The Johnson Connection

Yes, I vaguely remember hearing the story of our family's distant connection to Lady Bird Johnson. The connection is so tenuous as to be almost non-existent and the story quite funny when told in a particular way by certain family members, former Texans who were California Republicans and probably voted for Nixon, disdaining those appalling Great Society experiments of the 1960s and forgiving Nixon his personal foibles even as the damaged political Republican party machinery was grinding to a halt and disintegrating into a variety of pieces, later to be reassembled as some other thing. For all of Johnson's achievements as one of the architects of welfare as we know it, he was among those few presidents, including also Gerald Ford, who was never really elected president. Certainly, my family connections would probably be of no political benefit to the Johnson dynasty in their quest for election as our family never had any fond regard for the Texas Democrat for some reason which I don't quite recall, just something about the political machinery of liberalism and the way they do things I suppose. We actually are somewhat indifferent to that political machine thing, whatever it is, even if we as private citizens always will have our personal opinions about how things ought to be. Grandpa Calkins always did get sort of worked up and heated in discussions of such political topics as the Kennedy machine but anyway that does not mean that his opinion was entirely right or entirely wrong. Anyway, there is no reason for Caroline Kennedy to imagine that I would ever be of any political benefit to the Catholics in their thirst to avenge themselves of various ancient grudges dating back to the Protestant Reformation, as for example the sad story of Catherine of Aragon, the daughter of Spain's Ferdinand and Isabella, whose marriage to King Henry VIII was so ingloriously dissolved in 1533 after 24 years of marriage for lack of a male heir. We cannot go back to the past, to the Middle Ages and earlier. Time waits for no man, as they say. We only have the present going forward. I really don't remember anything else that matters now. Anyway, it is hard for me to understand how anyone would confuse me with Katherine Pyle, whose letters and memos as president of the college newspaper were quite funny in her sarcastic way, even if sometimes too harshly worded. I was sort of flattered to see my article reprinted in Atlanta but Katherine thought it was illegal and sent a legal treatise to the Atlanta publisher about the need to request permission first, thus souring relations for me. Thanks Katherine for nothing, sarcastically speaking of course.