If you have never read Robert Parker's fabulous book Capitol Hill in Black and White (published in 1986), I suggest that you get a copy of it ASAP. Robert Parker, a black man, was a patronage employee of Lyndon Johnson beginning around 1944 until LBJ's death in January, 1973. Robert Parker knew Lyndon Johnson extremely well and he details Johnson's over the top racist behavior and the fact that Lyndon Johnson like to patronage a black whorehouse in the Washington, DC area along with other politicos. One notable fact about LBJ is that in early July of 1964 he tried to have sex with his black White House secretary GERRI WHITTINGTON at the LBJ Ranch, mere days after his signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Gerri Whittington later requested and got a job transfer to the Pentagon.
Also, in Robert Parker's book you will learn that every table in the Senate Dining Room, where Parker was the maitre de, was bugged with listening devices. As a long time student of Lyndon Johnson, I can tell you that the odds are in the 99% to 100% range that Lyndon Johnson personally ordered those tables to bugged.
Here is the passage that Robert Parker decided to put on the FIRST page of his book and also on the BACK COVER of his book and it gives us yet another clear example of who Lyndon Johnson was:
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.
QUOTE
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.
UNQUOTE
[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 of 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. Whenever 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 ]
17-year-old 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"
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."
A recorded 1964 conversation between Lyndon Johnson and Jack Valenti:
“I think I can take every Mexican in the state and every nigger in the state.” – I don’t know who said that but I assume it was LBJ.
Lyndon Johnson, the Sadist, often Enjoyed Terrifying Negroes with Snakes
place in his Spare Tires
https://erenow.net/biographies/master-of-the-senate-the-years-of-lyndon-johnson-3/9.php
So
Johnson’s early efforts with Russell also included a speech. Delivered on Wednesday, March 9,
1949, it was his first speech on the Senate floor, and it was a major one:
it took him an hour and twenty-five minutes, speaking in deliberate, grave
tones, to read the thirty-five double-spaced typewritten pages that had been
placed on the portable lectern that had been put on his desk. And it was delivered
as a centerpiece of a southern filibuster against Truman’s proposed civil
rights legislation that would have given black Americans protection against
lynching and against discrimination in employment, and that also would have
made it easier for them to vote.
First, he defended the use of the
filibuster. The strategy of civil rights advocates, he said, “calls for
depriving one minority of its rights in order to extend rights to other
minorities.” The minority that would be deprived, he explained, was the South.
“We of the South who speak here are
accused of prejudice,” Lyndon Johnson said. “We are labeled in the folklore of
American tradition as a prejudiced minority.” But, he said, “prejudice is not a
minority affliction: prejudice is most wicked and most harmful as a majority
ailment, directed against minority groups.” The present debate proved that, he
said. “Prejudice, I think, has inflamed a majority outside the Senate against
those of us who speak now, exaggerating the evil and intent of the filibuster.
Until we are free of prejudice there will be a place in our system for the
filibuster—for the filibuster is the last defense of reason, the sole defense
of minorities who might be victimized by prejudice.” “Unlimited debate is a
check on rash action,” he said, “an essential safeguard against executive
authority”—“the keystone of all other freedoms.” And therefore cloture—this
cloture which “we of the South” were fighting—is “the deadliest weapon in the
arsenal of parliamentary procedures.” By using it, a majority can do as it
wishes—“against this, a minority has no defense.”
Then he
turned to the substance of the legislation. Racial prejudice was not the issue,
Lyndon Johnson said. Prejudice, he said, is “evil,” and “perhaps no prejudice
is so contagious or so dangerous as the unreasoning prejudice against men
because of their birth, the color of their skin, or their ancestral
background.” And, he said, he himself was not prejudiced. “For those who would
keep any group in our Nation in bondage, I have no sympathy or tolerance.” But,
he said, prejudice was not the reason that the South was fighting the civil
rights bills.
When we of the South rise here to speak
against… civil rights proposals, we are not speaking against the Negro race. We
are not attempting to keep alive the old flames of hate and bigotry. We are,
instead, trying to prevent those flames from being rekindled. We are
trying to tell the rest of the Nation that this is not the way to accomplish
what so many want to do for the Negro. We are trying to tell the Senate that
with all the sincerity we can command, but it seems that ears and minds were
long ago closed.
He
himself was opposed to the poll tax, Lyndon Johnson said, but the Constitution
gave the states, not the federal government, the right to regulate elections,
and Truman’s anti-poll tax proposals were therefore “wholly unconstitutional
and violate the rights of the States.” He himself, “like all other citizens,
detest[ed] the shameful crime of lynching,” he said, “but we”—the southern senators—are
trying to tell the other senators “that the method proposed in the civil rights
legislation will not accomplish what they intend”; lynching is dying out; “I
want to remind senators of the changing character of the South: an enlightened
public already has rendered such a law virtually unnecessary even if it were
not unwise in its scope.”
At times,
Johnson’s rhetoric grew so impassioned that he went even further than the other
southerners. He denounced
the proposed FEPC, for example, in terms that seemed to suggest that it might
lead to a return of something not far from slavery.
It is
this simple: if the Federal Government can by law tell me whom I shall employ,
it can likewise tell my prospective employees for whom they must work. If the
law can compel me to employ a Negro, it can compel that Negro to work for me.
It might even tell him how long and how hard he would have to work. As I see it, such a law would
do nothing more than enslave a minority.
So
harmful would the proposed FEPC legislation be (it “would necessitate a system
of Federal police officers such as we have never before seen…. It would do
everything but what its sponsors intend…. It would do nothing more than
resurrect ghosts of another day to haunt us again. It would incite and inflame
the passions and prejudices of a people to the extent that the chasm of our
differences would be irreparably widened and deepened”) that, Johnson said, “I
can only hope sincerely that the Senate will never be called upon to entertain
seriously any such proposal again.” And he presented one ingenious new
rationale—a “novel argument,” the Washington Post called it—to
support the right to filibuster. In the recent presidential election, he said,
Harry Truman had been far behind. “But there was no cloture rule on the man in
the White House. There was no rule limiting him to an hour’s debate because two-thirds
of the Nation thought they had heard from him all they could hear, or all they
wanted to hear.” So Truman had kept talking. Because “Mr. Truman … dared to
keep speaking, because Mr. Truman [did] not bow before the opinion of the
majority … the people were listening and were changing their minds.”
Lyndon
Johnson quote on how to manipulate the lowest white man with race
Dean Rusk offered to resign from the Johnson Administration
as Secretary of State when his daughter married a black man
QUOTE
When
Margaret Rusk, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Secretary of State Dean Rusk,
married a black man, Rusk offered to resign to save the Johnson Administration
from embarrassment. (Johnson did not take him up on it.)
UNQUOTE
[“Wedding Bells,” Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker,
May 14, 2002]
September 21, 1967 Headline “Rusk’s Daughter, 18, to
Marry Negro, 22”
https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=DS19670921.2.18&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------1
SAN FRANCISCO (UPI) Margaret Rusk, 18-year-old daughter
of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Guy Smith, 22, a Negro, have taken out a
wedding license. The license was issued late Wednesday in the suburb of Redwood
City, it was learned today. The wedding was expected to take place today at Stanford
Memorial Chapel. Miss Rusk
is a student at Stanford University, where she was scheduled to enroll for the
Fall term as a sophomore. Smith, of East Palo Alto, is a data processor. East Palo
Alto is a community populated largely by Negroes near the Stanford campus. Secretary
Rusk arrived by plane at the Moffet Naval Air Station near San Francisco Wednesday
for what was described as a visit with relatives. The wedding license application
listed the bridegroom’s parents as Clarence and Artemis Smith. Assistant County
Clerk Alfred Davancens of San Mateo County said the license was issued without
having the couple come to the courthouse, at the request of state deparment
security officers. Davancens said Smith was a Negro. Smith is employed by Massey
Temporary services and has been doing work on the space science program. In
Washington, Virginia Wallace, a state department employe who 'handles Mrs.
Rusk’s affairs, confirmed that the Rusks’ daughter was to be married. “I can’t
say anything more at this moment because of security and privacy,” she said.
Miss Wallace declined to give the date, time or place of the wedding or to
comment on the bridegroom’s background. A relative, who declined to be identified,
said Smith had been accepted for Army training as a helicopter pilot. He said no
date was set for Smith to start service but he expected to see duty in Vietnam.
‘‘He knows he will have a rough time over the marriage but he is only worried
about his family, which still is in the South,” he said. Margaret is the Rusks’
only daughter. They have two sons, Richard, 21, and David 26. After his arrival
Wednesday Secretary Rusk joined his wife, Virginia, who had been visiting her
brother, Jack Foise, a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. At Stanford
Memorial Chapel, state department security officers and Stanford campus police
were stationed outside, keeping the curious from the building. The chapel is
located in the center of the Stanford campus at Palo Alto about 40 miles south
of San Francisco.
“Late Secretary
of State Dean Rusk’s Children On Their Father’s Legacy” Shauna Stuart, GPB,
May 29, 2014.
Peggy Rusk-Smith: He was in
Georgetown. He has just graduated from Georgetown. He was in ROTC, so we was
scheduled to go on active duty soon. And we wanted to be married before he did.
Ellen Reinhardt: But then your
wedding photo is on the cover of TIME magazine.
Peggy
Rusk-Smith: (laughter) That was a big shock. We weren’t trying to make any
kind of statement. It has really nothing to do with our relationship. The fact that
everyone else was making a big deal about it was their issue.
Ellen Reinhardt: Your father was colorblind. But at the same time, he offered to step
down as Secretary of State because he was worried that some of the public reaction
to your marriage was going to impact President Johnson. Johnson, of course, refused
his resignation. Did you know about that at the time?
Peggy
Rusk-Smith: He gave me lots of reasons why he thought it would be not a
good idea for us to get married. One was my age. One was the fact that I hadn’t
finished school. One was the fact that they guy was probably going off to Vietnam.
I mean, he definitely believed in equality for all and integration. And he
taught me that, obviously. But, he never brought up race as a reason not to marry,
although he did point out that he was afraid that a lot of the senators and congressmen
who were in powerful positions -- {it} might somehow influence their vote on
supporting President Johnson’s policies.
Rich Rusk: They had a
terrific marriage. Guy died two years ago. He went from that marriage to fly a Huey
Helicopter gunship in Vietnam.
Speech in Austin (1948)[edit]
- This civil rights program about
which you have heard so much 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 fought
it in the Congress. It is the province of the state to run its own elections.
I am opposed to the anti-lynching bill because the federal government has
no business enacting a law against one kind of murder than another... If a
man can tell you who you must hire, he can tell you who not to employ. I
have met this head on.
LBJ “Nigger quotes” https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Lyndon_B._Johnson
Attributed[edit]
If you can convince the lowest
white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking
his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets
for you.
Negroes, they're getting pretty
uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now
they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've
got to do something about this.
I'll have them niggers voting Democratic for two hundred years.
- I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it. If you can
convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't
notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on,
and he'll empty his pockets for you.
- As quoted in "What
a Real President Was Like: To Lyndon Johnson, the Great Society Meant
Hope and Dignity", by Bill
Moyers, The Washington Post (13 November 1988).
- 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!
- Said to his chauffeur, Robert Parker, when Parker said he’d prefer to
be referred to by his name rather than "boy," "nigger"
or "chief." As quoted in Parker,
Robert; Rashke, Richard L. (1989). Capitol Hill in Black
and White. United States:
Penguin Group. p. v. ISBN
0515101893. Retrieved
on 6 January 2015.
- I'm going to have to bring up the nigger bill again.
- Said to a southern U.S. Senator upon the occasion of the Republicans
re-introducing the Civil Right Act of 1957, according to LBJ's Special
Counsel Harry McPherson. As quoted in McPherson, Harry. Interview with
Michael L. Gillette. "Transcript,
Harry McPherson Oral History Interview VI, 5/16/85, by Michael L.
Gillette, LBJLibrary." 16 May 1985.
- Let's face it. Our ass is in a crack. We're gonna have to let this nigger
bill pass.
- Said to Senator John Stennis (D-MS) during debate on the Civil Rights
Act of 1957. As quoted in Caro, Robert
A. (2002). The
Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, Volume 3. New York: Knopf. p. 954. ISBN 0394528360. Retrieved on 6 January 2015.
- Sam, why don't you all let this nigger bill pass?
- Said to Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn (D-TX) regarding the Civil
Rights Act of 1957. As quoted in Dallek,
Robert (1991). Lone Star Rising:
Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908-1960. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
p. 519. ISBN
0195054350. Retrieved
on 5 July 2014.
- These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem
for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political
pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this,
we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down,
not enough to make a difference. For if we don't move at all, then their
allies will line up against us and there'll be no way of stopping them, we'll
lose the filibuster and there'll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts
of wild legislation. It'll be Reconstruction all over again.
- Said to Senator Richard Russell, Jr. (D-GA) regarding the Civil Rights
Act of 1957. As quoted in Lyndon Johnson and
the American Dream (1977), by Doris Kearns Goodwin, New York: New
American Library, p. 155.
- Son, when I appoint a nigger to the court, I want everyone to know he's
a nigger.
- Said to an aide in 1965 regarding the appointment of Thurgood Marshall
as associate justice of the Supreme Court. As quoted in Dallek, Robert (1991). Lone Star Rising: Lyndon
Johnson and His Times, 1908-1960. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. p. 519. ISBN
0195054350. Retrieved
on 5 July 2014.
- I'll have them niggers voting Democratic for two hundred years.
- Said to two governors regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1964, according
to then-Air Force One steward Robert MacMillan. As quoted in Inside the White
House (1996), by Ronald Kessler, New York: Simon and Schuster, p.
33.
- ,
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of
Ascent, p. 70]
Lyndon Johnson saying that he talked about his political
problems over with his “nigger maid” and Lady Bird
QUOTE
Once, in Austin, with a group of people present, he was
asked if he discussed his political problems with Lady Bird. He replied that of
course he did. “Of course,” he said, “I talk my problems over with a lot of
people. I have a nigger maid, and I talk my problems over with her too.”
UNQUOTE
[Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent,
p. 70]
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 statue and American flag
Web Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdjV1AVdynA
Lyndon
Johnson tried to have sex with his black secretary Gerri Whittington over the 4th
of July weekend, 1964. On Thursday, July 2nd, LBJ had signed the
1964 Civil Rights Act
Photos of Gerri Whittington: https://www.google.com/search?q=gerri+whittington+lbj&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=7khlU_jgDIOzyAT72YLQDA&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ&biw=1231&bih=880
“Gerri’s
last trip to the Texas White House would be on the weekend of July 4, 1964.
Lyndon was always so casual and relaxed at the ranch, which, much more than the
real White House, he considered his own space, where he could do as he pleased.
According to his aides in
earlier years, this included nocturnal wanderings with a flashlight into staff bedrooms.
What happened behind those doors is known only to those staff members whose
rooms he entered, but it was certain that others would know he was there. There
was little likelihood that the president of the United States could wander
about in the night - even in his own home - without someone hearing him and
drawing his or her own conclusion. Regardless of his motive, this kind of
behavior would be highly offensive to someone like Gerri, who valued her
reputation as much as anything in life. This was something Lyndon apparently didn’t
understand…. So he
probably gave it little thought before he showed up at Gerri’s room one night
after everyone had retired. Gerri thought
she handled it quite well. Without waiting to learn why he was there,
she told LBJ she wasn’t feeling well, and although it was nothing serious, just
her time of the month, she had to get to sleep. With that, she nixed the
possibility of anything from chitchat to- well, Lyndon did have a reputation,
although with Gerri he had always acted appropriately. He left, and that’s the
way it was. Mulling it over later, she thought perhaps he just wanted to talk.
But this was not the right time or place. She realized, however, that
her calm and quiet brush-off did not assure it would not happen again, and she
wanted to make sure it didn’t. When the president and entourage returned to Washington
after the holiday weekend, Gerri avoided the president while she thought it
over. She told me she had considered resigning, but hoped it wouldn’t come to
that….At the end of the week, when she finally came face to face with the
president in the secretaries’ office, he commented (with some exaggeration and
maybe a little sarcasm), “Did you decide to come to work - haven’t seen you
over here in a week or so?” The secretary keeping the president’s diary that
day noted the comment, as well as some good-natured banter with the other
secretaries.Gerri felt she may have made her pointby her absence.”
[Simeon Booker, Shocking
the Conscience: A Reporter’s Account of the Civil Rights Movement, pp.
244-245]
Email to Robert Morrow on 5/8/14 from Myra
McPherson
I wrote this
in 1974!! With lbj saying 'move over. This is your president' . Source , Carl
Rowan was quoted by name, the woman was not.
Look It Up! The Power Lovers: an intimate look at politicians and their
families.
Myra MacPherson
Author:
The Scarlet Sisters: Sex Suffrage and Scandal in the Gilded Age
Twitter:
@scandalsisters
See the book the Power Lovers, pp. 184-185 by Myra McPherson
for the LBJ crawling in bed with flashlight anecdote
On 12-31-63 Lyndon Johnson helped to integrate
the Forty Acres Club by bringing Gerri Whittington to a New Year’s Eve party
there. This was six months before LBJ tried to “integrate” Gerri at the LBJ Ranch
“New LBJ Library Director to Show
LBJ History Through Modern Lens” – Nov. 21, 2019
QUOTE
One evening,
LBJ decided on a whim that he wanted to attend a party held at the Forty Acres
Club, Lawrence explains: “The problem was that the club was segregated and some
of LBJ’s aides worried that he would mire his presidency in controversy if he went
there.”
“But
Johnson had other ideas. He deliberately walked into the club arm-in-arm with
one of his secretaries, an African-American woman named Gerri Whittington,” says
Lawrence. “From that day onward, the Forty Acres Club was desegregated.”
Lawrence’s
admiration for LBJ is rooted in both the President’s charisma, as well as his commitment
to social justice, and he hopes his enthusiasm for that history reverberates in
his role as the new director of the LBJ Presidential Library, beginning in January
2020.
UNQUOTE
Lyndon Johnson tried to have sex with Washington Star columnist Mary McGrory, age 45, in summer 1964
"LBJ
Asked to Go All the Way" NY Post May 3, 2014 by Geoff Earle
WASHINGTON
- Former President Johnson tried to seduce a famous political journalist.
Washington Star columnist Mary McGrory politely refused Johnson's pitch for a
liaison in summer 1964, Politico magazine reports.
McGrory thought a friend was pulling a prank when a Secret Service agent called
her to say LBJ wanted to meet her at her apartment.
"Mary, I am crazy about you," the married prez told McGrory,
according to her friend New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
McGrory told him she liked the job he was doing, but the admiration ended
there.
-
Geoff Earle
PoliticoWeb Link: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/queen-mary-105906.html#.U2U1mGdOV3x
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/queen-mary-105906/
Photos of Mary McGrory: http://www.politico.com/magazine/gallery/2014/04/mary-mcgrorys-washington/001796-025647.html#.U2VJKGdOV3x
On a quiet summer evening in 1964, Mary McGrory’s phone rang. The caller
identified himself as a Secret Service agent and said that President Johnson
wanted to stop by her apartment in 15 minutes. “Oh, really,” McGrory replied
drolly, sure that the caller was a fellow reporter pulling her leg, but the man
on the line insisted he was serious.
She
went out into the hallway of her apartment building, a drab modern brick affair
a few miles up Connecticut Avenue from the White House, and found several Secret
Service agents standing near the elevator. Realizing that the leader of the
free world was, indeed, on his way, she ran back inside and frantically tidied
up. Several minutes later, the president appeared at her door.
At
age 45, Mary McGrory was already one of the most influential political
columnists in the country, a veteran of three presidential campaigns whose four-times-a-week
musings in the Evening Star were an absolute must-read for everyone from
political pros to the most casual observers. A Bostonian ever proud of her
Irish roots, McGrory had adored President John F. Kennedy, and she had been a
constant behind-the-scenes presence during the Camelot years. So she was no stranger
to power, but the impromptu nature of Johnson’s visit was unnerving.
McGrory
invited him in and offered the president a drink. They engaged in some friendly
small talk until Johnson, tumbler of scotch in his large hand, finally put his
cards on the table. “Mary, I am crazy about you,” he confessed. He wanted to sleep
with her.
Then,
in what has to be one of the most awkward and unromantic propositions in presidential
history, Johnson tried to make the case that since McGrory had always admired
Kennedy, she should now transfer her affections to him. “He wanted to have a reporter
who had been their favorite reporter,” says Maureen Dowd, the New York Times
columnist and McGrory protégée who heard about the encounter from McGrory and
attributed it to LBJ’s perpetual rivalry with the Kennedys. “It wasn’t so much
him pouncing on her as him competing with JFK.” In LBJ’s mind, sleeping with
McGrory, like raising the height of the toilets in the White House, was just
another way to one-up the late president. As McGrory’s friend Phil Gailey put it
to me, “He assumed, I guess, that the only reason she loved the Kennedys was
because they had power. What a klutz.”
Listening
to Johnson’s declaration, McGrory later told her friends, she felt flattered,
startled and mortified at the same time. She took a deep breath and said, “I admire
you, Mr. President, and I always will. And I think you are doing a terrific
job, and that is where it stops—right there.”
President
Johnson finished his drink and said, “I just wanted you to know.”
“Now
I know,” she replied. “Thank you.”
And with that, the president and his Secret Service detail left.
Hi, Robert! As I wrote on my FB post,
she did not actually say she was a mistress; I had to put two and two together.
Not difficult, but without an outright admission on her part I would be reluctant
to name her ... However, if you'd like a name, I can tell you that NBC reporter
Cassie Mackin was a paramour of LBJ's.
This was described in one of the oral histories I transcribed; the interview was with a male colleague of hers. This would be on file at the LBJ Library. Unfortunately, after all these years, I can't remember the name of the interviewee, so it would take some research at the library to find it. And it might still be classified ... It's great hearing from you, Robert. I've been following your research and am interested in this new book you co-authored with Roger Stone. Please stay in touch ... Mack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Mackin
Yes, anything that moved was fair
game for Lyndon ... Cassie Mackin covered his 1960 campaign, which indicates
they went way back, before the tryst during his presidency (described in the
oral history).
The Shrinking of Lyndon Johnson
He wasn’t the arm-twisting, indomitable genius of
Robert Caro’s imagination
By
February 9, 2014
https://newrepublic.com/article/116404/lbjs-civil-rights-act-arm-twisting-was-myth
A few minutes after he signed the Civil Rights Acton July 2, 1964,
President Lyndon B. Johnson presented Hubert Humphrey, who had led the fight
for its passage in the Senate, with a copy of his signing speech. On it, the
president wrote, “without whom it couldn’t have happened.”
Johnson wasn’t one to share credit easily, but he understood a simple
fact about Washington: Humphrey—and the dozens of other people who made the
bill happen—would be relegated to a footnote, and history would give credit to
the man who signed it. And he was right. Three days later, The New York Times credited
Johnson as “the man who pushed [the bill] through Congress.”
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, and
the impression that Johnson single-handedly drove his forces in the Senate, manipulating
his opponents with flawless ease, has only grown with time. In the latest
volume of his acclaimed Johnson biography,
2012’s The Passage of Power,
Robert Caro largely parrots Johnson’s own account of the period: “It was a
struggle,” he writes, “whose strategy and day-by-day tactics were laid out and
directed by him.” And the play All the Way, which opened last
fall with “Breaking Bad”’s Bryan Cranston in the role of Johnson, likewise
portrays the president as the omniscient political manipulator.
But this is mostly myth. Johnson
had many legislative achievements during his presidency, but on the Civil
Rights Act, he was largely ignored by his Senate allies and rebuffed by the recipients
of his bear-hugging affection. The real work was performed by a long list of senators
and representatives, their staffers, and a dream team of Department of Justice
men who included Robert Kennedy, Nicholas Katzenbach, and Burke Marshall—not to
mention civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., who built immense
moral momentum behind the bill.
Correcting the record isn’t just a matter of historical
rebalancing. Fifty years later, pundits, enemies, and even fellow Democrats
criticize Barack Obama for not being more of an arm-twisting, hard-nosed
partisan like Johnson. (According to a recent New Yorker profile of Obama, Caro even felt it necessary to
explain to the president at a White House dinner that his book “wasn’t an
unspoken attack on you.”) But on what many consider his most famous piece of
legislation, Johnson was at best a supporting player. The question is, does
that indict Johnson, or does it point to something more fundamental about how
we judge our political leaders—and how American politics actually works?
One reason Johnson gets credit for the bill’s success
is his legendary ability to wheedle and threaten and beg to get what he wanted,
the so-called Johnson treatment. But in the case of the Civil Rights bill, Johnson’s strong-arm tactics
misfired. When he took office in November 1963, the bill was stuck in the House
Rules Committee, which approves legislation before it goes to the floor and
which was run by the arch-segregationist Howard Smith of Virginia. Johnson demanded
that the Democrats issue a discharge petition, in which a majority of House members
can force the committee to release a bill. But the petition was a lost cause,
and, in the end, quiet bipartisan negotiations, not Oval Office big-footing,
got the bill out of Smith’s clutches.
The president was equally out of
touch with the Senate. During the run-up to the filibuster, he
demanded that Mike Mansfield, Johnson’s successor as majority leader, “get out
the cots”—that is, force the Senate into 24-hour sessions as a way of wearing down
the senescent Southern Democrats. But Mansfield, a quiet, pipe-smoking ex-Marine, respectful of Senate tradition
and deferential to each senator’s independence, did all he could to keep the
president at a remove from his chamber. When a visiting group of rabbis urged
Mansfield to follow the president’s advice, the majority leader replied
bluntly: “When Johnson was majority leader, he ran things the way he wanted
them. Now I am majority leader and will run things the way I want them.” The cots
did not come out.
Believers in Johnson as the bill’s primary mover often point to marching
orders he handed down to Humphrey during the filibuster. After Humphrey went on
“Meet the Press” on March 8, 1964, to praise Everett Dirksen, the Senate minority
leader who held the key to dozens of fence-sitting votes, Johnson gave him a
congratulatory call. “Boy, that was right,” he said, and he encouraged the senator
to do more of the same. “You drink with Dirksen! You talk to Dirksen! You
listen to Dirksen!”
It’s a great quote. But it’s
cheerleading, not strategizing. And if getting close to Dirksen was a new idea
for Johnson, he was the last of the bill’s supporters to discover it: John F.
Kennedy and his staff began courting Dirksen before they even introduced the bill
in June 1963.
Even Humphrey, a Johnson partisan, conceded in a memo written shortly after
the filibuster ended that the president did not play much of a role on the bill: “We did give him regular reports
on the progress of civil rights over at the Tuesday morning breakfasts. But the
president was not put on the spot. He was not enlisted in the battle
particularly. I understand he did contact some of the senators, but not at our
insistence.”
The impact of that senatorial outreach was minimal. Johnson won over just one vote
for cloture: Carl Hayden of Arizona. And Hayden, who was pro-civil-rights but
supported filibustering on principle, merely agreed to absent himself during
the cloture vote. Johnson failed to swing a single Southern Democrat, despite
the fact that several, including J. William Fulbright of Arkansas and Al Gore
Sr. of Tennessee, were considered possible converts.
Perceptive journalists picked up on this. “As majority
leader, the president was all muscle and scant conversation. In the present impasse, the criticism
is freely heard that the reverse is true,” wrote the columnist Doris Fleeson
in The Washington Star on April 22, 1964.
Not that Johnson didn’t try. On April 10, he called West Virginia Senator
Robert Byrd, who caucused with the Southern Democrats against civil rights.
“You’re with me! You’ve got to be with me,” he implored.
But Byrd was unmoved: “No, my convictions are against the bill.” Johnson
tried a different tack. It was, after all, an election year. “It’s going to be rougher
if I don’t pass that bill.”
“No, it won’t either.”
“Yes it will. Are y’all going to beat it?” the president asked,
referring to the Southern Democrats.
“I hope to hell we beat it,” Byrd said.
Soon after, Johnson hung up in dismay.
Johnson did make two considerable contributions to the
bill’s success. In The Passage of Power,
Caro documents at length how the president labored successfully to get Senator
Harry Byrd, the Finance Committee chairman, to release the administration’s
$11.5 billion tax-cut bill in time to clear the Senate before the filibuster.
As Caro argues (and Johnson believed), had Byrd kept the tax cut back, the
Southerners could possibly have used it as a hostage to force a compromise on
the Civil Rights bill.
But Johnson’s
most important contribution was symbolic.
His speeches, from the first time he addressed a joint session of Congress on
November 27, 1963, are filled with demands that Congress pass a strong Civil
Rights bill. It took courage, in an election year, to put the full weight of the
presidency behind such a controversial measure. Johnson was also hedging his bets, though. When asked at
a press conference five months later whether the bill was moving fast enough,
he said, “That is a matter for the Senate to determine.” Even as he supported
the bill, Johnson didn’t want to catch the blame if Humphrey and his team failed.
The fact is, no single person made the bill happen. And while this lesson
is particularly true for the Civil Rights Act, it is also true for the history of
American lawmaking in general. When we talk about landmark actions by the
federal government, we tend to let the respective president take the credit (or
blame). We recall that it was Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves, even though
dozens of congressmen wrote and supported the laws that pushed him to sign the
Emancipation Proclamation. The Affordable Care Act is labeled “Obamacare” by
its detractors and supporters, even though Obama consciously let Congress take
the lead on crafting the bill.
But reducing a law’s history to the actions of a single person obscures
the complexities and compromises that define it and its lessons for future
lawmakers. This year we will hear a lot about the Civil Rights Act as one of
Johnson’s signature accomplishments. If we leave it at that, we will miss much
of what the bill’s story has to tell us—about how to achieve bipartisan
cooperation, about the role of social activism in policy-making, and about the
limits of the executive branch when it comes to crafting landmark legislation.
On the evening of June 19, 1964, a few
hours after the Senate voted to pass the Civil Rights Act, Humphrey strode out
onto the eastern steps of the Capitol, where he found several hundred civil rights
well-wishers. “Freedom!” they shouted. “You gave us justice, senator.” Humphrey
beamed. President Johnson was nowhere in sight.
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