The great thing about the Abramoff DeLay Scandal is the way it is bringing liberals and conservatives together in condemnation of corruption, and in excavating the history of washington corruption. Here is David Broder in the Post on Lyndon Johnson: Its a Texas thing.
DeLay's Texas Model: "If Tom DeLay was blind to the perils of mixing money and politics, business and government, he was true to the tradition of his state, where the long-dominant Democratic Party plumbed all possible permutations of that intimate connection.
To take but one example, consider the phone conversation between Lyndon B. Johnson and George Brown, chairman of the board of Brown & Root, the construction giant, on Jan. 2, 1964, soon after Johnson became president, as quoted in 'Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964.'
As Michael Beschloss, the editor of the volume, summarized the conversation, 'Brown, one of Johnson's earliest financial backers, . . . has asked him on behalf of another old supporter, Gus Wortham, a Houston insurance tycoon, and John Jones, president of the Houston Chronicle, to ask Robert Kennedy's antitrust officials to suspend antitrust restrictions against a merger they are seeking between two Houston banks. As a master horse-trader, Johnson . . . wants a written promise from Jones that the Chronicle will support him as long as he is president.'
Brown tells Johnson that Albert Thomas, the Houston congressman who is also working on the merger, thinks that the deal the president wants is 'too much of a cash-and-carry thing . . . too much of a trade. . . . It'd hurt you as well as them.'
But Johnson won't be deterred. 'If they don't want to tell me that they're my friends in writing. . . . I'm not going to do it as long as their attitude's that way. You get me that letter,' Johnson orders, ' . . . and I'll have them sit down with the Controller of the Currency and we'll override the whole goddamned outfit. And they'll do it, to hold their own jobs.'
That is how business was done. Johnson himself inh"