Word: lbj
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LYNDON JOHNSON HAD this little game he liked to play. He would call in one of his more uptight, straightlaced Ivy-League advisors, like Douglas Dillon, and then would conduct a perfectly normal discussion of some current issue--while LBJ sat on the toilet. LBJ enjoyed watching his advisor squirm and would bark something like "What's the matter with you, boy?" if the aide's discomfort became too obvious...
...have to deal with an image, a fix. I didn't know how to deal with LBJ until he became a war criminal and I didn't know how to deal with Ford until the pardon...
...youth and the intellectual left--having found each other several years before in a shared feeling of utter powerlessness to counter the increasing irrationality of American policy in Southeast Asia--had brought down (or so it seemed at the time) LBJ and his great war machine and were on the verge of leading America to a renewal of democratic policy-making and a moral view of the world. Eugene McCarthy had started humbly in New Hampshire, but had brought the message home to LBJ that Americans wanted peace and would no longer accept American involvement in a jungle...
...been heard alongside those of the Berrigans and the Quakers and the various experts on Communism who could see that the most damaging and unwelcome intrusion in Southeast Asia was that of Western colonialism. If one looks for the origins of the smug social-Darwinist philosophy held by the LBJ's and the Nixons who perpetrated this war "to save us from the evils of socialism," one finds none other than the Ivy League's (well, Yale's) William Graham Sumner, who probably did as much to push positivistic social science at the expense of religion and the classics...
...WALKING along Boylston St. one day recently when I noticed a listing of "The Appalachia Shop" at the entrance to the new Garage shopping complex. I thought about my mountain ancestors, who were making quilts and selling mules a couple of generations ago, and about what LBJ said of the problems of mountain people, and then decided to find out what this bit of supposed craft and likely underdevelopment was doing in the middle of Harvard Square's trendiest new investment...