by J. W Lateer
The problem encountered by the European fascists was that the other partner in league with Senator Dodd, the sinister James O. Eastland of Mississippi, had other ideas. The last thing Eastland would want was another Catholic President with a liberal social agenda when he could instead have a fellow Southerner and former Senate ally as President in the person of Lyndon Johnson.
So Eastland tipped LBJ off ahead of the assassination. Of course LBJ had to go through all the paces and not interfere. Kennedy was being stalked. There had been the Chicago assassination attempt and another in Tampa, within just days. LBJ knew the murderers were powerful, organized, worldwide and unstoppable. To them, LBJ was a dead man walking. But if he could survive Dealey Plaza, then he would be President and would be in a safer (though still not completely safe) position.
The Phone Call Between LBJ, Mayor Daley and John W. McCormack
On December 3, 1963, there was a phone call between the powerful Richard J. Daley of Chicago, Speaker of the House John W. McCormack and President Lyndon Johnson. The tone of the call was confrontational. Mayor Daley was berating McCormack and LBJ because the Congress was busy passing the “Cotton Bill” when Daley was demanding action on the Civil Rights Bill and the Tax Bill. Daley refered to LBJ as “that fellow from the South.” McCormack was defending the importance of the Cotton Bill, but he was clearly the mediator in this confrontation.
Mayor Daley was undoubtedly complicit in the JFK assassination. The so-called “Chicago Plot” had taken place on November 2, 1963. The Chicago Police turned the investigation over to the Secret Service and walked away from the case. This decision, where four snipers had been found laying in wait for JFK, could not have been made by the Chicago Police without the knowledge and consent of Mayor Daley. One could go further and suggest that the Chicago Plot itself was pre-arranged by Daley and the plotters, which seems the more likely scenario.
The significance of the Daley-LBJ-McCormack phone call is to be found in the context of that call. Also, one must look at the political dynamic. Senator Thomas Dodd was a Northern Catholic activist. Mayor Richard J. Daley was almost as Catholic as the Pope himself. Speaker McCormack was also apparently a militant Catholic anti-Communist activist. LBJ must have been aware that he was in a phone conversation with two militant Catholic leaders, when militant Catholic anti-Communists in Europe along with Senator Dodd had just succeeded in murdering his boss in partnership with Eastland and friends. But the European forces were clearly predominant in the plot. So they could easily target LBJ next. LBJ must have been only too aware of that.
The Scarcity Of Information About Speaker John W. McCormack
One of the obvious giveaways in JFK assassination research is when the personal papers are unreasonably restricted. Another one is if Wikipedia articles are very brief, cursory, devoid of important information and seem to be often taken down or changed. Still another is when there is no biography written about someone who was very famous and would normally have a published biography available.
There are many examples of famous people in the JFK assassination literature who fall into this category. The Canadian, Major Louis Bloomfield, had his papers sealed by the courts even when this sealing was contrary to statutes and laws. Senator James O. Eastland donated his papers to the University of Mississippi Law School and access was refused for many decades. Much was eventually found missing. There is no biography of Eastland.
Others are General David Sarnoff of RCA, Rep. Hale Boggs, Senator John Stennis, Senator Joseph McCarthy (whose papers were sequestered), the investment bank of Kuhn, Loeb and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS). Another in the same category is Speaker of the House John W. McCormack.
There have been biographies of people of much less renown. In fact, there is a biography of an Irish Tenor named John McCormack. There is a biography of Representative Carl Albert who was majority leader under McCormack. There is a biography of Tip O’Neill, another famous Boston Speaker of the House. But there is not a biography about the most noteworthy Speaker of the House in the 20th Century.
According to a website that contains information about personal papers, Boston University has 66 feet of microfilm of McCormack’s personal papers. So there is not a lack of available information about McCormack.
In these modern times, another way to judge information about a person is their page on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia article on McCormack is fraught with blatant problems. It is like it was“written by a fan” says Wikipedia. “It is like a reflection or opinion essay,” says Wikipedia. Also, there are not sufficient citations.
What we do know for sure about McCormack is that he was born in 1891 and that he had little education. He managed to pass the Massachusetts Bar Exam despite having no high school or college education. He must have been of above average intelligence to do that.
McCormack was elected to Congress in 1928. He was to be reelected 20 times. He became Majority Leader of the Democrats in 1940 and served in that capacity until 1961 when he became Speaker of the House upon the death of Sam Rayburn. In 1934, he became chairman of the Dies Committee. The Dies Committee was a predecessor to the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC). Martin Dies was a radical anti-subversive individual who liked to grandstand and enjoyed the attention that came with sensationalizing security issues.
McCormack was actually a co-chairman of the Dies Committee because the man in line for the chairmanship, Samuel Dickstein, felt uncomfortable investigating Nazis. Dickstein was Jewish.
After chairing the Dies Committee for a year, McCormack filed a committee report that recommended 1) registration of agents of foreign governments, 2) subpoena powers running across the entire U.S. for Congressional Committees. Both of these suggestions went on to become law. When he was chairing the committee hearings, McCormack was regarded as courteous to the witnesses and not trying to draw attention to himself, as did co-chair Samuel Dickstein. The report also denounced both Fascism and Communism in various contexts. So McCormack was a hunter of Communists as a Congressman when Senator Joe McCarthy was only 26 years old.
But what is lacking is any information about what legislation McCormack sponsored, introduced and favored.
Senator Thomas Dodd and Representatives Charles Kersten and John W. McCormack seemed to have similar political priorities. Dodd and Kersten could fairly be called Catholic partisans. The following chart shows the frequency in which the names of all three men were cited in Ukrainian nationalist periodicals from World War II up until the mid-1960’s. The Anti-Bolshevik Nations Correspondence would be the best indicator. These Ukrainian types of publications are only available to the knowledge of this author at the academic website Hathitrust. Although other such publications are there dating from the 1940’s or early 1950’s, the ABN Correspondence is only there beginning with issues dated 1961 and after, (even though ABN had existed for more than a decade as of 1961):
Thomas Dodd
Charles Kersten
John W. McCormack
Abn Correspondence
1961-1962
3
7
0
1963
3
8
0
1964
7
6
2
Ukrainian Bulletin
1952
0
3
0
1956-1959
22
14
15
1960
3
2
3
1961-1962
8
5
3
1963
6
4
1
1964-1966
20
4
10
Ukrainian Quarterly
1946-1948
0
0
0
1949-1950
0
0
0
1951-
1952
0
15
0
1953-1954
0
3
0
1955-1956
5
21
1
1957-1958
0
7
0
1959-1960
14
4
2
1961
1
4
1
1962
0
5
0
1963
1
8
0
1964
2
2
1
1956-1966
4
3
0
1967
1
0
0
As can be seen from the above data, Speaker of the House John W. McCormack was cited in a pattern that was similar to Senator Dodd and Congressman Kersten. Senator Dodd was an insider in the assassination plot. Congressman Kersten, though not necessarily an insider, apparently had advance knowledge of the plot and was involved before the fact with the Europeans who were planning to blame the assassination on the Soviets. From all appearances and until more detailed information or a biography of. McCormack becomes available, it is a strong possibility that the plotters would have been ecstatic if he were to become the President.
LBJ was set up in an open limo just two cars away from JFK, within the shadow of the Texas School Book Depository with Lee Harvey Oswald (or someone) peering from a window, possibly with rifle in hand. And LBJ ducked.
There is one available book which deals with Speaker John W. McCormack. That book is The Austin/Boston Connection by Anthony Champagne and others. In that book, McCormack is revealed to be a bald-faced liar. He claimed his father had died when he was 13 and that his father was Irish. He said his three older siblings had died in infancy. None of those three things were true.
On page 128 of the Champagne book, it is stated that “McCormack’s core support came from 20 to 25 members of the House who came from Catholic urban constituencies and which members were themselves Catholic.”
Champagne explains that the Texas and Massachusetts delegations ran the House of Representatives because, uniquely among Democrats, neither Texas nor Massachusetts had many African-Americans. This gave their delegations freedom to maneuver on the hot-button issue of civil rights. Arch-conservative South Carolina Congressman L. Mendel Rivers called McCormack “the most anti-Communist man in the country.” (Champagne, p. 131).
If Speaker of the House McCormack had become President under such circumstances, one could be sure that Martial Law would have been declared. It would have had to have been. What other choice would there be? And the conservative Admirals and Generals on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and in other major commands would have (unfortunately) made Martial Law permanent, or at least until the situation stabilized and the question of catching the perpetrators was resolved.
The would have been the scenario which the World War II Nazis still surviving would have considered their World War III.
Notes:
Cited in the text is LBJ: Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, by Phillip F.Nelson, p. 474.
To hear the phone call between LBJ, McCormack and Mayor Richard J. Daley, see: http://web2.millercenter.org/lbj/audiovisual/whrecordings/telephone/conversations/1963/lbj_k6312_02_14_daley_mccormack.wav
For information about McCormack and the Dies Committee, see: The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, by Walter Goodman, p. 10.
As cited and quoted in the text, see The Austin-Boston Connection: Five Decades of House Democratic Leadership, 1937-1989 by Anthony Champagne, Douglas B. Harris, James W. Riddlesperger, Jr, and Garrison Nelson (2009).
Chapter 25
Commentary on the LBJ Phone Calls
Major Points and Issues
The LBJ phone calls represent one of the most obvious and homogeneous groups of original sources available to provide background and information on the assassination. There has been a book written specifically on this subject by author Max Holland, which was published in 2004 and is referenced in the notes following this chapter. The book by Holland covers calls from November 22, 1963 all the way until 1967. Since most of the calls speak for themselves, presenting the analysis of other authors here would be redundant and does not fit the purpose of this chapter.
The calls which will be analyzed here run from November 22, 1963 until November 30, 1963 with one exception which occurred December 3, 1963. The calls are conveniently accessible at maryferrell.org.
In our analysis here, an attempt will be made, not to take the calls as individual calls, but rather as a group and look for common characteristics and themes. This general impression can then be placed side by side with the general conclusions we have reached from evidence from of the other sources. The two sets of conclusions should match up. The calls have to mirror, or at least allow for our overall theory of the assassination.
The following are the issues that emerge from the phone calls in declining order of importance:
In his phone call about the Warren Commission with James O. Eastland, LBJ mentions two names as having “international” experience. The names were John Sherman Cooper and John McCloy. LBJ tries to blame the “Russian thing” but the only international experience that Cooper and McCloy were known for was with Germany, and specifically Nazi’s. LBJ seems to know this, but tries to camouflage it with respect to Cooper. This is the biggest smoking gun in the phone calls.
LBJ tells McGeorge Bundy he will meet with, among others, the new German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard and British Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Hume but that he intends to snub French President Charles de Gaulle.
He informs advisor Jesse Kellam that he intends to invite German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard to his ranch. LBJ wants to get in good with Erhard, since Erhard and his henchmen have likely just murdered JFK, and LBJ could be next. This is major supporting evidence of the “German connection.”
The Civil Rights bill was demanded by civil rights leaders in order for them to play ball and not ask for more investigations. JFK was murdered by a combination of the very worst enemies of African Americans; ironically the assassination was not targeted directly at their immediate situation. For them the Civil Rights Bill was a nice bonus from a bad situation.
Virtually all of the 98 persons who were on the phone calls had an official or logical reason to be talking with LBJ. Everyone had an official title, was or had been an advisor to LBJ, or had some special expertise to offer the new President. Many were regional political leaders such as state governors.
What was the role of LBJ in these calls? He was functioning as a funeral director more than anything else, channeling everyone’s feelings as well as ideas about where to go from here.
The proportion of Republicans to Democrats on the calls among Senators was 12-6 in favor of Democrats.
The likely conspirators with whom LBJ spoke were Eastland, Dodd, Boggs, Bundy, Dulles and Richard J. Daley of Chicago. We should put a question mark on that issue beside the name of Speaker John W. McCormack.
There were no calls with C. Douglas Dillon. When talking to Ted Sorensen, LBJ said “I just got Doug Dillon out of here” and quickly added “that was on the budget” To quote Shakespeare , LBJ “answereth where none doth inquire.” LBJ seemed to feel a need to explain why he was meeting with Dillon even though nobody asked. He may have been hesitant to say he and Dillon were discussing security or Secret Service. LBJ and Dillon may also have been discussing Secret Service information about Oswald or similar sensitive information. LBJ wanted to emphasize “it was about the budget.” He offered no other such explanation about any meetings he had with anyone or what they talked about in any other conference where he had been in this period. Or LBJ may have been feeling guilty or worried about meeting with someon
e he felt to be a JFK assassination plotter.
The most amazing thing about the calls was the proportion of people who were “happy campers.” This is not to mean that these people were happy that JFK had been killed, but rather they were happy with the way the aftermath was being handled. Not one person expressed an overall sense of worry or an attitude of pessimism about anything.
The most unhappy camper was Senator Russell Long, whose own father, Huey Long had been assassinated. His father Huey Long had possibly been assassinated by the same political faction in Louisiana who were deeply involved in the JFK assassination. That would not make your day. Judge Leander Perez had actually been standing beside Huey Long when he was shot. Perez played a very large role in the segregationist movement in Louisiana in 1963. LBJ treated Senator Russell Long very coldly and distantly, very rare for LBJ.
Robert S. McNamara seemed essentially unhappy and his call was treated as a wrong number. Apparently LBJ pretty much hung up the phone on McNamara.
