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May 20 - May 28, 2019
“Congressman, if anyone called me at midnight and told me to come over and shine his shoes, I’d tell him to go fuck himself.”
Harry Truman submitted to Congress an impressive new liberal agenda to end the wartime hiatus in social reform: increased Social Security benefits, a higher minimum wage, federal aid to education, prepaid medical care, health insurance, and—in what would, if passed, be the first major civil rights legislation of the century—laws against lynching and against segregation in interstate transportation and laws ensuring the right to vote and establishing a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC).
The proposed civil rights program, he was to say, was a “farce and a sham—an effort to set up a police state in the guise of liberty.” It is, he was to say, “the province of the state to run its own elections. I am opposed to the anti-lynching bill because the federal government has no more business enacting a law against one form of murder than another. I am against the FEPC because if a man can tell you whom you must hire, he can tell you whom you cannot employ.”
Conservative arguments against civil rights havent evolved much in 70 years
“There’s no use to cancel it because Lyndon has to eat anyway, and they’re all invited,”
the Legislature would henceforth no longer meet every year but every other year because, as one Texan said, “The more the damn Legislature meets, the more Goddamned bills and taxes it passes!”
Some of Coke’s “gags” would, in fact, become staples of Austin lore. During a hunting trip with several fellow legislators and a lobbyist, for example, a rancher, an old friend, called Stevenson aside and told him that in one of the back pastures where the men were to hunt was an aged horse—an old family pet—so infirm that it should be destroyed. The rancher asked Stevenson to do it for him. Stevenson agreed. As the hunters’ car was passing the horse, he asked the driver to stop, and got out. “I think I’ll just kill that ol’ horse,” he said, and, taking aim, shot it in the head. His
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“If you started talking about wheeling and dealing—trading votes, whatever—what you got from Coke was that stone stare. Sometimes it wasn’t that he was angry; it was just that he was bored. But if you were talking about what government should do and why we should do it, then you had his interest.”
Learning that there was no auditing whatsoever of the expenditures of state agencies, he wrote, introduced and pushed to passage a bill establishing the office of State Auditor.
From the time he was a youth, he had written down in his ledgers … every personal expenditure he made. He knew where his money went.…
use the gasoline tax revenue not for the service on new debt, but to retire the old debt—the bonds already issued by individual counties to build roads within their own borders. This would ease local tax burdens; it would “get the people out of debt.” Use the balance of the gasoline tax revenues to build new highways—but
He visited all the state prisons in Texas, visited them and slept in cells with the convicts. He visited prisons in the Northeast. And the reforms he then proposed not only improved Texas prisons, but did so at a fraction of the cost of the Governor’s proposals.
Once, there was what a friend recalls as “a terrible ruckus on the floor,” and Coke was doing nothing to quiet it down, and someone asked why not, and he said, “As long as they’re not voting, they’re not passing any laws. And as long as they’re not passing any laws, they’re not hurting anybody.”
Stevenson said; it was always tempting to have government come in and solve problems, but every bit of government help came with strings of bureaucratic regulation attached, and every string was a limitation on the most important thing we possess, and have to leave our children—the thing that made Texas and America great. Freedom. Individual liberty. Every time that you accept a government program that you don’t really need, you’re giving up some of your freedom for a temporary gain; you’re selling your birthright for a mess of pottage.
His speeches were not on politics but on government—on the principles of government, of Jeffersonian democracy hardened by frontier individualism. More and more, one principle was emphasized. “Why do thinking people cherish liberty?” he asked. Because the accumulated wisdom of past ages has demonstrated that people are happiest individually and make the greatest advancement collectively when the … essential elements of liberty and independence prevail.… The blessings of happiness and prosperity have flowed from the rock of individual effort. Now it is proposed to subsidize individual effort.
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In Jefferson’s time, such opposition to government per se—such fierce frontier individualism—might have made Stevenson a real democrat; in the more complicated mid-twentieth century, his reluctance to make use of the powers of his office allowed the continuation of the vacuum in Texas government in which special interest groups—the Texas oilmen, natural gas and sulphur companies, Brown & Root and their subordinate contractors—who had no such reluctance to interfere in government had long exerted undue influence in the legislature.
The $34,000,000 state deficit he inherited at his inauguration had become a surplus of $35,000,000 by the time he left office.
once, when reporters were pressing him for an answer on a recent development, he said, “Listen, I’m too old to burn my lips on boiling coffee”; often thereafter, when pressed on an issue, he would say, “we’ll just let that cup cool a while”—and
So, for three days, Johnson waited, while doing everything he himself could think of to jar the stone loose: going out in a car, he had Woodward drive him over bumpy roads; in the clinic he walked up and down the stairs; holding on to Woodward for support, he bounced up and down—even jumped up and down—as hard as he could bear to. These exercises produced no result except increased pain and weakness.
“There are men in this nation today who go about over the country as apostles of fear,” Stevenson said. “They tell us another war is just around the corner. They are prophets of doom, howlers of calamity. We must—they tell us—be afraid.” Such men, Stevenson said, were trying to manufacture an “emergency” based on fear.
Sounds familiar
So successful was the Johnson campaign in locating pro-Johnson amputees for this task that the percentage of men introducing Lyndon Johnson who still possessed all their limbs was surprisingly small.
America must “draw the quarantine line and we would rather have it on the Mediterranean than on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico.”
Sounds a lot like Dick Cheney on Iraqi WMD
IT WAS FRANK HAMER who led the posse of lawmen who trailed Bonnie and Clyde for 102 days and set the ambush in which the famous bank robbers were finally killed,
“I sure did hate to bust a cap on a lady”—and
While other men knelt by Sneed’s side and loosened his necktie and shouted for a doctor as he gasped in pain, Alvin Wirtz knelt by his side, scribbled something on a piece of paper and, handing it to Sneed along with a pen, told him to sign it: it was his proxy; Wirtz had saved a Johnson vote.
“AS TARRANT GOES, SO GOES THE FURNITURE,”
“a continuation of a fight by a group of disgruntled, disappointed people.”
So very Trumpian
It seems … to be a fact beyond dispute that no other President has ever had to live in an atmosphere so heavy with distrust and disbelief as Lyndon Johnson.… What may well be a majority of the American people are persuaded that the President is a dishonest and dishonorable man.
not even his possession of the presidency had eased the insecurities of his youth.
