Hey, I have a question. Isn't it about time that scholarship in Lyndon Johnson addressed a very salient fact? Namely, that LBJ shot his way into the White House?
Lyndon Johnson's signature achievement - the civil rights act - was his "get out of jail card" for the JFK assassination. Many liberals justifiably believed that LBJ was behind the murder of JFK, so he had to give them something. Civil rights was LBJ's bone to the liberals who deeply distrusted him. The real agenda of LBJ was to keep himself out of jail and free himself from the Bobby Baker scandal, preserve the oil depreciation allowance for other oil executive perps in the JFK assassination, reward hawks in CIA/military and let his good buddy Hoover keep his job.
Mark Updegrove, the director of the LBJ Presidential Library, is in a pickle. Does he tell the TRUTH about Lyndon Johnson or does he get fired from his job? Many, many, many people in life choose to keep their jobs/status/position of privilege rather than tell the truth. Or, more importantly, even seek the truth.
This book has the feel of a "rush job" - as if someone said get out something fairly positive on LBJ asap. So apparently the staff just glommed together some LBJ quotes and quotes about LBJ and "bingo!" we have an instant book, wafer thin on any analysis of LBJ and who he really was.
Here is one of the quotes that the staff somehow overlooked.
Gus Russo:
In his oral history, Robert Kennedy bitterly recounted a remark that Johnson supposedly made to someone else after the assassination. "When I was young in Texas, I used to know a cross-eyed boy," Johnson said. "His eyes were crossed, and so was his character... That was God's retribution for people who were bad - and you should be careful of cross-eyed people because God put his mark on them ... Sometimes I think that what happened to Kennedy may have been divine retribution." JFK himself had slightly crossed eyes.
[Leo Janos, LBJ speechwriter, Church Committee interview by Rhett Dawson, Oct. 14, 1975 ... also Gus Russo, Live by the Sword, p. 377]
Another insightful LBJ conversation that was somehow was overlooked for this effort: the talk that Lyndon Johnson had on the night of 12/31/63, just 6 weeks after the JFK assassination, with his mistress Madeleine Brown at the Driskill Hotel in Austin:
"Lyndon, you know that a lot of people believe you had something to do with President Kennedy's assassination."
He shot up out of bed and began pacing and waving his arms screaming like a madman. I was scared!
"That's bull___, Madeleine Brown!" he yelled. "Don't tell me you believe that ____!"
"Of course not." I answered meekly, trying to cool his temper.
"It was Texas oil and those _____ renegade intelligence bastards in Washington." [said Lyndon Johnson, the new president; Texas in the Morning, p. 189]
I guess that would not put a shine on the LBJ legacy, would it? When will academia start addressing the ugly realities of the JFK assassination in an honest manner?
Updegrove's first chapter is entitled "A Man Who Remains a Mystery." LBJ is not a mystery. It is just there are some folks who just don't want to address the dark side of Lyndon Johnson and tell us who he really was.
The terms "sociopath," "psycopath," "pathological liar" are terms that are often misused; perhaps applied to some people when it is not applicable. Not in the case of Lyndon Johnson, though. LBJ was a textbook psychopath. LBJ was textbook sociopath. LBJ was a textbook pathological liar. Johnson was also a textbook manic depressive, an alcoholic and a very worried man who at times was smoking 60 cigarettes a day.
Lyndon Johnson was ruthless, crude, ultra-vulgar and dangerous. He was a pure a criminal as we have ever had in the White House. And he murdered John Kennedy among many others. The most dangerous psychopaths and sociopaths are the charming ones, the ones with social skills who never get "caught" and never go to jail. They usually die with the fruit of their plunder around them and dozens, hundreds of thousands of human wreckage left in their wake.
These psychopaths have the ability to turn their followers into cult members; they seek people who will toady to them and usually trick people into degrading themselves far beyond what a normal person is willing to do.
Here is Robert Caro on LBJ:
"And by 1941, also the major patterns of his entire life are established and clear. In attaining this influence, he has displayed a genius for discerning a path to power, an utter ruthlessness in destroying obstacles in that path, and a seemingly bottomless capacity for deceit, deception and betrayal in moving along it"
Let's examine some of the folks who appear in Updegrove's work. And some who pointedly do not.
Jack Valenti - if there ever was the human embodiment of the word "sycophant" it would be Jack Valenti. Brownnoser, butt kisser - Valenti was exactly the kind of guy who Lyndon Johnson demanded serve him. Valenti was such a toady that he married LBJ's secretary who Johnson was having an affair with, Mary Margaret Wiley, and pretty much was a "beard" so that the LBJ-Mary Margaret affair could continue. LBJ will tell you that Courtenay Lynda Valenti is the biological daughter of Johnson. After LBJ became president, Jack Valenti would let his "wife" go into the White House to have sex with Johnson.
Read the book "Dog Days at the White House" by Traphes Bryant for more on this.
LBJ and Lew Wasserman, an LBJ donor, later placed Jack Valenti as head of the Motion Picture Association where one of his key roles was to continue the cover up of the JFK assassination. Valenti was one of the lead organizers in 1992 of the over-the-top CIA/CFR attacks on the Oliver Stone's movie JFK. Valenti and Bill Moyers, another LBJ toady who sold his preacher boy soul to the devil, also orchestrated the attacks the removed the groundbreaking The Men Who Killed Kennedy (the Guilty Men) from the History Channel. That series was a direct assault on the legacy of Lyndon Johnson and exposed his critical role in the JFK assassination. You can still find it on YouTube.
Another one of LBJ's sychopants who makes an appearance in this book is Doris Kearns (Goodwin), an LBJ flirtation as well as biographer. Her husband Richard Goodwin is on the record as to how scarily mentally unhinged LBJ was a president as he collapsed under the weight of Vietnam and covering up for his role in the JFK assassination. Doris Kearns, presidential historian, is yet another one who has never told the full truth on LBJ.
Maybe it was because she was sleeping with him. You have *got* to read a Sally Quinn WashPost article titled "A Tale of Hearts and Minds" dated 8/24/75.
Sally Quinn:
"Doris Kearns also told authors Richard Harwood and Haynes Johnson about her relationship with LBJ in an interview that Sally Quinn refers to:
"They both took copious notes. In the interview Kearns told the reporters that her relationship with President Johnson was extraordinarily complicated, that she was still having trouble placing it in perspective, that she was troubled about how to handle her personal relationship with Johnson when she published her own book.
She told them that the essence of their relationship was that LBJ was in love with her, the he "pressed me very hard sexually the first year," that he courted her aggressively, the he asked her to marry him, that he was jealous of other men in her life.""
LBJ (age 59) was asking Doris Kearns (age 24) to marry him. My question: what was Lady Bird going to do?
Throw rice at the wedding?
Speaking of Lady Bird, it was painful to read quotes in this book by and about her. Lyndon Johnson humiliated her to no end, both by his ugly remarks and dreadful behavior. I think Lady Bird was "co-dependent" on LBJ in much the same way Hillary was on Bill Clinton. Would you want your daughter to marry Lyndon Johnson?
Most men who cheat on their wifes, at least do it somewhere else. Lyndon Johnson was literally boinking women 2 rooms down from Lady Bird both in the White House and at the LBJ Ranch.
LBJ once made the remark that he had gotten more women by accident than John Kennedy had gotten on purpose. LBJ, JFK and Bill Clinton were all "man-whores" of the first degree.
Again, I ask, can we *finally* start telling the truth about Lyndon Johnson, a man completely unworthy of having a legacy *protected* as this book is such an obvious effort at doing just that?
Bobby Baker - that was LBJ's virtual son as LBJ had been a professional son to Sam Rayburn and Richard Russell. Robert Kennedy was going to use the Bobby Baker scandal in the fall of the 1963 to finally politically execute the hated Lyndon Johnson once and for all. For 3 years the Kennedy brothers were waging a sub rosa war. The Kennedys brought knives the the battle; LBJ brought guns an it was settled at 12:30PM on 11/22/63 in Dallas, TX.
LBJ was one week ago from a LIFE magazine expose of his gargantuan corruption when JFK was murdered. RFK was feeding LIFE and the Senate Rules Committee damaging info on Lyndon Johnson. The word was out: get rid of LBJ.
McGeorge Bundy is in this book. That was the National Security Advisor to JFK who was manning the White House situation room on 11/22/63. McBundy unreasonably and suspiciously adopted the "lone nutter scenario" with in hours when much of the evidence was point to multiple shooters in Dallas. Bundy was also close to Allen Dulles and he was the secretary of the CFR in 1949 when Allen Dulles was the president. McGeorge Bundy assumed a lot of power over Lyndon Johnson post JFK assassination.
His brother Bill Bundy, also CIA and CFR, was the one who authored the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution." That allowed LBJ to wage and unconsitutional, undeclared "hot war" with Congress actually declaring war. LBJ and his staff knew their were serious questions about the attack on the American ships, but it was the provocation they wanted to wage war. A lot of Americans and Vietnamese died because of that.
JFK, as we now know, was very reluctant to go into Vietnam and in fact had plans to withdraw. LBJ told the JCS at their 1963 Christmas party, get me elected and I will give you your war in Vietnam! He did.
"Just let me get elected, and then you can have your war." [Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History, Viking, 1983, p. 326] Stanley Karnow's source for that LBJ quote was Gen. Harold K. Johnson, the Army chief of staff.
Walter Cronkite- that was the CBS anchor who LBJ told we had been waging "Murder, Inc." in the Carribean. As the revelations of Billie Sol Estes demonstrate, Lyndon Johnson had been waging "Murder, Inc." down in Texas to cover up all his crimes and liability. Yes, LBJ was that evil. LBJ was as worth of the Texas death row as anyone we have had in Texas in the past 60 years.
Gov. Allan Shivers directly accused Lyndon Johnson, to his face, for the murder of Sam Smithwick in the mid 1950's. Sam Smithwick was threatening to talk about the Box 13 scandal and Coke Stevenson was on his way to visit Smithwick. Smithwick was soon found hung in his jail cell. Like Gov. Shivers, I believe that Lyndon Johnson had the man murdered.
Lyndon Johnson was capable of absolutely *anything.* Read the book Power Beyond Reason: The Mental Collapse of Lyndon Johnson by D. Jablow Hershman. I consider it a psychological smoking gun to the JFK assassination.
http://www.amazon.com/Power-Beyond-Re...
Gerald Ford - that was the FBI's guy on the Warren Commission and he helped to cover up the JFK assassination. Allen Dulles was the primary perp there, but John J. McCloy, longtime chairman of the Rockefeller controlled Council on Foreign Relations and a close friend of Clint Murchison, Sr., was another key cover up artist.
Nicholas Katzenbach - CFR member - that was the man who wrote the memo on Sunday 11/24/63 that the government must doing everything it can to make the American people believe that Lee Harvey Oswald, and only Lee Harvey Oswald, murdered JFK.
Katzenbach:
"The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial."
"Speculation about Oswald's motivation ought to be cut off, and we should have some basis for rebutting thought that this was a Communist conspiracy or (as the Iron Curtain press is saying) a right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the Communists... We need something to head off public speculation or Congressional hearings of the wrong sort."
Oswald was US intelligence and he shot no one on 11/22/63 - not Kennedy and not Tippit. And Oswald sure was not on the Grassy Knoll where most credible JFK researchers and academics think the kill shot to JFK came from.
George Reedy - this man has given us a glimpse into what the real LBJ was like:
"He may have been a son of a bitch, but he was a colossal son of a bitch."
"Not only did Johnson get somewhat separated from reality, he had a fantastic faculty for disorienting everybody around him as to what reality was."
"What was it that would send him into those fantastic rages where he could be one of the nastiest, most insufferable, sadistic SOBs that ever lived and a few minutes later really be a big, magnificent and inspiring leader?"
In his book, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir by George Reedy... Reedy is quoted on his book flap as calling LBJ "a bully, a sadist, lout, and egoist." He describes LBJ as "magnificent, inspiring leader; the other that of an insufferable bastard."
I have always thought this passage contained a lot of truth regarding Johnson and the JFK assassination:
From Defrauding America, Rodney Stich, 3rd edition 1998 p. 638-639]:
"The Role of deep-cover CIA officer, Trenton Parker, has been described in earlier pages, and his function in the CIA's counter-intelligence unit, Pegasus. Parker had stated to me earlier that a CIA faction was responsible for the murder of JFK ... During an August 21, 1993, conversation, in response to my questions, Parker said that his Pegasus group had tape recordings of plans to assassinate Kennedy. I asked him, "What group were these tapes identifying?" Parker replied: "Rockefeller, Allen Dulles, JOHNSON of Texas, GEORGE BUSH, and J. Edgar Hoover." I asked, "What was the nature of the conversation on these tapes?"
I don't have the tapes now, because all the tape recordings were turned over to [Congressman] Larry McDonald. But I listened to the tape recordings and there were conversations between Rockefeller, [J. Edgar] Hoover, where [Nelson] Rockefeller asks, "Are we going to have any problems?" And he said, "No, we aren't going to have any problems. I checked with Dulles. If they do their job we'll do our job." There are a whole bunch of tapes, because Hoover didn't realize that his phone has been tapped. Defrauding America, Rodney Stich, p. 638-639]
"We can't be checking up on every shooting scrape in the country" Lyndon Johnson, 11/25/63 as LBJ was resisting the formation of the Warren Commission.
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