Johnson had been humiliated by the Senate’s rejection of his bid to become chairman of the Democratic Caucus and became more and more ambivalent toward Congress. He regarded his actual, constitutional role as the Senate’s presiding officer as beneath his dignity and an inconvenience, an obligation he would fulfill as minimally as possible. He received a daily call from his protégé Bobby Baker, who would fill him in on the latest gossip about his former Senate colleagues.139 Little else aroused his interest beyond tending to his remaining Texas constituency. During meetings with legislative leaders, he was described as “vacant and gray … discontented and tired.”140 His behavior all throughout this period suggests that he was preoccupied with other things on his agenda that only a few of his closest cronies knew anything about. He seemed to withdraw more and more from participating in anything substantial, as though he either didn’t have time for the most important initiatives of the administration in which he served and/or that he didn’t want to make progress on the White House agenda; perhaps he simply preferred to defer them to a later date, when he could then “pull all the plugs” to whip up Congress into passage of the biggest set of progressive social legislation in the history of the world. Such speculation, though difficult to prove, somehow fills some gaps in this fascinating puzzle.
Throughout his tenure as vice president, as the shock of having lost practically all his power settled in, and as all the “Harvards” and “Bostons” began taking over the reins of power, Johnson receded more and more into the background. The worst part for him was the constant humiliation he felt from the Eastern boys who had taken to calling him “Colonel Cornpone” and the “hayseed hick” behind his back;141 in his mind, he had become the most powerful man in Washington in the 1950s because he knew a lot more about running the nation than did all of these “whiz kids” from Harvard combined. Johnson disagreed strongly with Kennedy’s efforts toward détente with the Soviet Union; when the president authorized the sale of wheat—at a time when the United States had 1.2 billion bushels in storage and another one billion new bushels then being harvested, while subsidizing American wheat farmers to the tune of fifty-five cents per bushel over the world market price142—to the Soviets, who had experienced massive crop failures because of drought, Lyndon Johnson objected. Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger, on October 11, 1963, “The Vice President … thinks that this is the worst foreign policy mistake we have made in this administration.”143 Despite the general cold war animosity toward the Soviet Union at that time, the public understood the issues better than the vice president and generally approved of the sale. According to a contemporaneous account in Life magazine, “The government’s change of heart reflected the hardheaded attitude of a Midwest farmer who said, ‘I’m in favor of selling the Reds anything they can’t shoot back.”144
Lyndon Johnson’s disagreement with Kennedy’s Russian wheat sale was no different than his position on many other issues throughout the nearly three-year term of JFK’s administration; he was either overtly against the Kennedy position or cunningly attempting to undermine it, as has been demonstrated in the case of Kennedy’s policies toward both South Vietnam and Cuba. Johnson was simply marching to his own drum the entire period while trying to present himself as Kennedy’s biggest supporter; this is reflected in the number of times his biographers noted that he never publicly said unkind things about JFK. In reality, by early 1963, Johnson could not count on John F. Kennedy’s help anymore; his relationship with JFK, RFK, and the rest of the Kennedy administration was at an all-time low, thanks to his negligible efforts to support his nominal boss. He had purposely done nothing to help JFK pass legislation through Congress, an objective that had made his appointment to the vice presidency three years before more palatable to Kennedy. Unfortunately, Johnson’s role so far had been the opposite of Kennedy’s expectation; if anything, LBJ had done everything he could to thwart JFK’s agenda.
The Kennedys Discover Pretext to Remove LBJ
In addition to being very frustrated by Johnson’s ineptitude, John Kennedy was afraid that the Baker and Estes scandals would blow up during the 1964 campaign, jeopardizing his own reelection chances. He had discussed this with Bobby on many occasions, and despite RFK’s repeated and expected denials, the decision to replace Johnson had been made; it was only necessary to be able to justify it, to him or anyone else. Bobby had been procuring information on Johnson’s Mafia ties, specifically with his own nemesis, Carlos Marcello. A former Justice Department official has stated that on November 21, 1963, “Robert Kennedy had a thick investigative file on his desk on the Marcello-LBJ connection. In the 1950s, Marcello’s Texas ‘political fixer’ Jack Halfen had arranged to siphon off a percentage of the mobster’s racing wire and slot machine profits for LBJ’s Senate campaigns. In exchange, according to journalist Michael Dorman in his book Payoff, LBJ had helped kill certain antiracketeering legislation in committee.”145 According to author David E. Scheim, referencing Dorman’s research, “Halfen disclosed that a gambling network controlled by organized crime ‘had given $500,000 in cash and campaign contributions to Johnson over a ten-year period while Johnson was in the Senate.’”146 Jack Halfen had been serving his second year of a ten-year sentence in 1961 when Bobby Kennedy sent one of his investigators to interview him after Halfen had hinted that he might be willing to reveal incriminating information about Johnson. It would take thirty-seven years—until 1998—for the FBI records relating to all of this to be released; when they were, thirty-seven of the forty names on Halfen’s list were blacked out, leaving only three close friends of Johnson: Tom Clark (father of Ramsey and a former U.S. Attorney General and Supreme Court Justice), U.S. Congressman Albert Thomas (who would be caught winking at Johnson immediately after he was sworn in on Air Force One), and a former Texas deputy sheriff named Jake Colca.147
Yet another author, John H. Davis, in Mafia Kingfish : Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, also documented Johnson’s connections to the underworld through his close friend and neighbor, the lobbyist I. Irving Davidson, who had long, extensive contacts with a number of mafia figures, including Carlos Marcello: “It had been principally Davidson who had provided Marcello with most of his entrees into the agencies of the federal government, including the CIA, for which Davidson acted as a lobbyist on Capitol Hill, and into the worlds of Washington politics, international big business, and high finance … it was through Davidson that Marcello had been able to extend the reach of his influence to the oil-rich Murchisons of Dallas, to certain embarrassing members of President Lyndon Johnson’s camp, men such as Bobby Baker and Billie Sol Estes, … Davidson’s endless collection of people in high places, people who could possibly fill a key position in Carlos Marcello’s invisible government, also included none other than FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who in turn was a good friend of Davidson’s and Marcello’s friend Clint Murchison.”148 The tentacles of Johnson’s arm’s length reach into the underworld—through his close associations with such men as Bobby Baker, Mickey Weiner, Fred Black, Billie Sol Estes, Cliff Carter, and Irving Davidson—and led ultimately to Carlos Marcello, the head of the mafia in New Orleans.
In due course, it became well known that John F. Kennedy followed all news of Johnson’s legal entanglements, and he would specifically take much interest in the investigation of the Billie Sol Estes and Bobby Baker cases, with all of their connections to Johnson.149 This was confirmed in the early days of the administration, in a newspaper that Johnson had always read closely. The Dallas Morning News carried a headline in 1961 titled, “JFK Takes Interest in Henry Marshall Death.”150 Over three decades later, according to author Gus Russo’s sources, “In 1998, a high government official, on condition of anonymity, confirmed that Robert Kennedy had in fact instructed his Justice Department to initiate a ‘criminal investigation of Lyndon Johnson.’”151 By the time of the trip to Texas, Bobby Kennedy had information documenting Johnson’s long criminal history on many fronts: Bobby Baker, Billie Sol E
stes, and Jack Halfen, the legendary go-between who connected Lyndon Johnson directly to Carlos Marcello.152
It is likely that both John and Robert Kennedy had read the November 22, 1963, edition (distributed a few days before that date) of Life magazine, then the leading weekly People-type magazine, which had a cover page read by millions with a banner headline titled, “The Bobby Baker Case: U.S. Senate writhes as nation focuses on a mess involving one of its own … SCANDAL GROWS AND GROWS IN WASHINGTON.” The article noted how the ambitious young man from Pickens, South Carolina, had begun his career in the Senate as a page then rose to higher and higher levels, brought along all the way by his mentor, Lyndon B. Johnson. The description of how Baker’s influence had grown as a result of Johnson’s tutelage included the following: “Like a young Sabu herding bewildered elephants, he was adept at settling freshman senators into their strange surrounds and thereby incurring debts of gratitude that were payable on future call. Later, as Baker grew in stature, he became adroit at shepherding stray solons tamely into the Establishment’s fold. ‘You get along if you go along,’ was his standard counsel, and senators listened.”153 The Establishment was, of course, that group of about forty senators aligned closely with their majority leader, Lyndon B. Johnson. The article then went on to note the closeness of the Johnson-Baker connection: “‘He always spoke of LBJ as ‘The Leader,’ a man who knows Baker well said recently. ‘He even tried to be Johnson. He copied Johnson’s clothes and mannerisms. When he came into the Senate chamber, he’d take the Johnson stance, smooth his sideburns, brace his shoulders and scowl up at the balcony—the whole bit. The only thing wrong with his act was that he was six inches too short.’”154
Moreover, the Life cover page article was undoubtedly read thoroughly by millions when that entire weekend became a national period of mourning, as they turned away from their televisions for a brief respite, trying to find out as much as they could about the previously ignored vice president. It is not an overstatement to say that practically everyone in America cancelled at least some of their previous plans and devoted their attention to the aftershock, the cortege and funeral of JFK, the shooting of Oswald and Tippit, and all the other information exploding out of Dallas and Washington that weekend of televised, commercial-free news coverage. The article these millions of people were reading that weekend was very revealing of this man who was so close to the new president; it went on to describe him and his tremendous influence. One incident described the power the vice president still wielded in the Senate even after he left it in 1961; it involved Johnson’s instruction to Baker to reject what should have been the routine appointment of North Dakota Senator Quentin Burdick to the Judiciary Committee, who eagerly awaited the announcement. Baker discreetly passed the lie that Burdick had changed his mind about it, and the committee picked Ed Long of Missouri instead. The reason for this, according to this timely issue of the most popular U.S. magazine at that time, now being read by millions, was, “Burdick was a Kennedy supporter and therefore didn’t belong to the Establishment—a combination Lyndon Johnson wasn’t likely to forgive. So Bobby Baker shivved Burdick.”155 The time that the above-mentioned incident occurred, in January 1961, was exactly when the Kennedy-Johnson team was being inaugurated. So much for having a vice president who was a “team player” and who actually supported—by his deeds as well as his mouth—the president whom he was supposed to serve.
In addition to the published article noted above, in the November 22, 1963 edition of Life magazine, another breaking news story was being prepared by the same publication which was expected to end Johnson’s political life, at the very least removing him from the 1964 ticket, but in all likelihood, forcing him to resign before that and probably result in his criminal indictment. According to an assistant to Life magazine’s executive editor in 1963, James Wagenvoord, then twenty-seven years old, this article was pulled at the last minute and never published. In early November 2009, he contacted John Simkin, whose widely read Web site at the Education Forum subsequently published the following (edited) statement:
Beginning in late summer 1963 [Life] magazine, based upon information fed from Bobby Kennedy and the Justice Department, had been developing a major newsbreak piece concerning Johnson and Bobby Baker. On publication Johnson would have been finished and off the ’64 ticket ([the] reason the material was fed to us) and would probably have been facing prison time. At the time Life magazine was arguably the most important general news source in the United States. The top management of Time, Inc. was closely allied with the USA’s various intelligence agencies and we were used … by the Kennedy Justice Department as a conduit to the public … The LBJ/Baker piece was in the final editing stages and was scheduled to break in the issue of the magazine due out the week of November 24 (most likely one of the next scheduled editions, November 29th or December 6th, distributed four or five days earlier than those dates). It had been prepared in relative secrecy by a small special editorial team. On Kennedy’s death, research files and all numbered copies of the nearly print-ready draft were gathered up by my boss (he had been the top editor on the team) and shredded. The issue that was to expose LBJ instead featured the Zapruder film. Based upon our success in syndicating the Zapruder film I became Chief of Time/Life editorial services and remained in that job until 1968 (emphasis added).
Wagenvoord later added the following: “It was stated flatly that this was to be the end of LBJ on the ’64 ticket. Life had already run two Baker pieces, the first a general survey bad guy picture essay detailing the opening of the Carousel Hotel and his generally [sic] sleaziness”; and “I had seen Department of Justice couriers coming in and out of the offices and knew that a lot of material was being fed directly to the magazine from the department.”156
This late report about Bobby Kennedy supplying information to Life implicating Johnson, for the purpose of forcing him out of the administration, validates much of the other information included in this book; it also goes further, with respect to vindicating the charges, that Life immediately reversed its plan to publish incriminating information about Johnson and, instead, actively suppressed that information. Although the owner and chief executive of Life and Time magazines (Henry Luce and C. D. Jackson respectively) were ultraconservatives and disliked both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, their interest before November 22, 1963, would have been to harm the administration any way it could, and revealing the Johnson scandals would have done that. After JFK’s assassination, they quickly realized that subjecting the nation to the ordeal of a possible impeachment and trial of Johnson, on the heels of the assassination of Kennedy, could potentially lead to ever-increasing instability that might be enormously destructive to the country. Their previous dislike of both Kennedy and Johnson then morphed into reverence for the former and tepid support for the latter as a means of averting the constitutional crisis that might otherwise unfold. Any lingering suspicion of Johnson’s criminal past—or his possible involvement in Kennedy’s murder—would also undoubtedly be shelved for the same reason.
Furthermore, and no doubt in cooperation with the CIA in its continuation of Operation Mockingbird, Life magazine then arranged to purchase all of the rights to the Zapruder film, not for the purpose of using it to enlighten the public about the assassination, but to participate with the CIA in hiding the fact that Kennedy’s fatal head shot came from the front. The fact that the film was kept from the public for twelve years, and then found to have been tampered with (as documented in chapter 9), speaks volumes about the real purpose behind the manipulation of evidence. It also corroborates the charges made in later chapters regarding Johnson’s and Hoover’s direct involvement in evidence tampering.
Lyndon Johnson’s November Dilemma
The Baker scandal was looming as a major roadblock to Lyndon Johnson’s political career and therefore his dream of becoming president. He knew all about Bobby Kennedy feeding information to Senator Williams and to the Life magazine reporters right out of the Just
ice Department; there was very little that his chief collaborator, J. Edgar Hoover, didn’t know about, especially in Washington and at the Department of Justice. The situation for Johnson had now become so desperate that his nemesis, Bobby Kennedy, had even begun working to help his protégé, Bobby Baker, to avoid incriminating himself. According to Drew Pearson, Kennedy called Baker, telling him, “‘Get off the phone. You shouldn’t be talking’ warned Kennedy cryptically. In view of the Justice Department’s recent [1966] revelation that wire taps and electronic devices were used to monitor some of Baker’s conversations, the warning is highly significant.”157 Clearly, by the fall of 1963, Kennedy had begun using every tool at his disposal to move the subject of the Justice Department investigation away from Johnson’s enablers and underlings and directly at the vice president himself. Johnson had replaced Baker as the real subject of Robert F. Kennedy’s investigations. RFK had even begun using IRS investigators in order to use Johnson’s legal problems as leverage to force him off the ticket if he, as expected, attempted to fight the Kennedys in order to hold on to his position. One of these investigators, Walt Perry, told author Gus Russo in 1992 that Billie Sol Estes had “funneled $10 million in bribes to Johnson and that Bobby Kennedy had contacted Estes in prison, making him an offer: ‘If you testify against Johnson, you’re out [of prison].’ Billie declined the offer, saying, ‘If I testified against him [Johnson], I’d be dead within twenty-four hours.’”158
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