(11-01-2014 07:13 AM)runamuck Wrote: I was in high school at the time. I just remember all the girls running out in the hall crying and thinking geez...get a life. as a wife cheating philanderer whose family made their fortune bootlegging, I had to chuckle at all the camelot stuff.
You were thinking that on the day he died?
Quote:the media loved that guy [JFK]
Yes. His presidency occurred at almost the precise moment that television, and television "network news" in particular, became the dominant medium (supplanting radio and newspapers) in how Americans received daily information about what was going on around the country and around the world. And the people who determined the content of television network news were -- almost to a person -- deeply, hopelessly in the tank for John F. Kennedy. A few of them have actually been quite open and candid about it in the years since his death, although these occasional admissions have mostly been lost in the shuffle of history.
Quote:I liked how he handled the cuban missile crises tho.
Letting the Russians have everything they wanted enabled us to avoid a war, yes. Any American-male born between ~1934 and ~1944 should be grateful.
Quote:but drumming up a war in viet nam to support the corrupt leaders there was not a good move
There were two moves that America could have made responsibly and successfully in Vietnam under Kennedy: (1.) complete (or near-complete) withdrawal, and then let the Diem brothers fight it out as best they could with us watching on the sideline, or (2.) apply crushing, overwhelming force and annihilate anyone/anything that got in way. Instead Kennedy (and LBJ, too, of course) tried to split the difference, with catastrophic results that have not fully healed even to this day.
(11-03-2014 08:19 AM)runamuck Wrote: back before the advent of uhf tv, lbj pulled some shenanegans to get a law passed that there be only one tv channel allowed per so many local population. thereby ensuring that his tv station klbj would be the only one in austin for many years..then along came uhf and they had not planned for that so all the other stations that popped up in austin were uhf..so today you have channel 7 and then the likes of 24, 36.42, and so on..
Advertising on the radio/TV stations (KTBC, KLBJ, etc.) that were owned by Johnson's wife was one of the main ways for interested parties to funnel money into LBJ's pocket. Ethically, it was scarcely any different than Spiro Agnew being handed cash-envelopes in the vice-president's office, but LBJ was never really called-out on it (whereas Agnew had to resign as V.P. and cop a nolo-plea for tax-evasion in federal court). As I mentioned in a comment earlier in this thread, the editors of LIFE magazine were holding a meeting on the morning of Friday, November 22, 1963, to discuss a major series of articles -- the first to be published on Monday, November 25 -- that would detail the ways in which LBJ had accumulated his fortune. The role of the Texas Broadcasting Company was to be a significant part of the expose. Of course, fate intervened.