trysail
Catch Me Who Can
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Lyndon Johnson was without doubt the biggest cheat and liar ever elected President. Robert Caro's masterful biographical trilogy established beyond question that LBJ lied and cheated his way through life.
This morning's Morning Edition on NPR revealed yet one more example of Johnson's deliberate lying. Here's a partial transcript:
Renee Montagne: There are tapes of Johnson showing a different side of how he worked [Medicare's passage].
James Morone: Johnson maneuvered every step of the way getting this bill through Congress, and one of the things he did — and this is a little dicey in today's climate — was suppress the costs. So this young kid gets elected from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy, in 1962, and Johnson is explaining to him [over the phone] how you get a health bill through. And what he tells him is don't let them get the costs projected too far out because it will scare other people:
LBJ ( on tape): "A health program yesterday runs $300 million, but the fools had to go to projecting it down the road five or six years, and when you project it the first year, it runs $900 million. Now I don't know whether I would approve $900 million second year or not. I might approve 450 or 500. But the first thing Dick Russell comes running in saying, 'My God, you've got a billion-dollar program for next year on health, therefore I'm against any of it now.' Do you follow me?"
James Morone: We believe, after looking at the evidence, my co-author [David Blumenthal] and I, that if the true cost of Medicare had been known — if Johnson hadn't basically hidden them — the program would never have passed. America's second-most beloved program would never have happened, if we had had genuine cost estimates.
Renee Montagne: It isn't as if President Johnson did not have opposition. In fact, he had quite a bit of public opposition, a lot of hand-wringing. One of the most prominent opponents was Ronald Reagan, who was then a candidate for the governor of California:
Ronald Reagan ( on tape ): "One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people, has been by way of medicine. It's very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project — most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can't afford it. Now, the American people, if you put it to them about socialized medicine and gave them a chance to choose, would unhesitatingly vote against it."
Renee Montagne: Socialism, socialized medicine — that is just as scary today for a lot of people as it was in Reagan's time.
James Morone: If this program passes, Reagan said in another speech, one of these years we will tell our children and our children's children what it was like in America when men were free. What you have to understand, when you hear the town hall meetings, and you hear all the anger today, is that it sounded just the same across the media in 1963, '64, '65 as the Medicare debate heated up. Indeed, Reagan cut his national teeth opposing Medicare and rallying Republicans against it.
Renee Montagne: What is different now? What are the pitfalls for opponents of the health care overhaul, and what are the pitfalls for the Obama administration that didn't exist in President Johnson's time?
James Morone: For one thing, the sides won't come together. The Medicare opponents last time voted against it, but when it became inevitable, they all went across the aisle and voted for it. That's not likely to be true this time.
For the Republicans, the great danger is that the program passes and becomes very popular. Democrats spent years and years feasting off Republican opposition to Medicare. There's even a word in Washington: medagogue. A medagogue is someone who demagogues Medicare.
On the Democratic side, what Lyndon Johnson could do is much harder now because the financial situation is so much more complicated. There's an Office of Management and Budget that projects the costs out to the penny way off into the future. There are rules in Congress that say for every penny you spend, you have to find a penny in savings.
In other words, Morone is suggesting that Johnson couldn't get away with his flat-out lie about the cost of Medicare today. As a direct consequence of that intentional and deliberate lie, Lyndon Johnson set the United States on the path of an eventual rendezvous with bankruptcy.
For Lyndon Johnson, determination had to include belief.
He understood that all his life- as is shown by the fact that as a small boy "he was always repeating" the salesman's creed that "You've got to believe in what you're selling," and that decades later, in his retirement, he would say: "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..." And Lyndon Johnson could make himself believe in an argument even if he had never believed in it before, even if he had believed in an opposite argument- and even if the argument did not accord with the facts. A devotee like Joseph Califano would write that Johnson "would quickly come to believe what he was saying even if it was clearly not true."
When Lyndon Johnson came to believe in something, moreover, he came to believe in it totally, with absolute conviction, regardless of previous beliefs or of the facts in the matter, came to believe in it so absolutely that, George Reedy says, "I believe that he acted out of pure motives regardless of their origins. 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 his enemies. He literally willed what was in his mind to become reality." Califano, listening to Johnson tell a story which Califano knew was not true, and which Califano knew that Johnson himself knew, or at least had known at one time, was not true, writes of "the authentic increase in the President's conviction each time he recited it." The phrase used to describe the process by long time Texas associates like Ed Clark- the "revving up" or the "working up"- was homier, but it was the same process: "He could start talking about something and convince himself it was right, and get all worked up, all worked up and emotional, and work all day and all night, and sacrifice, and say, 'Follow me for the cause! - let's do this because it's right." And, Clark says, Johnson would believe it was right- no matter what he had believed before.
He understood that all his life- as is shown by the fact that as a small boy "he was always repeating" the salesman's creed that "You've got to believe in what you're selling," and that decades later, in his retirement, he would say: "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..." And Lyndon Johnson could make himself believe in an argument even if he had never believed in it before, even if he had believed in an opposite argument- and even if the argument did not accord with the facts. A devotee like Joseph Califano would write that Johnson "would quickly come to believe what he was saying even if it was clearly not true."
When Lyndon Johnson came to believe in something, moreover, he came to believe in it totally, with absolute conviction, regardless of previous beliefs or of the facts in the matter, came to believe in it so absolutely that, George Reedy says, "I believe that he acted out of pure motives regardless of their origins. 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 his enemies. He literally willed what was in his mind to become reality." Califano, listening to Johnson tell a story which Califano knew was not true, and which Califano knew that Johnson himself knew, or at least had known at one time, was not true, writes of "the authentic increase in the President's conviction each time he recited it." The phrase used to describe the process by long time Texas associates like Ed Clark- the "revving up" or the "working up"- was homier, but it was the same process: "He could start talking about something and convince himself it was right, and get all worked up, all worked up and emotional, and work all day and all night, and sacrifice, and say, 'Follow me for the cause! - let's do this because it's right." And, Clark says, Johnson would believe it was right- no matter what he had believed before.
-Robert A. Caro
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of The Senate.
New York, 2002.
Lyndon Johnson never won a fair election in his life, going all the way back to his third-rate college where he rigged his election as student body president. He cheated in virtually every election when he stood for public office. The most notorious was his 1948 election to the U.S. Senate where upwards of 10,000 ballots fraudulently submitted in Duval and Bexar Counties enabled his statewide victory margin of 87 votes.
