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There have been some fascinating reveals coming from the release of some of the JFK files.
Included among the big news was that Lee Harvey Oswald spoke to an infamous agent from with the ‘sabotage and assassination department’ of the KGB two days before he killed JFK. He’d also met with that agent two months before in Mexico City.
The fact that this was not revealed formally publicly by the government before is just astonishing, particularly given Oswald’s prior connections to the Soviet Union.
But the Washington Post also found another very interesting memo.
And it’s a rather embarrassing one for Democrats and raises a very interesting historical question.
Was Lyndon Johnson a member of the Ku Klux Klan? According to this memo, they had a Klan member who claimed there was proof that he was.
It says that Ned Touchstone, who was the editor of The Councilor and a member himself, had proof that LBJ was a member in his early days in Texas.
This, of course, is information that would cast quite a black eye on the perceptions of Johnson and his Great Society the domestic programs of Lyndon Johnson which included welfare. The alleged goal of the Great Society was to eliminate poverty and racial injustice.
It was already well known that Johnson while signing the Civil Rights Act was still an apparent racist.
Some choice samples.
According to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, he said this.
These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don’t move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there’ll be no way of stopping them, we’ll lose the filibuster and there’ll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It’ll be Reconstruction all over again.
And of course, there’s this infamous piece from Ronald Kessler from Inside the White House: The Hidden Lives of the Modern Presidents and the Secrets of the World’s Most Powerful Institution. * Warning for graphic language. *
Johnson, like other presidents, would often reveal his true motivations in asides that the press never picked up. During one trip, Johnson was discussing his proposed civil rights bill with two governors. Explaining why it was so important to him, he said it was simple: “I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for two hundred years.”
“That was the reason he was pushing the bill,” said MacMillan, who was present during the conversation. “Not because he wanted equality for everyone. It was strictly a political ploy for the Democratic party. He was phony from the word go.”
The memo doesn’t make clear what the proof is that they supposedly have on Johnson.