Lyle Sardie's LBJ: A Closer Look

[John Simkin]

Doug Caddy was kind enough to send me a copy of Lyle Sardie's documentary, LBJ: A Closer Look. Although technically very flawed, it includes a lot of useful information. Has anyone else seen these documentary? Is it still available?

[Dawn Meredith]

Doug Caddy was kind enough to send me a copy of Lyle Sardie's documentary, LBJ: A Closer Look. Although technically very flawed, it includes a lot of useful information. Has anyone else seen these documentary? Is it still available?

John,

I have this on VHS. It is one of the later versions tho still has problems.

I had seen one of Sardie's earlier versions and it was a total mess.

Don't know if it's available now. Mine was a gift from J Harrison many years

ago.

Dawn

[Douglas Caddy]

Doug Caddy was kind enough to send me a copy of Lyle Sardie's documentary, LBJ: A Closer Look. Although technically very flawed, it includes a lot of useful information. Has anyone else seen these documentary? Is it still available?

By typing in "LBJ: A Closer Look" on google, one can find how to obtain copies of the video.

I am interviewed in Lyle Sardie’s video and my voice is played over in other scenes in the work.

Here is some background as to how this came about.

Lyle had called me from his home in the Los Angeles area and had asked me to meet him at a hotel in Houston to discuss LBJ. When I arrived he immediately ushered me into another suite where his video camera was set up and started asking me questions with the camera rolling. Faced with this unexpected situation I decided to go ahead with the interview, although it would have gone better for both Lyle and myself had he informed me ahead of time that he planned to video-tape me. That way I could have given some prior thought as to exactly what I wanted to say.

However, I was deeply impressed with Lyle’s sincerity and his keen desire to make a historical record of the LBJ-Estes-Wallace conspiracy. Afterwards I supplied him with additional materials as best I could, including an article from People Magazine on Madeline Brown that he had not seen, and a key article from the Texas Observer on the murder of Henry Marshall.

Lyle was quite excited about the prospects of his completed video being shown at film festivals and of its being marketed successfully.

What he failed to realize was that Jack Valenti, LBJ’s former aide who was sitting in Hollywood as chief of the motion picture industry, would use all his power to make certain that Lyle’s video would go nowhere. If Estes is to be believed, Valenti has a personal reason to kill any expose of LBJ, a reason that goes beyond his faithful White House service.

Valenti was successful in torpedoing Lyle’s video in 1998, just as he was successful subsequently in bringing pressure to bear on the History Channel to ban from its archives Nigel Turner’s work, “The Guilty Men.”

However, by using Nazi methods to bury the truth, what Valenti has done is to pique the interest of historians and other persons who think maybe there may well be something here worth “a closer look.”