LBJ
Page 84
11. Ibid., p. 631.
12. Summers, Official and Confidential, p. 314.
13. Turner, p. 95.
14. Scheim, p. 249.
15. Scott, p. 206; Marrs, p. 394.
16. Davis, John H. p. 403.
17. Scott, pp. 207–208.
18. Summers, Official and Confidential, p. 330.
19. Talbot, p. 268.
20. Lane , Plausible…,p. 54.
21. Russell, p. 491.
22. Ibid., p. 453.
23. Russo, p. 357.
24. Ibid. pp. 357–358.
25. Ibid. p. 358.
26. North, p. 398.
27. Ibid., pp. 398–399.
28. Ibid., pp. 399–400.
29. Ibid., p. 401.
30. Twyman, pp. 773–774.
31. Trask, Pictures …, pp. 80–81.
32. Ibid., p. 87.
33. Russell, On the Trail …, p. 34.
34. Ibid., p. 37.
35. Twyman, Noel, Bloody Treason (e-version), Appendix F.
36. Ibid. (see also Appendix G)
37. Kessler, The CIA … pp. 69–70.
38. Ibid. p. 70 (Ref. Burrows, Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security, Random House, 1986, p. 219).
39. Murder in Dealey Plaza, edited by James H. Fetzer, PhD, pp. 311–324.
40. Horne, Inside the ARRB … . Vol. IV, pp. 1230–1239.
41. Ibid.
42. Twyman, Appendix F (Mobipocket ebook) p. 2654 [1/2010].
43. Twyman, Appendix F [January 2010] (Ref. Russo, Live by the Sword, pp. 330–340).
44. Russo, pp. 339–340.
45. Ibid., p. 338.
46. Twyman, Appendix G (e-book version).
47. Twyman, pp. 154–160.
48. Horne, Inside the ARRB, Vol. IV, p. 1361.
49. Trask, p. 86.
50. Marrs, p. 482.
51. Horne, Inside the ARRB, Vol. IV, p. 1361.
52. Davis, Mafia Kingfish … p. 324
53. Garrison, pp. 163–164.
54. Russo, p. 402.
55. Garrison. pp. 164–165.
56. Hurt, p. 265; Weisberg, Oswald in New Orleans, p. 163.
57. Russo, p. 404.
58. Ibid. p. 402.
59. Ibid. p. 400 (Ref. Leo Janos, Atlantic Monthly, July 1973).
60. Garrison, pp. 173–174.
61. Playboy Magazine, vol. 14 no. 10, Interview with Jim Garrison, October 1967.
* There are numerous sources which validate the CIA’s fabrication of evidence. One example: Garrison, pp. 72–75.
62. Garrison, p. 273.
63. Ibid., pp. 273–274.
64. Holland, The Kennedy Assassination Tapes pp. 389–394 (Hear it on the Internet at: http://www.impiousdigest.com/index00.htm).
65. Crenshaw, p. 109.
66. Douglass, pp. 309–310 (Ref. Douglass’s interview with James Gochenaur and HSCA tape-recorded interview with Gochenaur May 10, 1977).
67. Douglass, p. 310 (Ref. Crenshaw, JFK: Conspiracy of Silence, pp. 153–154).
68. Manchester, p. 518.
69. Manchester, pp. 518–519.
70. Crenshaw, pp. 132–133.
71. Ibid.
72. Manchester, p. 405.
73. North, pp. 412–413.
74. Lasky, It Didn’t Start …, pp. 135–137.
75. North, p. 402.
76. Baker, Wheeling. p. 402.
77. Scott, p. 222 (ref. Gentry, Hoover, 559n; William W. Turner, Hoover’s FBI, Los Angeles: Sherbourne Press, 1970, p. 185; New York: Thunderís Mouth Press, 1993, p. 174.
78. Scott, pp. 221–222.
79. Lasky, It Didn’t Start …, p. 131 (citing John Barron, The Case of Bobby Baker and the Courageous Senator, The Reader’s Digest, September 1965).
80. Lasky, It Didn’t Start …, pp. 135–137.
81. Ibid., pp. 132–135.
82. Lasky, It Didn’t Start …, p. 131.
83. Mollenhoff, p. 313–314.
84. Mollenhoff, p. 312–316.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid., p. 312.
87. Curtis, pp. 243.
88. Ibid., pp. 312–313.
89. Hancock, p. 309.
90. Text and audio of tape on the Web site which accompanies the book by Robert D. Johnson, All the Way with LBJ: The 1964 Presidential Election (Cambridge University Press): “http://allthewaywithlbj.com/lbj-and-the-bobby-baker-scandal/”.
91. Perlstein, p. 309.
92. North, p. 109.
93. Winter-Berger, pp. 64–69.
94. Hancock, p. 315 (ref. Baker, Wheeling … p. 211)
95. Ibid. p. 316.
* This was, evidently, a reference to a service offered the party girls before Roe v. Wade made the procedure legal.
96. Mollenhoff, p. 315.
97. Time magazine, September 11, 1964. See: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,830631,00.html#ixzz0XmKQLfNs.
98. Time magazine, December 11, 1964. See: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,897373,00.html#ixzz0XmGG9TRO.
99. Time magazine, March 12, 1965. See http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,839285,00.html.
100. Time magazine July 9, 1965. See http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,833902,00.html.
101. Mollenhoff, p. 316.
102. Ibid.
103. Hersh, Seymour, The Dark Side of Camelot, pp. 406–407.
104. Lasky, It Didn’t Start …, p. 125.
105. Ibid., pp. 139–140.
* Though the Baker case was replete with sex angles, the fact was that Senator Williams never called on the Rules Committee to investigate them.
106. Ibid., pp. 140–141.
107. Ibid.
108. Baker, Bobby, p. 182.
109. Ibid., p. 272.
110. Oral history interview with Carl Curtis for the Johnson Library, October 3, 1978. Interviewer: Michael Gillette.
111. Curtis, Carl T., Forty Years against the Tide, p. 248.
112. Ibid.
113. Bobby Baker Trial Begins, Associated Press, January 10, 1967.
114. Pearson, Drew. Issues in Baker Trial, January 7, 1967.
115. Jack Ruby’s Press Conference: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we2eucWXqjg).
116. Ref. Jack Ruby—Part 2 @ 5:35 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDDxYOqyqlc&feature=related).
117. Marrs, Crossfire, pp. 430–431 (ref: Penn Jones, The Continuing Inquiry, November 22, 1978 and December 22, 1978).
118. Ibid., pp. 432–433.
119. Ibid., p. 432.
120. Coppens, This Is Not America p. 222.
121. Marrs, p. 431 (ref: Copy in files of researcher J. Gary Shaw).
122. Van Gelder, p. 19 (quoting from a press release dated March 26, 1964 from the “Office of the Attorney General”).
123. Ibid., p. 37.
124. Ibid., pp. 61–63.
125. Van Gelder, pp. 82–83.
126. Ibid., p. 31.
127. Ibid., p. 68.
128. Ibid.
129. Ibid., p. 91.
130. Ibid., pp. 123–124.
131. Van Gelder, 92.
132. Van Gelder, 72–73.
133. Also see McClellan, Exhibits A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H and I.
134. Marrs, p. 209.
135. Schlesinger, p. 701–702 f/n. (Ref. Howard K. Smith, ABC News Broadcast, 6/24/76).
136. Holland, Max, The Assassination Tapes. The Atlantic Magazine, June 2004.
137. Ibid.
138. Ibid.
139. Douglass, pp. 90–92.
140. Kaiser, David. pp. 288–290.
141. Ibid.
EPILOGUE
[When we pull out] of Vietnam in 1965: I’ll become one of the most unpopular presidents in history. I’ll be damned everywhere as a communist appeaser. But I don’t care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have a Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected.
&
nbsp; —JOHN F. KENNEDY
Just get me elected, and then you can have your war.
—LYNDON B. JOHNSON
(TO THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF AT A 1963 CHRISTMAS PARTY)
Summary
In the first several chapters of this book, we saw the innate defects of Lyndon Johnson’s character and how they were to become his most defining traits. His learned behavior—the manipulative skills, the ability to lay elaborate plans to accomplish his goals, the ingenuity of categorizing everyone by their weaknesses for future exploitation—coupled with his natural abilities and manic-driven quest to achieve his goals provided him the platform from which his entire career was launched.
By 1958, at the age of fifty, Lyndon B. Johnson had accomplished a nearly unbelievable rise to the pinnacle of political power in the United States, yet he had come to believe that the chasm between where he was—the majority leader of the U.S. Senate—and where he aspired to be was practically an impossible hurdle. His mentors in Congress, Representative Rayburn and Senator Russell, had convinced him that his Southern ties would prevent him from winning the presidency. By this time, his constant battles with the highs and lows brought on by his bipolar disorder—which grew unchecked by medical attention for the entire course of his political career—left him with a great fear of rejection, afraid to run for the office he had always been obsessed with achieving.
In 1960, he so feared losing the nomination for the presidency that he didn’t announce his candidacy, and did no campaigning, until five days before the Democratic convention. Even then, he seemed to know that the campaign was over before it started; his only hope of beating John Kennedy was exposing his health problems. However, that did not work inasmuch as he could not produce the “proof” that it required; that would risk revealing his source for the information. Other than the most negative attacks on JFK and his father, Johnson’s presidential “campaign” was virtually nonexistent.
In contrast to his presidential “noncampaign,” his campaign for the vice presidential nomination was stunning in its ferocity. The array of armaments he deployed in Los Angeles—for a position no one had ever before striven for—was formidable, unmistakably well planned, and precisely executed. He used every tactic imaginable, from the persuasive powers of Phil Graham and Sam Rayburn to the blackmail material from the files of J. Edgar Hoover to the use of threats and intimidation by Johnson himself. He vowed to kill any legislative initiatives Kennedy might ever send to the Hill. The overpowering blitz was so effective that it became an offer Kennedy “could not refuse.” Lyndon Johnson desperately wanted the vice presidential nomination—arguably a “step down” from his position as majority leader—because he knew it would be the only means by which he would ever reach the White House. In 1960, he was fifty-two years old; if Kennedy had lived and been reelected in 1964, by the end of his term in 1968, Johnson would have been sixty years old, almost the end of his expected life given his family history. That wouldn’t do; he knew he had to create another plan to ensure his ascendency before then.
During his almost three-year term as the vice president, Johnson would do everything he could to sabotage Kennedy behind his back. In foreign affairs, it included disagreements on Cuba and the Soviet Union and, most significantly, Vietnam. In the domestic arena, the primary issue was how he attempted to slow the progress of civil rights legislation and keep it as ineffective as possible, only months before he would reverse course and force congress to pass the most sweeping reforms in history.
His real objectives during the period 1961–63 were focused on taking high-level risks to continue his side businesses of selling the value of his political influence through associates, underworld figures, and lobbyists. He even compromised other administration officials to assist him to perpetuate these scandals, in one instance persuading Orville Freeman, the secretary of agriculture, to relax regulatory rules in order for his friend and benefactor Billie Sol Estes to carry out massive financial fraud. The traces of Johnson’s hand in the criminal activity of a number of men, culminating in that of Estes and Bobby Baker—including the murders of several men uniquely vulnerable to the will of only one man, Lyndon B. Johnson—lead to the inescapable conclusion that he was capable of the most heinous crimes imaginable. In Dallas that day, he had key men positioned such that they would be available at the right times and the right places to ensure the plan was well executed. Only two of them—Cliff Carter and Malcolm Wallace—would know what was really going on; the others on hand, Connally, Moyers, Jack Puterbaugh, and a few lesser aides, would not. They were only following what might have been, for anyone else, strange and inexplicable orders, such as Moyer’s assignment to request the removal of the bubble top that otherwise would have protected John F. Kennedy.
Johnson’s behind-the-scenes manipulation of his men to prepare for the complete suspension of ordinary protection of the president—and his secretive charter of men to be selected by Angleton and his associates, purposely done with limited knowledge of operational details on his own part—would create the scene of the crime and presence of the assailants on the last day possible for salvaging his career. His plans for “phase 2” were designed to sew up the investigation and use the Texas judicial system to pronounce the designated “lone nut” the guilty party. At any later time, his nemesis, Bobby Kennedy, would have closed in on him and served an indictment rather than merely feeding information to congressional committees and Life magazine. His last day for achieving his lifetime obsession was, ironically, also the last day for him to thwart his grandmother’s prognostication. Rather than end his lifetime in prison, as she had predicted, he would end it in the White House, in accordance with what he had always believed was his rightful destiny.
He had always favored the “lone nut” option since it would avoid the risk of World War III, an event which would certainly have carried with it the possibility of nuclear war, and of course the Soviets could be expected to aim their first missiles at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. However, there were many men at the highest levels of the military and intelligence organizations who preferred a head-on confrontation with these enemies, promising to annihilate them with a “first strike.” To keep that option on the shelf, multiple trails to the assassin would be planted in Dallas, New Orleans, and Mexico City to justify an immediate invasion of Cuba; this would serve the purpose of plan B (required in the event that a “conspiracy” was undeniable) but would need to be covered over in the event that plan A prevailed.
Other trails—the supposed mail-order purchase of guns which were allegedly shipped to Oswald’s post office box in Dallas (even though he had given no authorization for mail to “A. Hidell” at that location) and the newly created allegation that Oswald was the “shooter” of the retired right-wing General Walker—were so immediately established as to create the impression that they were just a little too convenient for reality. Since Oswald had not been immediately killed—and his voice, which had now been recorded, was clearly different than the “Oswald” voice recorded by the CIA—it quickly became apparent that the Castro-inspired conspiracy option had to be scuttled. As the new president settled in for the flight back to Washington, an impromptu decision was made which officially deemed Oswald the assassin; phase 2, the cover-up, was redirected to prove that the assassin was a poor misguided communist “lone nut,” and Castro had nothing to do with it.
Cliff Carter had already begun calling the Dallas authorities to tell them as much, starting with the instruction that “you have your man” and no further investigation was necessary. Allen Dulles, probably knowing the real source of the assassination, stood ready to lead the charge that it was indeed merely a “lone nut” who killed the president when he prepared his notes for the first meeting of the presidential commission. In the meantime, it was time to “heal the country” and put the matter aside while the official government commission did its work. The citizens were assured that the government was in good hands, and the leaks from the commission perform
ed their function of mollifying an entire population. The presidential commission dutifully returned its verdict: the dastardly deed was merely the work of a misguided fool and he had been killed by another misguided but patriotic citizen, and now, all the rest were safe from both of them. With that, the case was, almost, closed. The fact that it was not is testimony to the relentless work of hundreds of researchers and authors previously cited who have successfully dismantled the lie piece by piece.
The objectives set forth at the beginning of this book have been completed; Lyndon B. Johnson uniquely met every one of the criteria for evaluating who might have been behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy:
• Who had the most to gain?
• Who had the least to lose?
• Who had the means to do it?
• Who had the apparatus in place to subsequently cover it up? and
• Who had the kind of narcissistic/sociopathic personality capable of rationalizing the action as acceptable and necessary, together with the resolve and determination to see it through?
The massive body of information about the Kennedy assassination—including the hundreds or thousands of books, the materials collected by researchers for more than four decades, the partially released secret government files—have produced a more complete understanding of the forces, which culminated in Kennedy’s murder. Some of the evidence has been there all along, including the Altgens photograph taken two to three seconds after Kennedy was hit in the throat in one of the first shots. Most of the rest of it, as attested to by the books listed in the bibliography, have spanned the forty-five-year period 1964–2009, and it has emerged very slowly despite the best efforts of many people to obfuscate facts and cloud the memories of those who witnessed the actual event.
How does one begin to explain the persona of Lyndon Johnson? To start a description by saying he was the thirty-sixth president of the United States automatically evokes the respect normally accorded to a person who achieved that high and majestic office. That the path he took to achieve it was different than any other man before (or after) him is worthy of more than an asterisk. His ascendancy came on the back of John F. Kennedy, just as his engineered (albeit flawed) “legacy” was bought with IOUs from JFK’s bank of favors. His legacy should reflect his real persona: an egomaniacal, duplicitous politician dedicated only to his pursuit of the presidency; worse, it was only to satisfy his own vanity rather than for any altruistic, public-spirited, or patriotic reasons, though he sought to convince his “subjects” otherwise. His character should be at least partially defined by the ever-higher stolen elections all along the way—from his college days on through his clearly fraudulent election to the Senate in 1948—all of the steps in his ascendancy were tainted by fraud. His reputation as a magnanimous and gregarious respected world leader was as bogus as the voter fraud, illicit fund raising, and influence-peddling activities that “won” him his high offices. Historians credit him with his “people skills,” but if one looks beneath the semipolished veneer—beyond the Texas colloquialisms, past the bluntness and sarcasm, the gross and demeaning behavior to others, and the ruthless disregard for legal and moral boundaries—the man should be known for what he was: a world-class criminal whose own grandmother had him pegged since he was a child when she predicted that he would one day end up in the penitentiary.