The AFU and Urban Legend Archive Politics lbj penis Select a topic - - - - - - - - Home Searches AFU FAQ - - - - - - - - AFU Animals Books Celebrities Classic Collegiate Death Disney Drugs Food GIF Language Legal Medical Misc Movies Politics Products Religion Science Sex Songs TV - - - - - - - - Other sites

From: njgill@ix.netcom.com (Nancy J. Gill)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: LBJ
Date: Sun, 10 Nov 1996 08:42:47 GMT

Doris Kearns was a twenty-four year old candidate for a Harvard Ph.D. in Government in the spring of 1967 when she first met Lyndon Johnson. Despite having written an essay for the _New Republic_ titled "How to Remove LBJ in 1968", she was hired as a White House Fellow, although she worked in the Labor Department rather than directly for the President, as had originally been planned before the essay was published. After Johnson announced his withdrawal from the1968 race, he asked Kearns to join the White House staff, and to begin work with him on his memoirs. Later, he asked her to return with him to Texas to work with him full-time on the memoirs, and on establishment of his presidential library and the Lyndon B.
Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin. While she declined to lived in Texas full-time, she spent long weekends, parts of vacations, and winter holidays with the Johnsons on their ranch during the next four years. Her book, "Lyndon Johnson & The American Dream" has this to say about how Johnson expressed his anti-intellectualism:

      From time to time, Johnson's antagonism
     toward these men of culture assumed the
     crude shape of simple exhibitionism. His
     penchants for talking to visitors while
     on the toilet, for using crude and
     scatological language, and for
     exhibiting his sexual organs were
     especially pronounced when he dealt with
     'gentlemen of culture.' In renouncing
     his civility he stripped them of theirs;
     he reduced them to his own ignominy, in
     which he celebrated a triumph over his
     mother's voice within him.

But did his crudity extend to "whose is bigger" contests? Not that Kearns documents, though she does relate that:

     Sometimes, in the middle of a meeting,
     Johnson declared a swimming break for
     everyone. And everyone followed him into
     the White House pool. To save time,
     Johnson said, he often swam in the nude.
     Stripping down by the side of the pool,
     he invited others to do the same. Some
     found it difficult. Those who didn't
     want to undress in front of everyone
     else, however, were badgered and mocked
     until they complied.  After the swim,
     the grudging swimmers were given towels.
     Standing in quarters so close that the
     drops from one body would splash onto
     another, they were expected to rub
     themselves dry, put on their clothes and
     return to the meeting. Few Presidents
     have permitted the kind of intimacy
     between themselves and their staffs that
     Johnson encouraged. When he had to go to
     the bathroom in the middle of a
     conversation, it was not unusual for him
     to move the discussion there. Johnson
     seemed delighted as he told me of "one
     of the delicate Kennedyites who came
     into the bathroom with me and then found
     it utterly impossible to look at me
     while I sat there on the toilet. You'd
     think he had never seen those parts of
     the body before. For there he was,
     standing as far away from me as he
     possibly could, keeping his back toward
     me the whole time, trying to carry on a
     conversation. I could barely hear a word
     he said. I kept straining my ears and
     then finally I asked him to come a
     little closer tome. Then began the most
     ludicrous scene I had ever witnessed.
     instead of simply turning around and
     walking over to me, he kept his face
     away from me and walked backwards, one
     rickety step at a time. For a moment
     there I thought he was going to run
     right into me. It certainly made me
     wonder how that man had made it so far
     in the world."

With respect to racist tendencies, she quotes Johnson on the subject:

     "I never had any bigotry in me," He
     explained much later.  "My daddy
     wouldn't let me. He was a strong anti-
     Klansman...The Klan controlled the state
     when I was a boy. They threatened to
     kill him several times."

Even taking in to account Lyndon's well known talent for exaggeration, it's hard to
discount the fact that he had made a special effort to help blacks many years before he came to the presidency.

     "In the middle thirties we didn't know
     Lyndon Johnson from Adam," recounted a
     venerable and distinguished Negro leader
     [Kearns' book was published in 1976],
     describing the period when Johnson had
     directed the national Youth Agency in
     Texas. "We began to get word up here
     that there was one NYA director who
     wasn't like the others. He was looking
     after Negroes and poor folks and most
     NYA people weren't doing that." Johnson
     did put together special NYA programs
     for the black young, often financed by
     secret transfers of money from other
     projects that had been approved at upper
     levels of the bureaucracy....When he
     finally did become President, when he
     "had the power and the obligation,"
     then, as he claimed, it did become his
     personal priority. In speeches,
     legislation, and continuing proposals,
     Johnson took the most advanced position
     on racial issues of any President in
     American history; appearing at times,
     ahead of the civil rights movement
     itself, until, sadly, the war in Vietnam
     extended its paralyzing hand to this as
     to his other domestic ambitions.

Kearns, of course, married Godwin (whoever he is), wrote about Franklin & Eleanor, mourned the loss of the Dodgers and detailed her subsequent embrace of the Red Sox for Ric Burns' "Baseball" on PBS, and joined Jim Lehrer as a decidedly non-token female
commentator. She appears to have liked LBJ in spite of herself--though she was in no way blinded by affection to his faults, and they were many.

My favorite apocryphal LBJ story (not in Kearns' book either) is about the time he was leaving a military base and appeared to be looking for his transport among many similar vehicles. "Your helicopter is over here, Sir," helpfully said the young aide assigned to him. "Son, they's all my helicopters," said LBJ, who enjoyed the trappings of
authority as much as any Chief Executive until Reagan.

Nancy J. Gill, Alameda CA
njgill@ix.netcom.com