LBJ
Page 54
1. For example, see Swearingen, pp. 97–100 (additional references to follow in chapter 9).
2. Ibid.
3. Palamara, p. 53.
4. Swearingen, pp. 248–252.
5. See Palamara, Vincent M., Boring Is Interesting. http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?absPageId=519589
6. Scheim, p. 69 (ref. Joachim Joesten, The Case Against Lyndon Johnson in the Assassination of President Kennedy, Munich: Dreischstr. 5, Selbstveriag, 1967, p. 9).
7. Twyman, pp. 667–668, 777–781.
8. Ibid., p. 624.
9. Ibid., pp. 622–624.
10. McClellan, pp. 180–183.
11. Ibid., p. 263.
12. Marrs, pp. 366–367.
13. Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy …, pp. 246–245, 367–368; Garrison, pp. 176–181; Scheim, pp. 218.
14. Twyman, pp. 522–525.
15. Davis, Deborah, p. 157.
16. Hunt, E. H., American Spy, pp. 126–47.
17. Newman, Oswald and the CIA, (2008) pp. 636–637.
18. Twyman, pp. 424–427.
19. Newman, Oswald and the CIA …, p. 162.
20. Douglass, pp. 40–41.
21. Ford: Portrait …, pp. 49–52.
22. Marrs, Crossfire, pp. 189–191.
23. Melanson, Spy Saga: Lee Harvey Oswald and U. S. Intelligence, pp. 7–10.
24. Marrs, p. 110 (citing Mark Laneís interview with James Botelho).
25. Melanson, Spy Saga: Lee Harvey Oswald and U.S. Intelligence.
* Recall that in chapter 3, Major General Charles Willoughby was identified as a strong supporter of the ABN; the name of its founder, Yaroslaw Stetzko, was on the masthead of Willoughby’s Foreign Intelligence Digest. Twyman, pp. 570–571 (ref. Russell, The Man … p. 254).
26. Warren Report, p. 713.
27. Russell, On the Trail …, p. 214.
28. Twyman, p. 720.
29. Newman, Oswald and the CIA …, pp. 171, 172.
* A former CIA officer, Donald Benzlea, has conceded that he read a debriefing document on Oswald in 1962. His statement is available on youtube.com as “The CIA Debriefing of Oswald.”
30. Hurt,. p. 326 (ref. Coleman and Slawson, “Oswald’s Foreign Activities,” pp. 110–11).
31. Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy, p. 233.
32. Horne, p. 1491.
33. Douglass, p. 46.
34. Marrs, p. 200.
35. Warren Report, p. 403.
36. Hurt, p. 219.
37. Ibid.
38. Marrs, p. 200.
39. Twyman, pp. 338–341.
40. Summers, Not in Your Lifetime, pp. 220–221.
41. Garrison, pp. 29–30.
42. Twyman, p. 706.
43. North, p. 276 (Ref. Summers, Conspiracy, p. 345).
44. Ibid., p. 277.
45. Baker, Judyth, p. 467.
46. Garrison, pp. 122–125; DiEugenio, pp. 32–36.
47. Scott, p. 180; Scheim, p. 225 (ref. Malone, William Scott, “The Secret Life of Jack Ruby” New Times, January 23, 1978).
48. Scott, p. 198.
49. Scott, p. 179 (Ref. Blakey and Billings, The Plot, p. 302; Summers, Conspiracy, 460–61).
50. Baker, Judyth, pp. 468–469.
51. Melanson. p. 21.
52. Newman, Oswald and the CIA, pp. 346–47.
53. Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 633.
54. Scott, Deep Politics, pp. 41–42.
55. Morley, p. 169.
56. Ibid.
57. Morley, p. 192.
58. Ibid., p. 195.
59. Ibid.
*See chapter 2, regarding Jefferson Morley’s continuing lawsuit against the CIA. Also, The George Joannides Coverup (JFKLancer.com).
60. Ibid., p. 197.
61. Ibid., p. 201.
62. Ibid., p. 201.
63. Scott, Deep Politics, pp. 41–42.
64. Newman, p. 635.
65. Morley, pp. 6–7.
66. Ibid., p. 15.
67. Russell, p. 495.
68. Ibid.
* In New Orleans, Oswald had also been introduced to others by Bannister as “Leon.”
69. Ibid., pp. 72–73.
70. Baker, Judyth, pp. 496–498.
71. McKnight, p. 16.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid., p. 20.
74. Marrs, pp. 539–550.
75. DiEugenio, pp. 55–56.
76. DiEugenio, pp. 55–56 (referencing Popkin, The Second Oswald, p. 86 and Meagher, Accessories, p. 370–372).
77. Russell, p. 574.
78. Ibid.
79. Russell, p. 575.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid., pp. 574–575.
82. Ibid., pp. 575–576.
83. Scott, p. 242 (ref. Curt Gentry in J. Edgar Hoover).
84. Ibid.
85. Summers, Official and Confidential, p. 314.
86. Warren Commission Hearings: Vol. VIII, p. 298.
87. Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 45.
88. Twyman, pp. 522–525.
89. Twyman, pp. 522–525.
90. Ibid., p. 526.
91. Ibid., p. 528.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid., p. 525.
94. Ibid., p. 527.
95. Bolden, pp. 41–60.
96. Swearingen, p. 58.
97. Ibid., p. 62.
98. Ibid., pp. 65–67.
99. Ibid., pp. 75–77.
100. Hancock, pp. 460–470 (Ref. HSCA and U.S. Customs reports).
101. Ibid.
102. Russell, p. 45.
103. Ibid., p. 104.
104. Ibid.
105. Ibid., pp. 294, 331.
106. Russell, p. 508.
107. Ibid.
108. Ibid.
109. Ibid., pp. 510–511.
110. Ibid., pp.512–514.
111. Ibid., p. 452.
112. Ibid., p. 447.
113. Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 49.
114. Douglass, p. 146 (ref. James Bl Wilcott’s Testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassination, March 22, 1978, p. 48, JFK Record Number 180-10116-10096).
115. Ibid. (Ref. Bob Loomis, Ex-CIA Couple Tell of Disillusion, Oakland Tribune September 18, 1978, p. B14. Also Warren Hinckle, Couple Talks about Oswald and the CIA, San Francisco Chronicle (September 12, 1978).
116. Marrs, Crossfire, p. 265.
117. Ibid.
118. Davis, Mafia Kingfish … pp. 175–176
PART IV
The November 22, 1963, Coup d’état
Chapter 7
THE HIT AND THE
AFTERSHOCK: ANOMALIES
ABOUND
Washington’s word to me was that it would hurt foreign relations if I alleged conspiracy whether I could prove it or not. I was just to charge Oswald with plain murder and go for the death penalty. Johnson had Cliff Carter call me three or four times that weekend.
—DALLAS DISTRICT ATTORNEY HENRY WADE
The thing I am concerned about, and so is [Deputy Attorney General Nicholas] Katzenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.
—FBI DIRECTOR J. EDGAR HOOVER*
JFK’s Trip to Texas
Before the ill-fated Dallas trip, as the president took a number of actions to begin a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, he himself was being eased out of control by high officials in the Pentagon and the CIA. These officials had gradually become very alarmed by information they had begun receiving about Kennedy’s secret life and his turn toward peaceful coexistence with enemies of the United States. Some of it would have come from Hoover’s wiretaps and bugs placed in Marilyn Monroe’s room so that all of their personal activities would have been recorded, including her knowledge of state secrets; then there was the matter of her unfortunate demise, under mysterious circumstances, which was doubtlessly monitored as well by Hoover. JFK’s record-breaking promiscuity threatened to become public, with a little help from the “personal and
confidential” FBI files available to Hoover and, therefore, Lyndon Johnson. In all, Kennedy’s problems in the autumn of 1963 were as bad as they had ever been, and it would be hard to imagine that they could get any worse; they were surpassed only by those confronted by Lyndon Johnson.
It is clear that John Kennedy never wanted to go to Texas in the first place, but he had been repeatedly pressed by Johnson to make the trip as an early campaign stop. Because of the flurry of investigations into Johnson’s involvement with the Bobby Baker scandal, JFK had already come to a decision to replace Johnson with Senator Terry Sanford of North Carolina, according to Evelyn Lincoln. A week before the Texas trip, on Air Force One as they returned from Florida, Kennedy told his friend Senator Smathers that he didn’t even want to go to Texas, a comment that Smathers went to the trouble of recording on video:1
Sen. George Smathers, U.S. Congress 1946–1968: I came back to Washington with the President. He was laying down. They had a bed in the Air Force One for him to lie on. So he said, “Gee, I really hate to go to Texas. I got to go to Texas next week and it’s just a pain in the rear end and I just don’t want to go. I wish I could get out of it.” And I said, “Well, what’s the problem?”
He said, “Well, you know how Lyndon is.” Lyndon was Vice President. “Lyndon wants to ride with me, but John Connolly is the governor and he wants to ride and I think that protocol says that he’s supposed to ride and Johnson wants Jackie to ride with him.” And Connolly was, at that time, a little bit jealous of Lyndon and Lyndon was a little jealous of him, so it’s all these fights were going on. He said, “I just don’t want to go down in that mess. I hate to go. I wish I could think of a way to get out of it.”
Hearing this from his close friend Senator Smathers, it is hard to believe those who have said that it was Kennedy who wanted to go to Texas and that Johnson didn’t want him to go.
In the aftermath of the assassination, Johnson exploded with rage at the fiction—so often repeated—that the trip was his idea, that he had dragged a reluctant president to Dallas and to his death. “That’s a great myth,” Johnson complained privately. “I didn’t force him to come to Texas. Hell, he wanted to come out there himself!” But LBJ was not about to interrupt Kennedy’s long wake by protesting his own innocence. He was powerless to silence Dungan, O’Donnell, Schlesinger, Sorensen, or any of the other agents of his humiliation.2
According to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Bobby Kennedy said JFK blamed Johnson for not being able to stop the infighting going on between himself and his protégé, John Connally, with Senator Ralph Yarborough. Kennedy was irritated with Johnson because of his intransigence on many fronts, not least of which was the political situation in Texas; he just didn’t feel that Johnson wanted to do anything to patch up the growing discord in his own home state.3 Another person close to JFK was his personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, who agreed that Kennedy did not relish the idea of the Texas trip but went anyway because he had made the commitment to do so; she wrote, “Reluctantly, Mr. Kennedy agreed to go to Texas. Advance reports from our own staff and from many other people gave us cause to worry about the tense climate in Texas—and, most especially, in Dallas. Dallas was removed and then put back on the planned itinerary several times. Our own advance man urged that the motorcade not take the route through the underpass and past the Book Depository, but he was overruled.”4
The preponderance of the evidence shows that Johnson and Connally pressed Kennedy for over one year to make this trip, a trip that JFK tried to put off until finally he was boxed in by a commitment that he couldn’t break. Theodore Sorensen confirmed this on video, saying Kennedy “was implored to come to Texas, where two factions of the Democratic Party were at each other’s throats.”5 (This begs the question, was this political schism provoked or perpetuated to ensure Kennedy’s cooperation with making the trip because of his known interest in getting the matter settled?) Kennedy pretended to look forward to making the trip, but his best friends and closest associates knew otherwise. On the trip, he had to continue begging both men to get along, to ride together in the various motorcades, and to try to make up, all to no avail. It was a trip into a one-party Democratic state, but a territory his vice president could not control despite his best efforts of playing both sides of the spectrum: he had been a conservative to conservatives and a liberal to liberals, yet not well liked by either. Many in Texas had figured this out already, and Johnson feared losing both sides by his pandering to the other as he continued talking out of both sides of his mouth. The conservative side of the Democratic Party had already begun splintering off to the Republicans, and the liberals had been attracted more and more to the Yarborough wing, putting him more in jeopardy of losing his hold on his own party.
October to November 20, 1963
John Connally went to Washington DC on October 4, 1963, to finalize plans for the president?s trip to Texas. Johnson and Connally had to convince Kennedy to proceed with the trip since some of his staff had warned him not to make the trip because the risks were too great compared to the dubious political rewards. Two weeks later, Johnson left for his Texas ranch to begin planning a “Texas welcome” for Kennedy’s trip. For over one month, he supposedly spent his time doing nothing other than planning for Kennedy’s trip, including the mundane planning of logistics for the president’s Dallas appearances and motorcade. In fact, these details were largely delegated to the same White House staff that routinely performed that function. By this point, his lieutenants in the special operation would have finished all of the critical tasks and had signed on all the necessary plotters; financing had been arranged with help from H. L. Hunt and Clint Murchison; the equipment was ready; the shooters and false Secret Service agents were trained and ready, provided their official looking credentials; and his own part of the elaborate plan was ready to be executed by mid-November. His personal involvement would focus only on the one event that would become the start of his presidency—the planning of the motorcade and the breakdown of security by every agency having a piece of that responsibility—eliminating Kennedy’s protection by Secret Service, the FBI, the Dallas Police, and the Dallas County Sheriff. Within Dealey Plaza, there would be no official security officers of any of these organizations, only a dozen or so unofficial “security officers” having IDs that purported to show that they were official. The handoff to the assassins, by now operating almost independently of Johnson, would be completed at the corner of Main and Houston streets.
Johnson’s involvement in the choice of venues for Kennedy’s speech was simple: it had to be the Trade Mart because the motorcade route to that location would allow a trip down Main Street, with a little dogleg turn up Houston Street to Elm Street, past the Texas School Book Depository building. That meant that he would need to override the predominant thinking that the Women’s Building at the fairgrounds would be the better choice from a security standpoint because it had only three entrances compared with over fifty at the Trade Mart; the Trade Mart also had catwalks above the stage that would provide cover for someone attempting to assassinate the president. Gerald Behn, special agent in charge of the White House Secret Service detail, was against the choice of the Trade Mart for all those reasons; he was in agreement with Jerry Bruno, the president’s political-advance man, who testified to the HSCA that he believed the Women’s Building was the final choice; this was only one of a number of statements which indicated that the site was changed after the original selection. Bruno had prepared an itinerary on November 7, which indicated that the Women’s Building was the destination. He had done that because, based upon his experience and observations, he knew that Behn customarily had the final authority to make that decision.6
The confusion caused by Johnson’s insistence on the Trade Mart as the luncheon site continued for months, even many years afterward. Secret Service Chief Rowley, arguably a key operator in the conspiracy, told the Warren Commission that presidential aide Kenneth O’Donnell was to blame for the choice of the Trade M
art, which was not true. Jerry Bruno told HSCA investigators on December 13, 1977, that he, Behn, and Ken O’Donnell wanted the Women’s Building. Contradicting Bruno, Behn told the HSCA in executive session on March 15, 1978, “O’Donnell simply informed Behn that the Trade Mart was the final selection and ordered him to secure it.”7 Behn claimed during his HSCA staff interview that he recalled that O’Donnell’s announcement favoring the Trade Mart “was made between the 5th and the 9th of November,” yet security meetings were held between November 13 and 15, 1963, during which this decision had not been revealed. Behn got word that the local agents claimed that they could secure the Trade Mart, “and we were going with that.”8 John Connally later made the same claim that Rowley and Behn had made, that O’Donnell had wanted the Trade Mart. Since Ken O’Donnell had passed away in September 1977, it appeared that these statements were an attempt to place blame on a dead man.
As previously noted, Johnson’s own man, who he had placed in the USDA, Jack Puterbaugh, was sent to Dallas ostensibly by the Democratic National Committee to ensure that Johnson’s key interests were met; he was put in charge of motorcade political protocol and had recommended the Trade Mart for the luncheon site. In addition to Puterbaugh, Johnson’s people included Cliff Carter, John Connally, Bill Moyers, and Betty Harris, all of whom were following Johnson’s orders on exactly how the motorcade would be planned.9 It is clear that Puterbaugh and Johnson’s other men, and woman, were all insisting on the Trade Mart site; in fact, Connally was becoming rather strident about it. Further complicating the issue, Secret Service Agent Winston Lawson claimed that the decision in favor of the Trade Mart was Jerry Bruno’s when in fact, Bruno had never wavered from his recommendation for the Women’s Building.10 Agent Lawson testified that “all he knew was that the decision about the motorcade was made in Washington, and that he assumed that it was made by the White House.”11 In his summary report to the HSCA, Lawson stated that it was Jack Puterbaugh who “recommended the Trade Mart” for the noontime Kennedy luncheon.