Pendergast family lore has it that Truman was originally accepted for patronage without even meeting him, on the basis of his family background plus the fact that he was not a member of any anti-Catholic organization such as the Klan. The Pendergast faction of the Democratic Party was known as the "Goats", as opposed to the rival Shannon machine's "Rabbits". The battle lines were drawn when Truman put only Goats on the county payroll, and the Klan began encouraging voters to support Protestant, "100% American" candidates, allying itself against Truman and with the Rabbits, while Shannon instructed his people to vote Republican in the election, which Truman lost. Truman later claimed that the Klan "threatened to kill me, and I went out to one of their meetings and dared them to try", speculating that if Truman's armed friends had shown up earlier, violence might have resulted. However, biographer Alonzo Hamby believes that this story, which is not supported by any recorded facts, was a confabulation based on a meeting with a hostile and menacing group of Democrats that contained many Klansmen, showing Truman's "Walter Mitty-like tendency ... to rewrite his personal history". Sympathetic observers see Truman's flirtation with the Klan as a momentary aberration, point out that his close friend and business partner Eddie Jacobson was Jewish, and say that in later years Truman's presidency marked the first significant improvement in the federal government's record on civil rights since the post-Reconstruction nadir marked by the Wilson administration. Lyndon B. Johnson An anonymous person told the FBI that Ned O'Neal Touchstone (1926–1988) – newspaper publisher who has been chronicled as influential in radical right politics in Louisiana politics during the 1960s – was a member of a group that called itself "the Original Members of the Ku Klux Klan" and that in 1963 he claimed that the group had documented proof of Lyndon Johnson having been a member of some KKK group in the 1930s. See also Ku Klux Klan in Inglewood, California Ku Klux Klan in Canada Ku Klux Klan in Maine History of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey Ku Klux Klan in Oregon Bibliography Annotations Notes News media ; . The Spot → political blog of the Denver Post. , . (taped March 2, 2001; posted to YouTube January 17, 2009). ; . . . . {{cite news |ref= |last1=New York Times, The |author-link1=The New York Times