LBJ

by Phillip F. Nelson

  The crime could have only been accomplished with at least the acquiescence and foreknowledge of the only man capable of choreographing the massive cover-up which was immediately launched. It is axiomatic that since the cover-up started even before the shots were fired, the order for JFK’s assassination could only have come from his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. No other possible candidate for the key man of the assassination—not Santos Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, or Sam Giancana; not H. L. Hunt or Clint Murchison; not James Angleton, Bill Harvey, or David Morales; not Curtis LeMay, Charles Willoughby, or John McCloy; not even J. Edgar Hoover; and certainly not Lee Harvey Oswald—had the motive, the means, the opportunity, the demonstrated pattern of previous criminal, even murderous conduct and the overall demented resolve to see it through. Only one man met all of the criteria required for the murder of John F. Kennedy: Lyndon B. Johnson.

  The “Executive Action” Organization: Highest Levels

  of the Hierarchy

  By the fall of 1963, John F. Kennedy had come to the realization that he couldn’t control key men in his own military: the CIA, the State Department, J. Edgar Hoover or his FBI empire, the Congress, the Cuban exiles, and worst of all, even his own vice president. He had used up much of his bully pulpit influence with his support for the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviets; his sway with big business was shattered after his pressure against U.S. Steel’s attempt to raise prices. Many were alarmed at his decision to sidestep the Federal Reserve and print silver certificates, and his support for the abolition of the oil depletion allowance outraged the oil barons. There were a lot of very influential men, in 1963, who had one thing in common: they thought that they knew better than Kennedy did about what was needed to win the cold war with Russia, the festering imbroglio with Cuba, and the nascent conflict in Vietnam. As the nation teetered closer to wars on several fronts, the darkness of a deadly conspiracy was beginning to coalesesce in Washington DC, fronted by a politician to whom the Kennedys had bowed. They were forced by his unscrupulous blackmail to place him in his position of trust and subsequently made to endure his petulant, overbearing, and boorish personality. In exchange for their accommodations to him, he became a saboteur of their most critical programs and finally an albatross that, they determined, had to be cast off within months in order to salvage their chances for reelection.

  As Johnson became less and less interested in his vice presidential duties, he enlisted the help of several key men he knew he could count on to assist him in his plan. Through the vicarious use of their authority over the vast independent bureaucracies they controlled, he would gain the ultimate control over the men they selected to follow the necessary orders; most of them would not even know the real objective, of course. For those who he determined to be in the loop, most would be operating under the illusion that the plan was only for a single part, a simulated assassination,* at least until phase 2, the postassassination cover-up. Later, it would become apparent even to them that it was a multiple-part, carefully prepared and coordinated plan involving elements of the Mafia, the Cuban exile community, international professional assassins, and renegades from the intelligence community who were involved with all three sets of assassination teams.

  The top level of his secret “task force” would have to comprise only men who shared his hatred of the Kennedys enough to act on it, with full knowledge of the risks and implications of being caught. It was imperative that all the “renegades” picked for this assignment were the best and could be trusted to keep the secret. Some were recruited for planning a simulated assassination that the Secret Service was supposedly planning as a pretext for the removal of all protection when the motorcade arrived in Dealey Plaza. These men could be trusted to “sign on” to phase 2 without a missed step. It was also understood that certain men of the Dallas Police force would have to be called in as necessary, and the three key men—Chief Curry, Captain Fritz, and Sheriff Decker—would need to be extensively investigated beforehand in order to get any negative information on them to force their cooperation in the event they resisted. While there was apparently little dirt found on Captain Fritz or Chief Curry,* there were some issues in Sheriff Decker’s past that would compromise his ability to withstand Johnson’s demands. According to author Peter Dale Scott, Bill Decker was described in 1946 Congressional transcripts of a political corruption investigation as “an old-time bootlegger” and “a payoff man with Bennie Binion” (owner of the University Club across the street from Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club as well as the Golden Horseshoe in Las Vegas) and once “served as a character witness for Dallas mafioso Joseph Civello”). In the absence of dirt, they would simply be coerced into cooperation through the force of Lyndon Johnson’s “persuasiveness,” which they knew Curry would be susceptible to since he seemed to be overly anxious to accommodate all of Johnson’s requests, as will also be seen in chapter 8. It was also a given that he, LBJ himself, might need to make some postassassination calls to the local officials in the event that his assistant, Cliff Carter, failed to “close the deal.”

  His longtime neighbor on Thirtieth Place next to Rock Creek Park in Washington DC, and a friend before and after that, J. Edgar Hoover, would be enlisted to help in a myriad of ways, possibly before but at least starting immediately after the event; he knew intuitively that Hoover could be relied on to handle the postevent phase after given enough cues to manage the investigation according to Johnson’s direction. Hoover’s unique abilities for dissembling, evidence tampering, stealing, and fabrication of evidence would eventually be manifested in numerous traces of his manipulation of his own staff in Dallas, New Orleans, and Washington DC, much of which would emerge over the ensuing four decades.1

  Hoover knew that if Kennedy was reelected in 1964, his ability to retain his directorship would be in jeopardy. While he had plenty of dirt on both Kennedys, he knew that they also knew about many of his own secrets. Hoover also realized that if he were removed from his position, he would lose his power to conceal those secrets; if the real story of the legendary director got out, his reputation as the greatest crime fighter of all time would be lost, and the new FBI building he had envisioned, with his name boldly engraved over the entrance, would never materialize. Any question about whether Hoover’s motivations were consonant with Johnson’s would be answered within the first days and weeks after the assassination, as he stopped the investigation at all the key points, after he pronounced Oswald was the “lone nut,” New Orleans and Mexico City in particular.2

  Other high-level and like-minded officials of the government, who Johnson knew were either personally beholden to him or whose own hatred of John and/or Robert Kennedy was at least as great as his own, had been recruited one by one to handle key aspects of the plan. A variety of inducements would be applied, depending upon their vulnerabilities as determined by Johnson as only he could tabulate based upon their individual weaknesses. He instinctively knew who could be trusted to know the broadest parts of the true mission, a number which had to be minimized. For everyone else farther down in the hierarchy, a successively smaller span of knowledge of the entire plan would be maintained; most would become unwitting participants simply because they were overtly forced to or were misled by a superior into unwittingly taking an action that facilitated the series of acts which culminated in the assassination. For example, the need to control the Secret Service—to provide for a complete breakdown of all the normal security elements during a motorcade—would only need the actions of one man at the top: the head of the Secret Service, James Rowley, who was a good friend of Johnson as well as Hoover, his former boss.3

  Besides Hoover, other key men in the FBI, including his male concubine, Clyde Tolson, and Bill Roemer, have been reported by others to have facilitated the assassination. In Roemer’s case, according to author and former FBI agent M. Wesley Swearingen, it is not clear as to whether it was due to his active complicity, his blind allegiance and acts of omission, or simply his chronic incompetence.4 Hoover
had a pathological need to control everything in any matter in which he became involved, and he knew whom he could trust to carry out even the most questionable orders without objection. By the same token, Rowley knew the men in his agency whom he could trust to carry out his orders, even the most bizarre of them, which would all but abandon the president in Dealey Plaza. Many of the orders that reached down to the field agents would even seem rather innocuous, relating to some fuzzy request supposedly coming from JFK himself about his desire to get “closer to the public,” or that he preferred having the bubble top off the limousine when in fact he had always been very cooperative with all of their recommendations and never questioned the presence of motorcycle escorts.5

  Covert Operations as Applied to LBJ’s “Executive Action Plan”

  The scenario that follows is based upon speculative but reasoned opinion of the dynamics involved in the “behind the scenes” plan originally developed at the macro level by Lyndon B. Johnson and carefully deployed through his numerous contacts throughout governmental and social associations documented in the other chapters of this book. But it is not conjecture to state, for instance, that he had long established personal relationships with the parties noted, and that these parties had their own long-term associations with the other people to whom they are linked and so on down the hierarchal “flowchart.” The underlying facts of the mutual hatred of John and/or Robert Kennedy by each of these named individuals are documented as well, throughout this book and its cited sources. The viciousness of this hatred—for example, by Bill Harvey, Carlos Marcello, Jimmy Hoffa, David Atlee Phillips, David Ferrie, David Morales, and many others—has been demonstrated as well. Finally, the attributes noted for the individuals, here and in other references contained in other chapters, are also well established: For example, that Lyndon Johnson himself was an accomplished planner of complex scenarios, whereby the subjects of them never suspected their own manipulation, has been shown in several places already. Likewise, Bill Harvey and David Ferrie were similarly gifted, in their case at a “micro” level, involving the logistical movements of men and equipment. The venomous nature of H. L. Hunt’s and Clint Murchison’s attitudes toward Kennedy has been proven—if not, consider Hunt’s statement that there was “no way left to get these traitors out of our government except by shooting them out.”6 Their financial wherewithal to finance the operation need not be documented; that is a “given.”

  Johnson, through a handful of key men noted throughout the narrative, had already ensured that all planning would be “compartmentalized” in a way to avoid any one person having any more responsibility for a single aspect than absolutely necessary, all the way up and down the line. He knew enough about how his friends at the CIA worked their “black bag jobs”—and in the initial planning had discussed the point in depth with them—to know that he had to emulate their secret methods. This meant that the precept of “plausible deniability,” combining outright lying with the absence of paper trails or any other physical evidence of illegal conduct, would become the guideline. It would mean there could never be the slightest hint of an explicit order to assassinate the president or other such physical record anywhere up or down the line that could be traced back to its source. All involved would understand that they would support the mission: obey their superiors, never question their authority, accept even the oddest orders strictly “by the book,” and understand that the precept “need to know” was the primary governing rule. In turn, they would be assured that they had nothing to fear from any law enforcement agency: federal, state, or local. Johnson’s man Mac Wallace was one who understood all of this; it had worked well for him twelve years earlier after his first murder, and he had remained a free man, gainfully employed since then in well-paying classified jobs with defense industry companies even after an untold number of more murders.

  Clint Murchison wasn’t the only rich Texas oilman close to Johnson and Hoover. H. L. Hunt’s top aide, John Curington, revealed that Hunt’s and Hoover’s close relationship went back to the early 1950s when they were poker-playing friends who shared right-wing political views and a visceral hatred of both Kennedys as well as Martin Luther King Jr. Another member of this group was retired army general Charles Willoughby who was connected to a worldwide right-wing anti-Communist organization, as described fully in chapter 3. One of his still-active contacts in the army was his former boss, General John Magruder, who ran the strategic services unit of military intelligence. According to Gerry Patrick Hemming who was involved in the periphery of the assassination (tagged as another “patsy” had there been a need to exercise the plan B option), Magruder’s linkage to Willoughby was only one of the interconnections of renegades from the military back to H. L. Hunt and J. Edgar Hoover; still another name mentioned by Hemming as part of the cabal was Charles Siragusa, the top agent in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics whom he claimed was a lower-level “mastermind” in charge of the hit team(s): “Narcotics is the only way to be on top of intell around the world because you’ve got everybody on your payroll and anything that moves you know about.”7 These military connections would become most useful in phase 2, when it became critical to initiate the many facets of the cover-up, especially invoking the top-secret, clandestine autopsy procedures.

  Johnson’s “executive action plan” was devised such that plausible deniability would become the watchword from the top down, through the middle-level planners such as Bill Harvey and David Ferrie, to the bottom feeders, such as Jack Ruby, the actual shooters, and of course, the unwitting Lee Harvey Oswald. The basic tenets of covert intelligence, including the uppermost plausible deniability, were closely enforced by all participants. Dick Russell said that Hemming also told him that Felipe Vidal Santiago “had dealt directly with the Hunts in Dallas but ‘they did not want to know about operational plans.’”8 Colonel William Bishop, a CIA hit man, corroborated the story of Richard Case Nagell and explained many of the linkages between the Texas oilmen described earlier and certain military officers and intelligence operatives involved in the cabal. One of these was Bill Harvey, who would become the key “pivot” man in the center of the entire enterprise, the glue that held it all together; Harvey has been discussed previously and will become more and more the focal point of phase 1, the preassassination part of the conspiracy. Bishop also connected the Mafia to the conspiracy, primarily through Carlos Marcello, as well as having provided the linkage to Jimmy Hoffa who contributed financially to the shared objectives.9

  Edward Clark, through his longtime association with Johnson as his “legal consultant/campaign finance manager/partner in crime,” had arranged for funding to be collected from all of the parties who wanted Kennedy dead.10 Through Clark, his main money and influence broker, Johnson indirectly tapped this source of funds to finance his “executive action plan.” Clint Murchison and H. L. Hunt were the major underwriters of the expenses of the operation: the French sharpshooters, the Mob hit men, the renegades from the CIA as well as the expenses for the equipment and logistics of moving men and guns into position and paying off the right politicians and police officials to expedite the plan. The understandings between Clark and Murchison, as with H. L. Hunt, would be agreed to over drinks and dinner at the Lamar Hotel in Houston, the Driskill Hotel in Austin, or the Dallas Petroleum Club, with phrases from old Texas colloquialisms, such as “I got a dog that hunts” (i.e., my man Lyndon is going to deliver). Barr McClellan described the understanding: “Not a word was said about crimes. The code was clear. The more obscure and clouded a gentleman’s proposal was, the more terrible the plan. Murchison knew that. He knew no one could be incriminated. He knew he would hear more, later, about the delivery of the goods. He knew a payoff would be expected.”11

  Everyone in these groups was expected to contribute, not only for the financial and planning needs, but for symbolic purposes as well; it was a way to ensure that everyone would have a chip in the game as a reminder to be discreet. Sharing the legal peril was the best way to keep
mouths sealed. Johnson himself threw in his own chip: Malcolm Wallace, furnished with Secret Service credentials, was there not as a shooter but as a supervisor who would ensure that the planted evidence included shells that matched the Mannlicher-Carcano, which would be found in the “sniper’s lair” and the rifle would be stashed along the stairwell on the fifth floor. The other rifle, the precision German Mauser actually used and inadvertently found by other unsuspecting officers, was supposed to be hidden among the boxes so that it could be snuck out later by a policeman on the payroll. The shells Wallace planted had indeed been shot from the planted Mannlicher-Carcano to tie them back to the gun; others had created false records purportedly showing that Oswald had ordered it from a Chicago gun dealer through a magazine ad and having it allegedly mailed to a post office box leased by him. One of the bullets shot from one of those shells—pristine, because it had been fired into a barrel filled with water—would wind up on a hospital gurney at Parkland Hospital, placed there by none other than Jack Ruby shortly after the assassination.12

  The authorities for the general tactical planning would emanate from Johnson through his back channel conduits to the military and intelligence network they helped establish, as described elsewhere, and from there through multiple channels to men given a very limited span of knowledge. Discreet instructions to destroy evidence of bureau connections to Oswald would be delivered, and requests to begin collecting the necessary funds to finance the operation would be communicated to his friends Clint Murchison and H. L. Hunt. Instructions would flow through to Bill Harvey to begin the complex plans for a three-pronged operation using entirely separate teams to ensure adequate redundancy. Harvey knew immediately, instinctively, that they would be composed of professionals from Corsica, his friends in the American Mafia, and the CIA operatives he had worked with for years, including a group of men in New Orleans associated with the Cuban exiles, all of whom he knew shared his passionate hatred of Kennedy. The other operatives would represent the chips from the groups Harvey would line up. The Marcello-Trafficante Mob would contribute their best planner, , the odd-looking homosexual pilot from New Orleans named David Ferrie, who would not only place and set up the “patsy,” and his immediate handler Ruby, but help recruit other men to take shots from the west end of the Texas School Book Depository Building (opposite the infamous “sniper’s nest” of the TSBD). Ferrie, like Harvey and Johnson himself, had a natural planning ability as well as a latent hatred of Kennedy and a wish to see him dead.13 Among his plans was to be nowhere near Dallas on November 22; in fact, he was sitting alongside Carlos Marcello in a federal courthouse in New Orleans at the time of the assassination. But shortly thereafter, as we shall see, he hurriedly fled New Orleans and drove through a stormy night with two friends to position himself in Houston, ready to fly men to Mexico. These participants would assure not only that JFK’s bodily protection would disappear at the right time to allow a synchronized multi attack on him, but that the conspiracy to assassinate him would immediately morph into a second conspiracy to cover up the crime and convince the American people that he was shot by a “lone nut.” Angleton had groomed the hapless Oswald for many years as someone who could be portrayed to be a social misfit and a confused “silly communist” who had already demonstrated his traitorous character by defecting to the Soviet Union.