YouSaid · the spoken record

Ray Mabus

lines on the record
77
first
2018-06-14
most recent
2018-06-14
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Aha moment for you, huh? It was winter was term limited. I was a bachelor and I thought if I'm ever going to run for anything, now's the time. And I ran against a guy who'd been in the office for 32 years. I was absolutely...”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Well, I called over to the auditor's office and asked him to send me the last three audits on the capital, on the county that the capital's in, Hines County. And that was in 1982, and they sent me 7576 and 77. I thought it was a clerical error, and I called them back up. They said, no, no, we're five years late doing the audits. So after we got the information that we were looking for, I started reading about the auditor's office. It was the most powerful office I'd ever seen. You had... 220 accountants working for you. You got to audit every penny of money that anybody spent, of tax money. So the governor, the legislature, the county, school districts, hospitals, and all the federal money that came into Mississippi. And so even though I never had an accounting course. It wasn't a requirement. You just had to get more votes.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Just saying we want better education. We're tired of this. We're sick of this. And if a legislator got two or three phone calls, it was an emergency and we could generate Or 300 in an evening. Claire and Ledger won a Pulitzer for covering it. And it was called a Christmas miracle. It was the first education reform act passed in the United States.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “And He had a group of young men. We were very derisively called the boys of spring. His name was Winter, and Mississippi legislature dubbed us that. And we sort of owned it. We had buttons made up. He wanted to push for education, and we were the only state in the Union without compulsory education, legacy of the civil rights movement, one of two without public kindergartens. And we had tried twice in the legislature and lost both times. And this boys of spring convinced the governor to, instead of quitting, to go big. And so we ran a campaign for education. We ran. We had rallies. We went on TV. I made, I think, about 700 speeches for education around Mississippi. And he called the legislature into special session. Every one of the leaders said, we're not going to do this because it was a tax increase involved.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Well, they were post-civil rights, so they didn't have to mouth this stuff about segregation. And they were all passionate about education.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And what sort of against all odds. He had told people he wasn't going to run that he was through. And he invited me back home. And when I told my law firm, one of my friends said, how much is the governor going to pay you? And I said, about a third of what I make here. And he said, why would the governor want somebody that dumb on his staff?”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Well, everything I did was terrible for Mississippi politics because a clerk for a judge that helped integrate the South. And then I worked for a Sergeant Shriver's law firm. So the Kennedy School stuff stuck. A guy that I had admired greatly in Mississippi politics, who I'd volunteered for his first race for governor in 1967 when I was in college, William Winter ran for governor the third time, first two times he had been crushed by just terrible people. And on filing deadline, he dropped in his papers in 79.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I actually got into all five of those schools. And the reason I picked Harvard besides just being familiar with it was they gave grades at the time and Yale didn't. And I wanted to see how I could do. I might have a little competitive streak in me.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “From time to time, but I never ran a campaign that wasn't raised. In fact, my first name I'm pretty sure was Harvard Educated because that was the way I was referred to. But I knocked it down with a story that had the added advantage of being true. I was back in my hometown, walking down Main Street, met Mrs. Whittington, the librarian. And she said, what are you going to do now that you're out of the military? And I said, I'm going to law school. She said, are you going to Old Miss Son? And I said, no, ma'am, I'm going to Harvard. She looked at me and said, couldn't you get into old Miss? And we're serious about the whole thing. So, yeah, it was, and that was a pretty transformative thing, too.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I went to Harvard to law school. My ship had been out in Newport, Rhode Island. I'd spent a lot of time there. And I didn't particularly want to go to law school, didn't particularly want to be a lawyer, but I figured that school was easier than work. And so I applied to the top five law schools in the country and said, if I got in, I'll go. And Harvard let me in three weeks after I applied. It's the worst possible thing I could have done for Mississippi politics.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “No, I was in the North Atlantic, in the Mediterranean the whole time. Water looks like water, and I questioned a little bit my decision to join the Navy when I got seasick every Every day, the first day we went out.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, I met people that I've never met before and I've never met since. I mean, even though I was in politics met all sorts of people, you know, I had a A seaman named Greco from New Jersey who wanted to go home and A garage, an auto repair place had. Hispanics from California. That just the sort of breadth and depth, and that was at a time when people were still getting drafted. So into the Navy. And about half of them didn't want to be there. That was sort of an interesting leadership experience”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Well, I was 21 years old. I was a division officer on a cruiser, so I had 60 people that all of a sudden I was their mother, their father, their priest, their rabbi, their banker, their psychiatrist. And you grow up a really fast and you learn responsibility and you learn to do something bigger than yourself. It's an experience that if you miss, I think you've really missed something.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Well, again, that father I picked so carefully, he had served in the Navy in World War II, and he really had a strong sense that you ought to serve, whether in the military or something else. And I had the same feeling. I was against the war in Vietnam, but I thought you ought to go and serve. And my time in the Navy. As I look back on, it's one of the most consequential times in my life. I'm not sure that the things I've been fortunate enough to do I would have done.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I always wanted to go back to Mississippi. And I ran for everything there was to run for in high school, ran for everything that was to run for it. OMS, got beat every single time. And went away and spent 10 years getting a master's being in the Navy.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Indiana, he had won California. And that was in the days of the bosses. I mean, there was a quote that I remember that said that if Richard Daly told people to vote for Ho Chi Minh to be the Democratic nominee that he'd get all the Illinois delegates and half of Pennsylvania.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I followed John Kennedy's presidential race. And I was 11. And I just thought this was the most thrilling thing I'd ever seen. And then... Really followed Bobby Kennedy's 68 race, and in fact, wrote my master's thesis on his election and whether he would have gotten the Democratic nomination.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “There were, but not many. And OMIS is 75 miles from Memphis. And so I was at OMS the day Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis. I remember I remember people, some people, not all, but some. Being very happy about that. And God knew well and still, he's a lawyer in Jackson now. He was in law school then. He went out in front of the Lyceum and lowered the flag to have staff and a bunch of football players beat him up for it. So it was still really raw then. And a lot of my friends, who were four or five years older that I got to know at Old Ms, either because they were in law school or they were backteaching or something. They were there when it had happened. And as I said, it was still jagged and raw.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I did. That's where my dad and my uncle had gone and they were winning national football championships. Had a great education.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Was aware of it, but it really didn't touch my life that much day to day. You pointed out my dad had this insatiable curiosity about the world so on the summers. Go. I went across a Trans-Siberian Railroad and I was in Iran for the first uprising against the Shah. So we weren't there a lot of the summers. But yeah, I was very aware of it and just how violent it was and how much hatred there was. And it was, I couldn't understand it. I literally couldn't figure out why people were That's hard over and that willing to do just unspeakable things to Keep a system in place that made no sense and was even at that age. I could figure out that it was one of the reasons Mississippi was so poor. It just wasn't doing what it needed to do.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Did, but like a lot of white kids and African American kids, we were friends when we were very small. And then we went to different schools. And so those friendships tended to wane over time. I mean, Ackerman was too little to be segregated by geography. I mean, so you knew all sorts of African Americans, but the friendships that were so close when you were three, four, five years old, you were playmates, you didn't know and didn't care about the difference. Then you got sent to wildly different schools. And you tended to lose touch.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “And I got up in front of a segregated high school and said the reason we ought to vote for Lyndon Johnson was that he'd pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That also didn't go over really well. But the fact I got elected governor 25 years later showed that something had happened.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “We had a straw vote in 1964 for president, 234 for Goldwater, one for Johnson. Here I am, the one for Johnson. My parents got all sorts of bad phone calls about that.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I grew up and went to a segregated school. My overwhelming memory, the one memory that I have. Was when James Meredith integrated OMIS, my home is about 80 miles south of Oxford where OMS is and about 40 miles north of Neshoba County. So right in the middle of all this. And I was a freshman in high school, and there was a talk of the school, and I came home and said something smart to my dad. And he just set me down, and I would have a lot rather gotten a whipping than have him talk to me. And he talked to me for a couple of hours about the rule of law, the equality of people, and how disappointed he was in me. And he didn't ever hear me say anything like that again. And just sort of how brave he was. And my mother at the same time.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “She was and great athlete, five feet tall, and played in college at Delta State. She was fierce. She was absolutely fierce and the story that encapsulates her to me as the Nashoba County Fair is the biggest political gathering in Mississippi every year and it's outside it's in July it's hot as all get out And she showed up probably about four hours early to hear me speak when I was running for governor. I came down and sat next to her, and he was twice as big as she was and half her age. She was almost 80 then, and he had a really nasty sign about me. And she looked at him as little white haired old lady. Sweetly said, Can I see your sign And he said, sure, and gave it to her. And she ripped it in half and said, That's my little boy. Get out of here.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Grandfather, who I did not know, he died before I was born, was from all accounts a very nice man, but somebody who had failed in business, failed as a farmer. My grandmother, who died when I was four, I think was the driving force, but I never got a good answer on that. My uncle was a West Pointer. My aunt spoke and talked four languages. At various universities and colleges around the country. And so”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I was born and grew up in a town with about a thousand people, Ackerman, Mississippi. My family's been there for since the 1830s. And I just picked my parents really carefully. My dad and his brother owned the hardware store. And they were all my dad, his brother, and his sister were all born around the turn of the 20th century. He was a much older dad, almost 50 when I was born. One was born in 1894, 1896, and 1901, and at a time when not many people finished high school, all of them got at least two degrees”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source