by Russ Baker
LBJ had numerous connections with the Bushes. One came through Poppy’s business partners Hugh and William Liedtke, who probably knew LBJ even before they knew Bush. While in law school in Austin, the Liedtkes had rented the servants’ quarters of Johnson’s home. (At the time, the main house was occupied by future Democratic governor John Connally, a protégé of Johnson’s.20) Another connection came through Senator Prescott Bush, whose conservative Republican values often dovetailed with those of Johnson during the years when LBJ served as the Democrats’ majority leader. After Johnson ascended to the presidency, he and newly elected congressman Poppy Bush were often allies on such issues as the oil depletion allowance and the war in Vietnam.
The Texas Raj, as it has been called, was a tight and ingrown world. Denizens sat on one another’s boards, fraternized in each other’s clubs, and intermarried within a small circle, with most of the ceremonies being held in the same handful of churches. Whether one was nominally a Democrat or Republican did not much matter. They all shared an enthusiasm for the anything-goes capitalism that had made them rich, and a deep aversion to what was known in the local dialect as “government inference.” That meant anything the government did—such as environmental rules or antitrust investigations—that did not constitute a favor or bestowal.
The man who perhaps loomed largest in this world is also among the least well known. His name was Everette DeGolyer, and he and his son-in-law George McGhee represented, to a unique degree, the ongoing influence that the oil industry has had on the White House, irrespective of the occupant. They were also allies of the Bushes. In addition to his consulting firm DeGolyer-MacNaughton, DeGolyer founded Geophysical Service Inc., which later became Texas Instruments, and was a pioneer in technologies that became central to the industry, such as aerial exploration and the use of seismographic equipment in prospecting. His career spanned the terms of eight American presidents, many of whom he knew; he was also on close terms with many Anglo-European oil figures and leaders of the Arab world. He sat on the board of Dresser Industries for many years, and, as we shall see in chapter 13, played a central role in cementing the U.S.-Saudi oil relationship. Until he died in 1956, DeGolyer was the man you went to if you wanted to get into the oil and gas game. The intelligence agencies sought him out as well.
DeGolyer’s son-in-law, the husky and voluble George McGhee, was the son of a bank president from Waco, with a career trajectory similar to Poppy Bush’s: Phi Beta Kappa, Rhodes scholarship (offered but not accepted in Poppy’s case), and naval service in the Pacific, followed by work in Washington on the War Production Board. McGhee also sat on the board of James and William Buckley’s family firm, Pantepec Oil, which employed George de Mohrenschildt, whom McGhee knew personally. Both McGhee and de Mohrenschildt were active in Neil Mallon’s Dallas Council on World Affairs. After the war, McGhee served as assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs.
“The Middle East had the one greatest capacity of oil in the world and was extremely valuable,” McGhee said in an oral history interview. “When I was assistant secretary of state, I dealt with this issue.”21 In 1951 he spent eighty hours at the bedside of Iran’s prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh in an attempt to mediate the terms of own ership for the Anglo-Ira nian Oil Company.22 Two years after their unsuccessful talks, Mossadegh was overthrown in a CIA-led coup. Time and again, McGhee “was on the front lines in the early crises that defined the Cold War,” according to Daniel Yergin, author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power.
McGhee became a protégé of Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, even serving in 1959 as chairman of the Dallas County LBJ for President Club. When LBJ became vice president, he oversaw McGhee’s appointment as undersecretary of state for political affairs. McGhee’s elevation to one of the top posts in the State Department particularly annoyed Robert Kennedy, who managed to get him reassigned as ambassador to West Germany. McGhee “was useless,” said RFK. “In every conversation you had with him, you couldn’t possibly understand what he was saying.”23 Needless to say, McGhee did not become a member of the Bobby Kennedy fan club.
In many respects, Bobby became the lightning rod for the hostility that Jack deflected with his charm. Bobby did not shrink from the role of enforcer. For as long as Jack remained president—and in 1963 a second term seemed likely—Bobby would have the sheriff’s badge. And even worse was the prospect that the Kennedys could become a dynasty. After Jack there might be Bobby; and after Bobby, Ted. It was not an appealing prospect to the Bushes and their circle; and it is only stating the obvious to observe that this was not a group to suffer setbacks with a fatalistic shrug.
The Kennedy administration struck at the heart of the Southern establishment’s growing wealth and power. Not only did it attack the oil depletion allowance, but its support of the civil rights movement threatened to undermine the cheap labor that supported Southern industry. Yet in the space of five years, Jack and Bobby Kennedy were dead, and the prospect of a Kennedy political dynasty had been snuffed out. Instead, within a dozen years of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, a new conservative dynasty was beginning to emerge: the House of Bush.
That the president of the United States, not to mention a senator and presidential candidate, could be assassinated by domestic enemies does not sit easily in the American mind. We want to believe in our institutions and in the order they embody. It is unnerving to even consider the possibility that the most powerful among us might deem themselves exempt from the rules in such a fundamental way. Yet, the leaders of these same institutions have frequently seen nothing wrong with assassinating leaders in other countries, even democratically elected ones. The CIA condoned, connived at, or indeed took an active role in assassination plots and coups against figures as varied as Guatemala’s Arbenz, the Dominican Republic’s Trujillo, Congo’s Lumumba, Chile’s Allende, Cuba’s Castro, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Iran’s Mossadegh, and Vietnam’s Diem. Is it that difficult to believe that those who viewed assassination as a policy tool would use it at home, where the sense of grievance and the threat to their interests was even greater?
One of the assassination enthusiasts, at least where foreign leaders were concerned, was George McGhee, who served the State Department in two places ruled by leaders who became targets: Patrice Lumumba and Rafael Trujillo. As the Washington Post wrote in McGhee’s obituary: “In the early 1960s, as undersecretary for political affairs, Dr. McGhee was dispatched to Congo and the Dominican Republic when the instability of civil wars and unaccountable governments threatened to destabilize the peace.”24 Some years before McGhee’s death, a JFK assassination researcher asked him in writing if he had had a role in Trujillo’s death. McGhee wrote back that while he had not, the assassination “was not a problem for me.”25
Prepping a Patsy?
For a nation traumatized by the death of John F. Kennedy, the notion that a rootless and disturbed individual could murder the president was troubling enough—but far less troubling to contemplate than the alternative possibility, that the assassination was part of a larger plot. The arrest and subsequent murder of Lee Harvey Oswald provided, in today’s jargon, a grim kind of “closure” for the public, one elaborately ratified by the Warren Commission. To probe into the nexus of interests that benefited from Kennedy’s death and its connection to the events of November 22—well, that would be the opposite of closure. The figure of Oswald, the lone gunman, was a highly questionable fit with the evidence, but neatly fulfilled the psychological needs of the country.
The conventional account goes like this: Oswald, an unstable person who hates the United States, begins showing an interest in Communism and seeks haven in the Soviet Union, where he works in a factory and marries a Russian woman, Marina. Disillusioned by his experience in the “workers’ paradise,” he returns with Marina to the Dallas–Fort Worth area and descends into a spiral of anger and irrationality. He experiments with myriad political causes, buys a rifle, and travels to New Orleans, where he expresses sympathy
for Castro’s Cuba and consorts with a bewildering array of flamboyant and disreputable figures. He returns to the Dallas area, takes a job along the route of a planned motorcade for President Kennedy, and as Kennedy passes, shoots him. Oswald is later captured, and almost immediately is killed by Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner with ties to mobsters actively involved in CIA-Mafia plots to assassinate Castro.
Yet even as the Warren Commission was endorsing that scenario, doubts were arising. The lawyer Mark Lane, onetime New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, and historian David Kaiser all spent years challenging the Oswald-as-lone-assassin theory. The House Select Committee on Assassinations convened in 1976 and concluded three years later that a conspiracy was likely. Oliver Stone’s blockbuster JFK film—which chronicles Garrison’s court battle against the Warren Commission’s findings—led to the formation of the U.S. Assassination Records Review Board.
When Lee Harvey Oswald told the press after his first interrogation, “I am a patsy,” many dismissed it as the predictable disclaimer of the guilty. But what if it were true? What if Lee Harvey Oswald really had been set up as the fall guy to deflect attention from the real plotters? Most other “lone nuts” who have killed presidents or celebrities have proudly claimed responsibility for their crime, not tried to blame others.
If any group of plotters were setting up Lee Harvey Oswald, they would want him to appear as both darkly mysterious and an obvious suspect. They might run elaborate tracks across Oswald’s path, to generate false leads and a thick fog of misinformation. Who would be better qualified to do this than an expert in the game—that is, someone with experience in intelligence and covert operations?
Peter Dale Scott, a retired UC Berkeley professor, has documented that Oswald may well have believed that he was working at least indirectly for a U.S. government agency, perhaps related to the investigation of trafficking in unregistered guns. In his book Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Scott shows how Oswald’s activities, starting with his return to the United States from Russia in 1962, closely tracked specific objectives of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). Though Texas laws in 1963 allowed untraceable over-the-counter firearms purchases, Oswald went to the seemingly unnecessary step of ordering his guns through interstate mail, which required identification and left a paper trail. Moreover, the two guns he ordered through the mail were both from companies being investigated by the ATF as well as the Senate.26 At the time, the ATF was housed within the Treasury Department, not the Justice Department, and thus was beyond the immediate jurisdiction of President Kennedy’s brother.
If Oswald were connected to the government in any way, he would not have been high-level. Like many foot soldiers in the intelligence wars, he would not necessarily have known precisely whom he was working for, or why. Rather, he could well have thought he was on one mission while he was actually being used for another. If that were so, it might not have been until the assassination and his arrest that he finally grasped the situation. In that case, his words at his arrest might have been the most candid statement in the whole affair.
ALL THIS MIGHT seem a mere exercise in speculation, but certain facts are clear: Oswald was a young man who craved guidance and purpose. His father died before he was born, and he lived for a spell in an orphanage until his mother remarried (briefly) and reclaimed him at the age of three. Not surprisingly, he seemed eager to find a father figure, escape from his dominating mother, and establish some stability in a peripatetic life that included nineteen moves before the age of seventeen.
His was an upbringing that can often lead to the military, and at thirteen, Oswald became a cadet in the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol (CAP). According to Collin B. Hamer Jr., who served as cadet adjutant of CAP’s Moisant Squadron in 1957, and later headed the City Archives collection of the Louisiana Public Library, Oswald was a student of one David Ferrie—a pro-tégé of New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello. A number of Oswald’s fellow cadets told the House Select Committee on Assassinations the same thing.27 Oswald and Ferrie can also be seen together in a group photograph from a 1955 CAP training camp.
The Civil Air Patrol was a national volunteer auxiliary to the military. Founded during World War II as a civilian organization, it played a role in safeguarding the American coastline from German U-boats and was eventually shifted to peacetime duties such as disaster relief. Its founders included two Rockefeller brothers and D. Harold Byrd, the right-wing Texas businessman and lifelong friend of LBJ’s, who owned the building that would later house the offices and warehouse facilities of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas.
The Civil Air Patrol was very much perceived as a bulwark of the cold war. A profile of the organization in the May 1956 National Geographic magazine noted that in the event of a nuclear attack, “CAP would support Civil Defense with the aerial damage surveys, radio communication, evacuation of injured, and airlift of food and medical supplies . . . [and] radiation monitoring.”28 It’s not hard to imagine that the impressionable young cadets might have been targets for recruiting into the clandestine services.
No one should be surprised to learn that the United States ran a fake defector program during the cold war—such intrigue is a staple in the spy-versus-spy world.29 By 1957, Oswald appeared to be good Soviet bait. During a three-year stint in the Marine Corps, he had been briefly stationed in Japan at Atsugi air base, from which the CIA launched supersecret U-2 spy planes over the USSR. After his return to the United States, he subscribed to the Communist Party newspaper. Soon thereafter, he was on his way to the Soviet Union as a would-be defector.
It was in the fall of 1959 that Oswald boarded a freighter bound for Europe. After stops in France, England, and Sweden, he traveled to Helsinki, Finland, where he obtained a visa valid for a six-day visit to the Soviet Union. On October 16 he arrived in Moscow. He visited the U.S. embassy there to dramatically renounce his U.S. citizenship and proclaim to the inevitable Soviet-installed microphones that he would give radar secrets to the USSR. Then he moved on to Minsk. In 1961, he met the attractive young pharmacist Marina Prusakova at a Palace of Culture dance and married her just six weeks later. Marina lived with her uncle, who was a colonel in the Soviet Interior Ministry security service; Oswald’s marriage to her only added a frisson of intrigue to his profile, raising eyebrows all around. It has certainly been cited as further evidence that he was operating for the Soviet cause.
In any case, the Soviets themselves apparently never quite trusted him. In Minsk he was constantly monitored by the authorities. Later, seemingly disillusioned by what he had seen of the grim reality behind the Soviets’ stirring propaganda, he would beg the United States to let him come home.
In fact, Oswald decided early on that he really didn’t want to be in the Soviet Union at all. As George Bouhe, a member of Dallas’s White Russian community who spent a lot of time with Oswald, would tell the Warren Commission:
[T]he man came to the American Embassy in Moscow asking for the permit to return to his native land. It took 2 years or something to process that application . . . I felt that whatever investigating agency of the United States, whether it is Secret Service, CIA, or anybody else concerned with repatriation with such a suspicious character, took their good little time of 2 years to process his return back to the United States. [He said], “Damn it, I don’t know why it took them so long to get on the horse.”30
The Escort Service
On July 28, 1960, CIA director Allen Dulles, wearing a full business suit, arrived at vice presidential nominee Lyndon Johnson’s Texas ranch to administer a top-secret briefing on national security.31 Such a briefing may have been customary at that time, but the soon-to-be vice president had his own sphere of influence as well—and as the former majority leader, an existing relationship with Dulles. And as would be proven later, he had no compunction about keeping his boss out of the loop.
Allen Dulles’s interest in Texas seems to have picked up shortly after he left the Kenne
dy administration. In December 1961, he contacted a colleague still with the CIA to request contact information for agency officers based in Houston.32 After the JFK assassination, Johnson would bring Dulles back into government—first as a member of the Warren Commission investigating Kennedy’s death and then as a member of the Gilpatric Committee, a group of advisers on the proliferation of nuclear weapons.33
Since 1961, LBJ had aligned himself with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on a policy JFK was resisting—namely, their desire to send U.S. combat troops to Asia. As a result, Vice President Johnson and his military aide Howard Burris were provided a steady stream of Vietnam intelligence reports that were denied to the president.34
