Description of the video:

SCARPINO: When you made the decision to go to law school did you do that with politics in mind?

HAMILTON: No. My interest in politics came quite a bit later. My interest in public policy was beginning to emerge, but I didn’t really think about running for public office during the entire time I was in law school. I thought I’d practice law for a while.

SCARPINO: And you did?

HAMILTON: And I did. But during that period I began to pay more attention to the political world, but did not participate in any way. I didn’t even declare a party preference at that point. When I got out of law school I went to Chicago and practiced with a small elite firm there. Very, very good lawyers.

SCARPINO: What was the name of the firm?

HAMILTON: At the time it was Wilkinson, Witwer and Moran. They were only five or six partners—very, what I would call silk stocking kind of a practice. I was one of two associates so I did a lot of library work in those days, spent a lot of time in the library. I filed all the papers down at the Cook County courthouse and argued some fairly minor motions. The firm really didn’t do much litigation. I got a little bored with it and decided to come to Indiana, and I did. I went to Columbus, Indiana.

SCARPINO: When you were in Columbus, according to what I read, you did become politically active as a Democrat.

HAMILTON: I did.

SCARPINO: When you picked a preference, why did you pick the Democrats over the Republicans?

HAMILTON: Well, first of all, it was not family. To this day I can’t tell you how my father and mother voted, although I don’t think either one of them voted what you would call a straight-line ticket. I guess my sympathies moved in that direction. Birch Bayh was a very good friend of mine. He ran—he was president of the ATO chapter at Purdue. I was the president of the ATO chapter at DePauw. We met at several conferences —that was a factor. John F. Kennedy probably was a factor, although I’m not sure I remembered that keenly at the time. If you’re a lawyer practicing in Indiana in a county seat town, you are kind of pushed or pulled in the direction of politics. The county counsel needs a lawyer, the zoning board needs a lawyer, and they tend to be politicians, local politicians, and so they want you to identify yourself as a Democrat or a Republican. I kind of fell into it, I guess; it wasn’t any clear, straight intellectual decision. I was in a Republican firm and they were kind of glad to have a Democrat in the firm so that they’d get more business. (Laughing)

SCARPINO: What was the name of your firm in Columbus?

HAMILTON: Sharpnack and Bigley. The Sharpnacks were a very prominent family in Bartholomew County. The senior partner was quite an elderly man in his eighties, Judge Sharpnack. His son, Lou Sharpnack, was chief trial lawyer of the firm, a very good one. Mr. Bigley had been president of the Indiana bar. There were two or three partners, and I was an associate initially; they brought me in as a partner within a year or so.

SCARPINO: You served as a member of Congress from Indiana’s 9th congressional district, from 1965 to...

HAMILTON: ’65, yeah.

SCARPINO: Right. The election was in ’64, is that right?

Hamilton. ’64.

SCARPINO: Even year. Until 1999. What prompted you to run for Congress?

HAMILTON: I think the answer was the law was a little boring to me. The only thing I really enjoyed was trying cases. We were trying a lot of eminent domain cases, I guess not usually thought of as very exciting, but I-65 was going through the county and I must have tried a dozen of those cases. Then, because I was the bottom partner, we had in place at that time this system they called pauper attorneys to represent poor defendants in criminal cases, and because the other partners wouldn’t handle that I did quite a bit of what you would call minor criminal trial work. And then also because the senior partners didn’t like to fool around with divorces, I handled a lot of divorce cases and family domestic relation cases. I liked that part of it. It was not what you’d call high-level law practice, but I enjoyed the courtroom work. But overall I think I had a kind of a sense of I’m not getting anywhere, and this isn’t captivating my interest. So I began to look at politics more seriously.

SCARPINO: Well, you represented Indiana in Congress for 34 years.

HAMILTON: Yes

SCARPINO: How did being a congressman captivate your interest?

HAMILTON: Well it’s a captivating career. You have the sense in the Congress, whether or not it’s accurate, that you’re in the center of things, big things. And you have a sense that you are making a contribution towards the direction and the success of your country, I believe, even though you may not be. I found it quite compatible with my interests. I like the people in the Congress. Always an important factor, I think.

SCARPINO: Both sides of the aisle?

HAMILTON: What?

SCARPINO: Both sides of the aisle?

HAMILTON: Both sides of the aisle. They—I really liked members of Congress, with very, very few exceptions. I think that they’re a special breed; they’re energetic, they’re committed, ideologically have strong views often times. But they’re attractive people, for the most part, and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed working with people even when I didn’t agree with them, a lot.

SCARPINO: What do you think of the leadership qualities that distinguish an effective congressman or congressperson?

HAMILTON: Well, there are a lot of different kinds of congressmen and women. You can classify them in different ways. There are inside players and outside players. There are legislators and there are politicians, and the Congress is a big enough body you really need them all. To be an effective member of Congress I think you have to master your brief, and have to be seen as a serious person in terms of legislation. I think the skill that is most needed in the Congress and probably most appreciated is the capacity to build consensus, because it’s not easy to do. It’s not difficult to walk into a room this size with ten people seated around the table with a lot of different views and blow it apart, I mean, what’s hard is to bring people together. The challenge of building a consensus on difficult issues really caught my interest.

SCARPINO: How did you go about doing that?

HAMILTON: Well, the first thing is just to establish a rapport with people of different political persuasions, not all of whom are in the opposite party; some of them are in your own party. Not to summarily dismiss them because you don’t agree with them. What you have to do is search out common views and identify areas where you disagree. Think, then, about how you bridge the disagreements. Sometimes it’s doable, sometimes it’s not. But you ask yourself how can you accommodate different points of view, without giving up what you want to try to achieve, which is a very difficult political judgment, oftentimes.

SCARPINO: When you ran for Congress the first time, what were your issues? How did you persuade the people of the 9th district to vote for you?

HAMILTON: I came along at an interesting time. I didn’t realize it in 1964, but 1964 was probably the strongest Democratic year in that century. That was just luck on my part, I mean, I hadn’t figured that out. I’ve often said that any fool on the Democratic ticket could get elected in 1964, and several did. So that was all luck. That was the Johnson/Goldwater year. Goldwater was kind of a strong uncompromising conservative, and Johnson was quite a skillful politician who took advantage of it. And then he of course had the legacy of the Kennedy assassination which put him in a very formidable position.

But the issues were clear, and even stark: Medicare, federal aid to education, war on poverty. There were very major, even momentous, decisions made in the so-called Great Society program, which has been of course praised and criticized subsequently. But the early days of my career, we had this flood of legislation coming along, which had backed up during the Kennedy assassination period in the early part of the Johnson administration. And those of us on the Democratic side at least thought there was a mandate. Oftentimes, you know, politicians always argue about what the mandate is. In this case, there was no doubt about it, at least in our minds. And so. . .

SCARPINO: What did you think the mandate was?

HAMILTON: To pass that legislation. Now just beginning at that time was Vietnam, and it had not yet become a major issue in 1964. But it quickly did, and in ‘66 and ‘68 then Vietnam really became a very, very big issue.

SCARPINO: Where did you stand on the question of the United States. . .

HAMILTON: I went to the Congress supporting the war, and so voted for a period of maybe two, maybe three years. I took two trips to Vietnam and I began to have doubts about it. I offered one of the early amendments on the floor to reduce our troop commitments in Vietnam. I’m not sure why the Democratic leadership picked me to offer the amendment. I think they wanted a new voice, not one of the older ones there. We lost the vote, but we got a lot more votes than people thought we would get, and it was kind of the beginning of Congress rebelling against the Vietnam policy.

I’ll never forget after that particular vote I went to the White House and— just as a coincidence after some social event, and President Johnson came up to me. President Johnson had been very good to me, and he said to me, “Lee, how could you do this to me?” Which was kind of agonizing because he had helped me a lot—I wouldn’t have been elected if Johnson hadn’t been on the ticket in ‘64. It kind of shows you the anguish you can confront in politics sometimes. I didn’t apologize for my vote, for my position and my vote, but I was pained by the fact that I was actually hurting him.

SCARPINO: What did you think of Lyndon Johnson as a leader?

HAMILTON: Oh my. I’ll have to come back for that session and we can spend all the time on that. He was no doubt about being a leader. He was hugely energetic, never stopped working, and he—the question always on his mind, the business of winning over votes just fascinated him. And the question always on his mind was what do I have to say to get this guy to get him to vote my way, and whatever it was, he’d say it. But he was very, very good at identifying your interests, and then framing an argument from his way. He was a natural politician, not a very good speaker. Boorish in many ways. But totally focused on gaining votes, even when he was president. Probably as good as any president as I remember working with the Congress just because he knew it so well. You know, he had been a member of the House, he’d been a member of the Senate. Just a very, very able politician.

SCARPINO: But I’m going to step back now into the Johnson years and the 1960s. You came to Congress at a pretty exciting time.

HAMILTON: I did.

SCARPINO: The Johnson Landslide and the Great Society.

HAMILTON: It takes a lot of luck in politics and I sure had it. 1964. Any Democrat. . .

SCARPINO: Well you got lucky for 34 years though. That’s not just luck. (laughing)

HAMILTON: In 1964 any fool on the Democratic ticket could get elected and several did.

SCARPINO: Well I was in Texas when Phil Graham got elected and I don’t think he expected to win to be honest with you. (laughter) I don’t think he expected to win.

HAMILTON: Well I think there is a lot of luck in politics and politicians generally don’t acknowledge it. Johnson had a lot of luck. He also married right because she had a lot of money. But luck plays a big role in politics. Now once you get into the Congress you have a lot of advantages and it’s pretty hard to lose an election once you get in Congress.

SCARPINO: You were there for Medicare, changes in federal aid to education, war on poverty, voting rights act, civil rights act, Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

HAMILTON: No, not the latter.

SCARPINO: You were not there?

HAMILTON: That was in 1964.

SCARPINO: Oh, that’s right. Thank you. Sorry about that. Medicare. How in the world did that make its way through Congress?

HAMILTON: Well, I would argue that 1965 was the most productive year of the Congress in modern American history and though the Great Society is much maligned it’s not repeatable. You still have, the laws we put into effect in 1965 you named them, several of them, are basically the law of the land today. Now they’ve been amended. They’ve been changed to some degree but they’re fundamentally intact. After, you know, Medicare had been debated in the country for several years. Kennedy favored it. And the thing that really pushed Medicare across was Kennedy’s assassination. There developed a sympathy for Johnson and Johnson was, among our presidents, among the most skillful in dealing with the Congress without much doubt and he had enormous momentum behind him. And he came in to the presidency with a clear agenda. Medicare, federal aid to education were probably the two big ones, foreign policy maybe a third one. And that was the debate between him and Goldwater and of course he smashed Goldwater. So his mandate as he saw it was to get enacted what he’d been talking about during the campaign and he did.

SCARPINO: Can you talk a little bit about the opposition to Medicare?

HAMILTON: Well it was pretty intense.

SCARPINO: And what were the grounds of the “word inaudible”?

HAMILTON: Socialism and the government takeover of health care. The same arguments you hear with regard to the health bill that just passed, the rhetoric is very much the same and I, the difference was that the Republicans in the House did not take the position the Republicans are today of just saying no. They worked with us, they developed some alternatives, and in the House, for example, we voted down the Republican alternative to Medicare which was I don’t know how to describe it, perhaps somewhat more modest that the Medicare proposal but still involved a lot of government medicine. And then we voted our bill and my recollection is we got a large number of Republican votes—not a majority—but a large number on the final passage of the bill.

SCARPINO: What do you think is the difference between Medicare then and health care now?

HAMILTON: The whole country’s changed in so many ways and the divisiveness we mentioned was certainly part of it. So, you had at that time more Republicans that I would identify as centerists than you do today. What’s happened in our politics today is that the Democratic Party has become more liberal probably, the Republican Party more conservative because of the way districts are drawn and media and other factors and the great question in American politics today is what’s happened to the center and the center has been come less visible, less strong in the Congress.

SCARPINO: What do think has happened to the center?

HAMILTON: Pretty well disappeared.

SCARPINO: Why?

HAMILTON: Because part of it is the way congressional districts are drawn. With the computer today you, if you have a house with a man and a woman, spouses or different parties, the computer will split the house.

SCARPINO: (laughter)

HAMILTON: I mean it’s that sophisticated. What that means is you get more Democrats in the district and more Republicans in the other district. That means that the representative wins the race by appealing to the core constituency, the hardcore Republicans or the hardcore Democrats. They tend to be more liberal or more conservative than the general mill and you get elected more by appealing to the extremes than you do by appealing to the center and you vote that way. That’s one factor. I think the media is another factor. I think the intensity is another factor. Money, all these factors come together.

SCARPINO: Do you think that those factors—appealing to the extremes, the media, money, have changed the qualities of leadership that are necessary to be successful?

HAMILTON: Yes. If you look at the leaders of the House today they are basically people who have come up by being successful money raisers and I’m not sure I’d say that about the Senate but any senator is a pretty good money raiser. You can’t run for the Senate without raising a lot of money. So I think money raising has become an obsession with candidates. If you sit down today for lunch with members of Congress—I do that occasionally—and the conversation’s always money. Where do I get the money? If you visit Capital Hill at 10 o’clock in the morning on a week day you’ll have a hard time finding representatives because they’re all over at the Republican or the Democratic National Headquarters making telephone calls all day long, rather all morning long.

SCARPINO: If I did the math right, you ran again in 1966.

HAMILTON: Yeah.

SCARPINO: And you came back to the 9th District having voted on Medicare, federal aid to education, various parts of the war on poverty, and I’ll talk about it in a minute but we can throw the voting rights act and the civil rights act into that mix. How did you sell that to the voters of the 9th District?

HAMILTON: Well, the charge against me was I was a rubber stamp for Lyndon Johnson and so that’s what I had to contend with. One of the things that saved me in that earlier race was that I had written a letter to Johnson at the end of 1965, very brief letter, in which I said, the key phrase was it’s time to pause. The national media picked that up. Front page story on it in the Wall Street Journal and so forth. And that enabled me to establish with my constituency a view that I was willing to take the president on and tell him to slow down—too much coming too quickly—I think it helped a lot. Then the other side of it is I came back every single weekend (laughter) and spent my life on the airplane.

SCARPINO: Did they have frequent flyer miles in those days?

HAMILTON: No they didn’t. (laughter) No they did not. But, you know, it’s a rural area, 20-some counties and I just had to spend an enormous amount of time moving around.

Description of the video:

SCARPINO: When you made the decision to go to law school did you do that with politics in mind?

HAMILTON: No. My interest in politics came quite a bit later. My interest in public policy was beginning to emerge, but I didn’t really think about running for public office during the entire time I was in law school. I thought I’d practice law for a while.

SCARPINO: And you did?

HAMILTON: And I did. But during that period I began to pay more attention to the political world, but did not participate in any way. I didn’t even declare a party preference at that point. When I got out of law school I went to Chicago and practiced with a small elite firm there. Very, very good lawyers.

SCARPINO: What was the name of the firm?

HAMILTON: At the time it was Wilkinson, Witwer and Moran. They were only five or six partners—very, what I would call silk stocking kind of a practice. I was one of two associates so I did a lot of library work in those days, spent a lot of time in the library. I filed all the papers down at the Cook County courthouse and argued some fairly minor motions. The firm really didn’t do much litigation. I got a little bored with it and decided to come to Indiana, and I did. I went to Columbus, Indiana.

SCARPINO: When you were in Columbus, according to what I read, you did become politically active as a Democrat.

HAMILTON: I did.

SCARPINO: When you picked a preference, why did you pick the Democrats over the Republicans?

HAMILTON: Well, first of all, it was not family. To this day I can’t tell you how my father and mother voted, although I don’t think either one of them voted what you would call a straight-line ticket. I guess my sympathies moved in that direction. Birch Bayh was a very good friend of mine. He ran—he was president of the ATO chapter at Purdue. I was the president of the ATO chapter at DePauw. We met at several conferences —that was a factor. John F. Kennedy probably was a factor, although I’m not sure I remembered that keenly at the time. If you’re a lawyer practicing in Indiana in a county seat town, you are kind of pushed or pulled in the direction of politics. The county counsel needs a lawyer, the zoning board needs a lawyer, and they tend to be politicians, local politicians, and so they want you to identify yourself as a Democrat or a Republican. I kind of fell into it, I guess; it wasn’t any clear, straight intellectual decision. I was in a Republican firm and they were kind of glad to have a Democrat in the firm so that they’d get more business. (Laughing)

SCARPINO: What was the name of your firm in Columbus?

HAMILTON: Sharpnack and Bigley. The Sharpnacks were a very prominent family in Bartholomew County. The senior partner was quite an elderly man in his eighties, Judge Sharpnack. His son, Lou Sharpnack, was chief trial lawyer of the firm, a very good one. Mr. Bigley had been president of the Indiana bar. There were two or three partners, and I was an associate initially; they brought me in as a partner within a year or so.

SCARPINO: You served as a member of Congress from Indiana’s 9th congressional district, from 1965 to...

HAMILTON: ’65, yeah.

SCARPINO: Right. The election was in ’64, is that right?

Hamilton. ’64.

SCARPINO: Even year. Until 1999. What prompted you to run for Congress?

HAMILTON: I think the answer was the law was a little boring to me. The only thing I really enjoyed was trying cases. We were trying a lot of eminent domain cases, I guess not usually thought of as very exciting, but I-65 was going through the county and I must have tried a dozen of those cases. Then, because I was the bottom partner, we had in place at that time this system they called pauper attorneys to represent poor defendants in criminal cases, and because the other partners wouldn’t handle that I did quite a bit of what you would call minor criminal trial work. And then also because the senior partners didn’t like to fool around with divorces, I handled a lot of divorce cases and family domestic relation cases. I liked that part of it. It was not what you’d call high-level law practice, but I enjoyed the courtroom work. But overall I think I had a kind of a sense of I’m not getting anywhere, and this isn’t captivating my interest. So I began to look at politics more seriously.

SCARPINO: Well, you represented Indiana in Congress for 34 years.

HAMILTON: Yes

SCARPINO: How did being a congressman captivate your interest?

HAMILTON: Well it’s a captivating career. You have the sense in the Congress, whether or not it’s accurate, that you’re in the center of things, big things. And you have a sense that you are making a contribution towards the direction and the success of your country, I believe, even though you may not be. I found it quite compatible with my interests. I like the people in the Congress. Always an important factor, I think.

SCARPINO: Both sides of the aisle?

HAMILTON: What?

SCARPINO: Both sides of the aisle?

HAMILTON: Both sides of the aisle. They—I really liked members of Congress, with very, very few exceptions. I think that they’re a special breed; they’re energetic, they’re committed, ideologically have strong views often times. But they’re attractive people, for the most part, and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed working with people even when I didn’t agree with them, a lot.

SCARPINO: What do you think of the leadership qualities that distinguish an effective congressman or congressperson?

HAMILTON: Well, there are a lot of different kinds of congressmen and women. You can classify them in different ways. There are inside players and outside players. There are legislators and there are politicians, and the Congress is a big enough body you really need them all. To be an effective member of Congress I think you have to master your brief, and have to be seen as a serious person in terms of legislation. I think the skill that is most needed in the Congress and probably most appreciated is the capacity to build consensus, because it’s not easy to do. It’s not difficult to walk into a room this size with ten people seated around the table with a lot of different views and blow it apart, I mean, what’s hard is to bring people together. The challenge of building a consensus on difficult issues really caught my interest.

SCARPINO: How did you go about doing that?

HAMILTON: Well, the first thing is just to establish a rapport with people of different political persuasions, not all of whom are in the opposite party; some of them are in your own party. Not to summarily dismiss them because you don’t agree with them. What you have to do is search out common views and identify areas where you disagree. Think, then, about how you bridge the disagreements. Sometimes it’s doable, sometimes it’s not. But you ask yourself how can you accommodate different points of view, without giving up what you want to try to achieve, which is a very difficult political judgment, oftentimes.

SCARPINO: When you ran for Congress the first time, what were your issues? How did you persuade the people of the 9th district to vote for you?

HAMILTON: I came along at an interesting time. I didn’t realize it in 1964, but 1964 was probably the strongest Democratic year in that century. That was just luck on my part, I mean, I hadn’t figured that out. I’ve often said that any fool on the Democratic ticket could get elected in 1964, and several did. So that was all luck. That was the Johnson/Goldwater year. Goldwater was kind of a strong uncompromising conservative, and Johnson was quite a skillful politician who took advantage of it. And then he of course had the legacy of the Kennedy assassination which put him in a very formidable position.

But the issues were clear, and even stark: Medicare, federal aid to education, war on poverty. There were very major, even momentous, decisions made in the so-called Great Society program, which has been of course praised and criticized subsequently. But the early days of my career, we had this flood of legislation coming along, which had backed up during the Kennedy assassination period in the early part of the Johnson administration. And those of us on the Democratic side at least thought there was a mandate. Oftentimes, you know, politicians always argue about what the mandate is. In this case, there was no doubt about it, at least in our minds. And so. . .

SCARPINO: What did you think the mandate was?

HAMILTON: To pass that legislation. Now just beginning at that time was Vietnam, and it had not yet become a major issue in 1964. But it quickly did, and in ‘66 and ‘68 then Vietnam really became a very, very big issue.

SCARPINO: Where did you stand on the question of the United States. . .

HAMILTON: I went to the Congress supporting the war, and so voted for a period of maybe two, maybe three years. I took two trips to Vietnam and I began to have doubts about it. I offered one of the early amendments on the floor to reduce our troop commitments in Vietnam. I’m not sure why the Democratic leadership picked me to offer the amendment. I think they wanted a new voice, not one of the older ones there. We lost the vote, but we got a lot more votes than people thought we would get, and it was kind of the beginning of Congress rebelling against the Vietnam policy.

I’ll never forget after that particular vote I went to the White House and— just as a coincidence after some social event, and President Johnson came up to me. President Johnson had been very good to me, and he said to me, “Lee, how could you do this to me?” Which was kind of agonizing because he had helped me a lot—I wouldn’t have been elected if Johnson hadn’t been on the ticket in ‘64. It kind of shows you the anguish you can confront in politics sometimes. I didn’t apologize for my vote, for my position and my vote, but I was pained by the fact that I was actually hurting him.

SCARPINO: What did you think of Lyndon Johnson as a leader?

HAMILTON: Oh my. I’ll have to come back for that session and we can spend all the time on that. He was no doubt about being a leader. He was hugely energetic, never stopped working, and he—the question always on his mind, the business of winning over votes just fascinated him. And the question always on his mind was what do I have to say to get this guy to get him to vote my way, and whatever it was, he’d say it. But he was very, very good at identifying your interests, and then framing an argument from his way. He was a natural politician, not a very good speaker. Boorish in many ways. But totally focused on gaining votes, even when he was president. Probably as good as any president as I remember working with the Congress just because he knew it so well. You know, he had been a member of the House, he’d been a member of the Senate. Just a very, very able politician.

SCARPINO: But I’m going to step back now into the Johnson years and the 1960s. You came to Congress at a pretty exciting time.

HAMILTON: I did.

SCARPINO: The Johnson Landslide and the Great Society.

HAMILTON: It takes a lot of luck in politics and I sure had it. 1964. Any Democrat. . .

SCARPINO: Well you got lucky for 34 years though. That’s not just luck. (laughing)

HAMILTON: In 1964 any fool on the Democratic ticket could get elected and several did.

SCARPINO: Well I was in Texas when Phil Graham got elected and I don’t think he expected to win to be honest with you. (laughter) I don’t think he expected to win.

HAMILTON: Well I think there is a lot of luck in politics and politicians generally don’t acknowledge it. Johnson had a lot of luck. He also married right because she had a lot of money. But luck plays a big role in politics. Now once you get into the Congress you have a lot of advantages and it’s pretty hard to lose an election once you get in Congress.

SCARPINO: You were there for Medicare, changes in federal aid to education, war on poverty, voting rights act, civil rights act, Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

HAMILTON: No, not the latter.

SCARPINO: You were not there?

HAMILTON: That was in 1964.

SCARPINO: Oh, that’s right. Thank you. Sorry about that. Medicare. How in the world did that make its way through Congress?

HAMILTON: Well, I would argue that 1965 was the most productive year of the Congress in modern American history and though the Great Society is much maligned it’s not repeatable. You still have, the laws we put into effect in 1965 you named them, several of them, are basically the law of the land today. Now they’ve been amended. They’ve been changed to some degree but they’re fundamentally intact. After, you know, Medicare had been debated in the country for several years. Kennedy favored it. And the thing that really pushed Medicare across was Kennedy’s assassination. There developed a sympathy for Johnson and Johnson was, among our presidents, among the most skillful in dealing with the Congress without much doubt and he had enormous momentum behind him. And he came in to the presidency with a clear agenda. Medicare, federal aid to education were probably the two big ones, foreign policy maybe a third one. And that was the debate between him and Goldwater and of course he smashed Goldwater. So his mandate as he saw it was to get enacted what he’d been talking about during the campaign and he did.

SCARPINO: Can you talk a little bit about the opposition to Medicare?

HAMILTON: Well it was pretty intense.

SCARPINO: And what were the grounds of the “word inaudible”?

HAMILTON: Socialism and the government takeover of health care. The same arguments you hear with regard to the health bill that just passed, the rhetoric is very much the same and I, the difference was that the Republicans in the House did not take the position the Republicans are today of just saying no. They worked with us, they developed some alternatives, and in the House, for example, we voted down the Republican alternative to Medicare which was I don’t know how to describe it, perhaps somewhat more modest that the Medicare proposal but still involved a lot of government medicine. And then we voted our bill and my recollection is we got a large number of Republican votes—not a majority—but a large number on the final passage of the bill.

SCARPINO: What do you think is the difference between Medicare then and health care now?

HAMILTON: The whole country’s changed in so many ways and the divisiveness we mentioned was certainly part of it. So, you had at that time more Republicans that I would identify as centerists than you do today. What’s happened in our politics today is that the Democratic Party has become more liberal probably, the Republican Party more conservative because of the way districts are drawn and media and other factors and the great question in American politics today is what’s happened to the center and the center has been come less visible, less strong in the Congress.

SCARPINO: What do think has happened to the center?

HAMILTON: Pretty well disappeared.

SCARPINO: Why?

HAMILTON: Because part of it is the way congressional districts are drawn. With the computer today you, if you have a house with a man and a woman, spouses or different parties, the computer will split the house.

SCARPINO: (laughter)

HAMILTON: I mean it’s that sophisticated. What that means is you get more Democrats in the district and more Republicans in the other district. That means that the representative wins the race by appealing to the core constituency, the hardcore Republicans or the hardcore Democrats. They tend to be more liberal or more conservative than the general mill and you get elected more by appealing to the extremes than you do by appealing to the center and you vote that way. That’s one factor. I think the media is another factor. I think the intensity is another factor. Money, all these factors come together.

SCARPINO: Do you think that those factors—appealing to the extremes, the media, money, have changed the qualities of leadership that are necessary to be successful?

HAMILTON: Yes. If you look at the leaders of the House today they are basically people who have come up by being successful money raisers and I’m not sure I’d say that about the Senate but any senator is a pretty good money raiser. You can’t run for the Senate without raising a lot of money. So I think money raising has become an obsession with candidates. If you sit down today for lunch with members of Congress—I do that occasionally—and the conversation’s always money. Where do I get the money? If you visit Capital Hill at 10 o’clock in the morning on a week day you’ll have a hard time finding representatives because they’re all over at the Republican or the Democratic National Headquarters making telephone calls all day long, rather all morning long.

SCARPINO: If I did the math right, you ran again in 1966.

HAMILTON: Yeah.

SCARPINO: And you came back to the 9th District having voted on Medicare, federal aid to education, various parts of the war on poverty, and I’ll talk about it in a minute but we can throw the voting rights act and the civil rights act into that mix. How did you sell that to the voters of the 9th District?

HAMILTON: Well, the charge against me was I was a rubber stamp for Lyndon Johnson and so that’s what I had to contend with. One of the things that saved me in that earlier race was that I had written a letter to Johnson at the end of 1965, very brief letter, in which I said, the key phrase was it’s time to pause. The national media picked that up. Front page story on it in the Wall Street Journal and so forth. And that enabled me to establish with my constituency a view that I was willing to take the president on and tell him to slow down—too much coming too quickly—I think it helped a lot. Then the other side of it is I came back every single weekend (laughter) and spent my life on the airplane.

SCARPINO: Did they have frequent flyer miles in those days?

HAMILTON: No they didn’t. (laughter) No they did not. But, you know, it’s a rural area, 20-some counties and I just had to spend an enormous amount of time moving around.