers family-focused solutions to seemingly intractable public-policy issues.

At 78, Steinem is one of the mothers of the American feminist movement. She spoke with TheRepublic in advance of her appearance as keynote speaker at a lunch for the YWCA Maricopa County at the Ritz-Carlton Phoenix on Tuesday, Oct. 30.

After so many years of talking, marching and coordinating, Steinem speaks effortlessly but thoughtfully, moving rapidly through such far-ranging topics as the work being done by the National Domestic Workers Alliance, why American society still lacks gender parity and why she believes in re-electing President Barack Obama.

Steinem is addressing the Valley at a time when women's roles are being hotly debated because of shifts driven by the recession and by years of agitation by gender-equality advocates, on such blogs as Feministing and Jezebel, and in such books as Hanna Rosin's "The End of Men."

These conversations represent what some call a fourth wave of feminism, focusing not just on women's rights but, following Steinem's ever-inclusive lead, attempting to fold in broader social-justice issues.

Since founding Ms. Magazine in 1972, Steinem has broadened her advocacy to workers' rights, non-violent conflict resolution and the end of child abuse and institutionalized violence. She's working on a book reflecting on her years of activism called "Road to the Heart: America As If Everyone Mattered."

Talking to Steinem today, she's a woman with an eye for all types of social injustice, but she's also hopeful and believes each individual can effect change. This is why she continues to speak publicly and write.

Question: Why partner with the YWCA, and what do you plan to address in your talk?

Answer: The YWCA is such an important institution and it doesn't get credit, so I always try to include them. They kept their heart and spirit between the suffragette era when they were founded and the current one. Most of the organizations strong in the suffragette era didn't continue, but YWCA did, ? continuing to serve all women.

I want to talk about two things: One, the great adversary to the women's movement is the idea that the women's movement is over, which is just another form of backlash, and two, how important this election is.

Q. What do you mean when you talk about attacks on feminism?

A. Most women are not worried about having it all, they're worried about losing it all. Having it all is only applicable to a very small, privileged group. The same people who were saying 30 years ago that feminism was unnatural or going against God, it's the same people who are saying it's not necessary anymore.

We need changes in policy. It's not possible for the individual to solve all these issues by herself. The individual cannot solve the problem that this is the only advanced democracy in the world without state health care. To blame the individual for the situation is to keep that person from making change. It's a way of shifting responsibility for action and inaction.

Q. Who comes to hear you speak?

A. It's so diverse. I'm met by hearty organizers who say, "We've organized this for tonight; we've rented a hall," and they're always worried that not enough people will come, but then the hall is overflowing. The interest is huge. Women's issues are not just women's issues; they're our daily lives, but because it's not reflected in the media, it may come as a surprise. The media treats women like they're separate.

Q. Is this why you want to talk about the election?

A. If you read the public opinion polls, you see all the issues are majority issues: equal pay, reproductive rights, environmental quality. But you don't see that because we have very low voter turnout. Right now, the electorate is still older, richer and Whiter than the population. I am certainly advocating that people vote for Obama because the Republican Party is no longer run by Republicans. This party is so extremist that they could no longer nominate Nixon, the first Bush and Reagan. It's very dangerous for one of our two great parties to be run by extremists.

Q. What's your favorite part of addressing groups?

A. Listening. That's my favorite part. If you create a space where people are free to speak their minds, then they do. It's creating a space in which the people in the room get to know each other. … Often somebody on one side of the room asks a question and someone on the other side answers it. It's what organizers do, we make spaces in which people can find community.

I hope that we have a long discussion time after I speak. That, to me, is when I get to learn and I discover if I can be helpful in specific ways.

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