The Jonestown Banks - by John Judge

The assets of Jim Jones' People's Temple have yet to be fully accounted, but early research in the press and by independent investigators put the total between $26 million and $2 billion. Following the money leads down a twisted trail of international banks, dummy fronts, real estate investments and conflicting government reports. Various sources estimate a total of at least $17-$20 million in foreign investments, and property worth $2.5 million that passed through deed, sale and ownership from 1976 to 1979. Some $12 million dollars was deposited in mysterious accounts in Panama. During the recent scandal involving the Vatican Bank, Bank Ambrosiana and deceased Italian financier Roberto Calvi, information surfaced indicating that some of the siphoned millions went to Panamanian banks. Timemagazine noted in a July 26 issue this year that Archbishop Paul Marcinkus of the Vatican Bank set up twelve ghost companies in Panama for the movement of funds. A short five days later, on July 31, 1982, the New York Times carried an AP wire story that the President of Panama was resigning, and all high officials were soon to be replaced there. A review of the holdings known to the public in the Jonestown affair may reveal to serious researchers what connections exist between the financial operations.

A Chart of Financial Holdings 

LAT = Los Angeles Times; SFE = San Francisco Examiner

Amount	Bank	Location	Source
$711,000	Barclay's Bank Int. Ltd.	Georgetown, Guyana	LAT 1/5/79
$100,000	Bank of Montreal (CA)	San Francisco, CA	LAT 1/5/79
$21,000	Bank of Montreal (CA)	San Francisco, CA	LAT 1/5/79
Unknown	United California Bank	San Francisco, CA	LAT 1/5/79
Unknown	Bank of America	Los Angeles, CA	LAT 1/5/79
$10,000*	Bank of America (personal)	San Francisco, CA	SFE 1/9/79
Unknown	Wells Fargo	Ukiah, CA	SFE 1/9/79
$2,043,000	Swiss Banking Corp.	Panama City	SFE 1/9/79
$5,231,536	Union Bank of Switzerland	Panama City	SFE 1/9/79
$5,173,000	Union Bank of Switzerland	Panama City	SFE 1/9/79
$206.396	Bank of Nova Scotia	Nassau,Bahamas	SFE 1/9/79
Unknown	No name given	Curacao	SFE 1/9/79
Unknown	No name given	Virgin Islands	SFE 1/9/79
$76,000*	Grenada National Bank	Grenada	SFE 1/9/79
$560,000	Barclay's Bank (supplies)	Pt.-Au-Spain, Trin.	SFE 1/9/79
$200,000	National Cooperative Bank	Georgetown, Guy.	SFE 1/9/79
$33,757	Banco Union de Venezuelas	Caracas, Ven.	SFE 1/9/79
$2,000,000	No name given	Caracas. Ven.	SFE 1/9/79
Unknown	No name given	Paris, France	SFE 1/9/79
$1,000,000	Union Bank of Switzerland	Zurich, Switz.	SFE 1/9/79
Safe Deposit*	Union Bank of Switzerland	Zurich, Switz.	SFE 1/9/79
$11,000,000*	"Treasure Chest" (1974)	Redwood Valley, CA	SFE 1/9/79
$2,000,000	Jonestown site total	Guyana	SFE 1/9/79
$1,000,000*	Bank of Nova Scotia	San Francisco, CA	SFE 1/9/79
Unknown	Wells Fargo	Los Angeles, CA	SFE 1/9/79

*These were the assets revealed shortly after the massacre. Jones' personal account at Bank of America was reported to have dwindled from "hundreds of thousands," the Grenada account may have been part of an initial reported investment of $200,000 in 1977 to pave the way for a colony there. The contents of the Zurich bank's safe deposit box may have been as much as $2,000,000 by some reports, but later claims that the Swiss accounts were "emptied" into Panamanian banks don't gibe with these figures for Union Bank of Switzerland accounts. Naturally, the Redwood Valley "Treasure Chest" of $11 million may not be an addition to the later totals, but it should be considered in context. The Bank of Nova Scotia account was reportedly "closed out" and may or may not have become the same bank's account in the Bahamas. But it certainly shrank in size. Despite the possibility of some overlap, these totals do not match the final tally of $10,000,000 given out by court receiver Fabian.

Terri Buford, one of Jones' top lieutenants, was often responsible for setting up the international accounts. For instance, both she and Debbie Layton Blakey were reported to have carried out a "mysterious financial mission" from Panama to London, where they were alleged to have "studied Socialist and Communist banks," then on to France and Switzerland. Terri repeatedly instructed the bank clerk in Switzerland not to "discuss anything" during their visit, but he did mention a $2,000,000 account in passing, perhaps the one in the safe deposit box (San Francisco Examiner, 1/9/79). Accounts were secured in many names besides Jones' and People's Temple. Terri Buford, Carolyn Layton, Maria Katsaris and others from Jones' entourage were used. In addition, dummy organizations like Bridget, S.A., Angelique, and others, disguised the accounts. Terri Buford reportedly gave the Grand Jury investigators records of deposits in Panamanian banks totalling $7.5 million, while press reports suggested that more money was residing in Swiss and Guyanese banks. Following the massacre, Buford and Mark Lane traveled in Europe, leading to speculation that they had been instrumental in removing money from the Swiss accounts, a charge (LAT, 1/20/79) Lane was to vehemently deny in print. Lane was simultaneously the attorney for People's Temple and accused assassin James Earl Ray. Lane and Buford also lived with and cared for a key witness in the Ray case, Grace Walden Stevens. According to some reports in theNew York Times (2/4/79), Jones offered Mark Lane money to help free James Earl Ray. Later stories suggest that Buford and Lane were in collusion to bring Grace Stevens into Jonestown under an illegal passport (NYT, 12/8/79).

Buford's Panama visit may have been connected to a "few banking trips to Caracas, Panama City and the San Francisco suburb of Belmont" (Miami Herald, 3/27/79) made by Jones' confidant, Maria Katsaris, in 1978. Clearly, three numbered accounts were in place there by 1978. Court-appointed receiver Fabian finally admits in November of 1979 that there were two accounts. One in the name of Annie McGowan at the Union Bank of Switzerland in Panama, a follower of Jones who died in the carnage. The two accounts described there by the San Francisco Examiner could both meet the description in terms of cash balance. They are, respectively, accounts #121-00-191A and #121-00135A (seechart above). In addition, Fabian notes the existence of a $2,000,000 balance in the Swiss Banking Corporation of Panama in the name of a "dummy front." This is account #3357 (see chart above) (LAT, 11/18/79).

Michael Prokes and Tim Carter, two of the camp guards who survived, claim that Maria Katsaris instructed them to take a chest with $500,000 to the Soviet Embassy. On their return to the United States, they claimed contact with Soviet Embassy officials in Guyana. They said they knew Valerly Koval (reportedly a Major in the KGB and a top operative in Latin America), and Feodor Timofeyev (a KGB Deputy, allegedly). Timofeyev's name appeared on letters addressed to the Soviets instructing them on access to $7 million in a Panamanian account at the Union Bank of Switzerland (San Francisco Chronicle, 1/21/79). This story is most likely an elaborate ruse to cover the real money flow, or an excessive trap to lure Soviet "involvement" with Jones' camp after the massacre. Jones was not in any way disposed to give money to the Soviet Union. But let's take a closer look at the real development of the Panama money cache.

In January, 1979, the Department of Justice released its intention to bring a $4.2 million suit against People's Temple funds to recover the cost of body removal by the U.S. military. Defendants named at that point included the Asociacion Religiosa Pro San Pedro, S.A. of Panama. The following day, the presiding magistrate, Judge Brown, sent a "lawyer to Panama," and the suit claimed that the "Panama affiliate" was "organized to handle the assets of People's Temple" (Oakland Times, 1/23/79). The San Francisco Chronicle had estimated a financial empire of at least $26 million (SFC1/9/79), but when Judge Brown moved to dissolve the People's Temple on January 24, State Attorney General Appalas placed the total much lower. "Contrary to previous press reports, Appalas said, total Temple assets approached only $12 million and were located in Grenada, Venezuela, the Barbados, Guyana and Trinidad," said the San Francisco Chronicle(1/24/79). No mention of Panama. The same day, Guyanese official Kit Nascimento attempted to absolve Guyanese government officials, including President Burnham's wife, of any wrongdoing in the removal of a reported half million dollars by plane from the Jonestown site, claiming it was all deposited in the Bank of Guyana in Georgetown. It is not clear how this claim, which involves an account totaling $700,000 relates to the reported money in Guyana after the deaths (see chart above) (Washington Post, 1/24/79). A few days later, Jim Jones' mother-in-law, Charlotte Baldwin in Richmond, Indiana, denied that he left a large estate, and recounted his daughter Suzanne's claim that there was only property and "$17,000 in a Nassau account," presumably not a reference to the Bank of Nova Scotia deposit (WP, 1/29/79).

Not until a Newsweek story on March 12, months later, did Robert Fabian confirm that the Temple had a safe deposit box in Switzerland, and bank accounts in "Panama and Guyana." However, his claim at that point was that the three sources together could account for only an additional $6 million. The following day, in Berne, Switzerland, the Swiss government blocked access to funds and information on the Swiss accounts under a 1973 U.S.-Swiss Legal Assistance Treaty. They were only willing to give further information if the FBI could prove the funds were gotten by criminal means. U.S. officials were still estimating the Swiss accounts topped $10 million (WP, 3/13/79). The following day, March 14, Michael Prokes held a press conference, revealed the phony tapes that suggested the Jonestown suicides were not coerced, then shot himself in the head. Finally, in August, conflicting stories began to emerge from Switzerland. An official announcement of August 3 established that three bank accounts had been held since 1976, and that money was suddenly transferred to the U.S. and to Panama around the time of the killings. The statement also seemed to involve the release of $2 million and the papers from the safe deposit box to U.S. authorities. These authorities were now saying that assets totalled more than $10 million, "most" in Panama City branches of Swiss Bank Corporation and Union Bank of Switzerland. No reason was given for the transfer and names of the depositors and exact dates were not released. Other reports and rumors persisted: Jones had ordered $7 million sent to the Soviet Union in December, 1978. Swiss accounts numbered from six to a dozen. Money was held in dummy fronts in Guyana. Some even suggested funds were being sent to the PLO. (SFC 8/3/79). Another story suggested that the amount suddenly shifted to Panama had been $2,000,000, and Justice Department officials were surprised and skeptical that money had come into the U.S. without their knowledge (WP 8/3/79).

Suddenly, court-appointed receiver Fabian announced in October that he had "found" $7.2 million in Panama. "We've gotten word from Panama that there's $5.2 million in one bank and another $2 million in another." However, Fabian said this was not new money, and total assets were still in the $10 million range, because "part of the money in Panama" was transferred there in 1978 from Swiss banks whose accounts were now "empty."

How does this story match the rest of the evidence about the Swiss and Panamanian accounts? Does it belie the Swiss government claims, the U.S. authorities, or Mark Lane? Fabian also claimed that there was another $3,000,000 in Guyana, but said we were unlikely to ever see it in the U.S. due to Guyanese government claims. The only claim at that point was Nasciemento's plea that the money taken from the site was held in anticipation of U.S. claims, and in good faith. Another $200,000 was located in the Caribbean banks, and $1.7 billion was outstanding in claims, said Fabian (WP 10/6/82). The government claims held steady from this point on. Ten million total, $3 million in Guyana and $7 million in Panama (SFC, 11/17/79), usually split into two accounts of $5.2 million and $2 million (SFC 10/26/82) coming by way of Switzerland. Charles Touchette, a Temple officer, was to claim hidden accounts totaling $66 million, but Fabian scoffed at it (SFC 11/17/79). What, then had become of the additional $5 million account in Panama, and the mysterious Asociacion Religiosa Pro San Pedro, S.A. (referred to later as "Asociacion Pro Religiosa do San Pedro")? Was it the "dummy front" for Jones, or for other interests? Was it one of the operations set up by Robert Calvi to hide Vatican investments?

Fabian dissolved the assets. Of the Asociacion he said, "We'll have to dissolve that one and get it in the name of People's Temple, the California Corporation" (SFC, 11/17/79). He managed to sell the church building in San Francisco to a Kraft Company employee, Ho Deuk Bae, for $300,000, who in turn said he would establish there the Korean Central Christian Church and the Korean Presbyterian Evangelical Reformed Church, reportedly not connected to the vast Unification Church of Rev. Moon. (OT, 3/15/79). At one point, he threatened to sell the Albatross, the 400-ton shipping vessel out on a supply run to Trinidad when the murders came down. Top Jones aide, Phillip Blakey made a reported "last call" to his father-in-law, Dr. Lawrence Layton, from Panama. About ten followers stayed on the boat, setting up a community in Trinidad at first, while one Nigel Slingger, a Grenada businessman and insurance broker for Jonestown, repaired the vessel. Charles Touchette set up an open house in Grenada for Temple members, and Paul McCann, Phillip Blakey, Steven Jones (son), and others continued to live together. McCann indicated on KPIX-TV that they wanted to set up a shipping company to "finance the continued works of the original Temple." That financing, and those works, continue to elude scrutiny. There was no later record of the sale of the Albatross. The Jonestown accounts, as they were, have been divided. But the reality of the horror, like the money that backed it up, continues to flow in unseen channels.

The unanswered question remains. Was the Jonestown empire built with the same dirty money that came from the Banco Ambrosiano, the Nugan-Hand Bank and other international conduits of cash for the men who trade in narcotics, espionage, human flesh and death?

The role of Mark Lane, who served as attorney for Jim Jones, is even more clearly intertwined.[230] Lane had co-authored a book with Dick Gregory, claiming FBI complicity in the King murder.[231] He was hired as the attorney for James Earl Ray, accused assassin, when Ray testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations about King.[232] Prior to this testimony, Ray was involved in an unusual escape plot at Brushy Mountain State Prison.[233] The prisoner who had helped engineer the escape plot was later inexplicably offered an early, parole by members of the Tennessee Governor's office. These officials, and Governor Blanton himself, were to come under close public scrutiny and face legal charges in regard to bribes taken to arrange illegal early pardons for prisoners.[234]

One of the people living at Jonestown was ex-FBI agent Wesley Swearington, who at least publicly condemned the COINTELPRO operations and other abuses, based on stolen classified documents, at the Jonestown site. Lane had reportedly met with him there at least a year before the massacre. Terri Buford said the documents were passed on to Charles Garry. Lane used information from Swearingen in his thesis on the FBI and King's murder. Swearingen later served as a key witness in suits against the Justice Department brought by the Socialist Workers Party.[235] When Larry Flynt, the flamboyant publisher of Hustler magazine, offered a, $1 million reward leading to the capture and conviction of the John F. Kennedy killers, the long distance number listed to collect information and leads was being answered by Mark Lane and Wesley Swearingen.[236]

With help from officials in Tennessee, Governor Blanton's office, Lane managed to get legal custody of a woman who had been incarcerated in the Tennessee state psychiatric system for nearly eight years.[237] This woman, Grace Walden Stephens, had been a witness in the King murder.[238] She was living at the time in Memphis in a rooming house across from the hotel when Martin Luther King was shot.[239] The official version of events had Ray located in the common bathroom of the rooming house, and claimed he used a rifle to murder King from that window.[240] Grace Stephens did, indeed, see a man run from the bathroom, past her door and down to the street below.[241] A rifle, later linked circumstantially to James Earl Ray, was found inside a bundle at the base of the rooming house stairs, and identified as the murder weapon.[242] But Grace, who saw the man clearly, refused to identify him as Ray when shown photographs by the FBI.[243] Her testimony was never introduced at the trial. The FBI relied, instead, on the word of her common law husband, Charles Stephens, who was drunk and unconscious at the time of the incident.[244] Her persistence in saying that it was not James Earl Ray was used at her mental competency hearings as evidence against her, and she disappeared into the psychiatric system.[245]

Grace Walden Stephens took up residence in Memphis with Lane, her custodian, and Terri Buford, a key Temple member who had returned to the U.S. before the killings to live with Lane.[246] While arranging for her to testify before the Select Committee on Ray's behalf, Lane and Buford were plotting another fate for Grace Stephens. Notes from Buford to Jones, found in the aftermath of the killings, discussed arrangements with Lane to move Grace Stephens to Jonestown.[247] The problem that remained was lack of a passport, but Buford suggested either getting a passport on the black market, or using the passport of former Temple member Maxine Swaney.[248] Swaney, dead for nearly 2-1/2 years since her departure from the Ukiah camp, was in no position to argue and Jones apparently kept her passport with him.[249] Whether Grace ever arrived at Jonestown is unclear.

Lane was also forced to leave Ray in the midst of testimony to the Select Committee when he got word that Ryan was planning to visit. Lane had attempted to discourage the trip earlier in a vaguely threatening letter.[250] Now he rushed to be sure he arrived with the group.[251] At the scene, he failed to warn Ryan and others, knowing that the sandwiches and other food might be drugged, but refrained from eating it himself.[252] Later, claiming that he and Charles Garry would write the official history of the "revolutionary suicide," Lane was allowed to leave the pieces of underwear to mark their way back to Georgetown.[253] If true, it seems an unlikely method if they were in any fear of pursuit. They had heard gunfire and screams back at the camp.

Lane was reportedly well aware of the forced drugging and suicide drills at Jonestown before Ryan arrived.

Ann Frank

Now, that's what I call an October Surprise....

Hang on... Wait, what..?!

Let me guess - The fourth volume of the four, implicitly, would be the one covering the Auschwitz / Bergen-Belsen narrative...

It is a historical fact, disputed by absolutely no-one, that not only did Ann Frank survive Auschwitz, her entire family evaded selection for the gas chambers.

As can best be established, she died in January or Feburary of 1945 in Belsen, victim of an epidemic of Typhus.

Regarding how this happened, I quote The Enemy:

"In the chaos that marked the unloading of the trains, the men were forcibly separated from the women and children, and Otto Frank was wrenched from his family. Of the 1,019 passengers, 549—including all children younger than 15—were sent directly to the gas chambers. Anne Frank had turned 15 three months earlier and was one of the youngest people to be spared from her transport. She was soon made aware that most people were gassed upon arrival, and never learned that the entire group from the Achterhuis had survived this selection. [My emphasis] She reasoned that her father, in his mid-fifties and not particularly robust, had been killed immediately after they were separated."

So, just to clarify; none of the Jews deported from Amsterdam with the Franks to Auschwitz was sent to the gas chamber - none of them.

I quote The Enemy:

"Bíró László József (surname placed first per Hungarian convention; Spanish: Ladislao José Biro; 29 September 1899 – 24 October 1985) was the inventor of the modern ballpoint pen.

Bíró (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈbiːroː]) was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1899 into a Jewish family. He presented the first production of the ballpoint pen at the Budapest International Fair in 1931.

While working as a journalist in Hungary, he noticed that the ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly, leaving the paper dry and smudge-free. He tried using the same ink in a fountain pen but found that it would not flow into the tip, as it was too viscous. Working with his brother György, a chemist, he developed a new tip consisting of a ball that was free to turn in a socket, and as it turned it would pick up ink from a cartridge and then roll to deposit it on the paper. Bíró patented the invention in Paris in 1938.

In 1943 the brothers moved to Argentina. On 10 June they filed another patent, that issued in the USA as US Patent 2,390,636 and formed Biro Pens of Argentina (in fact, in Argentina the ballpoint pen is known as birome). This new design was licensed for production in the United Kingdom for supply to Royal Air Force aircrew, who found they worked much better than fountain pens at high altitude.

In 1945 Marcel Bich bought the patent from Bíró for the pen, which soon became the main product of his Bic company."

"The following is the passage from the The Definitive Edition of the Diary of a Young Girl that has a mother in Northville filing a formal complaint. 

'Until I was eleven or twelve, I didn't realize there was a second set of labia on the inside, since you couldn't see them. What's even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris…When you're standing up, all you see from the front is hair. Between your legs there are two soft, cushiony things, also covered with hair, which press together when you're standing, so you can't see what's inside. They separate when you sit down and they're very red and quite fleshy on the inside. In the upper part, between the outer labia, there's a fold of skin that, on second thought, looks like a kind of blister. That's the clitoris.'"

Why Webster Tarpley Left the LaRouche Movement

Webster Tarpley to "N," December 2, 2009

"My association with organizations in which LaRouche was prominent ended in 1997. Since then I have been attacked in public by him and his remaining supporters several times. Since 1997, I have had no relation whatsoever to LaRouche.

Before 1997, I was President of the US Schiller Institute USA, and served on the EIR editorial board, and the US and European Executive Committees of the Labor Committee movement.

LaRouche was jailed in 1989 for tax evasion and related infractions, but more basically for political reasons. In order to get out of jail, he agreed to operate as an asset of the US intelligence community. This led to the ouster of several leaders like myself who would not accept that capitulation. Since 1994-5, his political and economic analysis has become increasingly erratic and confused, always stressing that nothing can be done for world economic development without US leadership and control - an absurdity. He did not oppose Obama's election, but then discovered that Obama was the new Hitler. He virtually predicted the end of the world for last October 12, and it did not ensue. LaRouche is now 87 years old and needs to retire, but insists on maintaining a personality cult. HIs group has lost much of its membership and is of marginal importance within the US. In other countries there are still some who mistakenly view LaRouche as a significant domestic opposition to US financial imperialism, but this estimate is obsolete. LaRouche is increasingly irrelevant, and the quality of the group's journalistic output has collapsed to grotesque levels.

Accordingly, I suggest that we forget about LaRouche and see what can be done for Latvia.

Do you have any good books, articles, or web sites on the Latvian crisis? I should think there is no time to lose.

Webster Tarpley"

What's even more embarrassing than the Obama-Hitler drivel are the Newletters / URGENT! Press Releases / Comminiques put out by the "LaRouchePAC2012" consisting of five full pages of nothing but :

"BenghaziBenghaziBenghai..!!"

"HillaryHillaryHillary...!!"

With NO research and no factual basis behind any of the outlandish assertions and demands for immediate impeachment proceedings, things I fully knew to be both wrong - which turned out to be not only wrong and demonstratbly false, but incredibly shallow sensationalism - by my extreme good fortune, this happend also to be my first direct contact with LaRaouchian literature, affording me potentially a lucky escape from the vortex!

However, it seems that even up to the present time, like Scientology, the rump LaRoche organisation, the remnant is running Controlled Opposition campaigns against itself in-camera.

Thusly:

Anthony Wedgewood Benn and the Death of the Left

"I'm not frightened about death. I don't know why, but I just feel that at a certain moment your switch is switched off, and that's it. And you can't do anything about it."

Tony Benn

"Making mistakes is part of life. 

The only things I would feel ashamed of would be if I had said things I hadn't believed in order to get on. 

Some politicians do do that."

Benn.

"The Marxist analysis has got nothing to do with what happened in Stalin's Russia: it's like blaming Jesus Christ for the Inquisition in Spain."

Tony Benn

The Last Days of the President - LBJ in Retirement by Leo Janos - Atlantic Magazine, July 1973

Johnson Didn't Do It.

"I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger." 

"We had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean." 

"After the Warren Commission reported in, I asked Ramsey Clark [then Attorney General] to quietly look into the whole thing. Only two weeks later he reported back that he couldn't find anything new... I thought I had appointed Tom Clark's son—I was wrong."

The Last Days of the President 

LBJ in retirement 

by Leo Janos 

..... 

On the night before Christmas, 1971, Lyndon Baines Johnson played the most improbable role of his varied and controversial life. Protected from public view behind the gates of his Texas ranch, and no longer suffering the cloying presence of a battalion of White House reporters, Johnson donned a red suit and false beard, climbed aboard a small tractor, and drove to the hangar adjoining his airstrip. Assembled inside were the families of his ranch hands for what had become a traditional ceremony over the years: receiving greetings and gifts from LBJ. This time, they were so stunned at the sight of the former President ho-ho-hoing aboard a chugging tractor that they greeted his arrival with disbelieving silence. Undeterred, Johnson dismounted the tractor and unloaded a bag of toys for the children, sent to him for the occasion by an old friend, New York toy manufacturer Louis Marx, father of Patricia Marx Ellsberg.

"I'm going to enjoy the time I've got left," Johnson told friends when he left Washington in January, 1969, a worn old man at sixty, consumed by the bitter, often violent, five years of his presidency. He had never doubted that he could have won the 1968 election against Richard Nixon if he had chosen to run for another term. But in 1967 he launched a secret actuarial study on his life expectancy, supplying personal histories of all the males in the recent Johnson line, himself included. The men in the Johnson family have a history of dying young," he told me at his ranch in the summer of 1971, "My daddy was only sixty-two when he died, and I figured that with my history of heart trouble I'd never live through another four years. The American people had enough of Presidents dying in office." The prediction handed to Johnson was that he would die at the age of sixty-four. He did.

He returned to the Texas hill country so exhausted by his presidency that it took him nearly a full year to shed the fatigue in his bones. From the outset he issued the sternest orders to his staff that the press was to be totally off limits. "I've served my time with that bunch," he said, "and I give up on them. There's no objectivity left anymore. The new style is advocacy reporting—send some snotty-nosed reporter down here to act like a district attorney and ask me where I was on the night of the twenty-third. I'm always guilty unless I can prove otherwise. So to hell with it." His press grievances were usually accompanied by favorite examples of anti-Johnson stacked decks—among these, the flurry of comment generated when he had lifted his shirt to expose ample belly and fresh surgical scar. He explained: "Rumors were flying that I really had cancer. I had to prove I really had my gall bladder taken out." By contrast Nixon, he thought, had intimidated the press into fair treatment. "The damn press always accused me of things I didn't do. They never once found out about the things I did do," he complained with a smile. One result of such self-righteous bitterness was that the man who had been the world's most powerful and publicized ruler was simply swept down a hole of obscurity, surfacing only occasionally at University of Texas football games or at the funerals of old friends such as Hale Boggs and Harry Truman. A logical surmise was that Johnson was brooding in silence on his ranch porch, pouting at the unfriendly, unloving world beyond his guarded gates. But LBJ's temperament was more complicated than that: relaxed, easy, and friendly for days, he would suddenly lapse into an aloof and brooding moodiness, only to give way to a period of driving restlessness. He was a seesawing personality for as long as anyone could remember.

His first year in retirement was crowded with projects. He supervised nearly every construction detail of the massive LBJ Library complex on the University of Texas campus, which houses not only thirty-one million documents acquired over thirty-eight years in Washington, but also the LBJ School of Public Affairs. At one point, university regent Frank Erwin approached Johnson about an Indiana educator who was interested in running the LBJ School. Johnson frowned at the mention of the state which sent to the Senate one of Johnson's least favorite persons, and among the most vocal of his war critics, Vance Hartke. "Frank," Johnson responded, "I never met a man from Indiana who was worth a shit."

There was fresh bitterness over a series of hour-long interviews, with Walter Cronkite for which Johnson had contracted with CBS before leaving the White House. The first show, on Vietnam, had been a fiasco. "I did lousy," Johnson admitted, and raised hell over what he claimed had been an unfair CBS editing practice—Cronkite refilming new questions to answers he had originally given during the interview at the ranch. "Cronkite came down here all sweetness and light, telling me how he'd love to teach journalism at Texas someday, then he does this to me," he fumed. The critical reaction to his television interview on Vietnam reinforced Johnson's conviction that his presidential memoirs should be divided into two separate books, one on domestic policies, the other on foreign affairs. In this way, he reasoned, the Great Society would be spared from the critical response he anticipated to his explanations of Vietnam policy. His publishers talked him out of separate books, and Johnson cautiously began unfolding his version of his presidential years. Assisted by two trusted staff writers, Robert Hardesty and William Jorden, he issued only one firm guideline, that not one word should appear in the book that could not be corroborated by documentation. To aid in this effort, Johnson threw open to his writers every file and document from his White House years, including telephone conversations he had held as President, which were recorded and transcribed for history. (Exposure to this material was largely for his writers' background information; few revelations or previously unpublished documents appeared in Johnson's book.) Jorden, a former New York Times reporter who had worked as an assistant to Walt Rostow, was particularly impressed with his research reading. "My God," he said, "I thought I knew just about everything involving Vietnam during my White House days. I discovered that I had missed a lot."1

William Jorden worked on the book's Vietnam chapters, which went to twenty drafts, and were read by McGeorge Bundy, Generals Earle Wheeler and William Westmoreland, and Abe Fortas, LBJ's pre-eminent confidant, among others, before receiving final approval. The result of all this effort was a fully researched but flat and predictable apologia of the Johnson years, most of its vital juices evaporated many drafts ago.

Hurt and disappointed by the adverse critical reaction to his book, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963-1969, Johnson found solace working the land of his 330-acre ranch, which he bought in 1951. Under a fiery Texas sun, the Pedernales River runs clear and full. Fat cattle graze languidly in the shade of live oaks. Johnson knew that he owned some of the loveliest property in Texas, and unleashed his energies as a working rancher like a restless child entering a playpen. LBJ installed a complex irrigation system (and was observed clad only in paper shorts helping to lay pipe in the middle of the shallow Pedernales), constructed a large hen house, planted acres of experimental grasses sufficiently hardy to withstand severe hill country weather, and built up his cattle herds through shrewd purchases at the weekly cattle auctions near Stonewall. On one occasion, ranch foreman Dale Milenchek talked Johnson into purchasing an $8000 breeding bull. The massive animal impregnated only a few cows before suffering a fatal leg infection. Johnson complained, "Dale bought me the most expensive sausage in the history of Texas."

No ranch detail escaped his notice. Once, driving some friends around the spread, LBJ suddenly reached for his car radiophone, which crackled just as much in retirement as it had when he was President. "Harold, Harold, over," he barked. "Why is that sign about selling the Herefords still posted? You know we sold them last week. Get it down." At the LBJ State Park, across the road, Johnson enjoyed escorting his guests to a slide show and exhibit on the hill country. On another occasion, I observed Johnson watching a preview of a new slide show with increasing annoyance as the bearded face of a local Stonewall character appeared in various poses, slide after slide. Turning angrily to his park supervisor, Johnson exclaimed: "Will you please tell me why we need six slides of Hondo Crouch?" Another must on a Johnson-chauffeured tour was the family graveyard, a few hundred yards from his home. "Here's where my mother lies," he solemnly declared. "Here's where my daddy is buried. And here's where I'm gonna be too." Then, a sudden acceleration and the white Lincoln Continental would roar to the cow pastures.

Old friends invited to dine with the squire of the Pedernales would be advised that dinner was at eight. But not until ten or eleven would Johnson appear, happily tired and dung-booted, to regale his guests about the new calf or progress with his egg production. "He's become a goddamn farmer," a friend complained. "I want to talk Democratic politics, he only talks hog prices." Often, Johnson took friends to a favorite hill on his spread to watch the sunset. His Secret Service bodyguard, Mike Howard, unpacked an ice chest and glasses, and the group would relax and drink to the setting sun. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, cook Mary Davis, a keenly intelligent black lady, would begin pressuring Lady Bird to get Johnson and his guests back before dinner was ruined. "Another half hour and I simply cannot be responsible for this roast," Mary would complain. With a sigh, Lady Bird would begin the artful manipulation of her husband. Contacting him on the car radio, she would suggest: "Honey, why don't you take everyone over to Third Fork and show them the deer?" (Third Fork was only a quarter of a mile away, in the direction of home.) Such ploys often failed, however. "Damn it," Johnson would reply, "I'm not going to be pressured into keeping to anyone's schedule but my own."

He was still very much "Mr. President" to the retinue serving him in retirement, including three round-the-clock Secret Service protectors, a Chinese butler named Wong, brought to Texas from the White House, two secretaries, a dozen former White House staffers, who worked at the library but could be tapped for other duties when the occasion demanded, as well as a dozen or so ranch hands who were kept scrambling. A phone call would dispatch an Air Force helicopter to carry him forty miles from his ranch into Austin, where a landing pad had been built on the library roof. For longer trips he used his own twin-engine turboprop. A visitor expressed surprise that LBJ could still summon a helicopter to fly him around the Austin area. An aide responded, "He was living this way when he was in the Senate."

He took up golf, puttering around courses in Fredericksburg, and on trips to Mexico. One day, playing with a few aides and friends, Johnson hit a drive into the rough, retrieved it, and threw the ball back on the fairway. "Are you allowed to do that?" one of the wives whispered to a Secret Service agent. "You are," he replied, "if you play by LBJ rules."

Each December 21 he would host a rollicking party at the Argyle Club in San Antonio to celebrate his wedding anniversary. The guest list was limited to his closest friends, including a Texas businessman named Dan Quinn, who on the day of the wedding had had to run out and buy a ring for Lyndon to give to Lady Bird, since the groom had forgotten that particular detail. The hired band was instructed to play danceable music only, and Johnson, a classy ballroom dancer of the first rank, would dance with every lady present into the wee hours.

Each February Johnson would take over a seaside villa in Acapulco for a mouth's siege. The exquisite estate is owned by former Mexican President Miguel Alemán, a business partner with LBJ on several Mexican ranchland deals. Johnson would fly in family, friends, and aides, as well as his own cook, food, bottled water, and even air-conditioning units. He brought his own food, water, and liquor to Acapulco to avoid the embarrassment of his 1970 trip when nearly all of his guests developed classic cases of "Mexicali revenge" after being fed local produce. At night, films would be shown, courtesy of LBJ friend Arthur Krim, who would have the newest releases flown down. Johnson also loved to visit Alemán's ranch, Las Pampas, deep in the Mexican interior, enjoying the total isolation and rugged beauty of the place. He was moved by the poverty of some of the ranch hands, who almost invariably had large families. Using an interpreter, Johnson would lecture the wives about birth control and the need to have small families if you are poor. Back in Texas, he began sending the families packages of birth control pills, vitamins, clothing, and blankets. "If I became dictator of the world," he said, "I'd give all the poor on earth a cottage, and birth control pills—and I'd make damn sure they didn't get one if they didn't take the other."

ach Friday morning, a White House jet landed at the LBJ ranch, depositing foreign policy briefing papers prepared especially for Johnson by Henry Kissinger's staff. On two occasions Kissinger himself arrived at Johnson's door for personal briefings on the peace talks; twice he sent his deputy, General Alexander Haig. In all, LBJ's relations with the Nixon White House were cordial, although he sensed that the briefing papers told him only what Nixon wanted him to know. His death canceled plans he had negotiated with the White House to entertain Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in Texas, following her February meeting in Washington with Nixon. Johnson thought it would be a splendid idea to have Mrs. Meir participate in a question-and-answer session with the students of the LBJ School. Through an old supporter, New York industrialist Abe Feinberg, he queried Mrs. Meir on the matter and received word she would be delighted to visit with the students and attend a Johnson-hosted luncheon in Austin. The White House arranged to fly Mrs. Meir to Texas. A few weeks before Johnson's death, Richard Nixon called to tell him that a cease-fire was imminent. Johnson got in touch with his veteran speechwriter, Horace Busby, and asked him to prepare a statement on the cease-fire. "Get this thought in," Johnson instructed Busby. "No man worked harder or wanted peace more than I." 

Johnson had decidedly mixed emotions about his successor. He was puzzled by Nixon's cold style ("Imagine not inviting one member of Congress to Tricia's wedding. If you don't respect them, they won't respect you") and aghast at some of Nixon's domestic policies. Shortly after leaving the White House, he remarked to a Texas businessman: "When I took over the presidency, Jack Kennedy had left me a stock market of 711. When I left the White House, it was over 900. Now look at it. That's what happens when the Republicans take over—not only Nixon, but any of them. They simply don't know how to manage the economy. They're so busy operating the trickle-down theory, giving the richest corporations the biggest break, that the whole thing goes to hell in a handbasket." Amused staffers recall that on the trip back to Texas aboard Air Force One, Johnson went up and down the aisles giving financial advice: "Keep all your money in cash," he urged. "Nixon will have us in an inflationary recession before his first year is over." (He had also, he told me, given his outgoing Cabinet members a different, if equally sobering, kind of advice: "Each of you had better leave this town clean as Eisenhower's hound's tooth. The first thing Democrats do when they take power is find where the control levers are. But the first thing Republicans do is investigate Democrats. I don't know why they do it but you can count on it.")

Johnson gave Nixon "high grades" in foreign policy, but worried intermittently that the President was being pressured into removing U.S. forces too quickly, before the South Vietnamese were really able to defend themselves. "If the South falls to the Communists, we can have a serious backlash here at home," he warned. "When you think of what the South has been through, and what the government is up against, it is nothing short of a miracle that they have kept everything together for as long as they have. Thieu's no saint, but you have got to respect his ability to keep things together under the worst conditions imaginable." Over a lunch, at which I was a guest, a few days after the first installments of the Pentagon Papers appeared in the New York Times, Johnson ruminated about his own Vietnam policies. "We made a couple of key mistakes," he admitted. "To begin with, Kennedy should have had more than eighteen thousand military advisers there in the early 1960s. And then I made the situation worse by waiting eighteen months before putting more men in. By then, the war was almost lost. Another mistake was not instituting censorship—not to cover up mistakes, but to prevent the other side from knowing what we were going to do next. My God, you can't fight a war by watching it every, night on television."

He then launched into a long defense of his policies against the allegations and implications contained in the Times's articles. "All the time, in 1964, I really hoped we could negotiate our way out of a major war in Vietnam," he said. "The Russians shared our hope." As the situation deteriorated in Vietnam, he said, he tried, by proceeding with U.S. troop buildups quietly and slowly, to avoid inflaming hawk sentiment at home and, perhaps more important, forcing Hanoi to call on the Chinese for help. "I told my advisers, 'By God, don't come to me with any plans to escalate this war unless you carry with you a joint congressional resolution.' I wasn't going to follow Truman's mistake in Korea when he went in without congressional approval. They claim I used Tonkin Gulf as an excuse. Hell, the Communists hit us there twice. The first time their torpedo boats hit the day before, I did nothing, hoping it was either a mistake or the action would not be repeated. But when they hit us again the very next day, I was forced to act. And just about every member of Congress was marching right along with me." He was particularly ruffled by the accusation that he had been secretly planning to bomb the North at the time of the 1964 campaign, when Barry Goldwater was calling for precisely such an act. "It is absolutely untrue," Johnson said. "On at least five occasions I personally vetoed military requests for retaliation bombing raids in the North. Only late in 1965 did I reluctantly agree to it. Not one of my principal advisers—Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, and George Ball—opposed my decision not to rush into retaliation strikes. We had contingency plans to bomb in the North for retaliation for terrorist raids in the South. But I didn't want to do this. Finally, they attacked our base in Pleiku in February, 1965, destroying many planes and killing a lot of our men. I was forced to act. I felt I had no choice. All of my civilian advisers, every one of them, agreed with me. Dean Rusk told me, 'Mr. President, this is a momentous decision.' I suppose it was."

We were in a private dining room on the third floor of the LBJ Library. Across the hall was a replica of Johnson's White House office. A three-foot electric pepper mill sat at the head of the table, and butler Wong scurried in with a plate of steak and sweet corn. Johnson seated himself ahead of his guests, a presidential practice carried into retirement, and began to eat. Aides arrived to whisper in his ear about incoming calls. He either shook his head or left the table for many minutes. Secret Service agents haunted the surrounding corridors, walkie-talkies in hand. Déjà vu was a decorative theme: on one wall of the dining room were the framed photographs of heads of state whom Johnson visited during his years in office. "Here's my favorite," said Lady Bird, pointing to a photo of South Korea's President, General Chung Hee Park. "He was a real no-nonsense fellow." (Lady Bird was more conservative than the public ever realized.) LBJ laughed. "I remember our trip to Seoul. My God, I've never seen so many people lining the streets. I asked Park, through an interpreter, what would he estimate the crowd to be? The interpreter jabbers a bit and tells me, 'President Park, he say population of Seoul is one million. People on the streets is one million. That's all the people we have. So solly.'"

During coffee, the talk turned to President Kennedy, and Johnson expressed his belief that the assassination in Dallas had been part of a conspiracy. "I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger." Johnson said that when he had taken office he found that "we had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean." A year or so before Kennedy's death a CIA-backed assassination team had been picked up in Havana. Johnson speculated that Dallas had been a retaliation for this thwarted attempt, although he couldn't prove it. "After the Warren Commission reported in, I asked Ramsey Clark [then Attorney General] to quietly look into the whole thing. Only two weeks later he reported back that he couldn't find anything new." Disgust tinged Johnson's voice as the conversation came to an end. "I thought I had appointed Tom Clark's son—I was wrong."

Johnson rarely worked at the LBJ Library, preferring instead to do business at his comfortable ranch office, where on the wall opposite his large desk hung a painting of a Texas landscape by artist Peter Hurd. At Lady Bird's behest, Hurd had been commissioned to paint the official presidential portrait, resulting in what Johnson called "the ugliest picture I ever saw." Reminiscing, Johnson explained: "He didn't follow the strict rules about size and style laid down about those portraits. I like his scenes much better."

Pn March, 1970, Johnson was hospitalized at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, after complaining of severe chest pains. Doctors reassured him that he had not suffered a heart attack; instead, the pains were caused by angina, a hardening of the arteries to the heart resulting in an insufficiency of blood to the body's most vital organ. Although there was little that could be done to cure the condition, Johnson was urged to lose considerable weight. He had grown dangerously heavier since leaving the White House, gaining more than twenty-five pounds and weighing around 235. The following summer, again gripped by chest pains, he embarked on a crash water diet, shedding about fifteen pounds in less than a month. But shortly before Christmas, 1971, he shocked his friends by suddenly resuming cigarette smoking, a habit he had discarded over fifteen years before, following his first, near fatal, heart attack. "I'm an old man, so what's the difference?" he explained. "I've been to the Mayo Clinic twice and the doctors tell me there is nothing they can do for me. My body is just aging in its own way. That's it. And I always loved cigarettes, missed them every day since I quit. Anyway, I don't want to linger the way Eisenhower did. When I go, I want to go fast." He quickly became a chain smoker.

In April, 1972, Johnson experienced a massive heart attack while visiting his daughter, Lynda, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Convinced he was dying, he browbeat Lady Bird and his doctors into allowing him to fly home to Texas. So, late in the night of his third day in intensive care, a desperately sick LBJ was rushed to the airport and ferried back to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. The departure was so sudden that the Charlottesville hospital director, hearing a rumor that Johnson might try to leave, rushed to the hospital only to find LBJ's empty wheelchair in the parking lot.

Miraculously he survived, but the remaining seven months of his life became a sad and pain-wracked ordeal. "I'm hurting real bad," he confided to friends. The chest pains hit him nearly every afternoon—a series of sharp, jolting pains that left him scared and breathless. A portable oxygen tank stood next to his bed, and Johnson periodically interrupted what he was doing to lie down and don the mask to gulp air. He continued to smoke heavily, and, although placed on a low-calorie, low-cholesterol diet, kept to it only in fits and starts.

Meanwhile, he began experiencing severe stomach pains. Doctors diagnosed this problem as diverticulosis, pouches forming on the intestine. Also symptomatic of the aging process, the condition rapidly worsened and surgery was recommended. Johnson flew to Houston to consult with heart specialist Dr. Michael De Bakey, who decided that Johnson's heart condition presented too great a risk for any sort of surgery, including coronary bypass of two almost totally useless heart arteries.

"I once told Nixon," he said, "that the presidency is like being a jackass caught in a hailstorm. You've got to just stand there and take it. That's what I'm doing now." But he was also busy preparing his estate for his death. During the four years of his retirement he had managed nearly to double his considerable estate, which included stock in at least nine Texas banks, television interests in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, a real estate and photographic supply company in Austin, 3700 acres of land in Alabama, and extensive property holdings in Mexico, the Caribbean, and five Texas counties.

The flagship of Johnson's business empire had been the Austin television station, KTBC, which Lady Bird had launched in 1952, nine years after she bought radio station KTBC. In September, 1972, LBJ engineered the station's sale to the Los Angeles Times-Mirror Corporation for nine million dollars, a premium price which impressed several of Texas' shrewdest horse traders. The sale provided Lady Bird with $4.7 million, and the two Johnson daughters with $1.3 million each. Working with his most trusted assistant, twenty-nine-year-old Tom Johnson, who had served as assistant White House press secretary (and is the newly appointed editor of the Dallas Times-Herald), LBJ negotiated with the National Park Service to take over his ranch home as a national museum after his death and when Lady Bird no longer desired to live there. Most poignant of all, he began a series of tough bargaining sessions with a Tulsa land company to sell the working portion of his beloved ranch. Surprisingly, these financial moves were made without the assistance of his lifelong business partner, Judge A. W. Moursund. "The judge and I have split the blanket," Johnson said. And that is all he would say.

Apparently the two had argued about the purchase of a bank, but, whatever the reason, Johnson and Moursund, a Blanco County judge whom LBJ had known since boyhood and who during LBJ's' presidential years had a direct White House line plugged into his hill country ranch, remained totally estranged for the last year of Johnson's life. The split-up offered a rare peek inside Johnson's complicated business empire. Holdings and liabilities jointly filed included more than $700,000 in loans from federal land banks in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Dividing property, Johnson received a 4000-acre ranch and 214 subdivision lots along Lake LBJ in Austin; while the judge received 3200 acres in Oklahoma and more than 2000 acres in a nearby Texas county. All of the loans were listed in the names of Moursund and his wife.

Sick and depressed, Johnson had hoped to attend the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach, if only to stand up and take a bow. He needed some warmth and applause, but from Larry O'Brien and others the message filtered back that he had better stay home. The McGovern nomination disgusted him. Nixon could be defeated if only the Democrats don't go too far left," he had insisted. But to Johnson, party loyalty ranked with mother love, so he was far from pleased to find such old colleagues as George Christian, Leonard Marks, and former Commerce Secretary C. R. Smith working for Nixon against other old friends such as Liz Carpenter and Joe Califano, who campaigned for McGovern. Of John Connally, with whom his relationship had long been complicated, and who he thought would run on the GOP ticket as Nixon's running mate, Johnson remarked philosophically: "John sees a good opportunity." But when another close Texas confidant stretched his endorsement of Nixon to include active support for Texas Republican Senator John Tower, Johnson angrily called the offender and exploded: "You're a fat old whore."

Johnson's choice to beat Nixon was Edmund Muskie. In his view, Senator Muskie was "crucified by the press. They zeroed in on him because he was the front-runner and pounded him out, just like they did to Romney in 1964." His disappointment was mollified slightly by his own estimations of the Maine senator, which he had discussed with friends a few years before. "Muskie," he had said, "will never be President because he doesn't have the instinct to go for his opponent's jugular." Prior to the convention, Johnson held long telephone conversations with both Muskie and Chicago's Mayor Daley on the strategy to stop McGovern. He advised Muskie to stand firm and hold out to see whether there would be a second ballot. But he refused to act on Daley's plea that he, Johnson, take an initiative and speak out against McGovern. "Johnson knows that if he takes such a stand it will be counterproductive," a friend said at the time. "If he goes against McGovern, it will only boost McGovern's stock. Lyndon just doesn't carry any weight in the party anymore, and he knows it. It's a miserable fact for a man who only four years ago was President of the United States. But it is a fact."

So Johnson suffered the election in silence, swallowing his nitroglycerin tablets to thwart continual chest pains, endorsing McGovern through a hill country weekly newspaper, meeting cordially with the candidate at the ranch. The newspapers showed a startling picture of Johnson, his hair almost shoulder-length. Former aide Bob Hardesty takes credit for this development. "We were working together one day," Hardesty recalls, "and he said, in passing, 'Robert, you need a haircut.' I told him, 'Mr. President, I'm letting my hair grow so no one will be able to mistake me for those SOB's in the White House.' He looked startled, so I explained, 'You know, that bunch around Nixon—Haldeman, Ehrlichman—they all have very short hair.' He nodded. The next time I saw him his hair was growing over his collar."

During the final months of his life he was suffering terrible pain. One of his last public appearances, his dramatic speech at the Civil Rights Symposium at the LBJ Library, proved to be so exhausting that he spent the next two days in bed. He filmed a final interview with Cronkite, taking long rests between camera loadings. Against the urgings of his wife and friends, he attended the mass funeral of fourteen Austin youngsters killed in a bus crash. "Those people supported me when I needed them over the years," he insisted, "and I'm going to support them now."

Lady Bird noticed that he was unusually quiet on that cold January morning, but nothing seemed wrong, so she decided to drive into Austin for shopping. At mid-afternoon, on January 22, the Secret Service placed an urgent call to her via the car-telephone, and Lady Bird, in a shaking voice, called aide Tom Johnson at the television station. "Tom," she said, "this time we didn't make it. Lyndon is dead." 

FOOTNOTE:
One of the more secretive Presidents, Johnson nevertheless was unexpectedly willing to open up portions of his archives to scholars as quickly as possible. At the time of his death, he had arranged for the LBJ Library curator to meet at the White House with Nixon's then chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, to discuss declassification of Johnson's foreign policy papers. The basis of the meeting was Nixon's new executive order providing more flexible guidelines on declassifying documents. LBJ hoped his papers would meet these new guidelines.


Copyright © 1973 by Leo Janos. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; July 1973; The Last Days of the President; Volume 232, No. 1; 35-41.