Perhaps the crown jewel in the tiara of allegations by conspiracy theorists that LBJ was behind Kennedy’s murder is the statement of his alleged mistress, Madeleine Brown, that the night before the assassination, Johnson, in so many words, admitted his guilt. In her 1997 book, Texas in the Morning: The Love Story of Madeleine Brown and President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the attractive redhead, an advertising account executive who associated with a crowd in Austin and Dallas of easy circumstances, and clearly knew most of the political players in the Democratic Party, describes her passionate romance with the then congressman, commencing in 1948 while she was separated from her husband, and continuing on into his presidency. She said she had a son, Steven (who died of lymphatic cancer in 1990), by LBJ, and the son does bear a resemblance to the former president.* Yet she is unable to offer any letter or document to substantiate her claim of a relationship with LBJ, and the one photo she submits in her book as evidence of being in LBJ’s presence shows her and her son seated at a party and a man standing nearby with his back to the camera. She claims the man is Johnson, but he does not appear to be, at least to me. In any event, to say that the story Miss Brown comes up with strains credulity is to be much too magnanimous.
Brown says that on the evening before the assassination, she attended a social event at the Dallas home of Texas oil magnate Clint Murchison. “It was my understanding,” she said, “that the event was scheduled as a tribute honoring his long time friend, J. Edgar Hoover, whom Murchison had first met decades earlier through President William Howard Taft.” Hoover, she says, was at the party, as was John McCloy (who ended up on the Warren Commission), Richard Nixon (who was in town that night, leaving Dallas from Love Field at 10:05 a.m. on American Airlines Flight 82 on the morning of the assassination), H. L. Hunt (the right-wing oil baron), and a host of other Dallas luminaries. Because of his hectic schedule, Johnson, she says, wasn’t supposed to be at the party, but he made an unscheduled appearance as the party was breaking up. “I knew how secretively Lyndon operated. Therefore, I said nothing…not even that I was happy to see him. Squeezing my hand so hard it felt crushed from the pressure, he spoke with a grating whisper—a quiet growl into my ear, not a love message, but one I’ll always remember: ‘After tomorrow those goddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again—that’s no threat—that’s a promise.’” The following morning around 11:00 a.m., she says, Jesse Kellam, LBJ’s close friend and political operative in Austin who was organizing an Austin fund-raiser for Kennedy that night, which Brown was assisting with, called her to confirm her schedule. He told her, she says, that she probably would not be able to see Lyndon that night for more than fifteen minutes. Recalling that flashes of wild lovemaking danced in her head, she said she responded, “Jesse, for any time I have with Lyndon, I am grateful.” But Jesse warned, “Lyndon is in a terrible mood, screaming about the Kennedys. All he can say is, ‘Those goddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again after today.’”24
So if we’re to believe Miss Brown, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who by common consensus was one of the most shrewd men ever to ponderously grace (an oxymoron?) this nation’s political stage, decided not only to murder President Kennedy, but also to tell others about it. The man whose photograph could be alongside words like sly, wily, and clever in the dictionary was intent on advertising his part in the conspiracy to his girlfriend, to Jesse Kellam, and to God knows how many other people. I wouldn’t believe a story like that if you shouted it in my ears for one hundred years. Yet, as one example among many, Craig Zirbel writes in the Texas Connection that it’s “crystal clear that Johnson was aware that Kennedy was going to be murdered…He told his girlfriend it was going to happen.”25 In his 1992 book, The Man Who Knew Too Much, which came out five years before Brown’s book, Dick Russell quotes Brown telling him about LBJ’s threat vis-à-vis Kennedy before the assassination, and does not question her veracity at all.26
Brown hardly deserves this rebuttal, but she says that LBJ was at the Murchison party in Dallas the evening before the assassination, but he couldn’t have been if he had wanted to because he was in Houston that night, about 225 miles away. “I was chairman of a huge dinner in Houston honoring Albert Thomas that Thursday night,” LBJ aide Jack Valenti says, and “the two speakers were the vice president and the president. I rode in a car with LBJ to the [Houston] airport and we flew on Air Force Two to Fort Worth, where we talked at the Texas hotel until one in the morning [1 a.m., November 22, 1963].”27
What about Hoover? Hoover would have had a difficult time making it to the party. His daily log shows that he was at his office starting at 8:57 in the morning of November 21, 1963, and left the office at 5:14 p.m. On Friday morning, he was back in his office at 9:00 a.m., leaving at 6:01 p.m.28 If someone wants to believe that on Thursday evening, after leaving his office at 5:14 p.m., Hoover raced to the airport to catch a flight to Dallas for the alleged party with Murchison, Nixon, and others, then took a red-eye (did they have red-eyes back then?) back to Washington, D.C., that night or caught a 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. flight the next morning, I guess there’s nothing I can do to stop him.
And as far as Nixon was concerned (Nixon was a partner in a New York City law firm that represented Pepsi and he was in town attending a soft drink bottler’s convention), if he came to the party he had to be a very late show because on the night before the assassination, he had a “ringside” seat with a group from Pepsi that included actress Joan Crawford, the wife of Pepsi’s CEO, listening to a performance by French singer Robert Clary in the Empire Room of Dallas’s Statler Hilton.29 Tony Zoppi, the entertainment writer for the Dallas Morning News, was there that night, and told Gary Mack, the Sixth Floor Museum’s curator, that when he left the Empire Room around a quarter to eleven to file his story before deadline for the next morning’s edition, Nixon was still there with this group.30
Indeed, Dallas assassination researcher David Perry has conducted a very extensive investigation into all of Brown’s allegations, and there is no question in his mind that not only weren’t LBJ and Hoover at the party, but there was no such party. Perry gathered several pieces of evidence debunking Brown’s “party” story. For one, he learned that Clint Murchison Sr., at whose home the party allegedly took place, was in ill health at the time, dating from a stroke in 1958, and had moved out of his Dallas home four years earlier, turning over the ownership of the home to one of his three sons, John, and John’s wife Lupe. In 2002, Perry interviewed Mrs. Eula Tilley, the wife of Clint Sr.’s chauffeur, Warren Tilly, who could not speak at the time because of throat cancer. She told Perry, “Both Warren and I worked for Mr. Murchison for a long time. He had seven houses, you know…I know he wasn’t at any party when Kennedy was shot. He did not have a home in the Dallas area. He was at his Glad Oaks Ranch between Athens and Palestine [Texas, about 120 miles southeast of Dallas]. I’m not sure how long before the assassination we were at the ranch but it was more than a few days. I remember because I was serving lunch to Mr. Murchison and his neighbor Woffard Cain. One of them said Kennedy had been shot.”31
Additionally, a party the likes of which Brown spoke of, with luminaries such as Nixon, LBJ, and Hoover attending, would have automatically made the next morning’s newspapers—at least the entertainment and society sections if not the daily news. Perry therefore scoured the papers (Dallas Morning News and Dallas Times Herald) but found no reference to any such party.32 Perry makes the telling point that after all of his investigation, “The only person I know of who claimed [he or] she was actually at the [alleged] party was the late Madeleine Brown.”33
Perry, in fact, questions whether Brown even had an affair with Johnson, finding her story of the alleged relationship riddled with fabrications, inconsistencies, and unconfirmed allegations. For instance, the first time Brown went public with her story was nearly twenty years after the assassination, at a Dallas news conference on November 5, 1982, saying she “was the mistress of Lyndon Baines Johnson” and had decided to “clear the record.” A
nd she never said anything about having a child by him.34 That extremely important embellishment would come much later.
Perry also notes that in Brown’s book, she said she first met Johnson at a grand party attended by Dallas’s high and mighty at Dallas’s Adolphus hotel “three weeks” before LBJ’s Senate victory party in Austin on October 29, 1948.35* But Perry checked all the local newspapers for several days on both sides of October 8–9, 1948 (three weeks earlier), and there was no reference to any such high-powered and high-society party. Indeed, Perry confirmed that LBJ was in Washington, D.C., around this time, the first time that LBJ came to Dallas that October being on October 22 to give a luncheon speech to the Dallas Reserve Officers’ Association.36
Apparently, Brown has so little credibility that in the three volumes historian Robert A. Caro has written thus far on LBJ (only the volume on his presidency remains unpublished), Brown wasn’t entitled to a single word of mention. And it’s not because Caro refrained from discussing LBJ’s alleged extramarital affairs—for example, his relationship with Alice Glass.37 It appears Caro found Brown simply too ludicrous and her claims too unfounded to dignify with even one word.
Brown, by the way, has gone far beyond her absurd allegation about LBJ’s supposed admission to being behind Kennedy’s murder, proving beyond all doubt that she is not a person worthy of any belief. Among her incredible pronouncements, she told conspiracy author Harrison Livingstone in 1992 that “Lyndon Johnson did not die naturally.” His own Secret Service killed him, she alleged. “They hated him.” Also, “There were three plots to kill Kennedy, and the other two were backup plots. One of them was LBJ’s plot, which took JFK out with the KGB’s help”; “Billie Sol [Estes] knows all three shooters” who killed Kennedy; “Why do you think that John J. McCloy and Richard Nixon were there when Kennedy died?…They put aside their warfare and came together to kill Kennedy”; “[H. L.] Hunt called Ruby and ordered him to kill Lee Harvey Oswald.”38
Madeleine Brown, naturally, has been publicly embraced by the conspiracy community, and prior to her death often attended its conventions, such as the November 19–23, 1998, one in Dallas. On November 6, 1992, Brown was convicted of forging a relative’s will back on September 2, 1988. The conviction was reversed on appeal in 1994 on a procedural error. Brown died in 2002.
One question about LBJ for the conspiracy theorists: If he was part of a plot to kill Kennedy, and the Warren Commission thereafter officially concluded there was no plot, wouldn’t he be very happy and likely to keep quiet? Would he be likely to say more than once that, as he told the Atlantic in 1973, “I never believed that Oswald acted alone although I can accept he pulled the trigger”? Indeed, if LBJ were complicit in the assassination, why would he appoint a blue-ribbon commission to investigate the assassination (the Warren Commission)* consisting of seven men of impeccable reputation and unquestioned probity, five of whom were Republicans? Wouldn’t he know that the likelihood he could get such a group to protect him and cover up for him would be substantially diminished? I mean, even as to Chief Justice Warren alone, are we to believe that Johnson established the Warren Commission by executive order to “ascertain all the facts relating to the assassination,” but then, as I told the jury in London, “took Warren aside and said, ‘However, Chief, if you really do find out the facts, you keep those facts under your robe. Okay, Chief?’”
And a final question for Miss Brown, wherever her soul is today: You dedicated your book “in loving memory” of your son and Lyndon Johnson. If accusing Johnson of having Kennedy murdered is a part of your “loving” memory of him, what in the world would you be saying about him if you hated him? That it was he, not Hitler, who was responsible for the Holocaust?
If it is possible to write a sillier book than Madeleine Brown’s alleging that LBJ was behind Kennedy’s murder, it is Barr McClellan’s 2003 book, Blood, Money and Power: How LBJ Killed JFK. After taking us through more than two hundred pages of his dreamy fairy tale, as we saw earlier, the author has LBJ confessing to the murder when he was about to die, thinking that his honesty in admitting to having murdered Kennedy would actually improve (?!!?) his poor reputation with the American people.
Cuba
Just as present-day Cuba and Fidel Castro are synonymous with each other, the thinking that Cuba was behind JFK’s murder is synonymous with saying that Castro was behind it. And the theory that the Cuban government had Kennedy killed always focuses exclusively on Castro.
Suspicion of Cuban complicity in the assassination reached its high-water mark shortly after the assassination, when the American people learned that Oswald revered Castro and had sought to go to Cuba just two months earlier. Also, there was known hostility between the U.S. and the Cuban leadership, starting with the Cuban cabinet’s authorization on July 6, 1960, of the expropriation of all U.S.-owned property in Cuba. President Eisenhower responded that same day by ordering a reduction in the amount of sugar to be imported from Cuba, and then ended diplomatic relations with Cuba on January 2, 1961. Our support of the Bay of Pigs invasion on April 17, 1961, and the Cuban missile crisis in the fall of 1962 contributed to the belief among many that Castro somehow had a hand in the president’s murder. Indeed, as an internal memorandum of the supersecret National Security Agency (NSA), the federal intelligence agency charged with the electronic eavesdropping and deciphering of messages to and from foreign adversaries, says, “Immediately after the assassination, NSA initiated a large-scale manual and machine review of SIGINT [Signals Intelligence], including all U.S./Cuba traffic [around the time of the assassination]. A computer search was initiated using Oswald’s name as the minimum for research criteria. Additionally, all traffic between Cuba/New Orleans and Cuba/Dallas was manually reviewed.” The electronic eavesdropping disclosed that “Cuban military forces went on alert immediately after the assassination.” The NSA concluded that “a thorough review has revealed no intelligence material revealing or suggesting Cuban involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy.”1
This conclusion by the NSA is in keeping with the conclusion of every other investigative body that has evaluated the issue. And today, although the belief still persists among some, the overwhelming majority of Americans as well as most conspiracy theorists have discarded the theory that Cuba was behind the assassination. It should be noted, however, that as late as 1978, fifteen years after the assassination, the question of Cuban complicity in Kennedy’s murder was apparently of sufficient concern for three members of the HSCA and three staff members to make two trips to Cuba to investigate the issue, which included a four-hour, tape-recorded interview with Castro on April 3, 1978, in Havana.
The few conspiracy theorists who still cling to the theory of Cuban complicity in the assassination always cite as one of their principal authorities former president Lyndon Johnson, who told many people that he believed Castro had Kennedy murdered. Joseph Califano Jr., an LBJ aide from 1965 to 1969, told the Wall Street Journal, “Johnson believed, as he said to me, that Fidel Castro was responsible for Kennedy’s assassination. In a reference to attempts by the Kennedy brothers to assassinate Castro, Johnson told me, ‘Kennedy tried to kill Castro, but Castro got Kennedy first.’”2 But unless a president, because of his position, was privy to information about Castro’s having Kennedy killed—which Johnson never claimed or intimated he was—his reasoning and opinion on the matter are no more apt to be authoritative than anyone else’s. And Johnson’s belief is bereft not only of evidence but of common sense.*
One of the chief proponents of LBJ’s reasoning was Italian-born mobster Johnny Roselli (real name, Filippo Sacco). When the CIA first decided to assassinate Castro in August of 1960, it gave the assignment to former FBI agent Robert Maheu, at the time a top aide in Las Vegas to Howard Hughes. Maheu, in turn, passed the contract on to Roselli, who in turn enlisted Mafia kingpins Santo Trafficante Jr. and Sam Giancana to carry it out.3†
The HSCA noted that it was significant that public revelations by Roselli (t
hrough his Washington lawyer, Edward P. Morgan, contacting syndicated columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson) about the plots to kill Castro “corresponded with his efforts to avoid deportation in 1966 and 1971 and to escape prosecution for illegal gambling activities in 1967. It was Roselli who managed the release of information about the plots and who proposed the so-called turnaround theory of the Kennedy assassination (Cuban exiles hired by the Mafia as hit men, captured by Castro, were forced to ‘turnaround’ and murder President Kennedy). The committee found it quite plausible that Roselli would have manipulated public perception of the facts of the plots, then tried to get the CIA to intervene in his legal problems as the price for his agreeing to make no further disclosures.”4
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