The Murderous Psychopathy of Lyndon Johnson
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In June, 2018 a NYT article on Seymour Hersh was published and it described how
that in Sy Hersh’s autobiography he has an anecdote of Lyndon Johnson
defecating on the ground at the LBJ Ranch to show a reporter, Tom Wicker of the
NYT, his displeasure at his
reporting. In fact, Lyndon Johnson for decades had a habit of defecating in
front of people. Congressman Jake Pickle, a longtime LBJ man, writes in his
autobiography, that the first time he was ushered in to meet LBJ in the early
1941, Johnson was on the toilet. Pickle comments: “Years later, I heard of similar incidents,
where Johnson conducted business from the bathroom. It was a habit that
embarrassed people and threw them off balance. Some, especially in the Kennedy
camp, found this habit particularly disgusting, and even frightening. They
believe Johnson used it to intimidate and humiliate subordinates.”[i]
LBJ in the White House used to conduct
Cabinet meetings on the toilet. This disgusting fact is reportedly why Treasury
Secretary Douglas Dillon chose to leave the Johnson Administration.[ii]
Reporter Wayne Madsen was friends with
UPI reporter Helen Thomas and she told him a similar “LBJ defecation story”
which occurred in the mid 1960’s when LBJ was president. Madsen says that
Thomas told him this story around 2008:
“Here is my recollection of what Helen
Thomas told me.
Helen Thomas
covered the White House for UPI. During LBJ's term, the president asked Helen
if she wanted an exclusive interview. He ushered her upstairs into the
president's private quarters. He had her take a seat outside the bathroom. With
the door wide open, LBJ sat on the toilet to take a crap and he had Thomas
asking him questions during what was a long interlude. Helen said an exclusive
interview with the president was what every reporter would have died for. In
this case, it came with Johnson taking a crap and exposing Helen, to, of
course, a view of Jumbo, his name for his penis.
Helen probably
told me at the Press Club probably in 2008. There were several events marking
the 100th anniversary of the Press Club that she attended.
I'd guess the
interview was in 1966 or 67.”[iii]
Lyndon
Johnson also used to pull his penis on display for a variety of reasons. One
time LBJ was asked why we were in the Vietnam War and he pulled his penis out
as a response. LBJ would go nude swimming and make penis comparison comments
with his aides. Johnson would give press conferences with both male and female
reporters present and he would just start urinating at the LBJ ranch. One time
LBJ was told by a Secret Service agent that he was urinating on the agent’s leg
and LBJ’s response was “Son, I am the president and that is my prerogative.”
Lyndon
Johnson had no boundaries and he was often crude, disgusting, vulgar and
sadistic with his aides and the people around him. When reading biographies of
LBJ, the reader often wonders what would he not do? The man ran his political
office like a business, often taking cash bribes and kickbacks. Lyndon Johnson
was not merely taking envelopes full of money, for big political deals he would
demand suitcases full of cash. Billie Sol Estes, who was LBJ’s cut out for
massive kickbacks, told IRS investigator Walt Perry that he had given Lyndon
Johnson 10 million dollars in cash from the 1950s through the early 1960s.[iv] That would be equal to
about 85 million dollars in 2018 U.S. dollars. Lyndon Johnson was not just
vulgar and disgusting; he was a political criminal of spectacular proportions
operating at the highest levels of American government for decades.
When he was young Lyndon Johnson’s
grandmother predicted he would go to prison because of his juvenile delinquent
behavior, which including strapping a stick of dynamite to a stray dog and
blowing the poor creature up in the town square.[v]
LBJ
respected no personal boundaries. Former aide Jake Pickle tells about the time
one cold morning on the campaign trail when Johnson refused to get out of bed
and felt he was coming down with a cold. Pickle recounts LBJ’s remedy:
QUOTE
Johnson
looked up at Warren Woodward. Then Johnson said, “Woody! Get down in this bed
with me. What I need is some body warmth!”
Woody looked
at Johnson. He looked at us. The Johnson issued the order again. So, fully
dressed, Woody lay down alongside Johnson - and under out watchful eyes.
As the
Senator snuggled up to his bed partner, Woody, with big banjo eyes, looked up
at me and said, “Pickle, you SOB, if you ever tell this, I’ll kill you.”
UNQUOTE
A prime
example of LBJ’s malignant, even deadly, narcissism is the time he forced two
pilots from Austin to fly to him at the LBJ Ranch when the weather on February,
17, 1961, was in cold, foggy white out conditions all over the Texas Hill
Country. When his pilot Harold Teague resisted making the flight because of
extremely dangerous flying conditions “Johnson is said to have exploded,
venting his profanity upon the pilot, demanding to know ‘what do you think I am
paying your for?’ and again ordering him to ‘get that plane’ to the ranch.” The
result was LBJ’s private, Convair 240 plane crashed into a hill seven miles
from the LBJ Ranch and the pilots Harold Teague, age 39, and Charles Williams,
age 37, died in crash that looked like a war scene.[vi] J. Evetts Haley put the
crash scene photo with LBJ surveying his handiwork on the cover of his book A Texan looks at Lyndon: A Study in
Illegitimate Power, published in 1964.
Although
JFK’s and Bill Clinton’s spectacular sexual promiscuities are well known to the
public, Lyndon’s equal sexual derangement is not as well known. LBJ used to say
that he got “more women by accident than Jack had on purpose.”[vii]
LBJ had
numerous mistresses over the decades and he made countless sexual advances upon
women. LBJ would even have sex with these women under that same roof with Lady
Bird, who he treated like dirt under his muddy boots for decades. LBJ had
numerous illegitimate children: he had Steven Mark Brown (1950-1990) with
Madeleine Brown and at one point in 1963 he had TWO of his secretaries pregnant
at the same time. One was Yolanda Boozer who had a child Lyndon Boozer with LBJ.
Lyndon Boozer (born in summer 1963) today is a telecom executive with ATT in
the Wash, DC area and he spent five years getting the Department of Education’s
building named for his father LBJ.[viii]
The other
secretary who LBJ had pregnant in the summer of 1963 was Mary Margaret Wiley
Valenti, who was LBJ’s #1 mistress and who married LBJ aide Jack Valenti in
1962. Valenti let her keep sleeping with LBJ and her first born daughter
Courtenay Lynda Valenti is the daughter of LBJ. Courtenay Valenti is an
executive with Warner Brothers Pictures and sits on the LBJ Foundation Board of
Trustees.[ix] Courtenay was born about
3 weeks before the JFK assassination, while Lyndon Boozer was born in the
summer of 1963.
In her
memoir, Texas journalist Sarah McClendon says that a young Bill Moyers, an LBJ
“religious aide,” was brought into the LBJ orbit as a cover for LBJ and that
Moyers “was a chaperone who would travel with Lyndon
and Mary Margaret to show that all was on the up-and-up.”[x]
In 1989, a
40-year old man Rodney Baines White died of AIDS. He had been told and
presented to the world as the son of LBJ’s brother, Sam Houston Johnson.[xi] Raymond Frank, the former
Sheriff of Travis County, who was close friends with Sam Houston, says Rodney
was in fact the illegitimate son of Lyndon Johnson. LBJ put Rodney in the Navy
as the Vietnam War was heating up and “Rodney used to complain that Lyndon
wanted him to be the family’s sacrificial lamb in Vietnam.”[xii]
Madeleine
Brown has an important chapter in her book Texas
in the Morning: The Love Story of Madeleine Brown and President Lyndon Baines
Johnson. She tells about the time she trysted with LBJ when he was vice
president at the historic Menger Hotel which is located across from the Alamo
in San Antonio. She had brought her black nanny to babysit her young boys and
LBJ had seen the nanny, Dale Turner, look at him and Madeleine as they entered
their hotel room. Fearing exposure, Johnson made it clear to Madeleine, who
strongly resisted, that she had to get rid of Dale even though she was like a
member of Madeleine’s family and a second mother to the boys. After that tryst
with LBJ, Madeleine says:
“Dale never
returned. Our maid for ten years, as well as being Jimmy’s and Steven’s
surrogate mother, had disappeared without a trace. The boys cried for days. I
notified the police, telephoned her family and friends - all to no avail. To
this day [1997], I have not seen or heard from Dale Turner. Never.”[xiii]
Lyndon
Johnson would have rubbed out that nanny like a fly on a wind sill.
Sexual
depravity, cruelty to animals, political and personal corruption of the first
degree - so what else was Lyndon Johnson capable of doing? How about murdering
Sam Smithwick in 1952, murdering U.S agricultural official Henry Marshall in
1961, murdering President John Kennedy in 1963 and orchestrating Israel’s
murders of the sailors on board the USS
Liberty on June 8, 1967 during the Six Day War? The odds are high that
Lyndon Johnson, acting indirectly through Jack Ruby, murdered CIA patsy Lee
Harvey Oswald on Nov. 24, 1963 in the aftermath of the JFK assassination. On
top of all that Lyndon Johnson was very likely attempting to murder Jack Ruby
while he was in prison by assigning an MK-Ultra doctor Louis Jolyon West to him
and giving Ruby cancer injections. It was no accident that while in jail Jack
Ruby’s regular doctor was fired and CIA-funded Dr. Jolyon West was assigned to him.
Wikipedia describes Dr. West as a psychiatrist who took his
patients/subjects/victims “to the limits of human experience.” Dr. West was a
CIA contractor for its MK-ULTRA brainwashing studies. Additionally, Dr. West
infamously killed an elephant with an overdose of LSD.[xiv] Richard Helms, who LBJ
made head of the CIA in June, 1966, helped to run the CIA’s infamous MK-ULTRA
program which conducted unconscionable mind control experiments, attempted to
destroy all records of mind control projects.[xv]
Jack Ruby
died in prison of a pulmonary embolism on January 3, 1967 but he was convinced
that the U.S. government was trying to murder him with cancer injections. The
Texas Court of Appeals had just overturned his death sentence and Ruby was due
for a new trial and he had made comments that Lyndon Johnson was behind the JFK
assassination.[xvi]
Ruby said that if JFK had picked Adlai Stevenson to be Vice President “there
would never have been an assassination of our beloved President Kennedy” and
Ruby said in a letter smuggled out of prison that LBJ was a “Nazi in the worst
order.”
It is
striking the number of high level contemporaries and political players who
thought Lyndon Johnson was a murderer. This list of people includes Texas Gov.
Allan Shivers, Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, CIA chief William Casey, Gen.
Joseph Cappucci (a very high level military officer who was chief of Air Force
counterintelligence in the late 1960s), the KGB, Mexican intelligence service
DFS as well as inner circle LBJ people such as Madeleine Brown (one of his top
mistresses) and his top vehicle for kickbacks, mega cash cow Billie Sol Estes.
Evelyn
Lincoln, JFK’s personal secretary for 12 years and thus a deep JFK insider, immediately
(within hours) put LBJ at the top of her list of suspects in the JFK
assassination. LBJ was listed above
KKK, Dixiecrats (right wing segregationist Democrats) and Robert Kennedy’s arch
enemy Jimmy Hoffa.[xvii]
Lyndon
Johnson himself spilled the beans on what Texas Gov. Allan Shivers thought
about LBJ in a conversation with journalist Texas Ronnie Dugger when LBJ was
president. Dugger relays this eye opening anecdote in his The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson:
QUOTE
In
1956, when Shivers and Johnson were fighting each other for political control,
“Shivers charged me with murder,”
Johnson, with great incredulity, told me. Speaking from his four-poster bed
late one night in the White House, Johnson said that Shivers had made a speech
accusing him of Smithwick’s murder, and in San Antonio “the reporters came
running up to me saying Shivers had charged me with murder, and what did I want
to say about it?” Obviously Johnson had dismissed the charge, but he did not
say so, rather repeating indignantly, “Shivers said I was a murderer!” Shivers, shown this account
of what Johnson said, told me, “I don’t care to discuss it.”
The reason
LBJ would have murdered Sam Smithwick, and he very likely did, was that Sam
Smithwick, in prison in 1952, was a threat to talk about the notorious LBJ
ballot stuffing in Jim Wells County that was LBJ’s decisive crime leading to
his victory in the 1948 Democratic Senate primary. This occurred at a time when
the Democratic nominee in Texas was a sure thing to beat any Republican in a
general election.
Here is how
historian Randall Woods covers the Smithwick story:
QUOTE
In
1952, Smithwick wrote Coke Stevenson from prison, insisting that five days
before the shooting, two Mexican Americans had delivered into his hands the
contents of Box 13 from the famous 1948 senatorial campaign. In return for
leniency from the state, he was willing to produce them. Stevenson set out
immediately for Huntsville and the state prison. “I had left the ranch and got
as far as Junction,” Calculatin’ Coke recounted, “when I got the information
that he was dead.”
Indeed,
the former deputy sheriff was found hanging from the bars of his cell.
Shivers’s friends began spreading the word that Johnson together with South
Texas political boss Archie Parr had had Smithwick murdered to cover up their
theft of the 1948 senatorial election.[xix]
UNQUOTE
When one
examines the totality of LBJ’s criminal career: the Henry Marshall murder,
JFK’s murder, the USS Liberty
murders, the billion dollar gold bullion heist of 1969 as detailed in the Gold
House trilogy of books by John Clarence, one can easily conclude that yes, of
course, Lyndon Johnson orchestrated the prison murder of Sam Smithwick in 1952
and LBJ’s henchmen tried to stage it as a suicide.
Another
person who gives us great insight into Lyndon Johnson is one of his key
mistresses, Madeleine Duncan Brown who wrote her memoir of her relationship
with LBJ and titled it Texas in the
Morning: The Love Story of Madeleine Brown and President Lyndon Baines Johnson,
published in 1997. JFK assassination researcher Harrison Livingstone helped
Madeleine publish her book and seasoned and respected and seasoned JFK assassination researcher Ed
Tatro helped Madeleine write her book. Madeleine was one of the key and
longtime mistresses of LBJ from 1948 until 1969. She and LBJ had a son Steven
Mark Brown who was born in 1950 and died of cancer in 1990.
Although
Madeleine may not have been LBJ’s most important mistress (that honor goes to
Mary Margaret Wiley who later married Jack Valenti) Madeleine Brown may be one
of the most important witnesses of the JFK assassination to ever come forward.
That is because Madeleine revealed that in the immediate aftermath of the JFK
assassination, Lyndon Johnson was blaming the JFK murder on the rich,
billionaire businessmen of Dallas, TX (his closet supporters) and U.S.
intelligence (which LBJ was very close to and was one of the powerful few men
in Congress who had oversight of them).
Lyndon
Johnson would often meet his mistresses in the high end hotels in Texas such as
the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, Menger Hotel in San Antonio and the Shamrock
Hotel in Houston. In Austin, LBJ kept room #434 on permanent retainer at the iconic
and historic Driskill Hotel.[xx] That room is located on
the top floor, south side of the Driskill and it is now known as the Governor’s
Suite. The Driskill describes it today as “Boasting hardwood floors, soaring
ceilings, personal granite wet bar and oversized, outdoor patio overlooking
Austin’s world famous Sixth Street entertainment district.”[xxi]
The
Governor’s Suite, room #434 at the Driskill, is important because that is where
the most important revelation in the JFK assassination occurred. It is where on
the night of Dec. 31, 1963, Lyndon Johnson told Madeleine Brown that the rich
oilmen/businessmen of Dallas (his supporters) and in his graphic words “fucking
renegade intelligence bastards” were behind the JFK assassination. LBJ was too
much of a perfect psychopath to ever admit that he orchestrated the whole
thing.
On that
night Madeleine was meeting LBJ for a New Year’s Eve tryst when she quizzed him
on the recent JFK assassination which had rocked the world 6 weeks before.
Madeleine describes the scene:
QUOTE
"Lyndon, you know that a lot
of people believe you had something to do with President Kennedy's
assassination."
He
shot up out of bed and began pacing and waving his arms screaming like a
madman. I was scared!
"That's
bullshit, Madeleine Brown!" he yelled. "Don't tell me you believe
that crap!"
"Of
course not." I answered meekly, trying to cool his temper.
"It
was Texas oil and those fucking renegade intelligence bastards in
Washington."[xxii]
UNQUOTE
That is what
the savviest JFK assassination researchers have concluded. By the late 1960s
and 1970s many students of the JFK assassination had concluded that the CIA, or
elements of U.S. intelligence and the military were behind JFK’s murder. In the
1980s the hammer dropped hard on LBJ when LBJ insiders Madeleine Brown, Billie
Sol Estes and Barr McClellan went public with their stories of Lyndon Johnson
perfidy and as Robert Caro was writing biographies of LBJ that painted him as a
“goddamn animal” (the words of Richard Nixon upon reading Caro’s first volume
on LBJ, The Path To Power, 1982).
Also in 1982 LBJ aide George Reedy wrote his book on LBJ and revealed Johnson
in the fall of 1963 was acutely aware that the Kennedys were trying to destroy
him utterly, not merely remove him from the 1964 Democratic ticket. In the
foreward to his book, Reedy literally described his book as an “exercise in
exorcism” to get rid himself of the burden of Lyndon Johnson.
Madeleine
Brown’s critical account is buttressed by contemporary press reports and LBJ’s
president daily diary which confirm that he ended up the Driskill later in the
night on New Year’s Eve Dec. 31, 1963. Earlier in the evening, LBJ had
integrated the Forty Acres Club with his black secretary Gerry Whittington (who
months later rebuffed his crude sexual advances and asked to be transferred out
of the White House), then he went to Univ. of Texas president Frank Irwin’s
residence and then ended up at the White House press party which was occurring
downstairs in the Driskill at the then current location of the Headliner’s Club. Johnson then headed
upstairs to his retained room #434 to see his beloved mistress Madeleine where
he spilled the beans on who was really behind the JFK assassination.
Madeleine
also says that early in the morning of the JFK assassination, Lyndon Johnson
called her from the Texas Hotel in Fort Worth (where JFK and LBJ were staying)
and told her “That son-of-a-bitch crazy [Texas Sen. Ralph] Yarborough and that
goddamn fucking Irish mafia bastard Kennedy, will never embarrass me again!” Then
he yelled into the phone, “I’ve got about a minute to get to the parking lot to
hear that bastard!”[xxiii]
Within hours
John Kennedy was assassinated in a Dallas motorcade. Students of LBJ know that
the word “goddamn” was a favorite of his.
Along with
Madeleine Brown, another key voice of revelation Lyndon Johnson’s role in the
JFK assassination has been Barr McClellan who worked at the powerful
LBJ-affiliated law firm Clark, Thomas and Winters. That law firm had the
lawyers that did all of the critical, dirty work for Lyndon Johnson. In 2011
the Austin American-Statesman headline read “Clark, Thomas & Winters,
Austin’s oldest law firm, closes: Firm shuts down before one of it’s ex-partners
goes on trial in Pedernales co-op theft and money laundering scandal.”[xxiv] During the time of LBJ,
the King of Clark, Thomas & Winters for decades was an extremely powerful
man named Ed Clark. Ed Aubrey Clark was LBJ’s blood brother and Reader’s Digest had an article in the
1950s in which they referred to Ed Clark as the secret political strongman of
Texas. If you have any questions about the power of Ed Clark, just read Robert
Draper’s 2003 article on him in Texas
Monthly which is entitled “Death of a Fixer.” When he was in college,
Robert Draper met Ed Clark and described him as “a large biscuit-faced man who
wore a tentlike suit and a grin that one might term bumpkinish.”[xxv]
Draper’s
grandfather was Leon Jaworski, a prominent Houston lawyer whose claim to fame
as being a Watergate special prosecutor. Leon Jaworski, who was present when
his collegiate grandson Robert met Clark, later told him that Ed Clark was a
“very, very powerful man.”[xxvi] Texas power broker Ed
Clark was extremely powerful with both the federal and Texas governmental
bureaucracies; he was what is known today as whale political bundler and he had
sharp influence on who the Democratic party nominee was for both statewide
offices and locally in Travis County where he lived.
Ed Clark
also used to brag privately to Barr McClellan about his role in orchestrating
the JFK assassination. Clark was being given free oil leases by companies who
were rewarding him for his role in the JFK assassination. As Barr McCellan
relates, Clark would slap paperwork for these free deals on his desk and say
“Barr, take care of this. This is for Dallas,” meaning this is for my arranging
the JFK assassination. Ed Clark was one of LBJ’s closest blood brothers, like
FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover was and the Texas oil men such as ultra far right
billionaire H.L. Hunt.
When LBJ was
the Senate Majority Leader (Jan. 1955 - Jan. 1961) he would come home to Austin
and the first people LBJ would confer with would be Austin Mayor Tom Miller and
Ed Clark. The chauffer for this group was a budding lawyer Frank Denius and he
would take Miller and Ed Clark over to the Austin Mueller Airport to pick up
LBJ when he flew in. Then the party would head over to Randy’s Circle R Barbecue
where LBJ would regale them on what he, his mentor House Speaker Sam Rayburn
and President Dwight Eisenhower were up to in Washington, D.C. Frank Denius,
who later became perhaps THE leading citizen in Austin, TX wrote about that in
his autobiography On The Way.[xxvii]
Don Thomas
was another partner in that LBJ law firm and he used to (privately) brag to
Barr McClellan that he helped to take care of the critical ballot stuffing down
in Jim Wells County for LBJ in his 1948 Senate primary vs. Coke Stevenson. That
was the race that “Landslide Lyndon” won by 87 votes to become the Texas
Democratic Senate nominee. Don Thomas would tell Barr that he (Thomas) took
care of the LBJ ballot stuffing in South Texas but as for Dallas (JFK’s
murder), Ed Clark had arranged that. Don Thomas, who handled much of LBJ’s
financial affairs, was extremely close to Lyndon Johnson. Another longterm and
key investment advisor to LBJ was the very sharp Waddy Bullion. His son John
Bullion describes the LBJ-Don Thomas relationship in his book In The Boat with LBJ:
QUOTE
Don Thomas
was the rare soul who complemented first-rate professional abilities with a
pleasant, quiet, self-effacing personality. If he had a passion, it was his
determination to remain behind the scenes and out of the public’s eye. Others
could take the bows; Thomas’s satisfaction came from knowing those who he
respected admired his brilliance. To Dad, he was the ideal teammate. For Lyndon
Johnson, he became that rarest of birds, a personal friend. “No one,” Dad told
me recently, “was closer personally to LBJ, except of course Lady Bird.” Then
he looked directly at me, and repeated with an intense emphasis: “No one.”[xxviii]
UNQUOTE
Ed Clark
also took credit for the ballot stuffing for LBJ down in South Texas. Frank
Denius relates what Ed Clark told him about the crimes of 1948, “He told me
about flying down to South Texas in an unmarked Brown and Root plane, landing
on the airstrip of a ranch in a remote location, meeting with political bosses
- with plenty of cash in his pockets - flying back to Austin that night.”[xxix]
The
revelations of Barr McClellan, an insider at Clark, Thomas & Winters are
very important. Two of the people closest on Earth to Lyndon Johnson, his
political fixer Ed Clark and his tax attorney and go-to man Don Thomas, both
privately bragged to McClellan in the years following the JFK assassination
that Ed Clark, and by extension his longtime political blood brother Lyndon
Johnson, orchestrated the JFK assassination. Lyndon Johnson later appointed Ed
Clark (who lived from 1906-1992) as ambassador to Australia from 1965 to 1968 during
the peak of the Vietnam War.
John Coates,
yet another associate attorney at Clark, Thomas and Winters, also told Barr
McClellan “If the truth be told, Clark arranged the assassination of Kennedy.”[xxx]
By the
1980s, when Madeleine Brown and Barr McClellan came public with their
revelations and when Robert Caro published his first book on LBJ, The Path to Power (1982), the reputation
of Lyndon Johnson was being annihilated. No longer was the fiasco of the
Vietnam War the only albatross being hung around LBJ’s neck. His perfect
psychopathy and his murder of John Kennedy and other victims were being
exposed.
A third
person with very damaging information about LBJ also came forward in the
1980’s: Billie Sol Estes. Estes admitted what close LBJ observers had long
suspected: that Lyndon Johnson was behind the June, 3, 1961, murder of U.S.
agricultural official Henry Marshall. Estes revealed to Texas Ranger and later
U.S. Marshall Clint Peoples that he, Lyndon Johnson, LBJ political director and
factotum Cliff Carter, and LBJ’s alleged personal hit man Malcolm Wallace were
behind the murder of Henry Marshall. The reason Agricultural Dept. bureaucrat
Marshall had to be killed was that he was taking a deep dive into the corrupt LBJ
connections of Billie Sol Estes who was gargantuan #1 cash cow of kickbacks of
government contracts for Lyndon Johnson.
Estes told
Walt Perry, an IRS investigator of the early 1960s, that he had given Lyndon
Johnson $10 million in kickbacks/bribes for government contracts. $10 million
in 1960 dollars is equal to about $85 million in 2018 U.S. dollars. The stakes
for exposure of the corrupt LBJ-Estes
connection were extremely high for Lyndon Johnson. The Attorney General for the
Kennedy Administration, Robert Kennedy went to Estes and told him he could get
him out of jail if he would testify against LBJ. Estes reply was “If I
testified against him [LBJ], I’d be dead within twenty-four hours.”[xxxi]
In the 1980s
and onward Billie Sol Estes said that LBJ used his personal hitman Malcolm
Wallace to murder Henry Marshall. Whether Wallace was involved as the
triggerman or not, it is extremely likely that Lyndon Johnson was behind the
murder of Henry Marshall, whose obvious murder (5 shots with a bolt action gun)
was bizarrely ruled a “suicide” by local authorities. The Marshall family in
the early 1960s demanded a grand jury/inquest to look into that suicide ruling.
One did and it was presided over by LBJ protege Barefoot Sanders, then the U.S.
Attorney for the Northern District of Texas, and it came back with no change in
the ruling of the death of Henry Marshall as a suicide. At the time of the
Henry Marshall murder, which he helped to cover up for LBJ, Barefoot Sanders
was 36 years old. Later Sanders worked in the LBJ White House. In 1972 Sanders
became the Texas Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, although he lost to Republican
John Tower in the general election. Sanders later became notable for serving as
a federal judge from 1979 until his death in 2008, approximately 29 years of
service. Barefoot Sanders (1947) had been a former student body president of
the University of Texas, just as Malcolm Wallace, LBJ’s alleged, personal
hitman (according to Estes) had been student president in 1944 when he led a
march of 8,000 students in support of the socialist president of the Univ. of
Texas Homer Rainey. John Connally, another LBJ protégé, and future Texas
governor, was also the president of the Univ. of Texas at Austin student body
in 1938.
One of the
key things that Billie Sol Estes told both his lawyer Doug Caddy and U.S.
Marshall Clint Peoples was that Lyndon Johnson would use military planes to
transport his hitmen around the country to assassinate anyone who might be a
dire threat to him. The reason Johnson did this was 1) LBJ had a lot of stroke
with the military and 2) most importantly, there would be no commercial air flight
records of the travels of his hit men.
Joan Mellen
has written a book Faustian Bargains:
Lyndon Johnson and Mac Wallace in the Robber Baron Culture of Texas, that
although it confirms the corruption and psychopathy of Lyndon Johnson, calls
into question whether LBJ protégé Malcolm Wallace was involved in the murder of
Henry Marshall in June, 1961. She interviewed Wallace family members who,
decades later, gave Wallace an alibi, absolving him of the Henry Marshall
murder. A few things are for sure, Mac Wallace indeed murdered golf pro Doug
Kinser on October 22, 1951 and he had an LBJ-affiliated lawyer named John Cofer
run his defense. Mac Wallace in Feb. of
1952 was convicted of the murder of John Kinser and given by the judge an eye
popping suspended sentence of 5 years probation and no time in jail! That shows
you the deep, dark power Lyndon Johnson wielded in Texas in his heyday of the
1950s and 1960s. His associates could murder and literally get away with it.
After the
Henry Marshall murder of 1961, there was a composite sketch made of a man who
was asking directions to Henry Marshall’s ranch on June 3, 1961, the day he was
murdered. This composite was printed in an article “The Killing of Henry
Marshall” by Bill Adler for the Texas
Observer, Nov. 7, 1986 issue.[xxxii] That composite looks a
lot like Billie Sol Estes himself and might implicate him personally in the
murder of Henry Marshall. No matter who murdered Marshall, the homicide was
covered up and it was ruled a suicide by local authorities. When an outrage
Marshall family demanded an inquest, a judicial inquiry to determine cause of
death, the person who was assigned to run the inquest was none other than LBJ
protege Barefoot Sanders. The early 1960’s inquest came up with the ridiculous
ruling of “suicide” as a cause of death and it was covered up by LBJ’s people.
FBI agent Tommy G. McWilliams made the fantastic claim that Marshall had died
of a suicide, despite the fact that he was shot 5 times with a bolt action 22.
The FBI of the 1950’s and 1960s carried a lot of water for Lyndon Johnson due
to the close relationship of LBJ and FBI Director Hoover, who were not only
political allies but neighbors from 1943-1961. LBJ’s top liaison at the FBI was
Deke DeLoach, the #3 man at the FBI who was almost like family to Lyndon
Johnson.
John Simkin,
a researcher into the JFK assassination, wrote a very fine essay on the Henry
Marshall murder entitled “Did LBJ order the killing of Henry Marshall?” Simkins
concluded: “I believe that Henry Marshall's death is linked to the
assassination of JFK.”[xxxiii]
The Kennedys
in 1962 were paying very close attention to the Billie Sol Estes scandals and
probing for ways they could use it against Lyndon Johnson. Likewise in the fall
of 1963 the Kennedys were going to use the Bobby Baker scandal as ammunition to
get rid of Lyndon Johnson, according to JFK’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln. Three
days before his death in Dallas, JFK had told Lincoln that he was going to
replace Johnson as VP on the 1964 Democratic ticket, “He looked straight ahead,
and without hesitating he replied, at this time I am thinking about Governor
Terry Sanford of North Carolina. But it will not be Lyndon.”[xxxiv]
Longtime LBJ
aide George Reedy published Lyndon B.
Johnson: A Memoir in 1982 about his experiences with LBJ and he revealed
LBJ was utterly obsessed with the notion (now known as a fact) that the
Kennedys were out to destroy LBJ. Reedy:
“In the back
of his mind, it is possible that he believed these visits were inspired by
Bobby Kennedy as part of a "plot" to delete the name LBJ from the
ticket in 1964. This had become an obsession with him- a conviction that
peopled the world with agents of the president's brother all seeking to do him
in. Someone- I never found out who- very actively fed this belief and kept him
in a perpetual state of anxiety. This reached major proportions with the
outbreak of the Billy Sol Estes and Bobby Baker scandals.”[xxxv]
In fact the
Kennedys had a two track plan to destroy LBJ. Robert Kennedy, at the behest of
JFK, was the point man leading the charge and he was fueling both a Senate
Rules Committee investigation of LBJ’s corruption and also RFK was fanning the
flames of imminent media attacks on LBJ which were to focus on his corruption
and ill-gotten wealth. Seymour Hersh in his 1997 The Dark Side of Camelot interviewed the former Senate Rules
Committee counsel Burkett van Kirk who confirmed to him that Robert Kennedy had
sent a Justice Dept. lawyer up to Capitol Hill with to give the Republicans as
much dirt on LBJ as they could. Van Kirk said the Kennedys were getting rid of
LBJ and he was as sure of that as he was of the sun setting in the west.
In 2009
James Wagenvoord, who in 1963 was a young business manager and assistant to the
Life Magazine Executive editor, came
forward and confirmed the JFK’s point man Robert Kennedy was feeding Life Magazine dirt on LBJ to be used in
an imminent cover story on LBJ’s corruption.[xxxvi] This expose of LBJ was
due out the immediate week after the JFK assassination and it was canceled once
LBJ became president.
Phil Brennan
was the columnist Cato for the National
Review in the fall of 1963. Brennan recollects: “A few days later, the attorney general, Bobby Kennedy, called five of
Washington's top reporters into his office and told them it was now open season
on Lyndon Johnson. It's OK, he told them, to go after the story they were
ignoring out of deference to the administration.”[xxxvii]
In
the fall of 1963 the Kennedys were working to destroy Lyndon Johnson and LBJ was
completely aware of this dark fact. Lyndon Johnson, in an act of self-defense,
orchestrated the JFK assassination with the wealthy elite of Texas, elements of
CIA and military intelligence to murder John Kennedy. Their motives were
different. LBJ’s was personal survival. The Texas elite, especially the Dallas
elite and Ed Clark were about to lose their 30 year investment in LBJ power
broker. CIA operatives and military intelligence were enraged over foreign
policy, especially Cuba policy and the assassination of Diem in Vietnam in an
American facilitated coup. CIA and military war hawks knew LBJ would be much
more amenable to their interests.
The
identification of Air Force General, elite CIA operative and Allen Dulles
protégé Edward Lansdale at Dealey Plaza by his peers Col. Fletcher Prouty and
Gen. Victor Krulak means that Allen Dulles, Lansdale’s mentor, was very likely
a co-conspirator with LBJ in the murder of JFK.[xxxviii] Max
Boot has written a fine biography (The
Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam) of
Gen. Lansdale and if you read the second half of this book you will find many
examples of Lansdale having motive to kill JFK. Three weeks before the 11-22-63
JFK assassination Lansdale was ignominiously cashiered by the Kennedy
Administration as his friend Ngo Dihn Diem of South Vietnam was being deposed
and killed in a USA-facilitated coup. LBJ immediately resurrected Lansdale’s
career and sent him to Vietnam in summer 1965 in a move that was covered positively
by American newspapers nationwide. Gen. Lansdale’s #1 sponsor in Congress was
Sen. Thomas Dodds (D-CN), a foreign policy hawk, who had been a front row
Kennedy-hater and close political ally of Lyndon Johnson.
Allen
Dulles, the mentor of Gen. Lansdale, was the first person who LBJ suggested (to
Hoover) for the Warren Commission and Dulles immediately went to work covering
up the JFK assassination from that influential vantage point. Author Walt Brown
has proven in his book The Warren Omission the outsized role in which Allen
Dulles played on the Warren Commission and Brown concluded, “Yet from careful reading
of the five pertinent volumes of the Hearings, as well as from Figure 2, it
becomes clear that of Commission members, Allen Dulles was the Grand
Inquisitor. Figure One in part explains that. Most simply put, Allen Dulles was
there the most.”[xxxix]
Late
in life Dulles, who had been sacked by JFK as head of the CIA after the Bays of
Pigs fiasco, made a spectacularly bitter comment to journalist Willie Morris
about the slain JFK, “That little Kennedy, he thought he was a God.”[xl]
Richard
Nixon, Barry Goldwater, former CIA chief William Casey, Kennedy-hater Roy Cohn,
Henry Cabot Lodge, the KGB and Mexican intelligence all believed that Lyndon
Johnson was behind the JFK assassination. Political operative Roger Stone was
very close to Nixon in his post presidential years. When Stone would ask Nixon
about the JFK assassination, Nixon would reply, “Both Johnson and I wanted to
be president, but the only difference was I wouldn’t kill for it.”[xli] Stone
says that when he would then press Nixon on who killed JFK, Nixon would just
shiver and exclaim “Texas!” Nixon and LBJ shared a major political donor: Clint
Murchison, Sr., the leading politico businessman of Dallas, TX.
Nixon
had close ties to the CIA and he helped to plan the Bay of Pigs invasion before
JFK entered office. H.R. Haldeman, the White House chief of staff for Nixon,
said that Nixon’s code word for the JFK assassination was “the whole Bay of
Pigs thing.” In the famous (June 23, 1972) “smoking gun tape” that helped to
drive Nixon from office, Nixon refers to CIA operative E. Howard Hunt by saying
“Of course, this is a, this is a Hunt, you will-that will uncover a lot of
things. You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things and that we just
feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This
involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to
do with ourselves.”[xlii]
Later
in the tape Nixon tries to get the CIA to stop the FBI from investigating the
Watergate break-in by saying “the President believes that is going to open the
whole Bay of Pigs [JFK Assassination] thing up again.”[xliii]
Nixon
is talking about CIA officer E. Howard Hunt and the CIA connected anti-Castro
Cubans and their participation in the JFK assassination (“the whole Bay of Pigs
thing” in Nixon’s code). Nixon is trying to get the CIA to tell the FBI that by
investigating Watergate some ugly things about the JFK assassination could be
made publicly known.
Sen.
Howard Baker once asked Nixon what he knew about the JFK assassination. Nixon
replied, “You don’t want to know.”[xliv]
E.
Howard Hunt in the years before his death, confessed that Lyndon Johnson and a
cadre of CIA operatives were behind the JFK assassination. You can read about
it in a 2007 Rolling Stone article
entitled “The Last Confession of E. Howard Hunt.”[xlv] E.
Howard Hunt, ultimately admitted to being a “backbencher” in the JFK
assassination but his son Saint John Hunt believes his father, who had a
fantastic hatred of the Kennedys, was up to his eyeballs in the murder of JFK.
Saint John says that one of the things his father used to say around the house
was “Let’s finish the job - let’s hit Ted [Kennedy].”[xlvi] E.
Howard Hunt was very close to CIA director Allen Dulles and Wikipedia says that
“After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Hunt was reassigned as Executive Assistant” to
CIA chief Allen Dulles and “he helped Dulles to write [his book] The Craft of Intelligence.”[xlvii]
For
the most part Lyndon Johnson’s cover story behind the scenes to many government
officials and opinion makers was that Fidel Castro had killed JFK. For example
in March, 1971, LBJ told influential publisher George Weidenfeld, “You see, the
Kennedy brothers liked playing cops and robbers, and when Bobby was
Attorney-General he was responsible for the CIA and they sent people into Cuba
to git Castro, but they failed and
Castro git Jack Kennedy.”[xlviii] LBJ
was more honest with people he trusted implicitly. LBJ told one of his top tier
mistresses Madeleine Brown that his super rich supporters in Dallas and
“renegade intelligence bastards” killed JFK. In 1967 LBJ’s trusted chief of
staff Marvin Watson told Deke DeLoach, LBJ’s liaison with the FBI, that Johnson
“was now convinced there was a plot in
connection with the assassination. Watson stated the President felt that CIA
had had something to do with this plot."[xlix]
Watson had been a longtime LBJ operative who started working for Johnson in his
1948 Senate race.
In the early 1970s when LBJ had one of
his heart medical scares, he was flown from the LBJ Ranch to Brooke Army
Medical Center in San Antonio. According to author Robert Burnside: “The couple I had dinner
with was Robert B. and Elizabeth Slobins, and their close friend, the former
wife of the M.P. official who was in the room when Johnson gave repentance to
the preacher. Supposedly, Lyndon’s words were, “It wasn’t my fault. Lady Bird
and Hoover came up with the original plan [for the JFK assassination]!”[l] For people who know of LBJ’s mental
instabilities, heart problems and inability to take responsibility for anything
he did that sounds precisely like something a troubled Lyndon Johnson would
say: blaming his wife for his murder
of President Kennedy.
Within minutes of his hated rival (and
boss) John Kennedy being declared dead, Lyndon Johnson was one of the first
(and only) people in the country to be pinning the JFK assassination on a
“communist” and not on a right wing Dallas nut which the vast majority of
people assumed had just killed JFK. Dallas in 1963 was known as a hard right
town dominated by ultra rich, reactionary oil men and business men. It had a strong
presence of John Birchers and a newspaper, the Dallas Morning News, that towed a frothing Kennedy-hating
conservative line. LBJ and his wife Lady Bird had nearly been assaulted in the
1960 presidential campaign in Dallas by a “mink coat mob,” an experience that
Lady Bird called her most terrifying experience ever. Just weeks before JFK was
scheduled to come to Dallas, UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson was spat on and hit
with a placard by a scrum of right wing activists. After these ugly incidents
many had warned JFK to steer clear of Dallas. On the day of the JFK
assassination, Dallas police chief Jesse Curry went on TV early in the morning
and made an appeal for law and order and good manners when JFK came for his
lunchtime motorcade.
In the fall of 1961, the publisher of
the Dallas Morning News Ted Dealey
attended a White House luncheon and did the verbal equivalent of throwing a
glass of water in President Kennedy’s face when he said, “You and your
administration are weak sisters. We need a man on horseback to lead this
nation, and many people in Texas and the southwest think you are riding
Caroline’s bicycle.”[li]
The Dallas Morning News later said
that 84% of the phone calls and letters it received were in support of Dealey’s
comments.
There has even book a book Dallas 1963, written by Bill Minutaglio
and Steven L. Davis that chronicles “a city crammed with
larger-than-life characters dead-set against the Kennedy presidency. These
included rabid warriors like defrocked military general Edwin A. Walker; the
world's richest oil baron, H. L. Hunt; the leader of the largest Baptist
congregation in the world, W.A. Criswell; and the media mogul Ted Dealey.”[lii] These were “the obsessed
[Right Wing] men in Dallas who concocted the climate of hatred that led many to
blame the city for the president's death.” (I should add that H.L. Hunt was such a close
personal friend of Lyndon Johnson that he and arch Mississippi segregationist
Sen. Jim Eastland went hunting with LBJ a mere two months before LBJ’s death in
January, 1973.)[liii]
By November,
1963 Dallas had so carved itself a national reputation for its Kennedy-hating
hard right politics that it earned nicknamed the “City of Hate.” Even 50 years
later articles were being written on “Dallas still struggles to shake its
reputation as the ‘City of Hate.’”[liv]
Which
begs the question, why did Lyndon Johnson between 1:20 and 1:26 PM, within
one hour of JFK being shot, and a mere 20 minutes after JFK was declared dead
by the Parkland doctors at 1PM, tell assistant White House press secretary Mac
Kilduff “We don’t know what kind of a communist
conspiracy this might be” thirty to forty minutes before the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, a man with a nominal public
persona as a pro-Castro Marxist? Lyndon Johnson, almost alone among Americans,
was pushing the “Communists Did It” line. LBJ never let up on that to the end
of his life as he often privately told people Castro killed JFK. Oswald in fact
was a CIA patsy who had been working with far right former FBI agent Guy
Banister in New Orleans and he was set up by the CIA for the JFK assassination.
It appears that Lyndon Johnson, with strong CIA ties, knew precisely that Oswald
the CIA patsy was in place.
LBJ’s longtime blood brother J. Edgar
Hoover, the director of the FBI, was tasked covering up the JFK assassination.
Within hours the FBI was pushing the parting line that a “lone nut” had killed
JFK and that all the shots to JFK had come from behind. In reality JFK was shot
in both his throat and his head from the front. Hoover’s real views on the JFK
assassination can be understood from what he told the son of his close friend
Texas oil man Billy Byars. Billy Byars, Jr. asked Hoover in the summer of 1964
what he thought of the JFK assassination.
Hoover’s reply was “If I told you what I really
know, it would be very dangerous to the country. Our whole political system
could be disrupted.”[lv]
LBJ appointed Michigan GOP congressman Gerald
Ford to the Warren Commission. Ford secretly agreed to inform the FBI on what
the Warren Commission was doing and later in 1970 Newsweek identified Ford as
“the CIA’s man in Congress.” Ford publicly supported the Warren Commission and
he even wrote a book Portrait of the
Assassin indicting Oswald for JFK’s murder. Privately, however, President
Gerald Ford told French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing a different story,
“We arrived at an initial conclusion: it was not the work of one person, it was
something set up. We were sure it was set up. But we were not able to discover
by whom.”[lvi]
Senator
Richard Russell, LBJ’s mentor in the Senate, was another member of the Warren
Commission that was convinced a conspiracy killed JFK, although I doubt he
thought LBJ did it. From the news reports of Jan. 19, 1970: “Senator Richard B. Russell, Democrat of Georgia, said today he
never believed Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy without at
least some encouragement from others . . . The 72-year-old Senator made the
statements to newsmen in response to questions prompted by an article in the
Washington Post based on a series of taped interviews he recorded . . . Senator
Russell said the Warren Commission was not able to investigate specifically the
source of such possible encouragement, and he added he could not pinpoint it.”[lvii]
Hale
Boggs was another member of the Warren Commission who utterly did not believe
what he had signed. His wife Lindy was very close friends with Lady Bird
Johnson. Boggs came to the conclusion that “[FBI chief] Hoover lied his eyes
out to the Commission - on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets the
guns, you name it.”[lviii] In
fact, author Joan Mellen has proven it was Hale Boggs (not Sen. Russell Long as
Garrison had publicly stated) who prodded Jim Garrison to open his
investigation into the JFK assassination.[lix]
Tip
O’Neill, the former Speaker of the House from Massachusetts wrote in his
autobiography Man of the House that
he once had dinner with two of JFK’s closest aides, Kenny O’Donnell and Dave
Powers. Both men were in the Secret Service car behind JFK’s limousine in
Dallas and both men were utterly convinced that at least two shots came at JFK
from behind the fence on the Grassy Knoll.[lx]
O’Donnell revealed the FBI made him change
his testimony to say that the shots came from the right rear, a massive
fabrication.
Exactly
one month after the JFK assassination, on Dec. 22, 1963, former president Harry
Truman wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington
Post and it was titled “Limit CIA Role To Intelligence.”[lxi] Allen
Dulles was very concerned about that Truman column because it is possible for
the reader to interpret Truman’s broadside to the CIA as saying the CIA has
just murdered John Kennedy and we have a big problem with the way this agency
is involved in operations as opposed to its original analytical role.
Robert
Kennedy, who had been trying to covertly destroy Lyndon Johnson, immediately
suspected, as did Evelyn Lincoln, that LBJ and Hoover were up to no good in the
JFK assassination. One of the first people that RFK quizzed was CIA director
John McCone and asked him point blank if CIA operatives had just killed
President Kennedy. RFK was immediately thinking LBJ-Hoover-CIA as perps in the
JFK assassination. There was a lot of hatred in the CIA towards the Kennedys
over the 1961 fiasco at the Bay of Pigs.
Also
on the Nov. 22, 1963, Robert Kennedy called an anti-Castro Cuban exile (many
had CIA connections) named Enrique “Harry” Williams and flat out told this
survivor of the Bay of Pigs “One of your guys did it.”[lxii]
Remember, Richard Nixon’s code name for the JFK assassination was “the whole
Bay of Pigs thing.”
RFK
aide Frank Mankiewicz said that Robert Kennedy in private was quite dismissive
of Warren Report and in the estimation of Mankiewicz Kennedy was waiting to
grab the reins of federal power before he moved to re-open the investigation
into the death of JFK.[lxiii]
CIA
director McCone believed there was a conspiracy in the JFK assassination.[lxiv] Publicly,
RFK supported the Warren Report. Privately RFK was convinced that JFK had been
murdered in a domestic conspiracy and he vowed to solve it if he ever became
president. After JFK was killed, RFK told his aide Edwin Guthman, “I thought
they would get one of us. I thought it would be me.”[lxv]
Which
brings us back to Lyndon Johnson. LBJ biographer Robert Caro tells would LBJ
would often do when the name Robert Kennedy came up among his friends:
QUOTE
He would reply with a gesture.
Raising his big right hand, he would draw the side of it across the neck in a
slowing, slitting movement. Sometimes that gesture would be his only reply;
sometimes, as during a meeting with Ed Clark in Austin, he would say, as his
hand moved across his neck, "I'll cut his throat if it's the last thing I
do."
UNQUOTE
Roger
Stone in his early political years of the late 1960s was very close to John
Lodge, the brother of Republican Henry Cabot Lodge who JFK had beaten in a
Massachusetts Senate race and later made him the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam.
John Lodge told Stone that Henry Cabot Lodge told him that CIA, “some Mafiosi,”
and LBJ were behind the JFK assassination.[lxvi] Likewise
in 1980 when Stone was campaigning in New York for Ronald Reagan, both longtime
Kennedy-hater Roy Cohn and Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, then the underboss and
front boss of the Genovese crime family told Roger Stone that LBJ was behind
the murder of JFK.[lxvii] As a
side note, LBJ insider and Texas businessman Clint Murchison, Sr. was a
business partner with the Genovese family in the 1950s.
When
Roger Stone was on his book tour for The
Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ he ran into a nephew of former
CIA director William Casey who told Stone he had asked the old man who really
killed JFK. Casey’s reply to his nephew: “Lyndon Johnson had his fingers in the
soup bowl.”[lxviii]
Another
very high level politico of the 1960’s, Sen. Barry Goldwater, also came to
believe LBJ killed JFK. JFK researcher Jeffrey Hoff of Arizona met Barry
Goldwater in October, 1973, at a GOP picnic in Willcox in Cochise County, AZ.
The topic of the JFK assassination came up and Sen. Goldwater, who had been
LBJ’s opponent in the 1964 presidential race, told Jeffrey Hoff that he
believed LBJ killed JFK and that the Warren Commission was a sham and a
complete cover up. Hoff says that Goldwater was quite confident when making
those pronouncements.[lxix]
Goldwater, according to LBJ chief of staff Marvin Watson, “was a longtime
personal friend of Lyndon Johnson.”[lxx]
Howard
Willens who worked in the Kennedy Justice Dept. and on the Warren Commission
was asked in 2013 if he knew that in real time in 1963 that Lyndon Johnson and
the Kennedys were at loggerheads, that they were having great difficulties.
Willens replied, “Everyone in Washington, D.C. knew that.” The political elites
in Wash, D.C. knew that there was a sub rosa war going on between the Kennedys
and LBJ. The Dallas Morning News on
the very day of JFK’s assassination even had a headline “NIXON PREDICTS JFK MAY
DROP JOHNSON.”[lxxi]
Drew
Pearson, the nation’s top political writer whose column was syndicated in over
600 papers with a readership of 60 million people, was about to drop a bunker
buster bomb on LBJ with a “devastating” article on LBJ’s corruption that was
due to run in the papers nationwide on Sunday, Nov. 24, 1963.[lxxii] LBJ’s death led to the
spiking of that ruinous expose.
An
eye-opening book to read on LBJ is Capitol
Hill in Black and White, published in 1986 by Robert Parker. Parker was a
chauffeur for LBJ who often called him “nigger,” “boy,” and “chief” and never
by his name Robert. Parker later became the longtime maître d’ of the
prestigious Senate Dining Room. Parker knew LBJ extremely well.
Parker tells what the reaction on
Capitol Hill was to the murder of JFK: “It didn’t take long for the enemies of
Lyndon Johnson to crawl out of the Capitol woodwork. “Old LBJ must have had
something to do with it,” I heard them say the very next day. The suspicion
echoed in every corridor from Senate staff attorneys, legislative aides,
waitresses, and tourists. Their grief for John F. Kennedy made their cynicism
and dislike of Lyndon Johnson even more intense.”[lxxiii]
Parker is describing a real time response
of a tidal wave of suspicion of Lyndon Johnson’s involvement in JFK’s murder by
the most plugged in political insiders and residents of Washington, D.C..
Parker continues and describes the reaction of veteran civil rights activist
Whitney Young: “Like most people in the Kennedy camp, Young was upset. It was
bad enough to lose a dynamic leader like John Kennedy, but to get Lyndon
Johnson in exchange was to rub salt in the wounds of grief. Young was telling [NAACP
operative Clarence] Mitchell that everywhere he went he heard someone say LBJ
was behind the assassination of Kennedy.”[lxxiv]
Everywhere
Whitney Young went, people were saying LBJ had just killed JFK. It was Whitney
Young’s business to know a lot of influential people on Capitol Hill.
Lyndon
Johnson in a Jan. 11, 1967 phone call to his trusted aide Supreme Court Justice
Abe Fortas commented on the recent spate of books and articles casting
aspersions on the Warren Report, “They've [Robert Kennedy and his supporters] started all
this stuff...they've created all this doubt...And if we'd had anybody less than
the attorney general--ah, the chief justice--I would've already been
indicted."[lxxv]
Another Wash, D.C. high flier who was
convinced that LBJ had killed JFK was Gen. Joseph J. Cappucci, the head of Air
Force counterintelligence in the late 1960’s and a close personal friend of FBI
director J. Edgar Hoover. Gen. Cappucci in 1969 was having dinner at the Hilton
Hotel in Rome, Italy, with his close friends Col. William Henry Amos (also Gen.
Cappucci’s right hand man) and his wife Jan Amos, when the topic of
Chappaquiddick came up. The table was making negative comments about the
Kennedys when Gen. Cappucci opined, “No wonder Lyndon Johnson had JFK killed.” That
was quite a stunner to Jan Amos who was told by her husband in the car ride
home, “Jan, you are never to repeat a word that Gen. Cappucci spoke” in
reference to his comments about the JFK assassination. Earlier in 1964, Col.
Amos was the one who had direct military orders to find and destroy every copy
of J. Evetts Haley’s smashing expose on LBJ entitled A Texan Looks at Lyndon: A Study in Illegitimate Power on military
bases across the USA.
Jan Amos
said that her husband Col. William Amos said that LBJ “was the rudest and most
uncouth bastard he had ever been around or worked for.” Former Secret Service
officer John Norris who spend 18 years protecting many U.S. presidents said
“LBJ was just about the meanest, orneriest SOB I ever met.” Norris continues,
“He didn’t seem at all grief-stricken about what had just happened [the JFK
assassination], and knowing how ambitious he was and how much he and the Kennedys
disliked each other, it was easy for a person to wonder if he might have had
something to do with the assassination.”[lxxvi]
Gen. Curtis
LeMay was a Kennedy-hater who was one of the first generals that (fellow
Kennedy-hater) LBJ tried to get in touch with in the immediate aftermath of the
JFK assassination. In his oral history with the LBJ Library, Gen. LeMay “let it
all hang out” as he called the Kennedy people “cockroaches” who were
“vindictive,” “ruthless,” and had (low) “moral standards.” LeMay in his 1971
oral history said:
“For several
months before the President was assassinated they were rumors, and then
they got to be a little more than rumors, Vice President Johnson was going to
be dropped for the coming election. And all the Kennedy team was finally got to
openly to giving to the Vice President to the back of their hands, and it was
rather embarrassing for the country around Washington because it was so
apparent. Then bang, all at once he is President.”[lxxvii]
Let’s crystalize LeMay’s comments. The Kennedys were giving
LBJ the back of the hand and then BANG! [Dallas] LBJ becomes president.
KGB Col.
Oleg Nechiporenko was stationed in Mexico and he later wrote a book Passport to
Assassination, The Never-Before-Told Story of Lee Harvey Oswald by the KGB
Colonel Who Knew Him and in it he revealed
that in the immediate aftermath of the JFK assassination “many in the DFS [the
Mexican intelligence agency Direccion Federal de Seguridad] felt the Lyndon
Johnson was responsible.”[lxxviii]
One of the jewels produced by the Assassination Records
Review Board was a memo from J. Edgar Hoover dated 12/1/66 (and sent to LBJ on
that day) which stated that as of September, 1965, the Soviets were telling
their KGB agents in America that they had concluded that Lyndon Johnson was
behind the JFK assassination. This is important because Lyndon Johnson and CIA
officials spent decades trying to blame the JFK assassination either on Fidel
Castro of Cuba or the USSR. This critical Hoover memo was kept secret by the
U.S. government until the ARRB forced it to cough it up in the late 1990s,
about 30 years after it was written by Hoover. Here is the key passage:
QUOTE
On September 16, 1965, this same source reported that the KGB Residency in
New York City received instructions approximately September 16, 1965, from KGB
headquarters in Moscow to develop all possible information concerning President
Lyndon B. Johnson's character, background, personal friends, family, and from
which quarters he derives his support in his position as President of the
United States. Our source added that in the instructions from Moscow, it was
indicated that "now" the KGB was in possession of data purporting to
indicate President Johnson was responsible for the assassination of the late
President John F. Kennedy. KGB headquarters indicated that in view of this
information, it was necessary for the Soviet Government to know the existing
personal relationship between President Johnson and the Kennedy family,
particularly between President Johnson and Robert and "Ted" Kennedy.
In spring of 1977 when John Kennedy, Jr.’s friend Meg
Azzoni visited John at his mother Jackie’s well-appointed apartment in NYC when
the HSCA (House Select Committee on Assassinations) was in session. Meg
reports: “Jackie
told John and I at the 'break-the-fast' breakfast, 'I did not like or trust
Lyndon Johnson.' No one said another word the whole meal in memorial
contemplative silence."[lxxx]
Besides the
JFK assassination and besides leading the USA into the Vietnam War under the
false pretenses of the notorious Gulf of Tonkin incident, Lyndon Johnson’s
greatest crime may have been his orchestration of Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967, in the Six
Day War. The reason LBJ was trying to murder all 294 Americans on board and
leave no witnesses was that LBJ wanted the USS
Liberty sunk and then the USA and Israel could blame the attack on Egypt. The
USA would then have a pretext to enter the Six Day War and bomb and remove
Nasser of Egypt who had drifted into the Soviet camp over the past decade. In
the course of this heinous crime, by threatening to remove USSR’s client state
of Egypt, Lyndon Johnson almost caused WWIII. In order to understand the USS Liberty one must first understand
that Lyndon Johnson was a murderous, amoral psychopath, a pluperfect
Machiavellian, yet a lunatic.
There are
scores of high level U.S. officials - NSA, CIA, White House, JCS, who knew that
Israel had intentionally attacked the USS
Liberty. James Bamford does a good job of summarizing these heavy hitters
who know the truth in his email to Steve Afterood on July 25, 2001 (see
footnote).[lxxxi]
A few names would be Richard Helms of CIA, Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, former
Chairman of the JCS, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Under Secretary of State
George Ball. Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who spent 25 years at the highest levels
of U.S. intelligence, is on the public record making forceful comments that
Israel intentionally attacked the USS
Liberty.[lxxxii]
However, many of these
high level U.S. officials, including Adm. Inman, have not accepted the
exceedingly ugly truth of the USS Liberty
incident: that Lyndon Johnson orchestrated Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty and that he wanted every one
of those American sailors dead because he wanted to blame the incident on
Egypt.
For more
information on what really happened with the USS Liberty, I suggest reading Peter Hounam’s book Operation Cyanide (published in 2003) or
Judy Morris’ online essay “The Most Incredible Story Never Told: The USS Liberty, Israel and LBJ’s Order
to Destroy the USS Liberty.” Respected
academic Joan Mellen is publishing in late 2018 an important book on this
topic, Blood in the Water: How the US and
Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty. The cover story put out decades
ago by the US government and Israel that the USS Liberty attack was an accident and a case of Israel mistaking
the USS Liberty for an Egyptian horse
ship is an absurdity.
Israel’s
unmarked Mirage jets made a point of bombing the Liberty’s antennae and bridge first. They later torpedoed it,
napalmed it and even machine-gunned the life rafts (a war crime) because they
were trying to murder every American (witness) on board. Miraculously, the USS Liberty did not sink and managed to
get off an SOS flash bulletin within 15 minutes so the world knew the USS Liberty was under attack. Israel was
even trying to jam the Liberty’s
communications which is a clear sign of what they really were up to.
When in
response the Sixth Fleet sent rescue jets to the Liberty, both Sec. of Defense and President Johnson got on the line
and ordered the jets recalled twice, with LBJ infamously shouting “We will an
embarrass an ally [Israel].” So how did LBJ know so soon in real time that the
unmarked jets bombing the USS Liberty
were from Israel? LBJ knew because he orchestrated this heinous act of treason.
Author Peter
Hounam interviewed a retired Air Force pilot Jim Nanjo who told him that the
alarm klaxons went off at his military base very early on the morning of June
8, 1967, California time. He and his unit were ordered onto the tarmac with
their nuclear payload bombers before Israel had begun attacking the USS Liberty in the Mediterranean. Capt.
Nanjo was aware that US Air Force bases had simultaneously been put on high
alert in Guam, Britain, Morocco and Spain. Only the USA president Lyndon
Johnson had the power to personally order the US strategic (meaning nuclear)
command to go on high alert. The fact that LBJ did this is before the USS Liberty was attacked is a proof that
he had foreknowledge of this attack. If LBJ had foreknowledge of the attack on
the USS Liberty, then he ordered the
Israeli attack on the USS Liberty
because there is absolutely no conceivable way Israel would intentionally
attack a ship of its greatest ally in 1967. Israel was far too fragile then and
Lyndon Johnson’s robust Zionist-supporting were widely known both in the USA
and in Israel. LBJ had been Israel’s strongest congressional ally in the 1950s
and after JFK’s death “the relationship between the U.S. and Israel soared to
new heights.”[lxxxiii]
Lyndon
Johnson had a large cadre of Zionist Jewish fundraisers, political advisors and
lawyers around him. Some of top fundraisers were heavyweights Ed Weisl and
Arthur Krim, whose wife Mathilde was a close personal friend of LBJ. Supreme
Court Justices Abe Fortas and Arthur Goldberg were in the LBJ orbit. In fact,
Goldberg was the US ambassador to the United Nations at the time of LBJ’s/Israel’s
attack on the USS Liberty. Goldberg
had also been the president of the American Jewish Committee, one of the
premier pro-Zionist organizations in the USA. Back in Austin, Texas, Jewish
businessman and ardent Zionist Jim Novy was “one of Lyndon B. Johnson’s
greatest benefactors” according to Wikipedia.[lxxxiv] Wikipedia goes on to
say: “An ardent Zionist, Novy held several
executive positions in the Zionist Organization of Texas. He had intended to
visit the British Mandate of Palestine in 1938 but events in Europe interrupted
his trip. In 1943, while he and LBJ were raising $65,000 in war bonds from
local Jewish businessmen, it is rumored that funds were also raised to aid
underground Jewish fighters in Palestine with covert shipments of arms in
crates labeled "Texas Grapefruit.”[lxxxv]
Another Zionist Jew friend of LBJ was prominent British
publisher George Weidenfeld. Weidenfeld recounts in his memoirs that not only
did LBJ tell him in 1971 that Castro killed JFK, but that Weidenfeld debriefed
Johnson on the USS Liberty tragedy:
“I quizzed Johnson about the Six Day War which I
felt he had not dealt with in sufficient depth in his book. ‘Well,’ he
answered, ‘I wish I could have written more. They made me take out quite a lot
of things. The last day of the Six Day War was the worst day of my life.’ He
then gave me a blow-by blow account.”[lxxxvi]
In sum, Lyndon Johnson for decades had been “all in” with
the cause of Zionism and LBJ had scores of influential and prominent Jewish
Zionists who he kept as friends. Even today articles are written in Haaretz proclaiming “Lyndon Johnson:
Israel Had Had No Better Friend.”[lxxxvii]
The
Associated Press in 2014 reported that under the Johnson Administration
(1963-1969) LBJ had a “personal and often emotional connection to Israel” and
“the United States [under Johnson] became Israel’s chief diplomatic ally and
primary arms supplier.”[lxxxviii]
In 2010
Jason Maoz wrote a fine article for the Jewish
Press entitled “The Best Thing JFK Ever Did for Israel.”[lxxxix] Maoz’ conclusion was
that the best thing JFK ever did for Israel was picking Lyndon Johnson to be
his Vice President! (LBJ and Sam Rayburn blackmailed and intimidated JFK into
selecting LBJ as his Vice President at the 1960 Democratic convention in Los
Angeles.) Maoz sums it up quite well:
QUOTE
Johnson had been one of
Israel’s staunchest supporters on Capitol Hill throughout the 1950s, and once
the trauma of Kennedy’s assassination began to wear off and LBJ settled in as
president, the relationship between the U.S. and Israel soared to new heights.
First off the table was
the nuclear issue. In The Bomb in the
Basement, his history of Israel’s procurement of nuclear weapons, Israeli
author Michael Karpin wrote that “as soon as [Johnson] entered the White House
the pressure on Israel on the Dimona issue ceased.”[xc]
UNQUOTE
The bottom line is this: the vast amount of evidence, as
believed by the top governmental officials of the 1960s is that Israel
intentionally tried to sink the USS
Liberty and murder all 294 Americans on board. Because Lyndon Johnson was
closely knit and in allegiance with powerful Zionists and many Jewish friends
both in America and Israel, there was absolutely no way - zero percent chance -
that Israel would attack an American ship unless they had been expressly
ordered to do that by the very pro-Zionist American president Lyndon Johnson.
LBJ’s mother Rebekah Johnson was a Christion Zionist and
she would tell him when he was Senate Majority Leader in the 1950s to take care
of the Jews, they are God’s chosen people.[xci]
The USS Liberty
murders (34 dead, 174 wounded): they may have been Lyndon Johnson’s greatest
crimes ever.
Robert Morrow, the co-author of the Clintons’
War on Women, is a political researcher and libertarian activist in Austin,
TX. He has expertise in the JFK assassination, the crimes of the Clintons and
Bushes, and the criminal pedophilia of Donald Trump.
[i] Jake Pickle, Jake, p. 39.
[iii] Wayne Madsen email to
Robert Morrow, dated July 16, 2018.
[iv] Gus Russo, Live By the Sword: The Secret War Against
Castro and the Death of JFK, p.283.
[v] Barr McClellan, Blood, Money and Power: How LBJ Killed JFK,
p. 34.
[vii] “Bill Clinton, JFK and
LBJ, and the New Media’s Wall of Ignorance,” Dr. Steven J. Allen, Capital
Research Center, June 21, 2018.
[x] Sarah McClendon, “Mr President, Mr. President!: My Fifty
Years of Covering the White House,” p. 93.
[xi] “A Death in the Family,”
William Adler, Texas Monthy, April,
1989, pp. 94-96.
[xii] “A Death in the Family,” William Adler, Texas Monthly, April 1989,
p.94.
[xiii] Madeleine Brown, Texas in the Morning: The Love Story of
Madeleine Brown and President Lyndon Baines Johnson, pp. 136-137.
[xviii] Ronnie Dugger, The Life and
Times of Lyndon Johnson, pp.
340-341.
[xix] Randall Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition, p. 250.
[xxii] Madeleine Brown, Texas in the Morning, p. 189.
[xxiii] Madeleine Brown, Texas in the Morning, p. 167.
[xxvii] Frank Denius, On The Way: My Life and Times, p. 108.
[xxviii] John Bullion, In The Boat with LBJ, p. 88.
[xxix] Frank Denius, On The Way: My Life and Times, p. 103.
[xxx] Barr McClellan, Blood, Money & Power: How L.B.J. Killed
J.F.K, p. 293.
[xxxi] Gus Russo, Live By the Sword: The Secret War Against
Castro and the Death of JFK, p.283.
[xxxv] George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, p. 134.
[xl] James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why
it Matters, p. 16.
[xliv] Don Hewett, recounting
his conversation with Sen. Howard Baker for Kennedy Library Oral History.
[xlv] Erik Hedegaard, “The
Last Confession of E. Howard Hunt,” Rolling
Stone, April 5, 2007.
[xlvi] Saint John Hunt
interviewed on the Alex Jones Show,
May 14, 2007.
[xlviii] George Weidenfeld, Remembering
My Good Friends, p. 350.
[xlix] Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 616 in
a footnote. Also Washington Post,
Dec. 13, 1977.
[l] Robert Burnside, JFK and the World Oligarchy, pp.
189-190.
[li] Darwin Payne, The Indomitable Sarah: the Life of Judge
Sarah T. Hughes, p. 235.
[liii] J.
Lee Annis, Jr., Big Jim Eastland: The
Godfather of Mississippi, pp. 192.
[lv] Anthony Summers, The
Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, p. 383, interview with Billy Byars, Jr..
[lix] Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice, p. 2. In Jan.
2000 Joan Mellen interviewed Phyllis Kritikos, the second wife of Jim Garrison,
who told Mellen that Jim Garrison said that it was Cong. Hale Boggs who prodded
him investigate the JFK assassination and not Sen. Russell Long.
[lx] Tip O’Neil, Man of the House, p. 178.
[lxiv] “Robert Kennedy saw
conspiracy in JFK’s assassination,” by Bryan Bender and Neil Swidey, Boston Globe, Nov. 24, 2013.
[lxvi] Roger Stone, The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against
LBJ, p. 2, second edition.
[lxvii] Roger Stone, The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against
LBJ, p. 178, second edition.
[lxviii] Roger Stone
conversation with Robert Morrow in early 2014.
[lxix] Robert Morrow
interview with Jeffrey Hoff on Nov. 17, 2012 at JFK Lancer Conference in
Dallas, TX in the Adolphus Hotel.
[lxx] Marvin Watson, Chief of Staff: Lyndon Johnson and His
Presidency, p. 68.
[lxxii] Philip Shenon, A
Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of The Kennedy Assassination,
pp. 43-44.
[lxxiii] Robert Parker, Capitol Hill in Black and White, pp.
131-132.
[lxxiv] Robert Parker, Capitol Hill in Black and White, p. 132.
[lxxv] LBJ-Abe Fortas phone
call of January 11, 1967, LBJ Library.
[lxxvi] Bill Sloan, JFK: Breaking the Silence, p. 117.
[lxxviii] Col. Oleg Maximovich Nechiporenko, Passport to Assassination, The Never-Before-Told Story of Lee Harvey
Oswald by the KGB Colonel Who Knew Him, pp. 180-181
[lxxx] Meg Azzoni, John F. Kennedy, Jr. to
Meg Azzoni 11 Letters: Memories of Kennedys & Reflections on His Quest,
p. 52.
[lxxxii] https://consortium
news.com/2014/11/12/behind-the-uss-liberty-cover-up/?print=pdf
[lxxxiii] “The Best Thing JFK
Ever Did for Israel,” Jason Moaz, The
Jewish Press, 11-3-20.
[lxxxvi] George Weidenfeld, Remembering My Good Friends, p. 351.
[xci] A 1950s letter from LBJ’s
mother Rebekah Johnson to LBJ in the possession of Raymond Frank of Austin.
Frank was a close personal friend of Sam Houston Johnson, LBJ’s brother.
