Part I: The Distant Past
For almost two centuries, no elected President ever got rich from Politics, Presidential or otherwise. Quite the opposite is actually true.
Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) is a tragic example. After graduating West Point and several years in the Army, he entered the private world until the Civil War (1861-65) when, like many other ex-officers, he rejoined the Union Army and rose very rapidly. He was unusually aggressive in his actions.
In the Western Campaign, along with his top assistant William Tecumseh Sherman (another West Point officer returned from private life), they, unlike other commanders who lacked either competence or adequate aggressiveness, successfully took Vicksburg and split the Confederacy.
Finally, President Lincoln found two generals to win the war. U. S. Grant became the general in total command while Sherman, independently, took Atlanta and marched through Georgia and the Carolinas destroying the ‘granary’ of the Confederacy. The South was finally doomed.
When General Robt. E. Lee finally evacuated Grant’s siege of Richmond to save his army, Sherman’s army was approaching from the South. At Appomattox Court House, Lee surrendered and the war that took over 500,000 (to as many as 700.000) lives was finally won.
In 1868 and again in 1872, U. S. Grant was elected President and retired to live on his savings and a well-earned pension in 1877. He moved to New York sometime later and invested his life savings in a business venture for his son – but the business failed and General Grant was becoming bankrupt.
(I remember visiting Grant’s Tomb as a child in Riverside Drive Park in Manhattan.)
Grant was an incessant cigar smoker and whiskey drinker. When War critics pestered Lincoln about Grant’s drinking, Lincoln came up with a great set of responses. Unlike his other generals, Grant was always looking to attack whatever the cost – the Union was far richer in money and manpower and would inevitably win – the sooner the better as in almost every war.
Grant’s drinking was harped on by the political appeasers of the Democrat Party, so Lincoln finally said: I am going to find out what brand of whiskey he drinks and send a barrel of it to my other generals. That shut them up.
By 1885, devoid of money and with the encouragement and assistance of Mark Twain, in his last months of life, Grant dictated his memoirs which became a two-volume classic and provided tens of thousands of dollars with an unprecedented royalty agreement for his surviving family.
He finished his dictation three days before he died of throat cancer – the whiskey and the cigars finally caught up with him.
Part II: The 20th Century
The first President to get rich from politics actually got rich from political connections a decade or so before he became President.
Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-73), an awful President and an awful man, was vastly enriched from his political connections. His continually betrayed wife, Lady Bird Johnson, with between $17,000 and $40,000 of her inheritance, bought a failing radio station during WWII and improved its operation – but not enormously.
Long before Johnson succeeded the assassinated John F. Kennedy in 1963, he used his political connections as a conniving Senator in 1952 to acquire the Broadcast license of the only (monopoly) television station in Austin, Texas – the State Capital.
[In 1948, the anti-trust division of the Department of Justice completely changed the movie industry. Previously, there were seven companies (20th Century Fox, Paramount, Columbia, Loews Incorporated – MGM, Universal, United Artists and Warner Brothers) all of whom owned both a movie studio and movie theaters that they filled with their own productions. They competed like crazy. Movie tickets were cheap. However, after the breakup of the studios versus the theaters, two lawyer-agency businesses became enormously rich and the movie industry significantly deteriorated as a business. Studios had to learn to survive by creating product for television. Some were better at this than others. During the Depression in the 1930s, when tickets were cheap, people waited on line outside theaters for their turn to be entertained. In the 1950s, movie theaters, to survive, installed air conditioning so ticket buyers could temporarily escape summer’s heat. In the 1960s or 1970s, when Universal Studios was effectively bankrupted, one of those two monopoly agency-businesses actually took them over. The flourishing of television in the 1950s began slowly and then accelerated exponentially.]
Lyndon Johnson’s monopoly VHF Austion station became worth many millions of dollars being affiliated with all three networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS) so as to pick and choose whatever network offerings would be most profitable.
From 1963, when he became President, through 1964 when he was elected on his own by lying to the American Public by saying “I am not going to send American boys to fight a war that Asian boys ought to fight for themselves,” Lyndon Johnson waited until barely after the election when he and his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, took the American involvement in Viet Nam from 16,000 men to over half a million.
During those four years, American pilots, who were shot down and captured over North Viet Nam, were held and tortured in the ‘Hanoi Hilton.’ When family members of the captives came to President Johnson, he bullied them into not speaking to the Press – claiming that it would only make things worse.
In 1968, when Nixon was elected President, those same families came to him and told him what he did not know. During the next four years, President Nixon downsized the American military in Viet Nam and had Henry Kissinger secretly trying to negotiate a complete ending to the American involvement including the return of our POWs.
By the 1972 election (in which Nixon carried 49 states), there were very few Americans left in Viet Nam. In December of 1972, after isolating politically North Viet Nam from both the USSR and Red China, Nixon bombed Hanoi and Haiphong Harbor which had previously been immune from bombing. POWs in the Hanoi Hilton, like future Senators Jeremiah Denton and John McCain, subsequently revealed that the ‘ground shook,’ the guards became friendly instead of abusive and the war from the American point of view quickly came to an end. There is a very famous picture from early 1973 that I never saw until at least a decade later of Naval Officer John McCain with a crutch under his right arm, smiling and shaking hands with President Richard Nixon on an airport tarmac – probably at Pearl Harbor.
Though Nixon downsized the war, ended it and reacquired our POWs, every young person that I have ever had a casual conversation with about Viet Nam for several decades, would tell me that it was ‘Nixon’s war.’ And they never admit that Lyndon Johnson had anything to do with it.
Part III: To be continued…
The massive and unprecedented Narcissistic Duplicity of LBJ was further extended by 2 Geniuses of the Power and Profitability of Political Theater – the GP (Great Prevaricator of 1993-2001) and the FFF (Folksy Flim-Flam Fraud of 2009-2017).
