Posted on 03/19/2022 9:16:26 AM PDT by Steely Tom
I've been listening (for the umpteenth time) to the C-SPAN interview of Robert Caro (by Brian Lamb). Robert Caro is the author of an enormously detailed history of the life and career of Lyndon Johnson. Also for the umpteenth time, I listened to this exchange between Brian Lamb (BL) and Robert Caro (RC) concerning the "Box 13 Scandal," which was Johnson's stepping stone to the United States Senate. This exchange begins about 27 minutes, 30 seconds (27:30) into the video linked above.
BL: You have a chapter in this book devoted to his wife, and someone who is still alive… Lady Bird Johnson. Here is a photograph… Do you happen to remember what year this photo was taken?RC: 1948.
BL: And what was he (LBJ) doing in this year?
RC: He was running for senate against the man on the other side of the page, the man with the pipe, Coke Stevenson.
BL: Who at that time was… ?
RC: Well… he was the former governor of Texas. He was running against Johnson, for the senate.
BL: And the outcome of this election?
RC: Johnson won by 87 votes out of about a million votes that were cast.
BL: And one of the points that you make in this book is that he stole the election.
RC: The election was stolen, yes.
BL: And how do you prove that?
RC: Well, I prove it… it's not even.. It's not actually that hard to prove. It's just that nobody, apparently, did it. There are more than a thousand pages of court transcripts… see, hearings were held on this at the time and more than a thousand pages of testimony were taken, in which all the witnesses are testifying the same way. Except for one. That man was… that one is a man named Luis Salas, who was the election judge in the crucial precinct, Box 13, in Jim Wells County. Now he testified to the opposite of all the other people. I found Mr. Salas in Houston, in 1986. He was then quite old, but clear of mind. And I asked him about the discrepancy between his testimony and everybody else's. And he said "Well that's simple, Robert… I lied under oath." And he then told me, and took me in great detail, through the story of what happened in Box 13. And this time, his story simply corroborated what everybody else had said.
BL: In this photograph, Bob Caro, Luis Salas is over here on the… don't know if you can see him yet…
(Brian Lamb is holding the relevant page up for the camera and pointing)
RC: No, down...
BL: over here on the… the far… as you are looking at the screen, the far right… ?
RC: No, the man to the bottom… is Luis Salas.
BL: Oh ok, right there…
RC: As you can see, Luis Salas there is this huge gun toting, burly enforcer for George Parr, the "Duke of Duval." When I went to see him, I guess I had this mental image of that's what he looked like, but of course he was 84 years old; the man who opened the door for me was a stooped, gentle, rather frail old man… gold-rimmed glasses.
Mr. Stevenson switched to the Republican Party in 1949, after he retired from politics.
Interestingly, I note that the title of the YouTube video is the same as the title I gave to this thread, but YouTube auto-supplies the title in the link as simply “Means of Ascent.” Accident? You be the judge.
I read a good chunk of Caro’s biography. I remember the impression that Caro thought Johnson was very sleazy. But also a good thing for America because Liberal ideas are awesome.
But it’s been years and I may misremember.
An "honest liberal" being basically exactly what you describe.
"You've got to crack some eggs to make an omelet," which is just a fancy way of saying "the ends justify the means."
Or more recently... what was that thing that was said about the Bush National Guard memo? "Literally false, but factually true," or some such nonsense. I can't quite remember.
This gives me hope that the Deep State subterfuge of 2020 will be revealed. Long after it does any good.
I find the the LEFT is very willing to admit ‘mistakes’ and ‘shenanigans’ in the past BUT they will swear that nothing of the such besmirches their actions in the recent past or now! Such a flexible mindset that goes with LBJ and his younger friend Harry Reid.
Who else remembers Johnson’s big buddy Billie Sol Estes, fraudster extradrainaire. The big difference between then and now is that Estes was prosecuted, convicted, imprisoned. Today, the crooked pals and families of the leftist politicians don’t even get a second look.
Somebody may eventually come forward to testify to fraud in the 2020election, but the media will bury the story.
Is he the one who branded LI parkways racist?
x answered me in advance, thx
I think Rather said, “Fake but accurate.”
Jim Wells County, Texas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Wells_County,_Texas
Like all other Democrat/ Communist Ole Long Ears Johnson was. Crook a Thug and a Bigot.
good ol’ LBJ ... the man, as president, ran the whole Vietnam War himself.
the man who foisted his ‘great society’ welfare program on the whole darn country.
Who’s an outsider of which outsider? Papa Kennedy had been a rum runner when that seriously involved mafia muscle. Camelot was a pipe dream on the outside the WASP establishment, as portayed by the Boston Brahmin John Carradine with Spencer Tracy as the Honey Fitzgerald character in the Last Hurrah. JFK was lumped as a Cowboy; LBJ, who did wear a 10 gallon hat, was actually closer to the WASP establishment as Senate Leader who delivered to the 60 Families’ demands. All irrelevant in the world of Davos Man.
Yes, that's it. Thanks.
But that describes Washington in general...
In fact, it was Donald Trump's vow, "The party's over; I'm going to clean up Washington," that gave America 6 years of unrest, lies, turmoil, and attempts to destroy Trump and his family at all costs!
The magnitude of the resolve to destroy Trump and his family is directly proportional to the magnitude of the corruption.
As Mike Huckabee said, "When you throw a rock over a fence, it's the hit dog that hollers," and you can tell by the amount of hollering which dogs got hit the hardest!
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