sorenson - w va
so i'm at the part in sorenson's book where they are in the west virginia primary
in 1960 against humphrey. kennedy had won in wisconsin, but not by much.
these days we think of the primaries as crucial, but in those days most of the action was at the convention.
(this year's libertarian party convention determined its candidate, what's his name.
badnarik. the lp has never really understood primaries, in the 10 states where they get to have them. my guess is badnarik won't get a lot of votes this fall, that he'll come in 4th with maybe 300,000 votes.)
the players were stevenson, who had been drafted by convention in 52 or was it 56 or both, symington, humphrey, and johnson. johnson had lined up lots of delagates while not entering any primaries. he wanted to be drafted at the convenion like stevenson had been, expecting that humphrey and kennedy would cancell each other out.
in 56, johnson sought the presidential nomination and lost, while kennedy sought the vice-presidential nomination and lost. so they were both players in 1960.
lbj had been running for president probably since he was 15, but definately since he was 22.
as a school teacher to mexicans in south texas at 22, he demanded respect, saying they were looking at the future president of the united states. he knew.
i'll need to check my dates. if he was born around 1900, that would be 1923, but i think it was later, 1933ish. he insisted the kids speak english only, and spanked the boys when they spoke spanish. he expected them to study hard, and organized sports teams, and instilled what today might be called self-esteem.
i think he got electric lights installed at the school for the first time.
so he knew he would be president, but he might not have decided when exactly.
in 1946, when jack kennedy ran for congress from boston, as a carpetbagger,
his father assured reported reporters that he would president in 1960.
so johnson wasn't running against jack - he was running against joe kennedy senior.
i forget if it was joe jr or jack, who when he was born, his grandfather said
"there's the first irish presdient of thre united states."
his grandfather was honey fitz fitgerald. saloonkeeper and mayor of boston.
joe was a campaign aide when fitzgerald won election to congress from the same district jack did, but was tossed out by the house of representatives because the election had been stolen. stuffed ballot boxes and strong-arm tactics, gangster activity, coordinated by joe kennedy. source: seymour hersh, reporting on the house records which were unsealed after 50 years.
jack's mission, should he choose to accept it, was not just to reclaim the seat
his grandfather had been denied, at a time when fitzgerald was the only catholic in congress. it was to be the first catholic president - that would be their revenge.
in order to get there, joe needed money. he found it.
earle halliburton built hallibuton by hard work and ingenuity and patent infringement, operating in the private sector. brown and root built brown and root by hard woprk and sucking up to the government. the company today known as halliburton is a betrayal of the good name of earl haliburton, and is a cover for the continued shenanigans fo brown and root. really it was brown and brown - root was always just a silent partner who put up the capital. source: the legend of halliburton. indy public library.
editorial comments are mine.
joe kennedy was a mixture of the two - he could and did make money in both private and public sectors. bootlegging, sure. legal importing of liquor, sure. banking. shipbuilding. stocks and bonds. a movie studio. real estate. legal and illegal, honest and dishonest, as long as the money was green.
one partner was franklin roosevelt jr. the roosevelts' story is beyond the scope of the story i'm telling, but is has been suggested that running medicinal products around the world would not have been unknown to the roosevelts.
the son of the president made a good crony for joe. together they imported scotch and rented whores - joe was big pimpin'. the biographuies say that the kennedies had a british attitude toward women - as commodities to be used for sex and discarded,
unlike the american romantic view of love. i don't know whether that's fair toward hte british, but it is fair toward the kennedies. joe, jack, bobby, teddy, all cheated, wildly. recklessly. with joe it was hardly cheating - he was brazenly open about bringing his mistresses around.
gloria somebody? it'll come to me. swanson.
big early movie star. the marilyn monroe of her day.
joe was a letch, who always hit on the girlfriends of his children.
i might be that way too if i had a spare billion. the part i don't get is tossing them aside when bored - i'm an american style romantic. but as a bisexual, i recognize the behavior - gay culture is that way - guys use each other for sex,
without looking for a deep emotional bond. since i am looking for a deep emotional bond, i get hurt time after time. i can't say i've never enjoyed casual sex for its own sake, but usually i regard sex as auditioning for a partner - and they don't.
west virginia.
see, humphrey is complaining, in the sorenson book, about kennedy buying the election. joe. and it's true. hersh says 2 million was spent, mostly in payoffs to county sheriffs and committeemen. humphrey was broke.
it wasn't just money. the family was a team, a dozen experienced hard core activists, including junior roosevelt. jack made speeches and shook hands.
phones were worked. lit was dropped. good solid politics, backed by daddy's money.
they knew they needed west virginia to force humphrey out they knew they needed humphrey out to sweep the primaries, in order to sew up enough delagates to beat
johnson at the convention. it worked. ok that's enough for now.
sorenson and such
i forgot that blogger always puts the newest entries first.. i want the oldest entries first, so that it tells a story. ut that's ok. easy to fix later.
so as i was saying, this is a blog about lbj, roughest notes that i can polish later.
i need to have coffee or go back to bed. so recently i bought second crate of books on kennedy, and i should list what i've bene reading:
sorenson "kennedy". it's the one i'm on now. sorenson was kennedy's number one speechwriter and staff person. it's a suck-up book, but informative, an insider's view.
the education of edward kennedy. it's open on my bed at home, started when i thought the sorenson would be dull - it's not. what makes it interesting is that it's written in 1972, back when teddy kennedy was still interesting.
the tao of pooh. this was a nice break between more serious books, something i read friday after i finished
the legend of halliburton.
this book helped plug a hole i'd been missing. halliburton, currently in the news a lot because of its role in iraq and with cheney, =is= brown and root, the money behind lbj.
so the story of lbj continues as the story of bush.
the dark side of camelot - seymour hersh
i don't know if hersh is a reliable source. he was a player himself, writing for the new york times in 1974, and has an agenda. but he confirms some of the rumours and has new info.
sex. drugs. murder. movie stars. swimming pools. intrigue, romance. spies. money. gangsters. capers. if only i could somehow get damon runyon to tell this story.
it's a hell of a story.
my model here is howard zinn.
also kudos to gerard colby zilg, who's "dupont dynasty" is a model for the kind of history i want to write.
it's not about raking muck. it's about telling the truth. speaking truth to power.
cutting past the pr and the flack and the lies and cute little myths.
camelot had a dark side. the great society wasn't so great.
ok, yeah, i'm a "wingnut", a madman myself, bright, paranoid, a bit obsessive.
john kennedy wrote profiles in courage (with a little help from his friends) while laid up with a bad back. he had the time and energy to research and write, on a theme. i'm laid up with depression - i've been unable to work for years.
this past year has been difficult - people trying to kill me, for example.
so this project takes my mind off my more immediate troubles.
so i have time to write it. writers are a dime a dozen. for evey one we've heard of who breaks through, many go unpublished, or sell 200 copies of a first novel or a political treatise.
i'm no caro. i'm not trying to be. but there's a hell of a story here, and it might take a madman to write it. so i'll keep at it for a bit.
the kennedy women.
this one, about rose especially, had the most detail on the person lives of these people, what made them tick. it was about 900 pages, and not dull at all.
the search for kennedy. i'm glad i started with this one. it focuses on his earlier years, is meticulously researched, written with a sceptical but not hostile tone,
and cuts through the PR to some stark reality. it shows the man behind the myth. ok all for now. those are my sources. for now. more books to come.
big picture.. what this is to be about, and some notes.
One of my mom's favorite books is "the power broker" by robert caro.
it's a study of one man, robert moses, and about the way he rebuilt the city of new york.
my mom taught me to love to read - it gave an escape from my father's tyranny and the dullness of suburbia.
and she taught me to enjoy the skirmishes of local government. she had been a spook in dc during the eisenhower era, before becoming a suburban housewife and citizen lobbyist for parks and libraries and such.
i was doing lit drops by age ten and working a poll at 14 and doing radio spots with a senator at 15, was 20 when i first campaign managed a statewide race, 24 when i first held office, then law school, making partner, running for judge, and then having a nervous breakdown and losing everything.
so now i'm mad, and play online as therapy.
apparently i'm mildly autistic, so being beaten by my father was unendurable,
rather than just a normal part of growing up.
in trying to understand myself, and trying to understand my father, and the times i grew up in, i'm looking closely at lbj. he's the first president i remember.
what my father was doing at home, he was doing to the country.
so when caro decided to spend the rest of his career writing wonderful books about johnson, i got hooked.
the path to power, the means of ascent, master of the senate - these are masterpieces, leading up to the 4th and final volume, with lbj as president.
they cut thru the hype and show a ruthless tortured driven man who put ends before means and let nothing stand in his way.
and he attained his goal, and became president, and created the great society -
a socialist revolution - and it wasn't enough, and he was still depressed.
it's a hell of a story.
only there's a catch. caro writes a book every ten years or so. it could be eight years before volume 4 comes out. i can't wait that long - i need to know how it turns out.
so, i started a project. i'm not sure which came first, the chicken or the egg, but in reading the background stuff, at some point i realized i could write the book myself. not like caro will. but i could rush into print with a half-assed version,
and scoop caro by telling the story myself.
and i have a marketing gimmick, one i picked up from cory doctorow.
it's called open source. you give your book away on the internet, and it sells more copies than if you didn't. it's the old idea behind shareware. it's the story of linux as told by eric s raymond in the cathedral and the bazaar.
so this blog, these first entries, are a step toward that book.
jyoti mishra first encouraged me to write a book.
wil wheaton introduiced me to jyoti and gave me books by cory doctorow and eric s raymond that explained the open source model. wil's "just a geek" is an example of how that works. wil's just a geek. wil is the actor who was the kid in stand by me who was going to grow up to be a writer. now he has.
i notice i haven't said anything yet about lbj.
so anyway, i went up to see this friend i have in milwaukee, and we went to a used bookstore, and i bought a crate of books on johnson. that was almost a year ago.
recently i figured that in order to understand johnson, i should learn something about kennedy, so a few months ago i bought a crate of books on kennedy.
it's bene interesting. kennedy is a lot like johnson - dark tragic driven ruthless ends before means.
kennedy, johnson, nixon. these were the presidents of my country during my formative years. each mad. as king george iii had torn his country in two, creating the american revolution, these three madmen took on vietnam and lost,
tearing the country apart, tearing me apart.
so i'm broken and confused and trying to sort things out.
to understand myself, i need to understand my father.
to understand my father, i need to understand lbj. to understand how lbj becomes president, you need to know something about joe kennedy and his son john.
it's a hell of a story.
so this is a place i can start making notes.
someday i hope to edit the notes into something more coherent, and take it to a publisher, if it gets that far. or i can make one copy on cafepress.
next entry will have info on what i'm reading now.
pathway 2007 - fear it
http://www.trpa.org/
Once upon a time, there was a lake, and a plan.
Many many years later, a lawsuit about the plan reached the Supreme Court.
Evil triumphed over good, 6-3.
Now, after 20 years, there is to be a new plan.
[insert darth mall joke]
Will no one stand against this menace? hark? who might that be?
That strange yapping noise.. could it be a weendog?
[insert john williams sounding theme music]
recent article C Monterey County Herald
Posted on Thu, Sep. 02, 2004
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Initiative targets Tahoe development
RENO, Nev. (AP) - State and federal officials have launched a new initiative designed to foster increased cooperation as they update blueprints for managing the Lake Tahoe Basin over the next 20 years.
''Pathway 2007'' is a cooperative endeavor by the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, the U.S. Forest Service and environmental regulators from Nevada and California, who hope to coordinate long-term development and ecological strategies affecting the lake and those who live or visit there.
''We have a unique opportunity to work together to save Lake Tahoe before our chance is lost to save its blue waters,'' said TRPA spokeswoman Julie Regan.
Through the process started Tuesday, TRPA officials plan by 2007 to update the agency's 20-year regional plan for the Tahoe Basin. Officials from the Forest Services Tahoe unit are also updating a long-term forest management plan.
California's Regional Water Quality Control Board and the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection, meanwhile, are preparing a strategy identifying the maximum level of pollutants that can be tolerated by Lake Tahoe. They're also looking at how to reverse a trend that has the lake losing its famed clarity at an average rate of a foot or more per year.
By preparing all the plans jointly, officials hope to maximize their effectiveness.
''The level of the impact of our human footprint is really based on a lot of large land-use decisions,'' said Harold Singer, executive officer of the California water agency. ''It is our hope the regional plans will provide the road map.''
TRPA last prepared a 20-year plan in 1984 and the controversial strategy ignited a political firestorm, leading to lawsuits filed against the two-state agency by the California attorney general and the League to Save Lake Tahoe.
A building moratorium took effect across the basin and years of settlement discussions were necessary before a regional plan was at last agreed upon in 1987.
Through extensive public involvement, TRPA hopes to avoid similar problems this time around, said John Singlaub, the agency's executive director.
''We're trying to learn from that lesson,'' Singlaub said. ''Is there a danger of still being sued in the end? Sure, these are big decisions.''
TRPA is allowing 225 new homes to be built around the Tahoe Basin in 2004 through a system that awards or penalizes local governments based on progress in key environmental goals. The new regional plan will dictate development practices around the lake for the next two decades after 2007.
The agency will also consider changes to its nine primary environmental ''thresholds,'' or targeted improvements to water and air quality, wildlife habitat, scenic protection and similar areas.
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a test
sigh. this post will be edited out, it didn't work
update: this blog has been repositioned no i mean repurposed.
skip those next two entries about tahoe.. this is now an lbj blog.
that is, it's a place to put notes for what i hope will someday be a
book and a wikipedia article, about lyndon baines johnson.
i'll continue this thread in a new entry, 9/26, below.
