When it comes to anecdotes, it’s always best to poke them with a sharp stick occasionally. That goes double for anecdotes about Walt Disney. No, I promise you: he wasn’t cryogenically frozen upon his death. He really wasn’t. Promise.
A less well-known story surrounds Walt’s political persuasions. By 1964, he was most certainly an avowed Republican. Neal Gabler, in his biography Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Random House, 2006) tells us the following:1
“…none of his honours may have been greater than the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award the nation can bestow. Walt received it from President Lyndon Johnson at the White House during the 1964 presidential campaign – Walt wore a Goldwater button under his lapel – and it was a measure of his status that among his fellow honorees that day were the poets T.S. Eliot and Carl Sandberg, the novelist John Steinbeck, the urban historian Lewis Mumford, the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, the artist Willem de Kooning, the composer Aaron Copland, the columnist Walter Lippmann, the journalist Edward R. Murrow, and Helen Keller. Walt Disney was in the pantheon.”
Hang on, hang on. Back up from that list of names a minute. What was that?
“Walt wore a Goldwater button under his lapel”
So Walt Disney received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat… and wore a campaign button for Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for president, during the ceremony? This is very, very funny indeed.
But is it true?
Gabler sourced this particular piece of information from Remembering Walt (Hyperion, 1999), by Amy Boothe Green and Howard E. Greene. In it, there’s the following short quote from Charlie Ridgway, a publicist for the Disney theme parks for over three decades:
“The day Walt went to the White House to receive the Freedom Award from President Johnson, he wore his Goldwater button inside his lapel. Walt had been terribly antipolitical until George Murphy ran for the Senate. Being a friend of George, he supported him and that got him into politics again. From then on he was a rather avid Republican. Johnson did not take Walt’s political commentary with good grace at all.”
It’s a great story, but it also raises questions. For a start, if Walt wore the badge inside his lapel, how did Johnson even see it in the first place? Did Walt flash the badge at him? And if he didn’t flash the badge at him, why would he wear it in the first place? Just for his own amusement? For that matter, how did Ridgway know about any of this in the first place? Did he personally witness it?
It all feels a little too good to be true. Worryingly like an anecdote that people wish had happened, or something that Walt had joked about doing, but never actually did. There’s just not quite enough information in the above quote to truly trust it.
Luckily, somebody else has done the real work. Back in 2007, animation historian Michael Barrier did some research, and wrote this in-depth essay, which is essentially the final word on the whole affair. I won’t quote extensively from that piece; it’s worth reading for yourself. But, incredibly, while some of the details are still difficult to pin down, the story turns out to be pretty much true. Amazing.
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Here’s the thing. Michael Barrier didn’t just magically come up with that essay out of thin air. In fact, for a long time, he doubted the story was true at all.
For instance, here’s what he said on 28th January 2007:
“Today I received Charles Ridgway’s memoir Spinning Disney’s World: Memories of a Magic Kingdom Press Agent. I was particularly curious about whether Ridgway would substantiate the oft-repeated story that Walt Disney wore a Goldwater campaign button when he received the Medal of Freedom from President Johnson at the White House in 1964. He’s the source for that story that Neal Gabler cites on page 612 of his Disney biography, relying on a quotation in Howard and Amy Boothe Green’s Remembering Walt. But Ridgway’s memoir adds nothing to that quotation; it’s plain that he wasn’t at the White House ceremony, and he doesn’t identify a source of his own. So Ridgway and the Greens, and Gabler after them, have perpetuated an implausible story that makes Walt Disney out to have been an extraordinarily boorish guest when he received his country’s highest civilian honor. Shame on all of them.”
He continued to write about the tale on the 30th January, 12th March, 10th June, 14th June, and the 27th June. As late as that 27th June entry, Barrier still disbelieves the story.
In his final essay on the subject, he explains why:
“In writing about the Medal of Freedom ceremony, I’ve consistently expressed skepticism about the Goldwater-button story. I didn’t mention it in The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney, because I thought the sources were vague and suspect. Other authors have not been as cautious, and it turns out that their versions of the button story—however confused in their details—are to some extent anchored in the truth. But they’ve proved to be right for what I think is the wrong reason: because they accepted something as correct, even when they had no reason to believe that it was. That is, alas, the prevailing standard in a great deal of what has been written about Walt and his studio.
I’ve been wrong about the button story for what I think is the right reason: I couldn’t back up what the other authors accepted without question.”
Which is an attitude I have an immense amount of sympathy with. Many times in my writing here on Dirty Feed, I’ve avoided certain “obvious” facts about the things I write about; not because they’re definitely not true, but because I simply couldn’t substantiate them, and something smelt fishy.
Being accidentally correct isn’t really the goal.
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In Michael Barrier’s 30th January posting, one thing caught my eye in particular:
“I should have included a link yesterday to the thorough demolition of this particular urban legend — including how the button has migrated to different places on Disney’s jacket — at snopes.com.”
This, of course, would be an example of Snopes getting the story wrong – or, at least woefully incomplete – because it actually turned out to be true after all. Hey, it happens. If you’re going to spend time working in the urban legend coalmines, of course you’re going to get things wrong occasionally. The important thing is to show your working, and be open to corrections. Never mind, I’m sure Snopes updated the article…
…oh, it’s been deleted.
Wait, let’s not jump to conclusions. Maybe the URL just changed; we’re coming up to nearly two decades ago now. Let’s search the site for any mention of Barry Goldwater and Disney. Hmmmm. Nothing. The article really has completely gone.
OK, well, never mind. The Wayback Machine is always useful in these circumstances… oh bugger. Yes, the Wayback Machine has no public archives of Snopes from before 2021. This deliberate decision to disallow the Internet Archive from publicly archiving the site was apparently the policy of founder David Mikkelson, before being reversed a few years ago. I’ve been unable to find any public justification by David for that decision.
But the end result is obvious: it makes Snopes, at least during the time period where Mikkelson was in charge, look shady. As though they just tried to hide their errors, rather than learn from them.
Because the valuable thing about Michael Barrier’s work here wasn’t just that he dug into the story, and got about as close to the truth as anybody is likely to get. It’s that he documents his change of opinion in the matter, and most crucially, why. In today’s climate, that feels to me like one of the most valuable things in the world. Public acknowledgments of a change of opinion are rarer than they should be; a considered explanation even more so. Learning how to be wrong, and what to do about it, is a valuable life skill.
One that Barrier was keen to teach us… and that Snopes wasn’t.
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With thanks to Darrell Maclaine for digging out his copy. ↩