where the west had huge investments in mining interests. to use that influence to free him and fight apartheid. that didn t happen. years passed. decades passed. an international movement sprung to boycott business, to di vest from them. to impose, to try to get governments to impose formal sanctions on that regime. it took hold here in the united states in the 1980s a. young student in los angeles asked his school s administration to stop investing in south african companies. that student s name was barak obama. free mandela became a popular rallying cry. not everyone in america was on board with freeing mandela and fighting the apartheid regime a. bill was introduced in congress. the anti-apartheid act of 19 necks would require the complete withdrawal.
we look at the conservative air in the known 60s. now you are advancing in the 1980s and can you say it was an extraordinary fillier, too. the republicans controlled the senate t. republican party stood up to president reagan. nobody had overturned a presidential veto on foreign policy in the 20th century. you had 37 and 53 republicans, including richard lugar who is still there. mitch mcconnell who said he was in college during civil rights movement and then he was on the side of civil rights and then it got all complicated with affirmative action and bussing and sanctions he said made it all clear again. he stood up again against the president. i was covering the white house then and occasionally they would bring in small groups of reporters to chat with the president on the theor theory w
was a long walk to sanctions, not just a long walk to freedom. what is your take on why it took so long, given the overt racism in south africa to get to that point? well, as i just mentioned, why did it take us so long to get a voting bill passed under linden johnson? how could we a country of 200 or 300 years allowed slavery, jim crowe slavery to have persisted for so long? i think that s just another example of it that over time finally the morality and the ill morality of racism was able to be overcome. but it is not easy and i think many feelings are still there. you can see there is still a divide in our country. we still divide up red state, blue state. we have those fighting the civil war in many ways in their own minds, whether it s northern aggression or the interruption of a way of life in the south, et cetera.
[ music playing ] that was the song sun city, in a way nelson mandela and the anti-apartheid movement permeated the 1980s from all star videos to the cosby show t. oldest daughter named her newborn twins nelson and whenny. organized labor behind boycotts, investment sanctions after years of debate as we said, congress passed a sweeping sanctions law in 19 ex-. president reagan took out his rehave to pen and september it back to congress. i want to welcome former senator cohn. he was among the republicans to override that veto. he also served as secretary of defense during clinton s second terrell. take us back to that moment, eleanor cook in the last segment set up what a historic moment that was to have a president s
veto overwritten. the question of sanctions in 1986. can you take us back to the dewitt playing out in your party? because there were plenty of republicans who voted to override that veto. there were also plenty of republicans, jesse helms, orrin hatch, thad cochran that wouldn t do it. take us back and tell us what that was all about. well, i think there were two things at work. your guests talked about this being a vote and debate about foreign policy, about the anc being a proxy for the soviet union and certainly there was the element of communism involved and this was really a support for a communist group. but deeply underlying that was really the issue of racism and the evil of racism and the discussion about communism i think was just an overlay of that, that you look at our own history, how long it took us to