Private Presidential Pathways, a collection of candid presidential photographs by the late New York Times photographer George Tames, will be on exhibit at the University of West Georgia’s Ingram Library from February 8 through March 4. As part of the gallery, Dr. Bruce Schulman, William Huntington Professor of History at Boston University, will present Three Elections that Reshaped the Presidency and the Nation – 1964, 1968, 1972, on Tuesday, February 23, at 11:00 a.m. in the Ingram Library. The exhibit and project are sponsored by the Ingram Library’s Penelope Melson Society.
Tames, the New York Times White House photographer from 1945 to 1985, had a career spanning the presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt through Ronald Reagan. Tames was an expert at capturing each president’s personality and character as well as the stress under which each worked. His iconic image of John F. Kennedy silhouetted in the Oval Office has become emblematic of the American presidency and the weight of the position. Other photographs that Tames took of nine presidents in 40 years have become nearly as iconic. These include Richard Nixon waving goodbye following his resignation and the so-called “Johnson treatment.” In 1992, filmmaker Ken Burns called Tames’ photographs the “DNA of our political story for the past 45 years.” Private Presidential Pathways displays 28 of Tames’ images.
Private Presidential Pathways is on loan from the Averitt Center for the Arts in Statesboro, Georgia, and was developed by Tames’ daughter, Stephanie, a Statesboro resident for 26 years. This project is supported by Georgia Humanities through appropriations made by the Georgia General Assembly.
During his program, Dr. Schulman will discuss how three pivotal elections in the 1960s and early 1970s ushered in fundamental changes in presidential politics – in the ways candidates campaigned for the nation’s highest office, the manner in which political parties selected their nominees, and how presidents governed the United States. He will explore how the three elections of 1964, 1968, and 1972 transformed American public life for generations and witnessed more than a shift in ideology or in the fortunes of the two major parties. Lyndon B. Johnson’s historic landslide victory in 1964 swept a liberal majority into power and paved the way for the enactment of the Great Society, the most far-reaching expansion of federal government authority since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. However, only four years later, Richard Nixon and third-party candidate George Wallace tallied almost as many votes as Johnson had won. Their overwhelming majority ushered in two decades of Republican preeminence as the nation repudiated Johnson's can-do, activist liberalism. In 1972 Nixon won his own dazzling victory, capturing 49 out of 50 states.
Dr. Schulman, who chairs Boston University’s history department, is the author of three books on the political history of the 1960s and 1970s. He has additionally written for The New York Times and The Washington Post, among other newspapers, and has served as a consultant and commentator on ABC News, PBS, and the History Channel. Due to his major contributions to the study of American history, Schulman was named to be part of the Organization of American Historians’ “Distinguished Lectureship Program.”
On the day of Dr. Schulman’s talk, special public parking will be provided in the Townsend Center gated lot beginning at 10:00 a.m.
The main exhibit is on display between 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Monday through Friday. Parking on the UWG campus is unrestricted on Saturdays and Sundays (other than handicapped, reserved, yellow curb, and red curb spaces). For further information, visit www.westga.edu/library or contact Catherine Hendricks at chendric@westga.edu or (678) 839-5337.
Do you have a comment or opinion about this story's topic? Perspective Online wants to hear from you. Submit a letter to the editor today.
