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Tag: Lyndon Johnson

  • Bryan Cranston Nabs Tony Nomination

    Bryan Cranston won an Emmy, a Golden Globe, and a Screen Actor’s Guild Award for his performance as chemistry teacher turned meth king Walter White in the AMC drama Breaking Bad. Now, the actor has the opportunity to add a Tony Award to his list of accolades.

    The 58-year-old actor was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play for his performance as President Lyndon B. Johnson in the production All the Way, which is currently running at the Neil Simon Theatre on Broadway. The play was also nominated for Best Play.

    Cranston’s competition includes: Chris O’Dowd (Of Mice and Men), Samuel Barnett (Twelfth Night), Tony Shalhoub (Act One), and Mark Rylance (Richard III).

    The reviews for Cranston’s turn as President Johnson have been predominantly positive. Peter Marks of The Washington Post wrote, “Portraying America’s 36th chief executive, Lyndon Baines Johnson, in Robert Schenkkan’s democratic procedural drama “All the Way,” Cranston proves so effortlessly captivating that you could imagine pulling a lever for him — or even contributing generously to whatever campaign war chest he trots out.”

    The synopsis for All the Way:

    1963. An assassin’s bullet catapults Lyndon Baines Johnson into the presidency. A Shakespearean figure of towering ambition and appetite, the charismatic, conflicted Texan hurls himself into Civil Rights legislation, throwing the country into turmoil. Alternately bullying and beguiling, he enacts major social programs, faces down opponents and wins the 1964 election in a landslide. But in faraway Vietnam, a troublesome conflict looms.

    Lucy Liu and Jonathan Groff announced the nominations on Tuesday morning. You can check out the full list of contenders at the Tony Awards Official Website.

    The award ceremony will be hosted by renowned song and dance guru and A-List Hollywood star Hugh Jackman. The show will air on Sunday, June 8 at 8/7c on CBS.

    Image via Bryan Cranston, Facebook

  • MLK & Ali were NSA Targets During Vietnam War

    More revelations have been coming out since the NSA came under fire via the Edward Snowden leaks, and to some, these latest discoveries may not be so surprising: AlJazeera America reported that the NSA did eavesdrop on famed civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., legendary boxer Muhammad Ali, and several others during the Vietnam War in recently declassified documents.

    The documents were declassified and released on Wednesday after the governmental panel responsible for declassification ruled in favor of a team of researchers from George Washington University who were seeking the release of the papers, which included the names of top-secret NSA targets in the late 1960’s and early ’70s.

    In a program code-named “Minaret,” the NSA was tasked with monitoring those personalities that were considered hostile to war efforts. Lyndon B. Johnson was president at the time Minaret was assembled, but the program continued throughout the the paranoid Nixon administration. In the official release, the researchers state the list includes such prominent names as Dr. Martin Luther King, Whitney Young, Muhammad Ali, New York Times journalist Tom Wicker, and veteran Washington Post humor columnist Art Buchwald. Two politicians, Senator Frank Church of Idaho and Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, were also included. The full list of names has yet to be released.

    Slate notes that the reasons justifying such irresponsible surveillance haven’t changed in 40 years; at the time, the NSA had cited “[the identification of] domestic terrorist and foreign radical suspects” as reason enough to tap their phones. However, an NSA lawyer who examined the program after it was shut down in 1973 wrote the following in the classified records: “[as someone] who first looked at the procedural aspects [for the NSA, the agents involved in Minaret] seemed to understand that the program was disreputable if not outright illegal.”

    If you want to read the official release from George Washington University regarding the papers, which includes a ton of awesome citations, you can check it out here.

    [Image via the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, On-line Photo Archive, W425-21]