In March 1964, Jacqueline Kennedy and Robert Kennedy entered into an agreement with author William Manchester to write “an extensive account describing the events of and surrounding the death of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963.”122 The reporters covering this announcement had no idea of the disaster that was about to ensue. That result was almost guaranteed by the looseness and ambiguity of the letter of understanding written by Robert Kennedy, the top legal official of the United States having a staff of thousands of attorneys, and signed by the author he had chosen for the project. Later correspondence between the two continued the confusion, including a telegram sent by RFK, which stated that “members of the Kennedy family will place no obstacle in the way of publication of his work.”123
The entire controversy stemmed from Manchester’s account of Lyndon Johnson’s behavior after the assassination, including his taking over Air Force One, then forcing Mrs. Kennedy to participate in his swearing in ceremony. The Kennedys did not want the unvarnished truth revealed because it would only exacerbate the poor relationship between them and Johnson, and run the risk of harming Robert Kennedy’s image and political career. As the controversy became public, Bobby’s prescience on that point proved to be correct, but not in the way he feared; instead, he came to be seen as a ruthless, vindictive, mean-spirited man who would countenance “book burning” where it suited his needs. Johnson, ironically, was seen as the hapless victim of the Kennedy’s stridency, despite the fact that it was his own boorish behavior and his rude, insensitive, and arrogant actions that caused the rift in the first place.
Though William Manchester made a number of mistakes in the epic account he rushed to have published , his account is veritable and almost intact, in spite of tremendous pressure on him to delete much of his treatment of Johnson. Ultimately, he agreed to some changes “in passages deemed distasteful by Mrs. Kennedy” to soften the criticisms of Johnson. But the early changes proved to be inadequate to appease them, even though they had personally not reviewed the manuscript. It was clear that Manchester had correctly described Johnson’s actions; however, the changes requested were based on political points, which RFK’s strategists (including Richard Goodwin, Edwin Guthman, John Seigenthaler, Pierre Salinger, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Theodore Sorensen) had asked for, before excerpts were published in Look magazine. Lawrence Van Gelder described the tension between the Kennedys, Johnson, and Manchester in his book, Why the Kennedys Lost the Book Battle:
In the first installment, the Kennedy strategists sought changes affecting 288 words; in the second, 270; in the third, 2,737; and in the fourth, 3,177. It was clear that the deletions sought were proportional to Lyndon Johnson’s mounting prominence in the narrative. Johnson had not been interviewed by Manchester. Two appointments were made, then cancelled. Johnson did, however, see written questions from Manchester. He did not answer all of them. His testimony before the Warren Commission had not stressed any friction aboard Air Force One … Kennedy told Manchester, the author said later, that Sorensen had advised him to file suit because the manuscript endangered his political future … . But efforts to induce Manchester to change his manuscript did not cease … . the author said there came what he later called “the largest wave, of 111—the suggestion that 111 passages be deleted. These were clearly political. They were not made by the Senator, who had not read the manuscript, but by one of his representatives … .” “Of course,” the author said later, “we were still cutting. But with these people when you cut something, nobody ever says, ‘Thank you.’ They look at the rest and try to think: ‘What else can we cut now.’”124
In the end, Jacqueline Kennedy got the most important deletions she had asked for, including a significant softening of Johnson’s demand that she appear and be photographed for his swearing-in ceremony. Altogether, Manchester agreed to delete a total of seven pages from the book at Mrs. Kennedy’s request.125 It should be noted that Manchester had already eliminated two hundred pages, “which I felt was personal or which would injure the prestige of people now in public office.”126 When he originally wrote Mrs. Kennedy after completing the book, he admitted that, “I tried desperately to suppress my bias against a certain eminent statesman who always reminded me of someone in a grade-D movie on the Late Show, the prejudice showed through …”127 (Emphasis added.) Author Van Gelder allowed that “there was little doubt about the identity of the unnamed person.”128 Ironically, it was Lyndon Johnson who had created the animosity which caused the controversies Manchester recorded, yet it was also he who benefited from the public reaction against this account, apparently because it was considered unnecessarily harsh and unfair to the new president. Once again, Johnson escaped the elusive atonement which he richly deserved because of the public’s disbelief that his behavior could have been as bad as Manchester had apparently presented it. Johnson had Moyers, Reedy, and others pull all the strings they could to turn the situation around within the press corps; he knew that, as president, he would automatically be imbued with the deference that automatically attaches to the presidency, which was the biggest prize of all: an unlimited supply of “benefit of the doubt,” which for him was the currency he had used throughout his lifetime.
Harper and Row published the reedited Death of a President, and it became a best seller. Look set new records for magazine sales in its serialization of the book. William Manchester banked $650,000 in 1967 and obtained new book contracts for future revenue. Robert Kennedy got nothing except a drop in his favorable polling numbers, which had been on the ascendancy for the two previous years. “It was Robert Kennedy who bore the brunt of public outrage and whose future was drastically altered by the dispute.”129 While getting no concessions from Manchester, RFK also “lost prestige among the liberals, who considered him a book burner and were chagrined at the revelation, that same month, of Kennedy’s role as a wire-tapper [of Martin Luther King]. The newly wooed Southerners, particularly in Texas, resented Manchester’s portrayal of Dallas as a spawning ground for violent psychotics. Party leaders around the country … now viewed Kennedy as a bungler or worse. ‘I never thought much of Lyndon,’ explained one leading Texas Democrat. ‘But now I understand what he’s gone through. The Kennedys have so displayed that they’ve put their ambitions ahead of patriotism, I’m obsessed with the necessity to support Lyndon.’”130 Such a sentiment—to say that one “now understands what Lyndon has gone through”—is sad indeed.
Ultimately, Manchester agreed to withhold the censored pages for 100 years, until the year 2067. According to author Van Gelder, the material in these pages indicates that it “dealt almost entirely with Johnson: his part in the events of Novmber 22, 1963; his relationships with members of the Kennedy family; his image as a crude and boorish Texas cowboy, wiping his muddy boots in the halls of Camelot.”131 Some of the specific points included, among other things:132
“members of the Kennedy party—in effect holding Johnson responsible for the assassination—refused to sit with him on the return flight from Dallas; that he had been brusquely blocked off from the coffin when the plane landed at Andrews AFB; that his general conduct toward Mrs. Kennedy on the plane was heavy-handed; that he had insisted she appear for his oath-taking and prior to the settlement of the lawsuit, it was leaked that Schlesinger—within hours after the assassination—had inquired about dumping Johnson as a candidate in 1964.”
Whatever might have prompted Schlesinger’s actions to try to dump Johnson will apparently never be known, at least until 2067, if even then. Manchester’s agreement with the Kennedys was to keep the deleted pages under seal for one hundred (100) years; perhaps my grandson, born in 2007, will still be around to discover what was so damaging to the 1967 relationship between Lyndon Johnson, Bobby, and Jacqueline Kennedy that required these deleted pages to be withheld from the public for that long. It is likely that those deleted passages contain great insights into Johnson’s role based upon his immediate actions after the assassination.
The Wallace Fingerprint: Identifi
ed Thirty-five Years Later …
The primary role of Johnson’s hit man, Mac Wallace, was to ensure that the “right” shells were in place and all others on that floor were picked up. Wallace’s fingerprint was identified three decades later as being a “match” to one left on a box in the sniper’s nest. Researcher/author Walt Brown called a press conference in Dallas in May 1998 to announce that a previously unidentified fingerprint at the “sniper’s nest” had been linked to Malcolm Wallace by an expert fingerprinting analyst. Using the 1951 fingerprints from Malcolm Wallace’s arrest for the murder of Doug Kinser, a certified fingerprint examiner, A. Nathan Darby, positively matched Wallace’s print with a copy of a fingerprint labeled “Unknown,” which had been lifted the day of the assassination from a carton by the southeast sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. This carton was labeled “box A,” and also contained several fingerprints identified as those of Lee Harvey Oswald. Mr. Darby, a member of the International Association of Identifiers, signed a sworn, notarized affidavit stating that he was able to affirm a 14-point match between the “Unknown” fingerprint and the “blind” print card submitted to him. The generally accepted standard requires only a 12-point match for legal identification. Since cardboard does not retain fingerprints for very long, it is clear that Malcolm E. Wallace had left his fingerprint on “box A” on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository early on November 22, 1963.133
Critics of this identification have said that there was too much missing from the partial fingerprint being studied to attach 100 percent certainty to the results despite Darby’s unequivocal certitude. For this reason, the evidence has never been conclusively settled one way or the other during the intervening twelve years; one reason for that may be because neither the FBI nor the Texas DPS will release the fingerprints for further testing in the absence of a specific pending case to attach it to. Evidently, solving the murder of a former president is not sufficient justification for the release of this public record.
Lyndon Johnson’s Gamesmanship
In 1967, Marvin Watson, a Johnson aide, confided to an FBI official that his boss now felt that there was conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy. The FBI official wrote: “[Johnson] was now convinced there was a plot in connection with the assassination. Watson stated the president felt that CIA had something to do with this plot.”134 In the fall of 1968, shortly before he would leave the White House for good, Johnson volunteered a piece of information to the ABC newsman Howard K. Smith: “I’ll tell you something [about John Kennedy’s murder] that will rock you,” he said. “Kennedy was trying to get to Castro, but Castro got to him first.” “I was rocked, all right,” Smith later recalled; he begged for details. But Johnson refused to provide any, saying only, “It will all come out one day.”135
Six months after Johnson’s death, The Atlantic published an article by one of his former speechwriters, then a Time bureau chief, Leo Janos, The Death of the President. The interview, taken toward the end of Johnson’s life, was done with the understanding that the end was coming soon. Johnson made a comment that would expand on his statement made five years earlier to Howard K. Smith. Johnson told Janos that in his opinion, President Kennedy’s assassination had been the result of a conspiracy organized within Cuba in retaliation for the various U.S. plots against Castro. “I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger,” he said to Janos.136 Additionally, he said that once taking office, he had discovered that the CIA “had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.”137
Between these three rather provocative canards, Johnson had planted three distinct potential geneses of the plot: the CIA acting alone, Castro, and the Mafia in cahoots with the CIA. They were the primary three theories being discussed at the time, including at Jim Garrison’s trial of Clay Shaw. As with practically everything else Johnson had ever said, there was a “self-serving” aspect to these comments; in this case, he was simply trying to divert attention from himself and toward other, mutually exclusive, alternatives. In the first statement to Janos, he said, “I never believed that Oswald acted alone …” (Emphasis added.) That means that he lied to the American public multiple times (not surprisingly or out of character, of course) presumably to keep from alarming the country. If he never believed his own Warren Commission, then he was with the majority opinion on that issue, but that begs the question: Who then might have been behind it? If he meant in the latter part of the statement exactly what he said, that he stumbled upon this information about assassination attempts on Castro after he became president, the implication is that all of this was a complete surprise to him. That is highly unlikely, considering the number of confidants and back channels he had throughout the Pentagon, the CIA, FBI, and other intelligence agencies. He would have surely been aware of these incidents, at least right after they had been deployed, if not before. It has been reported that within the administration after the Bay of Pigs, it was common knowledge that President Kennedy made his brother the driving force behind the effort to overthrow Castro.138 Johnson was certainly part of that administration; even though he was kept at bay by many insiders, he still had many other contacts who would have made him aware of activities by his nemesis, Robert F. Kennedy. While it is possible he did not know of Robert Kennedy’s most secret plans in 1963, to think that he was unaware of the previous efforts against Castro before his taped conversation with Ramsey Clark on March 2, 1967, and another with John Connally on March 13, 1967, would require a complete suspension of disbelief.
Giving him the “benefit of the doubt” on that point, and assuming he really believed that Castro was behind the assassination, suggests that he purposely ignored even the possibility of a retaliatory attack by a Communist country ninety miles from the U.S. shore. Against such a “real threat” next door, the subsequent bullying and bellicose threats which would soon lead to an all-out war with a nonthreatening third world country nine thousand miles away—under the full force of American military power over the ensuing decade, at an enormous loss of life and limb to our soldiers, sailors, and airmen—makes even less sense. As troubling as all of that is, it is even more disturbing when one considers the juxtaposition of these two separately unfolding policies as they occurred in real time, beginning in November 1963 and continuing throughout the end of his term in 1968. Castro, for his part, made a number of entreaties to Johnson through William Attwood and Lisa Howard, who were the still-active “back channel” conduits through which Kennedy had tried to negotiate privately with Castro; Johnson ignored these attempts and continued ignoring Castro. His UN Ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, also tried to get Johnson to make an effort to resume communications, to no avail. Castro then enlisted the help of his Cuban Minister of Industry, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who met with Eugene McCarthy at Lisa Howard’s New York apartment in December 1964 to try to establish a relationship: Johnson ignored that as well.139
Lyndon Johnson showed little interest in dealing with, or removing, Fidel Castro. He told Dean Rusk, Maxwell Taylor, and John McCone a week after the assassination, on December 2, 1963, that South Vietnam is “our most critical military area right now.”140 Furthermore, according to David Kaiser, Johnson “never seriously considered the alternatives of neutralization and withdrawal (from Vietnam). Johnson, in short, accepted the premises of the policies that had been developed under Eisenhower—premises whose consequences Kennedy had consistently refused to accept for three years.”141 The real reason for Johnson making his stand in Vietnam, rather than Cuba, may have been as simple as his not wanting to give Robert Kennedy the satisfaction of taking action toward an invasion of Cuba. As absurd as that might sound, it is entirely consistent with all the other actions Johnson ever took, nearly always based on the narrow trajectory of what was best for himself, personally, as demonstrated repeatedly throughout this text.
His last statements regarding the assassination were simply intended as yet another smoke screen
or puzzle for those who write history books to interpret. He made this statement knowing that most people held the view that there had been a conspiracy even though there were many different ones from which to choose. This was simply another attempt by him to muddy the water by selecting the one he thought was most salable in the hope that posterity would come to settle on that one, thus deflecting the real one—the factual one which he feared that someone would figure out and might someday become established as the one most commonly held. In other words, he was simply planning to game the system for eternity, just as he had so expertly done for his entire forty-plus-year career. He probably went to his grave thinking that his superior intellect and manipulative skills—including his treasured “Johnson treatment”—would continue protecting his reputation well after his death. Just as George Reedy would eventually explain for posterity, Johnson would tell a story that he had come to believe was the truth; if he really believed it, and if everyone else believed it too, then wouldn’t it become official history, what all those nitpicking journalists and historians would pass on as representing the truth?
1. Manchester, p. 453.
2. Ibid.
3. Russo, p. 383 (Ref. David, Lester and Irene David. Bobby Kennedy, The Making of a Folk Hero. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1986, p. 215).
4. Ibid.
5. Manchester. pp. 454–455.
6. Manchester, pp. 454–455.
7. Hancock, pp. 290–291 (ref. Smith, The Unknown CIA; My Three Decades with the Agency, Potomac Books, 1989, p. 163.
8. See “Bullet Holes in the limousine and extra bullets in Dealey Plaza (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtFoPCKVp-8&feature=player_embedded).
9. See Kennedy Assassination Chronicles: www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive.
10. See youtube.com: Limo to Detroit, Parts 1 and 2.
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