by Jim Marrs
By the time of the Kennedy assassination, dead witnesses, missing evidence, and interference with official investigations were nothing new to Lyndon Johnson.
It may also be highly significant that during Johnson’s rise to power in Washington, one of his closest friends—in fact, a neighbor who frequently was his dinner guest—was none other than FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, also no stranger to the manipulation of politically sensitive investigations.
After becoming president, Johnson was encouraged to retire the crusty Hoover. But Johnson—possibly aware of the damaging evidence Hoover could provide against him—declined, saying, “I’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.”
Although it was against established security practice for the president and the vice president to be together in public, Johnson was riding only two cars behind Kennedy in the fateful Dallas motorcade.
At Parkland Hospital, Johnson was informed of Kennedy’s death and then urged by Kennedy’s assistant press secretary Malcolm Kilduff to make a public statement. As reported by author Jack Bell, Johnson told Kilduff:
No, Mac. . . . I think I had better get out of here and get back to the plane before you announce [Kennedy’s death]. We don’t know whether there is a worldwide conspiracy, whether they are after me as well as they were after President Kennedy, or whether they are after Speaker McCormack or Senator Hayden. We just don’t know.
It is significant to note that although Johnson mentioned fears of a “worldwide conspiracy” loudly in the hours immediately after Kennedy’s death, there appears to have been no significant action to counter such a threat. While the Texas border was closed for a couple of hours, there was no widespread closing of US borders and major airplane and ship terminals were not shut down. Furthermore, while some units were placed on stepped-up status, there was no full-scale military alert, despite the commander in chief’s stated concern.
Most significantly, at the same time Johnson was loudly decrying “a worldwide conspiracy,” Warrant Officer Ira D. Gearhart, codenamed “Bagman” or “Football,” who carried the launch codes for nuclear missiles in the event of sudden attack, was left behind not once but twice. He and Johnson became separated in the mad dash to Parkland and even then the Secret Service would not allow him in the room with Johnson at the hospital. In the rush to return to Love Field, Gearhart was left behind at Parkland and had to force his way onto a policeman’s lap in an attempt to keep up with Johnson. Apparently Johnson had no real concern over hostilities with foreign powers.
It has seemed strange to researchers that while Kennedy’s men wanted to leave Dallas as quickly as possible, it was Johnson who demanded that the entourage remain at Love Field until he could be sworn in as president by federal judge Sarah T. Hughes.
Hubert Humphrey, who later became Johnson’s vice president, once correctly stated, “A vice president becomes president when there is no president. Later, when he takes the oath, he puts on the cloak of office. But that act is purely symbolic.”
After arriving back in Washington, Jackie Kennedy explained to Robert Kennedy that the delay in returning was due to Johnson, who told her the attorney general had told him to take the oath of office in Dallas. Robert Kennedy was surprised and replied that he had made no such suggestion. Johnson compounded this lie months later in his deposition to the Warren Commission, when he again stated that it was Attorney General Kennedy who had urged him to take the oath immediately.
The new president was waiting on board presidential jet Air Force One when Kennedy’s body reached Love Field. In his Warren Commission affidavit, Johnson said Kennedy’s aide Kenneth O’Donnell specifically told him to take the presidential plane because it had better communication equipment. However, O’Donnell denied this, telling author William Manchester, “The President and I had no conversation regarding Air Force One. If we had known that he was going on Air Force One, we would have taken Air Force Two. One plane was just like the other.”
O’Donnell later wrote that a Warren Commission attorney asked him to “change his testimony so that it would agree with the President’s”—an offer O’Donnell declined.
While others were shocked into immobility by Kennedy’s death, Johnson exhibited a strange—and perhaps suspicious—ability to press forward with his work. Johnson aide George Reedy commented that while “everything was chaotic, only the President knew what he was doing.” While Kennedy’s body still lay in state in the White House East Room, Johnson spoke with John Kenneth Galbraith, a liberal Harvard economist and confidant of Kennedy. Johnson laid out his 1964 election strategy to the flabbergasted Galbraith, saying, “I want to come down very hard on civil rights, not because Kennedy was for it, but because I am for it.”
Author Jack Bell noted, “Almost from the moment he took the Presidential oath, Johnson had been unfolding a master plan designed to win the Presidency in his own right and . . . to carve for himself a favorable place in history.”
During the course of the assassination investigation, a number of incidents occurred involving Johnson that suspicious researchers have viewed as destruction of critical evidence.
Within seventy-two hours of Kennedy’s death—at Johnson’s order—the presidential limousine SX-100, which carried Kennedy through Dallas, was shipped to Detroit, where the body was replaced and the interior completely refurbished. In any other case, this would have been destruction of evidence, since bullet marks on the windshield and blood traces could have provided essential clues as to the number and direction of shots.
After the assassination, Governor Connally’s clothing—also vital evidence—was taken from the office of congressman Henry Gonzalez by Secret Service agents sent by Johnson aide Cliff Carter. Connally’s clothing had been cleaned and pressed by the time it was handed over to the Warren Commission and, hence, useless as evidence.
One of Johnson’s actions that caused researchers of the assassination no end of problems was Executive Order 11652, which locked an immense amount of assassination evidence and documents in the National Archives away from the American public until the year 2039. It was this act, more than any other, that has caused so much speculation about Johnson’s possible role in the assassination. However, by the twenty-first century, thanks primarily to the creation of the Assassinations Records Review Board, much of this material had become public, though in 2013 there continued to be conflicts with the National Archives over the release of JFK assassination documents.
It is now publicly known that Johnson’s mental state deteriorated significantly in the years following his predecessor’s assassination. Former aide and speechwriter Richard Goodwin, who had helped fashion LBJ’s “Great Society,” has written that Johnson became obsessed with the idea that America was being taken over by his enemies—communists and “those Kennedys.” Goodwin said he and aide Bill Moyers even consulted psychiatrists about his boss’s behavior.
Another episode that may have had underlying psychological significance was related by Johnson’s younger brother. Sam Houston Johnson said a few days after the assassination he got a long-distance call from the new president, who told him, “I’ve been waiting for the chance to talk to you and let you know how much I appreciated all you’ve done for me, Sam Houston.” Sam, who said he had had a few drinks, jokingly replied, “I had nothing to do with Oswald.” Lyndon flew off the handle, shouting into the phone, “Goddamit, Sam, what kind of remark is that?” Lyndon, widely known for his coarse humor, astonished his brother by launching into a thirty-minute tirade, getting angrier and angrier by the moment.
Madeleine Duncan Brown, whose claim to have been Johnson’s mistress for twenty years has never been successfully refuted, publicly stated that Johnson had foreknowledge of the assassination. In her 1997 book, Texas in the Morning, Brown told of meeting with Johnson in Austin’s Driskill Hotel at the end of December 1963. When she told him some people were accusing Johnson of playing some role in the assassination, he told her, “It was Texas oil
and those fucking renegade intelligence bastards in Washington.”
But did Johnson really have enough power to initiate the assassination and to force literally dozens of government officials and agents to lie and cover up that fact? Probably not.
However, if Johnson played some role in an assassination plot, he would have taken great pains to distance himself from such a conspiracy. Evidence of such a role would certainly not be readily available. Therefore, today it is possible only to point out that Johnson—above everyone else—benefited most from Kennedy’s death. Plus, it only stands to reason that no one would kill the chief executive without some assurance that his successor would not move heaven and earth to pursue and punish the perpetrators.
With the assassination, Johnson achieved his lifelong goal of gaining the presidency, his business and oil backers were rid of Kennedy’s interference, and his supporters who wanted an Asian war—notably Brown & Root and ranking officers at the Pentagon—were free to pursue a widening conflict.
A final point is that Johnson—always conscious of his role in history—must have feared appearing to be a dunce by continuing to support the Warren Commission’s lone-assassin myth. In an interview with Walter Cronkite in the early 1970s, Johnson expressed the belief that the assassination involved more than one person, then asked network executives to delete his remarks from the broadcast—which they did.
In 1973, Johnson was quoted in Atlantic Monthly acknowledging, “I never believed that Oswald acted alone although I can accept that he pulled the trigger.”
Johnson even voiced the suspicion that the CIA had a hand in the assassination, according to an FBI document released in 1977. The document quotes Johnson’s postmaster general and close friend Marvin Watson as relaying to the bureau that “[Johnson] was now convinced there was a plot in connection with the assassination. Watson stated the President felt the CIA had something to do with this plot.”
Yet this, too, was kept hidden from the public for years and is still not widely known.
Was Johnson well aware of such a plot and mentioned it in later years only so that future historians would not classify him as dense and naïve?
While this ambitiously driven man from Texas most probably did not initiate a death plot against Kennedy, everything known about the man—from the deaths and cover-ups of Texas scandals to his continued prosecution of the unpopular Vietnam War—indicates that Johnson may have had the willingness to join in a conspiracy that would place him in the White House.
As commander in chief of the armed forces and close confidant to the powerful J. Edgar Hoover, Johnson certainly had the ability to subvert a meaningful investigation into Kennedy’s death—and a wealth of evidence suggests just such subversion. Did Johnson and Hoover contract with the mob to kill Kennedy? Or did the mob approach them? Or did they simply turn a blind eye to an existing plot? The truth of their involvement may not be proven for years, if ever. However, a conspiracy involving Lyndon Johnson and his buddy Hoover as an alternative to the Warren Commission’s discredited lone-assassin theory goes farther in tying together the disparate bits of assassination evidence than any theory offered to date, and cannot be summarily dismissed.
Due to the demonstrable actions of both Johnson and Hoover in suppressing, altering, and fabricating evidence in this case, both men are clearly accessories after the fact. Under our legal system, accessories in murder cases are considered just as guilty as the person who pulled the trigger.
History will surely hold president and commander in chief Lyndon Johnson, along with his friend FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, guilty in the assassination—if not for orchestrating the assassination itself, at least for taking actions during their time in office to block any meaningful investigation into the plot.
Soldiers
During the past two hundred years the military forces of the United States have accumulated a distinguished history. From the Revolution-era citizen who could become a fighting man ready to protect his community in a minute to the professional Marines who grimly stand guard in the face of terrorism at US embassies around the world, the American soldier has proven his worth time and again. Amid the bitter dissension produced by US policy in Southeast Asia and currently the Middle East, few people seriously question the ability or bravery of the individual GI.
However, throughout world history, it has proven extremely difficult to return to civilian control of government in peacetime once power has been invested in the military. From the takeover of the Roman Empire by the Praetorian Guard up until today, military leaders have sought to maintain power and control.
This situation was aggravated in the United States during World War II by a combining of military and industrial power.
The Military-Industrial Complex
On January 17, 1961, three days before John F. Kennedy took office as president, president Dwight Eisenhower gave his farewell address to Congress. In this talk he coined the phrase “military-industrial complex” and warned against potential abuses by such an entity. He said:
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economical, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
Eisenhower’s warning was especially timely, as the role of the military-industrial complex in American life has continued to grow under successive presidencies. By 2013, many police officers were wearing black bulletproof vests and Nazi-style helmets while remote-controlled drone aircraft prowled American skies.
The rise of the military-industrial complex can be charted by annual military budget expenditures. In 1950 the military budget was $13 billion; by 1961 this had risen to $47 billion; and by the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, it was $100 billion. By 1986 annual expenses by the Department of Defense had risen to nearly $170 billion. In 2012 this figure was up to $707.5 billion. By adding in the budgets of Homeland Security, the Department of Energy, and FBI counterterrorism, total expenditures for national security came to an astounding $1.4 trillion.
A large part of the argument for maintaining an ongoing war economy came from men and women who lived through the shock of Pearl Harbor. Vowing never again to allow the United States to be caught unaware by an enemy—although substantial evidence now shows that the Japanese attack was not wholly unexpected in certain Washington circles—such persons have argued that assembly and production lines must be kept operating so that America can convert to war production quickly, if needed. This argument—plus the fact that millions of American jobs depend on defense contracts—has been instrumental in maintaining the war economy.
Critics, on the other hand, claim the permanent war economy has actually been a drain on America’s economic life—with its production of non-usable goods and its penchant for inefficiency and corruption.
A product of his time, senator John F. Kennedy parroted the Pentagon line during the 1960 campaign, promising increases in military spending.
Once in the Oval Office—with access to other sources of information—Kennedy changed his attitudes toward the military. Earlier he had echoed Pentagon figures showing that the Soviet Union possessed between five hundred and one thousand intercontinental ballistic missiles. According to later reports, the number was more like fifty. Kennedy complained that he had been ill-informed as to the actual number of missiles and suggested that this exaggeration was part of Pentagon strategy.
This complaint has been repeated over and over through the years, even by former CIA director William Colby in comments on the cover of the book The Myth of Soviet Military Supremacy, which he called “the greatest intelligence g
ap of all: the exaggeration of Soviet power in comparison with America’s, which fuels the wasteful and dangerous nuclear arms race.”
In addition to worries over the military, Kennedy also became concerned with the $3 billion federal deficit of his time—a paltry sum compared to today’s nearly $16 trillion—and feared it would present a threat to the US dollar. Accordingly, Kennedy named a Ford Motor Company executive, Robert McNamara, as his secretary of defense and changes began to take place. On March 28, 1961, Kennedy told Congress, “In January, while ordering certain immediately needed changes, I instructed the Secretary of Defense to reappraise our entire defense strategy, capacity, commitments, and needs in light of present and future dangers.”
Kennedy began to significantly modify the way defense and intelligence operated. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower had depended greatly on the National Security Council (NSC), a creation of the National Security Act of 1947. In 1963 the NSC consisted of the president, vice president, secretary of state, secretary of defense, and director of the Office of Emergency Planning.
Theoretically, the CIA was to be controlled by the NSC. But Kennedy had another way of getting things done. Accustomed to the quick-acting, hard-hitting world of political campaigning, Kennedy neglected the NSC method. Instead, he would call upon his friends and family to get things done. While this may have been effective at the time, it left both the Pentagon and the CIA largely to their own devices—a circumstance Kennedy came to regret.
During this same period, US foreign policy was being greatly influenced by a new vision of the role of the military in the world. This vision was codified in a May 15, 1959, document written by General Richard Stilwell as a member of a special presidential committee. Innocuously titled “Training Under the Mutual Training Program,” this document offered nothing less than a plan to protect the noncommunist world by having nations ruled by a military elite with training and ideology supplied by Americans.
