American Conspiracies
Page 3
Now here’s the strange part. For Booth to fulfill his mission, “it required information that could only have come from the highest sources in Washington.”10 In the first place, Lincoln’s attending a play that night hadn’t been publicly announced. Carrying a single-shot derringer pistol and a knife, Booth had to walk through a crowded theater and then pass through two doors into the State Box. How could Booth have known that Lincoln had a substitute bodyguard that night who wouldn’t be at his post at the fateful moment? Booth then stood behind the president without being seen by three other occupants, fired his one bullet, jumped onto the stage and shouted a message to the audience—“Sic Semper Tyrannis!” (As Always with Tyrants)—and escaped through a rear exit onto his waiting horse. “More than blind luck” had to be involved in “these skillfully timed movements and activities.”11
At least this was the way that historian figured it. But, with Lincoln himself being so averse to bodyguards and protecting himself, he certainly wasn’t surrounded by the security we have today. He didn’t want it, and seemed resigned to the fact that if someone was going to kill him, they could. So to me, how hard could it have been to pull off, if you were a determined group of people?
At that same time on the other side of Washington, Lewis Powell broke into Secretary Seward’s house and left him and four others bleeding from their wounds. David Herold took off before the mayhem ended. George Atzerodt got cold feet and never even tried to kill Vice President Johnson. (This has led some to believe, without any justification, that Johnson was involved in the conspiracy.) Booth and Herold then found refuge at a Maryland tavern run by Mary Surratt, who as an accomplice later became the first woman ever executed by the federal government. Her son, John Surratt, had also been part of the kidnapping plot.
Which brings us to the story of Dr. Mudd. In recent times, President Carter and President Reagan came under some pressure from Mudd’s descendants and both all but declared Mudd innocent of any complicity.12 Sorry, gang, but your ancestor got off easy. Remember, Booth had a broken leg from the moment he landed on the stage. He bypassed three other doctors along his escape route, to make straight for Mudd’s house. Later the doctor claimed he’d never seen Booth before, and so was innocently providing medical care to an injured stranger who needed help. But I highly doubt Mudd was caught completely unaware when Booth rode up to his house. At the least, he certainly had knowledge of what was happening.
The truth that came out later was this: Mudd had introduced Booth to John Surratt the previous December of 1864. In fact, Mudd was “responsible for two key figures being added to Booth’s team of conspirators.”13 Booth had earlier been a guest at the doctor’s home. For the kidnap plot, Atzerodt claimed, Booth “sent provisions and liquor to Dr. Mudd’s for the supply of the party on their way to Richmond with the president.”14 Even if Booth hadn’t stopped off at Mudd’s, there was plenty of evidence to have hauled in the physician as one of his cohorts in the Confederate underground.
After hiding Booth out, Mudd then bought him two full days head start by withholding information from the Union soldiers who were tracking Lincoln’s killer. But Mudd and his wife couldn’t get their stories straight, and ten days after the assassination, he was taken into custody. At the conspirators’ trial, five witnesses (including the doctor’s own wife) testified that Mudd had admitted knowing Booth’s identity. Mudd escaped the gallows by a single juror’s no vote.
After an epidemic of yellow fever struck the Florida Keys prison where he was sent, Mudd jumped in to provide medical service and ended up receiving high praise for his efforts. Andrew Johnson, during his last months as president, then gave Mudd an unconditional pardon in 1869. Mudd went home to his wife and four children, had five more kids and even tried to get elected to the state legislature, before he died from pneumonia just shy of his fiftieth birthday.15
Twelve days after the assassination, Booth and Herold were finally tracked down to the Virginia farmhouse of Richard Garrett. Herold came out of the burning barn and was tied to a tree. Supposedly Booth refused to come out and was shot in the neck by Sergeant Boston Corbett with a single bullet from a Colt revolver. Corbett, an eccentric religious fanatic, had violated orders to stay thirty feet away and make sure Booth was captured alive. At the time, Corbett was quoted as explaining: “It was not through fear at all that I shot him, but because it was my impression that it was time the man was shot; for I thought he would do harm to our men in trying to fight his way through . . . if I did not.”16
Some, however, think Booth shot himself, and there was even a story that aired on NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries that he’d actually gotten away! Here’s how that one got started: Booth had been quietly buried under a dirt floor in an old penitentiary, and the secretive nature of his burial raised questions almost from the get-go. One of the Union soldiers who claimed to have been at the Garrett farm said it was somebody else’s body.17 Then in 1907, a Tennessee lawyer named Finian Bates wrote a book claiming that Booth safely made his way south, changed his name, and ended up in Oklahoma. The book sold an amazing 75,000 copies, and the lawyer had “Booth’s body” mummified and took it on the road to exhibit to thousands!18 As late as 1994, some historians tried to have the “original” Booth exhumed for DNA tests, but that got rejected. The fact is, of nineteen people who viewed the body afterwards, all but one were in agreement it was Booth. You couldn’t fake the letters “J.W.B.” that had been scrawled in India ink on the back of his hand since he was a boy. Besides that, there was a telltale scar, a plugged tooth, and that broken left leg with the old shoe.19
Which doesn’t solve whether Booth was intentionally silenced before he could stand trial—and possibly implicate some higher-ups beyond the Confederate fanatics. Back in 1937, an amateur historian named Otto Eisenschiml published Why Was Lincoln Murdered?, maintaining that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was involved in Lincoln’s death. In more recent years, The Lincoln Conspiracy (1977) put forth a similar scenario.
For sure, Stanton hadn’t started off as a big fan of Lincoln’s. A year after the election, he’d spoken of “the painful imbecility” of the president. It’s contended by a majority of historians that his contempt had eventually given way to respect and that Stanton became staunchly loyal and was always urging Lincoln to accept bodyguards. So, while a lot of the charges against Stanton don’t seem to have a legitimate basis, from my reading it seems that some of them are worth considering.
First of all, to me, the planning of an assassination isn’t going to be carried out by common everyday citizens who are unhappy with the rule of their country and take it upon themselves to change it. When you look at who killed Caesar, it was the Roman senators. If there is a conspiracy involved, it’s going to include the highest levels. You always need to ask the question, who profits the most? I wouldn’t rule out the Confederates, because you could understand the motive of revenge. Certainly the list of whom they’d most like to see die would be the people who directly led to their losing the war. But I tend to think there would also be some kind of help from the Union side. They can have ulterior motives, because politics is the name of the game. When you look at the two political parties today, they can be very cutthroat within their own ranks. Why would you expect anything different back then?
During the Civil War, Stanton was the second most important official in Washington—but somehow he wasn’t included on Booth’s target list. After the assassination, he not only made himself acting president but took charge of the investigation right away. “While others sat sobbing, he ordered a furious dragnet in which civil liberties were ignored and dozens of people were falsely arrested—none of whom had in any way aided the assassin.”20 In the wake of what had happened, that’s not too surprising. What does raise my eyebrows is that, only a few hours after the assassination, seven names on Stanton’s to-capture list were part of the earlier kidnap plots. Which leads you to conclude that the War Department must have had prior knowledge, at least about those.21 And i
f they did, how come nobody had been arrested already?
Then there’s the matter of Booth’s diary. Yup, Oswald and Sirhan weren’t the first assassins to set down their thoughts ahead of the deed. Booth’s little red book was supposedly removed from his body after he was shot. The diary was taken to Washington and ended up in Stanton’s custody, at which point it disappeared for awhile. When it was located in time for the conspirators’ trial that summer, Lafayette Baker—the fellow who gave the diary, intact, to Stanton—said somebody had removed eighteen pages. Others who’d seen the diary testified that the pages had already gone missing when Stanton received it. But those were all underlings of Stanton’s at the War Department.
With Nixon, we’d have the infamous eighteen-minute gap in the White House tapes that his secretary Rosemary Woods, “accidentally” erased. In the same vein, who could have “erased” those eighteen diary pages of Booth’s? One story that surfaced about this came from a congressman, George W. Julian, who said that when he got summoned to the War Department ten days after the assassination, he discovered Stanton pacing back and forth and saying, “We have Booth’s diary, and he has recorded a lot in it.” Julian claimed that Senator John Conness from California showed up and, as he was checking out the diary, started mumbling: “Oh my God, oh my God, I am ruined if this ever gets out!” Then, according to the congressman, Stanton issued instructions to put the diary in his safe.22
What’s interesting is, Senator Conness was one of the so-called Radical Republicans, who wanted a much tougher Reconstruction policy toward the South than Lincoln was willing to go for. It was alleged that an envelope linking Conness to George Atzerodt, one of the conspirators, had been found in Atzerodt’s room, but Stanton didn’t choose to follow that up.23 When Stanton died on Christmas Eve, 1869, it’s pretty likely that a lot of secrets went with him.
This much we know for certain: Eight Lincoln conspirators were found guilty before a military court on June 30, 1865, and four of them were hanged—Powell, Herold, Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt. She was the least directly involved of any of them, but she owned the boardinghouse and tavern where the conspirators gathered—and she knew enough to have alerted the authorities about what was up. Her son, John Surratt, was a different story. He’d been deeply involved with Booth in the kidnapping plot. At first Stanton offered a $25,000 reward for Surratt’s capture but, after his mother’s hanging, seems to have lost interest. Surratt got to Europe before the Vatican corralled him, but he escaped. Eventually he did get caught and came back to be tried in a civil court. But the government didn’t have the evidence to convict him on a murder charge.
So where did Surratt end up? As a respected tobacco farmer in Maryland who earned extra money giving lectures and married the second cousin of Francis Scott Key, who wrote “The Star Spangled Banner.” Surratt lived to the merry old age of 74, when he died of pneumonia in 1916. He is said to have burned the manuscript of his autobiography a few days before that.24
One of the recent books has Booth portrayed as a rebel agent who, after Richmond fell, turned his thoughts from kidnapping to killing. A Confederate plot that went at least as high as their secretary of state, Judah Benjamin (who burned all his papers before he escaped to England and never returned), is today the most accepted of all the conspiratorial possibilities.25 The “lost confession” of Atzerodt, talking about Booth’s knowledge of a Confederate plan to blow up the White House, was discovered in 1977 and bolsters that theory.26 Still, I wonder if it’s a little too pat—kind of like the idea today that Castro had Kennedy assassinated in retaliation for the plots against him.
There are some other “out-there” theories, like Booth being a hired gun of big international bankers such as the Rothschilds, who didn’t like the president’s monetary policies. Or that the Vatican did it, because the totalitarian Popes considered Lincoln their enemy. If that piques your interest, you can try to find Democracy Under Siege: The Jesuits’ Attempt to Destroy the Popular Government of the United States: The True Story of Abraham Lincoln’s Death.27 (I didn’t look into that one.)
Even if Booth’s was the only smoking gun, we can safely say that the first presidential assassination in American history involved much more than first meets the eye. Almost a century and a half later, historians are still uncovering new evidence about the plot. Clearly, with the conviction of eight other coconspirators, who knows how far it went? That was just where the buck happened to stop.
Just like it did a hundred years later with Lee Harvey Oswald.
WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?
Let’s start by getting some honesty into our school textbooks about the conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of our greatest president. Our kids should know that groups can and have engaged in plots to pursue their own nefarious ends and undermine our democracy.
CHAPTER TWO
THE BIG-MONEY PLOT TO OVERTHROW FDR
THE INCIDENT: A coup attempt by some of the titans of Wall Street, to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934 and put a military man in charge of the country.
THE OFFICIAL WORD: The plotters were foiled when the man they selected, Major General Smedley Butler, blew the whistle to Congress.
MY TAKE: This was an attempt to turn America into a fascist country run by corporate powers, but it’s been ignored in most official histories of the Great Depression.
“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt
I would think that a coup to overthrow our government and turn us into a fascist state ought to make it into our history books. That way, we could read about it and hopefully learn from it, so that we don’t live to repeat it. But this certainly wasn’t taught in any public school curriculum that I saw. You learned about Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Never did I hear about leaders of business during that era literally setting out to have a coup! I don’t consider myself dumb or not well-read, but researching this book is the first I’ve come across this story. That was when I came across a book originally published in the Seventies called The Plot to Seize the White House,1 by an investigative journalist named Jules Archer. Yet back in the 1930s, the plot had been fully documented in congressional hearings, although in the end they decided not to name certain names. It was also documented by some of the big media, even though they downplayed the whole thing.
I find it interesting that we do learn about some traitors in American history—Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr come to mind—but, once again, they’re more of the “lone nut” variety. Rich and powerful titans of finance wouldn’t stoop to such a thing, right? Well, if it hadn’t been that they tried buying off the wrong man to be their puppet, quite possibly we’d have been living in a country not that far removed from Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy. That man was Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, one of the great unsung heroes in our history—but he’s not exactly a household name, is he?
A little background first: FDR, after getting elected in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, started implementing his New Deal. He took on the stock speculators and set up new watchdog agencies. He put a stop to farm foreclosures, and made employers accept collective bargaining by the unions. And he took the country off the gold standard, meaning that more paper money could be available to create jobs for the unemployed and provide loans. That outraged some of the conservative financiers. FDR went even further and started talking about raising their taxes to help pay for these programs. So the oligarchs of finance hated him and everything he stood for on behalf of the common man. They considered the new president a traitor to his own class, namely them. Within a year of FDR’s taking office, they’d started hatching a plan to get rid of him.
The plotters’ idea was to enlist a military man who was popular
with veterans from the First World War. Many veterans were disgruntled because they’d never been paid the bonuses promised them when the war ended. When their “Bonus Army” protested by camping out in Washington in 1932, Smedley Butler had shown up to support their cause. He was the most decorated Marine in American history. And when another general, Douglas MacArthur, led a charge to destroy the veterans’ tent city under orders from President Hoover, Butler got so pissed off that he switched parties and voted for FDR in the election that year.
But maybe the coup-makers didn’t know that when they decided Butler was the man to lead their takeover of the government. Or maybe they figured that, with enough money and the temptation of running the country, anybody was corruptible. The idea was to create havoc by Major General Butler leading a veterans’ march on Washington. Pressured by these events, FDR, so they thought, would be convinced to name Butler to a new cabinet post as a Secretary of “General Affairs” or “General Welfare” (Homeland Security would have to wait awhile longer). Eventually, the president would agree to turn over the reins of power to Butler altogether, under the excuse that his polio was worsening, and would become a ceremonial figurehead.
The whole notion seems pretty far-fetched today, especially given what we know about the integrity of Roosevelt through the Depression and World War II. Apparently though, the Wall Street group thought they could pull it off. But they sure didn’t do enough homework on the military man they thought would play along, Smedley Butler. He’d grown up in a politically prominent Quaker family in Pennsylvania, and gotten his baptism-under-fire with the Marines at Guantánamo during the Spanish-American War. During his distinguished service, he would come under fire more than 120 times and receive 18 decorations, including three Medals of Honor.