LBJ

by Phillip F. Nelson

  “I asked Ramsey Clark to quietly look into the whole thing. Only two weeks later, he reported back that he couldn’t find anything new.” Disgust tinged Johnson’s voice as the conversation came to an end. “I thought I had appointed Tom Clark’s son—I was wrong.”59

  Evidently, Johnson—frustrated by Ramsey Clark’s inability to close down Garrison’s investigation any other way—decided to unleash multiple attacks on the DA’s character and methods, unfortunately including a circuit through the voice of Ramsey Clark, pressing him so hard to do so that his mouth started the attack before his brain had evaluated the logic behind his charges: Clark immediately launched an attack on Garrison, claiming that Shaw had already been exonerated by the FBI, implicitly meaning that they had actually investigated his ties to the others—including Oswald—involved in the preassassination planning. One newsman asked Clark directly if Shaw was “checked out and found clear?” “Yes, that’s right,” replied the attorney general. Clark also said the Justice Department knew what Garrison’s case involved and did not consider it valid. The attorney general obviously did not realize the implications of his statement; Jim Garrison wasted no time in explaining it to him: “The statement that Shaw, whose name appears nowhere in the twenty-six volumes of the Warren Commission, had been investigated by the federal government was intriguing. If Shaw had no connection to the assassination, I wondered, why had he been investigated?”60 This was ludicrously inconsistent with the entire story they had heretofore fabricated, of course, so Clark had to back off within a day of this pronouncement, conceding that his statement was “erroneous.” That episode did more than merely belie the direct lie; it came close to revealing the larger lies; it barely missed inadvertently exposing the truth of JFK’s assassination.

  Shortly afterward, on another level evidently created by Johnson through the CIA, an orchestrated attack on Garrison was mounted by the major news media—led by NBC, CBS, Newsweek, and Time magazines—accusing him of attempting to intimidate witnesses, engaging in criminal conspiracy and inciting felonies such as perjury, criminal defamation, and public bribery. As they did this, they were simultaneously, for inexplicable reasons, deciding that they would no longer allow their reporters to pursue questions about the Warren Commission findings; from that point on, they adopted the “official line.” Subsequently, Playboy magazine published an interview with Garrison to evaluate these charges:61

  PLAYBOY: All right. The May 15 issue of Newsweek charged that two of your investigators offered David Ferrie’s former roommate, Alvin Beauboeuf, $3,000 and an airline job if he would help substantiate your charges against Clay Shaw. How do you answer this accusation?

  GARRISON: Mr. Beauboeuf was one of the two men who accompanied David Ferrie on a mysterious trip from New Orleans to Texas on the day of the assassination, so naturally we were interested in him from the very start of our investigation. At first he showed every willingness to cooperate with our office; but after Ferrie’s death, somebody gave him a free trip to Washington. From that moment on, a change came over Beauboeuf; he refused to cooperate with us any further and he made the charges against my investigators to which you refer. (emphasis added) Fortunately, Beauboeuf had signed an affidavit on April 12,—well after the alleged bribe offer was supposed to have been made—affirming that “no representative of the New Orleans Parish district attorney’s office has ever asked me to do anything but to tell the truth. Any inference or statement by anyone to the contrary has no basis in fact.” As soon as his attorney began broadcasting his charges, we asked the New Orleans police department to thoroughly investigate the matter. And on June 12th, the police department—which is not, believe me, in the pocket of the district attorney’s office—released a report concluding that exhaustive investigation by the police intelligence branch had cleared my staff of any attempt to bribe or threaten Beauboeuf into giving untrue testimony. There was no mention of this report, predictably enough, in Newsweek.

  Reactions in Washington DC to the 1967 Garrison Trial

  As Jim Garrison prosecuted the Clay Shaw trial in New Orleans, Helms was also said to have routinely started his daily 9:00 a.m. meetings at CIA headquarters with questions like “How is the Shaw trial going? Are we giving them all the help they need? Is everything going all right down there?”62 This information was revealed by a former CIA agency staff employee, Victor Marchetti, who said that comments like “We’ll pick this up later in my office,” or “talk to me about it after the meeting” were used to tightly control who was privy to certain information. When he tried to find out more about what was going on, he was told that “Shaw, a long time ago, had been a contact of the Agency. He was in the export-import business … he knew people coming and going from certain areas; followed by, ‘well, of course, the Agency doesn’t want this to come out now because Garrison will distort it, the public will misconstrue it.’”63 If there is any doubt about how scared the CIA brass was about the possibility of Garrison getting too close to the truth, and had to be stopped, that account should put the matter to rest. From the start, the Agency had done everything it could to ignore requests for information from the Warren Commission, and when it did finally comply, provided phony documents and/or photographs.*

  By the same token, President Lyndon B. Johnson, and his acting attorney general, Ramsey Clark, were also following developments in the trial very closely. On February 20, 1967, Clark and Johnson discussed again the investigation that Garrison had launched. Louisiana Congressman Hale Boggs, a former member of the Warren Commission, had commented to several people that he believed that the assassination might be linked directly back to Lyndon Johnson. Clark seems a little shocked by Johnson’s uncharacteristic equanimity, as described by Max Holland:64

  Still, Clark is already discomfited by one “nutty” aspect of the story, namely the rumor that Garrison is allegedly linking Johnson with the conspiracy. As fantastic as this rumor sounds, its source is credible. It comes via Representative Hale Boggs, whose district encompasses much of New Orleans, putting him in a position to know whereof he speaks. Boggs, of course, was also on the Warren Commission, which puts him in a bit of a dilemma. Whereas he might be inclined to speak out against Garrison (whom he apparently dislikes) and denounce the DA’s probe, it is risky to attack a prosecutor who shares the same jurisdiction. To Clark, any allegation about Johnson’s involvement is an early indicator that Garrison might be deranged.

  It perhaps comes as a surprise to Clark that Johnson treats the whole matter with considerable equanimity, not even swearing or muttering to himself when Clark brings up Bogg’s story. The president’s reaction is in marked contrast to his response last October when the insinuation first surfaced. As it turns out, the news from New Orleans is far from the wildest story making the rounds. Johnson asks Clark if he has heard about an even more fantastic rumor in Washington, one that was conveyed personally to the president by syndicated columnist Drew Pearson, considered something of a renegade by his Washington peers. The story, which Johnson heard a month earlier, is that after the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle, the CIA sent men into Cuba to assassinate Fidel Castro, who then retaliated. And as if the implications of that weren’t staggering enough, Pearson also says that Robert Kennedy concocted the plots against Castro, as they occurred in the days when he was “riding herd” on the Agency for his brother.

  CLARK: I had heard that Hale Boggs was sayin’ that he—Garrison—was sayin’ that … or privately around town [was saying] that it [the assassination] could be traced back [to you] … or that you could be found in it some place, which … I can’t believe he’s been sayin’ that. The bureau says they haven’t heard any such thing, and they[’ve] got lots of eyes and ears. ’Course, that was a [credible] fella like Hale Boggs. But Hale gets pretty emotional about people that he really doesn’t like, and people who have fought him and been against him, and I would be more inclined to attribute it to that. Either that, or this guy Garrison [is] just completely off his rocker.

&nbs
p; JOHNSON: Who did Hale tell this to?

  CLARK: [somewhat in disbelief] Apparently Marvin [Watson].

  JOHNSON: [aside to Watson] [Did] Hale tell you that—Hale Boggs—that this fella [Garrison], this district attorney down there, said that this is traced to me or somethin’?

  WATSON: Privately he [Garrison] was usin’ your name as having known about it [the assassination]. I said [to Boggs], Will you give this information to Barefoot Sanders? Ramsey was out of town, this was Saturday night. He [Boggs] said, I sure will. So I asked the operator to get Barefoot and Ramsey together, and they did.

  After that exchange, the course of the conversation turned to the even more “fantastic rumor” about the assassination attempts on Castro.

  Johnson’s reaction to this news speaks volumes. The fact that these comments were coming from one of the members of the Warren Commission, a highly respected congressman, is particularly insightful. His death by plane crash in a desolate part of Alaska a few years later, and one year after his lambasting of Hoover on the floor of the House of Representatives, followed by the mysterious disappearance of many of his records related to his work on the Warren Commission from Tulane University, only adds to the mystery of what Hale Boggs really knew. The Los Angeles Star, on November 22, 1973, reported that before his death, Boggs claimed he had “startling revelations” on Watergate and the assassination of JFK.

  CBS News correspondent George Herman asked Clark about the death of David Ferrie in a March 12, 1967, interview on Face the Nation. When asked why documents concerning Ferrie had been classified by the FBI and the Justice Department, Clark lied, “No, those documents are under the general jurisdiction of the General Services Administration.” In 1968, Clark—no doubt acting at the behest of President Lyndon B. Johnson, appointed a panel of four medical experts to examine various autopsy evidence on JFK’s death, and it dutifully concluded that Kennedy was struck by two bullets fired from above and behind, one of which traversed the base of the neck on the right side (right where Gerald Ford had moved the wound); the second one having entered the skull from behind and destroyed its upper right side (which would be consistent with how the skull had been modified at one of the two military hospitals in Bethesda, Maryland). On his last day as attorney general, January 25, 1969, he ordered the Justice Department to withhold from Garrison the x-rays and photographs from the autopsy of John F. Kennedy, undoubtedly making permanent a procedure that had already been in effect for the last two years.

  In Defense of Dr. Crenshaw’s Assertions

  For thirty years, Dr. Charles Crenshaw kept his memories of the tragic weekend of JFK’s assassination to himself. During those three decades after he and the other Parkland Hospital doctors tried to save the president’s life, then his assassin’s, they continued a de facto “conspiracy of silence.”65 He and the other Parkland doctors would not necessarily agree on every fact involved in these events—and none of them had even realized that Kennedy had been shot in the upper back, since his body was laid on his back the entire time in Trauma Room One—but they were nearly unanimous in their agreement about two wounds the president did suffer:

  • The nonfatal wound in his throat, no larger than the “tip” of Dr. Crenshaw’s little finger, was an entry wound;

  • The shot that entered his right front side above the hairline had come from his front, and had produced a large “fist-sized” hole in the rear of his head; the right rear of his brain was gone, according to Dr. Crenshaw.

  While twenty-one out of twenty-two witnesses at Parkland Hospital agreed in their earliest statements about these conclusions, including Drs. Malcolm Perry and Kemp Clark, the “men in suits,” in this case the Secret Service, forced Dr. Perry and then Dr. Clark to change their testimony. According to author James W. Douglass, “As Dallas Secret Service Agent Elmer Moore would admit to a friend years later, he ‘had been ordered to tell Dr. Perry to change his testimony.’ Moore said that in threatening Perry, he acted ‘on orders from Washington and Mr. Kelly of the Secret Service Headquarters.’ … Moore [admitted that he] ‘badgered Dr. Perry’ into ‘making a flat statement that there was no entry wound in the neck’ … [and said] ‘I regret what I had to do with Dr. Perry’ … [but] he had been given ‘marching orders from Washington … I did everything I was told, we all did everything we were told, or we’d get our heads cut off.’”66 In April 1992, almost twenty-nine years after the assassination, Dr. Crenshaw finally broke his own silence:67

  I believe there was a common denominator in our silence—a fearful perception that to come forward with what we believed to be the medical truth would be asking for trouble. Although we never admitted it to one another, we realized that the inertia of the established story was so powerful, so thoroughly presented, so adamantly accepted, that it would bury anyone who stood in its path … I was as afraid of the men in suits as I was of the men who had assassinated the President … I reasoned that anyone who would go so far as to eliminate the President of the United States would surely not hesitate to kill a doctor.

  After Crenshaw’s book rose to number one on the New York Times’ best-seller list, he was attacked mercilessly by people who were not interested in the truth being revealed. Ultimately, it was the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that leaped into the fray to attempt to discredit one of their members. They first tried to deny that Dr. Crenshaw was even in Trauma Room One with President Kennedy; that scurrilous charge was quickly addressed by records submitted by Dr. Crenshaw, including Warren Commission testimony establishing that five different doctors and nurses specifically mentioned seeing him working with them to revive the president. There is no question that he was there and in 1994, a court agreed, awarding Dr. Crenshaw and his coauthor, Gary Shaw, a sum of money and ordering JAMA to publish a rebuttal article. There is more to the story of JAMA’s egregious attempt to reinforce a discredited theory by attempting to deny the truth, but due to space limitations, and the fact that the point has now been adequately covered, the matter will be suspended; enough has been said for the reader to ponder who was behind the motivation for the slanderous treatment of Dr. Charles Crenshaw.

  But the real reason for the attempt to discredit Dr. Crenshaw had nothing to do with his involvement with other doctors working on John F. Kennedy; it was really about what he said regarding a telephone call received during the time he assisted Dr. Shires in trying to save Lee Harvey Oswald’s life. Dr. Crenshaw stated that Lyndon Johnson personally called the hospital about an hour after Oswald had been admitted, asking him to secure Oswald’s “deathbed confession.” Practically everyone in the country knew about Oswald’s shooting almost immediately after he was shot at 11:21 a.m. (12:21 p.m. in Washington), whether or not they personally saw it on live television in real time on Sunday morning. Johnson had heard about it on his way back from one of his rare appearances in a church, when Secretary of State Rusk informed him. The call which Johnson made to Dr. Crenshaw was made at the full height of his excited reaction to the news that the assassin had been shot, and he thought that getting Oswald’s “confession” would help to put a lid on any further investigation.

  It should by now be clear that Lyndon Johnson would not hesitate to make such a call, any more than all the other calls he made that weekend. To those critics of Dr. Crenshaw’s statements, who continue defending the myth of a guiltless Johnson, the claim that he did not have sufficient time to do so because he was in his limousine on his way to the Capitol is simply a disingenuous attempt to further obfuscate the truth. There was plenty of time for such a call after he arrived at the Capitol. What the critics leave out from Manchester’s account is that, when Bobby and Jacqueline met briefly with Johnson in the Blue Room, Johnson was already highly agitated about Oswald’s being wounded, informing Bobby for the first time and saying, “You’ve got to do something, we’ve got to do something. We’ve got to get involved. It’s giving the United State a bad name around the world”68 (emphasis added). It is entirely in keeping wi
th Johnson’s obsessive-compulsive/manic behavior for him to remain in this hyperactive, frenzied state of mind throughout the forty-minute trip to Capitol Hill, no doubt irritating everyone else in the limousine. According to Manchester, the limousine reached Capitol Hill at 1:47 p.m., after which the “Band plays ‘Hail to the Chief’ at 1:52.”69 Between that time and 2:07 p.m., when Oswald was pronounced dead, was a fifteen-minute interlude during which Kennedy’s coffin was being carried into the Capitol rotunda. At 2:00 p.m. Washington time, 1:00 p.m. in Dallas, Oswald had been in the emergency room for one hour and fifteen minutes, which is consistent with Dr. Crenshaw’s statement that the call came at least an hour after the operation had begun; he would die shortly after Crenshaw returned to the operating room, at 1:07 p.m. Dallas time.

  Entering the Capitol was a routine homecoming for Johnson; he practically owned the place, at least in the part of his enigmatic mind where he kept his most private thoughts. He had access to many offices there, including, of course, the “Taj Mahal,” also known to reporters as the “Nookie Room,” which he coerced from the new majority leader, Senator Mansfield, who Johnson thought was unworthy of such splendor. A quick whisper to his wife to excuse himself for a few minutes for whatever reason (e.g., a restroom stop) would have freed him to go there to use the telephone to make this short call; after Dr. Crenshaw took it, the call was over within half a minute.70 Johnson wanted Dr. Crenshaw to take a message to the operating surgeon, Dr. Shires. “I want a death-bed confession from the accused assassin. There’s a man in the operating room who will take the statement. I will expect full cooperation in this matter,” he said firmly.71 Such a call, made from a telephone in his office at the Capitol Building, would not have been placed through the White House switchboard; therefore no record of it would have existed. Not that the existence of records of Johnson’s telephone calls should matter regardless; he seems to have figured out ways to make calls that never appear in the official logs. For example, one such call, according to William Manchester, was made by him to J. Edgar Hoover at 7:25 p.m. on Friday evening.72 He also conferred with Hoover from 9:10 to 9:25 p.m. that evening.73 However, there is no record of either call in Johnson’s official diary, nor has a tape of either conversation been made public. There is no question but that Johnson and Hoover talked frequently by telephone throughout the first several days and weeks after the assassination and that only a few of their conversations were actually taped. Readers are urged to view the video interview of Dr. Crenshaw on YouTube.com to consider his veracity, as compared to that of LBJ and his apologists. (See “LBJ’s Phone Call to Parkland Hospital.”)