President Lyndon B. Johnson was famous for how he groomed certain subordinates for specially-created positions that enabled him to use them for his future advantage. As an example, when he was a congressman, one of his assistants, Horace Busby, stated that Johnson had once sulked for days about something and finally his top aide, John Connally, asked him what was eating on him. Johnson responded that he had observed that the most effective congressmen: . . . always have some little fellow in their office who sits back in a corner. He doesnt have to have any personality, doesnt have to know how to dress, usually they dont have their tie tied right, a button off their shirttypical Johnson, running on at thisnicotine stains on their fingers, no coat, all like that. But they sit back in the corner, they dont meet any of the people that come in the office. They read and they think and they come up with new ideas, and they make the fellow smart. Ive never had one of those, and I want one. [i]
By the time he became president, Johnson filled a similar position with a man who he referred to as his in-house intellectual, John P. Roche. There were many other such examples, one of which produced manifold benefits for over four decades, occurred in 1966, when he arranged with Hollywood mogul Lew Wasserman to appoint Jack Valenti as the Guardian at the Gate to ensure that no movies (or any other future form of electronic media) would ever be produced that might reveal Lyndon Johnsons most innermost secrets.
The First Pay-back Incident: Valenti Swings Into Action
In 1968-69 an incident occurred which was one of the first (but not nearly the last) major instances of the dividend pay-back for this ingenious maneuver to keep his future legacy intact. There would be many more in the following decades, leading up to the monumental effort in 2003-04 when Valenti joined by Lady Bird Johnson, Bill Moyers, ex-Presidents Jerry Ford, and Jimmy Carter forced the History Channel to suspend broadcasts of the extended series of The Men Who Killed Kennedy, including:
Episode 7: The Smoking Guns, Episode 8: The Love Affair and Episode 9: The Guilty Men.
But that first example was one that Johnson evidently personally invoked during his last year in office, in 1968. It started when his second cousin, Jay Bert Peck, did some things that, apparently, greatly embarrassed Johnson. As often happened when someone did something to embarrass LBJ, Mr. Peck died shortly after this, in his case by being shot in his own house by an intruder.
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