What can we learn from Gus Russo, the Worst JFK Assassination Researcher of All Time?

 What can we learn from Gus Russo, the Worst JFK Assassination Researcher of All Time?

Read Russo’s book Live by the Sword and you can learn about the many, many times Lyndon Johnson privately blamed Fidel Castro for the JFK assassination. It was LBJ’s deflection from his own culpability in the JFK assassination.

Then you can read about how Billie Sol Estes told IRS investigator Walt Perry that over time Estes had given Lyndon Johnson $10 million in kickbacks. LBJ controlled Billie Sol Estes and not the other way around. $10 million in 1960 dollars was equal to $100 million in 2022 dollars.

Billie Sol Estes told IRS investigator Walt Perry in 1963 that he had given $10 million in bribes and kickbacks to Lyndon Johnson

 [Gus Russo, Live By the Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK, p. 283]:

QUOTE

           Walt Perry, an investigator for the Internal Revenue Service at the time, says that Bobby Kennedy was attempting to use Johnson’s legal problems as leverage, should Johnson not agree to leave the ticket voluntarily. Perry was brought in by Willam Webster (later to become the FBI director) to assist in the Billie Sol Estes investigation. He befriended Estes, who, in the course of things, told Perry that he had funneled $10 million in bribes to Johnson. He also related in an anecdote about Bobby Kennedy. Perry recalls, “Estes told me that in 1963, Bobby Kennedy contacted him in prison. Bobby made him an offer, saying, ‘If you testify against Johnson, you’re out [of prison].’ Billie declined the offer, saying, ‘If I testified against him, I’d be dead within twenty-four hours.’”

UNQUOTE

          [Gus Russo, Live By the Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK, p.283]

          Gus Russo footnotes on p. 561 of his book that he interviewed Walt Perry on June 6, 1992.

          $10 million in 1960 dollars would equal $100 million in 2022 dollars: http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

 

LBJ on that "cross-eyed" John Kennedy and divine retribution - LBJ's utter hatred of JFK

Gus Russo:

 

          "In his oral history, Robert Kennedy bitterly recounted a remark that Johnson supposedly made to someone else after the assassination. "When I was young in Texas, I used to know a cross-eyed boy," Johnson said. "His eyes were crossed, and so was his character... That was God's retribution for people who were bad - and you should be careful of cross-eyed people because God put his mark on them ... Sometimes I think that what happened to Kennedy may have been divine retribution." JFK himself had slightly crossed eyes."

[Leo Janos, LBJ speechwriter, Church Committee interview by Rhett Dawson, Oct. 14, 1975 ... also Gus Russo, Live by the Sword, p. 377]

The book Farewell America- commentary by Gus Russo (note from Robert Morrow: Mike Howard was a longtime LBJ friendly Secret Service agent and he may very well have been assigned to Jackie Kennedy to spy on her.)

https://www.jfk-online.com/farewellrusso.html

 Farewell America – Commentary by Gus Russo

 . . . [A]ccording to sources close to the Kennedy circle, Bobby contacted "my best friend in the Justice Department," Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Moynihan was charged with resolving two questions: 1) Was the Secret Service bought off on the day of the assassination? and 2) Was Bobby's nemesis Jimmy Hoffa involved? After a short period of involvement on his investigative task, Moynihan reported negatively on both counts. Moynihan was confronted with this allegation by a writer from Ramparts magazine in 1968. According to authors Bill Turner and Warren Hinckle: "Moynihan jumped as if a live grenade was rolling toward him. In CIA fashion, he declared he would neither confirm nor deny his secret mission for Bobby Kennedy. After leaving the room to use the phone, the suddenly unamiable Irishman returned and announced that he had nothing more to say."⁽¹⁾

In March 1964, Secret Service Agent Mike Howard witnessed an incident that may relate to Bobby's interest in a Hoffa connection. At the time, Howard had been assigned to Jackie Kennedy, with whom he would become quite close. (Howard recalled her having terrifying nightmares. He would often spend the night just outside her bedroom, sometimes rushing in to comfort her when she would wake up screaming, then sit on the edge of her bed until she fell back asleep.) One morning in April 1964, Howard remembered going down to the kitchen in Jackie's house in suburban Virginia, and being startled to see Robert Kennedy there. RFK asked Howard to drive him to a section of Dulles Airport where private planes were parked, and Howard drove onto the tarmac, where Jimmy Hoffa was disembarking from a plane that had just landed.

Approaching each other without shaking hands, Kennedy and Hoffa spoke in conversational tones for some ten minutes. Not wanting to eavesdrop, Howard heard none of the conversation until its end, when he heard Hoffa ask, "Is that all right with you?" "Yes," replied Kennedy. On March 4th, 1964, the Justice Department had just obtained a conviction of Hoffa for complicity in jury tampering, and would push for a second conviction in April, when Hoffa and seven others would go on trial in Chicago for defrauding the Central States Pension Fund of over $20 million. That might have been the subject of the conversation at the airport-but that spring, Robert Kennedy remained too shattered by his brother's assassination to undertake any serious work as Attorney General. There was, of course, another possibility -- the assassination. Did Kennedy want to look into Hoffa's eyes while asking him if he had anything to do with his brother's killing -- as he had done with, among others, John McCone of the CIA?⁽²⁾

Although Moynihan declined to divulge any information, other sources, albeit second-hand ones, have disclosed that Bobby Kennedy's next foray into the mystery of his brother's death came after the release of the Warren Commission Report. At that time, Kennedy said, "I just can't believe that guy [Oswald] acted alone. I'm going to contact someone independent of this government to get to the bottom of this." Bobby then contacted a lifelong friend of the Kennedy family, then working in Britain's intelligence agency, known as MI6. The friendship dated back to the days when Papa Joe Kennedy was the US Ambassador to England. Undertaking this highly secretive mission, the MI6 agent contacted two French intelligence operatives who proceeded to conduct, over a three year period, a quiet investigation that involved hundreds of interviews in the United States. One agent was the head of the French Secret Service, Andre Ducret. The second was known only as "Philippe" -- believed to be Philippe Vosjoly, who was a former French Intelligence Chief in the United States. Over the years, Ducret and Philippe hired men to infiltrate the Texas oil industry, the CIA, and Cuban mercenary groups in Florida. Their report, replete with innuendo about Lyndon Johnson and right-wing Texas oil barons, was delivered to Bobby Kennedy only months before his own assassination in June of 1968.

There is no information concerning Bobby's reaction to the document. After Bobby's death, the MI6 agent contacted the last surviving brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, inquiring as to what to do with the material. Teddy said the family wasn't interested. The agent proceeded to hire a French writer by the name of Herve LaMarre to fashion the material into a book. Published in Europe and authored under the pseudonym of "James Hepburn," the book was entitled Farewell, America. It contains highly exaggerated prose combined with a large dose of poetic license. Because the anecdotes about LBJ and others could be considered downright libelous, the book was never published in America. Over the years, however, through private dealers, the book obtained an "underground" distributorship in the United States. One of the dealers approached Dave Powers, Kennedy intimate and curator of the John F. Kennedy Museum, for his opinion of the book. Echoing Moynihan, Powers responded, "I can't confirm or deny the European connection, but Bobby definitely didn't believe the Warren Report."⁽³⁾

For more background on the "European Connection," see the notes of former FBI agent William Turner on file at the Assassination Archive and Research Center in Washington, DC. Turner and his partner Warren Hinckle traveled extensively, interviewing a number of those enlisted in the Bobby Kennedy investigation.

 From Gus Russo, Live by the Sword
(Baltimore: Bancroft Press, 1998), pp. 574-5, fn. 35

 NOTES

1. Warren Hinckle and William Turner, Deadly Secrets (New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1992), 260.

2. Mike Howard, interview by author, 7 December 1993.

3. Al Navis, interview by author, 19 November 1993. In the 1980's, Navis conducted inquiries about RFK's investigation with members of the Kennedy family inner-circle.

Very good Jim DiEugenio 1999 article on Gus Russo

https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/who-is-gus-russo-2

According to author Gus Russo, about 25,000 threats were reportedly logged during Kennedy's 34 months in office. Most of them made by crackpots, but some by potentially real assassins. In 1976, the Secret Service released a report indicating that its "Security Index" listed one million people as potential threats to President Kennedy at the time of his death.

Gus Russo email to Robert Morrow on 9/19/2023 and his views on Pamela Turnure

QUOTE

Pam Turnure was screwing JFK. She lied about Jackie. Want proof? See the letter Jackie wrote four days after the killings to the man she supposedly said killed her husband (below). And look at the letter LBJ sent her, which you probably think is all lies. 

I interviewed Pam with Sy Hersh. I visited Evelyn Lincoln in Chevy Chase a half dozen times in her condo. She signed a copy of that book for me.

I’ve heard everything you’re saying. And it’s all third hand, cherry-picked crap. Useless “opinions.”

Please don’t bother me with this stuff any more.

UNQUOTE

Gus Russo’s wildly inaccurate take on the JFK assassination – Robert Morrow reply: Oswald liked JFK and did not shoot him; Oswald was a fake pro-Castro Marxist; Oswald was a pre-selected patsy for the JFK assassination

https://www.bancroftpress.com/grusso_bio.html

About Live by the Sword

Humiliated at the Bay of Pigs, John and Robert Kennedy sought desperately to eliminate Castro. Their strategies for overthrowing the Cuban leader were so elaborate and bizarre, they could only engender paranoia. Castro openly threatened to retaliate.

Pro-Castro agitator Lee Harvey Oswald learned that Robert Kennedy was personally supervising groups plotting against the Cuban leader. Filled with rage and a sense of destiny, Oswald went to the Cuban embassy in Mexico, announcing he would kill America's president in exchange for sanctuary in Havana. Live By the Sword forces the conclusion that members of the Cuban regime accepted the troubled American's offer. Russo shows that Oswald was indeed JFK's lone assailant, but that after the president's murder, a devastated Robert Kennedy and key officials launched a comprehensive coverup to hide its true causes.Gus Russo, based in Baltimore, Maryland, has reported for acclaimed ABC and PBS documentaries on JFK, and done research for authors Gerald Posner, Seymour Hersh, and Anthony Summers. Exhaustively researched, Live By the Sword ends 35 years of public mistrust and confusion over the Kennedy assassination.

About Gus Russo

An acclaimed investigative reporter, Gus Russo was a lead reporter and researcher on the three-hour landmark 1993 documentary, "Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?" Most recently, he served as an investigative reporter and senior consultant to the producer for ABC's "Dangerous World: The Kennedy Years," hosted by Peter Jennings. The two-hour program received both critical and popular acclaim, and was based on Seymour Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot, for which Russo was a research consultant. He has also done research for respected authors Gerald Posner and Anthony Summers. Russo has appeared on all major TV networks as a JFK assassination expert, including "CBS Reports with Dan Rather." He has frequently spoken on NPR as well as on many college campuses.

For over 20 years, Russo has sought to compile a credible account of President Kennedy's assassination and the foreign policy errors that set the stage for it. He is the investigative reporter who has most closely reviewed the files released by the JFK Assassination Records Review Board. Now, using first-time, on-the-record interviews with key players, never-before-seen photographs, U.S. documents recently declassified by the "JFK Act," and other material personally obtained through FOIA requests, he has crafted what will likely become the definitive chronicle of a critical episode in American history.