LBJ

by Phillip F. Nelson

  Resolving the Unsolved Murders

  The series of murders for which Lyndon B. Johnson has been implicated were mostly committed in the 1960s, but the first two were in the early 1950s. A brief review of them is necessary in order to understand the context of how the future president of the United States apparently became involved in such extreme and despicable conduct. It should be observed that the early murders were sufficiently detached from Johnson so as to keep him at a safe distance by his attorney crony Ed Clark. While that would remain part of the modus operandi for the later murders, enough traces of his own hand and his direct motives would later appear to make the connections ever stronger until the final murder, that of John F. Kennedy. As one examines the details of each of the murders, the question inevitably arises, “Who would have had the motive to be behind this murder?” The answer, insofar as anyone else who might have had a motive, will of course vary by the individual victim. But when the focus is adjusted to a macro level—the entire group of the murdered people previously named—there is really only one person who would have conceivably benefited by all of them. The invisible hand of Lyndon B. Johnson can be seen behind each murder described: from Doug Kinser in 1951 to his own sister Josefa in 1961 (both intended to keep Josefa out of the news, which might expose himself to ridicule, a career-ending scandal, or the penitentiary). The remaining murders (except for the last one, of course) were of men connected to the Billie Sol Estes scandals, which were inexorably linked to Johnson because they had threatened to implicate him directly in fraud against the government as well as a number of businessmen. This, of course, would mean a prison term for him; but worse, in his view, was the loss of any possibility of him becoming president, which in his mind was his lifetime destiny.

  The fact that he was never charged or convicted of them should be considered a mere technicality, just as others who have committed murder but were never convicted of them; due to other failures of the justice system, Johnson “got off.” The random effectiveness of the American system of justice—which in the case of Johnson allowed him to continue enjoying his freedom to engage in ever higher, more deadly lawlessness and evade justice—should not mitigate the validity of arguments demonstrating that he was, nevertheless, guilty of numerous crimes. The evidence against Johnson is admittedly of a “hearsay” and circumstantial nature, thanks to his success at the time in having it suppressed. Nevertheless, many people have been convicted of murder on far less such evidence, in some cases, even in the absence of the body and/or the murder weapon. In the murders of the people who uniformly got into Johnson’s way—and only Johnson, in the context of the entire group—the bodies were found, but the evidence was manipulated in such a way as to protect him from prosecution.

  In the last one, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson would clearly have a bigger, more obvious motive than anyone else. In fact, his motive—coupled with those of the various accomplices noted within—would dwarf those of the hapless Lee Harvey Oswald. The motive of the president’s accused killer, despite the enormous creativity of the Warren Commission and its staff to try to invent one, was never established. He had none; in fact, he had left several indications, as noted elsewhere, that he actually liked Kennedy. While it is impossible now to convict Johnson of the earlier murders, that should not be considered as an impediment to consider all of them—they all remain open, “unsolved cold cases”—as specific intrinsic evidence of a pattern. If the use of murder as a tool to accomplish his objectives during desperate times worked effectively once then twice and again and again, it follows that the use of the same tool could be rationalized by an obsessive and sociopathic mind to gain the object of his lifetime goal.

  During his time as president, of course, Johnson had never consulted a psychiatrist, but he did in the final months of his life because the burden of carrying his crimes evidently became too much for him. According to his one-time attorney whose insights into Johnson’s persona were described in his book, Blood, Money & Power, Barr McClellan stated that a trust arrangement was negotiated for the psychiatrist who treated Johnson to define what was to be considered privileged, but that after his death, and Lady Bird’s death, he would be in a position to reveal his findings, though that has never been done. According to McClellan’s insights into what Johnson told his attorney Don Thomas, it was understood that Johnson told Thomas about all the previous murders, as well as the assassination of Kennedy. He cited the investigations launched by Bobby into his criminal past and how they were closing in on him, closing out all of his options, as well as the Congressional hearings that were doing the same.1

  The matter of Lyndon Johnson’s mental health will be considered further below as it lies at the center of his successful political rise over nearly four decades to the same extent as his dramatic fall, which began immediately after being elected in the greatest landslide victory of all time. The events which the reader has become familiar with since the first pages of this book require one to reconsider Johnson’s widely held public persona and the high esteem in which he is still held in many quarters. An honest evaluation of Johnson’s actual imprint on American history requires one to consider this other evidence, which is not presently widely known about his past. Most historians and biographers prefer to avoid any allegation against him unless it can be proven through court documents, which show that a properly adjudicated legal case established the allegation as absolute fact, or have multiple credible sources for every assertion made against him; to dismiss the assertions of Madeleine Brown and Billie Sol Estes among others because they are considered disreputable—despite the fact that their statements are consistent and believable given the independently verifiable supporting material and witnesses—is to ignore substantive, provable information bearing on Johnson’s involvement. If anyone should be considered disreputable, it should be Johnson himself based upon his proven record of the most outrageous lies and deceits, a summary of which appears throughout this book. Everything he accomplished—not the least of which, his “presidential commission”—should be examined with a jaundiced eye approach wherein everything he considered as “fact” is assumed to be suspect.

  Given Johnson’s single-minded obsession with becoming president of the United States and the intensity of his resolve to achieve it—seemingly catapulted to higher and higher levels each time he repeated it, to himself or, occasionally, others—he is clearly the single individual most responsible for setting the assassination forces in motion. He would not have been able to achieve his objective without the willingness of others, many of whom, admittedly, may have already begun plotting on their own. But the others, whether they were high or low in the pecking order, acting from their base as a renegade CIA, FBI, or Secret Service member, disaffected Cuban exile or Mafia leader, were not in a position to ensure that they would get away with the crime. Only one person had the wherewithal to accomplish that. The totality of the evidence points toward Lyndon Johnson as the primary instigator, the uniquely positioned single person behind all the forces which led to John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The twin “keystones” of this mass of evidence detailed in earlier chapters become clear only when they are juxtaposed together; then they become the compelling “smoking gun” which moves the circumstantial evidence from being merely “persuasive” to “convincing” and beyond a reasonable doubt:

  • The statements of motorcycle patrolman B. J. Martin, who stated that according to the guys who were escorting his car in the motorcade … [Johnson] started ducking down in the car a good 30 or 40 seconds before the first shots were fired … One of them told McGuire he saw Johnson duck down even before the car turned onto Houston Street, and he sure as hell wasn’t laughing when he said it.

  • The Altgens photograph taken a few seconds after Kennedy was shot shows clearly that practically no one else had reacted except for Kennedy himself as he instinctively tried to grab his own neck. A closer examination, however, shows that one person had already reacted by disa
ppearing below the seatbacks even before the first shot, thus providing clear photographic evidence of the veracity of Patrolman Martin’s statement.

  It is said that the “best evidence”—in terms of the prosecution of a legal case—is that which is most certain, and the example generally used is photographic evidence that has not been tampered with. The Altgens photograph, arguably the single most famous still photograph of the assassination, has been there all along and would have been impossible to have been altered. Johnson himself probably noticed its implications and would have therefore liked to get it altered if he could to put himself back in it. Since that was obviously not possible—having it cropped to eliminate him and the car he was in—a censored version was entered as evidence for the Warren Commission. The police testimony, although now considered hearsay, would have been admissible at the time if given under oath soon after the crime. But that was, of course, not done because there was no real investigation and the perpetrator of the crime had become the de facto chief justice of the land, having displaced the official chief justice of the Supreme Court to temporarily head the kangaroo court established to cover up the “crime of the century.”

  There is only one realistic explanation which fits all of the real facts of JFK’s assassination, including Lyndon Johnson’s absence from the Altgens photograph: he knew that Dealey Plaza was to be the killing zone. As soon as the motorcade turned on to Elm Street, he knew that bullets would be flying from three different directions. It also explains the heated argument he had with Kennedy at the hotel the morning of the assassination as he tried to replace Connally with Yarborough in the president’s car; he tried to avoid putting his friend Connally in the line of fire but had no problem with having the hated Yarborough sitting in front of Kennedy. He knew the shots would all be aimed toward JFK; however, he was also aware that he had his own enemies, and he couldn’t count on not being in the line of fire himself, even for an accidental missed shot. So he did what he had to do: he ducked, either through earlier well-thought-out planning or as a last-minute instinctive self-preservation act, even before the first shot was fired, which explains why he was so nervous throughout the motorcade.

  Johnson’s unseen hand, in the form of many of his aides and accomplices, was actively controlling the Dallas motorcade route (Puterbaugh), the change in motorcycle police protection (Rowley, Boring, Roberts, and Puterbaugh), the removal of the bubble top (Moyers), as well as halting the Dallas investigation (Carter) within hours and the FBI investigation (Hoover) within days. Ensuring that the final verdict of guilt would be assigned to the now-dead “lone nut” would also come from men completely under his control; that objective—originally intended for a Texas venue, changed in midcourse to the more venerated but equally controllable federal level—was the pièce de résistance of his entire plan. The evidence of all of these facts, along with all the other circumstantial evidence presented here, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Lyndon B. Johnson, at the very least, had foreknowledge of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. More than any other person, he had the means, motive, and opportunity to have been the singular key conspirator-instigator and the mastermind of the operation. The factual evidence presented here renders the long-debated official conclusions suspect because so much of it is simply part of the lie created by Johnson. Accepting this premise means that many of the cover-up actions once considered as too unbelievable must now be considered as the most plausible accounts. Such factually supported assertions can be summarized as follows:

  • A widely based conspiracy existed to assassinate Kennedy, including the involvement of a number of Secret Service personnel—as well as a number of “fake” Secret Service agents—to eliminate normal protection of the president in the Dallas motorcade.

  • The Zapruder film, and other films and photographs, were altered for the purpose of showing that Kennedy was shot only twice from behind, through deletion of frames showing his brains being blown out the back of his head—which was the same footage that showed how the limousine stopped momentarily as the fatal shots hit Kennedy’s head—false debris was “painted in” to attempt to portray the brain matter being ejected upward instead.

  • Johnson ordered his personal aide Carter to pressure Dallas Assistant DA Alexander and DA Wade to not charge Oswald with “conspiracy.” It was at this point that he clearly had reached a decision to drop the “Castro did it” option, for which much evidence had been created, and go with the “lone nut” option.

  • The body of JFK was taken at gunpoint—as only a “presidential” directive could have assured—away from Parkland Hospital before a real autopsy could be performed then later removed from the heavy bronze funeral casket and subjected to alterations to also show that shots came only from the rear.

  • Autopsy records, photographs, and x-ray film have been destroyed and replaced with fabrications on Johnson’s orders. As Larry Hancock pointed out, “In a [1967] conversation with attorney General Ramsey Clark, Johnson expressed his displeasure with Dr. James Humes’ referring to a photograph that did not officially exist.”*

  • Also as shown by Larry Hancock, Johnson “personally issued orders to place Bethesda personnel under a gag order in regard to the autopsy; Captain John Stover, commanding Officer of the National Naval Medical School, reportedly received this instruction from Admiral Buckley on orders from the White House.”2

  • As previously documented, much of the “evidence” used by the Warren Commission was fraudulent, just as many of the witnesses it used threatened to provide incorrect testimony to support its predetermined verdict. Only a well-defined comprehensive plan established well in advance of the operation could possibly have ensured this result.

  • In the aftermath of the assassination, the “invisible hand” quickly produced a “verdict” for the hapless “patsy” followed by a curtailed and corrupted “investigation,” which was given over to a commission which completely accepted the tainted FBI reports, added their own distorted analysis, and fabricated evidence based largely on the most incredible witnesses—creating fanciful if outrageously absurd “theories” in the process—and dutifully added the imprimatur of the U.S. government to its report back to the instigator of the entire crime; only Lyndon B. Johnson was in a position to control every aspect of the pre- and postassassination conspiracies.

  Eleven years after the assassination, New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh interviewed James Angleton, who made a rather enigmatic and cryptic remark which seemed to be an acknowledgement of sorts of CIA involvement in the assassination. David Talbot describes Hersh’s comments about that incident:3

  “A mansion has many rooms … I’m not privy to who struck John.What did the cryptic remark mean? I would be absolutely misleading you if I thought I had any fucking idea,” says Hersh today. “But my instinct about it is he basically was laying off [blame] on somebody else inside the CIA, and the whole purpose of the conversation was to convince me to go after somebody else and not him. And also that he was a completely crazy fucking old fart.”

  The preponderance of the evidence at this point in time indicates that James Angleton was deeply involved in the preassassination conspiracy in many ways as previously described but clearly with respect to moving Lee Harvey Oswald into position. The postassassination cover-up appears to have been handled primarily by Allen Dulles and Richard Helms. Perhaps this division of responsibilities was all worked out in advance, within the “many rooms” of the big mansion in Langley. There were many people put into long-term positions, which enabled them to control the Johnson “legacy” for decades, including a number who were employed in Langley, Virginia. One of them was Johnson’s long-term secretary, Marie Fehmer, who acknowledged being a high-ranking CIA officer in 1989 to Jane Pauley on the Today show, having moved directly from the White House to her new position at the end of Johnson’s term. Interestingly, her mother Olga Fehmer had been a friend of Mrs. George (Jeanne) de Mohrenschildt and Abraham Zapruder, all of whom worked t
ogheter at Nardis of Dallas in the 1950s.4

  In his reconciliation of his own book with that of Doug Horne’s, Noel Twyman wrote, “Doug Horne concludes that ‘the National Security State killed President Kennedy …’ I can’t argue much with him on that, but it could not have happened without bringing Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover into the plot before the fact, if they were not themselves the master planners, along with H. L. Hunt, General Charles Willoughby, CIA’s Bill Harvey, James Angleton, and the French Connection—but this isn’t the National Security State—at least as I think of the term—[is it] a question of semantics, perhaps? Maybe it’s what the National Security State could sink to if given the necessary evil people in the right positions, and in the right circumstances.”5 The closeness of Twyman’s and Horne’s conclusions are now narrowed down to “a question of semantics,” and the combination of their views is essentially congruent with the conclusions of this book; it may be that the assassination was indeed the product of a “national security state,” but if so, the head of that entity in 1963 was arguably Lyndon B. Johnson, carrying out a plan he first conceived at least in 1960, if not before. It is this key point that becomes the key to the “chicken or egg” question. Lyndon Johnson’s planning began well before John F. Kennedy was even nominated to become president, and much before JFK’s actions in the Bay of Pigs, the Cuba missile crisis, the Laos and Vietnam issues, his “peace speech” and the nuclear test ban treaty had thoroughly upset the many men who came to question his ability to run the federal government apparatus of the United States.