The Honorable Frank D. Barber was born on April 2, 1929, in Hot Springs, Arkansas. His parents were Frank and Mary Venus Barber. When he was three, the family returned to Mississippi, his mother's native state. He attended public schools in Hattiesburg and Laurel as well as Sacred Heart Academy in Hattiesburg and a Benedictine boarding school in Louisiana and graduated from Hattiesburg High School in 1947. While in his senior year of high school, he worked afternoons in the law offices of Paul B. Johnson, Jr.

Barber attended one year at the University of Mississippi, before volunteering for the U.S. Army. He served one year active duty and was to serve the balance of his military obligation with the National Guard. However, with the outbreak of the Korean War, his National Guard unit was called up, and he was eventually sent to Germany with the Seventh Army, where he was made sergeant. While there, one of his duties was to teach American soldiers who were enrolled in the literacy program at the American School in Frankfurt.

After military service, Barber returned to school at Mississippi Southern College. He was elected treasurer of the student body during his first year at Southern and president in his senior year. His major accomplishment as president was to oversee the writing of a new school constitution. He received a bachelor's degree in history, political science, and English. His legal training began at the University of Mississippi, where he attended law school one year before transferring to the National Law Center at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. After receiving his law degree, he was admitted by examination to the District of Columbia and the Mississippi bars.

Barber's first foray into politics came when he was ten years old and he went door-to-door distributing flyers for Paul B. Johnson, Sr. Soon after graduating from high school, he worked in Paul B. Johnson, Jr.'s unsuccessful 1947 campaign for governor. He was fieldman in James O. Eastland's 1954 senatorial race and advance man in Paul B. Johnson, Jr.'s 1955 senatorial campaign.

A list of Barber's accomplishments and service is wide and varied. While working on the Washington staff of then-U.S. Senator Eastland, he held many positions including legislative assistant on the committee staff of the Internal Security Subcommittee of the Senate, whose job it was to investigate alleged communists. He was in private law practice in Hattiesburg and Jackson; state Senator, representing the 42nd Senatorial District; executive assistant to Gov. Paul B. Johnson Jr.; assistant attorney general for Mississippi; secretary of the Mississippi State Senate; member of the Governor's Commission on Constitutional Reform; counsel to Mississippi Contractors Board; member of the Special Counsel Mississippi Public Service Commission; chairman of the Senate Constitution Committee; and counsel for the General Legislative Investigating Committee in Mississippi. In November 1994 he was among the first judges elected to the new ten-member state Court of Appeals.

Barber's belonged to numerous organizations, including Sigma Nu fraternity; Phi Alpha Law Fraternity; the Exchange Club; the Junior Chamber of Commerce; the Chamber of Commerce; the American Legion; Forty and Eight; Veterans of Foreign Wars; American, Federal, Mississippi, and Forrest County bar associations; Mississippi Historical Society Christian; York Rite; 32-Degree Scottish Rite; Masons; and Shriners.

Barber died on March 4, 1997. He is survived by his wife, Mary Jane Barber; daughters, Rosebud Barber, Amanda Barber, Annabel Barber Wang, and Melanie Barber; sons, Will Barber, Frank D. Barber, III, and Paul Barber; and seven grandchildren.

This is an interview for the Mississippi Oral History Program of the University of Southern Mississippi. We are interviewing The Honorable Frank D. Barber, who is presently secretary of the Mississippi Senate. The interview is taking place in Mr. Barber's office on the third floor of the Mississippi Capitol in Jackson, Mississippi, on May 30, 1990. The interviewer is Reid S. Derr.

Derr: Mr. Barber, first of all, let me thank you for giving us this interview. I'm sure it will be valuable in the future. If you would, begin by giving us a little sketch of your personal background, your upbringing, education, and so on.

Barber: Right. Well, my heritage on my mother's side is from south Mississippi. My folks, my maternal grandparents, moved to what is now Forrest County in the 1890s from Summit in Pike County, Mississippi. They just came a few hundred miles or so east.

They lived on a farm in Summit. My grandfather was in business in Hattiesburg and my mother was born there in 1902. Hattiesburg was about twelve or fourteen years in existence. My mother was born, and it was not Forrest County then; it was Perry County. It was the Second Judicial District of Perry County. Forrest County only became a county carved out of Perry County in 1910, so the first eight years of my mother's life was in Perry County.

There's a corollary to that. That was very helpful when I was running for the state Senate in Forrest and Perry counties. I told the folks over in Perry County that my mother was a native of Perry County, and it was true! (laughter) I didn't go into a great deal of detail, but I did say, the Second Judicial District of Perry County. I don't believe that was deception, it was true and in a campaign you've got to use everything you possibly can.

Unfortunately, I was not born in Hattiesburg or Forrest County. My mother married during World War I a soldier from Camp Shelby who came south with the 38th Infantry Division, Indiana National Guard. Now he had previously lived in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, but he had moved about 1916 to East Chicago, Indiana, and he joined the National Guard before World War I. They were mobilized for the Mexican campaign, the Mexican expedition against Poncho Villa. General "Blackjack" Pershing commanded those troops. But the Mexican expedition was over with before my father got out of Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana, and was sent to Camp Shelby, Mississippi, to train.

He was very fortunate; he was sent to France. The war was over in France before he got over there. The corollary to that story is, he was eligible for the American Legion, but not the Veterans of Foreign Wars. I'm eligible for both, but I've got to add, the only powder I ever smelled was talcum powder, ladies' face powder! (laughter) I'm not a great war hero, but I did serve overseas during a war.

Derr: I take it, though, that you grew up in Hattiesburg.

Barber: I was born April 2, 1929, in Hot Springs, Garland County, [Arkansas]. Ironically, my parents had to move there in the early 1920s - I'd say around three or four years before I was born, '25 or '26. My mother had to move there for her health. She came down at the age of about twenty-four with rheumatoid arthritis and she went to Hot Springs literally on a stretcher - she couldn't walk - and the doctors recommended that she go up there for the baths. At that time that was about the only relief that they could give. And they had some specialists up there in arthritis, arthritic or rheumatic conditions. Well, to make a long story short, the treatment did help her to the extent that four or five years later I was born. And when we left there, she walked out of Hot Springs; she was on her feet and has been on her feet ever since. She's eighty-seven now and will be eighty-eight in September of this year. But that's correct: I was reared in Hattiesburg.

Well, first you've got to understand: we went back at the bleakest part of the Depression in the early '30s. My father had been in business in Hot Springs, Arkansas, but had been in business in Prentiss, Mississippi, in Jefferson Davis County, before he went to Hot Springs, Arkansas. He went back and, I believe, worked with my grandfather for a while. Then he went to Laurel and had a small business, and then was in Biloxi and New Orleans during the Depression. I've seen letters. It was a very sad - really. I've seen letters that the people in the American Legion in Biloxi [wrote]; they gave him a letter of introduction. They called them "comrades" then. Incidentally, the American Legion dropped "comrade'' after World War II and the Russian thing, but the VFW still calls their members comrade. "This will introduce Comrade Barber, who has a wife and small child. Any work you can give him will be appreciated.'' But anyhow, we survived the Depression.

But it was in Laurel, Mississippi, thirty miles from Hattiesburg, that we were living when I first entered school. I was in the first grade there, second grade in Hattiesburg; and in the fifth grade I went back to Laurel because my grandmother was very sick. My mother was tied up with her last illness, and I had a half a year in Laurel. My grandmother died and I went back to Hattiesburg. I finished the eighth grade there in Hattiesburg. I went to both public and parochial schools, but I finished the eighth grade at the parochial school, which was Sacred Heart Academy. After that I was able to go - and this was the middle of the war - and I think it was one of the best things to ever happen to me as far as my education is concerned - I was able to go to a Benedictine school in Louisiana, a boarding school, for three years, where we really received about the equivalent of what is now a college liberal arts education. We had Latin, mathematics, heavy on languages, literature and sciences, [and] that sort of thing, so it was very good. But after the third year it became a luxury we could no longer afford, [so] I went to the public school in Hattiesburg, whence I graduated in 1947.

Well back then, it was, if you wanted to be a lawyer, and I did - from about the time I was ten years old I wanted to be a lawyer - you went to Ole Miss. I was a freshman at the university and I was there a year. I had some reverses moneywise and that became a luxury I could no longer afford, [so] I went to the [U.S.Army]. They passed in 1948 the Selective Service Act of '48, and to fulfill your obligation you could volunteer for a year and then you would incur a reserve obligation, but you were finished [with] your active service. I said, "Well, rather than go to the service when I'm in the middle of law school or before I go to law school, I'd just go now and get it over with.'' Besides money was a little slim, it really was. There was no GI bill, we were just - in boarding away from home and everything, it was very expensive.

Well, Ole Miss has always been sort of a gentleman planter's sons' school, and I found out later that the planters' sons didn't have all that much money, but they had good credit: they'd always borrow on that next year's crop! Anyhow, it was a great chance to meet people and to meet a lot of World War II veterans who were coming back and whom I later ran into in law and in government. There were about twenty people up there who were - maybe not that many, but there were at least a dozen young men - who were [both] in the legislature and students; [they] had been elected in the election of '47 and served from '48 to '52. None of them are still here, but a lot of them are still alive and still active.

(brief interruption)

Barber: So at age nineteen I was in the regular army of the United States and I served a year and got out too early for the second semester at Ole Miss, but exactly the right time for the end of the first quarter at Southern. Southern was on the quarter system at that time, and was until about five six or seven years ago, I think - maybe ten, I don't know. But it worked out fine for me. I was able to live at home, which was not too expensive.

Now, we didn't get the GI Bill because we were not at war during that period. The only thing we had, really - well, what precipitated the Selective Service Act of '48 was the Berlin Airlift, but we came home healthy and in good shape. It was not too expensive to go to school at Mississippi Southern College in my hometown, live at home, and commute out to the campus. The only fly in the ointment - I got involved in student politics. That spring I was elected treasurer of the student body. Incidentally, I was elected without opposition, but I campaigned like I had opposition and made several speeches. All of the candidates had to make a speech in chapel.

Derr: What you're saying is that within months of coming to Southern, you were elected.

Barber: Yes, to a student body office. There's a picture of that in one of the scrapbooks.

Secondly, but the fly in the ointment was, June 30 forty years ago, [in] 1950, the North Koreans crossed the 38th parallel, and to fulfill my reserve obligation I had joined the Mississippi National Guard. The unit in Hattiesburg was Headquarters Battery, 631st Armored Field Artillery Battalion. Forty years ago, September 9, 1950, we were called to active duty, the first National Guard in Mississippi called to active duty [and] one of the first in the nation. One of the reasons we were called to active duty was because it was an artillery unit.

I'm going to describe this unit because it's important geographically. The headquarters and headquarters battery was in Hattiesburg, Forrest County; Battery A was at Wiggins, just south of Hattiesburg; B Battery was in Pascagoula; and C battery was in Lucedale and Service Battery was in Biloxi. So it was a little microcosm of southeast Mississippi. It was a tremendous experience because I met, [got to] know, and still know these people from all over southeast Mississippi. We were a close-knit unit. The reason we were called up so early - I was not there at Fort McClellan - but at Fort McClellan, Alabama, that summer they shot so well - it was a 155[mm] howitzer battalion, self-propelled howitzers - that the regular army people made a note of this and they relieved the battalion shooting for the artillery school at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, sent them to Korea, and sent us up there to replace them.

Derr: As trainers?

Barber: Well, shooting for the school means firing of the problems for the artillery school, you see. That's where they taught these foreign observers to adjust the cannon, the howitzers. Incidentally, that's the same shell these howitzers shot that they are manufacturing down here at Bay St. Louis in Hancock County [at] the ammunition plant that they are about to close. They had better keep that thing open for a while, at least until after these talks in Washington are finished. So nine months out of the service [I was] back in the service. I came out a private the first time, but I went in as a corporal and shortly thereafter became a sergeant. But I was in the battalion headquarters as sort of administrative assistant. I did a lot of work for the colonel, the commanding officer. I wrote all of his speeches, that's one thing, but I had an assignment in personnel. And I was in a lot of special projects. I was a troop information education non-commissioned officer, et cetera. Anything that came up out of the ordinary they generally assigned me to.

Derr: Did you actually end up in Korea after Oklahoma?

Barber: No. Amazingly - why I don't know - we didn't go to Korea. Of course, we shot for the school a year and then by that time there had been other units called to active duty and trained to do the same thing and it was time for us to go overseas. The unit on one side of us went to Korea; the unit on the other side of us went to Korea.

About this time another unit very close to us from the New York National Guard - the whole battalion was from Brooklyn - they completely did away with it, they decimated it. It was probably the worst unit ever in the history of the armed services. They integrated a lot of the people they kept. They got rid of all of the officers, but some people they kept they integrated into our unit and they sent us to Germany. Why, I don't know. Why we went to Germany and not to Korea, I don't know. That was in '51; in the summer of '51 we went to Germany. I think we got there in July of '51. The problem with the Korean War [was], they didn't know what was going to happen in Europe at the time. We were assigned to the Seventh Army, and the Seventh Army was beefed up; and not only beefed up, when you got there, you stayed out in the field, as we called it: you stayed on maneuvers practically the whole time. We'd have these training exercises, maneuvers, and I remember watching the Russians through the field glasses and all that sort of thing.

I was assigned as a liaison sergeant and put out in the field after we got to Europe because I was the only one who had any previous experience in the field. The rest of them were all college boys who could handle the office, but they couldn't get out in the field. I wasn't all that great out in the field myself, but it was on my record that I had had that training.

We were about to freeze to death out there, and one of the best things that ever happened to me in the service was, in December of '51 a levy came down for teachers for the American School in Frankfurt to teach American soldiers. It was a literacy program, really. I taught the fifth-grade level. We had sergeants and people that could hardly read and write really, and they were going to be phased out of the service if they couldn't come up to snuff. So I did that for about three months. I was delighted to get out of the weather because it was cold for me.

Derr: What was your full tour?

Barber: We only stayed a year and came back the following July. By this time, really, the war had wound down in Korea. You remember, we went all the way down to the Pusan perimeter; they pushed us all the way back from the Yalu River to the Pusan perimeter, and then they came back. They came back almost to the 38th Parallel, and in '53 they got to the 38th Parallel. Territory-wise nothing changed from June 1950, 'till the cease-fire in '53.

We lost a lot of men in Korea and a lot of those people that I was in the regular army with were killed, I found out. It was hard to have any contact with them, you know, but these people were on three-year and four-year enlistments and they were the first to go as filler troops.

Derr: How long was your enlistment tour?

Barber: I was just sent two years. Then I have the other year, of course.

Well, I'll tell you, there was no doubt about where I was going to school when I got out. All of us - I mean, we were all from south Mississippi, we all went back to Southern. What we did: two classmates of mine and I - well, I had remembered at Ole Miss and I had written for the - Ole Miss had two magazines when I was a freshman up there. One was called the Rebel and the other was called the Hi Y'all. I wrote for the Rebel and I used to sell the Hi Y'all. So in Germany we got the idea to publish a humor magazine. Now, you don't see humor magazines anymore, but this is the one that was at Mississippi Southern. Rogers, Barber, and Maddox, that was the name of the publishers who published this and I wrote the first editorial. Of course, we were trying to make some money, too, you see. I was business manager and Bill Rogers was editor and Henry Maddox was associate. Now, Henry went with us [into the military], but he went to OCS [Officers Candidate School] and didn't go to Germany with us. Bill Rogers was a corporal in our outfit and I was a sergeant. Let's see: yes, "A magazine is born. From Hammelburg to Hattiesburg.''

Derr: Incidentally, I checked in the [McCain Library and] Archives. They have no copies of that Southern Exposure humor magazine.

Barber: They don't? I'm going to give you these. I'm going to give it to you because I know it will be safe down there. It was not a great success, but it was valuable to me. This is a personal reference: it was valuable to me because I selected the girls to be on the cover. I selected the girls who were the best politicians in the sorority. That was Martha Barron, whose parents had the Barron Motor Company, the Ford dealers in Hattiesburg. This is Carolyn McDavid, who is married to Judge Russell Moore up here. He just died and she's still here in Clinton. Sharon Franklin is from Jackson. [She] married a Dr. Willard Walker in Hattiesburg. Doris Samples, I don't know what ever happened to her. And Plishette [?] Worthington is a Mrs. Parkinson in Greenville. I can't remember her name, but she was the last. But we only published seven issues. We'll go into the publication, this printed stuff later.

I had in mind, really, running for president of the student body, and I did later in the year. I was a junior that year.

Derr: This would have been in '53 now?

Barber: [In] '53. I ran against a fellow named Doug Ferguson, who was a Kappa Sigma, and I was a member of a fraternity at Ole Miss, Sigma Nu, which later got a chapter down at Southern, but had none there [in '53]. But that was an advantage for me to run for president of the student body because I was both an independent and a fraternity man and I was a veteran and there were a lot of Korean veterans. There were some World War II veterans left on the campus who had come to school late, but there were a heck of a lot of Korean veterans on the campus. Particularly, there was a bunch of Korean veterans on that football team, and we had a hell of a football team back then. I don't know, they all liked me for some reason, I don't know why. But I beat him. I had three fraternities and he had three. There were only six fraternities down there and I had these good friends in these sororities. So I won. I've got the clippings there. Yes, that was it.

I did some studying, but I did mostly extracurricular activities that year because - but I did well in what they called social studies back then, but it was very heavy on history, political science, and that sort of thing. What we were doing, Rogers and I and Maddox: damned fools, we had just come from Europe - well, Rogers and I had just come from Europe - so we decided to take this course that led to a State Department career that Dr. [Leon A.] Wilbur had set up. I'm glad we took it, but it was very difficult. First, you had to have two languages. I had had Latin at Ole Miss and Latin in high school - three years of Latin in high school and one year at Ole Miss - but they didn't have Latin at Southern, so I had to start my languages all over, and I took German and French. I'm glad I did. I'm not fluent in either, but I speak German better than French because I was in Germany and learned a little conversational German, and I've got a vague knowledge of the grammar, et cetera, and I can speak French.

Derr: Well, you did all right with the boys out there at Boys State. (laughter)

Barber: Yes, my pronunciation was excellent (laughter). No, that's true about the KA [Kappa Alpha fraternity] getting that [motto] up there, and then you heard what the porter said. He said that that Indian whose name I didn't know - he said there was an Indian hanging around the Capitol about the time it was painted and had a daughter named Princess Whitehead or something [who served as a model]. I'd like to know who sneaked up there and put that fraternity motto up there.

Derr: Isn't that something?

Barber: Nobody knows now. And for years I thought it was a Phi Delta Theta [motto], which is a fraternity they have at Ole Miss, because there was a fellow here that wrote for the Memphis Commercial Appeal who was a Phi Delta Theta and I think he told everybody that that was a Phi Delta Theta motto.

So the junior year finished and I was president-elect of the student body and took office as president of the student body. I'd promised a new constitution; we did that. That was about the principal accomplishment. Dr. Wilbur had a daughter named Laura Ann Wilbur, who is a Ph.D now and she is one of the top people in this country in the teaching of the deaf. When I was in Washington at one point, she went to Gallaudet College there; she did some work there. They ought to bring her down here, but I don't know if they could pay her enough down here. We've got another vacancy at the deaf school. You might have read that. Well, you've got to remember I had the GI Bill of Rights; I had my magazine at one time; and we also published a student directory. We sold ads for that. My salary was $40 a month as president of the student body [and] I got a little over $100 on the GI bill - well, I was making about $200 a month or maybe a little bit better than that, which was not bad, and living at home.

Derr: You essentially put yourself through, then.

Barber: Yes, I was putting myself through, there's no question about that. My father was not living and my mother was working, as I remember. If I really needed some money, I could get it from her. She had a little property which she rented out. Hattiesburg has always been a good town for renting property because of Camp Shelby and two wars and then the school.

Well anyhow, I was relatively affluent, but in my senior year in December I got married. Well, we moved over across the street from the college next door to Dr. John Edmund Gonzales, who still lives there. Incidentally, Dr. Lucas and I had dinner last week, and what's the other fellow's name that's vice president for administration? He comes up here a lot.

Derr: I don't know. That's too far over my head in the administrative world.

Barber: Don't worry about it; I've got his name here somewhere.

When I was elected, until we had the new constitution, we had a student council; and each group on the campus, like the Baptist Student Union, the Wesley Foundation, the Canterbury Fellowship, or the pre-law club - any group or organization - had a representative to the student council. And each class had one. Well, it was about thirty people in all. I changed that to an elected student senate apportioned across the campus. Ironically, on the original student council when I was president of the student body, Aubrey Lucas was a member and represented the Wesley Foundation, the Methodist student group.

Well, one result of my marriage was - and I was telling Lucas the story the other night: the first post-war president of Southern was Dr. Robert Cecil, R.C., Cook. We became very close. I think that administration was a little apprehensive of my election because I recommended investigating the bookstore and all that sort of thing. But when you look at all those things, when you get pretty close to it, there's really not that much skullduggery around: there's a reason that book [prices] are so high. But we did make some changes in the vending machines and that sort of thing so the students would realize a little bit more out of it. And we did set up a book exchange for used books, which they didn't have before.

Anyhow, Cook and I became very close, and he told me that he was going to get me [a law scholarship]. He said, "I'm on this committee that picks somebody for a law scholarship at New York University." Law scholarships were very rare then. They're fairly common now, but back then I don't think Ole Miss gave [but] maybe one or two, if that many. I don't think they had any, really - maybe it was a hundred dollars here, a hundred dollars there, but [not much]. But for that day and time this was a munificent [sum], something like $13,000 to New York University - which probably took every penny, but in the '50s that was a lot of money. One condition of the scholarship, however, was that you not be married. Well, I got married in December and that was the end of New York University. But I was graduated.

I disappointed Cook. He interrupted the proceedings when my name was called and he said, "I predict this man will be governor of Mississippi." Well, I haven't become governor, but I have been assistant to a governor - Gov. [Paul B.] Johnson, [Jr.,] whose papers you have.

So in September I went back to Ole Miss to the law school. It was uneventful except for a lot of work. It's not because of Southern, but I didn't have to work that hard at Southern because I had had such a tremendous liberal arts background in high school, in boarding school. Except for the math and science, it was fairly easy for me.

Now, I'm going to stop at this point. At this point we're at 1954; I've received a BA degree. Incidentally, I was one of eight people that year who got a BA degree. Most people had bachelor of science degrees, and a great number of that was in education. It was still primarily an educational [school, offering] preparation for careers in education.

They were just getting the framework of a liberal arts school and, really, Cook was getting ready for a university. But shortly thereafter he resigned to go into private business. He became the publisher of the Jackson State Times and later became president of an insurance company in Hattiesburg. He had some businesses at the same time he was president. He was the editor and publisher of Who's Who in American Education. He was an interesting fellow. He was a promoter and what Southern needed at that time. Nobody ever accused him of being a great scholar, but he wasn't dumb. He had an interesting background. He was a [Mississippi] State graduate but had been on the education faculty at Ole Miss and had been director of their summer school one time before the war.

Derr: Well now, you never graduated from Ole Miss Law School. How did you get there and -

Barber: No sir. I wanted to interrupt at this point. I graduated from college, but I've got to mention this: from the time I was ten years old I had not only had an interest in law but had an interest in politics. There's Governor Johnson, Jr.'s, picture right over here, and Governor Johnson, Sr., was a candidate in 1939. He had run twice before, in '31 and '35, but in '39 he was elected. I used to put out literature on the streets of Hattiesburg for Governor Johnson, Sr. He knew me and we were very close. In fact, the day he got elected he had me on his knee in his office, talking to friends and reporters. He was a very great man. He used to write me letters. Well now, this is what I can't figure out: where the hell these letters are. I had them and I could have sworn I gave them to [former USM President William D.] McCain in '72 on one occasion, in my first attempt to turn over some papers to [USM]. McCain doesn't have any recollection of it and the library has no [record]; but there were several letters. It was a little scrapbook, and I'd love to see those letters. I'm sure I gave them to him out on the campus one day.

(The interview continues on tape one, side two.)

Barber: So I might point out that this friendship with Governor Johnson - it was through Governor Johnson that I met Sen. [James O.] Eastland. Governor Johnson, Sr., appointed Senator Eastland to a vacancy in the United States Senate, occasioned by the death of Sen. Pat Harrison, who was chairman of the Finance Committee and president pro tempore of the United States Senate. I first met Senator Eastland at Governor Johnson, Sr.'s, funeral in December of 1943, when I was just thirteen or fourteen years old. I don't believe Jim Eastland remembered me a bit. He was a comparatively young man. Well, he was in his thirties when he was appointed and first elected. But this all comes back later on. I fooled around in the election of '43 with some local candidates for the legislature, et cetera, just chewing out cards on the street and that sort of thing for a dollar. The first dollar I ever made in my life was through politics. It never did pay very much. That was for a candidate for mayor named D.W. Holmes. He lost, but he later became mayor. His son is Bud Holmes, who has been great friends of the university. Of course, Judge [Walter] Nixon probably wishes he had never met him, but - (laughter)

Anyhow, coming up to 1946, it's a funny story. Governor Johnson, Sr., was dead, of course, but Paul Johnson, Jr., was thirty years old. He came back to Hattiesburg from the Marine Corps and set up a law office. I was in my last year of high school; I was a student at Hattiesburg High School, and I wanted to work in the afternoon. They had this vocational education program, I think it was called Trades Industrial Distributive Education. There were two of us who tried to get into this program, who wanted to work in law offices. One went to work for Alfred Moore, who later became chairman of the board of Magnolia Federal [Bank], and he did title work. I told them I wanted to work for Paul Johnson, Jr. I didn't know Paul Johnson, Jr.; I knew his father. You know, he had been off to Ole Miss and practiced law here and then went to the Marine Corps [and] I never had an opportunity to know him. Mr. Elmer Sanders, I'll never forget it, was the vocational teacher and he went to see Paul Johnson, Jr. He said, "I'll be happy to have him, but I can't pay him anything." Well, that's true, they didn't pay anything; but I did go up there and work in his law office in the afternoon. Back then he was kind of interested in the oil business. The Johnson estate - there was a lot of land in the county there and there was some oil production down in the southwestern part of the county, the Pistol Ridge field. Well, to make a long story [short], I spent most of the first part of that work abstracting the Johnson estate in the courthouse. I'd done some abstracting before for a Judge Harrelson there, a county judge.

The significant thing about it is that in about April or May of '47 we began hearing things about Paul Johnson, Jr., running for governor. Well, I graduated from high school; the next day I was on the sound truck going all over Mississippi. I was sort of an advance [man]. Well, back then you announced the public speakings over the sound truck: "Tonight Paul B. Johnson, your candidate for governor, will be in Mendenhall, Mississippi, at the courthouse. Come see [and] hear your next governor!" or something like that, words to that effect. Anyhow, it gave me a great opportunity to see a heck of a lot of Mississippi at a very young age. Well, he lost.

In '51 I was in the army. He lost again, but I came back and helped him a little bit on leave before I went to Germany. The second primary - there was no general election then with the Republicans - we were in Germany and it took us about two days to find out who had been elected. There was a man in Hattiesburg named Lee, who Governor Johnson put on the Alcohol Beverage Control Board staff after we legalized liquor, he and I got in a jeep and went to Frankfurt to try to find out who had been elected, and we found out that we had lost in '51.

[In] '55 I was at Ole Miss. In '54, having graduated from Southern, I went to law school. In '55 he became a candidate for governor again. I was in law school and took the summer off to [campaign], and I was his advance man. That was my job. I went ahead of him and put up the ads in the paper for his appearances. I've often told the story: we lived off the land. I mean, he gave us very little expense money. We'd see his supporters [and] get the local supporters to take care of the advertisements for the radio back then, the newspaper, et cetera. It would be about ten days ahead of the candidate, you see. Then if you had done your work right, then you could join the candidate on Friday or Saturday at his appearances, and they used to always have a meeting on Sunday. That campaign was pretty much organized out of the Ole Miss Law School. Brad Dye was in it.

But I'm getting ahead of my game. In '54 after I graduated from Southern, Senator Eastland had a campaign for re-election, a very stiff election against Lt. Gov. Carroll Gartin from Laurel. The election was the first time he'd really been seriously contested [for his] senator's seat, and Gartin had the support of the administration up here, Gov. Hugh White. So South Mississippi was sort of a battleground, and Hattiesburg being thirty miles from Laurel where Gartin was from, Gartin had a hell of a lot of friends and connections in Hattiesburg. His wife was from Perry County. The Bentley family, they were big lumber people. You might have heard of the Bentley Hotel over here in Alexandria. That was a Bentley from Perry County. Her father was Dr. Gavin, who had been a state senator from up in there - not from Perry County, but from north of there. Anyhow, Paul Johnson, Jr., recommended me to Senator Eastland for that campaign. I was a field man; I was one of the youngest field men. I had five counties I was responsible for. That's sort of like the campaign manager for five counties. I coordinated his campaign in five counties.

Derr: This is in '54 now?

Barber: [In] '54 for Senator Eastland.

Derr: Now when were you -

Barber: Advance man for Johnson in '55.

Derr: OK, I wanted you to explain what you meant by "eating off the land."

Barber:Living off the land. Well, I said we had very little expenses. We'd go to [an area and] we had a list of people to see. He had been in these campaigns: his father had run three times, he had run three times by this time, and we had these supporters in these counties. Well, let's say we'd leave Jackson on Monday morning [and] we'd go to Kosciusko. We'd go see the Jordans at the funeral home there and we would generally get a meal off them. We wouldn't stay at their houses, but we'd [eat]. That's what I mean by living off the land. But living off the land is raising the money locally for your activities. Of course, it's different now. It's all television and that sort of thing now.

We lost that one in '55. We got in the second primary. Well, he ran second the first time he ran, but there was no second primary. In '47 he was running against Fielding Wright, who was the governor. He had succeeded the governorship upon the death of Thomas L. Bailey two years before. Incidentally, when [Ray] Mabus runs again next year, this will be the first time since '47 that a sitting governor has run for a full term, for re-election. [In] '51 [Johnson] he was in the second primary. He led the ticket against Hugh White, but Hugh White beat him. He led the ticket against J.P. Coleman; J.P. Coleman beat him in '55. So in '59Cthis is his story now - in '59 he was elected lieutenant governor, and that's the time I ran for state senator and we served together. He was lieutenant governor and I was senator from the [42nd Senatorial District] - he was my constituent. And I was committee chairman the first day, which is very unusual. It's unusual now. But I had paid my dues in those damn campaigns, I'll tell you.

Well anyhow, I'm at Ole Miss Law School in '55 [and] J.P. Coleman defeats us. J.P. Coleman and I are very close friends now -

(brief interruption)

Barber: Somebody told me that Governor Coleman - he was becoming governor in January when I'd be in my second year of law school at Ole Miss - said, "I'll tell you one thing: I'll never let that Frank Barber graduate at Ole Miss." I don't believe that's a true story. The reason that he was mad at me was, they said - well, I made speeches for Johnson, too; I forgot to tell you that. I was campaigning. They said in Kosciusko, Attala County, that I called J.P. Coleman a draft dodger because he didn't go to the war in World War II. I said, "No, that's not true." I said that Coleman said that he didn't go because he had a hernia. I said if he really wanted to go, he'd have had an operation and got the hernia fixed! (laughter) - both of which are mythical. Neither of [those] occurred, but it was sort of an issue there. Johnson had been out in the jungles of the South Pacific in the Marine Corps and he really was a seasoned, battle-tested veteran. But, hell, that would have been great in '47, even in '51 - we were in the middle of the Korean War - [but] in '55, nobody gave a damn whether anybody had gone into the service or not. It just was not timely. Coleman and I are very close personal friends. We see each other fairly - not regularly but often.

Derr: But you took it as a threat, I take it, that he [supposedly said that].

Barber: Well, that had nothing to do with my leaving. I had gone up to Ole Miss to begin my second year of law school. I had every intention of finishing there as soon as possible and getting on with my life. The fortunes of politics having been what they were - you've got to understand my [position]. I was directly connected with Paul Johnson, Jr., since '47 and practically seven years of my life was devoted to his interests and we had lost every time. He lost in '47 twice because he ran for the United States Senate. He lost in '51; that was the third time. He lost in '55; that was the fourth time. I was in that Senate race. I mean, I was a student at Ole Miss, but I was campaigning in Lafayette County for him. So I was really devoted to him. I remember we got out of the student houses, the veterans' housing, which was miserable back then. We had to haul kerosene for heat and for hot water.

Derr: This was while you were in law school?

Barber: This was the first year in law school. I remember the registrar had some apartments. I rented one from him which was air conditioned, which was [nice]. We didn't have air conditioning or anything up there and it was terrible. So I had about a week before school started [and] I went up to my father's - I should have told you this: my father and mother were divorced and my father had remarrried and was in Hot Springs, Arkansas, back where he had lived before. Mother was in Hattiesburg. I went up to see him with my family, my wife and daughter, and I got a call from my father-in-law who, incidentally, had been a roommate of Senator Eastland at Ole Miss. The senator had called him, but he couldn't find me in Hattiesburg. He said, "Call Senator Eastland as soon as possible. I think he wants you to come to Washington." So I called him. He said, "Frank, how soon can you be in Washington?" I said, "Well, I can be there any time you want me to be there." He said, "Well, this job doesn't pay much - it just became open - but I think you can live on it." I said, "Well now, Senator, I've got to go to law school." He said, "Well, you can go to law school in Washington. Hell, there's four law schools in Washington." That's the way he talked. There were probably five, I guess: George Washington, Georgetown, American, Catholic U. - that's four. So I got the offer to go up there.

He had just become chairman of a sub-committee of the Judiciary [Committee]. He was not chairman of the full committee, and [for] the first time he had a committee staff in addition to his personal staff. Back then personal staffs were very limited, particularly from a small state. You didn't have many people working - very little turnover, too. I was the first Mississippian he was able to appoint on this committee staff, which is sort of - it's not civil service, but it's sort of - you know, they keep staff on. It was the Internal Security Subcommittee of the Senate and our job was to chase communists.

Now, you've got to get this into the proper prospective. The [Sen. Joseph R.] McCarthy era was essentially over because the reason that Senator Eastland was chairman of this committee was because the Republicans had lost the Senate. They only had [control of] the Senate [and] Congress during the first two years of the Eisenhower administration. Joe McCarthy came to national prominence and was only chairman of this subcommittee on investigations of the Government Operations Committee for two years. I mean, his star rose and fell in essentially two years. When [John L.] McClellan became chairman of that committee, McCarthy was gone. McCarthy died while I was in Washington about two years after I got there. This committee had been started by Sen. [Patrick A.] McCarran of Nevada, and a lot of his people were on this staff. For a subcommittee it was a pretty big staff. I guess there were about twenty-some-odd people on there. McCarran's people were on there and then [William] Jenner of Indiana, a Republican, had it when he was [chairman]. You've never heard of him, have you?

Derr: No, I sure haven't.

Barber: "Wild Bob Bill" Jenner. He was in the great mold of McCarthy, but he was no McCarthy: he was smarter than McCarthy. Then Senator Eastland had the subcommittee until it quit. Later he became chairman of the Judiciary Committee and he didn't really pay a lot of attention to if after that; he didn't have the time to do it.

But it was a fascinating thing to be on that committee. My job was clerk-messenger. I was the lowest man on the totem pole, but I was happy to have the job. It doubled my income, or tripled it. Well, I still had the GI bill, too, until my last year of law school. Then while Congress wasn't in session, they'd let me go to law school in the daytime in the regular school. And back then Congress didn't stay there all year like they do now. You know, about July they'd be starting to quit and then August they'd be gone, so September 'till January we were [free].

Derr: You had a full semester then.

Barber: Yes, I had a full semester. So I graduated with my class at Ole Miss, the same May. I really didn't lose any time.

Well, Washington was just fantastic to be in, even during the sleepy days of the Eisenhower administration. I mean, for a poor ole country boy from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, it was just a delightful place to be. The United States Senate was in one building; now it's three. It was in what we called the Old Senate Office Building, the Russell Senate Office Building now. There was a fellow on the fourth floor named Richard M. Nixon, who was vice president of the United States; there was a fellow who had offices all over the place named Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was Majority Leader. He had just become Majority Leader in '55 with the change in party control. A fellow named Jack Kennedy, the junior senator from Massachusetts [was here], to mention a few. Ole Man Bricker, Senator [Dewey] Bricker of Ohio - the Bricker Amendment, do you remember that?

Derr: I'm not familiar with that, no.

Barber: John Bricker is an interesting thing. I had met John Bricker when I was ten years old in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He had been governor of Ohio when Paul Johnson, Sr., was governor of Mississippi. Even before World War II they mobilized the Ohio National Guard [and] the 37th Infantry Division came to Camp Shelby, Mississippi. Bricker came down to review the troops. I was with Johnson [as] a boy. Bricker's office was very close to ours. He was a Republican, incidentally, and ran for vice president with Dewey in 1944CDewey Bricker. Well, there were all kinds of fascinating people around, [both] Democrats [and] Republicans. [Everett] Dirksen of Illinois, Big Dirk, [was there].

Derr: Was it the people primarily that fascinated you about Washington or were there other [attractions]?

Barber: Yes, primarily. It wasn't any great - oh yes, there were issues. You see, March 17, 1954, made a profound difference in the South. That was the year that Brown v Board of Education was decided, and that became the central issue up there.

(brief interruption)

Barber: You've got to remember this: [during] the last year of the Truman dministration and the first few months of the Eisenhower administration - we're talking about January, February, [and] March of '53 - every school in the District of Columbia was segregated, every hospital was segregated, every restaurant was segregated, every otel was segregated; the entire city was a segregated southern city. Eisenhower by executive order integrated the federal establishment first. The federal establishment was segregated. So I was up there just two years after this, but there was not much change; nothing much had happened. I mean, it was still a little quiet southern city. [At] George Washington I can remember one black in the whole law school. I'm sure a great number of blacks around here went to George Washington. I mean, they had a program later for minority students; a couple members of the legislature [studied there and] a black female judge here went to George Washington. But race became the central issue with the Southern senators and civil rights became the [battleground]. We had a Civil Rights Act passed during the Eisenhower administration - with the help of Lyndon Johnson, incidentally - but it was a Civil Rights Act we felt like we could live with.

Thirty years later it's just hard to explain the situation, but we felt - and I believe Senator Eastland was absolutely sincere - that it was a constitutional issue. All of his oppositions to civil rights, and Senator Stennis's also, were based purely on law, reason, and the Constitution. I've still got some doubts whether Brown v Board of Education is a good law, but I have no doubt that it's the law. But really the thing that broke the back of the anti-civil-rights movement, or of the southern opposition, was not Brown v the Board of Education or any edict of the Supreme Court; it was the actual passage by Congress of the Civil Rights Act of '64 and particularly the Voting Rights Act of '65. For the first time we had a law passed by the representatives of the people that outlawed segregation, in '64. And then politicians, and particularly in places that have large numbers of Negroes, like Mississippi, paid attention to the Voting Rights Act of '65. And when it was fully implemented, that was the death knell of segregation in Mississippi, in the South, and in the nation.

Well, race is still unfortunately a burning issue in the country. You know poor [Mayor David] Dinkins [has] got his hands full in New York.

So I'm going to quit right now. I'm in Washington [and] I've finished law school. All right, I'll go back: this will bring us up to the [University of] Southern [Mississippi] thing. I finished law school in '57. Then I've got to take the bar exams, first in the District of Columbia in December of '57 and here in the spring of '58. I passed both of them the first time, unlike little John Kennedy. But I didn't take the New York bar; the D.C. bar is tougher than the New York bar. So I had my choice: I could have stayed in Washington and continued to work for the senator - and I did for a year after I graduated - or I could come home and practice law. I was admitted in both places.

I went to see the senator - this is a good story. I said, "Well, Senator, I believe I'm going to go home when Congress adjourns." He said, "What are you going to do that for?" I said, "Well, I think I'm going to practice law and run for the legislature." He said, "I think you're a damn fool. If you want to practice law, you ought to practice law here in Washington. I've just become chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Every Supreme Court judge that's appointed is going to come through that door. In fact, every federal judge appointed is going to come through that door. You'll get to meet them. Every lawyer of any stature in this country is going to come through my committee.''

(brief interruption)

Derr: When was this discussion with Eastland? Early '58?

Barber: This was about the summer of '58. My then wife didn't want to leave Washington; she loved it. She was very culturally attuned and liked the plays and museums. We lived around the corner from the Library of Congress. Well, we really hadn't lived as well as I did when I was a senior in law school. Of course, we lived in some small apartments. We had a little boy born; we had a little girl and then a boy. The senator came one afternoon and it was hot as hell and we didn't have any air conditioning. The next day, I got a raise! (laughter) We went around the corner, the corner of Sixth and East Capitol. You've been to the Library of Congress.

Derr: Yes sir.

Barber: You know where East Capitol is, or maybe you don't.

Derr: I can't place the street. I can place the building and I've been in it.

Barber: Well, there's North Capitol, South Capitol, East Capitol. There's no West Capitol; that's Pennsylvania Avenue. North Capitol goes out toward Howard University, out in that section. Well, East Capitol - if you left Pennsylvania Avenue, as did John Wilkes Booth the night he killed Lincoln, and you're going - back then the easiest way to get to Maryland was to go down East Capitol and turn on Sixth Street and then cross the Anacosta River out there. Well, that's where we lived, on the corner of Sixth and East Capitol, and I figured out one night - I was reading - that that's where John Wilkes Booth turned his horse, riding into Maryland. It was a three-story house [with] five bedrooms [and] three baths, a really lovely place. I think we got it for $275 a month, which we felt was very expensive at the time. But we had the third floor rented out.

Excuse me, this might take forever. Anyhow, I didn't listen to Senator Eastland, therefore I didn't become a millionaire lawyer in Washington, D.C., which I could easily have done - I'm serious - with his backing.

Derr: Describe in a little bit of detail what your work was for Eastland at this point.

Barber: Well, at that point I was promoted from [clerk-messenger]. I started off as clerk-messenger; my next title was clerk; my next title was investigator, when I got my law degree. Let me just put it this way: your title had very little to do with what your work was. I did a lot of work extra-committee; it was in the senator's office. At that time this was common. You had people on the committee that worked in your office; you had people in your office that did some work with the committee. It was just not as structured as it is now. I've got a daughter up there now who is on the Merchant Marine Committee; she never sees a congressional office or the congressman that's her chairman. Well, she sees him at the committee but not in his office.

But I did a lot of constituent work for [the senator], and that's exactly what I did the next time. I was a legislative assistant, but I was mostly assigned to constituent problems and constituent relations - correspondence, speechwriting, that sort of thing. The first time, I didn't write any speeches. That's practically all [I did] - I mean that's not all I did, but that was among the things I did the second time.

I did a lot of personal things for him, too. I drove him, for one thing - took him to the airport and picked him up at the airport. I remember he used to have the gout before they got that pill for the gout. Just like Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, the man looked twenty years older. He was humped over and I had to take him to the doctor; it was just terrible. But I was a sort of a personal assistant to the senator, as best I can describe it, and I had some committee duties. By this time, the last year I was there, we weren't hunting too many communists because I guess we couldn't find too many.

But [there is] an incident that happened while I was there that I ought to tell you about. That was when I began to understand and appreciate how sorry Republicans are. One thing that made me a Democrat was this experience in Washington, because we had a one-vote majority in the U.S. Senate. Senator Eastland's chairmanship and my job depended upon that one vote. So in the senatorial election of '56, that really made me a Democrat because the Republicans on this committee, we kept them, but they'd have gotten rid of me in a minute. They'd have gotten rid of the Democrats on there. By this time, we had two or three other Mississippians up there, but I was the first.

We had a chief council named Jay Sourwine. He resigned unfortunately. He was a Democrat, a McCarran man. He resigned to run for the senate in [Nevada]. He was another damned fool who went home to run for the senate in Nevada. Well, he got beat.

So Jenner or somebody persuaded Senator Eastland to appoint a Judge Morris, a municipal judge in New York who had been an assistant to Congressman Kudare [?] from New York, who had had sort of a preliminary committee to the Un-American Activities Committee in the House. It was a similar inquiry in the late '30s or early '40s, or maybe right after World War [II] - maybe in '46 or so. I think it was '46 when the Republicans had control of the House. Anyhow, he had been [on] the Kudare committee; it was on some phase of communism, domestic communism, and Morris had been chief counsel.

They brought this fellow Morris in and, man, he was a wild man because he wanted to establish a reputation also to run for office. He wanted to run in New York and he later ran for United States Senator in New Jersey. Well, he pulled things like [this]: [Jacob] Javits was attorney general of New York [and] he became candidate for United States senator. He had him down there for investigation of when he was an officer in the army during World War II and some connection with the United Nations supposedly. It was really kind of bogus. Eastland was suspicious of this fellow, but he didn't clamp down on him.

I tell you what really got him, though, was when they had a [staff hearing]. In addition to hearings where you have to have a senator for a hearing, they had these staff meetings with witnesses. They weren't necessarily sworn - well, they might have been sworn, but there was some question about the legality of this type of hearing; it was sort of a Star Chamber proceeding. And they had this professor or ex-professor from Harvard and he was talking about some people supposed to have been in a communist cell in the '30s at Harvard. And among them was a person named, just named, in this -

(The interview continues on tape two, side one.)

Barber: One of those people who had been at Harvard at that time had become the Canadian ambassador to Egypt. And this staff report was not supposed to be issued publicly. It was supposed to go to the committee and then they were to vote on whether to issue it or not.

For some reason Morris instructed the editorial director, who was really the press man for the subcommittee, to issue this to the Associated Press early one morning. I was summoned to the residence of the chief counsel the night before and told to be there in the morning to physically pick the thing up from Bill Lowell, the editorial director, and take it over to the Associated Press. Hell, I didn't know what the hell was in the thing; I hadn't been at the [meeting]. I said, "Fine, Judge Morris, I'll be happy to." I took the thing over first thing in the morning to the Associated Press and, of course, it went on the international wire.

Well, the next thing we knew, the Canadian ambassador to Egypt jumped off a building and killed himself in Cairo! Oh, Christ Almighty! The next day I thought the world was [ending]. Hell, Eisenhower was involved in the thing; the State Department was involved in the thing. But what got us excited was when Lyndon Baines Johnson called Jim Eastland and said, "What in the hell is going on over there?" (laughter) And there was only one man that I ever saw Senator Eastland have any great reservations about offending. I mean, really, he was very deferential to LBJ when he was Majority Leader. I think probably when he was president, he was not so deferential. But Lyndon Johnson - there was a lot of controversy about Eastland taking the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee because of this civil rights business, you see. You've got that context in '55 [and] '56? But Lyndon stood by him and made sure the Senate Democrats stayed in line for Jim Eastland.

Derr: So he liked Lyndon.

Barber: He liked Lyndon; he was obligated to Lyndon.

Derr: Sure.

Barber: That was very serious with him and should be with everybody. But that's the way politics works, or should work. [You] ought to be loyal to those that brought you. Or you ought to dance with those that brought you to the dance. (laughter) There are several ways to say it.

But anyhow, I was summoned to the chairman's office, to Senator Eastland's office. And I could hear Lyndon, I mean, phone calls were going [back and forth]. Earl Clements was Majority Whip; he was calling. Lyndon was calling. You could hear them hollering over the damn telephone. And he said, "Who told you to release [that report]? You released that?" I said, "Yes sir, I released it. I released it because Judge Morris told me to." He said, "Judge Morris denies it. He said you released it on your own," or words to that effect. I said, "Well, it's a goddamn lie, Senator," or words to that effect. But Morris denied authorizing it. That's where I learned about Republicans. They can't be trusted; some of them can't be trusted. Some of them are very nice people - [Abraham] Lincoln, for example. (laughter)

Seriously, I offered to resign. The senator said, "You don't have to resign. We're going to get to the bottom of this." I believe that he finally figured out this fellow Morris. Morris later became president of the University of Dallas, which is a right-wing Roman Catholic college, or used to be. I don't know how it is now. They say it's a pretty good school. It's very small. I don't know where Morris is. Bill Rusher, do you know who that is?

Derr: With National Review?

Barber: Yes, he's publisher. He was associate counsel to the subcommittee under Morris. He was here not too long ago and I talked to him briefly at a Mississippi College function. I meant to ask him about Morris, but [I didn't]. If I ever run into him again, I'll ask him. Morris may be dead by now. Anyhow, that wasn't the end of my career in Washington, but I did go home to Hattiesburg, hung out a shingle, and the next year ran for the legislature.

Derr: And that was your primary purpose in returning.

Barber: My purpose - I told [the] senator I wanted to run for the legislature. He said, "Hell, there's nothing to that. I was in the legislature. I only served four years." I kept remembering that when I was in the legislature and I only served four years.

I think everybody ought to serve four years, but you can either make a career out of it or not. Back then it was very hard to serve. There was really no pay to it. There's not much now, but there was none then. I mean, we got $3,000 every two years [and] no expenses while we were in session. They get expenses now. We were in special session all the time when Ross Barnett was governor and [there was] one crisis after another. So that's [the story].

I'm going to turn this [scrapbook] over to you. I want to have this copied. I'm going to give you the original and make copies. I'm going to do that this week.

It was a tough campaign being elected. When I came back from Washington I didn't know exactly whether I'd run for the Senate or the House, but fortunately there became a vacancy in the Senate. My friend, Stanton A. Hall, became a judge and therefore a vacancy occurred. There's an axiom in politics: never run against an incumbent. I had spent a year practicing law and trying to get ready to run.

I led the Senate race in the first primary by 84 votes. I got 3,200; Dr. Eure got 3,116; Lawrence Arrington, the former district attorney, got 2,551; Joe Stevens, who had run against Stanton Hall before and had run second, ran fourth - he got 2,347 - and a man named Sam Farris got 2,131. Now, there was another man named M.B.B. Holloway, who was an almost blind man. He had been an educator and he ran, too. They don't have his [votes listed]. Maybe he withdrew before it was over with. But there were five candidates, and Dr. Eure and I went in the second primary.

Derr: Now, were these numbers you gave me for the August primary?

Barber: The first primary. Both of them were in August, but -

Derr: They would have been about two weeks apart then.

Barber: Three weeks, thank God.

Derr: Well that was a pretty short race then, considering you declared in June. You had three months of intensive politicking.

Barber: I declared probably in May; the deadline for qualifying was in June. There's no dates on these papers.

Derr: I believe I read in the Hattiesburg American the other day that you declared on June 2.

Barber: OK, I think you're right. That sounds exactly correct.

Derr: What was your support-base? I mean, you had been in Washington, away from -

Barber: [I'd] been in Washington and [at] Ole Miss and - do you remember those fellows I told you about in the National Guard?

Derr: Right. OK, they're coming back to (inaudible).

Barber: One of the sergeants with me - I was a sergeant - was a man named Andrew D. Carter. He's still down there. His brother was J.A.P., "Jap," Carter, who was a longtime supervisor down there. Well, that was in the southern part of the county. You know, there's a funny thing about politics. I think you spend more time in the rural areas than you do in the urban areas, and I was fairly well known in the city anyhow. I mean, people had been there for sixty-five or seventy-five years. People like [Carter helped me]. He lived in McLaurin, south of town, and then [there] were boys I had served with from Brooklyn and boys I'd served with in -

I just worked the hell out of Perry County. I mean, I was almost unknown over there, but, I tell you, people helped me. My predecessor, Stanton Hall, helped me. In fact, I don't believe I could have been elected without him. That's George Robert [Hall]'s father.

Derr: What in particular did he do for you? Just contact people?

Barber: He told people. The fellow has been up here. He said, "Who would do the best job for us?" He said, "Well, [Frank Barber]."

Governor Johnson got elected lieutenant governor in the first primary and he did the same thing very quietly. [People] said, "Well, Paul, who would like to have up in the Senate with you?" He said, "I like Spurgeon Eure, but I know I can depend on Frank Barber." I mean, just quiet [promotion]. That goes along with it.

Derr: That's a lot of clout. Those two men -

Barber: Damn right. The lieutenant governor is a hell of a lot of clout, particularly if you're just elected.

Derr: What particular issues emerged as issues?

Barber: Between us?

Derr: Yes.

Barber: Purely personalities. We didn't have any great [differences]. Actually, we did have this philosophical distinction: I think I was a man more of the people than he was. I mean he was a handpicked candidate of a group of businessmen down there. He was an accidental member of the House. His father died as a candidate and he became a write-in candidate. He was an adequate but really a weak representative. The House of Representatives is a tough place to be when you're a freshman.

Derr: In the respect that you don't have the experience, or how is that?

Barber: You don't have the committee assignments; you don't have the - it takes you a long time to get ahead in the House.

Derr: In other words, you've got to grow into the politics of the House itself.

Barber: That's correct, particularly back then. Mr. Sillers was Speaker from 1944 'till the '60s. He died in '6[6]. I think I convinced the people, particularly the rural people, that I was more in tune with them than he was. In fact, he was the least political person you want to find. He is a nice person and we're friends.

Derr: But how did he show this lack of political acumen, if I might put it that way?

Barber: Not acumen so much as personality. He just didn't have the common touch; he didn't have the warmth. People can sense that. I used television, and I think I used it to a great advantage.

Derr: How else did you campaign, then, besides television?

Barber: Television, radio. I used the hell out of radio. I still believe in radio.

Derr: How did you work rural Perry County, for example?

Barber: Hell, I shook hands. I went over there and spoke in public. On Saturday I'd speak out there. Across the street from Stevens' Store [in Richton] there's a place where they'd sell feed back then - and still do, I guess. There's a platform and I'd get a microphone and get up there and speak. There'd be two or three hundred people around there that could hear you.

But I shook hands. I went from community to community; I talked to people. It was a personal campaign. You can do it in a senatorial district. Senatorial districts down there are smaller now than they were. It was a personal campaign and we used the newspaper, which is [common]. The Hattiesburg American is the only paper down there, [and] we used the Richton Dispatch.

Derr: How did you like campaigning?

Barber: I love campaigning. Hell, I've done it since I was ten years old. I like it now. A lot of people don't like it. Senator Eastland hated it.

Derr: So it was nothing new to you.

Barber: No. All that was new was that I was running on my own; I mean, I was running myself.

But it was a tough race. I mean those fellows - the name, Stevens, is very important in Perry County. The principal business people in Richton were named Stevens. Stevens' store is the biggest [store]; Ben Stevens was mayor then. And they voted for their relative - I mean, he was a distant relative - although they didn't like his politics too much. He had the organized labor support. I think I got it the second. Of course, that's what defeated him the time before when he almost won.

Derr: Was that a significant group?

Barber: Well, labor can hurt you or help you in Hattiesburg. But the people backing Eure were not pro-union. I was pro-[union] - I didn't climb the fence, but I knew Stevens had it in the first primary, so I didn't do anything in particular. I mean, I tried to get it on an individual basis, but I didn't do anything in particular. But the second primary the labor people came to me. They didn't give me any money -

Derr: - but the votes were there.

Barber: Yes. I think Hercules helped me. They had an independent union back then. They're Teamsters now, I think. They were teamsters the last time I heard. They were an International Woodworkers' [union]. Maybe it was just an independent Hercules union, I don't know. A man named Dunigin, who I think is still living, had it. Anyhow, his son is the publisher of the McComb paper.

(end of first interview)

This is the second part of an interview with The Honorable Frank D. Barber. The interview is taking place in Mr. Barber's office in the Carroll Gartin Building in Jackson, Mississippi. The date is June 30, 1993. The interviewer is Reid S. Derr.

Derr: Mr. Barber, thank you for your time. I appreciate you talking with me about Paul Johnson. Let's begin with the '63 campaign, if you would reminisce a little bit about your involvement in the '63 campaign.

Barber: I hate to change your question, but let me just say this: Governor Johnson made four races for governor. I just got out of high school in 1947 and was on part of that campaign on a sound truck. [In] '51 he ran again. I was in the army, but I took two weeks off, the two weeks I had before I went overseas, and did some campaigning for him then. In '55 I was very active in the campaign, probably the most active I've been in any of his campaigns. Ben Chase Callon [?] of Natchez was campaign manager and Mr. Martin Fraley of Corinth, who sort of ran his office [and was] a man of all work-advisor, strategist, technician, tactician. With those two exceptions, the full-time staff was composed of students from the university, mostly law students. Included among them were Brad Dye and the late Jimmy Walker, both of whom came to the legislature in '59, [and] I was in it. I came to the Senate in '59, and a whole number of Ole Miss students. He almost won that race.

Derr: Was Marshall Bennett among that group?

Barber: No, Marshall Bennett did not come until '63. He was a student in '63. I guess he was too young in '55. But Marshall Bennett and Thurman Boykin were the heads of what we called the - it wasn't called Youth for Johnson, but it was something similar to that - the youth organization.

Derr: Tell me a little bit about Martin Fraley. I don't know a lot about him.

Barber: All right Colonel Fraley was a - you shouldn't have asked that question, it's going to take all morning. Martin Fraley was a Mississippian, but he first became famous - or infamous - in Oklahoma politics. He had been in the Oklahoma legislature, and how he got to Oklahoma I don't know and how he got to the legislature I don't know. But he served a term or two in the legislature. He was very close to a governor of Oklahoma named "Alfalfa Bill" Murray. Bill Murray was governor during the Depression, and he was one of these populist governors and very - a lot of books [were] written about him - in the Roosevelt era. There were Bill Murrays all over the west - the south and the west, I guess. And later his son became governor, Johnston Murray - which brings us to Paul Johnson. At the time Paul was governor, there were only three governors whose sons became governor, and I don't know if that's changed since. There were the Talmadges in Georgia, Eugene and Herman Talmadge; the Murrays,"Alfalfa Bill" Murray and his son, Johnston Murray in Oklahoma; and Paul B. Johnson, Sr., and Jr. Now, it may be that that has changed, though, since 1964.

Derr: Well, how did Fraley get hooked up with Paul Johnson Jr.?

Barber: All right now let me -

Derr: Am I hurrying you too much?

Barber: Yes, because you've got to -

Derr: Sorry about that (laughing).

Barber: After he left the legislature he became the executive vice president and executive director of the Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association for Oklahoma. And there was some scandal about that, about the oil people and the Murray administration, and Martin Fraley; but, of course, Mr. Fraley to my knowledge was never indicted or charged with anything.

I don't know how he got to Oklahoma and I don't know why he left Oklahoma. The first I ever heard of him was at the 1952 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I was a student at [Mississippi] Southern [College] and a friend of mine and I just drove up there. Well, there was a challenge delegation. So in order for us to get into the convention we had to deal with both the regular delegation, which was headed by Governor White and the national committeeman, Attorney General J.P. Coleman, and the rump delegation, which was headed by a man named Clarence Hood from Meridian, who was a lumber man but no kin to Warren Hood, and Miss Tilly Clark from DeKalb, Mississippi, who was the rump national committeewoman. So we'd get tickets from anybody we could, [including] Congressman Colmer, who was our congressman from down there. But Fraley was on that rump delegation. Incidentally, this was not a racial situation; it was all white. But if they were financed - I don't think they were, but if they were assisted, they were assisted by the, I think then, CIO. I think this was before the [AFL-CIO] merger, in '52, I'm not sure. But there were a lot of labor people on that thing. Dixon Pyle, the labor lawyer here, was on the committee. You know who that is?

Derr: Yes.

Barber: He's in that [Mississippi State] Sovereignty Commission suit on behalf of the civil rights activists who don't want the thing exposed. I've been talking to (inaudible) about that. I've got him an interview with one of those plaintiffs, Ed King.

Derr: Right.

Barber: Anyhow, Fraley was a very friendly fellow. See, Paul had run in '51; this was '52 [and] he had backed Paul in '51. He was a liberal by Mississippi standards, a very strong liberal; and Paul Johnson in '47 and '51 was a liberal candidate. [In] '47 the campaign probably was the least expensive gubernatorial campaign in Mississippi history. The office was staffed by little girls from Southern Bell and Tel[ephone] then who were on strike - CWA, Communication Workers of America - and they just volunteered their time for him. They ran that campaign for fifteen thousand dollars, Pat Johnson, Pete's father, who was his campaign manager in 1947, told me. You couldn't run a campaign one week today for fifteen thousand dollars.

Derr: No, for sure.

Barber: Maybe not one day.

Derr: Were you involved in either of those '47 campaigns?

Barber: I was there, yes.

Derr: I knew you were there, but -

Barber: Wait a minute, I was on the sound truck. We'd go to these towns and I would announce, "The next governor of Mississippi, our thirty-one-year-old candidate, Paul B. Johnson will be in Mendenhall, Mississippi, at 6:30 P.M. Come out and hear him" or words to that effect.

Derr: I remember you telling me about that. That's right, I'm sorry.

Barber: Unfortunately, the fellow is dead who drove the sound truck. He was practically illiterate, but he talked a lot.

Derr: Who was that?

Barber: That was Curtis Eckstein [?]. Then another man that was very active in that campaign of '47 was the Governor's cousin - or Paul Johnson, Jr.'s, cousin - Hammond Hinton. Have you heard of him?

Derr: Yes.

Barber: Well, he was sort of the guru of the campaign; he called the shots. He had been in Governor Johnson, Sr.'s, campaigns and he had been in the administration.

Derr: Now, he was at Ole Miss with Paul, Jr., was he not?

Barber: I think he was. I think he was there before Paul got there. Well, I don't know. I think they were there together. I'm not positive of that, but the Old Governor was very partial toward Hammond. Well, that was his sister's son. I'm pretty sure that's the relationship.

Derr: Is Hinton still living?

Barber: No, he died before Paul Johnson, Jr., ever got elected to anything. It was a tragedy really. Not long before he was elected lieutenant governor in '59, Hammond died. His wife may be around, but she doesn't know anything.

Derr: That's all right.

Barber: They married late. It was his second wife and they married late in his life. But he would have been the man to talk to about these early years, the early campaigns. But he went through the '47, '51, and '55 campaigns.

Now in the '55 campaign for some reason they sort of gave him a back seat in the campaign. This often happens. They considered him a liability rather than a - well, I think Hammond was pretty liberal. I mean a progressive, a Governor Johnson, Sr., type liberal or progressive.

Derr: Well, was there any kind of -

Barber: But that probably was not philosophical, it was probably personal with some strong supporters or something.

Derr: Yes.

Barber: Now, another name you ought to put down [because] I think he had some influence - I know he had some influence in '55 and '63 - was Judge Tom Brady on the [Mississippi] Supreme Court.

Derr: What was his relationship with Paul?

Barber: Well, Tom Brady had been very close to Governor Johnson, Sr. As a matter of fact, Tom Brady was the commissioner of Public Safety, the head of the highway patrol. He was the second commissioner of public safety we ever had. General Birdsong was the first, and he kept coming back. But Governor Johnson, Sr., got rid of Birdsong and put Brady in. He was a colorful head of the highway patrol. He wore these twill cavalry pants and boots and had a uniform. I haven't seen a commissioner wear a uniform since then, but I'd heard it was a (inaudible). He was pretty flamboyant. He was bad to drink about this time, too - which wasn't too good. Governor Johnson, Sr., hated whiskey; he was an absolute prohibitionist, personally and politically. But I don't think he did anything to Brady. I think maybe [he] called Brady in a couple of times, but as far as I know Brady completed his term. His family is fairly wealthy. They were in a bank down there in Brookhaven and he was a lawyer. I think Governor Barnett appointed him, one, to the circuit court and, two, the Supreme Court. It may be another governor - well, it couldn't have been another governor that appointed him. He'd opposed all of them up to Barnett and Johnson, you see. I don't know, but Brady exerted some extremely conservative influence on Johnson, Jr.

Derr: Was he a consistent supporter up through '55?

Barber: Oh, he was a consistent supporter until he died.

Derr: OK.

Barber: I mean, he administered the oath.

Derr: Right, he swore him in.

Barber: Yes, that's right. They were extremely close. The families were very close. You've got to understand: I don't know if I've gone through this before - I think another one of your questions does this - the metamorphosis of Paul Johnson in national politics. And that's also connected with, for want of better words, liberal-conservatives-reactionary [political labels].

Derr: Are you specifically speaking of the race issue?

Barber: Well, I am speaking of the race issue, but that came later. As I told you, [in] '52 race was no issue.

Derr: Right. Well, I'm not so concerned about it either.

Barber: I mean, race was never an issue in this state, really to my knowledge, until '54 except - well, I mean, Bilbo would make these snide remarks or humorous comments, but nobody paid a lot of attention to it one way or the other. The whole Bilbo thing about sending the blacks back to Africa is the myth. He introduced a bill for African resettlement. Have I told you this before?

Derr: I believe so, yes.

Barber: OK. Well, the whole thing was, Marcus Garvey came to him when he was probably the only United States senator to talk to him and had this proposition, had this Black Star Line, you remember?

Derr: Sure.

Barber: [He] had this whole plan for African resettlement. So Bilbo humored him [and] introduced the bill and that was about the end of that. It didn't get anywhere. But eternally thereafter, he's the man that wanted to send the blacks back to Africa. He didn't want to send them anywhere except to the resettlement office.

Derr: But in terms of Paul Johnson's evolution, liberal and conservative. We were talking about that.

Barber: Well, let's just say this. You know that in 1948 he backed Truman when hardly anybody else in Mississippi politics did.

Derr: I wasn't aware of that. That's a black hole in my knowledge.

Barber: That's extremely important. If you're going to understand Paul Johnson, Jr., you've got to understand this fellow came back from World War II filled with all the vim, vigor, and enthusiasm of youth, and as his father's son and his father was a great Democrat. His father made speeches all over the North for Democratic candidates for Congress. They didn't have to make them in the South back then. I mean, he was on the speaker's committee of the Democratic National Committee; he was very close to people like Jim Farley - extremely close to Jim Farley. I'm talking about Sr., now.

Derr: OK.

Barber: So, I mean, he takes up his father's causes.

Derr: Yes, I'm not surprised he supported Truman.

Barber: Well, in the first place he gets beat in 1947 for, one, governor; two, United States senator. And you talk about that campaign, I was in that campaign too. I was a freshman at Ole Miss, but we campaigned throughout that area up there. I mean I was on the - they'd call me or write me to do this and that, and I did. But I remember [there was] one candidate from here, [who] ran third: Forrest Jackson, who was supposed to have inherited the Bilbo mantle. This was Bilbo's unexpired term. He made a speech in Oxford in the square there at the Lafayette County courthouse and I was in the crowd. Forrest Jackson said, "Now, take this fellow little Paul Johnson. Earlier this year he was running for governor and now he's running for United States senator. I wouldn't be surprised if next year he doesn't run for President of the United States." I hollered out, "He'd make a good one." That stopped him in his tracks. He laughed and was very nice to me, very cordial. He said, "Well, you might be right." They were friends. Forrest Jackson and Paul Johnson were friends. But you know, I was eighteen years old and I didn't have a great deal to do with the overall strategy of the campaign. But he ran third. Let's see there was Stennis, Colmer, Jackson - Paul Johnson ran fourth - Congressman Rankin ran fifth. He was a national figure.

Derr: I understand [that] Colmer blamed Johnson for his losing that race, though.

Barber: Yes, because they both were from south Mississippi, but Colmer, very frankly, beat Paul Johnson in practically every county in south Mississippi, including Forrest, his home county. Paul's best vote was where it's always been: up in northeast Mississippi. Rankin could very well have blamed him for beating him, too, because he took a lot of northeast Mississippi votes.

Derr: You were talking about Paul Johnson's support of Truman in '48.

Barber: OK, Truman in '48. You see, I was a student up at Ole Miss and I had to get my signals every once in a while from Johnson but, hell, sometimes I'd act on my own. And I can only tell this in the context I know, but [during the Democratic National Convention] in '48 in Philadelphia, Mississippi walked out - and Alabama and several other southern states - and they all assembled down at Birmingham for the State's Rights Convention, which the media called the Dixiecrat convention. Anyhow, the call went out to the State's Rights Democrats to assemble in Birmingham. Well, hell, I was a student at Ole Miss and we took the University Grey's flags - they were locked there at Ole Miss - to Birmingham. In fact, Governor Wright called Ole Miss. He said he wanted some students there to go to the convention - or somebody in his office called - and wanted to give the convention a little color. So, hell, I'll never forget, we took those flags [that] the University Greys carried in the Civil War to Birmingham. And we had a hell of a time hollering and running up and down. It was the first national convention I'd been to. I'd been to the state convention that year.

Derr: But Paul Johnson was not there.

Barber: No. He wasn't there.

Derr: Why did he support Truman?

Barber: Well, wait a second.

Derr: OK.

Barber: Well, I mean, we got back - I thought [Gov. Strom] Thurman [and Gov. Fielding L.] Wright was a good ticket at eighteen years old - but I talked to Paul Johnson. He said, "No, that's not a good ticket." He dissuaded me from that and made a Trumancrat out of me, made a Truman man out of me overnight.

But it was a lost cause. You couldn't get any votes for Truman. There were isolated people who were for Truman. He didn't do as bad as some Democrats had in the state: for example, Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Well, I know he supported Truman; he told me he supported Truman. And not only that, Truman won; and he was quietly, behind the scenes, the principal patronage dispenser under Truman, and he himself became the assistant U.S. attorney.

Derr: I understand he got that through Eastland, though.

Barber: Well, who in the hell - that's true. Every federal appointment then for thirty years came through Eastland, but you're only able to get the U.S. attorney if you've got the President of the United States to nominate him and the Senate confirms him. So Joe Brown was the U.S. attorney from Natchez and he was appointed by Truman [through] Eastland, and so was Paul Johnson.

Derr: Yes.

Barber: Who told you he got it through Eastland?

Derr: I think his wife did.

Barber: Well, she's right in a sense. But I think there was a hell of a lot more [to it]. Had he not supported Truman, he might not have gotten the job.

Derr: That's understandable.

Barber: He went through Eastland. I think it was wise for Eastland to appoint him - even though Eastland was always loyal to the Johnsons. He had gotten his appointment from Paul Johnson, Sr. He'd have never gone to the United States Senate at age thirty-four on his own. He knew that. He backed him every time. A lot of his supporters couldn't stand the fact that he supported Johnson but he always did. [He was] very loyal. But what Dot [Mrs. Paul B. Johnson] said is, I think, emblematic of what most of these people around here [think]. They don't want to give the national Democratic Party any credit for anything, even the little [things]. Did she say anything about his supporting Truman?

Derr: No.

Barber: Did she say anything about dispensing patronage, post offices, things like that?

Derr: No, you can tell me more about that.

Barber: Well, I'm telling you it became a tremendous issue in the 1951 campaign. They called Johnson a Trumancrat.

Derr: That's right.

Barber: I mean, why did they do that? There had been some people that went to jail dispensing this patronage - I mean, selling these jobs. I don't know if any of them went to jail, but some were indicted. One fellow couldn't go to jail because he was ill. He would sit on a bed on his porch. I remember I went to see him one time, a man named Curt Rogers [?]. He would be around his place, but if somebody came down the road, he'd jump in that bed. (laughing) Hell, that's true. Curt and Sharp [?] Rogers from Silverena, Mississippi. Now, they were close friends with Paul Johnson.

Derr: The Rogers were?

Barber: The Rogers were, and still are if they're living. They were the most loyal people in the world - good people, too. But they wanted to build up the Democratic Party, that's why they sold those jobs. That's what they said (laughing).

Derr: Right.

Barber: The Trumancrats were Clarence Hood - I told you that - Miss Tilly Clark over at DeKalb and Sharp and Curt Rogers down at Silverena, Mississippi, Smith County. There was a man named Beasley - his name was Erin Beasley; he was a dope fiend - and a fellow by the name of Buford Posey. You ought to interview Buford Posey if you can find him in Philadelphia. He's a graduate of the University of Southern Mississippi.

Derr: Oh, really? Buford Posey, I've heard of him.

Barber: He could tell you all about the Trumancrats because he were one (laughing) - he was one.

Derr: So what you're saying is that Paul Johnson was instrumental in a split in the Democratic Party over the Truman state's rights issue early on.

Barber: Yes, he took the Truman side.

Derr: So in that respect, he was liberal.

Barber: He took the Truman side and he paid for it. He probably would have been governor in the election of '51 but for that issue. Well, they did all kinds of things in '51 against him.

Derr: For example?

Barber: Well, for example, the then-editor of the Jackson Advocate was a black named Percy Greene. He was president of something called Independent Democrats in Mississippi or some ad hoc group. [He was] self-appointed. But he makes a radio address - I think it was the Sunday before the election for the second primary - for Paul B. Johnson. Well, Johnson had never seen or heard of him. Of course, that's one thing, and the Jackson Daily News, Fred Sullens hated everybody named Johnson, starting with the old man. Then Fred Sullens jumped on it the next day and it was all over the state: I mean, "Black-" no, it wasn't black-"Negro Leader Backs Johnson," and his picture's in there. Well, they paid Percy Greene to make that speech. Then the same weekend they had a Hugh White sound truck to turn over and they blamed the Johnson people for that. I think they just had a wreck.

Derr: That's what Mrs. Johnson says.

Barber: It was just a regular wreck, yes.

Derr: Or a hoax - or that it was -

Barber: No, it was damaged. But we never have been able to find that red-headed boy that was on that [truck]. Some newspaperman tried to find him years later. They thought it was a doctor here who was in the Hugh White campaign, but he said it was not he. What else did they do?

Derr: I know they used magazine articles to show that Johnson got a huge number of black votes in all-black precincts.

Barber: You're exactly right, in the first primary. In the first primary the Mount Carmel box in Jeff Davis County is practically all black, the Mound Bayou box in Bolivar County is practically all black; and they used that as a -

Derr: I think those were the two that I've seen.

Barber: Yes. They not only had newspapers; they would pass these circulars - and you'd get a lot worse in a circular than you could in the newspapers.

Derr: One was an Ebony magazine [article] with a discussion of blacks' political participation and then Johnson's heavily black vote superimposed on it.

Barber: It wasn't even in Ebony magazine, probably.

Derr: No, it was superimposed on the article, sure.

Barber: OK.

Derr: But I assume that's out of the White campaign.

Barber: Yes. Well, I was in Germany when all of this was going on. I heard that this happened, but I wasn't there. Incidentally, we had a hell of a time finding out who won.

Derr: Yes, you told me about that.

Barber: We finally went to the North American Newspaper Alliance and got the word about three days after the election.

All right, where were we? All right now, let's just go through this real quick. In '48 he was for Truman. In '52 he was for Adlai Stevenson. In '56 he was openly for Adlai Stevenson and he attended a rally and was on the platform with Senator Sparkman down here at Mendenhall. He was over there with him that night. In '60 he did not say a word. He was lieutenant governor but did not say a word. Now, Paul Johnson said nothing, but you've got to remember that eventually Jim Eastland and John Stennis both backed Kennedy. It was the Kennedy-Johnson ticket. Of course, in that instance they were probably backing the Johnson-Kennedy ticket (laughing), because no matter what happened there is this fellow [who] was going to be vice president and president of the Senate, or majority leader of the Senate. And I was mad at both of them, but particularly Eastland, because he didn't come out soon enough for Kennedy. I was extremely strong for Kennedy.

Derr: It seems in that period between his third loss in '55 for governor and about '57 that Paul Johnson really, should I say, was depressed. From the papers and some of the correspondence with Martin Fraley, for example, Martin was encouraging him, you know -

Barber: - to keep running.

Derr: Yes, exactly. "You're not a loser. Let's run you for lieutenant governor and get the experience that Coleman was so criticizing you for."

Barber: - that they keep saying you don't have.

Derr: Exactly.

Barber: You're exactly right.

Derr: Do you have any sense of what he was thinking during that period?

Barber: I've had the same conversation with Fraley. In 1954 and ['5]5 I was a student at the university again at the law school. See, I came to Southern after I was in the army and went back for one year of law school. I used to go to Corinth to see Fraley and also to see another big Johnson supporter named Rubel Phillips.

Derr: I didn't realize he was a supporter.

Barber: Oh, strong. The whole Phillips family were, and they were very close to Martin Fraley. Well, Rubel was twenty-two years old and circuit clerk up there. They were able to get a marriage certificate in Mississippi in one day and getting rich as a very young man right out of law school before he ever came down here. But Rubel's another story. Rubel will come back in '63 when he runs against Paul, and he made a pretty good run against Paul. He ran in '67 against John Bell Williams and did not do well at all. But there was always a strong anti-Johnson vote in the state obviously. The Johnsons, Jr. and Sr., made seven races for governor and won two, so there was bound to have been an anti-Johnson [vote].

Derr: So what was the substance of your discussion?

Barber: John Bell had never been on the ballot before and he was strong. The point is that Rubel did not - the only point, unfortunately, was, Rubel did not do too well against John Bell Williams. On the other hand, he did real well against Paul Johnson. Why? You know, he was a Republican, the first Republican since Reconstruction to run. He inherited all of the anti-Johnson vote, particularly in this case, not all but most of the Coleman vote in that race. It was a very bitter race. It was a very bitter race in '55, and it was a worse race in '63 between Coleman and Johnson.

Derr: You're welcome to talk more about that if you want to. I know Johnson was out to crush the Republicans for another hundred years.

Barber: Yes, I wrote that; I helped write that. But he didn't believe it like I believed it, though, because the next year he backed Goldwater. Shall we get into that right now? Let's see we've gone through [how on] Kennedy [he was] absolute[ly] silent and the Lyndon Johnson thing, OK.

Derr: I had mentioned that Johnson seemed depressed after his '55 loss and you said you consulted with Fraley and Rubel Phillips.

Barber: I didn't consult with Fraley about his depression. I consulted with him about what he was going to do, that he ought to run. No, I'm a little wrong here chronologically because I was going to see him about the '55 race in '54 and '55, you see.

Derr: Yes.

Barber: I mean, he should have won the '55 race. He knocked out Gov. Fielding Wright, and Coleman was pretty much unknown - he never had a race. I mean, he had been appointed attorney general and elected attorney general without opposition. He had never had to campaign [and] he never had to set up organizations, so he didn't seem to be too strong a candidate. Besides, he and Paul were close friends. Hell, in the first primary in '55 they used to consult with each other all the time. I think Coleman was a pretty shrewd fellow and he probably steered Paul in some wrong directions.

Derr: How did he do that?

Barber: Well, I can't give you a specific example but I am told that - I can't remember a specific example. I believe Gov. Paul Johnson said, "He'd call me and say, ‘Now, that fellow's for you. You don't have to go see him,' " or something like that. I can't remember.

Derr: Other people have said that he misled Johnson.

Barber: That's right. Of course, Johnson was pretty shrewd himself. He might have tried to mislead him, but I don't think so. I think he underestimated Coleman. Now, he had known Coleman since they were at Ole Miss together. I think Coleman had been for his father for governor.

Derr: What kind of a friendship did they have?

Barber: Well, I sat almost next to Coleman on the platform when Paul Johnson, Jr., was inaugurated. At the end of his inaugural address he said [that] it was the finest speech that had been delivered in Mississippi in this century or something like that.

Derr: Oh, so that was his reaction to it.

Barber: Yes, that was his reaction. I think it was sincere. He didn't have to tell me that.

Derr: I understand during the governorship that Johnson used to consult with Coleman too. In other words, they actually confided not just as personal friends, but they confided both as personal friends and political friends - except during the races, of course. Is that an accurate assessment?

Barber: I don't know where you got that. I did not see Governor Coleman but one time - let's go back.

Derr: Go ahead.

Barber: J.P. Coleman and I got really to be acquainted - he hated me. He claimed I charged him with being a draft dodger in Kosciusko in a speech one time. But I didn't call him a draft dodger. I just said that "He says that he had a hernia," and I said "If you get those things operated on and if he really wanted to go, he could have gone." I didn't call him a draft dodger! (laughing) So he knew who I was. But he was in the House of Representatives after he was governor and I was in the Senate. Hell, we'd had dinner together quite a bit. Paul was lieutenant governor and you couldn't ever get him out to dinner at night. I don't know where the hell he ate. He probably ate in his room. He lived at the Heidelberg [Hotel].

Derr: OK, this is Johnson now or Coleman?

Barber: Johnson as lieutenant governor. He lived at the Heidelberg and we lived off down at the King Edward [Hotel], where everybody lived. Johnson was a very quiet and conservative man up here. But anyhow, I got to know Coleman and I got to liking him. But I don't remember his ever going to see Paul Johnson when he was lieutenant governor, and I don't recall his ever coming in the governor's office.

Derr: OK.

Barber: Now, who knows who talks to whom on the telephone? Right?

Derr: Right. I think that was Pete's comment; that's why I brought that up.

Barber: And he said they were -

Derr: - that they were friends, yes.

Barber: They were friends, no question. They were friends before the whole thing started. I was at Governor Coleman's funeral and there were a tremendous number of Paul's friends there, and I was at Paul Johnson's funeral and there were a large number of Coleman's friends there. That's the thing about Mississippi politics: people. Hell, you fight for two or three months but, hell, it's not a blood feud or anything. I mean, you get over this thing. Now, I think this party thing might be a little more serious, I don't know. Of course, everybody takes these things - I mean, I take it seriously when your enemies are getting something. Of course, if there's anything to be given away, you're going to give it out to your friends; if there's anything left, we'll give it to the enemy.

Derr: Let's go on and talk about the '63 campaign. We've hedged around it, let's talk about it.

Barber: Right. I'll tell you what, what time is it now? Yes, we've got plenty of time. Let me get a cup of coffee.

(a brief interruption. During the break Mr. Barber mentioned the unpublished administrative history of the Johnson administration, entitled "The Pursuit of Excellence.'' Barber compiled the book at the conclusion of Johnson's tenure as governor.)

Barber: However, it does tell what happened during the Johnson administration, most of which has been forgotten, but it was a very progressive four years.

Derr: I've used "The Pursuit of Excellence" for some of my research, sure.

Let's talk about political conditions in Mississippi, especially as Paul Johnson understood them in late '63 and early '64 as he was preparing for his governorship. Tell me about some of the preparations that Paul Johnson went through [and] of what you saw in preparing for his administration, even during the '63 campaign, for example.

Barber: I think in preparing for the 1963 campaign Lieutenant Governor Johnson had two great advantages. One, for the first time as a candidate he was running from the inside rather than the outside. During the four years he was lieutenant governor, for the first time in his career he was able to, for lack of a better word, sell himself to the members of the Mississippi legislature - easily to the Senate over which he presided, but more importantly probably, to the people who had been in office in the House of Representatives for thirty years or more, Speaker Walter Sillers and the hierarchy of the House of Representatives as committee chairmen; all of whom were, very frankly, old men. Very frankly, [they were] men much older than Paul, who in the past had viewed Paul Johnson with a great deal of suspicion. They figured that he was a spender. They were conservative in spending and they figured that he, if elected, would open up the state treasury and a boondoggle would come up. But they found as lieutenant governor that he was not that type at all. In fact, they found he was very frugal, and he was very frugal.

Derr: Who are you thinking of? Hilton Waites, George Payne Cossar?

Barber: Yes, Hilton Waites and George Payne Cossar, who was the chairman of the Rules Committee and traffic cop of the legislation.

Derr: Sillers, of course.

Barber: And then Johnny Junkin was chairman of appropriations, Sillers, and then Buddie Newman. Now, Buddie Newman was only the chairman of county affairs, but he was extremely powerful. He toted a lot of water for Speaker Sillers.

(the interview continues on tape one, side two.)

Barber: Now, this was one advantage, this coziness with the legislature, for lack of a better word, that he never had before. Then, secondly, he had his own organization, which had existed, really, since 1931 when his father first ran for governor. [It was] honed in '35, '39, and '47 twice, '51, and '55. So if the Johnson organization was ever strong, it was strong in '63 because at long last they had the first elected official since '43 in the Johnson political family. But another significant thing is that he had worked with [and] cooperated with Governor Barnett, but more importantly with Governor Barnett's people, [his] friends. Barnett, you've got to remember, had run for governor twice before he was elected. He had a following and he had people and these people would naturally gravitate towards Paul Johnson during a campaign rather than Coleman, who loomed as one of the principal opponents. But early in '63 it looked like the major contender would be former governor Fielding L. Wright. Am I right or wrong?

Derr: No, that doesn't sound right.

Barber: Excuse me, I'm wrong. Former governor Coleman was the principal threat to Johnson's election as governor that year. Charles Sullivan was a contender but was not considered as strong as Coleman.

Derr: Well, it seems to me that out of Johnson's lieutenant governorship came his entire design for his governorship, apart from the law enforcement side of it. For example, his inaugural speech reads like an abstract of the Stanford Research Institute study.

Barber: It came from that. And I want to recommend this to you also. The inaugural address was principally composed by George Godwin, Jr., who is in the advertising business here in Jackson today. You ought to talk to him about that. I had a little bit to do with it but very little. I had a draft that was, I'm ashamed to say, more in line with the stand that the lieutenant governor had made at Ole Miss. I didn't mention that, but it was, I would say, a constitutionalist type of approach and very little of economics and Mississippi progress.

Derr: So there were several drafts of that inaugural.

Barber: Well, he sent me over to go over the rough draft with George. I made a few changes and I thought it was magnificent. I didn't know he was going to say that and I was delighted he was.

Derr: What kind of thinking went into his whole preparation for that speech and for his governorship? For example, let's begin with -

Barber: Let me back up and tell you a little bit about the campaign and particularly about me personally because I think it has some explanation of some of these other questions.

Derr: OK, sure.

Barber: In the first place, I'm going to go to your question: why did you withdraw from the race for state senator? In the first place, I didn't withdraw from the race for state senator; I had not announced. But I did have a conversation with Lt. Gov. Paul B. Johnson, who asked me if I was going to run and I said, "Well, I don't know yet." I had backed President Kennedy in 1960 rather strongly in Hattiesburg and in the state. The night that federal troops were dispatched by the Kennedy administration to Mississippi put my political future in a lot of doubt.

Derr: I'll bet! (laughing)

Barber: Well, Kennedy had told southern leaders that he would never send troops to the South. It was a big issue that Nixon had served with Eisenhower, who did send them. Further than that, Kennedy made some very great anti-Communist, anti-Castro speeches in southern Florida during the campaign, drafts of which had come from Senator Eastland's office. Senator Eastland was a strong anti-Communist, as was I. I mean, I was on the [Senate] Internal Securities Subcommittee and participated in a lot of hearings in the middle '50s. But Kennedy did not appear to us to be the great liberal that he was painted to be in so much of the South. I'm talking about even before Ole Miss. Kennedy's father, of course, was a well-known conservative - perhaps even a reactionary at one time. Jack Kennedy's record in the House of Representatives was moderate at most; in the Senate [he was] only slightly more liberal. [He drew] the committee assignment probably on the labor committee. He voted with the South on some important amendments - not final passage but amendments - to the Civil Rights Act [of 1957] when I was there. We considered him a friend and he was certainly attractive. We had been there in '56 in Chicago when he was running for vice-president and he had the support of the Mississippi delegation - ultimately [Senator Albert] Gore first and then Kennedy. Kennedy was a veteran and had a lot of veterans' leaders in Mississippi very strong with him: Jimmy Morrow from over at Brandon. But anyhow, I didn't support him because he was an absolute conservative; I supported him because I thought he was the best man to be president of the United States and, secondly, because I knew him. He was the type fellow that didn't mesmerize you, but he was a fellow that if he asked you, "Look, I need your help," you wanted to drop everything else and go out and help this guy. Then we had Lyndon Johnson on the ticket, whom I had a great deal of respect for, having been in the Senate almost four years and having been employed in the Senate. But how does this relate to the '63 campaign? Well, as I told you, Johnson in '60 said nothing - not one word. He didn't want to offend the regular Democrats or the Barnett irregulars.

Derr: The unpledged -

Barber: Whatever - unpledged, right. And apparently, the press left him alone. There might have been one interview or something. They just didn't interview lieutenant governors that often, I guess.

But anyhow, I told Johnson I was probably not going to run. I said, "Ed Pittman is talking about running if I don't run and his family has always backed me." His cousin was mayor and I ran for senator (inaudible). His uncle[s] Claude and Homer have been my good friend[s]. His daddy is my good friend, Lloyd is. Another uncle, Calhoun, is my good friend. So I mean and I think that if we do have a strong opponent, I think possibly that things could get mighty messy over this Kennedy business, this Ole Miss business, and I think maybe that this might be a good time to pass. So I told Jack Robinson, who at that time owned the Petal paper, and he published the fact that I was not going to run in the headlines. He didn't have anything else to write about that week probably. I did make a statement to the Associated Press and that was about it. The [Hattiesburg] American and television and radio I didn't have to [tell] [?].

Johnson said that he needed me in his campaign to organize the campaign, and that's what I did. I started early in the spring - no, it was late in the winter. [I] started methodically going from county to county. Frankly I was the only one he had. I had a cousin of mine to drive me and finally his brother, Pete's daddy [Pat], came over here from Louisiana to help. We finished the job.

Pat was a great organizer. He was good at that. He was sort of the inside man. He'd stay in Jackson and I'd be outside and I'd be in touch with him on the telephone, going from place to place. He'd say, "Go to Amite County, Liberty, and Centerville, and then over to Woodville and come on and wind up in Natchez at night and then we'll see what we were going to do tomorrow" and stuff like that.

Derr: So you were organizing the local organization?

Barber: Organizing the county-by-county organization. And that's what I did. When the campaign started, then I began to speak. I was a substitute speaker, surrogate speaker, but mostly that was on the weekends. It was organized during the week. Well, you not only organized, you had to go back and you had to keep these people [?] pumping.

In '55 I was the advance man. I set up all the speaking engagements and the advertising and so forth. Well, everything was just going fine until the Saturday before the second primary - or it might have been the first primary. I believe it was the first primary. I was speaking in Madison County at a coon-on-the-log. Do you know what a coon-on-the-log is? The dogs try to get the coon off the log where it is, it's kind of a - a lot of the ASPCA [American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals] people don't like it, but anyhow -

Derr: Pete talked about those.

Barber: Well, they had those coon-on-the-logs, but I never did see one, to tell you the truth, but I spoke at some. My opponent was Frank Unger, who has just been appointed assistant attorney general of the United States. So I made my speech. I told what a great person [Paul was]. I said, "I'm Senator Barber. I served in the Senate with Lieutenant Governor Johnson, and what a great lieutenant governor and presiding officer of the Senate he was" - just a lot of platitudes. And then [I said] I was from Hattiesburg and I told what a great civic leader and church leader he had been. [I] didn't say one word against Coleman, didn't say one word about the Kennedy thing, which was getting to be a - I believe this was the first primary, but it was beginning to be a - Paul had already hit them hard at the Citizens' Council at the Heidelberg Hotel. That was really the turning point of the campaign.

Derr: The Citizen's Council meeting [of May 17, 1963]?

Barber: Yes.

Derr: Because of his strong anti-Kennedy, pro-segregationist stand?

Barber: Well, anti-Coleman - tying Coleman to Kennedy. Well, Frank gets up there and he says, "Well, that's very fine and good." Frank's a great fellow, incidentally, a great friend of mine then and now - but better now than then. He said, "Frank Barber is painting you a very rosy picture, but let's look at the facts in this matter." And he brings out a damn poster this big. [Mr. Barber gestures to show the size.] It's a blow up from The Clarion-Ledger from the 1960 convention showing one Sen. John F. Kennedy and one state senator Frank Barber on one of their many meetings they had had in the Los Angeles vote drive. I showed you that.

Derr: You may have, yes. This is whose -

Barber: We've got that. Well, that's not important to Paul's story. This is Frank Unger who blew up this thing from The Clarion-Ledger.

Derr: Yes, I forgot.

Barber: The techniques then were very bad; you could hardly see. But it didn't matter. The point was that the Kennedy issue was phony because here's Barber here from Hattiesburg with the candidate. I never did talk to Frank about who thought that up, but [it was] somebody in the Coleman apparatus.

Derr: Were you privy to the meeting early in July or late June where Coleman and Johnson agreed to release some information to sink Sullivan in the primary?

Barber: No, I was not there.

Derr: OK.

Barber: I was not there, but I heard about it through Pat Johnson. Well, did they ever do it?

Derr: Yes, they did. I've seen in the -

Barber: It wasn't a joint statement or anything. They released some information and it was damaging to Sullivan. What was it on?

Derr: They agreed that Coleman would release information about Sullivan's 1960 favorite son campaign for president in Texas.

Barber: For president, that's right.

Derr: And then he had to defend himself and he sank. I guess Coleman and Johnson both felt that Sullivan was the greater threat. According to Pete, Sullivan was leading in the informal polls they took in the early summer.

Barber: Well, they were extremely informal because they didn't have any polls! (laughing)

Derr: Right, right. But the sense was that Sullivan is a bright, young face in Mississippi politics.

Barber: He had run before. That wasn't his first race for governor.

Derr: No, but he was still a very popular -

Barber: He ran when Barnett was elected.

Derr: Yes.

Barber: Yes, he had one advantage when he ran when Barnett was elected; Eastland was for him quietly. But Eastland fought the hell out of him the second time. They fell out completely. Of course, that was a personal thing. Sullivan was bad to drink, to get drunk, and he got drunk in the wrong place and got to mouthing off to Senator Eastland, which was the wrong thing to do. But Eastland buried him. He never did win that, [although] he got elected lieutenant governor.

Derr: Right. So you organized a lot in the '63 campaign.

Barber: Well, I didn't organize each of the eighty-two counties but I organized the majority of them.

Derr: OK.

Barber: Let me finish the story about the coon-on-the-log speech.

Derr: Go ahead.

Barber: That was on a Saturday before the primary on Tuesday. Well, we had a bunch of Johnson people in the audience. Tom Riddell was one of them. They contacted headquarters and I reported in there and they decided to take me off the stump because it might be a - I had another speech that day, I think, but I didn't have anymore. I had two that Saturday. But, to make a long story short, I didn't go out and speak again during the next three weeks. Of course, most of your speaking engagements were during the first primary anyhow. During the runoff you don't have time for [speeches]. But I spent the next three weeks - I don't remember hardly getting out of the Heidelberg Hotel. I was there in the hotel with Pat Johnson and he was on one phone and I was on the other. And Bay, Pete's mother, Dot, and the four of us were staying in that hotel on the telephone for three weeks. I might have gotten out one weekend but I don't recall it. But that's what I did during the campaign during the primary. During the general election it took a long time for it - it was about two months before it warmed up here. But it became obvious that Phillips had some money and that he had a lot of the disgruntled Coleman and some of the disgruntled Sullivan people. We got most of the Sullivan people against Coleman and kept them to the general election.

Derr: I understand that was partly because you all made a deal with the Sullivan organization before the primaries.

Barber: We didn't make it with Sullivan. Sullivan endorsed Coleman.

Derr: Oh, he did, but his organization went to Johnson. I'm drawing on some of what Pete said.

Barber: I'm very interested to see where Pete got all this information.

Derr: Well, that's why I'm doing multiple interviews, because everybody has a different version.

Barber: Maybe he was consulting with his father, I don't know. The Sullivan organization - see, there's no monolithic Sullivan organization that you can consult with, like there's no monolithic Johnson or Coleman organization. I mean, that's an oversimplification.

Derr: No, but Pete maintains -

Barber: - for 1963, at least.

Derr: But Pete maintains that there were key people in the Johnson organization who, behind Coleman's back, went not to Sullivan but [to his] key supporters and said, "Listen, either one of us is going to get in the second primary."

Barber: Against Coleman.

Derr: They're aimed at Coleman now.

Barber: I got you. I have no doubt that happened in an individual and isolated instance.

Derr: Exactly. They were dealing with these underlings.

Barber: I'll tell you who you ought to talk to is Gene Triggs.

Derr: I'm planning on it.

Barber: [Gene] was a good man, a good honest man. Sometimes he didn't know what in the hell was going on either. Don't tell him I said that. We got him out of the fertilizer division of the Department of Agriculture and Commerce, but he was a good man. We got him for several reasons: one, he was a Mississippi State man; two, he had been in the extension service, had been a county agent. I'd rather have the extension service than any group in Mississippi, the extension service and the National Guard. They each had high organizations through the counties.

Derr: Paul Johnson said during the fall campaign that he was spending some of his time just organizing for his governorship on the assumption that he was going to win in the fall.

Barber: He was setting up his administration.

Derr: Yes, exactly.

Barber: Well, I think he's telling the truth. He did that, and that was good politics, too. It showed his confidence in winning.

Derr: How did he react to the shooting of President Kennedy in Dallas in November of '63?

Barber: Well now, that's after the campaign.

Derr: I understand that.

Barber: OK, well, I'm a chronological man.

Derr: OK, I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Barber: It's all right, no. I'll tell you how he reacted. I'm the man who told him he was shot. Let me go back a few minutes. We'll quit talking about this.

Derr: (laughing) Go ahead.

Barber: During the Phillips campaign, and after the campaign was over, I still stayed in the same suite of rooms at the Heidelberg. The governor was there, too. He was there, he and Dot. The five of us were all there and after we won the campaign, we were setting up the administration as best we could. Gene Triggs came over every day with a little pad from the headquarters, but we stayed in the hotel. I mean, that was my assignment, and then I became - you asked me how I got to be in the governor's office.

Derr: Yes.

Barber: Well, I didn't become the spokesman and he never had a spokesman, but I became the press secretary. We had a press secretary during the primaries and he went back to his newspaper. He's a good one to interview - you could interview people all year - David Webb.

Derr: Sure.

Barber: You've heard of him. But we didn't hire a press secretary during the [interim], so in addition to my other duties I became the press secretary. After the campaign I took charge of most of the personal correspondence of the governor, which was a considerable undertaking because he had never been a great one for paperwork. So we had to try to organize some paperwork. There was a tremendous number of thank - you notes and all that sort of thing. We got all of that out and Triggs did a lot of this too. Triggs is a good man. He just didn't know anything about politics at that time, but he learned, he learned quick.

So that's what we were doing when [Jack Kennedy was killed]. Well, I came back to the hotel; I don't know where I'd been. I was in the parking lot of the hotel and General W.P. Wilson, who was the adjutant general of Mississippi, and his assistant, Colonel Jack Vance, were in a staff car listening to the radio when I passed by. I stopped by to pay my respects to the general and he said, "The President's been shot." I said like everybody else, "My God!" Poor General Wilson had an appointment to see Governor Johnson about being reappointed. Of course, he wasn't going to be reappointed, but he was owed that courtesy. To my knowledge he never saw Paul Johnson, that day anyhow. The governor-elect was speaking to the Mississippi Economic Council executive committee and I passed him a note. I don't know if he read it to the group or if he just read it. Anyhow, he cut his speech real short and he left and we went upstairs.

What was his reaction? It was shock, disbelief, regret, sorrow. I don't think he was in tears or anything like that, but he was visibly shaken, as was I, as was everybody when we got the message. That was Friday afternoon, yes, and then Saturday. I believe we spent all day Friday, all evening, around that television, and then Saturday. And then I believe I went to Hattiesburg Sunday. I don't believe I came back until after the funeral, which was Monday. It could have been Monday or Tuesday; I think it was Monday.

I have one regret about the whole weekend, though. I probably could have gone up with Barnett to the White House on Saturday morning. He was very well received by Bobby Kennedy. There was a pretty large, not a large group - but the military took you up because the secretary of defense authorized the military aircraft to take the official parties. Of course, the governor on an occasion like that is treated like a head of state. He is the head of state. People always wondered why the governor protocol-wise was honored more than a United States senator. Well hell, there's two United States senators, there's only one governor and there's only one head of state. So in a protocol situation in Washington, you're in the same category with the president of France and the queen of England. Well, I regret not going with the head of state from Mississippi. He would have taken me if I had asked him, but I didn't.

Derr: One author has said that it took John Kennedy's assassination to cause Paul Johnson to moderate his attitude on racial matters, which to me is nonsense.

Barber: That's not true. I agree with you.

Derr: But that's why I asked.

Barber: All right, let's just skip the nuts and bolts of the administration and let's just get into the - this fits chronologically. The assassination, the ascension of Lyndon Baines Johnson to the presidency, the '64 presidential campaign. Now, of course, Goldwater became invincible in Mississippi when he did what? He voted against the Civil Rights Act and [was] the only candidate for president who did. He was in a position to.

Actually, if we were going to have a Republican, we kind of liked Bill Scranton. We knew him from the Governors' Conference. See, by this time we'd been to one Governors' Conference. Bill and Mary Scranton were very favorite people of Dot and Paul Johnson. Of course, I was a little prejudiced. I've got people in Pennsylvania, one of whom had been first the deputy secretary of the commonwealth and then the secretary of the commonwealth for a brief period by appointment of Bill Scranton. But that's beside the point.

The thing about Lyndon's campaign, and probably the worst failure in my judgment that Paul Johnson had as governor, was his manipulating Mississippi's participation in the Atlantic City convention. It was an absolute farce from beginning to end and I'm not trying to - I was not permitted to have anything to do with it. In the first place, I was not permitted to be a delegate. I keep saying they knew I'd sign the (inaudible). But anyhow it was a different era. Cliff Insler [?], a member of the Supreme Court, was the chairman of the delegation. You couldn't get away with that now; the bar association wouldn't let you. Brady was again up there. I always liked Judge Brady and I'm crazy about Judge Insler, but they were the wrong people at the wrong time. But Judge Insler was just carrying out orders he'd hear from these yahoos down here that got a hold of Paul. The principal one was Kenneth Stewart, who was extremely close to the Governor, first in his office and then in the tax commission, but [he was] a strong, conservative, reactionary voice down in southwest Mississippi. And Judge Brady was another one. They just didn't want compromise; they wanted chaos and they got it.

Derr: What were they trying to accomplish?

Barber: I don't know what they were trying to accomplish. They were trying to take Mississippi out of the Democratic Party is what these fellows down here were trying to do. But what they did, they made us look horrible. One of my best friends personally was Sen. Elson K. Collins, who was a national committeeman for some reason. He and an assistant attorney general, who was fairly decent, argued our case before the credentials committee and it was just absolutely horrible. I mean, Fannie Lou Hamer just got the best of us completely. But still, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey leaned over backwards not to offend Mississippi. They only gave them a token representation, but the Mississippi regulars wouldn't sit there. Now, I'll tell you who did sit there: my mother-in-law sat there - she was an alternate. But her husband wouldn't, and Milton McMullen of Newton, but Mrs. Thelma McMullen took his seat. And I think a couple more people. But I don't know, it was the worst showing I think Mississippi's ever made nationally.

Derr: Why did Paul Johnson not want to go?

Barber: Why did he permit that? I don't know. He didn't go. He should have gone and led the delegation, but I think he was scared. Look, Judge Brady in 1955 gave him a complex, stemming from the '51 campaign, on this national party business, and he permitted it to happen and it did. As far as endorsing Goldwater, he did one time. To my knowledge, if you can find any other incidences of his saying he was for Goldwater, let me know.

Derr: I haven't seen any.

Barber: Of course, he knew where I stood. I mean, he knew. Well, that's why they wouldn't let me have anything to do with the convention. Besides, it was a hell of a party; I'd like to have been there. You know, Lyndon was going to be re-nominated, there was nothing really to decide, so everybody was having a good time. All my friends from Washington were there.

Derr: Well, was that a strategic decision that since he couldn't do any good, it would be, only be embarrassed personally that it was better to let some underlings go up to the convention and face the heat rather than the head of state? (pause) What you're saying is, you were so too far out of the loop.

Barber: - out of the loop on this one, right.

Derr: OK.

Barber: Well, I don't know. I talked to people in Atlantic City on the telephone. Well, I talked to my mother and father-in-law.

Derr: Now, this is going to -

Barber: I'm going to end this up. I told you about Mary and Bill Scranton. Nellie and John Connally at the Southern Governors' Conference were particularly close to Dot and Paul Johnson, and we were out at the Southern Governors' Conference in Texas. The first part of it was in Dallas and then we went to San Antonio. Paul, under the influence of John Connally, wanted to say something strong for Lyndon Johnson. Of course, he was interviewed by the national press out there. See, that's why he took me everywhere because I was his press advisor as well as his press secretary, and I knew all these guys. I knew them from when I was in the senate in Washington.

Derr: Was this '64?

Barber: This is '64.

Derr: OK, the Governors' Conference.

Barber: This is the fall of '64, October of '64. It was a month before the election. He came within one inch of backing up on - he said some great things about Lyndon Johnson. [He] said nothing about Goldwater but he didn't endorse Johnson. I really didn't expect him to but I would have been delighted had he done so. He had nothing to lose. He had everything to gain because, good God, the polls, the real polls, showed that it was going to be a landslide for Lyndon.

I was for Lyndon Johnson, and I had the damndest time balancing Paul Johnson and Lyndon Johnson. Mrs. [Lyndon] Johnson came to Biloxi and Paul went down there. Well, the campaign manager was Doug Williamson of Greenville, who was the son-in-law of Ed Clark from Austin, Texas, who was Lyndon's ambassador to Australia later on and one of Lyndon's lawyers in Austin. He invited me to ride the train. I didn't want to tell Paul Johnson about riding the train. So we went down to the Coast and got in his [Doug's] mother's limousine - these are very wealthy Delta people - and went to Mobile to get on the train. So we rode the train from Mobile. The First Lady came by to talk to us and we gave her drinks and this, that, and the other. My dear friend, Mrs. Able, was her social secretary. She had worked in the same office with me when her father got defeated in Kentucky, Sen. [Earle C.] Clements of Kentucky. So anyhow, we got to Biloxi and Governor Johnson was getting - you know how the trains are - getting in on this side of the train and I was getting off over on that other side (laughing). When he started to welcome Mrs. Johnson to Mississippi, I was standing in the audience. I will never forget Dot said, "I didn't know you were down here." I said, "Oh, I couldn't miss this."

All right now, very briefly - not very briefly, it's too long - he wanted to make up with the Lyndon Johnsons. So then he called on me, who had some influence. The first decision [was, we] had to make a decision whether or not to participate in the inaugural. Well, we not only participated, we participated tremendously. We had a float in the parade and we had a band in the parade. The Governor went up and the Governor went to all the functions. I don't think that was the point when Lyndon Johnson and he made up; Lyndon Johnson [and he] had very little time together.

I don't think Lyndon Johnson gave a damn. They had written off Mississippi in the first place. I can testify they didn't spend a dime down here. Doug Winn [?] and I did all the work and we got the 13 percent of the vote. We did such a great job. We were operating out of the Royal Hotel where Bilbo used to stay. It no longer exists. Anyhow, the Royal Hotel was a notorious whorehouse in Bilbo's day. But anyhow, later on I think the President appreciated our participating in the inaugural. But if he didn't, John Connally, I think, had said some good things to Lyndon Johnson about Paul Johnson. He invited him to the White House a couple of times for state dinners and that sort of thing. Well, I had a little bit to do with it; my friend, Mrs. Able, was the social secretary - but I think it was mostly John and Nellie Connally who looked after their Mississippi friends. And there were calls, I'm positive, from the White House to Paul and vice versa. This was the era when they were beginning these programs and we were trying to take advantage of it.

Derr: Paul talks about Lyndon's calls to him various times during the administration.

Barber: Yes. I was not party to those. I was in the next office but they didn't call me and say, "The President's on the phone." They didn't call me. He could call on the phone by himself. But I knew that he had called.

Does that answer your questions?

(the interview continues on tape two, side one.)

Barber: - the governor's agreement.

Derr: You'll have to talk about that. This is tape two of my discussion with Frank Barber.

Tell me about some of your work in Paul Johnson's office: how you functioned as an administrative assistant [and] what particular things you handled aside from press secretary responsibilities.

Barber: The makeup of the office of January 1964 was as follows: first, Herman C. Glazier was appointed the executive assistant to the Governor; Kenneth Stewart and I were named as special assistants to the Governor. I wanted the Governor to name me the special counsel to the Governor, but he said, "No, it's the same title that Kenneth has." But all three of us had served in the senate, and the receptionist, who was Edith Sims, called us all Senator Glazier, Senator Barber, and Senator Stewart, which was accurate but not necessary. I would not say that my principal duty was as press secretary because I would say that it only required about roughly an eighth to a tenth of my time. I might say this about press relations: we did have a meeting with the capital press before the inauguration and the Governor agreed to have a press conference every week. I don't know if this has been done before or afterwards [that] they'd have a regular press conference at a specific time every week, but this was instituted and then it was generally adhered to, unless, of course, the Governor was out of the city or out of the state. But we generally had it at ten o'clock on Tuesday morning and it was very well attended by the capital press, including the television, radio, and print media. I think this regular meeting helped a great deal.

Herman Glazier had most of the legal [and] constitutional responsibilities of the governor's office. By that I mean, the things that are required as governor by the statutes and the constitution of the state. I did have one function, however: I was extradition officer, or extradition hearing officer, for the state. Herman Glazier, incidentally, is a lawyer and a very fine lawyer. He's what I call a good "insides man."

Stewart and I sort of shared responsibilities for patronage. I'd say that Sen. Kenneth Stewart was probably involved in the larger decisions about who got what job in state government. But I maintained the files on patronage; I maintained the recommendations. When a patronage matter came up, when an appointment came up, I was called into the Governor's office with my files to see what kind of support various candidates for these positions had. Of course, being involved in patronage, I also had to talk to a lot of people. I saw a lot of people in the Governor's office. Most of the visits were very pleasant. Of course, we couldn't help everybody we wanted to, but we tried to help as many people as we could who needed either a job or just needed assistance in state government. Sometimes we'd have to make calls to the tax commission or the parole board, et cetera, but we tried to be a service agency as best we could.

Derr: Who dealt with the legislature?

Barber: All of us dealt with the legislature.

Derr: Because you were legislators?

Barber: We were three people who had come out of the legislature, who had been in the legislature. Incidentally, to this day I'll put up the legislative activities of the Paul Johnson administration against any before or since. During the four years, we lost one bill at a regular session and it came back in a special session and passed it. To my knowledge, Governor Johnson recommended blank number of bills and passed 100 percent of those he recommended. This shows the great benefit of Governor Johnson having served himself in the legislative branches as lieutenant governor, or at least as president of the senate.

Derr: How did you work with Herman Glazier in particular? What were his responsibilities?

Barber: I would say that Herman was my nominal superior. By that I mean [he] made more money, but not very much more. But Herman Glazier and I never had a cross word in the four years we were there. I always checked with him when I left the office, but we never had a disagreement. I don't know of many people who have had a disagreement with Herman Glazier. I had plenty to do and he had plenty to do, and occasionally - particularly towards the end of the session - he would have me help him review the legislation that had been passed and check it legally and constitutionally.

Derr: How were his duties different from yours?

Barber: Well, it's a funny thing. I really don't know except, as I said, he concentrated on the constitutional and statutory duties of the Governor - frankly, the paperwork that had to be drafted, executed in a certain way. I'm talking about executive orders, I'm talking about proclamations, and that sort of thing.

Derr: Did he draft any legislation, too?

Barber: Well, at this time I'm sure that he participated in the drafting of legislation, or would take a draft and put his hand to it or something like that. Of course, after the legislation was passed, we had to go over it again. I did very little of the drafting and that sort of thing. The attorney general's office at that time did that. Well, at this time [it was] not the attorney general's office; each house has a legal staff. But Herman Glazier was a very busy man. Let me just say this. Each of us assistants had our own constituency. I mean, there would be people that would call Herman with certain matters, or Ken Stewart, or there'd be people that would call me. I'm from Hattiesburg and I got that area pretty well and from the Coast also. And then Herman would hear from the Delta; Ken Stewart from southwest Mississippi. We were geographically pretty well distributed. But Herman had certain matters to take up with the Governor; I had [other matters] and so did Kenneth.

It was not a structured office. I mean, there was no table of organization and administration. I'll give you an example. We went in there and we had three men, [and] the Governor had brought his secretary up from Hattiesburg from his law office. We had two other ladies: one was assigned to me and one was assigned to Herman. We had another lady who was the bookkeeper or fiscal assistant, a financial assistant, and that was it. Now, if you look at the table of organization for governor, it not only fills up the area we were in in the Capitol but the entire twentieth floor of the Sillers Building. The situation now is to find out not who's on the Governor's staff but who's not on the Governor's staff.

We did, I think, a tremendous amount of good, of work, for this state - leave it to somebody else to judge whether it was good or not - with very few hands, very few people. Later on though, six months into '64, Kenneth Stewart went to the tax commission and left Herman and me there. And this continued until January of 1966 when we were able to recruit Bill Simpson to come up from the Coast.

Derr: Who was the governor's secretary then?

Barber: The lady?

Derr: Yes.

Barber: I can't remember her name. This was a funny thing: she left about six or eight months after she came in here. Her husband was in the service and she went out to the West Coast - he had been at sea, I think - and she was never replaced. Governor Johnson did not have a secretary. Bill Simpson and I laugh about it often sometimes. We have been called into the Governor's office with a pad and pencil to take a letter. Now, Governor Johnson did not dictate a lot; we wrote a lot of letters for him. And as far as the official - well, it's hard to say what's official and what's not - but I'd say that Mrs. Turk prepared for Herman Glazier the "official" papers for the Governor. I prepared with Mrs. Mullin's help the personal political correspondence.

Derr: Now who were Johnson's -

Barber: When I say "personal," it's a hard line between personal and political. I mean, we want to write Dr. Beecham down at Magnolia and say, "Thank you for your letter. Your suggestions are always welcome," et cetera. That's personal and political.

Derr: Sure. I understand the distinction. Who were his closest advisors? If Johnson had to think through some particular legislation or dealing with the -

Barber: I think the whole maze of the legislative branch. I think Herman Glazier, who had been assistant secretary of the senate when Paul was lieutenant governor, would probably be the one. I think as far as the executive branch, probably Kenneth Stewart probably would be. I was, frankly, called in more on my national contacts, particularly national contacts in the press. We had press coming through there all the time. I spent a lot of time with them. Time magazine had a man in Atlanta who came here once a month - not on any strict schedule, but it amounted to about once a month.

Derr: Yes, he showed up. What kind of role did Pat Johnson have?

Barber: Pat Johnson, I think, often felt that he was the stepchild of the family, but he really wasn't. He used to come to my office quite a bit and he was at the mansion quite a bit. I think he knew me better than he knew Herman or Ken Stewart. Hell, we lived together for six months at the hotel. But I think that socially Governor and Mrs. Johnson saw Pat and Bay Johnson more than they saw anybody else, and they were always included in anything they had. Now, we'd go to Governors' Conferences. It would always be me. I mean - this was '64, '65 and '66 - and Pat and Bay Johnson, the late Millard Bush and his wife, and Mike Martinson and his wife. Martinson was an advertising man here; he's dead. Millard Bush is dead.

Derr: I understand he was a big supporter of Johnson's.

Barber: Millard?

Derr: Well, Millard was, but Martinson [too].

Barber: Well, of course, he was. He supported him I'd say in '55, '59, [and] '63.

Derr: Wasn't there some competition between his advertising and Godwin's advertising agency?

Barber: Not really, because they split up the - I don't think Martinson was able to handle the economic or industrial development. He preferred tourism and that's what he got.

Derr: OK.

Barber: Who told you about some great rivalry?

Derr: I've seen it in the newspaper early in '65. There was some debate about who was going to handle what, because they were working on the tourism on the one hand and the industrial development.

Barber: I understand that that was written. That's some of that Pearl Street politics, but go ahead. [That was] the Hedermans.

Derr: Yes, I'm sure it was.

Barber: Paul Johnson, Sr., or Paul Johnson, Jr., probably could not have been elected governor without the Hedermans because they would not have had a statewide newspaper behind them. There was one son of Colonel Tom Hederman, Tom Hederman, Jr., [and] three sons of old man Colonel Robert Hederman. Each of the Hedermans received a major, a very good, appointment in the Johnson administration, and the wife of one of them did. I had very close relations with the Hederman family. The Hedermans were against my coming into the Governor's office, I've been told. I was told that by Senator Eastland in Washington a long time after the situation occurred. The reason they were against me was because when I was in the legislature I'd worked to legalize whiskey. But the Governor said, "I've got to appoint him." So [he did]. (laughing) He didn't have to appoint me but he's loyal, he's loyal to his friends. He knew I had dedicated a substantial part of my "political" life to his interests, which is true.

Derr: Sure. Explain to me Paul Johnson's relationship with the Citizens' Council.

Barber: Gladly. Paul Johnson was never a member of the Citizens' Council.

Derr: I didn't think so. I've seen no evidence of it.

Barber: I've never been a member of the Citizens' Council. The reason I was not a member - I asked Senator Eastland, who was organizing the Citizens' Council in South Carolina. I was on the staff when he was doing all of this. He said, "I wouldn't join that thing if I were you. You might be up for a federal appointment sometime." (laughing) He was not a member either. It was a funny situation.

You see, the Citizens' Councils were not all bad. It was an alternative of a lot of responsible people. You ought to see the list in this town of [members], the masthead or whatever. I mean, every bank president, every utility president, et cetera, were members of it. What a lot of people perceived was the purpose was to offset the Klan, that sort of thing. That's why they called it the "downtown Ku Klux Klan." But people could vent their wrath against the excesses of the federal courts, to quote the parlance of the times, through the Citizens' Council rather than going out and burning crosses and churches and [so on].

But I know it was worse. I mean, I think the leadership was really - they didn't say much but I've heard them on occasion. I think they were actually for physical violence. I don't want to quote the gentleman who told me that - I mean whom I heard say that.

But anyhow, the only connection I've ever seen between Paul Johnson [and the Citizens' Council] - and I've got to tell you this story, this is important. When he, in the Heidelberg Hotel, debated Coleman before the Citizens' Council, I think that debate helped him a heck of a lot. OK. Well then, I think the Citizens' Council felt that he owed them something. Direct your attention to December 1963. Two things happened. They had a snowstorm in Mississippi and Mississippi was in the Sugar Bowl. I've never told this to anybody in my life that I know of. Governor Johnson was scheduled to go to the Sugar Bowl and to meet with, one, Governor Wallace and, two, Judge Leander Perez. Have you heard this before?

Derr: No, I'm just telling you I know the name.

Barber: Judge Perez, yes. Well, it turned out that I went. I remember, Rex Armistead - you've heard of Rex Armistead?

Derr: Sure.

Barber: He might know a lot more about this than I do. He was an investigator for the highway patrol. I'm glad he was with me. You know he's killed about eight men, don't you?

Derr: There are a lot of stories about Rex. I want his phone number, if you have it, incidentally.

Barber: He won't admit it - no, he'll admit it [but] he said each one of them was justified. Anyhow, he's a great man.

We got on that train, and it was hell to get on that train because Alabama was playing Ole Miss at Tuscaloosa. But I got on the train. All I got to do was get on the damn telephone and talk to a few people. I was still in the state Senate at that time, so I called the security people of the Southern Railroad and they got Rex and me on the train. We got there [and] they gave us Governor Johnson's suite, which was the California Suite, which was really luxurious. When we heard Governor Johnson wasn't coming - he couldn't get there because of the snow - then we heard Governor Wallace wasn't coming. He couldn't connect there for the snow. There you've got the top leadership from Jackson of the Citizens' Council. You know, the national headquarters was here and they were down there but they were very nice to us. We were the only guests they had, I guess. And the next day after the ballgame - Barnett was there, but if there was a meeting with Barnett, I didn't know about it. The next thing that happened - neither of those governors got there. Now why I don't know. It's always been a mystery to me. Of course, the snow was one factor. Barnett got there. Shortly thereafter, we took office in '64 - the Citizens' Council had previously been receiving a stipend, a considerable stipend. How much was it, do you remember?

Derr: Two hundred and fifty thousand or something like that.

Barber: A quarter million dollars.

Derr: It was a bunch.

Barber: Well, they had a lot coming in, you know, from dues, et cetera, but a quarter of a million in one chunk is pretty good for any organization. Well, Governor Johnson cut it out, period. You knew that?

Derr: Yes. Well, what happened?

Barber: I don't know! (laughing)

Derr: Well, Erle Johnston talks about that. What happened in December of '63 I know [was] that Governor Johnson addressed the Citizens' Council, as he had often done.

Barber: January?

Derr: December of '63. But he did what appears to be a reversal. I mean, I don't know that the Citizens' Council had any access to his office. Did they? What was his attitude toward the Citizens' Council? Because to my knowledge he never spoke to a Citizens' Council gathering after December of '63.

Barber: Wait a minute now. This was before the presidential election too. I think that somebody told him not to go to that thing.

(brief interruption)

Derr: To [what]?

Barber: To the Sugar Bowl and the meeting. There was supposed to be a meeting between the two governors and the three states: Leander [was] ex-officio governor of Louisiana.

Derr: Right. Who [would] have told them not to go, or was it his own personal decision? Don't know?

Barber: [No.] I don't know who would know. All I'm telling you is, he was supposed to go until the last minute.

Derr: Right.

Barber: And I sure as hell wouldn't have gone if he wasn't going to be there.

Derr: Why were you glad to have Rex Armistead along with you?

Barber: I was glad to have him with me anywhere. He's a good fellow to be around, to be with. I like him. Hell, we've been everywhere together. He went on a lot of these trips with us.

Derr: When you were in the governor's office?

Barber: Yes.

Derr: Was he along for protection?

Barber: Yes. It was not as formalized as it is now. It became more formalized after the assassination, basically. They've got them on a twenty-four hour schedule now and about twelve people on the detail - maybe more than that. It's a very expensive thing.

Derr: Yes. What do you know about people coming into the Governor's office to give him special information? People maintain that he had a system of informants that helped him understand what was going on in the civil rights movement, what was going on in the Klan, what was going on in political activities statewide. Who came into the office that would give him special information, I guess, is what I'm asking - aside from you, Glazier, Stewart?

Barber: Well, there was a lot of ways to get in that office. You didn't have to - I received a report every morning from the highway patrol, but it was about who had been killed the night before. What I'm talking about is, about traffic accidents and that sort of thing.

Derr: Sure.

Barber: Now, we had people from the investigative division of the highway patrol - one of them was named Rex Armistead - we had people from the Bureau -

Derr: FBI, you mean?

Barber: Yes, but I don't think most of these people came up to the office. I think they left that stuff at the mansion - and the Sovereignty Commission, I'm sure. I hadn't talked to Erle Johnston about it, but - by the way Erle saw you, [didn't he]?

Derr: I've talked with him, yes.

(brief interruption)

Barber: In order for him to operate against the Klan, the Highway Patrol Organic Act, the basic act, had to be severely amended to give the Governor the authority to use the patrol for law enforcement when there was a breakdown in law and order, et cetera. Now, the best source of information about that highway patrol bill, and I remember it very well now, is Herman Glazier. He had a lot to do with that.

Derr: OK.

Barber: The legislature was always jealous about the powers that the highway patrol had, particularly about local control of law enforcement, so that's why you had to have those amendments; but they passed.

Derr: Right. I believe in March it passed. How in particular did Paul Johnson work with the big boys in the legislature? I'm thinking of Newman, Sillers, [George] Yarbrough and so on?

Barber: (Inaudible)

Derr: By phone?

Barber: I think they'd come over to the office.

Derr: They'd sit down and chat about things.

Barber: Not in a group usually, but one at a time.

Derr: OK.

Barber: Yarbrough was very close.

Derr: Would he be there in the office at least once a week when the legislature was in session?

Barber: I'm sure Yarbrough would, yes.

Derr: So it wasn't predictable, but it was a regular communication - discussion; they came to visit the office. I'm curious about his habits with the legislature.

Barber: Well, he'd see them there sometimes; see them at the mansion sometimes; talk to them on the phone sometimes.

Derr: There wasn't a set pattern is what you're telling me, OK.

Barber: There was no legislative leadership breakfast.

Derr: OK, there we go! (laughing)

Barber: - as they are wont to do in Washington.

Derr: Yes.

Barber: Everything was not structured at all. I mean, the operation of the office [and] the operation of the mansion. I mean, it was just no great pretentions.

Derr: Not bureaucratic, is what you're telling me.

Barber: It was not bureaucratic and it was not pretentious.

Derr: Yes. Let's go back to the Klan. You had mentioned the Klan a little while ago.

(brief interruption)

Derr: In exploring the highway patrol papers it impressed me that the Paul Johnson administration and the highway patrol had a lot more to do with cracking and neutralizing the Klan than is commonly acknowledged.

Barber: I think that's true.

Derr: OK. When did Paul realize -

Barber: Now, Armistead knows a world about that.

Derr: I want you to help me get to Armistead.

Barber: If we can get in my office I think I can reach somebody to reach him.

Derr: OK. When did he realize that he had to go after the Klan to preserve order in Mississippi? Or how did that come about?

Barber: Well, I think - now, this leads you into another question. If you're looking for a date, I can't give you a date; but I think he knew probably about the Klan - and I'm talking about the dangerous Klan, the people down in Laurel, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan - he probably knew about them through local and highway patrol sources, probably before the Bureau did. I'm saying that because you're got to understand, until Mr. Hoover came here that there was no Bureau in Mississippi. There were agents here, but the Bureau was in New Orleans and the original offices were in New Orleans and Memphis. Does that answer that part of the question?

Derr: Let me tell you a little bit about what I know.

(brief interruption)

[Mr. Derr related a story from Paul Johnson's oral history interview with the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library about how, when J. Edgar Hoover visited Jackson, the FBI director gave the governor a list of perhaps eighty or ninety suspected or known Klansmen. Johnson, in turn, gave Hoover a list of about eleven hundred Klansmen, as compiled by the Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol.]

Barber: [I don't] want to interrupt you now.

Derr: I'm finished.

Barber: We can talk some more about it at lunch. Now, here's what little I know about it. Again, this is -

Derr: I'm curious as to his thinking that he may have said in the office, if he thought out loud about -

Barber: What is the date of the Neshoba County murders?

Derr: June 21, 1964.

Barber: Sixty-four, OK.

Derr: We're talking about the Klan, incidentally.

Barber: Yes. The disappearance of the three civil rights workers in Neshoba County precipitated, one, a visit to the state by the former director of the CIA, Mr. Allen Dulles. Mr. Dulles was here on the personal instructions of the President of the United States. His task was to investigate and answer reports, principally in the eastern press, that law and order had broken down in the state of Mississippi and that it should be that the President of the United States, acting under his powers under the constitution to preserve a republican form of government in each state, should invoke, if necessary, martial law. Well, this was a very serious situation facing the state of Mississippi and its governor. Now, Mr. Dulles came down here, and he's a no-nonsense man. I met with him myself. It was fortunate that he and I happened to go to the same law school, the George Washington University. [He] and the young lawyer who was with him from Washington were the only two people in this party. Dulles was like the Texas Rangers; there was only one situation to be confronted so you only needed one man: one riot, one man. But Governor Johnson was very open and forthright with Mr. Dulles. I met with Mr. Dulles but I did not meet with him substantively. Governor Johnson met with him himself with nobody else to my knowledge. But [Johnson] gave him an open invitation to talk to anybody in the state, black [or] white, which he did. I mean, he left the establishment in Mississippi and went and talked to the black leadership. I've forgotten exactly whom he talked with. I believe one of them was Aaron Henry, the head of the NAACP, but I'm not sure. Most importantly, he talked with the people of the highway patrol. He talked with local law enforcement officers on a random basis throughout the state.

He was here less than twenty-four hours that I know of and he returned to report to the President of the United States. He took with him this message from Governor Johnson. Governor Johnson told him, "I can handle law enforcement in the state of Mississippi but I need these things. One, I need an FBI office in Jackson. You've got one in New Orleans and you've got one in Memphis, but we need one here and we need sufficient manpower to assist the highway patrol and the local officials carrying these matters out. We need your expertise; we need your manpower. Number two, I want to get some slots open in the FBI Academy for Mississippi." I believe those are the two principal requests of the federal government.

Derr: So he spoke those to Dulles, not to -

Barber: This is to Dulles.

Derr: - a month before.

Barber: No, this is to Dulles.

Derr: - not to Hoover.

Barber: This is to Dulles.

Derr: Gotcha.

Barber: All right. Dulles takes this back to the President of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson. I don't know what his reaction was, but I believe I know what his reaction was, "Hell, if that's all they need down there, get it." (laughing) And I don't know how many days or weeks it was before Dulles left and Hoover arrived, but it wasn't long.

Derr: Two weeks.

Barber: Two weeks later J. Edgar Hoover arrived here and he was here less than forty-five minutes, as I remember it. It might have been longer, but he flew in to Jackson Airport, he came by car to the what was then the Unifirst Building, the First Federal building. We met on the top floor. Governor Johnson met Edgar Hoover on the top floor. Of course, what he was here for was to open the office that Governor Johnson had requested two weeks ago, and they did. Now, I don't know how many names of Klansmen that Hoover gave him or that Johnson gave Hoover, but all I know is, in fifteen minutes we were back at the governor's mansion.

Derr: And Hoover was gone.

Barber: That's right.

Derr: So you were there for most of his meeting.

Barber: I was there for the ceremonies.

Derr: And the press was.

Barber: Johnson spoke, Hoover spoke, and maybe the mayor spoke. I don't know; I mean, it was just like opening up a Wal-Mart store.

Derr: But the nuts and bolts of it was done with the Dulles visit and this was all pro forma.

Barber: That's interesting. But that's all I know about it.

Derr: OK. Do you have any indications of -

Barber: But the Dulles visit is important.

Derr: Right, OK.

Barber: The Hoover visit might be important, I don't know. I said, "Delighted to meet you, Mr. Hoover." The only time I'd ever had any contact with him was answering the phone in the senator's office. "This is Edgar. Where's Jim?"

Derr: (laughing) Do you have any indication of when Paul decided he really had to get after the Klan?

Barber: No. I would think that it was a gradual thing, that he began hearing these reports. You know, he made speeches. He went down to McComb when they were having trouble. He'd go in and talk to them on the radio down there. There was no television. He didn't go into the riot area, but he went down to the area and talked.

I think you've got to go back to that inaugural address. See, while all of this is going on, I mean, we're putting in plants, we're getting ready to build plants for the Ingalls Shipyard, the shipyard of the future, down there. Among the legislation passed was amazing. We were probably the last state in the union to do it. I remember this particular bill because we had trouble explaining how to pronounce to the legislature. We legalized condominia for the first time. I mean, we had a lot of industrial [and] economic development bills in this, too, and a lot of economic development activity.

Derr: Sure. I'm curious as to the background to even the inaugural address, that he would say that neither hate nor prejudice nor fear will rule while I'm in the governor's mansion. Some people said that was directed directly at the Klan. Was it?

Barber: I think it was directed towards anybody to which it applied. Talk to George Godwin. I don't believe that Godwin knows anything about the Klan or knew anything about the Klan. He was just trying to - I mean, it's an image deal, it's an image builder, right?

Derr: Yes.

Barber: Maybe it was directed toward the Klan, I don't know. I never heard of the damn Klan around inauguration day, but maybe I'm the most naive person in the world.

Derr: Well, that may be reading some events back into the history, which we're not particularly wanting to do.

Barber: There's a book out that you might look at about the Klan. I mean, a great part of it is about the Klan. Chet Dillard here has written a book, [Clearburning] -

(the interview continues on tape two, side two.)

Barber: - [Sam] Bowers.

Derr: Right, in his book, OK.

Barber: Let me tell you something about Paul Johnson and law enforcement that very few people know. I've never heard anybody that knew it. When he was a student at Ole Miss, one summer his father got him a summer job in New Orleans as a detective. Mayor Walmsley, W-A-L-M-S-L-E-Y, and his dad were friends. Why, I don't know. So he's always been very interested in cops and robbers. He always was very interested in cops and robbers. [He became] a city detective. He was a detective in the New Orleans Police Department.

Derr: Yes. What? Early '40s then?

Barber: No, early '30s.

Derr: Early '30s.

Barber: I'd say less than '35. The man was born in 1916, that's right. He was very young. Well, Bob Maestri was mayor during the latter part of the '30s.

Derr: That could have been during college, right, [in the] latter part of the '30s. He could have been down there and had a job.

Barber: I don't know when Maestri became mayor. Maybe he lied. Maybe he wasn't a detective with Walmsley.

Derr: I've heard so many different versions of the discovery of the location of the civil rights workers' bodies.

Barber: I wasn't there; I don't know anything about it.

Derr: Well, there are papers that supposedly came across the desk, and Chipper claims that he still has some original reports of all this kind of stuff. But you don't know anything about it?

Barber: Well, if Chipper's got them, tell him to produce them.

Derr: Well, I don't know.

Barber: I don't know anything about it.

Derr: How did Paul initially react to the discovery?

Barber: The disappearance?

Derr: Yes.

Barber: Oh, the disappearance. Well, I was press secretary and I had to bite my lips. He said, "All of those people are probably in New York by now," or something like that. I mean, I thought that he ought to reserve comment until we found out the facts. Maybe he was doing the right thing. You can't judge people that have more information than you do.

Derr: Right.

Barber: And sometimes politicians say things off the top of their heads.

Derr: Yes. Well, let's talk about some more substantive policy things. Of course, you know that the Civil Rights Act of '64 was passed in June and then signed by President Johnson in July.

Barber: Yes, and Goldwater voted against it. Go ahead.

Derr: Right. Well, I'm curious as to Paul Johnson's views. Obviously, he opposed it initially. How did he work through John Satterfield to oppose it, first of all? What was his reaction when it was passed and signed? How did he deal with it, because there was a big change in the way he dealt [with] it from July of '64 to January of '65. Talk about the Civil Rights Act.

Barber: You're talking about the first Civil Rights Act, the first Johnson Civil Rights Act that was in '64.

Derr: - not the Voting Rights Act.

Barber: I know, I know what you're talking about.

Derr: OK.

Barber: The Public Accommodations Act was what it was. He counseled compliance and he so told in the Justice Department that he would do what he could to enforce it.

Derr: Well, he didn't talk that way at the Neshoba County Fair in '64.

Barber: What month was it passed?

Derr: It was passed in July and the Neshoba County Fair was August. He initially opposed enforcement of it, and the state supported John Satterfield up there while it was going through Congress in '63.

Barber: Well, the state hired John Satterfield as a lobbyist in the matter, which was a blatant waste of money in my judgment. John Satterfield - ya'll know who I'm talking about. (pauses) Cut that off because I don't want -

(brief interruption)

Derr: Mr. Barber, in this last segment I'm going to ask you mostly about Paul Johnson and some of his legislative initiatives in the Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce program that he put together. Could you give me your version of where his program of AIC came about?

Barber: I think it came from a number of sources, but I think it all stems from recommendations of the Stanford Research Group that actually was submitted in the past administration, Governor Barnett's administration, but it was implemented in his administration. The principal focus was the creation of the Research and Development Department or council and its efforts to match Mississippi's resources with Mississippi's capabilities to attract industry. It was felt that we had a great deal to offer but we needed an agency to package what we had to offer from an economic development standpoint. A unique feature of the agricultural program was the creation of the Mississippi Marketing Council as an integral part of the Agricultural and Industrial Board then, which is now the Economic Development Department of state government. Again, it was innovative. We had the capacity to produce X acres of cotton, soybeans, rice -

(brief interruption)

Derr: Do you happen to know who wrote the legislation, for example, for the Mississippi Marketing Council?

Barber: No, but I think Gene Triggs would know. Triggs under that legislation became the first director of the marketing council and then a year and a half later became head of the A and I Board.

Derr: Who came up with the idea of his agricultural 1.5 million dollars of agricultural produce in '75, as the 1.5 -

Barber: [The] 1.5 in '75 [program]. I haven't thought about that in years. I would think that people in the Farm Bureau had a lot to do with that. Of course, that's a guess. Again, I refer to Triggs. I'll tell you agriculture was not my field.

Derr: I don't want to ask you what you don't know about.

Barber: I remember the program, though. We reached it. The Governor forecast 1.5 by '75 and, damn, if we didn't reach it.

Derr: Do you have any idea who wrote the legislation for the R and D Center and all the -

Barber: I think that George Godwin, Jr., would be the best source of that. I think he had a lot to do with preparing the legislation. The attorney general's office then wrote the bill.

Derr: OK. In other words, outside people would have had the input but the AG's office put it together.

Barber: Yes, I think the final draft would be the AG's office.

Derr: Who may have written all the legislation connected with the Ingalls Shipyard stuff in '67?

Barber: Well -

Derr: I know Buddie Newman helped guide it through the legislature.

Barber: Yes, I think Buddie Newman would be a good source. There was a lawyer that was with Ingalls at that time, George - and I can't think of his last name - whom I think had a lot to do with the nuts and bolts of the thing. I'll tell you - look in the bottom drawer there. There's a green book.

Derr: This right here?

Barber: No. It's an old green book. That fellow taught at Ole Miss at one time.

Derr: What you're saying, though, is Ingalls cooperated in the writing of some of that legislation.

Barber: Yes. If it's important you might talk to Jerry St. Pe. [He] is the president and he might be able to tell you.

Derr: That's all right, we can -

Barber: Go ahead. I can look for this and answer too.

Derr: This is shifting the subject a little bit, but I was curious about Paul Johnson's thoughts on and then reaction to the Voting Rights Act of '65. I'm sure he was briefed on it. Would you have been the person who would have read it and briefed him on it?

Barber: I did not - was that '65?

Derr: Yes.

Barber: It passed in '65. All I can tell you about the Voting Rights Act of '65 was the general reaction from everybody in politics in this state, not necessarily Governor Johnson's. Of course, you've got to understand this about the Voting Rights Act of '65 as opposed to the Civil Rights Act of '64: the Civil Rights Act of '64 became immediately applicable. In other words, the restaurants were opened up to all races, creeds, colors, et cetera - hotels, all transportation. It was a social change - or, hell, it was somewhat of an upheaval. I'll give you an example. Here in town Dumas Milner, who owned the King Edward Hotel, decided to - not decided - he announced immediate compliance with the Public Accommodations Act, and about 90 percent of the legislators staying there left and went first over to the Robert E. Lee, which switched from a hotel to a club to avoid the requirements of the Public Accommodations Act, and then they moved to a motel after that. But I stayed in the King Edward Hotel. Actually, I stayed there until it closed.

Derr: I was going to ask if that contributed to its closing in '67.

Barber: Well, I think it had an effect, but I think it would have closed anyhow. You had the legislators staying there, but they only stayed there part of the time and you had to have other guests. The location by the railroad tracks, the noise, and the general deterioration of the neighborhood [contributed to it]. Hopefully, it will come back someday, but it hasn't yet.

Derr: What did Paul Johnson think privately of the Voting Rights Act?

Barber: Well, like all politicians he said, "This is it. The blacks can no longer be ignored as a potent political force, and with full implementation of the Voting Rights Act, you will see a lot of changes in the government." But, as I said, the Voting Rights Act was not immediately felt as the Public Accommodation Act was felt. Actually, it was several years before you even had substantial black representation in the Mississippi legislature.

Derr: Well, who would have drafted the legislation? I know that they tried to reapportion in '65 and pass voting laws that were in conformity with the Voting Rights Act. Do you have idea who could have drafted that stuff?

Barber: I would try Tommy Campbell, Thomas Campbell, C-A-M-P-B-E-L-L, who at that time, I believe, was the representative from Yazoo County and was sort of a specialist in voting legislation, but he's no longer in the legislature. In fact, he's no longer in state government; he's retired.

Derr: But he's still living?

Barber: Yes. [He's] living here in Jackson.

Derr: OK, what's Marshall Bennett's connection with Paul Johnson? He was one of Paul Johnson's young men, like I guess you were.

Barber: Yes. Well, he was considerably [younger]. I was thirty-one years old in the campaign of '63; he was nineteen years old or something like that. He was a sophomore or junior at Ole Miss. He and a man named Thurman Boykin were co-chairmen of the Youth for Johnson or Johnson's youth group during the campaign. He was a hard worker, and I think they contributed a lot. After the election, we didn't make them colonels on the governor's staff, we made them lieutenant colonels.

Derr: One of the first people Tish [Johnson Ross] asked me if I had talked to was Marshall Bennett and I was curious as to why she would have said Marshall.

Barber: They were friends at Ole Miss and Tish was married to - they're divorced now - Thurman Boykin, the co-chairman.

Derr: That's right, yes. I think I'm going to conclude the interview right now.

(end of the second interview)