HOME / press box: Media criticism.

Bill Moyers' MemoryWhy you can't trust it.

By Jack ShaferPosted Thursday, March 12, 2009, at 4:30 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

RSS

LBJ: Yeah, but I thought maybe you might be talking to him and you might find out [if it] looks like there is any claim of any frame-up.
Fortas: When I talked to [Jenkins], what he's told me indicates that … he just … started out for a walk and then ended up over there, which would negative—really negative—the idea of a plant.
LBJ: … Nobody suggested to him to go over there [to the YMCA]?
Fortas: That's right. He went all alone.
LBJ: Where from?
Fortas: From the Newsweek cocktail party.

According to Beschloss' book, Johnson told DeLoach of his setup theories on Oct. 20, saying that Republican operatives might have persuaded the waiters at the Newsweek party to get Jenkins drunk—presumably to frame him. (Beschloss footnotes this account to a memo from DeLoach to Hoover in FBI files.) That same day, LBJ bent the ears of newspaper publisher John S. Knight and labor leader Joseph D. Keenan with his GOP conspiracy theory. (Audio clips courtesy KC Johnson.)

The FBI interviewed more than 500 people for its Oct. 22 findings, known as the "Jenkins Report." The report uncovered no evidence of entrapment. (See the FBI summary behind the New York Times paid wall and the contemporaneous Time magazine story.)

Hoover and Johnson talk about the report in a recorded Oct. 23 conversation. One would think that if Hoover actually took the lead in informing Johnson about the Goldwater rumors, the topic would have come up here. But it doesn't. Instead, Johnson commends Hoover for doing a good job.

Even though the FBI report ruled out entrapment and he had praised the report, Johnson refused to surrender. In an Oct. 27 conversation, he badgers DeLoach about Choka.

LBJ: I never was convinced that you-all completed what you ought to complete on this Choka. … Is there nothing else we ought to do?
DeLoach: No, sir. … I don't think [Choka] was part of any frame-up. … I think frankly that this man was just hanging around in the same place, hoping to pick up someone.

Johnson then suggests that the FBI run the names of top Republicans—such as John Grenier and Dean Burch—past Choka to see if he recognizes them, presumably to demonstrate that Choka was part of a Republican frame job. DeLoach neither accepts nor rejects the assignment. But minutes later he volunteers that the FBI had gotten a rumor that another member of the Johnson staff was homosexual, saying, "Bill Moyers knew about it and asked me to check it out."

In an Oct. 31 recording, Hoover and Johnson do discuss an alleged GOP plot against Jenkins. After talking about a rumor that a high official—perhaps a Cabinet member—might be exposed as homosexual before the election, Hoover and Johnson turn to a second topic: Hoover has investigated a rumor passed along by syndicated newspaper columnist Drew Pearson that the Republican National Committee participated in the framing of Jenkins.

Hoover couldn't be more dismissive of the Pearson tip. "We got an affidavit from that [Pearson] source saying it was absolutely untrue; it was just said as a gag. Got that yesterday," Hoover says (transcript by KC Johnson).

Note that this isn't the alleged GOP plot Moyers writes about in Newsweek. In that rendition, district police are cited as Hoover's source.

Who was Drew Pearson? In Drew Pearson: An Unauthorized Biography, Oliver Pilat writes, "His columns almost invariably showed Johnson in a favorable light, being opposed or thwarted by stupid advisers or adverse events. The public flattery employed to influence the President was often glaring. Johnson, in turn, could not resist trying to manage the news" in Pearson's column. In a Sept. 5 conversation preserved in the White House tapes, Johnson promises Pearson that his aides will leak him damaging information about the Goldwater-Miller ticket. Pearson's Sept. 13 column, written by associate Jack Anderson, contains the leak.

Johnson took his Jenkins-was-framed theory with him into retirement. Doris Kearns Goodwin, who assisted Johnson in the writing of his memoirs, quotes Johnson on the subject of the scandal in her 1976 book Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. Johnson says:

I couldn't have been more shocked about Walter Jenkins if I'd heard that Lady Bird had killed the Pope. It just wasn't possible. And then I started piecing things together. The Republicans believed that the question of morality was their trump card. This was their only chance at winning; anyone who got in the way wound up as corpses. Well, the night of October 7, the night of the arrest, I had been invited to a party given by Newsweek which had been owned by Phil Graham, my good friend, who had told Kennedy to make me Vice President. I couldn't go, so I asked Walter to go in my place. Now the waiters at the party were from the Republican National Committee and I know Walter had one drink and started on another and doesn't remember anything after that. So that must be the explanation.

Note that in this retelling, Johnson doesn't say the director of the FBI informed him of the GOP "plot." Goodwin continues, "Whether Johnson actually believed his own statement here is questionable, but his overreaction to the question of homosexuality and his fantasy of conspiracy testify to the disturbance he must have felt."

Johnson's staff understood his problems with the truth. "You know, one of the things about Lyndon Johnson that you always have to be careful about—whatever Johnson tells you at any given moment he thinks is the truth," said George E. Reedy, Moyers' predecessor as Johnson press secretary, in an interview with the oral history project at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library. "In his own mind I don't think the man ever told a whopper in his whole life," Reedy says.