taking sides: lyndon baines johnson vs. richard milhous nixon

you should read caro's means of ascent -- a/k/a how LBJ got his original nickname, "landslide lyndon" -- for some real hellish machiavellianism!

Johnson's "sonofabitch" vs. Nixon's "cocksucker"

Nixon who saw the same political facts and in response devised the infamous "Southern strategy" to win the solid South for the Party of Lincoln, by turning it into the party of preference for southern racists.

LBJ also had the guts to withdraw from the race after the New Hampshire primary, even though he was a sitting president and he actually won that primary. Eugene McCarthy only got 38% of the New Hampshire vote in '68.

Nixon, even after Watergate had busted wide open and his many, many crimes were common knowledge practically had to be pried out of office with a crowbar.

LBJ screwed up badly in Vietnam and mired the country in an unwinnable war. Nixon was a flat-out war criminal.

So, LBJ gets my vote, if those are the only two choices. No contest.

er not to be an apologist (I don't think this is being one anyway but still need to put that disclaimer out there) but the political facts were not the same as Nixon had to contend with George Wallace running against him, whereas LBJ didn't.

1. he was running barely less than a year after JFK ate it in Dallas.
2. he was running against Goldwater, a total nutcase who LBJ very astutely portrayed as such.

But Nixon's southern strategy was more a long term plan than a short term tactic. A glance will show that the solid south has now turned pretty solidly Republican - which is where Nixon wanted it. He taught others to follow the path he trod first.

Nixon - a raving lunatic. The nearest thing to a certifiably insane nutbag the USA has ever had in the White House.

Both therefore have their advantages.

"If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest shopping center in the world?" - Nixon

hunter s. thompson, "he was a crook," rolling stone (Jun. 16, 1994).

http://www.albion.edu/history/tchambers/mencken.htm

Love this thread, and also just finished Walter Isaacson's Kissinger; it's impossible, after also reading Sy Hersh's Kiss bio and Hitchens' Trial of Henry Kissinger to decide who was more corrupt.

damn, we missed the party yesterday.

http://lbj100.org/

Last night I was listening to an interview on the radio (NPR program: On the Media) with an author who has just released a book about the newspaper columnist and muckraker, Jack Anderson, a guy who broke a lot of scandals involving Nixon, starting in 1952 and continuing for a couple of decades.

It seems this author interviewed E. Howard Hunt before Hunt's death. There, on tape, Hunt discussed a plan hatched by our hero, Richard Nixon, to assassinate Jack Anderson. Hunt and that other great American hero, G. Gordon Liddy, apparently spent a couple of weeks tailing Anderson, trying to figure out how to cause a fatal auto accident or else break into his home and slip poison into Anderson's medicine.

Nixon: so much more than batshit insane, he was one baby step from serial killer.

that is also cited in Summer's "Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon"

May God bless you all, and may God bless the United States of America! Nixon was raised a Quaker, too.

You can bet I've got a ticket for this:

http://www.hotdocs.ca//film/title/our_nixon

Deeee-lighted that declassified documents show Nixon interfered with the Paris peace talks.

Hasn't that been known for a long time--that he was mucking around in the background just before the '68 election? Or maybe he was just gumming things up with public pronouncements, I can't remember.

So much body language. It's like they're all saying "The fuck?"

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e2/Lyndon_Johnson_and_Nixon,_withAgnew.jpg/1024px-Lyndon_Johnson_and_Nixon,_withAgnew.jpg

And who knew that LBJ inspired the dictatorial jumpsuit/sunglasses combo.

Hasn't that been known for a long time--that he was mucking around in the background just before the '68 election? Or maybe he was just gumming things up with public pronouncements, I can't remember.

Hersh and Hitchens, among others, have mentioned it. Now apparently we know memos written by Walt Rostow, LBJ's NSA, confirming this happened.

I just got done reading The Presidents Club, and there's a big part about all this in the LBJ/RMN chapter.

LBJ let Nixon know that he knew about his spoiling the talks. LBJ called it treason, but never said anything public about it.

Once Nixon got in, he started getting paranoid and wanted to know how LBJ had bugged his plane (he hadn't) and how they could turn this around on Johnson.

Kissenger suggested they could say Humphrey was in on it, and Nixon laughs and goes "Aw hell no. Who'd believe that?"

Haldeman mentions that LBJ bugged HHH too, they all laugh again, and then go bomb Cambodia. Great book.

I alluded to that book (a good read) in the Watergate thread, but if I'm remembering correctly it doesn't link the Plumbers to Nixon's obsession with what LBJ knew.

http://news.yahoo.com/nixon-mocked-democrats-jerusalem-position-071323064--politics.html

I've watched both their American Experiences within the past few weeks (they aired close together, around '90-91). Many similarities, obvious differences. Thought the LBJ was especially good.

Who was Richard Nixon? He was supposed to be Quaker. Some say his father was a lemon rancher. Nobody believed he was real. Nobody ever saw him or knew anybody that ever worked directly for him, but to hear Woodward tell it, anybody could have worked for Nixon. You never knew. That was his power. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. And like that, 39 years ago today, poof. He was gone.

LBJ ALL THE FUCKING WAY. 2nd favorite pres after Lincoln.

would take nixon over either clinton any day, though.

(hrrmph. carry on.)

rip, nixon. sure. there've been worse.

http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1362833609l/17286954.jpg

Cheerful Christmas reading.

Attempts to rehab his rep:

Asked how her father would ultimately be judged, she responded: “I think that’s something the historians will look at. But can you think of where we would be without Lyndon Johnson? If we had not passed a civil rights bill? Before Daddy, we didn’t have any federal aid to education. The immigration bill. Think of what we would be like if Daddy hadn’t signed that bill.”

Mark K. Updegrove, the director of the L.B.J. Presidential Library and the author of a Johnson biography, said that Vietnam will forever keep Johnson out of the ranks of America’s greatest presidents. Most historians “would place L.B.J. in the ‘near great’ category, the second quintile of presidents,” along with Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, Harry S. Truman and Theodore Roosevelt, Mr. Updegrove said, adding, “There’s no question he should be judged on the entirety of his policy.

“At the same time, we want to make people aware of all the things he got done, which is nothing short of remarkable,” he said.

The events here are not the only ones that might prompt a reconsideration: “All the Way,” a play depicting Johnson’s presidency starting on the day after the Kennedy assassination, is now on Broadway, with Bryan Cranston portraying Johnson. It focuses on his struggle to pass the civil rights bill and on the 1964 election campaign.

Vietnam is just one reason that Johnson is regarded with relatively low esteem today, historians said. His image has suffered, they said, as liberalism has come under attack over the past 40 years. “He was the ultimate liberal president — he believed government was there to help,” Mr. Califano said. “The Republicans so beat us up on that score, and no one was there to answer.”

So Richard Nixon is pig swill after all.

Did Richard Nixon’s campaign conspire to scuttle the Vietnam War peace talks on the eve of the 1968 election to capture him the presidency?

Absolutely, says Tom Charles Huston, the author of a comprehensive, still-secret report he prepared as a White House aide to Nixon. In one of 10 oral histories conducted by the National Archives and opened last week, Huston says “there is no question” that Nixon campaign aides sent a message to the South Vietnamese government, promising better terms if it obstructed the talks, and helped Nixon get elected.

Nixon’s campaign manager, John Mitchell, “was directly involved,” Huston tells interviewer Timothy Naftali. And while “there is no evidence that I found” that Nixon participated, it is “inconceivable to me,” says Huston, that Mitchell “acted on his own initiative.”

Huston’s comments—transcribed and publishedon the web site of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California on Wednesday—are the latest twist in a longstanding tale of political skullduggery involving Nixon and his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson. It is a tale that features a secret “X-file,” a mysterious “Dragon Lady” and reports of wiretaps and bugging that has captured the imagination of scholars and conspiracy theorists for half a century.

i thought this was known for a while - or was it just rumored and is now being confirmed?

Suspected for a while -- Sy Hersh uncovered it in his '83 Kissinger bio.

as more documents get declassified (i.e. the one in '07 and '08 in which an enraged LBJ calls Nixon a traitor in a phone chat with minority leader Dirksen).

yeah this is not entirely new, it's just getting corroborated more and more as time goes by

that politico piece is quite poorly written

so I bought The Invisible Bridge and am 200 pgs in. I didn't know it would recount Watergate all over again, and that would it be gripping...all over again.

A prodigious feat of research, this. Unlike many biographers, Perlstein quotes political cartoons, editorials in obscure small town Nebraska newspapers, letters to the editor; he spent time with microfilm and microfiche. He also turns the book into cultural history: the explosion of intereset in the occult (e.g. The Exorcist), Nixon's price controls (dictating down to the cent how much the federal government could spend on steak and milk, "like a Soviet commissar," Perlstein writes, savoring the irony).

having lived through that as a pubescent, i would just get depressed

he also acknowledges tacitly Reagan's political genius: the actor's instinct for knowing the audience and how much it would tolerate. Reagan, the only major Republican to stand by Nixon through and after the end, stood in place while the establishment eventually swung his way, despite setbacks like the '74 midterms, Ford's beating him to the nomination.

i read the Frank Rich review, w/ Jim Baker (on Ford's team) & co astonised that 'these right-wing nuts are beating us'

sorry, i credit 'Merican idiocy over any genius of Reagan's.

you and your binaries

you're a Catholic. Have you learned nothing from Bunuel

he's a moron, he couldn't learn anything from anne sullivan. does perlstein go into the 72-74 food crisis? one of those things that had long term impact in so many areas but gets ridiculously little attention ime. always been curious to what extent the right wing base stood by nixon or at least rejected the msm narrative on watergate, there were precedents w/ kent state and lt calley but those also offered opportunities to not only reject liberal orthodoxy but also engage in bloodlust. reagan standing by him is interesting.

does perlstein go into the 72-74 food crisis? o

Oh, lots -- he includes a segment depicting the pathetic efforts by Dick's Pat-like food services administrator explaining that hearts, kidneys, livers, and other viscera make splendid meat substitutes if cooked correctly.

By late '73 only Reagan stood by him.

also mentions the best sellingPlain Speaking by Merle Miller, hagiographic nonsense about Harry Truman that according to him the nation wanted to believe despite the truth: "Harry S. Truman had made the most extraordinary extensions of executive authority in the history of the office, an entire new national security state, licensing many of the practices later associated with Joseph McCarthy."

Also discusses the national debut of speechwriter and professional belligerent Pat Buchanan at the Watergate Special Committee. He was so open about the perfidy of the Nixon administration and why it needed doing -- no apologies, just the smile and Irish charm that would mesmerize green rooms for the next 40 years -- that young Hannity was taking notes.

Just put it on order yesterday, so I could get the online discount.

thought this'd be about the 50th anniversary of gulf of tonkin (i.e., today).

i read 'plain speaking' when i was like 19 and went through a very brief 'yeah truman!' phase. was crestfallen to realize later that most of it was basically just truman making shit up.

hey balls, kill yourself

also if you even refer to me on so much as a film thread i will hunt you down

as for Nixon, i'm through obsessing on him when Obama makes him look like St Francis

i referred to you. times to get those toes to twinkling bill casey.

i'm through obsessing on him when Obama makes him look like St Francis

― son of a lewd monk (Dr Morbius),

are you fucking kidding me

number of civilian deaths from drone strikes, 2009-present: 2,400+

number of civilian deaths in operation rolling thunder, 1969-70, and operation freedom deal, 1970-73: 40,000 to 150,000

shall we look at civil liberties next

shall we?

howbout we just forget it and you can continue to give RWR a 10 in 'genius'

are you really so addled? you're the one who said Nixon was St. Francis compared to Obama.

i don't see those toes twinkling morbs. let's get a move on already.

Well, hell. Now that you mention it.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fb/Saint_Francis_of_Assisi_by_Jusepe_de_Ribera.jpg/475px-Saint_Francis_of_Assisi_by_Jusepe_de_Ribera.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Richard_Nixon_victory_wave.jpg

shall we look at civil liberties next

i realize nothing's going to shake you from the stance that obama is The Worst Ever on every single issue, but damned if i can find a single fucking reason to be nostalgic for a president who used his power to harass and spy on people he personally disliked, ordered his goons to commit break-ins and theft, wanted to blow up a building to prevent the pentagon papers from being published, and said on television that the presidency grants you the right to break any law you feel like.

trying to imagine Eric Holder testifying before Congress like John Mitchell, blithely telling legislators that the loss of Richard Nixon in 1972 mattered more than the Constitution.

anyone read Nixonland? how is it if so? i quite fancy the idea of this Invisible Bridge book, but i just re-read All The President's Men and The Final Days so i may well be Nixoned out for a good year at least.

it and the goldwater book (before the storm) are both must-read. start with the goldwater cuz you're supposed to anyway and you'll have (kind of) a nixon break. the main thing i remember him doing in that book (maybe even accurately) is shooting out a hand to keep pat in her seat when the rest of the RNC rises to applaud "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice".

what alfred says about the granularity of sources goes for the other two books as well. nixonland in particular is a terrifying panorama.

thanks yeah i must read that Goldwater one too, i know next to nothing about him.

anyone read Nixonland?

best US politics book I've read.

i realize nothing's going to shake you from the stance that obama is The Worst Ever on every single issue, but damned if i can find a single fucking reason to be nostalgic for a president who used his power to harass and spy on people he personally disliked, ordered his goons to commit break-ins and theft, wanted to blow up a building to prevent the pentagon papers from being published, and said on television that the presidency grants you the right to break any law you feel like.

am guessing these facts will mean little to the armond white of political opinions

yes JD, obv Obama Holder & Co are the more competent, stealthy evil

(and their national surveillance state is mainstream -- it's Nixonworld now)

also fuck you all and please kill me

you know, when you express opinions that people find incomprehensible, you shouldn't be surprised when they challenge you to explain them. it's called conversation, or debate, or whatever. you might even find that you can win people over to your side if you explain why you feel so aggrieved. that you always greet these requests for elaboration with threats of violence and impotent rage just makes you seem full of shit. and i'm guessing that you're actually not, but you're offering precious little evidence of anything else. i mean, you're just doing this for the attention at this point, aren't you?

[cue splenetic and pointless reply along with threat to never darken this thread again in 3... 2... 1...]

TPM has anexcerpt.

Ha, Alfred. Why didn't you say something?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fb/Saint_Francis_of_Assisi_by_Jusepe_de_Ribera.jpg/475px-Saint_Francis_of_Assisi_by_Jusepe_de_Ribera.jpg

http://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_982w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2014/07/21/BookWorld/Images/Invisible%20Bridge.jpg

That's a great cover.

Man yeah thats incredible

I want this book so bad.

check out Reagan rising!

also:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWV6V4JYEUw

oh you're all over here. i put this on that reagan thread:

perlstein update! they're going after him for plagiarism

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/business/media/rick-perlsteins-the-invisible-bridge-draws-criticism.html

oh i'm for sure buying it now.

― ♪♫ teenage wasteman ♪♫ (goole), Tuesday, August 5, 2014 11:06 AM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah that 'controversy' is laughable

I've done enough research to sympathize with any attempt to simply the act of collation.

having the endnotes on a website makes perfect sense to me.

i mean, nixonland almost broke my back carrying it around while i was reading it.

sorry morbs, as per usual i foolishly assumed your posting on a message board full of ppl with diverse views meant you were interested in a conversation, as opposed to just throwing out glib statements with an undertone of "y'all can't handle the truth" and offering either more of the same or "fuck you" when asked to back them up, will try to avoid making that mistake in the future.

go have a conversation with 'balls'

morbs when you're curled up on the floor in the middle of the night, crying and moaning about how you turned into such a dumb miserable fuck, a bigot playing out his last days online defending child rape and richard nixon, when you're there on the floor, thinking about how it'll all be over soon and how few will notice and fewer still care, do you take those deep intake sobs where it's almost like you're hyperventilating and you can hear the emptiness of your thick skull? cuz that's how i picture. or do you just lie there, silent, unblinking, urinating all over yrself? the latter seems to subtle and lacking of self pity for you ime so it's the sobs right?

Man what is your problem

bumping to flag that post

wtf balls

let's all use our FPs judiciously

i bet that sounded really great in your head

i said it out loud b4 i typed

(test the good stuff that way)

the armond white of political opinions

hey hey now balls, that was a mean thing to say to the guy who told you to die

mine was an xp but whatevs

"go die" is standard Tombot shit

also Obama needs to be credited with his share of the billions (ie everyone) who will die in climate change

'superior' to Nixon in prosecuting whistleblowers as well

oh no Armondized by the guy who worships Brian fucking de Palma

hooray!

i support balls

hang in there balls

example #2,457,478 in the never-ending "morbz can dish it out but can't take it" exhibition:

http://www.ashcroftsurgery.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/crying-baby.jpg

http://www.gotfuturama.com/Multimedia/FrameGrabs/2ACV17/Grabs/pic00612.jpg

What balls said was disgusting. No amount of obtuseness or dickishness can justify that sort of post. Wtf is wrong with everyone

Nixon.

http://i.imgur.com/HNaVoNk.jpg

^^^ A+

all i'm saying is, don't throw a punch if you've got a glass jaw.

that shit is Nixonian (to bring this back to something related to this thread's purpose).

yer still a sad little creep

Morbs, his point is legit whether you acknowledge it or not.

per the new board style, no more name-calling from me til ppl get cancer.

as you were

http://www.whha.org/photographs/white-house-administrations/images/nixon-oval-office-on-phone.jpg

"When you're curled up on the floor in the middle of the night, crying and moaning about how you turned into such a dumb miserable fuck, how few will notice and fewer still care, do you take those deep intake sobs where it's almost like you're hyperventilating and you can hear the emptiness of your thick skull?"

http://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdoodyh7bZ1qe7o43o1_500.jpg

"What? Who is this?"

http://www.motherjones.com/files/nixon-phone.jpg

"Yeah, that's what I thought." *click*

http://www.whitehousemuseum.org/west-wing/oval-office/oval-office-1969-apollo.jpg

"When you're curled up on the floor in the middle of the night, crying and moaning about how you turned into such a dumb miserable fuck, how few will notice and fewer still care, do you take those deep intake sobs where it's almost like you're hyperventilating and you can hear the emptiness of your thick skull?"

http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/intel/2011/03/25/25_reagan.o.jpg/a_560x375.jpg

"Sorry. Couldn't quite make out that last part!"

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2013/6/13/1371125278391/Richard-Nixon-007.jpg

"Damn, nothing gets to that guy."

http://thewallbreakers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/JFK_1960_21.jpg

"When you're curled up on the floor in the middle of the night, crying and moaning about how you turned into such a dumb miserable fuck, how few will notice and fewer still care, do you take those deep intake sobs where it's almost like you're hyperventilating and you can hear the emptiness of your thick skull?"

http://blog.chron.com/txpotomac/files/legacy/lbj.jpg

"Wait, now just wait. Not sure how I got this iPhone here in 1969, but just wait a cotton-picking second here while I work this thing out. Bird!"

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/web/ddd/includes/images/475/185.jpg

"Goddamm chickenshit hillbillies."

Amazing thing about this pair is that I think they would have really gotten each other. Not liked each other at all but here's two proper old-school prewar assholes who probably saw most of the changes taking place in America through fairly similar lenses - can't see Nixon loathing LBJ the way he would the Kennedys or whoever. I'm sure there's actual facts to back up/contradict this reading.

http://blog.nixonfoundation.org/files/2011/05/1.jpg

They both disliked the Kennedys. They both came from the West. They both had the same us-or-them attitude about everyone they met. Had it not been for Nixon purposefully sabotaging peace plans to end the war in 1968, they might've become buds.

i'd like to think that chair in the foreground is obscuring, like, a giant bowl of ham salad

Here is the leader of the free world and his would-be successors sounding like they're callers on the Paul Finebaum Show.

President Johnson: Now--so I think it’s very important this be confidential. Do you know whether your talking to me is knowledge to any of your people?

Nixon: Well, in my case, the phone was picked up by somebody here. I’m at the Union Station in Kansas City. The phone was picked up by somebody else. It may be known, but I will seal them down. I’ll just tell them we got a routine report.

President Johnson: OK. If anybody asks, we will not mention it here. If they ask us, we'll say that we stated the facts as we see them, namely, that there has been no agreement between us, that we will constantly negotiate, and when there is, why, the candidates will be among the first informed...

Humphrey: Mr. President?

President Johnson: Yes?

Humphrey: It’s obvious that I’m here at a school and I’m all alone. There’s nobody with me, and they do not know that I’ve got a call from you. But I’ve been held up in a meeting, and that press is always very alert. I’m just simply--is it all right just simply to say that we’ve had our regular report?

Nixon: That’s good.

Politically, however, (JFK and Nixon) were not continents apart. They agreed, for example, on the threat of communism. Kennedy had voted to continue funding the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and favored the latest version of the Mundt-Nixon internal-security bill. Like Nixon, he strongly hinted that Truman’s policy of vacillation had led to “losing” China and inviting Communist advances in Korea. He favored aid to Franco’s Spain and vast increases in the Pentagon budget.

Both congressmen felt that organized labor had grown too powerful. Earlier that year, upon receiving an honorary degree at Notre Dame, Kennedy had warned of the “ever expanding power of the Federal government” and “putting all major problems” into the all-absorbing hands of the great Leviathan the state....

Speaking to a group of students at Harvard three days after the election that autumn, Congressman Kennedy remarked that he was “personally very happy” that Nixon had defeated Helen Douglas. He reportedly explained that Douglas was “not the sort of person I like working with on committees,” but he did not make clear whether this was because of her manner, her politics, or her gender. On November 14, Kennedy wrote his friend Paul Fay, “I was glad to…see Nixon win by a big vote,” and he predicted that the winner would go far in national GOP politics, for he was “an outstanding guy.”

http://www.thenation.com/blog/168769/when-jfk-backed-nixon-against-progressive-woman#

Amazing thing about this pair is that I think they would have really gotten each other. Not liked each other at all but here's two proper old-school prewar assholes who probably saw most of the changes taking place in America through fairly similar lense

oh you weren't talking about Morbs and balls

JFK ran "to the right" of Nixon on the missile gap (which didn't exist). He talked tougher than Ike ever did.

LBJ and Nixon had mutual respect: both in the Congress at the same time, both loving J. Edgar Hoover. Nixon more afraid of LBJ, who wasn't afraid of anyone. Never understood why in the last year of his life he didn't just say "ah fuck it I'm dying" and release what he knew about the Nixon people and Chennault.

ask Oliver Stone

certainly by 1969 Nixon was scared shitless of J Edgar

you can tell i'm a postwar asshole bcz i'm culling my FB friends list

In everything I've ever read on Nixon, I think it's the commonly held view that he and LBJ were in sync on most everything by '68 and '69.

Nixon and Haldeman were careful to give LBJ any national security briefings they got: keep your enemies close, etc

I can't quite remember--was it LBJ's preference even that Nixon won in '68? I know that seems like a stretch, but I seem to remember that he had very mixed feelings about Humphrey.

LBJ was a mess by the end. He held evidence that Nixon's people had approached through an independent operative (Chennaut) the South Vietnamese about holding out (prob because LBJ had bugged Nixon's people) and thought Nixon would try to dismantle the Great Society.

These guys - Nixon, John Dean, Bob Haldeman - trying to figure out how to excuse their tape recordings by using the "he did it too!" defense, going back to LBJ bugging Nixon's plane and discovering the whole Chennault affair.

President Nixon: The difficulty with using it, of course, is that it reflects on Johnson.

Dean: Right.

President Nixon: He ordered it. If it weren't for that, I'd use it. Is there any way we could use it without reflecting on Johnson? How--“could we say that the Democratic National Committee did it? No, the FBI did the bugging, though.

Haldeman: That's the problem.

Dean: Is it going to reflect on Johnson or Humphrey?

Haldeman: Johnson. Humphrey didn't do it.

Dean: Humphrey didn't do it?

President Nixon: Oh, hell no.

Haldeman: He was bugging Humphrey, too.

All three men laugh.

President Nixon: Well, God damn.

Haldeman laughs.

Nixon was in the Senate while LBJ was there, not to mention he was VP when LBJ was Senate Majority Leader. the real story is that there's so little about their interactions till 1968 or so -- given all of the info about the both of them out there now, neither was really on the other's radar until late in the game. unless there's some book on LBJ and Nixon interacting that i've missed.

The President's Club and Master of the Senate mention their relationship. Remember: Nixon was four years a congressman but barely in the Senate (he didn't finish his term). Their paths started crossing when Nixon was veep and LBJ was minority then majority leader.

DICK: Johnson was all in the bugging. He had the mics in the compartment, picking up everything. Tell you what, probably every conversation I had on that plane was violated, Mr. Hey Hey back there with his headphones on.

BOB: Hubert getting his bugging from Johnson too, if you know what I mean.

DICK: Well, god damn yeah.

Here's the famous chat in which LBJ signals to Nixon, "I'm on to your shit." Reportedly Nixon's aides laughed hysterically in the background.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52PQxRMGraA

pplains doing some truly expert curation itt

George Wallace: Hello?

I mean seriously. I'm posting a screengrab instead of a copy-and-paste to illustrate not so much what was said (though that's more important), but just to illustrate how ludicrous that phone call must have been. (Hell, the audio's on that link above, hear it for yourself.)

http://i.imgur.com/yVrRB7e.png

so um did anyone notice that George Fucking Will confirmed what Hersh, Hitchens, Robert Parry, etc already knew: that Nixon sabotaged the '68 peace talks?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-f-will-nixons-long-shadow/2014/08/06/fad8c00c-1ccb-11e4-ae54-0cfe1f974f8a_story.html

Weird. Why?

why what?

I dont get why this is a thing he would write about, what his conservative angle is

To admit that a former GOP prez wasnt just a criminal but a traitor

he's always loathed Nixon, and look at the last paragraphs about the IRS: note the implicit Obama dig.

Minor weird aside: John Dean is on twitter - @JohnWDean

He's got a new Watergate book too.

I don't Twitter, but Nixon is possibly the only person ever I would have followed. Him, some liquor in close proximity, and a laptop--you couldn't ask for anything more.

Really, somebody fully fluent in Nixonese ought to set up a fake account--possibly somebody already has.

be the change you want to see in the world

as nixon himself famously said, if i'm not mistaken

Goddammit, Bob, this time we're playing for keeps. Fuck them all--maybe I will. (Seriously, I'd lose interest quickly. But someone could pull it off, like that Old Hoss Radbourn account--get on there and comment on everything that happens in Nixon's voice.)

Billy West described his Nixon voice for Futurama as "being on the verge of turning into a werewolf." Can't shake that description.

Really, somebody fully fluent in Nixonese ought to set up a fake account--possibly somebody already has.

― clemenza, Wednesday, August 13, 2014 5:31 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://twitter.com/dick_nixon

Hillary is well-positioned to be the New Nixon; hopefully on an election eve she'll go on TV and say "It's down to the nut-cutting."

(xpost) Thanks--figured someone would already have that underway. I'm scrolling through, and it's sometimes pretty good: "Betty Bacall was never one of our people. One of that goddamn Benedict Canyon crowd."

haha this is pretty amazing.

Eh.

@GovJayNixon Remember a dead man once won your seat so I wouldn't get comfortable, understand?

Carnahan was the governor who won a Senate seat posthumously.

http://i.imgur.com/doTI3uH.png

"Bird! I told ya to stop printin' these damn TWEETS."

Haaa, I think I see what you did there.

Almost too obvious, but if Nixon and Watergate were relocated to today's world, the Senate committee would have been requesting hard drives and combing through deleted e-mails and Facebook posts and Tweets to reconstruct the story. Or not...maybe there was something about a secret taping system that was more psychologically in sync with Nixon; maybe he would have had some variation on essentially the same set-up in 2014.

they would have their own internet

That's sort of what I was saying above. Of all the presidents in U.S. history, it's going to be shady secretive Nixon whose word-for-word conversations will be available to future generations still to come.

Wonder what Obama said to McDonough yesterday? You'll have better luck finding out who Haldeman thinks will beat the spread in the 1971 AFC championship game.

watched HBOs Nixon on Nixon last night back to back with 'Double Take' on Mubi... more Nixon than any one man should have to cope with in 2014 imo

Lies. No such thing as too much dick.

Guess that bundt needs a bigger pan.

Favorite hitter, Williams; pitcher, Koufax. He remembers arcane details surprisingly well. At one point, he mentions getting back from Russia in 1959, when he says the Senators were coming off an 8-game losing streak, and that he went to the next game and they won. I checked that...He got back Aug. 5; the Senators were indeed in the midst of a seventeen game losing streak at the time. They played a double-header on Aug. 5; lost the first game to make it 18, won the second. I can't find the start time of the second game, but maybe he attended that one. Which would be pretty close for a 65-year-old guy remembering something 19 years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVn_Odo0I4Q

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11514352/Richard-Nixons-Western-White-House-goes-up-for-sale-for-75m.html

I'm very open to a group bid on this.

Too bad there are never open houses for those types of places around here. It's a 20 minute drive away

reading Caro's bios I'm kinda struck by the similarities between Nixon and LBJ, the harsh, humiliating conditions of their youth, their flexible political positions, their pathological need for power, their self-destructiveness

also jowls

The Bryan Cranston LBJ movie on HBO was kinda weird. You could easily tell it was based on a theater show.

think we talked about that somewhere else - I couldn't take more than 15 minutes of it

Didn't see the thread.

Sometimes you see makeup on an actor that's so good, you just keep reminding yourself throughout the whole thing, "Wow, that makeup's pretty good."

Richard M. Nixon ‏@dick_nixon 4h4 hours ago

Johnson is coming into the life that's rightfully his: bad books, an ugly mistress. Cirrhosis. He won't die early, though. They never do.

different johnson

I'm aware.

perfectly clear

http://66.media.tumblr.com/eb6ee3ecf44b26407a57a7de9e6e0275/tumblr_n3ro2prStD1qjih96o1_400.gif

pplains my issue with it was that they seemed to take dramatic liberties with the material, except the choices they made made the story *less* dramatic. Like having him being all nervous and shaky about assuming the presidency - which very much runs counter to all the accounts given in Caro's book - is less interesting than him rising to the challenge with steely determination; or portraying his championing of civil rights as being strictly about votes rather than the deeper, more nuanced but genuine commitment he worked himself into, etc. It's like they decided to make one-dimensional cliched choices instead of more interesting ones.

Absolutely.

And how someone found a way to make Hubert Humphrey into even more of a namby-bamby golly gee-whiz whiny liberal wasn't necessary.

ha yes

thought of another thing LBJ and Nixon shared: bottomless wells of self-pity

They both loved their mamas.

long-suffering spouses

First or last names that are also slang terms for a penis.

42 years since Dick left

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32GaowQnGRw

Very glad to see the spirit of Black Friday everywhere.

http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=1b467fe3b2c9cbc8c7ded8810&id=e298ba760a&e=ee11fe0254

Yet another smoking gun:

During a phone call on the night of Oct. 22, 1968, Richard M. Nixon told his closest aide (and future chief of staff) H.R. Haldeman to "monkey wrench" President Lyndon B. Johnson's efforts to begin peace negotiations over the Vietnam War. Nixon long denied giving such an order, but Haldeman's notes, which were quietly made public in 2007 and were recently discovered by the historian Jack Farrell, prove he was lying.

Gets better too:

Time has yielded Nixon’s secrets. Haldeman’s notes were opened quietly at the presidential library in 2007, where I came upon them in my research for a biography of the former president. They contain other gems, like Haldeman’s notations of a promise, made by Nixon to Southern Republicans, that he would retreat on civil rights and “lay off pro-Negro crap” if elected president. There are notes from Nixon’s 1962 California gubernatorial campaign, in which he and his aides discuss the need to wiretap political foes.

forever a Dick

I had never heard that apparently Tricky Dick and Zsa Zsa Gabor had a fling together, at least according to a couple articles on the ladies life a couple weeks ago. I hadn't really heard of Nixon having affairs, but I guess that is another power trip too.

If poor old homely Wilbur Mills could have an affair with a stripper, then surely Nixon, the goddamed President of the United States of America, had a decent shot at an affair with no-talent opportunist like Zsa Zsa Gabor.

good grief I could totally hear that in Nixon's voice.

Richard M. Nixon ‏@dick_nixon Jan 1

The key term is "monkey wrench." It is used to fix things. President Nixon sought to improve the yield and efficacy of the peace talks. - RZ

wow smh

My deal was that Tricky Dick seemed more like a guy that would get his rocks off making lists and counting money than doing the nasty. Sex seems way too personal and sticky. It actually humanizes him a bit.

nixon's erotic side comes out when he talks about his enemies

that's how they play it and we're gonna play it just as dirty. get them on the ground where we want them. stick our heels in hard. twist.

Nixon supposedly came out of WWII working with a bank roll that helped get him into Congress. In the rear with the gear could be quite profitable.

Won most of it playing poker according to Nixonland

nixon's erotic side comes out when he talks about his enemies

― difficult listening hour, Monday, January 9, 2017 12:22 A

real lol (and true)

http://i.imgur.com/DNiIIPx.jpg

Won most of it playing poker according to Nixonland

seems like politicians who excel at poker do better than those who excel at chess

Slate: That also sounded to me like a chess player’s analysis. You’re the greatest chess player ever. Is Putin playing chess, or is he playing a different game?

Kasparov: No, I always wanted to defend the integrity of my game—when people said, Oh, Putin played chess, Obama played checkers. Putin, as with every dictator, hates chess because chess is a strategic game which is 100 percent transparent. I know what are available resources for me and what kind of resources could be mobilized by my opponent. Of course, I don’t know what my opponent thinks about strategy and tactics, but at least I know what kind of resources available to you cause damage to me.

Dictators hate transparency and Putin feels much more comfortable playing a game that I would rather call geopolitical poker. In poker, you know, you can win having a very weak hand, provided you have enough cash to raise the stakes—and also, if you have a strong nerve, to bluff. Putin kept bluffing. He could see his geopolitical opponents—the leaders of the free world—folding cards, one after another. For me, the crucial moment where Putin decided that he could do whatever was Obama’s decision not to enforce the infamous red line in Syria.

https://twitter.com/APIC_USA/status/834534585799053312

Farrell's Nixon bio is out.

“The press is the enemy,” Nixon told his aides. “Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/books/richard-nixon-biography-john-a-farrell.html?_r=0

Didn't realize till a FB post just now that today's the 43rd resignation anniversary. Trump seems to taken his Madman-Nixon mask off the shelf to commemorate.

The Farrell bio, by the way, is excellent, and he gives the fullest account of his "monkey wrenching" the '68 peace talks.

Don't have it. I bought Tim Weiner's One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon recently, but haven't read it yet.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MR. PRESIDENT!
Funny gifts appear to have been a tradition in the Nixon White House. In 1973, he received some caricature figures, a framed image of Massachusetts and DC (he didn't win them in '72) & this Halloween mask from daughter Tricia. (WHPO-D1193-19) pic.twitter.com/zLfd4HFMQd

— RichardNixonLibrary (@NixonLibrary) January 9, 2018

Last time I get to do this: spend 15 minutes talking to nine-year-olds about Richard Nixon on his birthday. He’s the greatest object lesson ever in the lie being worse than whatever led to the lie, and if you frame his downfall that way, kids immediately understand. Trump’s lies are so numerous and (often) so bizarre, I don’t think there’s much meaning there. Nixon was a much more interesting liar.

Obviously, you won’t come across a clearer explanation of Watergate than my diagram. The burglars are the x’s at the bottom right, Nixon is the check mark at the top left.

http://phildellio.tripod.com/watergate.JPG

Nixon was born 106 years ago tomorrow—here in 1974 offering cake to dog King Timahoe, San Clemente: pic.twitter.com/1aZkYptdDW

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) January 9, 2019

https://i.imgur.com/O81x9cV.jpg

"Well I'll be damned – your birthday's the day before mine!"

RMN shares a birthday with Joan Baez. Guess where Joan was when Nixon bombed Hanoi at Xmas '72... Yep.

Graceland?

Hanoi Joan

I've read enough about Nixon that I ought to know the answer to this, but was he as aggressive as Trump in going after people from his own party? My sense of Nixon is that he had his inner circle of Haldeman, Erlichman, Kissinger, etc., and that the rest of the party--even his own cabinet--barely existed.

Nixon didn't do that shit in public the way Trump does afaik

Before he became president, Nixon was a tireless speaker for any republican candidate or party organ that wanted him, as a means of collecting chits for return favors in the future. When he became president he switched more into the mode of dictating terms in advance, but he was a party man top to bottom.

Nixon definitely obsequious in a way Trump has never had to be

I was thinking of Nixon in '72, heading into the election, when he--like Trump--felt all-powerful and untouchable. I don't think he was out there beating the bushes for disloyal Republicans and responding to every last slight. Not even privately, I suspect; he had moved beyond party in every sense. If you look at his '72 ads, there's just Nixon, nothing else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dploiFDlRE4

Such an inspiring song.

Happy Earth Day.

http://phildellio.tripod.com/planting.jpg

every picture tells a story

"Goddamn it, Pat, is this really necessary?"

I wonder who on the shit list is under the dirt.

Just posted today--your dreams have been answered.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hOqnG9UHLE

http://phildellio.tripod.com/resignation.jpeg

Does anything say Valentine's Day better than Richard Nixon?

https://phildellio.tripod.com/nixon-2.jpg

somewhere, Roger Stone just got hard

You just sent me to therapy.

Screenshot I took from Versailles '73: American Runway Revolution.

https://phildellio.tripod.com/fashion.jpg

CNN starts an LBJ series tonight (yeah, I know, "Turn Turn Turn"):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pND1mP0Rwpo

That trailer's voice-over has a definite "In a world..." vibe.

a bit of a Casey Kasem vibe too

Still wishing for the day when the Mothers' "Trouble Every Day" becomes the go-to music for the mid-late '60s.

Jesus, I think it involves reenactments. I'll be out of there with the first one.

I bailed, indeed--the Man on Wire documentary might be the only one I ever saw where I reached a level of tolerance with the reenactments.

The other guy in the thread title has a new ally:

https://www.hotnewhiphop.com/kanye-west-shares-his-long-list-of-enemies-including-skete-davidson-news.147986.html

111th--planning something monstrous with Kissinger right now.

has already fired the special prosecutor in Hell

Still intrigued by what kind of balancing act he'd do with regards to Trump. He was the ultimate company man, but I think he'd try to figure out some way to create a little distance--a non-endorsement endorsement, if you will.

I was not quite eight when Nixon resigned. My most vivid memory of him is that, when he was on TV, he sweat. Like, a lot. His upper lip was slick.

This is my all-time favorite Nixon pic. It says so much about the man.

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/08/31/14/47274247-9943475-Pictured_Nixon_checks_his_watch_as_he_shakes_hands_with_a_member-a-12_1630417756875.jpg

I don't think he was a political genius so much as an amoral survivor. His only goal was his political survival, and any means to achieve that goal was acceptable.

If there has been a true political genius in the U.S. in the past 100 years, it was Bill Clinton.

Nah, man. FDR. At least his feral genius produced tangible good for decades.

FDR I'd put up there also. I obviously didn't experience the man first-hand. But Clinton has (or had) what Apple developer Bud Tribble, referring to Steve Jobs, called a "reality distortion field."

Nixon was at least complicated (Title 9, the EPA, detente with China)... for all his base amorality he actually did a thing or two

But yeah, we still live daily with FDR's legacy, maybe even a little LBJ as well

My very Republican grandmother used to fake gagging whenever the name Franklin Delano Roosevelt was mentioned.

Lol... so much of his 'pinko' stuff (via Keynesian economics) was a desperate attempt to avoid actual pinko shit; the 1930s was probably the most marxist decade the U.S. ever experienced

My very Republican grandmother used to fake gagging whenever the name Franklin Delano Roosevelt was mentioned.

LOL no

That didn't stop her from saying that FDR had "ruined the country."

So the US was a better place in 1933 than in 1945... that is some take

I can't separate "political genius" from the morality of those decisions, and FDR followed by LBJ are so obviously the winners. Bill Clinton, the only Dem we could've elected, alas, in 1992, left office having prevented the worst of a GOP counter-revolution who thought the presidency belonged to them after a dozen years, nominated good judges and (sure) justices, and was a charming rogue, but I don't wanna think about him anymore.

So the US was a better place in 1933 than in 1945... that is some take

Yes . . . and this from a woman who had truly harrowing stories of the Depression. There were times she was literally starving.

Nixon gets mistakenly called a liberal -- or, worse, "would never have been nominated by today's GOP!" -- because he endured an immovable Dem majority in both chambers of Congress and, trying to begin a political revolution that culminated with the election of Reagan, he signed their legislation.

Died 30 years ago today (Nixon, that is), although I think he still tweets.

Nixon never suffered enough for his crimes to satisfy me, but Kissinger's decades as an éminence grise were even more sickening.

He doesn't tweet. That's just some weirdo making goofy statements and thinking he sounds just like Richard M. Nixon.

he's pretty good!

Not Nixon good.

YouTube has been recommending a lot of videos from the Nixon Foundation, which I guess runs the presidential library, sells merch, etc. Feel like their social media team is really leaning into "bet you miss him now, eh?" (I don't, though.)

I'm surprised there isn't a counter-propagandist "Nixon still a craven shitbird" group pumping out unflattering videos

https://i.postimg.cc/t4j8Gzm5/nixon.jpg

"Summer," "fun," and "Nixon," all in the same sentence.