Lyndon Johnson Quotes

Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.

If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance.

Ask him about the cemeteries, Dean!

The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources--because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples.

We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.

[T]he vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.

Since Jimmy Carter, religious fundamentalists play a major role in elections. He was the first president who made a point of exhibiting himself as a born again Christian. That sparked a little light in the minds of political campaign managers: Pretend to be a religious fanatic and you can pick up a third of the vote right away. Nobody asked whether Lyndon Johnson went to church every day. Bill Clinton is probably about as religious as I am, meaning zero, but his managers made a point of making sure that every Sunday morning he was in the Baptist church singing hymns.

A man without a vote is a man without protection.

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read "President Can't Swim.

I may not know much, but I know chicken shit from chicken salad.

If you can’t come into a room and tell right away who is for you and who is against you, you have no business in politics.

Ask not what you have done for Lyndon Johnson, but what you have done for him lately.

President Kennedy’s eloquence was designed to make men think; President Johnson’s hammer blows are designed to make men act.

Guns and bombs, rockets and warships, are all symbols of human failure.

Poor whites are still taught to hate—but not to hate those who are keeping them in line. Lyndon Johnson knew this when he quipped, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” We

We have talked long enough ... about civil rights,' Lyndon Johnson had said. 'It is time ... to write it in the books of law' - to embody justice and equality in legislation.

While you're saving your face, you're losing your ass.

Education is not a problem. Education is an opportunity.

If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will”;

The noblest search is the search for excellence

Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men's skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.

if one characteristic of Lyndon Johnson was a boundless ambition, another was a willingness, on behalf of that ambition, to make efforts that were also without bounds.

If you do everything, you’ll win,

That bitch of a war killed the lady I really loved -- the Great Society.

Emancipation was a proclamation, but not a fact.

A handshake, as delivered by Lyndon Johnson, could be as effective as a hug.

President Lyndon Johnson's 10 point formula for success: 1. Learn to remember names. Inefficiency at this point may indicate that your interest is not sufficiently outgoing. 2. Be a comfortable person so there is no strain in being with you. Be an old-shoe, old-hat kind of individual. 3. Acquire the quality of relaxed easy-going so that things do not ruffle you. 4. Don't be egotistical. Guard against the impression that you know it all. 5. Cultivate the quality of being interesting so people will get something of value from their association with you. 6. Study to get the "scratchy" elements out of your personality, even those of which you may be unconscious. 7. Sincerely attempt to heal, on an honest Christian basis, every msiunderstanding you have had or now have. Drain off your grievances. 8. Practice liking people until you learn to do so genuinely. 9. Never miss an opportunity to say a word of congratulation upon anyone's achievement, or express sympathy in sorrow or disappointment. 10. Give spiritual strength to people, and they will give genuine affection to you.

If we stand passively by while the centre of each city becomes a hive of depravation, crime and hopelessness…if we become two people, the suburban affluent and the urban poor, each filled with mistrust and fear for the other…then we shall effectively cripple each generation to come.

It's not doing what is right that's hard for a President. It's knowing what is right.

I'll have those niggers voting Democrat for the next 200 years.

When Silent Cal Coolidge noted that “You don’t have to explain something you haven’t said,

We did not choose to be the guardians of the gate, but there is no one else.

What convinces is conviction. You simply have to believe in the argument you are advancing; if you don’t, you’re as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn’t there.

Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.

Why does Sea World have a seafood restaurant I'm halfway through my fish burger and I realize Oh man....I could be eating a slow learner.

Remember what Lyndon Johnson said about J. Edgar Hoover? I’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.

The 1960s: A lot of people remember hating President Lyndon Baines Johnson and loving Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, depending on the point of view. God rest their souls.

Don't Spit in the Soup, We All Gotta Eat

A president who is burdened with a failed and unpopular war, and who has lost the trust of the country, simply can no longer govern. He is destined to become as much a failure as his war.

Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass: Their voices, articulating the feelings of innumerable others, ultimately prevailed in the causes of emancipation and of suffrage. It took presidential action to make things official—a Lincoln to free the slaves, a Wilson to support the women’s suffrage amendment, a Lyndon Johnson to finish the fight against Jim Crow—but without the voices from afar, there would have been no chorus of liberty. The lesson: The work of reformers—long, hard, almost unimaginably difficult work—can lead to progress and a broader understanding of who is included in the phrase “We, the People” that opened the Preamble of the Constitution. And that work unfolds still.

I will not deny that there are men in the district better qualified than I to go to Congress, but, gentlemen, these men are not in the race.

And he worked himself, worked himself. He had made up his mind to be President, and he was demonic in his drive.

From the earliest beginnings of Lyndon Johnson’s political life—from his days at college when he had captured control of campus politics—his tactics had consistently revealed a pragmatism and a cynicism that had no discernible limits.

Victory is no longer a truth. It is only a word to describe who is left alive in the ruins

He’s [Gerald Ford] a nice guy but he played too much football with his helmet off.

There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few we can solve by ourselves.

Better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.

Every Democrat says he wants to be JFK while insisting that he will do more or less what LBJ did. No Democrat would dream of saying he wanted to emulate Lyndon Johnson, because the myth is what matters most.

the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, a liberal immigration bill, some seventy different education bills—they’re all passed during the 1960s by President Lyndon Johnson.

He’s [Nixon] like a Spanish horse, who runs faster than anyone for the first nine lengths and then turns around and runs backwards. You’ll see; he’ll do something wrong in the end. He always does.

Poor whites are still taught to hate—but not to hate those who are keeping them in line. Lyndon Johnson knew this when he quipped, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

There’s a reason you probably haven’t heard much about this aspect of the heartland. This kind of blight can’t be easily blamed on the usual suspects like government or counterculture or high-hat urban policy. The villain that did this to my home state wasn’t the Supreme Court or Lyndon Johnson, showering dollars on the poor or putting criminals back on the street. The culprit is the conservatives’ beloved free-market capitalism, a system that, at its most unrestrained, has little use for smalltown merchants or the agricultural system that supported the small towns in the first place....

It was the Civil Rights Act, which Democratic president Lyndon Johnson embraced and 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater opposed, that would define the Democrats as the party of civil rights and Republicans as the party of racial status quo.

[Richard Bedford Bennett] was the richest Prime Minister and the only millionaire to hold office before Pierre Trudeau. His money obviously colored his thinking -- colored it true blue -- but he did not consider it a political drawback. No leader, he said, could serve the public properly if he was constantly looking over his shoulder at the shadow of debts. This theory is now widely accepted in the United States where it has become practically impossible for a non-millionaire to run for high office without selling pieces of himself like a prize-fighter. Yet the public still suspects a self-made millionaire like Lyndon Johnson while revering the much-richer John F. Kennedy, who got it all from his father.

The second most powerful man in the country.” All his life Lyndon Johnson had been taking “nothing jobs” and making them into something—something big. And now, no sooner

When you come into the presence of a leader of men, you know you have come into the presence of fire; that it is best not incautiously to touch that man; that there is something that makes it dangerous to cross him. —WOODROW WILSON

Until the end of his life, whenever the subject of the vast growth of the LBJ Company and associated business enterprises was raised, Lyndon Johnson would emphasize that he owned none of it (“All that is owned by Mrs. Johnson.… I don’t have any interest in government-regulated industries of any kind and never have had”).

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in 1978, “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.

Among those dazzled by the Administration team was Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. After attending his first Cabinet meeting he went back to his mentor Sam Rayburn and told him with great enthusiasm how extraordinary they were, each brighter than the next, and that the smartest of them all was that fellow with the Stacomb on his hair from the Ford Motor Company, McNamara. “Well, Lyndon,” Mister Sam answered, “you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.” It is my favorite story in the book, for it underlines the weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal fluency which the team exuded, and the true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience. Wisdom for a few of them came after Vietnam.

For better than thirty years, as a working historian, I have written on leaders I knew, such as Lyndon Johnson, and interviewed intimates of the Kennedy family and many who knew Franklin Roosevelt, a leader perhaps as indispensable in his way as was Lincoln to the social and political direction of the country. After living with the subject

Mrs. Roosevelt felt, was the fault of society; “a civilization which does not provide young people with a way to earn a living is pretty poor,

You know, a man ain't worth a damn if he can't cry at the right time.

It requires more courage to suffer than to die. —Napoleon Bonaparte

Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose

In my few years of dating, I have received a number of gifts from men. Gifts that were bought in haste at duty-free, that were fattening or detrimental to vaginal pH, that overestimated my interest in Lyndon B. Johnson and the New York Mets.

Luther King gave people “the feeling that they could be bigger and stronger and more courageous than they thought they could be,” Bayard Rustin said—in part because of the powerful new weapon, non-violent resistance, that had been forged on the Montgomery battlefield.

His office was a spider’s lair of silver thread and tempting promises, a page out of Power Architecture Magazine. The dean copied the design from President Lyndon Johnson’s old senate office. The room narrowed toward his desk, an architectural device that channeled all eyes toward the dean, and his chair was slightly elevated, forcing visitors to look up. The two visitors’ chairs were both lowered and oversized, making each guest feel like a child, swimming in too much chair. His architect had assured him it was a subliminal masterpiece.

for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will. For the more one learns—from his family, his childhood playmates, his college classmates, his first assistants, his congressional colleagues—about Lyndon Johnson, the more it becomes apparent not only that this hunger was a constant throughout his life but that it was a hunger so fierce and consuming that no consideration of morality or ethics, no cost to himself—or to anyone else—could stand before it.

As I traveled the country promoting my book, I was asked by many people, ‘What are you trying to prove here? Lyndon Johnson is dead. He can’t be prosecuted. What is the point of this other than an academic exercise?’ Here is the point: The government does not always tell us the truth. In fact, the government seldom tells us the truth. If ONE citizen understands by reading my book that everything the government says must be regarded with a healthy dose of skepticism, then I will have achieved my goal. Perhaps the best analysis comes from former federal prosecutor and US Attorney David Marston, who wrote to me, “You have viewed the JFK assassination through the prism of a murder investigator’s first question, cui bono (who benefits)? The shocking answer is that the primary suspect has been hiding in plain sight for fifty years: LBJ.

There is a much stronger case to be made that efforts to help blacks have had more pernicious and lasting effects on black attitudes and habits than either slavery or segregation. Social welfare programs that were initiated or greatly expanded during the 1960s resulted in the government effectively displacing black fathers as breadwinners, and made work less attractive. Even before Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty began in earnest, New York and other states had already been expanding their social welfare programs. And despite the best intentions, the results were not encouraging.

These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don't move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there'll be no way of stopping them, we'll lose the filibuster and there'll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It'll be Reconstruction all over again. [Said to Senator Richard Russell, Jr. (D-GA) regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1957]

IS WHERE POWER GOES”: the most significant factor in any equation that adds up to political power, Lyndon Johnson had assured his allies, is the individual, not the office; for a man with a gift for acquiring power, whatever office he held would become powerful—because of what he would make out of it. Johnson

He was to become the lawmaker for the poor and the downtrodden and the oppressed. He was to be the bearer of at least a measure of social justice to those whom social justice had so long been denied. The restorer of at least a measure of dignity to those who so desperately needed to be given some dignity. The redeemer of the promises made by them to America. “It is time to write it in the books of law.” By the time Lyndon Johnson left office he had done a lot of writing in those books, had become, above all presidents save Lincoln, the codifier of compassion, the president who wrote mercy and justice in the statute books by which America was governed.

As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, nigger, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture. [Said to his chauffeur, Robert Parker, when Parker said he’d prefer to be referred to by his name rather than "boy," "nigger" or "chief."]

To a staff member who, after talking with a senator, said he “thought” he knew which way the senator was going to vote, he snarled, “What the fuck good is thinking to me? Thinking isn’t good enough. Thinking is never good enough. I need to know!” Often, he didn’t know.

For some people, the most important formative element is place. To appreciate Harry Truman, for example, you must understand the Missouri frontier of the nineteenth century; likewise, you must delve into the Hill Country of Texas to fathom Lyndon Johnson.3 But Benjamin Franklin was not so rooted. His heritage was that of a people without place—the youngest sons of middle-class artisans—most of whom made their careers in towns different from those of their fathers. He is thus best understood as a product of lineage rather than of land.

Reagan understood an important distinction that (Lyndon) Johnson never grasped: being in control and being successful aren't always the same thing.

Charity begins at home.

Are you afraid?” an interviewer asked him after the bombing, and there was a pause, and then Martin Luther King said, very firmly, “No, I’m not. My attitude is that this is a great cause, a great issue that we’re confronted with, and that the consequences for my personal life are not particularly important. It is the triumph of a cause that I am concerned about, and I have always felt that ultimately along the way of life an individual must stand up and be counted, and be willing to face the consequences, whatever they are, and if he is filled with fear, he cannot do it.

A candidate who, night after night, tries “to capitalize on the emotion of honest patriotism, cheapens the impulse.… It is like playing on the sacredness of mother love for the purposes of promotion.

A true leader is a man who can get people to work together on the points on which they agree and who can persuade others that when they disagree there are peaceful methods to settle their differences.

It is not clear who will bring to the Whitehouse those useful commodities of vivid language, a sense of history and most important - a sense of humour, but Johnson himself will provide many other attributes. He is effective precisely because he is so determined, industrious, personal and even humourless, particularly in dealing with Congress. (…) Kennedy had a detached and even donnish willingness to grant a merit in the other fellow’s argument. Johnson is not so inclined to retreat and grants nothing in an argument, not even equal time. Ask not what you have done for Lyndon Johnson, but what you have done for him lately. This may not be the most attractive quality of the new administration but it works. The lovers of style are not too happy with the new administration, but the lovers of substance are not complaining.

I never conceived of my biographies as merely telling the lives of famous men but rather as a means of illuminating their times and the great forces that shaped their times—particularly political power, since in a democracy political power has so great a role in shaping the lives of the citizens of that democracy.

Before Lyndon Johnson intervened to make sure blacks would become dependent on the government for just about everything they needed to live, black participation in the labor market was equal to or greater than that of whites. Today the “official” African-American unemployment rate—which doesn’t take into account the enormous number of blacks who aren’t even trying to find jobs—is around 14 percent. In fact, when you count those who don’t even try to find a job, it’s nearly 50 percent. When the numbers are added up, under this administration more than 60 percent of young black people are no longer even part of the labor force. It’s the lowest ever recorded in our history.

Then Lyndon Johnson came to Jim Rowe’s office again, to plead with him, crying real tears as he sat doubled over, his face in his hands. “He wept. ‘I’m going to die. You’re an old friend. I thought you were my friend and you don’t care that I’m going to die. It’s just selfish of you, typically selfish.’ ” Finally Rowe said, “ ‘Oh, goddamn it, all right’ ”—and then “as soon as Lyndon got what he wanted,” Rowe was forcibly reminded why he had been determined not to join his staff. The moment the words were out of Rowe’s mouth, Johnson straightened up, and his tone changed instantly from one of pleading to one of cold command. “Just remember,” he said. “I make the decisions. You don’t.

Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences - deep, corrosive, obstinate differences - radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

In the twentieth century, with its eighteen American presidents, Lyndon Baines Johnson was the greatest champion that black Americans and Mexican-Americans and indeed all Americans of color had in the White House, the greatest champion they had in all the halls of government. With the single exception of Lincoln, he was the greatest champion with a white skin that they had in the history of the Republic. He was to become the lawmaker for the poor and the downtrodden and the oppressed. He was to be the bearer of at least a measure of social justice to those to whom social justice had so long been denied, the restorer of at least a measure of dignity to those who so desperately needed to be given some dignity, the redeemer of the promises made to them by America. He was to be the President who, above all Presidents save Lincoln, codified compassion, the President who wrote mercy and justice into the statute books by which America was governed.

The white nationalist, nativist politics that we see today were first imagined and applied by David Duke during the heyday of his Grand Wizardshop, and the time of my undercover Klan investigation. This hatred is never gone away, but has been reinvigorated in the dark corners of the internet, Twitter trolls, alt-right publications, and a nativist president in Trump. The Republican Party of the 19th century, being the party of Lincoln, was the opposition to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist domination insofar as America's newly freed Black slaves were concerned; it is my belief that the Republican Party of the 21st century finds a symbiotic connection to white nationalist groups like the Klan, neo-Nazis, skinheads, militias, and alt-right white supremacist thinking. Evidence of this began in the Lyndon Johnson administration with the departure of Southern Democrats (Dixiecrats) to the Republican Party in protest of his civil rights agenda. The Republicans began a spiral slide to the far right that embrace all things abhorrent to nonwhites. David Duke twice ran for public office in Louisiana as a Democrat and lost. When he switched his affiliation to Republican, because he was closer in ideology and racial thinking to the GOP than to the Democrats, and ran again for the Louisiana House of Representatives, the conservative voters in his district rewarded him with a victory. In each case his position on the issues remain the same; white supremacist/ethno-nationalist endorsement of a race-centered rhetoric and nativist populism. What change were the voters. Democrats rejected Duke politics while Republicans embraced him.

The Republican Party spent the year of the liberal apotheosis enacting the most unlikely political epic ever told: a right-wing fringe took over the party from the ground up, nominating Barry Goldwater, the radical-right senator from Arizona, while a helpless Eastern establishment-that-was-now-a-fringe looked on in bafflement. Experts, claiming the Republican tradition of progressivism was as much a part of its identity as the elephant, began talking about a party committing suicide. The Goldwaterites didn’t see suicide. They saw redemption. This was part and parcel of their ideology—that Lyndon Johnson’s “consensus” was their enemy in a battle for the survival of civilization. For them, the idea that calamitous liberal nonsense—ready acceptance of federal interference in the economy; Negro “civil disobedience”; the doctrine of “containing” the mortal enemy Communism when conservatives insisted it must be beaten—could be described as a “consensus” at all was symbol and substance of America’s moral rot. They also believed the vast majority of ordinary Americans already agreed with them, whatever spake the polls—“crazy figures,” William F. Buckley harrumphed, doctored “to say, ‘Yes, Mr. President.’” It was their article of faith. And faith, and the uncompromising passions attending it, was key to their political makeup.

Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, W. E. B. DuBois, and Lyndon B. Johnson are just a few of the famous Americans who taught. They resisted the fantasy of educators as saints or saviors, and understood teaching as a job in which the potential for children’s intellectual transcendence and social mobility, though always present, is limited by real-world concerns such as poor training, low pay, inadequate supplies, inept administration, and impoverished students and families. These teachers’ stories, and those of less well-known teachers, propel this history forward and help us understand why American teaching has evolved into such a peculiar profession, one attacked and admired in equal proportion.

Of the things I had not known when I started out, I think the most important was the degree to which the legacy of the McCarthy period still lived. It had been almost seven years since Joe McCarthy had been censured when John Kennedy took office, and most people believed that his hold on Washington was over. ... among the top Democrats, against whom the issue of being soft on Communism might be used, and among the Republicans, who might well use the charge, it was still live ammunition. ... McCarthyism still lingered ... The real McCarthyism went deeper in the American grain than most people wanted to admit ... The Republicans’ long, arid period out of office [twenty years, ended by the Eisenhower administration], accentuated by Truman’s 1948 defeat of Dewey, had permitted the out-party in its desperation, to accuse the leaders of the governing party of treason. The Democrats, in the wake of the relentless sustained attacks on Truman and Acheson over their policies in Asia, came to believe that they had lost the White House when they lost China. Long after McCarthy himself was gone, the fear of being accused of being soft on Communism lingered among the Democratic leaders. The Republicans had, of course, offered no alternative policy on China (the last thing they had wanted to do was suggest sending American boys to fight for China) and indeed there was no policy to offer, for China was never ours, events there were well outside our control, and our feudal proxies had been swept away by the forces of history. But in the political darkness of the time it had been easy to blame the Democrats for the ebb and flow of history. The fear generated in those days lasted a long time, and Vietnam was to be something of an instant replay after China. The memory of the fall of China and what it did to the Democrats, was, I think, more bitter for Lyndon Johnson than it was for John Kennedy. Johnson, taking over after Kennedy was murdered and after the Kennedy patched-up advisory commitment had failed, vowed that he was not going to be the President of the United States who lost the Great Society because he lost Saigon. In the end it would take the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon (the only political figure who could probably go to China without being Red-baited by Richard Nixon) to exorcise those demons, and to open the door to China.

At Boston University, where the Reverend King had been studying for his Ph.D., the faculty, impressed by him, had urged him to become an academic, but, although attracted by that prospect, he rejected it in favor of a southern pastorship; “That’s where I’m needed,” he told his wife, Coretta. He was to discount his role in the Montgomery boycott. “I just happened to be there,” he was to say. “There comes a time when time itself is ready for a change.

If the Chiefs had successfully pressed with the president their position that the United States needed to act forcefully to defeat the North, they might have forced a difficult choice between war and withdrawal from South Vietnam. Through their own actions as well as through the manipulation of Taylor and McNamara, the Chiefs missed their opportunity to influence the formulation of a strategic concept for Vietnam, and thereafter always found themselves in the difficult position of questioning a policy that the president had already approved. The intellectual foundation for deepening American involvement in Vietnam had been laid without the participation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 5

Freedom is never given to anybody, for the oppressor has you in domination because he plans to keep you there.” And he went beyond Douglass to espouse a doctrine of passive, non-violent resistance. “Hate begets hate, violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness,” King said. “Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding.… This is a nonviolent protest. We are depending on moral and spiritual forces.

A very distinct pattern has emerged repeatedly when policies favored by the anointed turn out to fail. This pattern typically has four stages: STAGE 1. THE “CRISIS”: Some situation exists, whose negative aspects the anointed propose to eliminate. Such a situation is routinely characterized as a “crisis,” even though all human situations have negative aspects, and even though evidence is seldom asked or given to show how the situation at hand is either uniquely bad or threatening to get worse. Sometimes the situation described as a “crisis” has in fact already been getting better for years. STAGE 2. THE “SOLUTION”: Policies to end the “crisis” are advocated by the anointed, who say that these policies will lead to beneficial result A. Critics say that these policies will lead to detrimental result Z. The anointed dismiss these latter claims as absurd and “simplistic,” if not dishonest. STAGE 3. THE RESULTS: The policies are instituted and lead to detrimental result Z. STAGE 4. THE RESPONSE: Those who attribute detrimental result Z to the policies instituted are dismissed as “simplistic” for ignoring the “complexities” involved, as “many factors” went into determining the outcome. The burden of proof is put on the critics to demonstrate to a certainty that these policies alone were the only possible cause of the worsening that occurred. No burden of proof whatever is put on those who had so confidently predicted improvement. Indeed, it is often asserted that things would have been even worse, were it not for the wonderful programs that mitigated the inevitable damage from other factors. Examples of this pattern are all too abundant. Three will be considered here. The first and most general involves the set of social welfare policies called “the war on poverty” during the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, but continuing under other labels since then. Next is the policy of introducing “sex education” into the public schools, as a means of reducing teenage pregnancy and venereal diseases. The third example will be policies designed to reduce crime by adopting a less punitive approach, being more concerned with preventive social policies beforehand and rehabilitation afterwards, as well as showing more concern with the legal rights of defendants in criminal cases.

Lyndon Johnson was a master of self-justification. According to his biographer Robert Caro, when Johnson came to believe in something, he would believe in it “totally, with absolute conviction, regardless of previous beliefs, or of the facts in the matter.” George Reedy, one of Johnson’s aides, said that he “had a remarkable capacity to convince himself that he held the principles he should hold at any given time, and there was something charming about the air of injured innocence with which he would treat anyone who brought forth evidence that he had held other views in the past. It was not an act… He had a fantastic capacity to persuade himself that the ‘truth’ which was convenient for the present was the truth and anything that conflicted with it was the prevarication of enemies. He literally willed what was in his mind to become reality.” Although Johnson’s supporters found this to be a rather charming aspect of the man’s character, it might well have been one of the major reasons that Johnson could not extricate the country from the quagmire of Vietnam. A president who justifies his actions only to the public might be induced to change them. A president who has justified his actions to himself, believing that he has the truth, becomes impervious to self-correction.

The accomplishment of the testimony was two-fold: It changed the death of Marshall from suicide to death by gunshot, and it brought into light bespectacled Johnson hit man, Malcolm “Mac” Wallace. At one point, Wallace, a former marine who had been the president of the University of Texas student body, had strong political aspirations. In 1946, Wallace was an organizer for Homer Rainey’s campaign for governor.44 Wallace eventually became indebted to Johnson, and the closest he would ever get to political office would be in administering of carnage for Johnson and his Texas business associates. Wallace was the Mr. X at the gas station asking Nolan Griffin for directions. Described as a “hatchet man”45 for Johnson by Lyndon’s mistress Madeleine Brown, Wallace was an important link in many of the murders connected to Johnson. Estes’s lawyer, Douglas Caddy, revealed Wallace’s and Johnson’s complicity in Texas-style justice in a letter to Stephan S. Trott at the US Department of Justice: My client, Mr. Estes, has authorized me to make this reply to your letter of May 29, 1984. Mr. Estes was a member of a four-member group, headed by Lyndon Johnson, which committed criminal acts in Texas in the 1960’s. The other two, besides Mr. Estes and LBJ, were Cliff Carter and Mack Wallace. Mr. Estes is willing to disclose his knowledge concerning the following criminal offenses: Murders 1.   The killing of Henry Marshall 2.   The killing of George Krutilek 3.   The killing of Ike Rogers and his secretary 4.   The killing of Coleman Wade 5.   The killing of Josefa Johnson 6.   The killing of John Kinser 7.   The killing of President J. F. Kennedy46

1 and 2. The United States represents less than 5 percent of the world’s population; it consumes more than 25 percent of the world’s resources. This is accomplished to a large degree through the exploitation of other countries, primarily in the developing world. Point 3. The United States maintains the largest and most sophisticated military in the world. Although this empire has been built primarily through economics—by EHMs—world leaders understand that whenever other measures fail, the military will step in, as it did in Iraq. Point 4. The English language and American culture dominate the world. Points 5 and 6. Although the United States does not tax countries directly, and the dollar has not replaced other currencies in local markets, the corporatocracy does impose a subtle global tax and the dollar is in fact the standard currency for world commerce. This process began at the end of World War II when the gold standard was modified; dollars could no longer be converted by individuals, only by governments. During the 1950s and 1960s, credit purchases were made abroad to finance America’s growing consumerism, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. When foreign businessmen tried to buy goods and ser vices back from the United States, they found that inflation had reduced the value of their dollars—in effect, they paid an indirect tax. Their governments demanded debt settlements in gold. On August 15, 1971, the Nixon administration refused and dropped the gold standard altogether.   Washington