trysail
Catch Me Who Can
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...There had been speculation for years about Johnson's relationship to that company [the "LBJ Company"]. Lady Bird had purchased one small radio station in 1943 for $17,500. Since then, thanks in part to a twenty-year-long string of strikingly favorable rulings by the Federal Communications Commission (which, among other aspects, had left Austin as one of the few metropolitan areas with only a single commercial television station), the company had burgeoned into a chain of immensely profitable radio and television stations the length of Texas, and by 1963 it owned as well 11,000 acres of ranchland and major shareholdings in nine Texas banks. Johnson had quieted the speculations by his unequivocal denials that there was any relationship. He had said, over and over, for twenty years, that the LBJ Company was entirely his wife's business and he had nothing to do with it; that, as he claimed in one of his many statements, "All that is owned by Mrs. Johnson....I don't have any interest in government-regulated industries and I never have had." But if Lyndon Johnson had no interest in the LBJ Company, why was it taking out insurance on his life? And, of course, his denials had omitted the salient fact. Texas was a community property state, and therefore since Lyndon Johnson had an interest— a half interest— in all the company's income, he had become rich. If Reynolds' statements became public, it would cast doubt on Johnson's claim that there was no connection between LBJ and the LBJ Company— and once that connection was established, the company's financial dealings would become a subject of journalistic inquiry. Johnson had arrived in Congress poor, and during his career had ostensibly had no source of income other than his government salary. He had been boasting to friends for years that he was a millionaire. By 1963, he, a man who had never held any job but his government positions— whose salary had never been more than $35,000 per year— was not merely a millionaire but a millionaire many times over...
..." 'Millionaire'— this was perhaps the first time that Johnson had ever been identified as such in print, at least in a national publication; he had perhaps never been identified in a national publication as a wealthy man, let alone a very wealthy man; for Life to do so, it must know something about his personal fortune that he had previously been able to keep hidden.
And, in fact, it did.
The magazine's investigative team had been working since the end of October [1963], and, during that time, say its leader, Associate Editor William Lambert, 'I began to pick up all these hints' about Lyndon Johnson, not merely about Johnson and his relationship with the newly rich Bobby Baker, but about Lyndon Johnson 'and the acquisition of his fortune.' Following up on hints, the team had found, in the words of Russell Sackett, one of its members and also an associate editor, that 'The deeper you got, the more serious they were; he was far richer than anyone had expected,' that he was, in fact, very rich indeed.
'I was very indignant,' Lambert said, and during the week of November 11 [1963], he had gone to the office of George P. Hunt, Life's managing editor, and said of Lyndon Johnson, 'This guy looks like a bandit to me.' Although 'bandit' is, of course, a synonym for 'robber' or 'thief,' Lambert didn't feel he was misusing the word. 'I felt that he had used public office to enhance his private wealth.' 'We're going to have to spend some money [to investigate]. I need some people, and a lot of time.' Johnson's entire financial picture should be looked into, he said. 'It was almost a net worth job, and you know that takes an enormous amount of time. I told Hunt, 'He's got a fortune, and he's been on the [public] payroll ever since he got out of college. And I don't know how he got it, but it's there.' By the time he went to see Hunt, Lambert was to recall, 'We knew he was a millionaire many times over."...
-Robert A. Caro
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power
New York, N.Y. 2012.
This is an excerpt from the fourth volume of Robert A. Caro's monumental biography of the 36th President of the U.S.
I have read each volume as it emerged. With each and every volume, I have been more and more sickened and disgusted by Caro's revelations of Johnson's profound dishonesty.
The inescapable fact is that Lyndon Baines Johnson was a crook, a liar, a cheat, a thief and a blackmailer.
He cheated in every single election he ever entered— beginning as a student at obscure Southwest Texas State Teachers College— and he never stopped.
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