InstaPundit links to two post (here and here) commenting on the dramatic error in the following paragraph that appeared near the end of a long article, “The Charisma Mandate,” in yesterday’s New York Times Week in Review:
When Mrs. Clinton talked about how it took Johnson as well as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to achieve the rights legislation, Ms. [Doris Kearns] Goodwin said, “she was absolutely right.” Johnson’s great mastery was to get the support of Southern Republicans. “It required his understanding of absolutely every single senator,” Ms. Goodwin said. “They were a team. Without Martin Luther King agitating the country and J.F.K. picking up the bill there would not have been that pressure on the Congress, and without L.B.J. there would not have been a bill.”
The big problem here is that the only Republican in the Senate from the South in 1964 was John Tower of Texas.
I don’t expect most reporters to know that much, but has the Times fired all its editors?
Of course, if everyone in the organization assumes all Republicans are evil, and that only evil people could oppose the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s requirement that people be treated without regard to race (just as they assume equally fervently today that only evil people could oppose treating people with regard to their race), then it’s easy to understand why everyone there would assume that all the 1964 opponents were Republicans.
