LBJ Cries in the Crapper

by Pa Rock
Conspiracy Theorist

John F. Kennedy was murdered forty-six years ago next month, but the circumstances of that crime were such that controversy reigns supreme over what actually happened to this very day, and, much like the murder of Abraham Lincoln a century earlier, it promises to be one of those events that will keep good people arguing throughout the ages.

There are all kinds of theories about what really happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963. A few simple souls think that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, but a majority of Americans and many historical and crime researchers don't buy that vanilla explanation. Some believe that the murder was planned and organized by Fidel Castro as payback for America's involvement in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Others are sure that it was a mob hit, possibly as retribution for Robert Kennedy's laser focus on Jimmy Hoffa. Still others see the event as being planned and executed by agencies of our own government - say by FBI Director (and frumpy cross-dresser) J. Edgar Hoover who made little effort to keep his hatred of the Kennedy's a secret, or the CIA, or the military, or some fascist combination of elements of all of the above.

My personal theory is that it was put together by Lyndon and/or Lady Bird Johnson, a couple of slick political operators who were politically ruthless and knew how to get things done - and had much to gain. Johnson, whose chief role model was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was getting older and had a serious heart condition - and he wanted to be President in the worst way.

But, all of that is just so much conjecture. It won't be solved definitively until I retire and get time to do it myself.

Tidbits on the assassination continue to trickle out. Today there was a bit in Huffington Post by a writer named Steven M. Gillon. He was doing research on the assassination at the Kennedy Library in Boston last spring - on the exact day that a new record was opened to the public. That record was a transcript of an interview with retired Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh who was JFK's military aide on that fateful day in Dallas. McHugh gave an interview to the library in 1978 and provided information about the reaction of Lyndon Johnson to the murder. He had not shared his story with the Warren Commission during their investigation in 1964, possibly to avoid pissing off his Commander-in-Chief.

General McHugh said that Jackie Kennedy was seated aboard Air Force One wearing her bloodied pink suit and pillbox hat that had pieces of JFKs' brains stuck in the fabric. She was wanting to get the plane in the air and get away from Dallas. He notified the pilot to get it in the air, but the pilot said that he had been ordered to wait. Upon quick investigation, the General learned that LBJ was on board and not wanting to leave yet.

McHugh went to find the new President and determine what was going on. Johnson was not in the passenger section of the plane, so McHugh then went to the Presidential bedroom. When he couldn't find him there - he checked the only remaining space where the President could be - the restroom in the Presidential bedroom. General McHugh stated: "I walked in the toilet, in the powder room, and there he was hiding, with the curtain closed." He said that LBJ was sitting on the john crying and saying, "They're going to get us all. It's a plot. It's going to get us all." McHugh described LBJ as being "hysterical."

And all of that adds to my theory that one or both of the Johnson's were behind the murder of President John F. Kennedy. Lyndon Johnson was a tough old bastard, and if he was sitting on the crapper bawling like a baby, he was acting. If he was doing any emotional suffering, my guess is that it was because he had to stay cooped up in the little bathroom for so long until someone finally came in to witness his distress.

Lyndon Johnson was an amazing President in many respects. He knew how to twist arms and make Congress do his bidding. He understood that a great legacy would involve creating remarkable social programs like Medicare and championing civil rights. He was a conservative southern Democrat who came to the White House and became a domestic liberal icon.

But, like his hero FDR, Johnson also thought that he could achieve greatness through being a wartime president. (George Bush, who hid from combat during LBJ's war, succumbed to that same Siren's song forty years later.) What LBJ got was the morass of Vietnam. What LBJ got was literally being driven from office by the peace movement. I guess the good news for LBJ on the international scene was that at least nobody threw shoes at him!

I have no way of proving my spurious allegations that one or both of the Johnson's were involved in the murder of John F. Kennedy. I just think it is a distinct possibility. Of this, however, I am certain: Lyndon Baines Johnson, a macho hombre who enjoyed lifting his beagles by the ears and snapping his wife's bra strap in public, was not hiding in an airplane bathroom crying out of fear or panic. If he was crying it was scripted and right on cue.

Now do you see why I call this blog The Ramble?

The Goldwaters of Arizona

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

My daughter, Molly, lived in Arizona for a decade before I moved here. A couple of years ago while she was working in hospice care, Molly asked me if I had ever heard of some guy who ran for President named Barry Goldwater. Molly had learned this antiquarian name while working with an older lady who had been one of the good Senator's last caretakers.

Barry Goldwater was the Republican candidate for President in 1964. He was solidly trounced by the incumbent President, Lyndon Baines Johnson. I remember him well. I was sixteen that summer, and I was a Goldwater supporter. That's right. Liberal old Rock was once an enthusiastic partisan for Barry Goldwater, a.k.a. "Mr. Conservative." I even gave a speech in his behalf at a high school mock political rally. (I'm actually not ashamed of that. Another Goldwater supporter that year was a 17-year-old girl in Chicago by the name of Hillary Rodham.)

Goldwater was a political freak, so outside the mainstream of American politics at the time that those who supported him were routinely were laughed at and ridiculed. A week before the election he was given a modicum of respectability through a thirty-minute television speech by an unemployed actor named Ronald Reagan. Goldwater wound up winning his home state of Arizona and five states in the cracker belt of the American south. Two years later Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California, and went on to an even better job in January of 1981. Barry Goldwater went on to serve a couple of more decades in the United States Senate before returning to Arizona for his final days.

The Goldwater family has been in the news this week talking about politics, and from their public pronouncements, they seem to be divided along generational lines similar to those that affected the Macys and the Rodhams and many other families in 1964. Senator Goldwater's niece, C.C. Goldwater, declared yesterday that she and her siblings, and most of her cousins, were supporting the candidacy of Barack Obama. She said clearly:

"Our generation of Goldwaters expects government to provide for constitutional protections. We reject the constant intrusion into our personal lives, along with other crucial policy issues of the McCain/Palin ticket."

She added:

"My grandfather (Paka) would never suggest denying a woman's right to choose. My grandmother co-founded Planned Parenthood in Arizona in the 1930's, a cause my grandfather supported."

C.C. Goldwater also said, in discussing the current campaign, that

..."the Republican brand has been tarnished in a shameless effort to gain votes and appeal to the lowest emotion, fear."

But no good deed goes unpunished, and today Barry Goldwater's son, Barry M. Goldwater, Jr., took issue with his niece, saying that she should work within the Republican party to promote the values that her grandfather stood for. He went on to declare that he supports McCain.

I'll cast my lot with C.C. Something tells me that the man who authored Conscience of a Conservative would not be pleased with the massive debt incurred by the Bush administration. I doubt that Senator Goldwater would be impressed with our Dear Leader abdicating his duty as Commander in Chief and allowing "yes" men in uniform complete latitude in conducting the abysmal war. And I don't really believe that a man whose central philosophy was that the government should intrude in people's lives as little as possible would give two damns about what people did in the privacy of their own bedrooms!

Barry Goldwater was a giant of the times. Bush, Cheney, McCain and Palin all claim to be conservatives, but they are just bungling dwarfs not fit to stand in his shadow. It is time that they all piled into their clown car and drove off into the sunset - because a new day is fixing to dawn in America!

Redirection

Every few decades America undergoes some basic realignments, usually under the direction of a President who understands, with uncommon clarity, the importance of leading with a vision. We have had three such leaders in my lifetime:

John Kennedy challenged us to make America and the world a better place by focusing on others instead of ourselves. We weren't about greed, we were about giving. Kennedy gave us the Peace Corps, which is still a force for good in the world nearly fifty years later. He also redirected our national focus toward the stars, or at least the moon, and began a serious effort to strengthen math and science education in our schools.

Lyndon Johnson was thrust into the Presidency early in what should have been the Kennedy period. LBJ used his unparalleled power with Congress to create a massive Civil Rights program and anti-poverty agenda. It was under Johnson that many of America's most disadvantaged first began to realize that they, too, could gain entry into the system. Some of the jewel's in LBJ's crown of accomplishments include the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA - a domestic Peace Corps), Medicare, Medicaid, and Headstart - programs that radically changed America for the better.

Society is a pendulum. When Americans feel that government has gone too far to the left or to the right, they begin looking for someone who can bring the pendulum back in the other direction. There were American's in the sixties who resented what they saw as government's appropriation of their tax money for use with the people that demagogues assured them were too lazy to work. It was time for a shift, someone with a new vision.

Ronald Reagan came to the White House in 1980 with the vision of refocusing America from the "us" of Kennedy and Johnson, to the "me". Insteading of concentrating on what we could do for our country, Reagan asked us to focus on what we could do to make our own lives better, and let our poor neighbors fend for themselves.

And America has been on this "me" track now for almost thirty years. Even an eight-year democratic respite under the Clintons saw little done to enhance the lives of the poor and needy. The North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA), in fact, proved to be a critical factor in increasing unemployment and poverty in the United States during the Clinton years and throughout the presidency of George Bush.

George Bush has taken the pendulum so far to the right that it appears to be stuck. Our treasury has been sacked by Bush and Cheney's cronies, otensibly to fight a war that has drug on for five years and that we have zero (ZERO!) hope of winning. Our national prestige is in the crapper thanks to our unwillingness to negotiate or even be civil with other nations. We let bin Laden escape so that the President could rush into Iraq and prove something to his father, and then have a moment of glory prancing around the deck of an aircraft carrier. George Bush has stood, like the proud little peacock that he is, snapping orders as America digs the biggest hole in the history of the world, and he won't let us stop digging!

It is time for a change. It is time to begin redirecting our national energies in a more positive, and world-friendly direction. It is time that we begin to care about every mother's son, or daughter, and not just what is good for the stockholders of Halliburton, Blackwell, and Raytheon. It's our America, and it's time to bring it home!

There are three candidates left in the race for the presidency of the United States. John McBush, who states that he does not understand economics and is willing to stay in Iraq one hundred more years. McBush is a cranky old man (with an eye for blondes) who wants to serve out George Bush's third term. Billary Clinton wants to take us back to the good old days of the 1990's when our factory jobs went to Mexico and the assets of the wealthy went to the Caymans. She clearly wants to serve Bill's third term. Barack Obama wants to focus on people, and to provide us with a hope of regaining our stature in the world through diplomacy and good deeds rather than with bombs and braggadocio. Of the three, Obama is the only one who offers any hope for change.

Obama '08! It is time for a change!