George Smathers Options

[Ron Ecker]

In an old file I came across an article clipped from the 11/21/93 Gainesville (FL) Sun (“A Special Friendship,” by Mitch Stacy) based on an interview of former Senator George Smathers, then 80.

The most interesting portions:

“That’s the Monday when he said to me, ‘God, I hate to go to Dallas,’ recalls Smathers. “And I said, ‘You got to go because Lyndon would never speak to you again.’ Lyndon didn’t like him anyway.”

One touchy issue for Smathers as a lawmaker in the conservative South was civil rights, which Kennedy championed. Smathers says that backing civil rights at the time was as bad as being a communist as far as many voters in North Florida were concerned.

“I was telling him to go slow,” Smathers remembers. “He didn’t need to be told to do it. . . I was just saying, go slow; don’t run off all your votes in the South.”

Smathers learned of Kennedy’s death via a radio report as he was flying in a private plane from Jacksonville to a vacation spot in Georgia.

“It was a sad, sad day,” he says. “I talk about it some days, and tears come to my eyes, and I have to watch myself so I don’t cry. But it was a terrifically bad blow.”