taking sides: lyndon baines johnson vs. richard milhous nixon

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.