Wasnt the first till then, and wasnt the last since then.
Agreed, to an extent. I believe LBJ was in on it, but not necessarily the guy with enough pull to actually make the call. It's certainly the case that such things as you are referring to have been quite common throughout history. I'm very much enjoying a reread of the abridged (Modern Library Classics, 2003) Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon), and it's chock full of such occurrences spanning many centuries. Today, in "developed" nations, such things are done in a far less overt way, but to believe they are no longer done is pretty naive, and requires a belief that the nature of organized humanity has dramatically changed in very recent history. I'm not a believer in such a notion.
