taking sides: lyndon baines johnson vs. richard milhous nixon

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.

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