Saturday, February 14, 2004
Houston Chronicle 2004 02 11:The History Channel has asked three historians to review the credibility of a documentary that claims President Lyndon Johnson was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.
Former Johnson staffers and family members have demanded an independent investigation and a retraction of the allegations in the documentary. History Channel executives said they will broadcast results of the review.
[...]
Former aides to Johnson, along with former presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and Johnson's widow, Lady Bird Johnson, sought an independent probe of the claims in The Guilty Men.
Meeting last week with executives from the TV station were Larry Temple, special counsel in the Johnson White House and president of The LBJ Foundation; journalist Bill Moyers; Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America; and Tom Johnson.
After the meeting, Tom Johnson said the executives expressed concern that the issue had been "ratcheted up" by letters from Ford, Carter and Lady Bird Johnson to the chief executives of NBC, Hearst Corp. and The Walt Disney Corp., which own A&E Networks.
[...]
The historians are author Robert Dallek, considered an authority on the presidency; Stanley Kutler, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin and a leading authority on 20th-century American political and constitutional history; and Thomas Sugrue, an award-winning teacher and author at the University of Pennsylvania.
Temple, who now works as an Austin attorney, said he was inclined to act when viewers began calling and sending e-mails and letters to the LBJ Library . . .
"The theme was always: 'Why do we have this memorial for murder?' and 'Why do we have this library to honor a man who killed a former president?' " .....---
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