Everywhere
seasoned Civil Rights activist Whitney Young went, someone told him that Lyndon
Johnson was behind the JFK assassination. Source:
Robert
Parker’s - Capitol Hill in Black and White: Revelations of the Inside -
and Underside - of power politics by the black former maître d’ of the Senate
Dining Room (1986) - Robert Parker was an LBJ insider and a black man.
It didn’t take long for the enemies of Lyndon Johnson
to crawl out of the Capitol woodwork. “Old LBJ must have had something to do
with it,” I heard them say the very next day. The suspicion echoed in every
corridor from Senate staff attorneys, legislative aides, waitresses, and tourists.
Their grief for John F. Kennedy more their cynicism and dislike of Lyndon
Johnson even more intense.
Blacks,
who as a group had always mistrusted LBJ, were no exception. A few days after
President Kennedy was buried, Clarence Mitchell, director of the NCAAP’s
Washington office, got into a heated discussion about President Johnson with
Whitney Young, director of the Urban League. They were standing in the corridor
outside the Senate Dining Room. Mitchell called me over. Like most people in
the Kennedy camp, Young was upset. It was bad enough to lose a dynamic leader
like John Kennedy, but to get Lyndon Johnson in exchange was to rub salt in the
wounds of grief. Young was telling
Mitchell that everywhere he went he heard someone say LBJ was behind the
assassination of Kennedy. Young was concerned about the gossip.
“Johnson’s
not that kind of man,” Mitchell said. Then he turned to me. “Tell him, Robert!
You’ve known Johnson ever since you were a kid.”
As depressed as I was over the
death of the president, the accusations of murder leveled at Lyndon Johnson
made me even sadder. Although he could be the meanest man in Washington, I knew
he was no killer. I defended him. I felt that people like the ones Whitney
Young were gossiping didn’t understand LBJ and were not being fair to him.
That Lyndon Johnson was bored as vice president was clear to anyone who cared
enough to watch him. I had seen him often on the Hill between January 1961,
when he took his oath of office, and November 1963, when President Kennedy was
assassinated. I had served dozens of his private lunches, as well as hideaway
parties, which he attended for old times’ sake. President Kennedy had turned
him into his messenger boy on the Hill. And Johnson had let it be known that he
didn’t like being a toothless old lion.
A
few weeks before Lyndon Johnson moved into the White House, I was in the Inner
Sanctum when Senator Jordan walked to join a half-dozen of his southern
friends. “Did y’all hear about ol’ Lyndon?” he asked even before he sat down.
“He’s got himself in trouble already.”
Jordan
began fleshing out a story I had read that morning in The Washington
Post. I’m sure he got his information from Johnson aides, who were itching
to take over the White House.
“Ol’
Lyndon got on the phone and called Mrs. Kennedy the other day,” Jordan drawled
as if he were savoring each word. “He told her, ‘Sweetheart, listen, you don’t
have to move out until you’re good and ready. We’re not rushing you.’”
Jordan
and his friends laughed because they knew “ol’ Lyndon” couldn’t wait to swivel
in the Oval Office chair.
Jordan
continued, “Jackie slammed down the phone and huffed to an aide, ‘How dare that
oversize cowpunching son-of-a-bitch call me sweetheart! I want to speak to him
about it.’ The aide went over to ol’ Lyndon’s office.”
Jordan
paused for the punchline.
“Well,
ol’ Lyndon pounded the desk with that big fist of his, got out of
his chair, stretched tall, and said, “’I’m sick and tired of this horseshit!
Where I come from, we always call our ladies “sweetheart” and they call us
southern gentleman “honey.”’”
Jordan
could hardly stop laughing.
“Well,
ol’ Lyndon better not try being a southern gentleman with Jackie again!” he
said.
[Robert
Parker - Capitol Hill in Black and White: Revelations of the Inside -
and Underside - of power politics by the black former maître d’ of the Senate
Dining Room, pp. 131-133. ]
And also LBJ to Robert Parker:
·
As long as you are black, and you're gonna be
black till the day you die, no one's gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no
matter what you are called, nigger, you just let it roll off your back like
water, and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.
o Said to his chauffer, Robert
Parker, when Parker said he’d prefer to be referred to by his name rather than
"boy," "nigger" or "chief." Source: Parker,
Robert; Rashke, Richard L. (1989). Capitol Hill in Black and White. United States.
p. v. ISBN 0515101893. Retrieved on 6 January
2015. 71.178.53.148 00:38, 7 January 2015
(UTC)
Word from
LBJ: “This nigger drives for me.”
Before
I left for Washington, Jenkins handed me a letter signed by LBJ. “Don’t get
smart if you’re stopped again,” he warned. “Just keep your mouth shut and show
them this.”
I
stuffed the letter into the glove compartment without looking at it and began
the trip back to Washington. When I stopped for gas, I read it. “To whom is may
concern,” it said. “This nigger drives for me.”
I
was hurt and angry at Lyndon Johnson. To him, I was nothing more than a no-name
nigger. On the lonely drive home, I debated whether to show the letter to the
police if I was stopped. In the end, I decided I would use it only as a last
resort. Better another humiliation than death.
Over
the next twenty years, I frequently pulled out that old letter. The more I read
it, the more I realized that the “nigger letter” was a piece of political
wisdom. If Johnson had written of me with respect or even used my name, no one
would have believed the letter came from him. I would have been lynched as fast
as you can say LBJ. I began directing my anger away from Johnson toward the system
that made “nigger letters” necessary and toward those who kept the system
alive.
Although
Johnson’s letter was destroyed by a flood in my basement in the 1960’s, my
anger never cooled. That letter became the one thing that managed to destroy my
inner peace every time I thought of it. There was nothing I could do to make
the hurt go away.
[Robert
Parker - Capitol Hill in Black and White: Revelations of the Inside -
and Underside - of power politics by the black former maître d’ of the Senate
Dining Room, pp. 51-52. ]
LBJ would
often call his driver Robert Parker “nigger” so he could show off in front of
the Southern senators
“Annapolis
had been one fo the biggest slave markets on the East Coast, and in the
mid-1940’s its attitude toward blacks was just as hostile as it had been before
emancipation. I would drive Johnson and his party up to the front gate of Navy
stadium with instructions to be waiting there when they walked out after the
game. Whevever I was late, no matter what the reason, Johnson called me a lazy,
good-for-nothing nigger. He especially liked to call me nigger in front of
southerners and racists like Richard Russell. It was, I soon learned, LBJ’s way
of being one of the boys.”
[Robert
Parker - Capitol Hill in Black and White: Revelations of the Inside -
and Underside - of power politics by the black former maître d’ of the Senate
Dining Room, p.16.]
Nicholas Katzenbach on LBJ’s racial
attitudes and his telling of “nigger jokes”
“After that he would get on an old
fire engine that some admirers had presented to him and drive me around – me
sitting beside him in my Brooks Brothers suit and tie, LBJ driving in his
ten-gallon hat, flannel shirt, and blue jeans. He would point out sights of
interest, and when he saw one of his black workers in a field he would stand up
(the fire engine still moving), wave his hand, sound the siren, and shout,
“Come over here, boy, and meet your attorney general.”
I
would cringe beside him. It was almost as if he did not associate any of his
workers with the civil rights leaders he regularly met with in Washington,
although I am sure in fact he did. It was just a southern way of life that he
was used to and felt comfortable with, just as he often did with the stories and
jokes he told about blacks. They made me feel uncomfortable, but this president
who did so much to secure equal rights saw no impropriety and no inconsistency
between his stories, where blacks were the butt of a joke and his convictions
about racial equality.”
[Nicolas Katzenbach, “Some of It
Was Fun: Working With RFK and LBJ,” p. 207 ]
LBJ: “I’ll
have them niggers voting Democratic for two hundred years.”
Luci
Johnson: “Damn you. You go find my nigger right now!”
During
one trip, Johnson was discussing his proposed civil rights bill with two
governors. Explaining why it was so important to him, he said it was simple:
“I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for two hundred years.”
“That
was the reason he was pushing the bill,” said MacMillan, who was present during
the conversation. “Not because he wanted equality for everyone. It was strictly
a political ploy for the Democratic party. He was phony from the word go.”
MacMillan
said Johnson’s younger daughter, Luci, then seventeen, was a “wretched witch.”
On one stopover in Florida, she was having a tantrum because she did not know
where a servant was. She blamed MacMillan for it.
“She
said, ‘Damn you. You go find my nigger right now,’” MacMillan said. Playing
dumb MacMillan asked for a description of the man.
“She
screamed again. ‘Find my nigger.’ People around were smiling. She drew her hand
back as if she was going to slap me. I said, ‘Miss Johnson, I don’t think that
would be a good idea.’ She said, ‘Dammit, I’ll find him myself.’ This was the
attitude of these people who were championing civil rights.”
[Ronald
Kessler, Inside the Whitehouse, pp. 33-34]
Lady Bird Johnson was delighted by
Jefferson Davis statute and American flag
Lady Bird Johnson Home
Movie #9: Austin 1943
Web Link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdjV1AVdynA
Lyndon
Johnson explaining to George Wallace how to manage those “Goddamn niggers” in
1965
In honor of
yesterday's Civil Rights Summit at the LBJ Library, I would like to give you a
little tidbit about Lyndon Johnson as president, his take on civil rights &
his attitudes towards black Americans. LBJ called up George Wallace to visit
him in the White House, probably in 1965. Wallace brought along his right hand
man and #1 Alabama political operative Seymore Trammell. His son Warren
Trammell is one of my Facebook friends.
Here is how
the meeting of Lyndon Johnson and George Wallace went. This meeting was on
March 13, 1965. It was the following Saturday after the previous "Bloody
Sunday" in Selma. Actually this meeting was highly publicized, but the
actual contents of it as relayed by Warren Trammell are not well known. Also, I
do not know if the USA was bombing the Ho Chi Minh trail at that time, but I
think Trammell catches the unvarnished behind the scenes "flavor" of
LBJ quite well.
Go to LBJ's presidential schedule and look up March 13, 1965:http://www.lbjlibrary.net/collections/daily-diary.html
On the diary it says 12:05PM Meeting - LBJ, George Wallace, Seymour
Trammell, Katzenbach, Bill Moyers and Burke Marshall.
By the way,
like Wallace and the Trammells, I am a native of Alabama so this is
of special interest to me.
WARREN
TRAMMELL:
On Wed, Aug
28, 2013 at 5:52 PM, Warren Trammell wrote to Robert Morrow:
"To Robert Morrow: to whom it may concern....my father's
(Seymore Trammell) memories of his and Alabama Governor George Wallace's
private and not really publicized meeting, with President Lyndon Johnson in his
Oval Office, concerning the racial violence in the Southeast in the 60s. It's
been impossible to nail down the exact day since it was not well publicized.
In the mid 1960s in America, white/black
racial unrest had reached the most violent levels the South had ever seen in
modern times! Alabama Governor George Wallace and his number one adviser my
father Seymore Trammell had their hands full "managing" the
black/white racial violence all the Southern politicians thought was caused by
the Reverend Martin Luther King and his growing crowds of black followers!
At the same time in a lesser known part of the
world, the LBJ's USA was deeply embroiled in a massive war in North Viet Nam
over oil (the real reason we know today). America's President at that time, in
charge of "managing" these two violent situations, was Lyndon Baines
Johnson, affectionately know by his Southern political buddies as just LBJ or
just Lyndon. Unknown to the public, Southern politicians privately shared
Lyndon's hatred of what he called in private, "niggers". Lyndon hated
"niggers'! He called them "niggers" in private. He cussed
"niggers" every day, my father said, and called them all kinds of
vile names! He had his hands full with the Viet Nam war and hated being
"bothered by those G--damned niggers" my father said Lyndon said.
To rid his hands of those "G-damned
niggers" he called my father and Governor Wallace to his Oval Office
officially to have a "friendly informative talk" about the disturbing
violence in the South. George and Seymore were very excited! They just knew
their buddy Lyndon was going to give the massive help in "managing those
niggers" Lyndon said.
However, in typical trickster style, when
George and Seymore got into Lyndon's Oval Office, they were shocked! Lyndon
began to cuss like a sailor and ask them, "What in the hell are you boys
(Lyndon called them boys) doing with those G--damned niggers down there?"
Shocked and taken back, the "Guvna" said "Well Mr. President,
we're doing the best we can! What do ya want us to do?"
At that Lyndon began to cuss
"niggers" again. They were sitting on either side of a narrow coffee
table in the Oval office and big Lyndon with his long strong arms and big
powerful Texas rough hands reached over and slapped both Seymore and George
hard on their knees and held their legs a moment and said "Now you boys,
you gotta get your G--damned asses back down to Alabama and make those
G--damned niggers act right and calm the hell down! I am G--damned tired of
hearing 'bout those G--damned niggers on the G--damned news every night!
Every night at midnight, I hafta get on that damned Red Phone over there on my
desk and give the G--damned orders for the B-52 Bombers to fly over the Ho Chi
Minh trail and all over that G--damned North Viet Nam and bomb the the
hell outta the whole G-damned country every G--damned night and this G--damned
war is killing me!"
"You boys got it lucky. Hell George
(Lyndon called him George and "boy"), all the hell you got is those
G--damned niggers throwing rocks and tot'in signs! Hell, here, I had to get the
Secret Service to put-up double thick bullet proof glass to the White House
windows cause these G--damn niggers and hippies up here are shootin' bullets at
me and my wife and 2 little girls are scared to death! I hate those G--damned
niggers and hippies"
At that point my father tried to tell Lyndon
something but again Lyndon slapped him hard on his knee and said "Now be
quiet boy, here, take this pad and pencil and take some G--damned notes".
My father gave me the pad and pencil with the Presidential Seal on them!
The short meeting was over and Lyndon lastly
said "You boys go back to Alabama and get them G--damned niggers quiet!
And I don't want to hear nothin' else on the news about them G--damned niggers!"
At that point Lyndon said to the "Guvna", "Come-on boy we
gotta go outside, wave at the press and tell'em we had a very productive
meeting 'bout them G--damned niggers!" As they stepped up to the mic,
Lyndon said kind words about the blacks in the South and indicated that the
"Guvna" agreed with him and was going back to Alabama to help them
get their justice.
Lyndon grabbed George by the arm before he
could speak, turned him around and with his huge hand on the Govna'a back,
pushed him back into the Oval Office and out the door to get on one of the
Presidential Planes back to Alabama! The "Govna" and Seymore were
sadly disappointed and grumbled all the way back to Alabama, the Guvna angrily
chewing on his cigar and Seymore clutching his blank Presidential note pad with
great frustration."
Nicholas
Katzenbach on LBJ’s racial attitudes and his telling of “nigger jokes”
“After that he would get on an old fire
engine that some admirers had presented to him and drive me around – me sitting
beside him in my Brooks Brothers suit and tie, LBJ driving in his ten-gallon
hat, flannel shirt, and blue jeans. He would point out sights of interest, and
when he saw one of his black workers in a field he would stand up (the fire
engine still moving), wave his hand, sound the siren, and shout, “Come over
here, boy, and meet your attorney general.”
I would cringe beside him. It was almost as if he did not associate any of his
workers with the civil rights leaders he regularly met with in Washington, although
I am sure in fact he did. It was just a southern way of life that he was used to
and felt comfortable with, just as he often did with the stories and jokes he
told about blacks. They made me feel uncomfortable, but this president who did
so much to secure equal rights saw no impropriety and no inconsistency between
his stories, where blacks were the butt of a joke and his convictions about
racial equality.”
[Nicolas Katzenbach, “Some of It Was Fun:
Working With RFK and LBJ,” p. 207 ]
Luci Johnson screaming: "Damn you. You go find my nigger right
now!"
I wonder where Luci got that from? http://books.google.com/books?id=lJz-yIZNE2sC&pg=PA33&lpg=PA33&dq=luci+johnson+where+is+my+nigger?&source=bl&ots=4OU7dKaT1H&sig=k6tUPI_cdZJrpDIyGzq3bWRIBFc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=RBQfUrPfOZK5sQTAo4GwBA&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=luci%20johnson%20where%20is%20my%20nigger%3F&f=false
[bottom of page 33, top of page 34 "Inside the White
House"]
LBJ the
Sadist Terrifying Negroes with Snakes
"A
stereotype that had currency in the Hill Country was that Negroes were
terrified of all snakes. Sometimes Johnson or one of his Hill Country friends
would catch a snake, sometimes a harmless snake, sometimes a rattlesnake. Johnson
would put in the trunk of his car, and drive to a gas station at which a Negro
was working as the gas pump attendant. Pulling up to the pump to get gas, he
would tell the attendant that he thought the spare tire in his trunk might need
air, and would ask him to take a look at it. Often this practical joke was
successful; relating this story, he said, about one Negro attendant, 'Boy, you
should have seen that big buck jump!' He went on playing this joke not only
when he was in college, but when he was a congressional assistant -- when he
was a congressman, in fact. Once, when he played it while he was a congressman
-- in 1945 or 1946 at a service station at the corner of First Street and
Congress Avenue in Austin -- the joke had a different denouement. While Lyndon
was 'standing there laughing' at the attendant's shock, the black man picked up
a tire iron and, threatening to wrap it around Johnson's neck, shouted, 'I'll
make you a bow tie out of this!' The manager of the service station had to
hustle Johnson out a back door to get him away."
[Robert
Caro. Master of the Senate, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 3,
p. 715. 2002]
LBJ'S Daughter Was Wrong on 'Selma,' Dad
By Roger Stone
Thursday, 12 Feb 2015 08:13 AM
http://www.newsmax.com/US/lbj-kennedy-king-selma/2015/02/12/id/624300/
In an article reported by Newsmax, the daughter of
former President Lyndon B. Johnson has slammed the hit new movie
"Selma" for depicting her father as "a reluctant latecomer to the
civil rights movement."
Saying she was "saddened" by the film, Luci Baines Johnson took to
the pages of The Texas Tribune to claim her dad was instrumental in getting the
Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed during his presidency while
risking his own political career.
Is Luci Baines Johnson ignorant of his father’s actual record?
As a congressman, LBJ said that President Truman's civil rights program "is
a farce and a sham — an effort to set up a police state in the guise of
liberty. I am opposed to that program. I have voted against the so-called poll
tax repeal bill . . . I have voted against the so-called anti-lynching
bill."
The truth is that Lyndon Baines Johnson was a life-long segregationist who
resisted numerous attempts to eliminate the poll tax and literacy tests during
his 23-year career in the House and Senate. He blocked every major and minor
piece of meaningful civil rights legislation as the leader of the Southern
block in the U.S. Senate, and as its powerful majority leader.
It was Lyndon Johnson who neutered the 1957 Civil Rights Act with a poison pill
amendment that required violators of the act be tried before state (all-white),
not federal juries.
Many contemporary liberals including Joseph Rauh, the president of Americans
for Democratic Action, and A. Philip Randolph, a vice president of the AFL-CIO,
called the bill worthless, and “worse than no bill at all.”
Nor did LBJ’s personal conduct reflect support for civil rights. His black
chauffeur Robert Parker wrote in his book “Capitol Hill in Black and White” of
his personal experiences.
“I would drive Johnson and his party up to the front gate of Navy stadium with
instructions to be waiting there when they [the senators] walked out after the
game. Whenever I was late, no matter what the reason, Johnson called me a lazy,
good-for-nothing n*gger. He especially liked to call me n*gger in front of
Southerners and racists like Richard Russell. It was, I soon learned, LBJ’s way
of being one of the boys.”
As vice president, Lyndon Johnson orchestrated Southern congressional
opposition to John F. Kennedy’s civil rights agenda and repeatedly warned JFK
to go slow on the civil rights, voting rights, and open housing legislation
that Kennedy had promised in his 1960 campaign.
On Capitol Hill, Johnson simultaneously lobbied his “establishment” friends to
stall that same legislation.
In fact, LBJ did none of the arm-twisting for the 1964 Civil Rights Act
himself. He left that to Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Neither Johnson nor Humphrey
could deliver all Democrats, though, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act only passed
with the support of Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen and 27 Senate Republicans.
LBJ did strip the voting rights section out of the 1964 bill.
The movie "Selma" accurately portrays LBJ as reluctant to push a
voting rights bill in 1965 and using the FBI to wiretap the hotel rooms and
harass Dr. Martin Luther King.
Wiretaps approved by Robert Kennedy on Oct 10. 1963 for 30 days only were kept
in place by LBJ once he became president. LBJ played the tapes of King in the
act of adultery for his political cronies.
In fact, a recording of phone call between LBJ and his Attorney General
Nicholas Katzenbach, proves that Johnson knew that the FBI was tapping King —
“that must be where the evidence comes from . . . with some of the women, and
that kind of stuff.”
Katzenbach told LBJ that the King wiretap was one that his predecessor, Robert
Kennedy, had authorized, and “which I’ve been ambivalent about taking
off.”
In a memo, LBJ’s Chief of Staff Walter Jenkins instructed the FBI to leak sex
dirt they had collected on MLK to the media of the day.
Johnson would do an about-face on civil rights immediately upon becoming
president, apparently now that the “time was right.” He did so to begin the
creation of a grand legacy for himself through the passage of the same
legislation that he had previously impeded, and to fend off a challenge from
Robert Kennedy at the 1964 Democratic convention.
Even
when LBJ did the right thing on civil rights he did so for the wrong reason.
Author and Newsmax contributor, Ronald Kessler, reported LBJ telling a group of
Southern cronies “ I’ll have those n*ggers voting Democratic for 200 years.”
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