LBJ and Baptist History in the Margins

[Stephen Fox]

From the Pressler family fight with Carlyle Marney when Marney was at FBC Austin; to Bill Moyers and Jimmy Carter, James Dunn and Jimmy Allen, lot of Baptist history in the margins and legacy of LBJ

Coke Stevenson race of 48 is still significant.

James Dunn and Bill Moyers ought to have public conversation about it all
Sidney Blumenthal piece on Coke Stevenson stands in counterpoint to a chapter of Caro's monumental work.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/magaz ... g-dig.html

[Stephen Fox]

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/31/books ... all&src=pm

[Stephen Fox]

This one about got past me, but I hope to read it in the print issue soon.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012 ... _fact_caro

[Stephen Fox]

But strong take on LBJ and RFK. Last two paragraphs strong in some ways as the end of the Movie There Will Be Blood

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archive ... tion=false

[Stephen Fox]

For a long time I was certain Moyers was on the plane with LBJ, and President Kennedy's body as it flew from Dallas. But after reading the Caro excerpt in New Yorker, I got new questions.
Could Curtis Freeman, AaronWeaver, or Bruce Gourley find out for us through James Dunn or someone. I would like to know.

[Ed Pettibone]

For a long time I was certain Moyers was on the plane with LBJ, and President Kennedy's body as it flew from Dallas. But after reading the Caro excerpt in New Yorker, I got new questions.
Could Curtis Freeman, AaronWeaver, or Bruce Gourley find out for us through James Dunn or someone. I would like to know.

Ed: Steve Here is a statement that seems to confirm your initial thinking "Johnson also asked Jack Valenti, Bill Moyers, and Liz Carpenter to write a brief statement for him to read on the day's events, which he then edited slightly himself. At 6:10 pm, after landing at Andrews amid a crowd of Congressional leaders, he walked to an already prepared set of microphones and began his first public statement as president" Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_inau ... B._Johnson

Lyndon B. Johnson taking the oath of office on Air Force One following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Dallas, Texas. Identified persons include: (#1) Mac Kilduff (Press Secretary), (#2) Jack Valenti (media adviser), (#3) Judge Sarah T. Hughes, (#4) Congressman Albert Richard Thomas, (#5) Lady Bird Johnson, (#6) Chief Jesse Curry (Dallas police chief), (#7) Lyndon B. Johnson, (#8) Evelyn Lincoln (personal secretary to John F. Kennedy), (#9) Congressman Homer Thornberry, (#10) Roy Kellerman (USSS agent), (#11) Lem Johns (USSS agent), (#12) Jacqueline Kennedy, (#13) Pamela Turnure (press secretary to Jacqueline Kennedy), (#14) Congressman Jack Brooks, (#15) Bill Moyers (Peace Corps deputy director)

NOTE: on My computer the #15 is not seen on the picture the way the article is written I am inclined to think that indeed Moyers was in the photograph but perhaps was inadvertently cropped out in the transmission of this copy.



And
Go to Chapter One Section • Go to Book World's Review

Guns or Butter
The Presidency of Lyndon Johnson
By Irving Bernstein

[Stephen Fox]

Thank-you Ed.
I had a phone chat with a former colleague of W and B at the Washpost yesterday and he could not confirm Moyers on the plane but suggested the google wiki link and this morning a former associate of Tom Corts at Samford confirmed your findings.
So in fact I do have a note from Moyers and the legend I had been sharing with 5th graders in Alabama off and on over the years is true, I have contact with somebody on the plane that day.

Here is a note I just left on the 50 minute npr interview-- www.drshow.org -- of this morning May 8. Many of you will want to listen online to the entire program:

Great show. I read the New Yorker excerpt and have been fascinated for several days. The program repeats tonight in Alabama and I will be listening a 2nd time.
Just today I confirmed that Bill Moyers was on the plane with President Kennedy's Body and LBJ on the flight from Dallas to D.C. I have a note that I treasure from Moyers, so fascinating stuff indeed.
As many across the nation have done and considerably more will do on the 50th anniversary next year; the Where were you on that day question will gain even added significance.
I as a 5th grader in Gaffney, S.C; my father a Baptist minister. Later I was to become enchanted by Marshall Frady's coverage of the Civil Rights era.
Just Saturday by happenstance within ten minutes, I had two conversations at a flea market in NE Alabama. One with a minister who had a part in a funeral for an Uncle of Lady Bird in Billingsley, Alabama. From that I couldn't help but imagine Lady Bird had some influence on LBJ as he navigated Selma; Selma just about 20 miles from Lady Bird Taylor's Alabama roots.
And another with a football player, McClendon, who was on the 63 championship team with Joe Namath and Bear Bryant. He remembered Bear went ahead with practice that afternoon, but the next day the away game with Miami was called off.
Our conversation was lightly framed by my reference to Howell Raines 1983 TNR piece Goodbye to the Bear, about Bryant's relationship with George Wallace.
Alabama's dilemma continues, and now it is up to Bama Coach Nick Saban to levy some influence on Bama Gov Bentley on the immigration law.
To that extent in my world, Lyndon and Martin and the repercussions of Nov 22, 1963 are still very much alive.

[Neil Heath]

[quote="Stephen Fox"]Here is a note I just left on the 50 minute npr interview-- http://www.drshow.org -- of this morning May 8. Many of you will want to listen online to the entire program:

Stephen, that program doesn't air on Ga. Public Radio as far as I know. Can you tell us any more about it or the host? Is it similar to Terry Gross and Fresh Air?

[Stephen Fox]

Diane Rehm show is online. It is distinct from Terry Gross and Fresh Air. It musta dissappeared from Georgia recently cause a friend in Americus listens all the time, in fact heard me call in last fall.

Listen online, or read the transcript. Read the chapter in Barnes and Noble, Passage to Power. Look at the pictures at the site. Great program. Read the comments www.drshow.org for March 8, 2nd hour.

[Stephen Fox]

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012- ... on-johnson

[Stephen Fox]

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/arc ... em/256539/

[Stephen Fox]

If at all interested in LBJ, and I am convinced he does mollify the pilgrimage of James Dunn and Bill Moyers, their friendship and world view; thus Baptist history of the last 40 years and more (Marney since 56 when they became acquainted at FBC Austin) you will want to read this review while it is online.

I'm just starting on it myself but wanted to get it in the hopper while Jesus Tarries.

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-ar ... -democracy

[Stephen Fox]

from online page 7 or so of the TNR link above:

OTHERWISE, THOUGH, Caro presents Johnson’s isolation as a terrible waste of his talents, not least on the burning issue of civil rights. Despite his segregationist voting record, Johnson’s bright thread, according to Caro, had always included what he calls a “genuine empathy and compassion for Americans of color,” which dated back to his days in the 1920s as a schoolteacher among poverty-stricken Mexican children in desolate South Texas. Having first worked himself up over the Civil Rights Bill in 1957—when, Caro writes, “compassion had, for the first time, coincided with ambition”—Johnson worked himself up all over again as the civil rights movement surged in 1962 and 1963.

In February 1963, after he had delivered pro–civil rights speeches in Detroit and Cleveland, Johnson visited strife-torn St. Augustine, Florida, and addressed racially integrated audiences, achieving what his aide George Reedy called “a major breakthrough on the color line.” In a Memorial Day speech at Gettysburg, nearly a century after Lincoln’s address, Johnson echoed Martin Luther King, Jr.’s eloquent but controversial “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” written just six weeks earlier: “The Negro today asks justice. We do not answer him—we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil—when we reply to the Negro by asking ‘Patience.’ ... To ask for patience from the Negro is to ask him to give more of what he has already given enough.” Thereafter an invigorated Johnson ceased his sulking and, refusing to be put off, demanded a meeting with President Kennedy to discuss a major civil rights bill that the administration had drafted without consulting him and was about to introduce in Congress.

Johnson soon found himself at the center of the action at last. He offered sage tactical advice, urging the president not to send up a civil rights bill prematurely lest the Southern power-brokers in the Senate hold the rest of the administration’s legislative agenda hostage and force the rights bill to be ignominiously withdrawn. He pleaded for Kennedy to give blacks a firm and eloquent moral commitment. He declaimed about civil rights at top-level White House meetings with influential business and labor leaders, impressing even the skeptical Schlesinger, who thought he outperformed both of the Kennedy brothers. JFK began addressing Johnson, in RFK’s presence, with a respect that exceeded civil courtesy and even approached deference. “For a couple of weeks there, he started to look almost like the old Lyndon,” Reedy later recalled.

But then the “bad” Bobby intervened, showing up the vice president at a White House meeting with civil rights leaders, personally and ostentatiously undermining his authority over the committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, and generally humiliating him. Kennedy acknowledged that Johnson had some sound points to make on dealing with Congress, but he described his caution as obstructionist. Outmaneuvered, Johnson retreated once again into depression, probably worsened by heavy drinking, which scared his closest aides. Rumors were spreading around Washington that with the administration, including the vice president, now firmly on the record in favor of civil rights, Johnson’s electoral usefulness in the South had evaporated and he would be dumped in 1964— rumors that JFK stoutly denied, but that redoubled Johnson’s gloom. The Senate Rules Committee had undertaken an investigation of Bobby Baker that was moving uncomfortably close to Johnson. Despised by the “Harvards” and mistrusted by northern liberals generally, alienated from his long-time Southern conservative allies over civil rights, Johnson still had powerful friends in Washington, but he was beginning to resemble a political party of one. Finally, the vice president’s inability to heal a political division down in Texas between his former protégé Governor John Connally and Senator Ralph Yarborough signaled how badly his influence had waned even in his native state. It was left to the president to try and clean up the Texas mess on a four-day political and fund-raising trip that would take him to Dallas.