The Lyndon Johnson tapes: Richard Nixon’s ‘treason’
“We have found that our friend, the Republican nominee, our California friend,
has been playing on the outskirts with our enemies and our friends both, he has
been doing it through rather subterranean sources. Mrs Chennault is warning
the South Vietnamese not to get pulled into this Johnson move.”
LBJ on the phone to Senator Richard Russell.Publicly Nixon was suggesting he had no idea why the South Vietnamese withdrew from the talks. He even offered to travel to Saigon to get them back to the negotiating table.
Johnson felt it was the ultimate expression of political hypocrisy but in calls recorded with Clifford they express the fear that going public would require revealing the FBI were bugging the ambassador’s phone and the National Security Agency (NSA) was intercepting his communications with Saigon.
So they decided to say nothing.
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Nixon went on to become president and eventually signed a Vietnam peace deal in 1973Declassified tapes of President Lyndon Johnson’s telephone calls provide a fresh insight into his world. Among the revelations – he planned to fly into the 1968 Democratic Convention and win the presidential nomination. And he caught Richard Nixon sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks… but said nothing.
The 1968 convention, held in Chicago, was a complete shambles. Tens of thousands of anti-war protesters clashed with Mayor Richard Daley’s police, determined to force the party to reject Johnson’s Vietnam war strategy.
As they taunted the police with cries of “The whole world is watching!” one man in particular was watching very closely. Lyndon Baines Johnson was at his ranch in Texas, having announced five months earlier that he wouldn’t seek a second term.
The president was appalled at the violence and although many of his staff sided with the students, and told the president the police were responsible for “disgusting abuse of police power,” Johnson picked up the phone, ordered the dictabelt machine to start recording and congratulated Mayor Daley for his handling of the protest.
The president feared the convention delegates were about to reject his war policy and his chosen successor, Hubert Humphrey. So he placed a series of calls to his staff at the convention to outline an astonishing plan. He planned to leave Texas and fly into Chicago.
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Yet another member of “them” that the left never had any illusions about. Real justice would be served if the FBI went after the still living traitors from the late 1960s – Kissinger and Chennault.
From People 1981:
Yet by 1981 her fortunes were flying high again:
I had no idea this stuff was not merely possible but pretty well documented. Anybody see this, via Charles Pierce? http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/shocking-new-evidence-reveals-depths-treason-and-treache
ry-watergate-and-iran?paging=off
You didn’t?
Well…you’re not alone.
You have been media spoon-fed lie after lie after lie after lie until you have no idea which way is up.
I got a great big kick out of this one recently. From the Daily
Breast…err, ahhh …The Daily Beast, an extension of the old “Newsweek” mag that was so plainly a CIA front job that it went out of business from sheer embarrassment.Duh!!!
I know functionally illiterate street guys who were hip to that shit years ago.
PLEASE!!!
WTFU.
AG
Factoring in LBJ’s ability to schmooze with powerful men, his complex relationship with J. Edgar Hoover, and his previous vow to decline the nomination if offered, have to wonder if anyone can interpret this tape. He was clearly lost, but why?
Johnson was also complicit in the JFK assassination.
Did he know out front?
Maybe…after all Texas was his state. He pretty well owned it, politically and otherwise. Maybe it was just the classic mob boss tacit shake of the head yes when informed that “something” was going to go down that would benefit him and the powers w/which he was allied, and maybe worse.
But afterwards?
C’mon.
The Warren Commission?
Please.
LBJ?
Crooked as a snake with a broken back.
Up and down the line.
Bet on it.
AG
Here. And here.
Yes.
And literally hundreds more pieces of evidence.
My question to you is this. Do you really think that this coup…because that is what it was, Booman, a coup of some sort…is not still in place? On the massive evidence available to us from so many sources…”Anonymous” just for starters…how can you support a government that has at best made serious accommodations with the controllers of the system that directly resulted from this set of actions 50 years ago?
How can that government be trusted?
i cannot, myself.
I will not.
And I will support anyone who appears to seriously intend to do something about it.
The U.S. has been living in a rapidly metastasizing, cancerous lie for 50+ years. Only the truth will cure it.
Only the truth.
And no power either.
Nothing is higher.
Nothing.
Bet on it.
I am.
Later…
S.
I wrote a long response and lost it when my computer ran out of juice.
Oh well.
I’ll make a shorter response.
It’s best to think about individuals rather than some undefined force.
The folks who we’re talking about worked either at JM/Wave or in Angleton’s shop in counterintelligence or very closely with Helms. And they tended to move together for the next 20 years. Many of them worked in Laos during the war. Then they moved to Iran when Ford ramped up our military sales to the Shah. And then they started to scatter, retire, or die, but some were involved in the October Surprise, and the back-channel sales to Iran through Israel that led to the Iran-Contra scandal. The last I really saw of them was flying mujahadeen from Afghanistan and Pakistan into Azerbaijan in the early 1990’s.
Almost all of them are now dead or retired for quite some time.
Honestly, I think H. Ross Perot ran for president to put a stop to their activities, but it’s hard to explain. The best intro to the subject is Bo Gritz’s 1988 letter to George H.W. Bush. Bo Gritz is not a reliable source because he was always a bit insane, but Perot believed him and waged a massive battle against Richard Armitage.
Rather than get into all that, it’s important to realize that Armitage is responsible for knifing Cheney, which shows that the old habits die hard.
It also shows that things are complicated. When Bush brought back Ford-era cabinet members Cheney and Rumsfeld and Reagan-era folks like Eliot Abrams, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Negroponte and Armitage, he rekindled some of the old flames.
But those folks weren’t the same people who wanted Kennedy dead and had the means to make it happen.
They are “the same folks”…or allies/descendants of them…who ran the whole Iraq War scam on the American people , and I (on the evidence of the signing and passage of the N.D.A.A. itself, let alone the massive security state ramping-up that has been part and parcel of the Obama regime.) refuse to support those who have surrendered on any level to this set of powers.
I refuse, Booman.
Gotta daw the line or eventually you end up here:
Where does one draw the line, Booman?
I draw it here.
Bet on it.
When do the faceless drones come for you, Booman?
When?
Guilty until proven innocent?
Who ya gonna call?
Ghostbusters?
Please.
You’re smarter than that.
AG
You have difficulty understanding that the only people who keep power out of the hands of these bastards are people who have substantial power themselves. You also have trouble understanding that the Donald Greggs and Ted Shackleys of the 1970s and 1980s are freaking moderates compared with the modern opponent we face. The folks that ran in the Bay of Pigs circles (and their proteges) were actually opposed to the war in Iraq. I am talking about people close to Poppy and Scowcroft, like Armitage and Powell. who either opposed internally or externally the neo-conservative reaction to 9/11.
It’s worse than you imagine.
This dude probably would have seen Cheney as extreme. Perhaps even this dude.
You have no idea.
Any power that keeps the neo-conservatives out of power is providing about the greatest public service imaginable.
Murder for profit is murder for profit, Booman. Once one is involved in that approach to economics it’s just a matter of scope…a matter of degree.
You say that Obama and the so-called “progressives” are holding these radical conservatives back?
Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide…millions, truth be told…would counter with this simple question:
Who is holding this administration back?
The dead and maimed, the homeless and hopeless don’t give a rat’s ass about “who” has done this to them; they just want the torture to stop.
I repeat…murder for profit is murder for profit, and that’s the end of it as far as I am concerned. Murder in support of the “profit” of American people and/or the populations of the NATO powers is not only a bad idea on the long-term economic, political and sociological levels, it is a bad idea on the karmic level. One only has to look at the economic troubles raging through Western Europe and the U.S. to see that this Blood For Oil great game is simply not working on a practical level, nor is it working sociologically. The cultures of these aggressor countries are imploding underneath the guilt of 50+ years of criminality. Soldiers are committing suicide in unprecedented numbers; young civilian men are going stark raving mad with automatic weapons in their hands and if you have any contact whatsoever with the incredibly badly functioning underbelly of the massive bureaucracies in place…bureaucracies staffed almost entirely by functionally nearly illiterate products of the failed educational system which is itself a failed bureaucracy staffed by a generally very badly functioning group of near-idiots at the top of that particular food chain…if you have any contact with these systems it should immediately become clear that a machine staffed by fools is going to run aground or otherwise eventually experience a fail of the same type as those cruise ships about which we are breathlessly informed by our equally corrupt and stupid media bureaucracies.
Plato’s ideal ship of state has become a ship of fools, Booman.
A ship of fools.
We either reform or fail. Simple as that.
Simple as this, too.
The chickens always come home to roost. It’s only a question of when they’ll arrive and/or whether we can avert their arrival by positive action.
Drones in the skies; drones running the bureaucracies.
That is not positive action, Booman.
Not.
WTFU.
AG
Presumably, you think things would have been different (and better) if Kennedy had lived. But I have no idea why you think that based on your total condemnation of First World democracy.
I have no idea “how things would have been” had Kennedy…the Kennedys, actually…lived. But they would have been different. maybe a different cabal would have ruled this country and maybe the same people would have taken over by other means. Maybe the Kennedy cabal would have taken different routes. No one knows. I only say that the JFK murder was the key to the coup that installed the forces that have dominated this country for 50 years.
Better?
Worse?
Who the fuck knows?
I will say this, though.
JFK…and later RFK…more closely resembled thinking, feeling humans than did the crew of animalistic greedmongers who followed them. It wasn’t until Bill Clinton won the presidency that someone at least borderline human had any real power in this country. Well…Carter too, but how much power did he really have? That’s a long time to be ruled by aliens, ain’t it?
Alien to human feeling and natural decency, at any rate.
A long time, followed by another 8 years of even worse creatures. To my mind that 45 years or so (leavened by what amounted to two failed human presidencies after Clinton got himself honeytrapped) installed a Permanent Government and PermaGov-controlled media system that has proven itself to be immune to the idea and practice of normal “democratic” change. It has controlled the electoral possibilities so tightly, so well and so secretively that no real change is possible. Once it got rid of Howard Dean and replaced him with that lizard in human form John Kerry…that’s all she wrote.
Sorry, man. That’s the way I see it. The only hope that remains to us of getting rid of these powers is if and when they get careless from too much power.
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Let us pray that this is true, because if it is not true then the fire next time is going to be right smack dab under our own mortal asses.
Let us pray.
Later…
AG
Wherein I grow weary and resort to a colloquy.