taking sides: lyndon baines johnson vs. richard milhous nixon

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