LBJ

by Phillip F. Nelson

  Johnson’s telephone call to Hoover at 10:01 a.m. Saturday, November 23, was recorded and later transcribed before someone decided that the tape was too dangerous and had to be destroyed (it is clear now that the tapes he did make during this period were staged to make it appear that he and Hoover were merely reacting to events). This particular tape was more revealing than even the person who destroyed it realized:

  J. EDGAR HOOVER: “I just wanted to let you know of a development, which I think is very important in connection with this case—this man in Dallas (Lee Harvey Oswald). We, of course, charged him with the murder of the President. The evidence that they have at the present time is not very, very strong. We have just discovered the place where the gun was purchased and the shipment of the gun from Chicago to Dallas, to a post office box in Dallas, to a man—no, to a woman by the name of ‘A. Hidell.’ … We had it flown up last night, and our laboratory here is making an examination of it.”

  LYNDON B. JOHNSON: Yes, I told the Secret Service to see that that got taken care of.

  JEH: That’s right. We have the gun and we have the bullet. There was only one full bullet that was found. That was on the stretcher that the President was on. It apparently had fallen out when they massaged his heart, and we have that one. We have what we call slivers, which are not very valuable in the identification. As soon as we finish the testing of the gun for fingerprints … we will then be able to test the one bullet we have with the gun. But the important thing is that this gun was bought in Chicago on a money order. Cost twenty-one dollars, and it seems almost impossible to think that for twenty-one dollars you could kill the President of the United States (Note that no comments were made about the other bullet retrieved from the body, according to witnesses, below.)

  LBJ: Now, who is A. Hidell?

  JEH: A. Hidell is an alias that this man has used on other occasions, and according to the information we have from the house in which he was living—with his mother—he kept a rifle like this wrapped up in a blanket, which he kept in the house. On the morning that this incident occurred down there—yesterday—the man who drove him to the building where they work, the building from where the shots came, said that he had a package wrapped up in paper … But the important thing at the time is that the location of the purchase of the gun by a money order apparently to the Klein Gun Company in Chicago—we were able to establish that last night.

  LBJ: Have you established any more about the visit to the Soviet embassy in Mexico in September?

  JEH: No, that’s one angle that’s very confusing, for this reason—we have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet embassy, using Oswald’s name.That picture and the tape do not correspond to this man’s voice, or to his appearance. In other words, it appears that there is a second person who was at the Soviet embassy down there. We do have a copy of a letter which was written by Oswald to the Soviet embassy here in Washington, inquiring as well as complaining about the harassment of his wife and the questioning of his wife by the FBI. Now, of course, that letter information—we process all mail that goes to the Soviet embassy. It’s a very secret operation. No mail is delivered to the embassy without being examined and opened by us, so that we know what they receive … The case, as it stands now, isn’t strong enough to be able to get a conviction … Now if we can identify this man who was at the … Soviet embassy in Mexico City … This man Oswald has still denied everything. He doesn’t know anything about anything, but the gun thing, of course, is a definite trend.

  This discussion completely undermines the possibility of a lone gunman. Hoover’s statements reflect his knowledge of a conspiracy to kill JFK and that he is already aware that someone was impersonating Oswald in Mexico City. It appears that Johnson, in other unrecorded calls to Hoover, had already begun his efforts to recast the investigation toward Oswald as a “lone nut” rather than as being one man in a conspiracy involving Fidel Castro. An hour and twenty minutes after the beginning of his conversation with Johnson, in which he lamented the weakness of the case against Oswald, he issued a teletype from FBIHQ to all agents that the case was wrapped up, that they were to discontinue investigating “who else may possibly have been involved.” Exactly a day after the 11:20 a.m. FBI teletype, on Sunday immediately after Oswald is killed by Ruby at 11:21 a.m., J. Edgar Hoover would say to LBJ’s aide, Walter Jenkins, “The thing I am most concerned about, and so is Mr. Katzenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.”177 In one day, Hoover had come full circle and was now 100 percent confident in a case for which, just the day before, he had expressed serious doubt. This turnabout certainly wasn’t due to the evidence pouring in which had pointed toward a conspiracy. Oswald had been declared the assassin, not by the investigators on the streets of Dallas, but by the new president of the United States, the only possible authority who could have realistically made such an order.

  While Hoover had admitted to Johnson that the case against Oswald “is not very, very strong,” he suddenly if implicitly reversed those doubts and began making strong arguments to the public that they had gotten their man; simultaneously, he began a series of actions to close down the investigation and issue a “report.” In the same conversation he said a bullet from the gun was found on the president’s stretcher, which would be revised later to that of Connally. Almost simultaneously with the closure of the FBI investigation was an immediate effort by the CIA to implicate Oswald in pro-Castro activities and mysterious plots during a recent trip by Oswald to Mexico City. Of course, much of this discussion undermines the mantra that Johnson and Hoover expressed in public as well as through their immediate orders to the Dallas Police to halt their investigation and to the district attorney to charge Oswald alone and stop any further talk about a possible conspiracy. To have reassured the public that there was no known international or domestic conspiracy is one thing, but to state it categorically then sift the evidence toward that conclusion while ignoring Oswald’s Mexico visit and the implications it carried—and worse, to cut off the investigation of Oswald’s New Orleans activities and his associates there and those implications—was inexcusable. Unless, of course, they already knew these were all dead ends preplanted for the purpose of “plan B” because the conspiracy was of their own making. The cover-up was now under their total control except that they still had to “act out their parts” in a way that would help to portray themselves as innocent bystanders.

  Hoover’s statements that the gun was fired from the fifth floor of the Texas Book Depository belie the inconsistencies that had already surfaced in the investigation. He will repeat this “mistake” in his conversation with Johnson a few days later. While he said that the gun was found on the sixth floor, he said the shells were found on the fifth floor. All of this changed after November 29 when his ‘final report’ was submitted; from then on, the story was changed to eliminate these discrepancies.

  Saturday Morning in Dallas

  It did not take long for the orders to filter through the government bureaucracy: unwritten but forcefully communicated words to the effect that “there was only one shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald; no conspiracy existed. Proceed aggressively as necessary to conform the evidence and prepare the public.” As noted above, that decision was made even as the three Boeing 707s were still in flight toward Washington DC on Friday afternoon, well before Oswald had even been formally charged with the president’s murder. Only an order such as this could explain an incident that occurred sometime between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning. One of the first newspaper reporters in the country to realize that something strange was going on in the aftermath of the assassination was Connie Watson-Kritzberg, a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald. Following her interviews with Dr. Kemp Clark and Dr. Malcolm Perry, she had written an article stating that “the front neck hole was described as an entrance wound. The wound at the back of the head, while the principal one, was either an exit or [t]angential entrance wound.”<
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  When the article appeared in print in the Saturday edition, she noticed that someone had added another sentence to the above paragraph, which said, “A doctor admitted that it was possible there was only one wound.” She then asked an editor if he knew who had changed her story; he immediately knew what she was talking about and replied simply, “The FBI.” Her immediate reaction—to accept the premise that it was not something too unusual, the probable result of an innocent “fact checking” between the editor and his information sources based upon a coincidental event—was shaped by the crisis atmosphere then prevalent in the newsroom and the city generally; a lot of questions would be deferred in her mind as the original scenes were replayed over and again. Connie Kritzberg was only one of hundreds of Dallas residents who experienced that same phenomenon. She told this author that she eventually concluded that this directive was subtlety forced upon the newspaper, and the crudely written sentence inserted into her story, in order to begin the process of convincing the world that both shots came from one shooter, supposedly behind the president’s limousine.

  Unfortunately, this was merely the first instance in the case of JFK’s assassination where an agency of the federal government used underhanded tactics to begin reframing the assassination into a story dictated by someone who was still in flight, as he returned to Washington DC. There would be many more instances of this to come over the ensuing days, weeks, months, years, and decades. But the fact that this one was done immediately, mere hours after the murder, makes it critically important proof of how quickly the cover-up phase was started in order to immediately put the blame on a “lone nut” despite the abundance of evidence clearly showing that multiple shooters were involved. Before the weekend was over, there were many other troubling signs of strange events happening on many fronts: Dr. Hume burning his autopsy notes in the fireplace of his recreation room, the paper bag allegedly used by Oswald to carry the oily rifle was found with no sign of oil on it, the initial FBI inspection on the rifle in which no fingerprints were found, the first reports of three police officers who found the rifle swearing that it was a German Mauser, the call from J. Edgar Hoover to Dallas SAIC Gordan Shanklin ordering that Oswald’s file be sanitized followed by Shanklin ordering agent James Hosty to “get rid” of Oswald’s threatening note to him and then Hosty’s actions in tearing it up and flushing it down the toilet. But these were only a few of many “tip of the iceberg” events, nothing like the more astonishing—and even more revealing—things that happened then but would not be revealed until years later.

  Questions Regarding Jack Ruby’s Background

  Jacob Rubenstein (a.k.a. Jack Ruby) was not just a castaway Mob guy from Chicago. He was directly connected to some of the highest level mafioso in the country, including the head of the Chicago Mob, Sam Giancana, who he’d known from his Italian ghetto neighborhood in that city.178 All during 1963, Jack Ruby was trying to work out problems with the IRS and Texas revenue authorities. His nightclub business had been audited, and it was determined that “he owed the federal government excise taxes going back six years and totaling almost $40,000; and … owed ‘an additional $20,000 in other federal taxes.”179 It may be merely a coincidence that he had been audited at this particular time, but in any event, his precarious financial condition put him into a vulnerable position vis-à-vis his friends in the Mafia. During May, he was in regular contact with Carlos Marcello’s and Meyer Lansky/Ed Levinson’s functionary Lewis McWillie, operating out of the Thunderbird Hotel in Las Vegas.180 This is the same group connected to both Johnny Rosselli in Los Angeles, Sam Giancana in Chicago, and directly back to Bobby Baker in Washington, through Ed Levinson, Benjamin B. Siegelbaum, Clifford Jones, Fred Black, Mickey Weiner, and Irving Davidson. Baker is the lynchpin between all of the others, working generally through his closest associates, Davidson, Black, Jones, and Weiner181 on one end and Lyndon B. Johnson on the other.

  Just as the IRS and Texas authorities had been increasing their squeeze on him for several months, by mid-November, Ruby suddenly came into a large sum of money; only three hours before the assassination, Ruby visited his bank and talked to an official who later stated that Ruby made a deposit of $7,000 in large bills, which he had stuffed into his pockets.182 It was reported that police detectives found two large wads of bills when they searched Ruby’s apartment on November 24; he was carrying more than $3,000 in cash when he shot Oswald.183 Three days before that, he had talked to a realtor about a new location for his club and told a friend that he was planning on moving from Oak Cliff to the much more expensive Turtle Creek section of Dallas, which would double his apartment rent. He was also looking into taking a Caribbean vacation.184

  A reasonable deduction on the basis of all the known facts relating to Jack Ruby and his associations can be postulated as follows: The known connections between him and Mafia figures as noted throughout this book, and Ruby’s subsequent attempted confession implicating Lyndon Johnson in the conspiracy, suggest a combination of Johnson’s use of political influence with the IRS to “turn up the heat” on him to force him to settle his tax liabilities, and the Mob’s cooperation in making him “an offer he couldn’t refuse.” Ruby had spent a lifetime on the fringes of the Mob, and after the botched handling of Oswald, he knew that his life was no longer worth a plugged nickel, and he had no choice but to take out Oswald since he hadn’t been killed during his arrest. In contrast to all of these clear connections that reveal multiple motivations, there is nothing in his background that would support the notion that a man of his ilk might be overcome with emotion for JFK’s family and therefore take the actions that he did to publicly murder the assassin and be arrested for it immediately in the police station.

  Shortly after Oswald died from his injuries, the Dallas authorities released information to the local television stations that confirmed their investigation was centered on the “connection between Jack Ruby and Lee Oswald.” A copy of such a newscast, available at Youtube.com, reveals an early admission that police were aware of a connection:

  News Anchor:

  Also in the studio here is WFAA news director Bob Walker. Bob, what’s new?

  News Director Bob Walker:

  Just learned from City Hall, from a very authoritative source, that police are working on the assumption that there, indeed, is a connection between Jack Ruby and Lee Oswald and that in some manner of speaking Oswald’s murder was to shut him up. Also, they have said that they will not release in the immediate future at all, any of the information the FBI has gathered which lead them to believe so strongly that Oswald had assassinated the president. But the police and investigation now is working on the assumption that there is a definite connection between Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby and the attempt … and the successful attempt on Oswald’s life was an attempt to ‘shut him up,’ this word from a reliable source at city hall.185

  All references to any Ruby-Oswald connection would disappear as quickly as they originally surfaced after Oswald’s death. Johnson’s instructions to Henry Wade would have been to forcefully remind him what Cliff Carter, in his repeated calls to Wade over the previous two days, had told him, “Stop the investigation and cease all references to any possible conspiracy.” There is no record of this particular call, of course—since Johnson’s taping system was controlled not by his voice but by his finger—but the fact is that the “reliable source from city hall” was immediately shut down and no further mention of this aspect of the investigation was reported again.

  The WFAA television report, and others like it, reminded Johnson that to ensure his acceptance by the American public as the unquestioned leader of the nation, an official government report vindicating him was needed as quickly as possible. To put the public at ease, it would also be essential to convince the nation that the assassin—a man without any apparent motive—acted alone, and that the assassin’s own killer, Ruby, also acted independently. Johnson coached and collaborated with his old friend J. Edgar Hoover who directed all fa
cets of the early investigation. His first report was completed within one week, and within a few more weeks, the FBI’s complete version would begin to be reviewed by the Warren Commission. This select group of high-level officials of Washington—mostly friends of LBJ and Hoover—was charged with giving the official government imprimatur to this hastily developed version, with Lee Harvey Oswald cast as the “lone nut.” The final coup de grace was furnished by Jack Ruby. Johnson would soon decide that the investigation would be tightly controlled by a select number of trusted confidants within Washington rather than the Texas officials as originally planned.

  November 22, 1963, only marked the first half of the entire conspiracy; the murder of JFK then kicked off the second half, which was marked by concealment and fabrication of evidence on a massive scale, culminating in a completely dishonest official report cunningly designed to point the finger of guilt away from the perpetrator(s). But the murder at halftime was only one of a very long string of official deceits—each of which was committed to keep the secrets, the CIA’s “family jewels”—that would last for decades.

  Phase 2 of the Conspiracy Emerges: The Warren Commission

  Within days of Kennedy’s death, President Johnson, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach had agreed that a presidential commission should be established to lend credence to the FBI’s report and its foregone conclusion that Oswald was the assassin, and the only assassin. Johnson had resisted such an idea initially in deference to the Dallas Police Department and the Texas state officials, for whom he was indebted because of their cooperation with every one of his requests as he planned the motorcade, and he knew that he could count on their continued cooperation.