Post by StonesFan1990 on Nov 28th, 2011 at 1:12am
IMO, one of the last people you'd suspect of being a longhair or being a Hippie, but after leaving office in 1969, President Lyndon Johnson, who was notably hated by the Hippie movement, grew his hair long along with growing long sideburns. By the time he left office, he had come to understand the Hippies and even related to them, and in the privacy of his ranch, with the shackles of Washington off of him, he let his hair grow. It's by no means incredibly long, but for the early 70s and for a man born in 1908--for a man of his conversative clean cut generation--his hair is very long. Consider that he was a Texan who was in his 60s--A guy who would normally think long hair the mark of a sissy.
When talking about the Hippies/Counter Culture to a confidant, Johnson said: "Don't they realize I'm one of them? I always hated cops as a kid and just like them, I dropped out of school and took off for California. I'm not some conformist middle class personality. I could never be bureaucratized."
A bold move for someone who was the epitome of everything the Hippies thought they were against. LBJ just as much as Nixon was the symbolic anthithesis of everything the '60s and '70s were about, and it seems like unlike Nixon, LBJ understood the kids--but he was trapped. Whereas Nixon demonized the counter culture and it's associated figures as "bums", LBJ never came out against the younger generation, even when they were chanting "how many kids did [he] kill today". He never demonized them as Nixon and Reagan did. He quietly went into retirement, grew out his hair, ran his ranch and hoped Nixon would bring peace to Vietnam, and died.
Just before LBJ died, Nixon asked for LBJ's help in covering up Watergate by having his friends in Congress shut off the investigation, but LBJ refused. When threatened with Nixon's people releasing embarrassing info on Johnson, LBJ responded with the threat of releasing his own info--Nixon had committed treason and sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks of 1968 (before he was elected, to undermine Humphrey), when peace was VERY close at hand, by sending representations secretly to the South Vietnamese and telling them could get a better deal under a GOP administration--which made them withdraw from the table in '68 when it seemed like they were ready to negotiate a peace.
When talking about the Hippies/Counter Culture to a confidant, Johnson said: "Don't they realize I'm one of them? I always hated cops as a kid and just like them, I dropped out of school and took off for California. I'm not some conformist middle class personality. I could never be bureaucratized."
A bold move for someone who was the epitome of everything the Hippies thought they were against. LBJ just as much as Nixon was the symbolic anthithesis of everything the '60s and '70s were about, and it seems like unlike Nixon, LBJ understood the kids--but he was trapped. Whereas Nixon demonized the counter culture and it's associated figures as "bums", LBJ never came out against the younger generation, even when they were chanting "how many kids did [he] kill today". He never demonized them as Nixon and Reagan did. He quietly went into retirement, grew out his hair, ran his ranch and hoped Nixon would bring peace to Vietnam, and died.
Just before LBJ died, Nixon asked for LBJ's help in covering up Watergate by having his friends in Congress shut off the investigation, but LBJ refused. When threatened with Nixon's people releasing embarrassing info on Johnson, LBJ responded with the threat of releasing his own info--Nixon had committed treason and sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks of 1968 (before he was elected, to undermine Humphrey), when peace was VERY close at hand, by sending representations secretly to the South Vietnamese and telling them could get a better deal under a GOP administration--which made them withdraw from the table in '68 when it seemed like they were ready to negotiate a peace.