Dialogue with Litton

Select highlights from the television show

Students, historians, and general audiences nostalgic for the 1970s can now view full episodes of Jerry Litton’s Dialogue with Litton televised programs at the Western Historical Manuscript Collection in Columbia.

The Dialogue with Litton show, hosted by Congressman Litton, were town hall style meetings broadcast each month from Kansas City to “Bring Government to the People.” The programs featured Litton and a guest in an unscripted format discussing constituent concerns, often in a nonpartisan manner. These meetings were so successful that in one year, 1973-74, the original radio broadcast grew to a made-for-television program. The studio audience numbered 1,800 by the last taping in 1976.

With funding from the Jerry Litton Memorial Family Foundation and other generous contributors, the State Historical Society of Missouri and Western Historical Manuscript Collection arranged for cleaning, repair, and digitization of thirty-three videotapes to generate a new master file and viewing files on DVD. Hours of taped meetings with political guests such as Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, Governor Jimmy Carter, Senator Thomas Eagleton, and Senator Hubert Humphrey make for interesting television and will undoubtedly be used for research into the political and social history of the 1970s. The Dialogue with Litton programs provide a unique historical perspective on several issues that dominated the mid-1970s, including spiking inflation, high unemployment, emerging energy policies, and the food crisis.

Litton was elected U.S. congressman from Missouri’s Sixth District in 1972, the same year the Watergate break-in occurred. He was campaigning to win the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate race in 1976 when he died, August 3, in a plane crash.

The Jerry L. Litton Papers, with documents covering the years 1960-1976, were donated to the Western Historical Manuscript Collection-Columbia in 1979 by Litton’s father, Charley. Later, his mother, Mildred, added over 300 audio-visual items to the collection.