LBJ's Disgust at Clinton Mentor Bragging About Signing Southern Manifesto

LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON LIBRARY ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION ^ | 6/21/77 (date of interview) | Michael L. Gillete

[Doctor Raoul]

From Hubert H. Humphrey Oral History Interview III, 6/21/77, by Michael L.Gillette by the LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON LIBRARY ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION

Gillette: Manifesto

Humphrey: Manifesto.

Gillette:Did he ever talk to you about that?

Humphrey: Oh yes. Oh yes, indeed. And he'd remind me who did it. I remember he told me onetime, "I know you think Bill Fulbright is one of the great liberals around here. You liberals. You all have got your big heroes." Only in Johnson's voice. He said, "I want you to notice who signed the Southern Manifesto and who didn't. Now all your bomb throwers over there think I am the worst thing that came down here. They won't cooperate" and so on. "But they're all cheering Bill Fulbright. Why do they cheer Bill Fulbright? Because they think he's got great connections overseas. He's a Rhodes Scholar, and he's got the Fulbright Act" and so on and so on. And he'd go on. He said, "He signed the Southern Manifesto, didn't he? He signed that Southern Manifesto. I didn't." Oh, many times he'd mention that. He was very proud of the fact that he didn't sign it. Also, he used it.

Johnson used every tool in the book. This is when he'd get in an argument with Paul Douglas or Herbert Lehman or Estes Kefauver or any of these people that he thought he couldn't quite manage or that were resisting him. He'd let them know. Every so often he'd drop that little atom bomb; that when it was all said and done, "Boys, you've got some boys over here that you're sleeping with day in and day out, like Bill Fulbright, but I wasn't there when they signed that Southern Manifesto. I said no, and your hero said yes. Now how do you justify that?" See, he'd put them on the defensive. He used these things. He was so adroit.

[Doctor Raoul]

Fulbright = Bomb Throwing Liberal Democrat

There are several points in the interview where HHH as LBJ using "liberal" and "liberal Democrats" as pejoratives.

[NativeNewYorker]

The Southern Manifesto.

[RaceBannon]

have you got a copy of the SOUTHERN MANIFESTO and the signatories?

[Doctor Raoul]

Here's a moral exercise for today's liberal Democrats:

SEE Bill Clinton presenting the Medal of Freedom to Bill Fullbright, but HEAR LBJ's words, "Boys, you've got some boys over here that you're sleeping with day in and day out, like Bill Fulbright, but I wasn't there when they signed that Southern Manifesto. I said no, and your hero said yes. Now how do you justify that?"

And they ask yourselves, "Now how do you justify that?"

[Doctor Raoul]

See the link just posted in reply #2.

What most links don't show is what party they were in. I did some research and found:

MEMBERS OF THE UNITED STATES SENATE
Walter F. George – Democrat – Guy who actually read the Manifesto into the record.
Richard B. Russell, Democrat
John Stennis, Democrat
Sam J. Elvin, Jr., Then-Democrat
Strom Thurmond, Democrat
Harry F. Byrd, Democrat
Willis Robertson, Democrat
John L. McClellan, Democrat
Allen J. Ellender, Democrat
Russell B. Long, Democrat
Lister Hill, Democrat
James O. Eastland, Democrat
W. Kerr Scott, Democrat
John Sparkman, Democrat
Olin D. Johnston, Democrat
Marion Price Daniel, Democrat
J.William Fulbright, Democrat
George A. Smathers Democrat
Spessard Lindsay Holland.Democrat

[Doctor Raoul]

Thanks.

[Roberts]

Major bump!

[Doctor Raoul]

Maybe a few folks can copy and paste these names one at a time into google.com and confirm their party affiliation and report back on this thread.

First announce which one's you'll do, so we don't duplicate effort.

MEMBERS OF THE UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Alabama
Frank W. Boykin
George M. Grant
George W. Andrews
Kenneth A. Roberts
Albert Rains
Armistead I. Selden, Jr.
Carl Elliott
Robert E. Jones
George Huddleston, Jr.

Arkansas:
E.C. Gathings
Wilbur D. Mills
James W. Trimble
Oren Harris
Brooks Hays
W.F. Norrell.

Florida:
Charles E. Bennett
Robert L.F. Sikes
A.S. Herlong, Jr.
Paul G. Rogers
James A. Haley
D.R. Matthews.

Georgia:
Prince H. Preston
John L. Pilcher
E.L. Forrester
John James Flynt, Jr.
James C. Davis
Carl Vinson
Henderson Lanham
Iris F. Blitch
Phil M. Landrum
Paul Brown.

Louisiana:
F. Edward Hebert
Hale Boggs
Edwin E. Willis
Overton Brooks
Otto E. Passman
James H. Morrison
T. Ashton Thompson
George S. Long.

Mississippi:
Thomas G. Abernathy
Jamie L. Whitten
Frank E. Smith
John Bell Williams
Arthur Winstead
William M. Colmer.

North Carolina:
Herbert C. Bonner
L.H. Fountain
Graham A. Barden
Carl T. Durham
F. Ertel Carlyle
Hugh Q. Alexander
Woodrow W. Jones
George A. Shuford.

South Carolina:
L. Mendel Rivers
John J. Riley
W.J. Bryan Dorn
Robert T. Ashmore
James P. Richards
John L. McMillan.

Tennessee: James B. Frazier, Jr.
Tom Murray
Jere Cooper
Clifford Davis.

[XRdsRev]

Hale Boggs was a democrat representative from Louisiana's 2nd district from 1941-43 and again from 1947-72. He disappeared over Alaska in a presumed airplane accident and was never seen again. He was the father of ABC's "This Week" former host Cokie Roberts.

[holdonnow]

Note Hale Boggs, who was Cookie Roberts' dad (and he became House Democrat Leader, who later died in an airplane accident).

[plain talk]

Yeah, Johnson was a shrewd man and wanted to get blacks the right to vote - so they'd vote democrat.

Johnson used to tell me just simply this: "Let me tell you something, Hubert, [about] all this civil rights talk. The thing that we've got to do is get those blacks the right to vote. When they've got that vote power there will be no more of this segregation around here." He said, "That's what will shape up all these people in Congress, because they've got the swing vote." And he said, "Now you fellows are trying to get them public accommodations. You want them to ride in a bus"--and he'd go over all the little things--"but what they need is the vote. That's what I'm going to get them. I'm going to get them the vote power. When they get the vote power, they got the power. You wait and see. In any state where the blacks have got the vote power, you'll see their senators are much more willing to listen to their requests."


More info about LBJ and his strategy on Civil Rights legislature at http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/caro/excerpt.html:

Lyndon Johnson was, in fact, using that word a lot in the Democratic cloakroom that Summer. “Be ready to take up the goddamned nigra bill again,” he told one of the southern senators, Sam Ervin of North Carolina. Walking over to a group of southerners, he told them there was no choice but to take it up, and to pass at least part of it. “I’m on your side, not theirs,” he told them. “But be practical. We’ve got to give the goddamned n------ something.” “Listen,” he told James Eastland of Mississippi, who was anxious to adjourn for the year, “we might as well face it. We’re not gonna be able to get out of here until we’ve got some kind of n----- bill.”

Johnson’s voting record—a record twenty years long, dating back to his arrival in the House of Representatives in 1937 and continuing up to that very day—was consistent with the accent and the word. During those twenty years, he had never supported civil rights legislation—any civil rights legislation. In Senate and House alike, his record was an unbroken one of votes against every civil rights bill that had ever come to a vote: against voting rights bills; against bills that would have struck at job discrimination and at segregation in other areas of American life; even against bills that would have protected blacks from lynching. His first speech in the Senate—a ringing defense of the filibuster that was a key southern tactic—had opened with the words “We of the South,” and thereafter, as this book will demonstrate, he had been not merely a member of the Senate’s southern anti–civil rights bloc, but an active member...

[plain talk]

Another one from that last link. Not related to civil rights but interesting nonetheless.

Sometimes he (Johnson) would indulge in an even more blatant manifestation of his power. Somehow the vote hadn’t worked out as he had thought it would; he was a vote or two short of victory. So a vote or two would be changed—right out in the open. Johnson would walk across the floor to a senator who had been in opposition, and whisper to him, and the senator would rise and signal the clerk that he had been incorrectly recorded. “You would see votes changed right in front of your eyes,” the Senate aide says. Neil MacNeil, who knew the Senate so well, could hardly believe what he was seeing. “He did it in front of God,” MacNeil was to recall. “It didn’t happen much, but it happened. He was absolutely brazen about it. He put the arm on guys right on the floor.”

Sometimes Johnson would not even bother to walk across the floor. Once he yelled across the well to Frear, who was sitting at his desk: “Change your vote, Allen!” The Senator from Delaware did not immediately respond, so Johnson yelled again, in a shout heard, in the words of one writer, by “more than eighty senators and the galleries”: “Change your vote, Allen!” Allen changed his vote. Small wonder that Hugh Sidey, remembering years later the “tall man” with “his mind attuned to every sight and sound and parliamentary nuance,” who “signaled the roll calls faster or slower,” who gave another “signal, and the door would open, and two more guys would run in,” would say, “My God—running the world! Power enveloped him.”

[Doctor Raoul]

If we were liberals, we'd be making some kind of "the nut doesn't fall far from the oak" remarks right about now.....

[Doctor Raoul]

Ronald Kessler in his book, "Inside The White House" quotes Robert N. MacMillan (a USAF crewman on Air Force One) witnessed LBJ confiding in two governors why he wanted a civil rights bill.

At the bottom of page 33 of paperback: LBJ says, "I have them [insert racial slur here] voting Democratic for two hundred years." <P Following that passage, MacMillan describes how LBJ's kid Luci once demanded that he locate her "care giver". It was, "Find my [insert racial slur here]."

[Doctor Raoul]

Lyndon Johnson was, in fact, using that word a lot in the Democratic cloakroom that Summer. “Be ready to take up the goddamned nigra bill again,” he told one of the southern senators, Sam Ervin of North Carolina.

If I may borrow a phrase from the sainted leader of the Democrt's civil rights movement, then Harry Belefonte is one goddamned nigra who knows how to serve his Democrat masters.

[doosee]

Interesting list. I would bet that the Riley from S. Carolina was the father of the Riley that Clinton appointed as Sec. Of Education in his cabinet. From Charleston SC. The leftist media gave all of these people a free pass.

[Doctor Raoul]

We all know that if Storm's son ever ran, there would be NO mention of his father.

[plain talk]

Doctor Raoul: I had read that "I'll have them voting democrat ..." quote before but could not remember where I had read it. I had also misremembered the number of years. So it was 200 years, not 100 years! Thanks.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

This is exactly the point. The RATS may in the end be proven stupid to lift the scab of racism in government, because the historical record is FAR more unfriendly to RATS then to Republicans. Sure, Nixon probably said some things in 1968 to attract Wallace voters, and there are the Willie Horton ads in the 1988 elections. The Republicans are not without their skeletons. But the hand of racial oppression in the country has been by and large, a democratic one, and more and more stories like this one are bound to come out which will corroborate this position. We'll see how this all ends up for "sheets" Byrd, he may ultimately end up tarred by this racial tar baby.

I think the RATS have started to believe their own propaganda. Slick willie and aunt hillie have been prattling on and on about the "black voter suppression" which only exists in their vivid imaginations (like the black churches clinton supposedly saw being burned while growing up that didn't, in fact, exist). But the REAL black voter suppression was aided and abetted by RATS like Fullbright, Byrd, Russell and others. Just shows that RATS "think" with their emotions and not with their brains, and frequently engage in history rewriting on a massive scale. And so this racial McCarthyism may end up boomeranging against them in ways they cannot even imagine.