[…] of things did strike me. On Israeli nuclear development: “Perhaps the most significant development of 1963 for the Israeli nuclear programme, however, occurred on November 22nd … LBJ was sworn in..” (p165) “Kennedy was less than whole-heartedly pro-Israeli.” Author Green comments on a Kennedy-Golda Meir exchange that it was “the last time for many, […]
[…] and Carter – who tried to slow/stop the nuclear arms race, were right. But Kennedy was killed (if not by the Pentagon, by one of the politicians, LBJ, who fronted for it on Capitol Hill) and Carter retreated when his talk of nuclear disarmament was rubbished at home and in the Kremlin (where there […]
[…] of sense, why do something so massive and so economically destructive? The same propaganda effect, the same stampeding of Congress, could have been achieved with infinitely less. LBJ stampeded Congress with nothing more than radar contacts between North Vietnamese and US boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. If you wanted to blame al-Qaeda for […]
[…] ex-Presidents Nelson Mandela for instance. Celebrities have occasionally dropped by. But it is instructive to think back just a few years. Would we have seen, say LBJ and Robert Redford in the same venue Blackpool in 1972, perhaps being introduced by that years Conference Chair, Tony Benn? Perhaps the episode represents […]
[…] the U.S. invasion, and secondly by being there even when Iraq was run by Saddam. Has crony capitalism evolved since the days when Brown and Root pump-primed LBJ for special treatment? Whilst the Brown brothers set out to win government business by developing what by today’s standards would be judged corrupt means, and to […]
[…] then and his ignorance in the late 1990s when he wrote this is difficult to comprehend or excuse. Crucially, he accepts the received view that JFK and LBJ were the same: he is apparently unaware of JFK’s plan to pull the US out of Vietnam. ‘Nor is there any reasons to suppose that things […]
[…] known how many contributions Meyer Lansky had made to Humphrey’s various campaigns. (When Humphrey later took his oath as vice president of the US in 1965 under LBJ, the Bible he swore on was held for him by one of his old patrons, Minneapolis vice lord Fred Gates.) Adlai Stevenson won the nomination and […]
[…] to have robbed Nixon of the 1960 election.(15) Nixon, in turn, scuppered the Democrats in 1968, by persuading the Vietnamese to hold out on peace negotiations with LBJ, with the promise that they’d get a much better deal under a Nixon White House. Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey discovered what was going on while travelling […]
[…] category. For all his wealth and foreign adventurism, JFK was extremely (politically) liberal. He began much of the civil rights legislation which was seen to completion by LBJ. He was interventionist rather than laissez-faire; he picked fights with the directors of US Steel and with the oil companies. And he was killed in that […]
[…] the Anglo-American intelligence and surveillance system, notably some GCHQ bases in the Far East, provided intelligence to the US. But despite a great deal of arm-twisting from LBJ, and despite Wilson’s utter dependence on the US at this point for financial assistance to defend the value of the pound, Harold Wilson refused to send […]
