TAKE IT BACK
By MICHAEL STARR
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Ladybird Johnson is demanding a chunk of prime time to refute a History Channel show that points a finger at her husband as the mastermind behind the Kennedy assassination.
February 4, 2004 -- JACK Valenti, the onetime special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson, will meet with History Channel officials today - demanding they rebut a documentary they aired implicating LBJ in President Kennedy's assassination.
"I thought it was obscene as you can get," Valenti told The Post about "The Guilty Men," which aired on the network last November. "It was so riddled with surmise. Everybody they quoted was dead.
"The facts were strewn with misuse - and we have a whole catalogue of documentation proving they were wrong," said Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America.
"We're asking [the History Channel] to investigate this and to document that it's false - and then put it on the air as a rebuttal to this unruly documentary.
"We're prepared to go the distance on this."
Valenti is scheduled to meet with officials from The History Channel and sister network A&E today, along with Tom Johnson, chairman of the LBJ Foundation, PBS host Bill Moyers (LBJ's press secretary) and attorney Larry Temple, who was LBJ's chief counsel.
Valenti said it's possible they'll be joined by Joseph Califano, who was a top domestic aide to President Johnson.
"The Guilty Men," produced by British filmmaker Nigel Turner, was screened as part of The History Channel's programming marking the 40th anniversary of JFK's assassination.
The documentary claimed that then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson was part of the assassination plot.
It so upset Johnson's 91-year-old widow, Lady Bird, that she sent a letter to network officials last week saying that nothing else "has hurt as painfully" as the accusations made against her late husband.
Former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter also sent letters protesting the documentary. Ford, who helped investigate the assassination as part of the Warren Commission, called the LBJ charges "the greatest, most damaging accusation ever made against a former vice president and president in American history," according to a letter acquired by the Associated Press.
"The reason we're going [to the meeting] is, unfortunately . . . the general population sees something on a respected channel, and they believe it," Valenti said. "We believe it has to be rebutted, and we want the people at the History Channel to do that."
"The Guilty Men" was originally part of a five-part documentary produced by Turner called "The Men Who Killed Kennedy," which aired on Britain's ITV in 1988.
The series caused such a firestorm that Central Television, which commissioned the series, had a team of its own reporters check its veracity.
They found that many of the claims made in "The Men Who Killed Kennedy" were "total nonsense dreamt up by an amateurish American author from underworld gossip," according to a 1991 report in The London Times.
And Valenti, for one, agrees with that assessment.
"We have logs from the president and testimony from people who were there, like myself. I can bear personal witness to errors," Valenti said.
"[History Channel] can't take back what has already been aired - but at least historians will be able to sift through this," he said.
"We want another story out there - one that says the first [documentary] was an absolute and total lie."
Officials from the History Channel did not return several calls for comment yesterday. |
