Editor’s note: Rep. J. C. Watts, R-Okla., is leaving the U.S. House of Representatives after four terms. First a star quarterback at the University of Oklahoma (from which he earned a degree in journalism), Watts would eventually take to the gridiron professionally in the Canadian Football League. In 1994, he became the first black Republican elected to Congress from a Southern state since Reconstruction. Four years later, Watts’ political ascent would culminate in his election, by his peers, to a prestigious leadership role in the House as Republican conference chairman. An ordained Baptist minister and father of six, Watts just released his autobiography, “What Color is a Conservative?” – a revealing look at his accomplishments, his political career and his beliefs.
Along with his impending departure from the House and the publication of his book, Watts also is garnering attention as the media seek his unique perspective on the recent firestorm surrounding Sen. Trent Lott’s controversial comments at a birthday celebration for retiring Sen. Strom Thurmond.
At about the same time on Thursday that President George W. Bush was unleashing his harshest criticism of Lott to date, Watts discussed his own views on the senator’s remarks with newsman Jim Bennett.
Q: You state in “What Color is a Conservative?” that you were once asked in an online chat how you could be in the same party with someone like Strom Thurmond. How did you respond?
A: Well, people tend to use double standards. And they tend to try to paint things in a way that doesn’t reveal all the facts. I was asked how I could be in the same political party as Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, when Strom Thurmond blocked the doorway to civil rights and defended segregation back in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. And, not meaning to bring harm to anyone or to impugn anyone’s character, I said, “Well, if that’s the standard you use, how could I be in the party with [West Virginia Democrat Sen.] Robert Byrd, who at one time was a Ku Klux Klan member?” In politics, we are very good at trying to take a snapshot of a person’s life 20, 30, 40 years ago, and then, when they run for public office, we say, “That’s who they are.” As a person of faith, I believe in redemption. I believe that people can change. But whoever asked me that question believed the myth that only conservatives or Republicans have those skeletons in our closets. I mean, if that’s the standard that they use, I could point to Democrats who have had some of those same dark clouds in their past. And you know, Washington is a city that likes to attack and divide. It’s never been my cup of tea to do that. It’s always been my cup of tea to unite and to heal. So, I just thought that the lady or the gentleman who asked me that question was seeing only half of the field.
Q: Amidst the media feeding frenzy over Sen. Lott’s remarks praising Strom Thurmond, I have to ask you: What was your initial reaction when you heard about it?
A: I had just got into Washington and had been picked up at the airport when my press people told me about it. And then I was scurrying around town, trying to get to my apartment to get dressed to go to the White House Christmas Party – I had my wife with me – and so I really didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to it. But then the next day, the thing kind of escalated and it just intensified, and I started getting a lot of press calls on it. So I decided to call Sen. Lott to see what was going on, to get some insight into what he meant and what he was trying to say.
He told me what he said and in the end, Jim, I concluded that Trent did go too far. Sen. Lott did go too far. I suspect that, as he said, if he could take those words back, he would. He would have stated what he was trying to say differently. He wouldn’t have said it the way that he did. I think he went too far. I think he would love to have his words back. I think anybody could interpret that his words were racist, but I don’t think that Sen. Lott is racist.
When you consider what was said, people in Washington are going to take things like that and they’re going to be manipulated, they’re going to be bandied around, and people are going to get as much mileage out of it as they possibly can. And that’s unfortunate. But it’s also unfortunate that it’s the nature of the beast that Sen. Lott operates in. I don’t think he meant to imply that he condoned the segregationist platform that Sen. Thurmond campaigned on in 1948 for president.
And another thing: Sen. Lott went to the floor of the Senate and praised Sen. Wellstone [following Wellstone’s death in a plane crash]. He didn’t agree with much of anything that Sen. Wellstone believed in, but he praised him as a colleague. Nobody ever said, “Well, he condoned Sen. Wellstone’s policies because he praised him on the floor of the Senate.” I think we have to try and keep what he said about Sen. Thurmond in context. I understand that it was spontaneous, it was said at a 100-year-old colleague’s retirement birthday party, and he apologized for it, and I accepted his apology. And I moved on.
Q: Is there anything he can do now to calm this storm?
A: No. As I said earlier, it’s the nature of the beast that if something like that is said in the political arena, Sen. Lott is going to pay a political price for it. He’s got to hope that people will move on. But I doubt it. In the political arena, an arena in which everything that is said and almost everything that is done is scrutinized by Republicans and Democrats alike, they’re going to look for ways to score political points. I suspect that this issue will be used to incite people and to inflame people, which is unfortunate. You’ll have people from both sides, Republican and Democrat, who’ll jump on him and jump off his bandwagon because they don’t want to look as if they’re coddling a racist. But as I said, I don’t think his sentiments were expressed to be racist; I think he was praising a colleague at his 100th birthday party, his retirement party. Again, he apologized, I took him at his word, and I moved on. And I hope that we can get beyond this, but I’m afraid that we won’t. It’s a serious blunder in Washington, D.C., and when people can take those things and score political points with them, they don’t like giving them up.
Q: In “What Color is a Conservative?” you describe a similar controversy you went through. Did you come away from that experience with anything you might pass on to Sen. Lott on a personal level as he tries to recover from this?
A: First of all, in Washington they think that it is an oxymoron to be black and to be conservative. And I talk about this in the book – they just think if you’re black, you ought to be a Democrat, you ought to be liberal, you should buy into everything that Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton do. I believe in stepping outside of the group identity if I think the group is wrong.
What I said back then, no one today will ever set it up and talk about the context in which I said it. A Washington Post reporter who came to my district did an interview with me. In this interview, he told me, “Well, there are many in the black leadership who believe you’re a sellout, you’re an ‘Uncle Tom.'” I said, “Look, I can handle that. This is America. They can believe what they want to believe. But you know, I believe there are some of those same people who I believe are race-hustling poverty pimps. I think they use race and poverty as an industry.”
And those were my sentiments. I never put anybody’s name to it, I just said, “Hey, they can think whatever they like about me, but I reserve the right to think the way that I think about them.” But the reporter put Rev. [Jesse] Jackson’s name to it, and he put [Former Washington D.C. Mayor] Marion Barry’s name to it. And I never mentioned their names. So that kind of fueled the fire, and I eventually did come out and apologize, and I said I was sorry for the nature of my remarks, not for my sentiments. But I did not put anybody’s name to those comments. Those comments were spoken in general terms. But again, I learned in Washington that the press will take every opportunity possible to manipulate, to attack and to divide. And usually – not always – but usually they hold conservatives to a different standard than they do liberals.
Q: Weren’t you yourself the target of a thinly veiled racist attack in a campaign ad once? I recall that a very old photograph of you was used to convey an unspoken, but clearly bigoted, message.
A: I talk about this in “What Color is a Conservative?” When I ran for Congress in 1994, my white, Democrat opponent used a picture of me when I was a senior in high school, when I had a big ol’ afro that couldn’t have gotten through any set of double doors in the country. He put it in one of his commercials and basically said, “Is this who you want to be your member of Congress?” Implying, “Do you want this militant black guy with an afro to be your member of Congress?”
I never heard the old guard leadership say one thing about that being racist. I never heard the Democratic National Committee say anything about that. I never heard the press say anything about that. And I didn’t want them to. The people on my staff were saying, “We need to jump on him.” And I said, “Hey, look: I don’t want to trivialize race. It’s too important of an issue. I don’t want to make this a campaign about color. I want to keep it in the context of the issues. I feel I’m right on the issues, and I will allow the people to make that decision on Election Day.” But I thought it was interesting that I never heard the NAACP, the Democratic National Committee, the Republican National Committee or anybody come out and say that was wrong. No, I take that back. The Wall Street Journal and Bob Novak, believe it or not, were two that actually spoke out and said that it was wrong for him to use that in a campaign the way he did.
Q: Well, that story and your earlier reference to Sen. Byrd form a perfect example of the double standard you mentioned, and not only because of Byrd’s KKK membership years ago. As recently as March of last year, he used the granddaddy of all racist epithets in a nationally televised interview on Fox News and didn’t garner anywhere near the reaction Sen. Lott has.
A: Right. Right.
Q: Given all this bias, inequity and distortion we’ve just discussed, which media outlets do you trust?
A: Over the last eight years, I have done hundreds and hundreds of radio and television interviews. I have done almost every venue imaginable in trying to tell my side of the story, the rest of the story, about an issue. There’s a myth out there that Fox News Channel is a “conservative network.” They are not. They are just a network that allows both sides of the story to be told. Their motto is, “We Report, You Decide,” and as someone who is in the public eye, I can’t tell you that they always got it right, that they’ve always taken my side of the issues. But they’ve done a pretty decent job. So who do I trust in the press? I think the press is very good at printing what people say, but not what the facts are. My journalism training taught me that when you cover a story, you make sure that your facts are accurate. And that’s just not the case in so many forms of the press today. The case is, “We want to get the soundbite. We want to get the story out there. We don’t care about the facts. We just want to talk about what people said.” Well, someone could say, “Hey, ol’ Jim and J.C., when they were in college, they sold drugs out of their dorm room.”
If somebody says that, and that gets in print, it ends up in some Lexis-Nexis database, and every time Jim Bennett’s name or J. C. Watts’ name is pulled up, that’s going to be in the story. I’ve been shocked that some press people, they just have no concern for what the facts are, or for telling what the entire story is.
When I first went to Washington, a publication came and did a story about me, and I mean, just did a hatchet job on me. It was so bad, it was so brutal, we called them and said, “Hey, this is so wrong and this is so untrue, these things that you said. …” One of the things they said was when I was a college athlete coming out of high school, they said I signed my letter of intent on campus at the University of Oklahoma. Well, that was illegal! You could not do that! I don’t think you can do it to this day, and it was 25 years ago when I signed. You can’t do it to this day! Well, I called them, trying to set them straight and giving them the facts behind a lot of the things they had wrong. And do you know what they said to me? They said, “We have no interest in changing that. We’re an opinion magazine, and we’re happy with what we’ve said.” And I said, “In spite of the fact that it’s wrong? You don’t want to correct it? I can prove to you that it’s wrong. I’ve got pictures of where I signed my letter of intent. I’ve got proof on these other things that you’ve inaccurately stated!” And they said, “No, we have no interest in correcting that. We’re an opinion magazine, and that’s our opinion.” (Laughs) That’s the kind of attitude and the kind of spirit that you deal with from a lot of the press sources, especially in Washington, D. C.
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Jim Bennett is a freelance writer and the news director for KJLY Christian radio in Blue Earth, Minn., and KJIA Christian radio in Spirit Lake, Iowa. He and his wife, Missy, live in Fairmont, Minn., and are expecting their seventh child this month.
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