Meanwhile...

[selenak]

Doctor Who:

Casting news: I'm delighted we'll get an ensemble Team Tardis, i.e. three companions, two of which are people of color. Chibnall, when he's in good form, can do ensembles, and I'm looking forward to finding out who these characters are and how they'll relate to the Doctor and each other.

Harper Lee: when you're a dead writer of note, your letters will be published sooner or later. These sound as if they contain some gems, including this reaction to Obama's inauguration:

In one letter, dated 20 January 2009 – the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration – Lee wrote to Itzkoff: “On this Inauguration Day I count my blessings … I’m also thinking of another friend, Greg Peck, who was a good friend of LBJ. Greg said to him: ‘Do you suppose we will live to see a black president?’ LBJ said: ‘No, but I wish her well.’”

Well, what do you know: LBJ, female black president predictor? Am trying not to be depressed at the thought of what Harper Lee and Gregory Peck would say to the current occupant of the White House. Otoh, Lyndon Johnson (at full power, unhindered by depression) - let loose on the Orange Menace could have been quite something, because Johnson could out vulgar anyone any time, was excellent at destroying people in his way and above all could whip the Senate into shape. Also, muccamukk, Gregory Peck fan extraordinaire, did you know he was buddies with LBJ?

Meanwhile, in depressing reality:

Leaked White House Memo detailes more war on women's health

Because general war on women isn't enough, it seems the Orange One has picked a fight with a soldier's widow and a Congresswoman both last week. You know, I don't get (much of) the US re: soldiers. In no other country I can think of is there such a cult like reverence for "our boys" in everyone's (independent of party) rethoric and such a lack of care for veterans with ill health (unless, of course, they're politically useful generals) and families of dead soldiers in reality. Anyway, good article on the subject of the widow in question: Myeshia Johnson stands up to Donald Trump.

Lastly, the Mary Sue has an article looking back on The Stepford Wives. (The film based on Ira Levin's novel.) I think what gives it - and the trope it coined - its enduring power is that the disturbing answer it provides do the "what do men really want from women"? question is today still all too plausible. No, of course not all men. Etc. But enough.

Comments

[jesuswasbatman]

Unfortunately there are elements of it developing in the UK - see the way that the tabloids talk about Hope For Heroes as if disabled soldiers are the only disabled people who deserve help, and the Daily Express front page story this year attacking Jeremy Corbyn for attending the Glastonbury Festival instead of an Armed Forces Day event.

[bats_eye]

The Daily express has always pandered for the kind of people who miss the empire and view ww1 as a righteous crusade.

Their views are very much a minority.

[muccamukk]

I'm excited about this TARDIS crew! I think it's a really good way to go with 13, as it sidesteps a lot of pressure on the casting there. I'm really curious about how

I don't actually know much bio detail on Peck, as I try not to look into actors' lives (Nenya read more). I knew he was a Democrat and profoundly anti-Bomb and pro-Civil Rights, but that's about it for politics. Wonder what he and LBJ said about disarmament though. I like that he and Lee stayed friends. He did seem to be genuinely nice to women and had a lot of life-long female friends (Audrey Hepburn for example).

ETA: Nenya didn't know about LBJ either, but mentioned that he didn't get blacklisted despite speaking against HUAC, probably because of studio protecting a big money maker. I'm not sure what era he would have known LBJ in though?

[selenak]

Given raising Democratic money for elections in Hollywood was a tried and true tactic back then, I bet they met during the 1959/1960 Kennedy versus Nixon campaign at the latest. Otoh if they were fictional characters whom I had to write, I would say that Johnson's post-presidential period, those few years before his death, would be ideal for an actual friendship, because between brooding on Vietnam, the "Great Society" programs faltering and the arrival of a newly strengthened conservatism embodied by Richard Nixon on the political scene, LBJ definitely was in need of friends (and had done his share of wrecking relationships before that, I hasten to add), and Peck sounds nice enough to befriend a massively unpopular former President (at the time, before Watergate, I bet LBJ was seen as the worst, due to Vietnam) and see the good as well as the bad.

[muccamukk]

Having just spent way more time than this deserves on google, I suspect you're right. Johnson refers to Peck as "My very dear friend" in a speech in '64 (though that month Peck wrote a very formal letter thanking him for a dinner, so dunno). Same year LBJ also made Peck a member of the US National Council on the Arts (and reappointed him in '68). He promised Peck an ambassadorship if he got re-elected, but gave him the medal of freedom when he lost to Nixon. (Nixon did his best to black list his hippy ass.)

Harry Belefonte, in a tribute after Peck died, references "His warm and deep and very influential relationship with men like Lyndon Baines Johnson."

IMDB has, unsourced as always, that they fell out over Vietnam.

This is a thing that exists: http://www.texasarchive.org/library/index.php?title=2010_00053

[selenak]

Ha, thank you for doing all the research on this. :) Very formal letter doesn't mean one thing or the other, though, if it's written in the mid 60s to a sitting president?

I wish Robert Caro would publish the last volume of his Johnson biography already, but I suspect the Vietnam years and doing them justice would be a horrendous task for anyone. Still, Caro so far has struck me as one of the few non fiction biographers to manage a balance of showing all the flaws of his subject but all the strengths, too, giving the readers a sense of the time and everyone else, and just generally avoiding either the glorifying or the bashing approach.

Another reason for wanting the last volume: contemporary relevance and parallels of the Nixon/Kissinger duo sabotaging the Paris peace talks and Johnson post facto hearing about but deciding to keep quiet because of the democratic transition of power etc. I'm curious what Caro will present there, because his take on Johnson so far is that the man could be incredibly vengeful as a rule, and finding out the incoming president (a long time foe) and his team have colluded with a foreign power is a big one...

[muccamukk]

Yeah probably, just reading that I'd think they'd never met before. Still, it was probably the mode.

If you wanted to do your original fic idea (hypothetically), you could set it after they'd somewhat fallen out over Vietnam, Johnson had still given him the medal of freedom, and then Johnson goes down in flames and sulks off to the Ranch, almost every bridge in flames, and Peck shows up now uninterested in continuing any old fights. Which would have the sort of grumpgrumpgrudgeplottingnixonmurder and someone with a good deal of understanding odd couple thing.

I didn't know that about the peace talks! Reagan did that to Carter with Iran, too. They're like cartoon villains!

[selenak]

They are, and btw, I like your plot! Re: Johnson - Nixon, and the sabotaged peace negotiations, quoth the BBC, who broke the story:

It begins in the summer of 1968. Nixon feared a breakthrough at the Paris Peace talks designed to find a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam war, and he knew this would derail his campaign.

He therefore set up a clandestine back-channel involving Anna Chennault, a senior campaign adviser.

At a July meeting in Nixon's New York apartment, the South Vietnamese ambassador was told Chennault represented Nixon and spoke for the campaign. If any message needed to be passed to the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, it would come via Chennault.

In late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris - concessions that would justify Johnson calling for a complete bombing halt of North Vietnam. This was exactly what Nixon feared.


Chennault was despatched to the South Vietnamese embassy with a clear message: the South Vietnamese government should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal.

So on the eve of his planned announcement of a halt to the bombing, Johnson learned the South Vietnamese were pulling out.

He was also told why. The FBI had bugged the ambassador's phone and a transcripts of Anna Chennault's calls were sent to the White House. In one conversation she tells the ambassador to "just hang on through election".

Johnson was told by Defence Secretary Clifford that the interference was illegal and threatened the chance for peace.


In a series of remarkable White House recordings we can hear Johnson's reaction to the news.

In one call to Senator Richard Russell he says: "We have found that our friend, the Republican nominee, our California friend, has been playing on the outskirts with our enemies and our friends both, he has been doing it through rather subterranean sources. Mrs Chennault is warning the South Vietnamese not to get pulled into this Johnson move."

He orders the Nixon campaign to be placed under FBI surveillance and demands to know if Nixon is personally involved.

When he became convinced it was being orchestrated by the Republican candidate, the president called Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader in the Senate to get a message to Nixon.

The president knew what was going on, Nixon should back off and the subterfuge amounted to treason.

Publicly Nixon was suggesting he had no idea why the South Vietnamese withdrew from the talks. He even offered to travel to Saigon to get them back to the negotiating table.

Johnson felt it was the ultimate expression of political hypocrisy but in calls recorded with Clifford they express the fear that going public would require revealing the FBI were bugging the ambassador's phone and the National Security Agency (NSA) was intercepting his communications with Saigon.

So they decided to say nothing.

The president did let Humphrey know and gave him enough information to sink his opponent. But by then, a few days from the election, Humphrey had been told he had closed the gap with Nixon and would win the presidency. So Humphrey decided it would be too disruptive to the country to accuse the Republicans of treason, if the Democrats were going to win anyway.

Nixon ended his campaign by suggesting the administration war policy was in shambles. They couldn't even get the South Vietnamese to the negotiating table.

He won by less than 1% of the popular vote.

Once in office he escalated the war into Laos and Cambodia, with the loss of an additional 22,000 American lives - quite apart from the lives of the Laotians, Cambodians and Vietnamese caught up in the new offensives - before finally settling for a peace agreement in 1973 that was within grasp in 1968.

[muccamukk]

I've been reading a couple of bios of activists during that time, and the villainy there is really quite stunning. I was surprised not to have heard about that at all though. I guess they really did keep a lid on it for a long time so people in SDS, Weathermen, Black Panthers etc didn't hear (thus it wasn't mentioned in their stories).

(Why didn't this come out as part of Watergate? I guess the Dems didn't want to admit it then either.)

I wonder what the SE Asian casualties WERE? I wish the article had included them. All that aside, the US probably would have gotten a better deal itself in '68, given that it hadn't gotten its ass completely handed to it yet. But of course none of that mattered.

[selenak]

Yes, the articles in Western media tend to focus on the US casualties. Re: why didn't it come out during Watergate, well, the focus of the Watergate investigations was elsewhere, and if Humphrey or anyone (I think Johnson was dead by then?) had said, oh, btw, do you know that Tricky Dick ALSO did, it might have derailed the issue? Not to mention that any smart Republican could then have said "Why didn't you say so earlier, slander, slander!" And the far more provable campaign tricks etc. would have been forgotten. As one of the articles reporting the whole thing points out: "The greatest honour history can bestow," reads the inscription on Nixon's black granite tombstone in California, "is the title of peacemaker."

(And who was it again that satire died when Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Price?)

Anyway, I know Christopher Hitchens talked about it in his "The Trial of Henry Kissinger", and that was before the Johnson tapes were declassified.

Basically: far from being an anomaly in the Republican Party in this regard, the Orance Menace continued a proud GOP tradition when palling around with Vladimir Putin during the 2016 campaign. Seriously though, can you imagine what the Republican reaction would have been if a Democrat - any Democrat - had pulled that kind of intrigue? And in the Vietnam war, with those casualties and the national reputation and self regard going down the drain?

[muccamukk]

The article mentions that the BBC knew about it in 1994 from people involved in the campaign. Though it doesn't sound like they wrote it up then.

"Only Nixon can go to China." HAHA. (she said bitterly)

The Dems are really BAD at not fighting dirty when they have to. Unless it's against their own people, like the Dixiecrats did in Chicago '68. (I would also like to nominate Walter Mondale for role of villain!).

Anyway, it'd make a good fic.

[selenak]

It would. I just browsed a bit further, and one article says Nixon was already busy denying the story during his interviews with David Frost. (!) So while evidence wasn't yet released, rumors certainly were. Oh, and re: Kissinger's role, qote an article:

The Nixon campaign, meanwhile, had moles at work inside the Johnson administration and its diplomatic ranks. Mitchell had informed the campaign that Kissinger was “fully available,” Haldeman noted, but because of the “delicate” position he was in as a foreign policy adviser to Johnson and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, didn’t want the news made public. A week later, former CIA Director John McCone and Kissinger (just back from a visit with American peace negotiators in Paris) each alerted Nixon to a potential breakthrough. Kissinger told Mitchell there was “a better than even” chance Johnson would halt the aerial bombardment of North Vietnam by the middle of October. The Harvard professor was leveraging his knowledge for access to Nixon. “K’s really concerned about moves J[ohnson] will take & expects some before election,” Haldeman noted.

Yes, wouldn't it be terrible if the war ended before the election. (BTW, I assume Kissinger figured Humphrey would never employ him but that that Nixon would?)

And as to why the Dems didn't go public:

On October 30, the president muttered darkly about Chennault’s activities with Senator Richard Russell, the Democrat from Georgia. The next day, Johnson announced the bombing halt. That night, he was beside himself, raging about Nixon’s actions in a telephone call to Senator Edward Dirksen of Illinois, the Republican leader in the Senate. “It’s despicable. … We could stop the killing out there,” Johnson insisted. “But they’ve got this … new formula put in there—namely, wait on Nixon. And they’re killing four or five hundred every day waiting on Nixon.”

The FBI surveillance traced the Little Flower’s activities. “Anna Chennault contacted Vietnam Ambassador Bui Diem,” one report noted, “and advised him that she had received a message from her boss … which her boss wanted her to give personally to the ambassador. She said the message was … ‘Hold on. We are gonna win. … Please tell your boss to hold on.’”

With such transcripts in hand, Johnson blamed Nixon for strangling a chance for peace. He lashed out at Dirksen.

“I’m reading their hand, Everett,” Johnson told his old friend. “This is treason.”

“I know,” Dirksen said mournfully.

Dirksen reported the conversation to Harlow, who relayed the gist of it to Haldeman. “LBJ called Dirksen—says he knows Repubs through D. Lady are keeping SVN in present position if this proves true—and persists—he will go to nation & blast Reps & RN. Dirksen very concerned,” Haldeman wrote.

Nixon’s advice to Haldeman was to rally congressional Republicans against the Democrats and “kick them hard … [saying] this is a political gimmick” that could “risk Am lives w/o any return.”

The election was now only a day away. On Monday, November 4, Johnson held a conference call with Rostow, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Defense Secretary Clifford to decide if they should make Nixon’s treachery public. But Johnson did not have Haldeman’s notes—or other “absolute proof,” as Clifford put it, of Nixon’s direct involvement. And Nixon had denied it all in his November 3 phone call with the president.

Rostow had urged Johnson to “blow the whistle” and “destroy” Nixon if the undermining did not stop. But exposing the Republican campaign’s perfidy, on the eve of the November 5 election, meant revealing the Johnson administration’s surveillance of both a wartime ally and the domestic political opposition. The resulting scandal would taint the next presidency and might cause a fatal break with South Vietnam, and neither Johnson nor Humphrey was willing to pay that price. Even Rostow admitted there was then “no hard evidence that Mr. Nixon himself is involved.”

Johnson faced a situation like that which confronted President Barack Obama in the summer and fall of 2016, as U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed that the Russians had hacked and published Democratic Party emails with the intent of helping Republican Donald Trump.

Without proof of Trump’s knowledge or collusion, Obama appears to have made the same decision that Johnson reached in 1968. Releasing such stunning allegations in an election season, without collaboration, would itself be unseemly.

[muccamukk]

Amusingly, this just came up in my Out Next Month feed: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34346496

Though given all of the post Civil War election lunacy, I'd argue that it wasn't as new about dirty tricks as sold. Still.

[selenak]

If you read it, do write a review. Isn't the author the same guy who wrote Going Clear about Scientology? If so, it ought to be good.

[muccamukk]

That was Lawrence Wright, but I'll still library this one, once it's out.

[muccamukk]

Reviewed: https://muccamukk.dreamwidth.org/1120851.html

[selenay]

I'm also excited about our new TARDIS team. I'm slightly wary about Bradley Walsh, but I know he can act and he's not the only companion, so I'm okay with that choice. As you said, when he's on form, Chibnall is good with an ensemble and I have hopes this will suit his form well.

[selenak]

I remember people were to a name wary of Matt Lucas (whom I hadn't known so had no feelings about) before finding themselves liking Nardole, and a few years back, wasn't the objection to Catherine Tate massive as soon as the tag scene in "Doomsday" revealed she'd be in the Christmas Special (let alone the reaction when it was known Donna would return as a regular Companion for s4)? And andraste told me there was massive objection to Sylvester McCoy back in ye olde days. So basically, it's a good Whovian tradition. :)

[muccamukk]

http://doctorwhogeneral.wikia.com/wiki/Times_Doctor_Who_Was_Ruined_Forever

Did you link me this? I don't remember.

[selenak]

Nope, but I wrote a similar post, I think, at some point during the RTD-to-Moffat transition era...

[labingi]

Cool Doctor Who casting news. :-)

I would rather think about that than our idiot in chief. I have no explanation for our attitude toward our soldiers except maybe a) fervent because of Revolutionary + Civil War zeal needing to be very hostile to questionable loyalties from possible defectors and b) generally willing to throw anyone under the bus because... slavery, genocide, pioneering, Protestant work ethic...?