By Roger Stone
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.
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;’
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.
