JOHNSON If you and Hubert Humphrey have got any leadership, you’d get Joe Rauh [MFDP lawyer] off that damn television. The only thing that can really screw us good is to seat that group of challengers from Mississippi. . . . He said he’s going to take it to the convention floor. Now there’s not a damn vote that we get by seating these folks. What we want to do is elect some Congressmen to keep ’em from repealing this [1964 Civil Rights] act. And who’s seated at this convention don’t amount to a damn. Only reason I would let Mississippi [all-white delegation] come in is because I don’t want to run off fourteen border states, like Oklahoma and Kentucky. . . . Incidentally this Governor [Mississippi governor Paul Johnson] has done everything I’ve asked him to do in Mississippi. We’ve broken that case [the Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman murders]. I talk to him two or three times a week. Now he’s not for [me]. But I can’t say that he hasn’t listened to us and he hasn’t cooperated.

REUTHER Exactly. . . . We’ll lose Mississippi, but the impact on the other Southern states—

JOHNSON That’s all I’m worried about. . . . I’ve got to carry Georgia. . . . I’ve got to carry Texas. . . . We don’t want to cut off our nose to spite our face. If they give us four years, I’ll guarantee the Freedom delegation somebody representing views like that will be seated four years from now. But we can’t do it all before breakfast.

Source: Michael R. Beschloss, ed., Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963–1964 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 510–11.