LBJ
The Mastermind
of the JFK
Assassination
Phillip F. Nelson
Skyhorse Publishing
This book is dedicated to my wonderful wife, Karen,
without whose love, understanding, and patience I would
not have been able to complete it.
Copyright © 2011 by Phillip F. Nelson
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61608-377-9
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I. Background
Chapter 1. The Maniacal Obsession of Lyndon B. Johnson
PART II. The Context of the Times: Secrets, Scandals, and Scams
Chapter 2. The International Scene
Chapter 3. Washington Affairs
Chapter 4. Unsolved Murders and Other Lingering LBJ Scandals
PART III. The Preassassination Conspiracy
Chapter 5. The Mastermind Secures the Vice Presidency
Chapter 6. The Conspirators
PART IV. The November 22, 1963, Coup d’éat
Chapter 7. The Hit and the Aftershock: Anomalies Abound
Chapter 8. A More Plausible Scenario
PART V. Postassassination Intrigue
Chapter 9. The Cover-Up Continues
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to extend a heartfelt thanks to the people who have been immensely helpful to me in the process of completing this book. For the first edition, they included Noel Twyman, Doug Horne, and Larry Hancock, the authors of some of the best, most comprehensive works on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Noel’s book covered the complexities of this subject more comprehensively than any other author, and Doug’s book added even more depth to that body of information. Larry’s book, originally published in 2006, contains a wealth of information he had gathered from his review of thousands of documents, White House diaries, telephone logs, and tape recordings. Moreover, Larry assisted me by doing a “peer review” of an early draft of the manuscript and continued to offer suggestions as further work on the first—and then the second—edition of the book was prepared.
The author of the most important book ever published on the Warren Commission, Gerald McKnight, PhD, was also very supportive to me before and after the first edition of the book was published. Douglas Caddy, the former attorney for Billie Sol Estes who assisted Estes in his attempt to “come clean” with the Justice Department in 1984, has also been very helpful to me in gaining a better understanding about that incident and the reasons the effort was unsuccessful. Author James H. Fetzer, PhD, has been particularly accomodating in assisting with a number of improvements for this edition—including the revision to the “shot sequence” narrative that is arguably the best summary ever written on that point—as well as supporting the book through his book reviews, essays, and his postings on various Internet forums.
Thanks to one of many acts of kindness by researcher Robert P. Morrow, of Austin, Texas, I made contact with other longtime researchers, including Connie Kritzberg, who was a news reporter/editor for the Dallas Times Herald in 1963; her firsthand memories have troubled her ever since that tragic weekend. Connie’s account of having a news report she wrote on November 22, 1963, surreptitiously co-opted by the FBI has been added to this edition because of its gravity; it was one of the first indications that unseen forces were already at work to manage the outcome of the case and was one more incident among the many which must not be lost in the shuffle as so many of the details become more and more blurred with time.
The many other books listed in the bibliography have all contributed in some way to the development of this book. They represent the “most likely” aspects which have been combined and distilled into a story which probably could have been proven in court decades ago, if the facts now known had then been available.
Finally, I am very indebted to Tony Lyons, of Skyhorse Publishing, for the opportunity of having the book professionally redone, and David Schwartz, for his valuable work in transforming the original manuscript into a much easier read while simultaneously strenghening the case regarding Johnson’s involvement in JFK’s assassination. I am also grateful to Yvette Grant in the Skyhorse production department, whose help with numerous corrections and her meticulous eye was much appreciated. The result is a greatly improved book, one that will be much more likely to eventually cause the general public to begin to accept the awful truth of what happened in Dallas nearly fifty years ago.
INTRODUCTION
When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains,. however improbable, must be the truth.
—SHERLOCK HOLMES
(A. C. DOYLE’S THE ADVENTURE OF THE BERYL CORONET)
In 1963, I was a recent high school graduate who had begun working at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to save money for college; like everyone else alive at that time, I was stunned at the assassination of JFK and confused about the character of the new president, Lyndon Johnson. The only thing widely known about him were stories that magazines such as Look, Collier’s, Life, and Time had recently printed; the stories were generally discomforting because they seemed to produce more questions than answers about the new president.
While working in the main terminal one day in the summer of 1964, Henry Wade, the Dallas district attorney, and his wife approached the counter to check in for a flight to Traverse City, Michigan; Wade’s name had often appeared in news accounts coming from Dallas. They both looked bored and tired after their flight from Dallas but immediately responded when I asked, “Are you the Henry Wade of Dallas?” Mrs. Wade was the first to respond with a smile and an excited “Yes!” Henry also managed a little smile, and nodded; there was at least a streak of shyness about him, which came as a surprise for some reason. Apparently, no one else had recognized them, and neither would I have if I hadn’t seen their tickets. This was before the Warren Report was published, and I resisted the urge to ask Mr. Wade any questions regarding his most important, if fleeting, case; I merely stated my hope that their work (by their, meaning everyone involved in the investigation and adjudication) would soon resolve the confusion and distress that continued to afflict the country. He said thanks, and left with Mrs. Wade to board the airplane.
What I know now, but didn’t then, is that Henry Wade was merely one man of many who were being managed by that same new president to go along with a number of odd requests from Washington, all of which were shrouded in a mysterious blanket of national security concerns related to Kennedy’s assassination. The cold war was reaching the boiling point; in fact, it had remained on high heat since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and people argued over whether Kennedy had handled it well or not. Those who felt he had not thought he had missed an opportunity to invade Cuba and
send Castro packing and rid the Western Hemisphere of the Soviet Union and the menace of Communism. When the verdict of the Warren Commission was announced—that the assassination was the work of a single “lone nut”?the continued declaration of the “national security” canard, especially with respect to locking away all the remaining evidence (that which wasn’t already destroyed) for seventy-five years, began to ring hollow: If the crime was such a simple case of a lone nut, a misguided Communist, why exactly was so much of the case being treated so secretly?
What were once considered “facts”—photographs and films, autopsy records, FBI reports, eyewitness testimony—have since been proven to have been fabricated, lost, or distorted. The enormity of the cover-up, beginning with the Warren Commission, reveals the breadth and depth of the pre- and postassassination conspiracies that are emerging now only because of the work done by previous researchers and authors. A number of meticulously documented books have proven that the analysis presented by the President’s Commission on the Assassination of John F. Kennedy—the Warren Commission—was a lie. Some will have difficulty in accepting this premise because there is a natural tendency to want to believe the government, especially a commission of supposedly learned and august men who have served it throughout their lives. For people still experiencing doubt, a careful reading of Gerald McKnight’s Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why will disabuse them of any remaining questions about the validity of this point. The majority of Americans (and people around the world) already generally believe that much of the so-called investigation of events conducted by the FBI and the Warren Commission’s imprimatur was flawed; the consensus on this point has only grown since 1964. They were, and are, absolutely correct, despite the decades of deception foisted upon them by apologists for the completely discredited “official” version of events.
For over forty years it has become more and more apparent that much of the evidence originally put forward by the FBI and Warren Commission was invented or modified to fit the assertion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman, just as other original evidence has disappeared (including JFK’s brain). Furthermore, the false evidence was developed quickly, in some cases overnight, to prove that Oswald, a man his fellow marines would say “lacked coordination” and call “a very poor rifle marksman,”1 shot three bullets, two of which very precisely hit their moving target, in the space of a little over six seconds—a shooting feat, incidentally, that has never been replicated, even by expert sharpshooters. The proofs of these claims have appeared in numerous books, newspapers, and websites; they contain the kernels of truth that can be harvested and swept into the narrative as conclusive evidence. Each item we cite along the way can be represented as a “dot” on a very large historical matrix; the narrative will connect those dots and lead us to conclusions in a process guided by the Sherlock Holmes epigraph referenced above. Every investigation that preceded mine into the most famous cold case ever, the unsolved murder of the thirty-fifth president of the United States, contributed in some way to the distillation of information and interpretation of facts that are now being presented; I am indebted to all authors of such work, regardless of whether they have been cited here.
It is not the intent of this book to provide a complete list of all the errors, anomalies, inconsistencies, and impossibilities of the Warren Report since that has already been done by other cited authors, but to build upon preexisting research and provide a succinct but comprehensive overview of the entire plot and its cover-up. A cohesive and compelling account that combines the respective findings of earlier works—in a way that includes the best evidence from each of them while replacing the incongruities of discarded accounts—into a “most plausible” single story has not previously been written. Moreover, other books on the subject become so absorbed in the minutia of the crime that they fail to examine the resulting vacuum of “who was the mastermind.” That most of the people who were involved, directly or indirectly, in the events in Dallas are now deceased means it is highly unlikely that the whole truth behind the crime of the century will ever be known; the possibility of such knowledge has been eroded by almost five decades of deceit. Nevertheless, enough circumstantial evidence has surfaced to make a persuasive case. A figurative whole cloth can be woven from these threads of evidence, both empirical and anecdotal; documented facts and reasonable hearsay will be considered. Pending a complete and unredacted release of 100 percent of all secret government files, this is as close to the complete picture as it is now possible to achieve.
John F. Kennedy’s assassination changed the culture and historical direction of the United States. The event plunged Americans into collective shock, leaving all grasping for answers about who would commit such an audacious and unspeakable crime; at this juncture, how citizens viewed the motives and actions of their government took a decidedly more jaded and cynical turn. Suspicions remained of a larger unknown force behind the accused suspect, accompanied by an enormous, albeit suppressed, anxiety, as fear and group paranoia descended upon the American people. An ephemeral void, as though left by the departed spirit of John F. Kennedy, lurked throughout the nation in the days and weeks following his death, the result of lingering questions about an unthinkable possibility. The void eventually morphed into a ghostly, shadowy presence that grew larger and larger as more details of the assassination emerged. The shadows withdrew as the days became weeks and then months while the enigmatic persona of Lyndon B. Johnson became more familiar. LBJ, with his colloquial Texan toughness and coarseness—together with his insecurities and oversized ego, his contradictions—became one of the most distrusted presidents ever known in America.
JFK’s murder has never been solved because the public gave LBJ the benefit of the doubt, while he was alive and for four decades beyond, effectively removing him from scrutiny. That the official government’s accusatory finger pointed in other directions, and that LBJ was the primary pointer, precluded an examination of the most likely candidate, the one true suspect with an actual motive (unlike the hapless Mr. Oswald). Most people realized that the new president had infinitely more motive to kill Kennedy than did Oswald, a man who had said he actually liked JFK.2 But they suppressed this conclusion, because it was dangerous, the implications unfathomable. Johnson got his pass because the alternative was simply an unspeakable thought: The notion that a president could be killed in a conspiracy by others in his administration, especially his own vice president, was impossible for people to confront. That someone so highly placed could possibly be so evil was simply an outrageous idea. Such thinking was so awful, it induced a corollary paranoia. While this mood prevailed throughout the country, Lyndon Johnson presented himself on higher and higher levels as a creditable and earnest politician and was given the deference accorded to senior officials in those days. Reporters were hesitant to write negative personal stories about presidents then (imagine that!) or to critically examine presidential decisions and policies, much less stand up to the president, with a few specific exceptions like Clark Mollenhoff of the Des Moines Register. Most were swayed by the temptation of gaining favorable access to the president and keeping it through self-censorship.
Because most people consider the well-marketed, good side of LBJ (that of a magnanimous, consensus-seeking, backslapping, generous liberal politician) a mitigating factor to his bad side, the natural inclination, aided by a dearth of information about his negatives until now, is to give him the benefit of the doubt. To do so, however, means the malevolent characteristics that shaped his rise in politics, that catapulted him into the Oval Office, and with which he governed as president, are put aside and ignored, much as they have been for almost fifty years. The lies that have already replaced the truth about Johnson will never be cleansed from the American consciousness if they are allowed to continue to usurp the real story about John F. Kennedy’s demise.
The first three books of an eventual four-part series of biographies (the last volume is still being
written) by Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, examine Johnson’s life from boyhood through high school and college; his short stint as a teacher; his time as congressional assistant and head of the National Youth Administration; his election to Congress in 1937; his failed attempt to run for the Senate in 1941; his tainted election to the Senate in 1948; and his years in the Senate thereafter, leading to his election as vice president in 1960. The unparalleled detail with which Caro has documented Johnson’s experiences and the picture it reveals of Lyndon B. Johnson make this series the essential resource for understanding the motives, the morality (or amorality), the obsessive ambition, drive, and narcissistic personality of the thirty-sixth president. Instead of the popular, even charismatic campus figure described in other biographies—written by authors who never interviewed the people who knew him best, who accepted without question the stories of his youth that LBJ manufactured—his true persona becomes clear: He was a crude, condescending, duplicitous, ruthless, and deceitful man not above the use of criminal means to attain his objective. Caro, arguably a man who has studied Lyndon Johnson more than any other person, concluded, among other things, that Johnson could be trusted only to do what would benefit himself; his singular lifetime goal was to be the president of the United States and one who would be considered for all time among the greatest.3 It could even be argued, using conclusions from Caro’s books, that becoming president was much more than a goal—it was a compulsion he didn’t try to control: was his obsession.
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