Was President Lyndon B. Johnson Just a Time-traveling, Alternate-reality Racist Rick Sanchez?

On this gray, stormy, Boston October, Saturday morning, I engaged one of our favorite pastimes -- tumbling down the internet rabbit hole. Eventually, it brought me towards 'ole Lyndon B. Johnson, former Vice President to John F. Kennedy who, upon JFK's assassination in 1963, succeeded the throne to President of the United States. LBJ is particularly hailed by his fellow Democrats for his 'Great Society' reforms, where,

... the main goal was elimination of poverty and racial injustice... [and] in scope and sweep resembled the New Deal domestic agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

There are some, errr, lesser known facts about him, as well, though. As it turns out, he was quite the character. Self-absorbed egomaniac, exhibitionist, known machiavellian for getting policy through congress (Frank Underwood from House of Cards was primarily "two scoops of LBJ with a dash of Richard III and a pinch of Hannibal Lecter"), and mid-sentence burps all give LBJ a certain je ne sais quoi that even Rick Sanchez, himself, might envy...

"Ladybird--I mean, Morty--everything in life is about sex, Morty -- EXCEPT SEX. 
Sex is about POWER, Morty!!!" - Frank Underwood/LBJ/Rick Sanchez

Rick Sanchez, is that you?

I came across this wonderfully, appropriately animated video of an audio recording where LBJ is on the phone in the oval office of the White House ordering some tailored pants. This is where I found the rabbit hole and started peering into it. Now, it's clear this guy knows how he likes his pants and throws around measurements like its nobody's business, but there's a segment of the video, from about 1:11 to 1:51 that really stood out...

The glorious transcript of this segment, below:


Lyndon B. Johnson: "And another thing... the crotch-down where your nuts hang... is always a little too tight. So when you make 'em up, gimme an inch so that I can let-out, there, uhhh, because they cut me. It's like ridin' a wire-fence. These are almost--these are the best that I've had in the United States--"
Tailor: "--alright, uhh..."

LBJ: "But, ehh, uhhh... when I gain a little weight, they cut me under there--so, leave me, uhhh, you never do have much margin, there--*eh*--let's see if you can't leave me about a--*ehh*--an inch from the zipper en--*BLEURRRGH*--ends, uh, round--uh, under my--back to my bunghole."
Tailor: "Um, yup."

"Mort--*eh*--let's see if you can't leave me about a--*ehh*--an inch from the
zipper en--*BLEURRRGH*--ends, uh, round--uh, under my--back to my bunghole, Morty..."

LBJ: "So I can let it out, there, if I need to."
Tailor: "Uh, got it."


Wait... Let What Out? LBJ Apparently had a Massive Dong and was Quite Brazen About It

Apparently, there are a whole host of stories about Lyndon B. Johnson's, er, Johnson. He would regularly grab at and display it as a form of asserting his power, which is quite a Rick-esque-que move, if he were as well-endowed as LBJ. Take note, these are only the ones we know about.

Among other bits, according to Robert A. Caro,

He early became fabled for a Rabelaisian earthiness, urinating in the parking lot of the House Office Building as the urge took him; if a colleague came into a Capitol bathroom as he was finishing at the urinal there, he would sometimes swing around still holding his member, which he liked to call “Jumbo,” hooting once, “Have you ever seen anything as big as this?,” and shaking it in almost a brandishing manner as he began discoursing about some pending legislation. At the same time, he would oblige aides to take dictation standing in the door of his office bathroom while he went about emptying his bowels, as if in some alpha-male ritual assertion of his primacy. Even on the floors of the House and Senate, he would extravagantly rummage away at his groin, sometimes reaching his hand through a pocket and leaning with half-lifted leg for more thorough access.

But wait, there's more! According to Kate Anderson Brower,

The 36th president of the United States reportedly refused to accept staff arguments that outfitting the shower with the demanded features—including one nozzle aimed “directly at the president's penis”—would require a great deal of plumbing work. “If I can move 10,000 troops in a day, you can certainly fix the bathroom any way I want it,” Johnson told the staff, according to the book.

So we know he was quite open about his feelings towards 'ole "Jumbo", but it wasn't just in private to his close colleagues and advisors -- he was so bold he may as well have been an exhibitionist:

Lyndon B. Johnson once answered reporters badgering him about why the United States was in Vietnam with a simple, unmistakable off-the-record gesture: he unzipped, pulled out his penis and said, ''This is why!''

"This is--*eh*--this is why, Morty! Have you ever seen
anything as b--*BURP*--as big as this???"

And if you'd thought that this was just some one-off outburst, you'd be wrong...

There he was, the leader of the free world, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, aboard Air Force One standing in front of reporters, naked as a jaybird. 

As Cormier described it, Johnson "shucked off his underwear." Then, as if nothing unusual were going on, the President continued talking to the reporters while "standing buck naked and waving his towel for emphasis."

With a python named "Jumbo" and the personality attached to the owner to go with it, no wonder Ladybird often looked so exhausted.


Yes, Okay, LBJ was Relentlessly Racist

Well, if we're going to paint LBJ as a kind of semi-Rick-esque character, we're going to have to deal with the fact that LBJ was an unrepentant racist. I suppose, amongst virtually infinitesimal alternate-reality Ricks, at least one of them might have turned out this way, and if there was a racist Rick, you know he would be just as ruthlessly, shamelessly, and publicly so, just as LBJ was.

First there's the one some of us might be familiar with. Regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1957, LBJ said to Senator Richard Russell, Jr. (D-GA),

"These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don't move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there'll be no way of stopping them, we'll lose the filibuster and there'll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It'll be Reconstruction all over again."

Ouch. It's a very machiavellian and political way for a racist to view the situation, despite the fact that Democrats, even today, view LBJ and such legislation as necessarily beneficial to minorities as opposed to any possibility that it could be for keeping them down and dependent on Democrats and on the State. But if there was any question as to any racist motives for supporting this legislation, we can put that to rest, pretty easily. Regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1964, according to then-Air Force One steward Robert MacMillan, LBJ allegedly said to two governors,

"I'll have them n*ggers voting Democratic for two hundred years."

and, to Senator John Stennis (D-MS) during debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1957,

"Let's face it. Our ass is in a crack. We're gonna have to let this n*gger bill pass."

But, hey, maybe he wasn't really a racist, right? Maybe, as Democrats often say, he was just 'making believe' he was a racist, to get the votes past so he could genuinely help the black community and minorities, right? To his chauffeur, Robert Parker, when Parker said he’d prefer to be referred to by his name rather than "boy," "n*gger" or "chief.", LBJ responded with,

"As long as you are black, and you're gonna be black till the day you die, no one's gonna call you by your goddamn name! So no matter what you are called, n*gger, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it! Just pretend you're a goddamn piece of furniture!"

You be the judge!

Could LBJ have been in the Shadow Council of Ricks? We may never know.