First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, no doubt deserved the accolades
throughout her obituaries last week where she was praised for her
efforts to beautify the country and for her patience with her
philandering husband.
Bird: A great woman |
She was by all counts a gracious, church-going
woman and indefatigable campaigner for her husband.
Lady Bird had a tough road after the continental and stylish Jacqueline
Bouvier Kennedy brought culture and sophistication to the White House.
She served her country with grace and distinction and helped America
recognize that we had to protect our environment.
The front page of the Miami Herald of July12, praised the former First
Lady for her business acumen in the ownership of a chain of radio and
Television stations in Texas. This unfortunately must be corrected.
This myth is part and parcel of the general historical "cleaning up" of
Lyndon Johnson after he acceded to the White House after John Kennedy
was slain in Dallas.
As Robert Caro said in his book 'Master of the Senate;' [1]
"...After the purchase of radio station KTBC, while for public consumption
Lady Bird was listed as the station's president and was said to be in
charge of its operations and responsible for its success, in reality the
success was due to Johnson's political influence, and to the fact that
he sold that influence to individuals and corporations in return for
their purchase of advertising time on the station. In truth, he
oversaw, in detail, every aspect of KTBC's operations, often during
these years without consulting more than cursorily with his wife..."
LBJ: A liar, crook and scoundrel |
Caro goes on to report:
"...Lyndon Johnson, of course, had an additional use for political
influence: to amass wealth Ð first to obtain favorable rulings from the
FCC that made KTBC a dramatically more effective place on which to
advertise, and then to let businessmen and their attorneys and lobbyists
who needed favors from the government know that the way to enlist his
influence on their behalf was to purchase advertising time. So
successfully had he made such sales that by 1951, that station Ð the
station his wife had bought in 1943 for $17,500-was earning the Johnsons
more that $3,000 per week. That was an enormous amount of money in the
impoverished Hill Country..."
Lastly, Caro writes:
"...The station Johnson decided to buy was KANG in Waco, and he conducted
the negotiations for that property with the old Johnson touch,
bargaining with the owners for a favorable price while gently obtaining
from compliant FCC Chairman Bartley advance knowledge of him than it
would ever have been for them, and keeping that knowledge secret so that
they would sell to him at a lower price..."
Lyndon Johnson was a crook who abused the power of his office, a liar,
self-centered, crude, abusive man. He deserves credit for forcing
through the 1964 Civil Rights Act after a lifetime of being the key
strategist of the Southern block of the U.S. Senate, a role in which he
filibustered and blocked every anti-Lynching and Civil Rights bill.
In 1958 Johnson let the Senate vote on the only significant Civil Rights
bill that passed after Johnson skillfully watered it down to ensure that
Southerners charged with Civil Rights violations were tried before
all-white state juries, a Southern poison-pill which essentially gutted
the law.
In 1948, Johnson stole his first election to the U.S. Senate with an
egregious and obvious voter fraud involving Box 13 in Duval County where
the local Cauldilla altered the voting registry and stuffed the box.
Johnson was also particularly crude. He was known to summons his top
Aides, most of them Kennedy Ivy League types to the bathroom where
Johnson would conduct a meeting while sitting on the toilet defecating
with his pants down around his ankles. He secretly loved the discomfort
and humiliation of his Aides.
While in the U.S. House Johnson conducted a very public affair with
former actress and Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, wife of actor
Melvyn Douglas, who went on to be brutally beaten by Richard M. Nixon
for the U.S. Senate in 1950.
The George Reedys and Liz Carpenters and Bill Moyers have tried to clean
up Lyndon Johnson who came to Government dirt-broke and left a
multi-millionaire.
It is abundantly clear that Lady Bird Johnson's media empire of
television and radio stations was hers in name only and were in fact
owned, run and used for money-laundering by Lyndon Baines Johnson.
--------
[1] 'The Years of Lyndon Johnson Master of the Senate,' by Robert A. Caro, Vintage Books a Division of Random House, Inc., ÊMay 2003
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