Latest news with #LyndonBainesJohnson
Times
12-08-2025
- Politics
- Times
This LBJ biography helps explain deep US fear of vote rigging
On long car journeys we've been listening to Robert Caro's monumental four-volume biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Some books are better encountered read aloud than on the page, and this is one of them: brilliantly narrated with all the accents and voices, and Caro's often labyrinthine sentence constructions untangled by intelligent voice-modulation. Surely no other figure in modern history has ever been so fairly and comprehensively explained, and no other life more exhaustively chronicled. But one aspect of American politics, described early in the former president's ascent to power, and then later, has both shocked and educated me. Vote-rigging. It was endemic. In 1960, when LBJ ran alongside John F Kennedy for the presidency, votes from LBJ's home state of Texas proved vital, possibly critical, in getting Kennedy over the line. Caro spells out where those votes came from: blatant electoral fraud organised by Texan power-brokers linked to LBJ. Caro neither condones nor suggests that most Americans would condone; but a strong impression arises that these things happen, outrage can subside when the political establishment is disinclined to rake over the coals, and (though a stink was at first kicked up over the presidential fraud) America is capable of finally shrugging. Many years later, when Joe Biden beat Trump, the latter's conviction that he was cheated of victory appeared an obsessive and paranoid fantasy. It was. But now I understand why Americans with long memories might question whether all their elections really are free and fair. Reading about Greece's success in pulling itself out of the deep economic pit created by the country's having lived beyond its means, one cannot but admire its impressive current prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Our own descent into the pit is occurring more gently and in an altogether more dignified manner, but it's the same pit. So much so that Greece can already borrow on more favourable terms than the world will accord the UK. We British have been in the habit of importing royalty from Greece. I do wonder whether we might consider importing political leadership too. Way back in the mists of obscure 20th-century parliamentary history, your diarist was on the standing committee examining the bill that privatised Britain's principal airports, formerly state-owned. I argued then for obliging any new private owner to promote free competition, as it struck me that a franchise for a monopoly of retail provision would command an eye-watering price which airport owners should not be allowed to extract. Fast-forward 40 years and my friend Alice is at Stansted on August 8, flying to Spain and wishing to buy €80. 'Landside', she finds only one currency exchange dealer. They explain they charge a commission on the exchange. A determined person, Alice argues. The lady behind the counter takes pity on her and finally agrees to drop the commission. Alice asks for €80. As you will know the pound is worth more than the euro. She is charged £95.29. This is scarcely believable. So much so that I asked Alice to check. She has sent me the receipt. And I cannot but conclude they charged her 95 pounds for 80 euros. I've been checking rates on the high street. I cannot find any dealer who will give a customer back fewer euros than the pounds they hand over the counter. In some cases they will charge little more than £70 for €80. What has gone wrong? Last year The Sun reported that 'travellers could lose … £200 when they take away €1,000 at Stansted airport'. Do we have no regulatory authority able to police this banditry? Not long after the death ten days ago of Dame Stella Rimington, once the head of MI5, a little trill on the pan-pipes alerts me to an incoming WhatsApp. It's from a friend who used to work for a well-known recruitment agency. 'We once hosted her at our agency, my boss interviewing her for a client event. It was a memorable conversation. My boss began: 'We're headhunters, so we need to understand people. Stella, what do you do when you want to understand people better. How do you approach this?' 'I tap them,' replied Rimington.'
Yahoo
03-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
High tech: How federal government helped birth Austin industry along with other essentials
Austin's owes the origins of its vaunted high-tech industry to the federal government. At the close of World War II, the feds closed a bustling plant north of Austin that had processed magnesium used in explosives by the military. Engineers at the University of Texas lobbied the federal government to release the sprawling complex — north of what is now Research Boulevard, south of what is now the Domain — so that it could be used as a site for fresh scientific research. Thus was born the Balcones Research Center, later renamed the Pickle Research Center, after U.S. Rep. J.J. "Jake" Pickle, who followed Lyndon Baines Johnson and Homer Thornberry as congressional representatives for Austin and for the research hub located up on the former wooded prairie. More on the feds in Austin: The short suborbital career of Austin native Sam the Space Monkey Associated with this center were new, indigenous tech firms such as Tracor and National Instruments. In the 1960s and '70s, they were joined in Austin by IBM, Texas Instruments and Motorola, among others. Research collaborations and academic launchpads such as UT's IC² Institute, Microelectronics and Computer Consortium (MCC) and Sematech followed, along with home-grown tech home runs like Dell. Today, descendants of these Austin projects stand alongside AMD, Samsung, Oracle, Apple, Meta, Google, Intel, Amazon, Silicon Labs, Microsoft, Tesla, SpaceX and other giants in the field. The support of locally based investors, such as Austin Ventures, has encouraged entrepreneurs to found countless additional tech startups. In turn, the rush of tech-related money, ideas and leadership has changed the face of Austin culture. That includes its philanthropic, educational, culinary, retail, arts, design, moviemaking, festival and music scenes. More on the feds in Austin: Trip to LBJ Presidential Library unearths unexpected family history Not all the newcomers have expressed an interest in the community's past or its future. Yet those who have, following the mentorship of enlightened pioneers such as UT's George and Ronya Kozmetsky, have enriched our city immeasurably. And let's not forget other gifts from the feds and what else they contributed to the shape of Austin and Texas. 1840s: The U.S. annexed the Republic of Texas on generous terms, which included the eventual payment of the young country's considerable debt and a provision letting Texas keep its public lands, which benefited the new state's public schools, universities and construction of the majestic Texas Capitol, among other big projects. 1840s-1920s: The U.S. ensured the protection of the state's citizens against Mexico, which did not easily accept the loss of so much of its territory, and against the Native Americans who actually controlled most of that territory in the mid-19th century. The U.S. had ended Native American rule by the 1870s, and while formal peace was made with Mexico in 1848, combatants crossed back and forth across the Rio Grande well into the 1920s. More on the feds in Austin: More than 50 million artifacts from Texas' past kept at UT lab 1930s: While the Texas economy — dependent on cotton and newly discovered oil — thrived during the go-go 1920s, the Great Depression, along with the Dust Bowl, crippled most of the state in the 1930s. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal came to the rescue. In Austin, not only were many impoverished residents helped by programs such as direct relief and Social Security, as well as work programs like the WPA, CCC and NYA, the feds paid for local projects such as the UT Tower, numerous buildings, bridges and, perhaps most importantly, the dams along the Colorado River that offered essential flood protection along with electricity, water and recreation. 1940s: Austin and Texas were transformed forever by World War II. As in World War I, military bases proliferated, shipbuilding increased, and armament factories popped up all over the state. Families poured into the booming cities, and by 1950, Texas had become, for the first time, a state with a predominately urban population. Perhaps only California, with its Pacific Ocean ports and gargantuan defense industries, was altered more significantly. 1950s-2010s: Major Texas highways, airports, medical centers and research universities all depended on federal dollars. Fort Worth's defense plants, Dallas' financial enterprises, Houston oil and chemical industries, San Antonio, Corpus Christi and El Paso's military bases, Austin's university and tech sector — all of them required federal investment and federally funded infrastructure. 1990s: I'll add one last element that ties these together: Among the first federal efforts was to secure Texas militarily. That goal rarely wavered over the following decades. Among the major installations in Austin was the Del Valle Army Air Base, later renamed Bergstrom Air Force Base, after a native son who was an early casualty of World War II. In the 1990s, the feds turned the base over to the city of Austin to make way for what is now Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, an essential if overworked component of the city's success story. Texans like to think of themselves as self-sufficient individualists, but, as this stroll through the American-Statesman archives demonstrates, we've had a little help along the way. This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: High tech is not the only Austin component aided by federal help
