LBJ

by Phillip F. Nelson

  The core of the Texas base, called the 8F Group for the suite at the Lamar Hotel in Houston where they met, was primarily Texas oilmen: H. L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, and Sid Richardson were among this group, but it included others from various industries—men like George and Herman Brown, owners of the Brown & Root Corporation, a major construction company and the single largest benefactor of Lyndon Johnson, as well as Johnson’s chief lawyer and bagman, Edward A. Clark. All of these men were extreme right-wing anti-Communists of the John Birch Society genre willing to fund like-minded groups. But more importantly, they were businessmen who wanted to make money regardless of the niceties of due process, the integrity of the competitive bidding process or the constraints of ethical conduct; they needed their own like-minded man in Congress. Johnson knew that these men would be willing to pay a considerable amount of money in bribes and kickbacks in order to get profitable government contracts; he would become their indispensable Washington asset, a man who would become uniquely positioned to control their fortunes and, indeed, their continued existence. The oilmen, especially, were growing desperate over the issue of Kennedy’s determined intent to eliminate the depletion allowance. In their view, considering the cost to them of its elimination, any expense to save it was worth the investment.

  The material presented in later chapters indicates that Johnson collected many hundreds of thousands of dollars from these sources, practically all of it unrestricted insofar as how it would be spent; he alone determined how much would go to other politicians in Washington or elsewhere who would subordinate their interests to his and how much he would divert to his own personal wealth accumulation. Even as other politicians of lesser note (Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, for example) would be censured for illegally converting campaign funds to their personal use, Lyndon Johnson—the most prolific campaign fund abuse practitioner in history, bar none—would escape such scrutiny, doubtlessly because too many others were indebted to him and/or justifiably afraid of him.

  The Mafia Connections and Cuban Exiles

  In his official capacity as the attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy had undertaken a war with organized crime, extending the work he had begun in 1956 as an investigator for his brother’s Senate committee examining the issue. On the morning of November 22, 1963, RFK was conducting a conference to review the progress and establish the priorities for the ongoing battle. His top four targets were Sam Giancana of Chicago, Santos Trafficante of Florida, labor boss Jimmy Hoffa, and Carlos Marcello of New Orleans. Marcello was already being tried in New Orleans at that moment, and Kennedy was hopeful that the trial would lead to a permanent deportation since Marcello had snuck back into the country after Bobby had had him unceremoniously thrown out in 1961, without the formality of deportation. At Marcello’s side, acting as a strategist in his case, was David Ferrie, who, it has now been established, was another CIA contract employee.38*

  Bobby’s aggressive efforts to get rid of Marcello must have been an embarrassment to Lyndon Johnson, who had long worked in behalf of the interest of many mafiosi, Carlos Marcello in particular. His ties to Marcello went back to the early 1950s, when one of Marcello’s lieutenants, Jack Halfen, agreed to set aside a percentage of profits to help LBJ fund his senatorial campaigns. This would prove to be a good investment: In exchange for such contributions, Johnson consistently impeded antiracketeering legislation throughout his governmental service,39 and once he became president, the Justice Department’s organized crime operation was suspended; Johnson ordered all FBI bugging of the Mafia to cease. FBI Special Agent William F. Roemer Jr., who had been spearheading the attack on the Mob in Chicago, concluded “If you judge a man by his acts, here was a man [LBJ] who did more to hinder the government agency fighting crime than any other president or leader in our history.”40 According to author John H. Davis, “It has been estimated that the Marcello-Halfen group funneled at least $50,000 a year of the Marcello’s gambling profits alone to Lyndon Johnson, and, in return, Johnson helped kill in committee all anti-rackets legislation that could have harmed the interests of Carlos Marcello and Jack Halfen. It was safe to say, then, that thanks partly to the influence of Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Carlos Marcello was able to operate freely in Dallas in 1963.”41 Jack Halfen was in prison by 1964, but he had kept eight hundred feet of home movies showing him and his wife partying with the Johnsons at their ranch, and he need only give the nod to have it given over to RFK along with whatever other information he might wish to contribute to Bobby’s already-extensive files on Johnson’s Halfen-Marcello activities.42 Jack Halfen was later given a full pardon for his transgressions by President Lyndon Johnson in 1966.

  Yet despite the intensity of Kennedy’s drive to eradicate organized crime throughout the country, the FBI, which reported to him, somehow avoided ever wiretapping Meyer Lansky, Carlos Marcello, or Santos Trafficante, the only three high-level crime figures who were not tapped.43 The reason for Lansky’s excusal was due to the secrets he had used to control Hoover for over a decade already. In the cases of Marcello and Trafficante, the reason could only be that, despite RFK’s pursuit of mobsters in general, the CIA gave both men necessary cover and protection by involving them in the plan to assassinate Fidel Castro.44 Lyndon Johnson’s (and J. Edgar Hoover’s) longtime relationship with Marcello, through his lieutenants in Texas discussed elsewhere, was another reason for the absence of wiretaps in his case.

  In his unofficial role as JFK’s overseer of the CIA, Robert F. Kennedy was the driving force in the continuing initiative to put Castro out of business in 1963. The Kennedys knew that Cuba would become a major political liability in the 1964 election unless Castro was removed and the Communist menace eradicated for good in the Western Hemisphere. According to authors Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann, Bobby Kennedy was the creator of a top secret plan to solve what was really a political problem, for an invasion of Cuba that was scheduled for December 1, 1963. RFK was acting directly on behalf of the president—not in his capacity as the attorney general—but through a back channel to Cuban leaders Manuel Artime, Harry Williams, and others to a high-level Cuban officer, Juan Almeida. Bobby worked directly with these Cuban leaders through the Army Secretary’s Office with Cyrus Vance, Joseph Califano, and Al Haig.45 Califano and Haig have both written accounts that confirm this, and even speak of the intensity to which Bobby worked to get rid of Castro: Califano wrote that “as Robert Kennedy pressed for tougher actions, I thought: he is obsessed with Castro; he is pursuing a total war with Castro.”46 According to Al Haig, “‘Bobby Kennedy was running’ the covert Cuban operations ‘hour by hour. I was part of it, as deputy to Joe Califano and military assistant to General Vance … people were being killed … and the United States Army was supporting and training these forces … Cy Vance, the Secretary of the Army, was [presiding] over the State Department, the CIA, and the National Security Council. I was intimately involved … weekly reports were rendered to Bobby Kennedy—he had a very tight hand on the operation.’”47 In this capacity, Colonel Haig “wrote a July 19, 1963 memo suggesting ‘a concerted effort to create circumstances leading to US action to reestablish a non-Communist Cuba and expel the Soviet presence, including [US] military action and invasion if necessary.’”48

  Califano also explained the political pressure on the Kennedys that caused their intense actions directed at Castro: “President Kennedy had to do something about Cuba and Castro, because even though the Soviet missiles had been removed, thousands of ‘Russian troops remained on the island.’”49 Another unidentified source quoted by Lamar Waldron characterized Bobby’s attitude in this operation as “‘hard-nosed’ and ‘determined’ but also ‘rash and arrogant and frequently wrong.’ He felt that Bobby’s ‘Cuba policy wasn’t dictated by concern for democracy as much as realism and resentment toward Castro over the Bay of Pigs defeat.’”50

  The CIA’s plan to assassinate Fidel Castro, which emanated from the Eisenhower administration’s 1960 planning, under Vice President Rich
ard Nixon’s tutelage, had involved Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli. In 1960, ex–FBI agent Robert Maheu, who later became a top aide to the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes in Las Vegas, recruited Johnny Rosselli on behalf of the CIA to assist them in killing Fidel Castro. Rosselli introduced Maheu to Sam Giancana (a.k.a. Sam Gold) and Santos Trafficante (who was called Joe), the Florida Mob boss who had also been the most powerful of the mafiosi running casinos and bordellos in prerevolutionary Cuba; they were given six poison pills to murder Castro. For several months, attempts were made, unsuccessfully, to put the pills in Castro’s food. Beginning in the later part of 1961, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the methods were adjusted to other, more distant, forms of attack, including the training of sniper teams, using a secret CIA base in the Florida Keys. The man in charge of this operation, Task Force W, was the legendary Bill Harvey, who hated both Kennedy brothers with a passion. They didn’t think too much of him either, and as time went on, the hatred between them grew exponentially, as their disagreements over the best way to handle the Cuba careened out of control.

  As noted in the previous chapter, Johnny Rosselli had become a friend of Bill Harvey, meeting him in his Washington home as well as in Miami, at JM/WAVE headquarters with David Morales. Morales was the chief of operations in Miami and was in direct contact with Maurice Bishop, the cover name for David Atlee Phillips,51 who became the handler of both Lee Harvey Oswald and Carlos Bringuier. Bringuier was the head of the militant group DRE (Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil) who engaged in a street fight with Oswald in New Orleans in August 1963. It appears that this fight was staged by one or both of them, given their mutual handler, to establish Oswald’s bona fides as a radical Communist and supporter of Fidel Castro. Clearly this was an early part of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, as the operational planner (Bill Harvey) maneuvered Oswald into a vulnerable position: regardless of which option was later chosen—JFK killed by a lone nut, a maladjusted, delusional Communist, or an international Communist conspiracy traceable to Cuba—Oswald would have a definite trail to either.

  Noel Twyman pieced together the relationships between the CIA men at JM/WAVE52 and Rosselli, Giancana, Marcello, Trafficante, David Ferrie, and Jack Ruby, and then described Rosselli’s ultimate demise, which was connected to these relationships: “Years later, Rosselli would start talking and reveal to columnist Jack Anderson that Ruby was ‘one of our boys and had been ordered to kill Oswald.’ Shortly after his discussion with Anderson, and just after he testified in closed session to the Church Committee, Rosselli was murdered in the late summer of 1976; his body was found cut into pieces and stuffed in an oil drum that floated to the surface in a Florida intercoastal waterway.”53

  Within three weeks of Kennedy’s murder, a team of FBI agents had uncovered evidence connecting all of the above names in an apparent conspiracy to assassinate the president, putting the team “in a position to crack the case wide open if it had only pursued the evidence. Then, suddenly, on December 18, 1963, all FBI investigations ceased. No mention of David Ferrie or Carlos Marcello was made to the Warren Commission in its supplemental report of January 13, 1964.”54 Hoover obviously realized, only three weeks after the assassination, that if he did not put an immediate stop to any further investigation of the murder of the president, then he and Johnson would run the risk of one of his own investigators finding out about the real plot.

  JFK’s Legendary Sex Life

  JFK’s predilection for sexual relations with a wide variety of young women is essential to the understanding of his vulnerability to other high-ranking government and military officials. Unfortunately, it became such a major part of his character that he allowed it to become a direct threat to his fitness for office, at least in the opinion of many men within the federal government bureaucracy, military establishment, and the intelligence community. If it had not involved a series of high-risk affairs with suspected spies, it might not have risen to the level that threatened his life. But it did involve very high-risk liaisons with the wrong women.

  J. Edgar Hoover, of course, had known all about Kennedy’s affairs with numerous women, and he had made sure that both JFK and RFK knew that he knew all about them. Hoover’s agents had documentation on JFK liaisons with as many as thirty-two women during his presidency.55 Although most of the president’s sexual conquests were with women who posed no national security threats—girls from the office, like Fiddle (Priscella Wear) and Faddle (Jill Cowen), secretaries who did little typing,56 for example—there were several others who posed a serious threat. Those included women who were suspected spies, such as Ellen Rometsch, Maria Novotny, and Suzie Chang; Judith Campbell, the mobster’s moll; and finally, the glamorous Marilyn Monroe, who had threatened, only days before her own demise, to hold a press conference to reveal the details of her intimate affairs with the president and the attorney general, as well as the secrets of the international affairs that she had learned. Since Hoover’s knowledge of these affairs can be seen as Lyndon Johnson’s as well, a logically extended presumption can be made that he would have shared these secrets with a select few others—men whose support he would need for his planned coup—who might need to be convinced of the need to replace Kennedy because of these “treasons.”

  As president, John F. Kennedy became very compromised as a result of his personal obsessions. Most of the innumerable affairs he had conducted—even the noontime skinny-dipping sessions with young female secretaries like Fiddle and Faddle, which were often attended by his brothers Bobby and Teddy, but to the exclusion of practically everyone else—were successfully kept out of the public domain and therefore did not pose a threat to his presidency.57 In the interest of brevity, we will consider further only JFK’s relationships with Marilyn Monroe, Mary Pinchot Meyer, Judith Exner, and Ellen Rometsch, all of which, in their own ways, were potential time bombs that had to be contained. The high-risk affairs of both the Kennedy brothers with the Hollywood star Marilyn Monroe were also obliquely connected to still another potentially explosive threat: the intrepid celebrity-gossip journalist and television personality Dorothy Kilgallen; Ms. Kilgallen had published references to Marilyn Monroe’s lover, who she wrote was “a handsome gentleman who is a bigger name than Joe DiMaggio in his heyday.” On August 1, 1962, three days before Monroe died, Kilgallen had even called Bobby Kennedy at the Justice Department to try to verify the rumors.58 Dorothy Kilgallen’s inquisitiveness would eventually prove to be a deadly curse, but not before both Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy were themselves dead.

  Altogether, four of the people involved in JFK’s affairs—Kennedy himself; Dorothy Kilgallen, who had never met any of the others, yet became exposed to them through her work; Mary Meyer; and Marilyn Monroe—would eventually die of unnatural causes. Judith Campbell (later Exner), considering her other boyfriends, was lucky to escape with her life; Rometsch, then used to a glamorous life, swinging with the most powerful men in the world, would be thrown out of the country and consigned to a life in one of the bleakest of countries, East Germany.

  For the president and his attorney general brother, there were obvious risks of having been involved with a famous Hollywood sex symbol. Unfortunately for all concerned, this one was a lady whose hold on rationality was tenuous at best: The most glamorous movie star of all time was now threatening to expose her affairs by conducting a news conference to announce her experiences with both of the Kennedys and to disclose her knowledge of major national secrets. But the special nature of Kennedy’s affairs with Marilyn Monroe and Mary Meyer requires additional consideration, as presented below. Marilyn was murdered fifteen months before JFK was assassinated; Mary Meyer was killed eleven months afterwards. Kilgallen would die the year after Meyer. The three women did not know each other, but they had one thing in common: They were all women who knew too much. Their knowledge of Kennedy’s secrets (in Kilgallen’s case, secrets obtained about Lyndon Johnson from Jack Ruby) might have been the cause of their murders. For the Meyer affair, it was the
disturbing circumstances surrounding the murder of an ex-wife of a top CIA official, a man who despised John F. Kennedy since their childhood days.

  Mary Pinchot Meyer

  Mary Meyer’s long-term affair with JFK would have been known to Hoover and Johnson, though she was not yet the national security threat presented by the others. That would come later, after JFK’s assassination, when Mary Meyer had learned more than she should have about the conspiracy and her ex-husband’s involvement in it. It is the context of her intimate relationship with the president before he was assassinated that must be understood in order to assess the implications of what later happened to her. To appreciate how close they were, it is necessary to start with her past and juxtapose events of their lifelines into a single thread.

  Mary Pinchot Meyer was unlike any of the other women in John F. Kennedy’s life. She was someone he was intimate with in more than just a physical way; she connected with him on an intellectual level to a much greater degree than did any other woman, arguably including even his wife, Jacqueline.59 Among all his other lovers, according to James Jesus Angleton, who had reason to know, the president was in love with Mary Meyer: “They had something very important.”60 They had met as teenagers at a dance she attended at Choate, where he was a student. By the mid-1950s, Mary had married Cord Meyer, and the couple lived with their two sons in a large home in the Virginia suburbs, next door to Hickory Hill, at the time John and Jackie’s home before he became president, after which it was taken over by Bobby. In 1955, the Meyers’ pet dog was run over and killed. For some reason, Cord Meyer interpreted this as a threat related to his work and soon thereafter sought other employment, planning to leave the CIA. The following year, their son Michael was run over and killed at exactly the same spot. Cord considered that as a major reinforcement of the point: He could never leave the CIA.