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What we do know from the tapes was that Hoover thought he had flawless gaydar. Beschloss writes that Hoover believed, based on a report from liberal columnist Drew Pearson, that the Republicans were about to drop a "bombshell" on a Johnson administration official on Oct. 31, a bit of intelligence that he had passed along to Johnson. On the morning of Oct. 31, Johnson telephoned Hoover for new gossip, and the conversation ambled toward a Navy employee. LBJ: … They raised the question of the way he combed his hair and the way he did something else, but they had...

One of the darker periods of modern American history was J. Edgar Hoover's long reign over the FBI, as we have learned since he died in 1972. So it is more than a historical footnote to discover new records showing that prominent public television broadcaster Bill Moyers participated in Hoover's exploits. ...

When Beltway insider Jack Valenti died two years ago at age 85, he was playing the role of intermediary between Washington and Hollywood as the theatrical, snowy-haired president of the Motion Picture Association of America. But back in 1964, Valenti was a Houston ad executive newly installed at the White House as a top aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson. And J. Edgar Hoover's FBI found itself quietly consumed with the vexing question of whether Valenti was gay. Previously confidential FBI files show that Hoover's deputies set out to determine whether Valenti, who had married two years earlier, maintained a...

For decades, the face of the criminal justice system in this country has been black and male: hundreds of thousands locked behind bars, arrested in disproportionate numbers and facing execution at rates far greater than those for the general population. This week, Eric H. Holder Jr.'s swearing-in as the nation's first black attorney general and its top law enforcement official came weighted with heavy expectation that the system could change.

The War in Iraq/Trashcanistan has been officially changed from a military action to a Political battle. This was on display when the Coward in Chief caved to appease his peaceniks going back to the 16 month cut & run. Add to that his closing Gitmo w/no plan for the prisoners, then changing the name from WOT to The Challenge and you have Vietnam II. Lyndon Baines Obama has taken this war out of the hands of the military and turned it over to the political hacks. How long before Generals Hussain and Biden/Pelosi are pouring over maps planning bombing runs...

AUSTIN, Texas – In the last months of his administration, President Lyndon Johnson voiced worry over the Vietnam peace talks and stridently suggested that associates of Richard Nixon were attempting to keep South Vietnam away from the table until after the 1968 election, recordings of telephone conversations released Thursday show. "This is treason," Johnson said, referring to people close to Nixon, during a conversation with Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen.

Cecil Stoughton, the White House photographer who shot the iconic image of Lyndon B. Johnson taking the oath of office aboard Air Force One, has died. He was 88.

BookTV/C-Span2 HEADSUP!!! Tune in at 11:15 PM EASTERN or set your TIVO/DVD Recorder. FR's own "LS" and his latest work-product (book) will be the topic of a segment on BookTV (45 min. in duration). IF you miss this first broadcast, please go to the BookTV/C-Span2 page linked for future date/time of rebroadcasts.

While the state has seen demographic shifts in suburban school districts, the isolation and intense concentration of minority students in the 31 Abbott school districts is worse today than it was 20 years ago.  That's the basis for a "friend of the court" brief filed jointly by the New Jersey Black Issues Convention and the Hispanic Directors Association, two influential umbrella organizations. They are among nine groups challenging the state's overhaul of the school funding formula that guaranteed additional aid to the state's neediest districts. Locally, Paterson, Passaic and Garfield are classified as Abbott districts.   The court is scheduled...

Lyndon Baines Johnson, born 100 years ago this week, came from a part of the country where Jews were about as common as a herd of cattle in Manhattan. But in 1939, while still a young and relatively powerless congressman, Johnson was moved enough by reports of Jewish suffering in Europe to begin raising money and pulling whatever strings were necessary - not all of them legal - to save as many Jews as he could from the Nazis. Over the next few years, hundreds of Jews were issued counterfeit passports and visas and brought to Johnson's home state of...

Wednesday marks the 100th anniversary of Lyndon Baines Johnson's birth, and the former president's spirit seems particularly vivid on the ranch, where the National Park Service has restored Johnson's working office, which will open Wednesday for tours. It is a season of remembrance in LBJ country. Wednesday marks the 100th anniversary of Lyndon Baines Johnson's birth, and the former president's spirit seems particularly vivid on the ranch, where the National Park Service has restored Johnson's working office, which will open Wednesday for tours. Little more than a year after the death of Lady Bird Johnson, the LBJ Ranch is becoming...

National security can also mean spending money at home, they say DENVER (MarketWatch) -- Democrats have an ambitious agenda in this year's election: To stimulate the economy, cut taxes for middle-class families and seniors, increase spending on vital domestic issues, and not blow up the federal deficit. But their plans to promote the general welfare could be hobbled by an equally urgent need: To protect America from its enemies, foreign and domestic. 'There are just so many things that need to be fixed. If we don't start funding the Veterans Administration, if we don't start taking care of the veterans,...

WASHINGTON — Former President Ford secretly advised the FBI that two of his fellow members on the Warren Commission doubted the FBI's conclusion that John F. Kennedy was shot from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository in Dallas, according to newly released records from Ford's FBI files. Ford, still a congressman at the time, also told a senior FBI official about internal panel disputes over hiring staff, Chief Justice Earl Warren's timetable for completing the final report on the assassination and what panel members said about the FBI. In turn, Assistant FBI Director Cartha "Deke" DeLoach confidentially advised...

Democrat Barack Obama is continuing his tour this week of battleground states, where his biggest campaign vulnerability comes from swing voters. Obama's strengths are obvious. The Illinois senator can draw huge crowds, register millions of new voters and raise money like no other candidate in history. He is also a giant-slayer, meaning he managed to outmaneuver the powerful Clinton machine in a one-on-one contest. But in the end, Obama wheezed across the finish line. He lost nine of the last 14 primaries, and although Democrats are uniting behind their nominee, there is a lot to make them nervous about Obama's...

You don't have to agree with everything in this monumental account of politics in the 1960s and 1970s to find Rick Perlstein's "Nixonland" (Scribner, 896 pages, $37.50) interesting and even engrossing. The book is a masterful retelling of the turbulent period between the crushing defeat of Barry Goldwater by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and the equally stunning loss by George McGovern to Richard Nixon in 1972. Mr. Perlstein's use of the elections of 1964 and 1972 as ideological goalposts may be arbitrary, but it is easy to see why he selected them. Could two such different countries really be...

Bryce Lockwood, Marine staff sergeant, Russian-language expert, recipient of the Silver Star for heroism, ordained Baptist minister, is shouting into the phone. "I'm angry! I'm seething with anger! Forty years, and I'm seething with anger!" Lockwood was aboard the USS Liberty, a super-secret spy ship on station in the eastern Mediterranean, when four Israeli fighter jets flew out of the afternoon sun to strafe and bomb the virtually defenseless vessel on June 8, 1967, the fourth day of what would become known as the Six-Day War.......... .....Their anger has been stoked by the declassification of government documents and the recollections...

JERUSALEM - Tapes of Lyndon Johnson's Oval Office conversations, released to the public for the first time on Wednesday, reveal that the American president had a personal and often emotional connection to Israel, a scholar said. In the first public presentation of the tapes Wednesday at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Professor Robert Johnson said this connection influenced his policy decisions and helped lay the foundation for the special relationship between the two nations. "I sure as hell want to be careful and not run out on little Israel," Johnson said in a March 1968 conversation with his ambassador to the...

LBJ should share in Obama's success Johnson's voting rights program marked an earlier pivotal point in American history. And yet his name is rarely invoked. By Carl Leubsdorf As former aides, historians and journalists met recently at a celebration of Lyndon Johnson's 100th birthday, a persistent theme was the way echoes of his presidency still reverberate through the nation's politics. Four decades after Johnson's inability to settle the Vietnam War destroyed his presidency, the nation is coping with how to extricate itself from another quagmire - in Iraq. But the impact of his landmark domestic achievements, especially the historic measures...

INDEPENDENCE, Mo.—Business, meaning research by historians and nourishment for history hobbyists, is brisk at the Harry S. Truman Library on this 60th anniversary of the Berlin Airlift, the desegregation of the armed services, recognition of the state of Israel and the improbable election of the president responsible for many momentous policies. The library is a place, and now is a time, to ponder the transformation Truman wrought in the presidency and the Constitution and why that transformation should be debated before the next president is selected. With a mere 15 million pages of documents, this library is minuscule: The Clinton...

"go home and get your guns"-Stokely Carmichael April 4,1968 in Washington D.C. I had a habit of sitting in the kitchen and eating my breakfast while the radio was turned on to the morning news. The morning of Friday April 5th, 1968 I heard the account of a radio reporter (from UPI) who hid under a car while mobs rioted in the street around him. He sounded scared and he had reason to as rioting broke out in the nation's captial following the assassination of Martin Luther King late on the evening or April 4th and early on the morning...