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Lyndon Johnson and the Assassination of JFK


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Guest Robert Morrow

Joseph Shimon: Lyndon Johnson had requested more security than JFK by the 1963 Easter weekend

In April 1963, President Kennedy’s future trip to Dallas, Texas, was discussed privately between himself, Vice President Johnson, and his chief aide, Kenny O’Donnell. On April 23, Johnson announced plans for Kennedy’s trip to Dallas during a luncheon speech to Texas newspaper and radio station executives. The next day, the Dallas Times Herald wrote about the announcement.47 During the Easter weekend of April 13–14, special White House aide Joseph W. Shimon enjoyed the company of his daughter, Toni, who lived on Long Island with her mother. Shimon had worked in the White House at the highest levels. In 1963, he was assigned officially as a “Washington Police Inspector,” though he was also secretly working for the Justice Department and was a liaison to the CIA, having risen up through the ranks through the Metropolitan Police Department beginning in the early 1930s. Shimon had established a reputation for discretion in service to various presidents. He had won the confidence not only of President Franklin Roosevelt, but his successors as well. President Kennedy consulted Shimon regularly. The two were known to have taken numerous walks together on the White House grounds.[48] Shimon had one child, a college-age daughter named Toni, with whom he was extremely close in spite of being divorced from her mother. During the 1963 Easter weekend, Shimon and his daughter Toni were walking near Shimon’s North Stafford Street home in Arlington, Virginia, when he revealed something to his daughter that would come back to haunt her. As they strolled together, Toni began to feel a sense of foreboding, suspecting she would soon be missing her father’s company once again. Something else was coming, however, something she couldn’t foresee. “You’re on the outside and I’m going to hit you with something,” Shimon told his daughter. “Tell me right off the top of your head what you think.” “Okay,” she said, not expecting to hear what followed. “The vice president [Lyndon Johnson] has asked me to give him more security than the president,” said Shimon. As they continued walking, Toni’s mood began to darken. There was something ominous in her father’s voice, she remembered feeling. “What’s he afraid of, Dad?” she asked her father. “What do you think?”Her father responded, wanting to see if she understood and connected the dots. There was an awkward silence. She knew she was being tested. Toni would remember that moment and the darkness that had come over her that day.“Something’s coming down, Dad,” she said. “Does President Kennedy know about this?” “I haven’t mentioned it,” she remembered her father telling her. “What do you think?” her father asked again. “Something’s going to happen and Johnson knows about it,” Toni immediately responded. “Good girl!” said Shimon, proud of his tutelage of his only child.

[Peter Janney, “Mary’s Mosaic,” p. 253]

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Guest Robert Morrow
Robert Morrow said:

"How do you imagine how Vice President Johnson, a powerless eunuch, felt in October and November of 1963 Robert Kennedy was feeding both LIFE magazine and the Senate Rules Committee damaging material on LBJ? RFK was out to destroy Lyndon Johnson both politically and personally."

Robert,

Please cite your source and/or provide PROOF that RFK was "feeding both LIFE magazine and the Senate Rules Committee damaging material on LBJ." -- Robert? Do it now. Cite your source or offer proof that this is true.

How many times have I said that the "Dark Side of Camelot" was one of the most important books to read on the JFK assassination? Not only does Hersh's book present a truckload of information on John Kennedy's dysfunctional and unhinged sexual risk taking, more importantly it highlights the fact that there was something very weird about how Lyndon Johnson actually got on the 1960 Demo ticket as well as the fact that Robert Kennedy was on the verge of politically executing Lyndon Johnson by 11/22/63. "The Dark Side of Camelot" also highlights JFK's tensions with the CIA. It is a must read book. Evelyn Lincoln also told author Anthony Summers that the Bobby Baker scandal was going to be the ammunition for the Kennedys to get rid of LBJ.

But Dallas settled all of that.

Robert Kennedy was feeding damaging information on Lyndon Johnson's corruption to the Senate Rules Committee in fall, 1963, in attempt to destroy LBJ:

"In a series of interviews for this book, Burkett Van Kirk, who was chief counsel in 1963 for the Republican minority on the Rules Committee, told me of his personal knowledge of Bobby Kennedy's direct intervention. "Bobby was feeding information to 'whispering Willie'" - the nickname for Senator John Williams. "They" - the Kennedy brothers, Van Kirk said - "were dumping Johnson.." Williams, as he did earlier with Donald Reynolds's information about Lyndon Johnson, relayed the Kennedy materials to the senior Republican on the Rules Committe, Carl Curtis. The attorney general thus was secretly dealing with Williams, and Williams was dealing secretly with Curtis and Van Kirk. The scheming was necessary, Van Kirk told me, because he and his fellow Republicans understood that a full-fledged investigation into Bobby Baker could lead to the vice president. They also understood, he said, that the chances of getting such an investigation where slim at best. The Democrats had an overwhelming advantage in the Senate - sixty-seven to thirty-three - and in every committee. The three Republicans on the ten member Rules Committee, Van Kirk said, had little power. "We never won one vote to even call a witness," he told me. The investigation into Bobby Baker and Lyndon Johnson would have to be done in a traditional manner - by newspaper leak.

Van Kirk, who was named after his grandfather Senator E. J. Burkett of Nebraska, said that Bobby Kennedy eventually designated a Justice Department lawyer that fall to serve as an intermediary to the minority staff; he began supplying the Republicans with documents about Johnson and his financial dealings. The lawyer, Van Kirk told me, "used to come up to the Senate and hang around me like a dark cloud. It took him about a week or ten days to, one, find out what I didn't know, and two, give it to me." Some of the Kennedy-supplied documents were kept in Williams's office safe, Van Kirk said, and never shown to him. There was no doubt of Bobby Kennedy's purpose in dealing with the Republicans, Van Kirk said: "To get rid of Johnson. To dump him. I am as sure of that the sun comes up in the east.""

[seymour Hersh, "The Dark Side of Camelot," pp. 406-407]

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Guest Robert Morrow

Here is an essay on Lyndon Johnson and the JFK assassination that I am trying to get publish in a newspaper. You are welcome to share this link and post this essay elsewhere. http://lyndonjohnsonmurderedjfk.blogspot.com/2013/06/lyndon-johnson-and-jfk-assassination.html

Lyndon Johnson and the JFK Assassination

On the night of New Year's Eve Dec. 31st, 1963, at the Driskill Hotel, Lyndon Johnson and Madeleine Brown, one of his longtime mistresses, had an interesting conversation. Madeleine asked LBJ if he had anything to do with the JFK assassination. Johnson got angry; he began pacing around and waving his arms. Then LBJ told her: it was Dallas, TX, oil executives and "renegade" intelligence agents who were behind the JFK assassination. LBJ later also told his chief of staff Marvin Watson that the CIA was involved in the murder of John Kennedy.

Lyndon Johnson would often stay at the Driskill (room #254 today) and LBJ is confirmed by his presidential schedule as being present at the Driskill Hotel the night of 12/31/63

History is proving that Lyndon Johnson played a key role in the JFK assassination. An important book is LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination (2011) by Phillip Nelson. Roger Stone, an aide to Richard Nixon, is writing a book pinning the JFK assassination on LBJ. Stone quotes Nixon as saying “Both Johnson and I wanted to be president, but the only difference was I wouldn’t kill for it.”

By 1973 Barry Goldwater privately telling people that he was convinced that LBJ was behind the JFK assassination.

Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedys hated each other. So why was LBJ even put on the 1960 Demo ticket in first place? The old wive's tale is that it was to balance the ticket and win the electoral votes of Texas. The reality is that JFK was set to pick Sen. Stuart Symington of Missouri and had already had a deal with Symington to be VP that was "signed, sealed & delivered" according to Symington's campaign manager Clark Clifford. Then something strange happened on the night of July 13, 1960, in Los Angeles. According to Evelyn Lincoln, JFK's longtime secretary, LBJ and Sam Rayburn were using some of Hoover's blackmail information on John Kennedy to force JFK to put Johnson on the ticket in a hostile takeover of the vice presidency.

JFK told his friend Hy Raskin, "They threatened me with problems and I don't need more problems. I'm going to have enough problems with Nixon."

LBJ & Hoover were very close and literally neighbors for 19 years in Washington, DC, from 1943-1961. Both men were also plugged in socially and professionally to Texas oil executives such as Clint Murchison, Sr, H.L. Hunt and D.H. Byrd.

From that point on, for the next 3 and 1/3 years the Kennedy brothers and LBJ were engaged in a sub rosa war, even though they were ostensibly a political team. On the day of the '61 inauguration, LBJ protege Bobby Baker told Don Reynolds that JFK would never live out his term and that he would die a violent death.

For his part, Robert Kennedy spent the remainder of JFK's term trying to figure out a way to get rid of the power-grasping LBJ. The first opportunity to do this was the Billie Sol Estes scandal of 1961. Estes was a cut out for LBJ doing business and had received $500,000 from LBJ (which tells us how important Estes was). LBJ and his aide Cliff Carter manipulated the federal bureaucracy for Estes to ensure that he got exclusive grain storage contracts and numerous other special and highly lucrative favors. Estes says that he funneled Johnson over $10 million in kickbacks.

Henry Marshall was a US agricultural official who was investigating the corruption of Estes, particularly his abuse of a cotton allotment program. In January, 1961, LBJ, Cliff Carter, Estes and LBJ's personal hit man Malcolm Wallace had a meeting about what to do about Henry Marshall. LBJ said, "It looks like we will just have to get rid of him."

Side note: the first person I know who accused Lyndon Johnson of committing a murder was Gov. Allan Shivers who in 1956 personally accused LBJ of having Sam Smithwick murdered in prison in 1952. Smithwick was threatening to go public with information about the Box 13 ballot stuffing scandal of 1948 which gave LBJ the margin of victory over Coke Stevenson in the Democratic primary.

Henry Marshall was murdered on June 3, 1961. He was shot to death 5 times with a bolt action gun and his death was astoundingly ruled a suicide at the time. The Marshall murder & cover up shows the depth, breadth and absolute ruthlessness of the LBJ organization. Billie Sol Estes died recently on May 14, 2013.

Historian Douglas Brinkley has said that by 1963 JFK and his vice president LBJ had no relationship at all. That is not correct; in fact a sub rosa war was being waged between the Kennedys and LBJ. It was an adversarial, death struggle relationship.

In the fall of 1963, the Bobby Baker scandal exploded into the national media. Bobby Baker, who as the secretary of the Senate was a virtual son to Lyndon Johnson, was being investigated for a vending machine kick back scam and numerous shady deals. Baker was known for providing booze & women to the senators. LBJ denied any relationship with Baker (who had named two of his kids after LBJ) while at the same time sending his personal lawyer Abe Fortas to run (control) Baker's defense. Evelyn Lincoln told author Anthony Summers that the Kennedys were going to use the Bobby Baker scandal as the ammunition to get rid of LBJ.

Robert Kennedy had a two-track program to get rid of LBJ. Phil Brennan was in DC at the time: "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." James Wagenvoord, who in 1963 was a 27-year old assistant to LIFE Magazine's managing editor, says that based on information fed from Robert Kennedy and the Justice Dept., LIFE Magazine had been developing a major newsbreak piece concerning Johnson and Bobby Baker. This expose was set to run within a week of the JFK assassination. LBJ aide George Reedy said that LBJ knew about the RFK-inspired media campaign against him and was obsessed with it.

RFK's other "get rid of LBJ" program was an investigation by the Senate Rules Committee into LBJ's kickbacks and other corruptions. Burkett Van Kirk was a counsel for that committee and he told Seymour Hersh that RFK had sent a lawyer to the committee to feed them damaging information about LBJ and his corrupt business dealings. The lawyer, Van Kirk said, "used to come up to the Senate and hang around me like a dark cloud. It took him about a week or ten days to, one, find out what I didn't know, and two, give it to me." The goal of the Kennedys was "To get rid of Johnson. To dump him. I am as sure of that the sun comes up in the east," said Van Kirk to Hersh.

Literally at the very moment JFK was being assassinated in Dallas on 11-22-63, Don Reynolds was testifying in a closed session of the Senate Rules Committee about a suitcase of $100,000 given to LBJ for his role in securing a TFX fighter jet contract for Fort Worth's General Dynamics.

Three days before the JFK assassination, JFK told Evelyn Lincoln that he was going to get a new running mate for 1964. "I was fascinated by this conversation and wrote it down verbatim in my diary. Now I asked, "Who is your choice as a running-mate.' He looked straight ahead, and without hesitating he replied, 'at this time I am thinking about Gov. Terry Sanford of North Carolina. But it will not be Lyndon.'"

At this point I should add that I think the CIA/military intelligence murdered John Kennedy for Cold War reasons, particularly over Cuba policy. The fact that the Kennedys were within days of politically executing & personally destroying Lyndon Johnson could very well have been the tripwire for the JFK assassination.

The Russians immediately suspected that Texas oilmen were involved in the JFK assassination. They and Fidel Castro both feared they were going to be framed for it by US intelligence. By 1965 the KGB had internally determined that Lyndon Johnson was behind the JFK assassination.

Hoover wrote to LBJ about this in a memo that was not declassified by the US government until 1996:

"On September 16, 1965, this same source [an FBI spy in the KGB] 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."

Robert Morrow, a political researcher and political activist, has an expertise in the JFK assassination. He can be reached at Morrow321@aol.com or 512-306-1510.

Notes:

1) Brown, Madeleine Duncan. Texas in the Morning: The Love Story of Madeleine Brown and President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Conservatory Press, 1997. Page 189.

2) Schlesinger, Arthur. Robert Kennedy and His Times. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1978. Page 616.

3) Nelson, Phillip. LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination. Skyhorse Publishing, 2011.

4) Dickerson, Nancy. Among Those Present: A Reporter's View of 25 Years in Washington. Random House, 1976. Page 43.

5) Hersh, Seymour. The Dark Side of Camelot. Back Bay Books, 1998. Page 126 and 407.

6) Epstein, Edward Jay. Esquire Magazine. December, 1966.

7) Estes, Billie Sol. Billie Sol Estes: A Texas Legend. BS Productions, 2004. Page 43.

8) Dallek, Robert. Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1908-1960. Oxford Univesity Press USA, 1992. Page 347.

9) Brinkley, Douglas. Speaking on Hardball with Chris Matthews, 2012.

10) Brennan, Phil. "Some Relevant Facts about the JFK Assassination," NewsMax, 11-19-2003. http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/11/18/152526.shtml

11) Reedy, George. Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir. Andrews McMeel Publications, 1985.

12) Wagenvoord, James. Email to John Simkin dated 11-3-09. Web link: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=14966

14) Lincoln, Evelyn. Kennedy and Johnson. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968. Page 205.

15) Hoover, J. Edgar. Memo to Lyndon Johnson with FBI leadership carbon copied. 12-1-66. Web link: http://www.indiana.edu/~oah/nl/98feb/jfk.html#d1

From Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur Schlesinger (1978):
"In 1967 Marvin Watson of Lyndon Johnson's White House staff told Cartha DeLoach of 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." (Washington Post, December 13, 1977)


James Wagenvoord email to John Simkin, dated 11-3-2009:

Posted 04 November 2009 - 07:52 AM

I thought researchers would be interested in reading this email I received last night:

I've been reading through you web site and believe that I can add one of the final jigsaw puzzle pieces that affect the timing of JFK's Dallas trip and the nervousness of LBJ during the weeks preceding the killing At the time I was the 27 year old Editorial business manager and assistant to Life Magazines Executive Editor. Beginning in later summer 1963 the magazine, based upon information fed from Bobby Kennedy and the Justice Department, had been developoing a major newsbreak piece concerning Johnson and Bobby Baker. On publication Johnson would have been finished and off the '64 ticket (reason the material was fed to us) and would probably have been facing prison time. At the time LIFE magazine was arguably the most important general news source in the US. The top management of Time Inc. was closely allied with the USA's various intelligance agencies and we were used ofter by the Kennedy Justice Department as a conduit to the public. Life's coverage of the Hoffa prosecution, and involvement in paying off Justice Department Memphis witesses was a case in point.

The LBJ/Baker piece was in the final editing stages and was scheduled to break in the issue of the magazine due out the week of November 24 (the magazine would have made it to the newsstands on Nov.26th or 27th). It had been prepared in relative secrecy by a small special editorial team. On Kennedy's death research files and all numbered copies of the nearly print-ready draft were gathered up by my boss (he had been thetop editor on the team) and shredded. The issue that was to expose LBJ instead featured the Zapruder film. Based upon our success in syndicating the Zapruder film I became Chief of Time/LIFE editorial services and remained in that job until 1968.


Evelyn Lincoln (JFK’s personal secretary for 12 years):

As Mr. Kennedy sat in the rocker in my office, his head resting on its back he placed his left leg across his right knee. He rocked slightly as he talked. In a slow pensive voice he said to me, 'You know if I am re-elected in sixty-four, I am going to spend more and more time toward making government service an honorable career. I would like to tailor the executive and legislative branches of government so that they can keep up with the tremendous strides and progress being made in other fields.' 'I am going to advocate changing some of the outmoded rules and regulations in the Congress, such as the seniority rule. To do this I will need as a running mate in sixty-four a man who believes as I do.' Mrs. Lincoln went on to write "I was fascinated by this conversation and wrote it down verbatim in my diary. Now I asked, 'Who is your choice as a running-mate?' '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.'

Edited by Robert Morrow
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Guest Robert Morrow

Did Lyndon Johnson murder Martin Luther King in April of 1968? I don't know; but what I have absolutely no doubt of is that Lyndon Johnson was *capable* of murdering MLK, especially for opposing the Vietnam War which LBJ had impaled his presidency on.

I do think LBJ was behind the June 8th, 1967, Israeli attack on the USS Liberty: http://judymorrisreport.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-most-incredible-story-never-told.html

Dexter Scott King certainly believes Lyndon Johnson was part of the plot to murder his father Martin Luther King.

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/20/us/son-of-dr-king-asserts-lbj-role-in-plot.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm

Son of Dr. King Asserts L.B.J. Role in Plot
By KEVIN SACK
Published: June 20, 1997

Three months ago, Dexter Scott King declared that he and his family believed that James Earl Ray was not guilty of the murder of his father, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Tonight, in a televised interview, Mr. King asserted that President Lyndon B. Johnson must have been part of a military and governmental conspiracy to kill Dr. King.

''Based on the evidence that I've been shown, I would think that it would be very difficult for something of that magnitude to occur on his watch and he not be privy to it,'' Mr. King said on the ABC News program ''Turning Point.''

Mr. King, who heads the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, suggested that the Army and Federal intelligence agencies were involved in his father's assassination, in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

''I am told that it was part and parcel Army intelligence, C.I.A., F.B.I.,'' he said in the interview. ''I think we knew it all along.''

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Mr. King's older brother, Martin Luther King 3d, said in the television interview that Mr. Ray had ''basically nothing to do with this assassination.''

Mr. Ray, 69, is dying of liver disease in a state prison hospital in Nashville. He originally confessed to the killing and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Several days later, he recanted, saying that his lawyers had encouraged him to plead guilty to avoid the death penalty.

A Congressional inquiry and studies by several historians have concluded that Mr. Ray was almost certainly involved in the killing, although others may have played a part in a conspiracy.

The notion of a conspiracy by the Army and intelligence agencies to kill Dr. King has long been expounded by William F. Pepper, Mr. Ray's lawyer, who is seeking a trial for his client. In recent months, Mr. King, his three siblings, and their mother, Coretta Scott King, have apparently embraced Mr. Pepper's theories.

In the broadcast, Forrest Sawyer of ABC undermined at least part of Mr. Pepper's theory by introducing Mr. Pepper to Billy Eidson. Mr. Eidson is a retired Army officer whom Mr. Pepper has described as the leader of a unit that was ready to kill Dr. King if the assassin did not succeed.

Mr. Pepper has asserted that Mr. Eidson was himself later assassinated. After being presented with Mr. Eidson, Mr. Pepper said, ''I acknowledge that maybe I was provided with wrong information.''

In March, Dexter King traveled to Nashville to meet with Mr. Ray, and told him face to face that he and his family believed Mr. Ray's declarations of innocence.

With the King family's support, Mr. Pepper has won court approval for new ballistics tests on the rifle linked to Mr. Ray and the killing of Dr. King. Mr. Pepper hopes that new forensic methods will prove that the rifle did not fire the fatal shot. The tests have been completed, but a hearing has yet to be held on the results.

In the ABC program, Mrs. King and Andrew Young, formerly a top aide to Dr. King as well as a former chief delegate to the United Nations and Mayor of Atlanta, called on President Clinton to appoint a commission to investigate the killing again. Mrs. King proposed that anyone with information about the assassination be granted amnesty.

Neither Mr. Young nor any of the Kings could be reached for comment today.

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JFK was not the only prominent victim targeted by LBJ:

--------------------------------------------

Son of Dr. King Asserts L.B.J. Role in Plot

By KEVIN SACK
Published: June 20, 1997

The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/20/us/son-of-dr-king-asserts-lbj-role-in-plot.html

Three months ago, Dexter Scott King declared that he and his family believed that James Earl Ray was not guilty of the murder of his father, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Tonight, in a televised interview, Mr. King asserted that President Lyndon B. Johnson must have been part of a military and governmental conspiracy to kill Dr. King.

''Based on the evidence that I've been shown, I would think that it would be very difficult for something of that magnitude to occur on his watch and he not be privy to it,'' Mr. King said on the ABC News program ''Turning Point.''

Mr. King, who heads the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, suggested that the Army and Federal intelligence agencies were involved in his father's assassination, in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

''I am told that it was part and parcel Army intelligence, C.I.A., F.B.I.,'' he said in the

Mr. King's older brother, Martin Luther King 3d, said in the television interview that Mr. Ray had ''basically nothing to do with this assassination.''

Mr. Ray, 69, is dying of liver disease in a state prison hospital in Nashville. He originally confessed to the killing and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Several days later, he recanted, saying that his lawyers had encouraged him to plead guilty to avoid the death penalty.

A Congressional inquiry and studies by several historians have concluded that Mr. Ray was almost certainly involved in the killing, although others may have played a part in a conspiracy.

The notion of a conspiracy by the Army and intelligence agencies to kill Dr. King has long been expounded by William F. Pepper, Mr. Ray's lawyer, who is seeking a trial for his client. In recent months, Mr. King, his three siblings, and their mother, Coretta Scott King, have apparently embraced Mr. Pepper's theories.

In the broadcast, Forrest Sawyer of ABC undermined at least part of Mr. Pepper's theory by introducing Mr. Pepper to Billy Eidson. Mr. Eidson is a retired Army officer whom Mr. Pepper has described as the leader of a unit that was ready to kill Dr. King if the assassin did not succeed.

Mr. Pepper has asserted that Mr. Eidson was himself later assassinated. After being presented with Mr. Eidson, Mr. Pepper said, ''I acknowledge that maybe I was provided with wrong information.''

In March, Dexter King traveled to Nashville to meet with Mr. Ray, and told him face to face that he and his family believed Mr. Ray's declarations of innocence.

With the King family's support, Mr. Pepper has won court approval for new ballistics tests on the rifle linked to Mr. Ray and the killing of Dr. King. Mr. Pepper hopes that new forensic methods will prove that the rifle did not fire the fatal shot. The tests have been completed, but a hearing has yet to be held on the results.

In the ABC program, Mrs. King and Andrew Young, formerly a top aide to Dr. King as well as a former chief delegate to the United Nations and Mayor of Atlanta, called on President Clinton to appoint a commission to investigate the killing again. Mrs. King proposed that anyone with information about the assassination be granted amnesty.

Neither Mr. Young nor any of the Kings could be reached for comment today.

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Guest Robert Morrow

The governor of Texas was the first person I know who called Lyndon Johnson a murderer and he did it to LBJ's face.

In 1956 Texas Gov. Allan Shivers (privately & to LBJ’s face) accused Lyndon Johnson of having Sam Smithwick murdered in prison to keep him from talking about the Precinct 13 ballot box scandal

“According to Johnson, in 1956, Governor Allan Shivers of Texas accused him of having had Smithwick murdered. The charge understandably enraged Johnson. [Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant, p. 347]

I think that is pretty amazing for a governor of a state to accuse a senator, who he is quite familiar with, of murdering a man. In fact, I think that is an extremely significant insight into what those closest to Lyndon Johnson thought about him and what he was capable of. I think it is also significant that Allan Shivers supported LBJ, a man who he thought was a murderer, for president in 1960. It is a commentary on the tyranny of power (a phrase Vincent Salandria uses).

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2013 is not going to be a good year for the legacy of Lyndon Johnson. Article on Roger Stone's new book on LBJ.

http://eastorlandopost.com/did-lbj-conspire-kill-jfk-new-book-presidential-aide-says-yes

By Jacob Engels

With the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy just months away, a new groundbreaking history of that day attempts to prove that the Kennedy killing was not the work of a lone gunman in Dealey Plaza in Dallas but actually was a complex plot masterminded by the man who “was a heartbeat away from the presidency.”

The facts and conclusions – many of them made public for the first time – are all wrapped up in Roger Stone’s revelatory book, “The Man Who Killed Kennedy, the Case against LBJ,” scheduled for publication November 1, but already No. 1 on Amazon for pre-sales in the Political/Public Affairs category. It’s a must read for history buffs of anyone seeking the truth about the 20th Century’s most famous slaying.

Although Stone details the involvement of rogue elements of the CIA and the mob in JFK’s death, it is Stone’s contention that one vice president, LBJ directed the murder and another future Vice President , Gerald Ford, played a pivotal role in the cover up. Both would succeed to the presidency.

Stone, who served as a senior staffer on eight national Republican presidential campaigns, says his book is the first real distillation of the facts by a White House insider. “I served as a political aide to both President Nixon and President Reagan,” he says, which, he adds, separates his book from the others, which explore the events of November 22, 1963. Stone had extensive interviews with Nixon and former Attorney General John Mitchell for his book.

Maybe you can’t handle the truth, but Stone can and does in black and white … and red. His conclusion, as you can see from the subtitle of the book is that Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s vice president but no friend of Kennedy or of the Kennedy clan, was the key man behind the assassination.

“It was LBJ who insisted JFK visit Texas,” Stone says. “Johnson took no interest in the Houston and Austin stops, but he micro-managed JFK’s time in Dallas.” At the time the vice president was facing Justice Department and Senate investigations into corruption, “charges that could lead to political disgrace and even jail time,” the author and political pundit adds.

Life magazine was scheduled to publish an investigative story on LBJ's wheeling and dealing with Texas con-man Billie Sol Estes the Saturday after JFK’s visit to Dallas that also could have sent the vice president to jail, Stone says. Also the Senate was beginning public hearings into corruption charges by long-time Johnson pal Bobby Baker, who had been the Senate's Secretary to the Majority leader where he got the nickname “Little Lyndon.” Those hearings could have exposed and implicated Johnson. Feeling the growing heat on Capitol Hill that could engulf LBJ as well, Baker had resigned his Senate post in early October.

LBJ’s ties to Baker made Kennedy wary. According to the president’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy told her was planning to drop Johnson from the Democratic ticket in 1964 in favor of North Carolina Gov. Terry Sanford, a move that would surely have ended LBJ’s political career.

“LBJ kept in constant touch with his Senate allies by phone all day November 22, the day the hearings opened and the very day of JFK’s assassination,” Stone notes.

Stone adds as further proof of Johnson’s complicity in the murder that “On November 21, LBJ tells his mistress Madeline Brown, who bore him a son, ‘After tomorrow those SOBs will never embarrass me again. That's not a threat, that's a promise.’”

There are other aspects of that day in Dallas that support Stone’s conclusions. For example, Johnson and Texas Gov. John Connally, who rode with JFK in the motorcade, insisted on the route that took them slowly past the Texas School Book Depository, despite resistance from Kennedy aides Jerry Bruno and Ken O'Donnell. At the last minute LBJ tried to convince JFK to have Connally ride in the Presidential limousine and let his bitter enemy Senator Ralph Yarborough ride with Kennedy. The Secret Service violated it’s long-standing policy against slow 120-degree turns, which the motorcade had to make entering Dealey Plaza.

“I worked on multiple Presidential trips for Ronald Reagan,” Stone adds. “I can tell you that the Secret Service never decides a motorcade route, they only advise. Connally threatened to scrub the visit if JFK’s aides didn’t agree to his route plan.”

The Secret Service also failed secure the tall buildings on both sides of the street, standard procedure whenever the presidential motorcade is scheduled to drop below 40 MPH,” notes the author, who made more than a dozen presidential flights aboard Air Force One with Nixon and Reagan. The Dallas Police reduced the motorcycle escort supposed to ride three abreast on each side of the President’s car to just two motorcycle policemen and they were ordered to ride behind the Presidential limousine.

Conspiracy and cover-up theories have flourished ever since Kennedy’s death. But according to Stone, perhaps the most pivotal figure in the coverup and the one who is often overlooked in the saga was former President Gerald Ford.

In 1997, 20 years after he left the White House Ford, a vocal proponent of the single-assassin theory, acknowledged that while a member of the Warren Commission he made a few “changes” in the famous report. “My changes were only an attempt to be more precise,'' Ford told the AP when the text alterations were revealed.

What Ford had done was to raise the point of impact of the deadly bullet a couple of inches so that it appeared to have struck Kennedy not in the upper back ( as the Texas Death certificate recorded) but in the lower neck, as the commission's final report contended, which made the report more consistent with the premise that Oswald had acted alone. As the AP reported, “the effect of Ford's change was to bolster the commission's conclusion that a single bullet passed through Kennedy and severely wounded Texas Gov. John Connally, a crucial element in its finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman and only three shots were fired.

Photos of the president’s bloody shirt indeed show a bullet hole below the collar. Admiral George Burkley, a Navy doctor present at JFK's autopsy noted that the President's wound was "in the posterior back at about the level of the third thoracic vertebrae". "Ford lied to conceal the truth about there being more than three shots and therefore more than one shooter" said Stone. "Ford did more to advance the cover up than any other person"

According to Newsweek magazine Ford was viewed as the CIA's man in Congress and was working within the Warren Commission at the behest of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to insure the Warren Commission report conclusions matched an FBI report on the killing issued only weeks after the murder, which Stone’s book reveals.

So who actually pulled the trigger that killed Kennedy? Not Oswald, says Stone.

“Oswald is a patsy. LBJ’s buddy Malcolm Mac Wallace, a Marine marksman was the real shooter from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building,” Stone insists. “The killer was a long-time LBJ confederate and convicted murderer. Other than Oswald’s and those of bumbling Dallas Police, Wallace’s is the only other fingerprint the FBI found on the cardboard boxes that were used to fashion the 6th floor sniper's nest. Why would an associate of LBJ be in the sniper’s nest.

Stone says his book also ties Johnson to at least seven murders before JFK’s including that of a U.S. Agriculture Department official who was investigating LBJ's financial activities and two FBI informants working for LBJ crony and business partner Billie Sol Estes. In fact, it was Estes who later claimed Wallace also recruited Oswald and Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby.

When Stone is asked what does the Johnson family have to say about these allegations, he replies, “We hear LBJ's daughters may be taking legal action to prevent publication of the book.” The saga continues.

Jacob Engels, is the Founder of East Orlando Post. Along with the Post, he owns several other businesses and is currently enrolled at Valencia College. Jacob has lived in Avalon Park since it's founding and enjoys playing with his black Labradoodle Jasper, listening to indie rock, and seeking out new business ventures. He can be reached at info@eastorlandopost.com

- See more at: http://eastorlandopost.com/did-lbj-conspire-kill-jfk-new-book-presidential-aide-says-yes#sthash.keU73DAA.dpuf

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Guest Robert Morrow

There is a new trilogy of books out called the Gold House - about how Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon looted a bunch of gold from the government's Victorio Peak, located on White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

Web link: http://www.amazon.com/Gold-House-Discovery-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B00BMG20H2/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373990374&sr=1-1&keywords=the+gold+house+trilogy

And the topic of Lyndon Johnson and murder comes up again. One of the authors, I think John Whittle, interviewed a CIA Operative named "Mr. H" and here is what "Mr. H" said about LBJ wanting to murder Sen. Ralph Yarborough and he threw in Bobby Baker, too, as an afterthought.

[John Clarence & Tom Whittle, The Gold House: The True Story of the Victorio Peak Treasure: The Lies, The Thefts, p. 198-199]

(Mr. H was a CIA operative until 1965)

Mr. H. was asked if there was a time after Kennedy’s murder when he spoke to Connally or Johnson about the treasure. He said there was not and that he had done his job and there wasn’t anything else he was “asked to perform.” He was asked if he had any talks with Johnson while he was President regarding any assignments Johnson asked him to perform. Mr. H. said there were but “none were connected to the Peak.” He was asked if Johnson had given him a specific assignment.

Mr. H: Yes he did.

Clarence: What was that?

Mr. H: He wanted me to remove Senator Yarborough.

Clarence: When you say remove him…?

Mr. H: He wanted Yarborough dead. This was just after the second visit I made to the Peak.

Clarence: It wasn’t long after that then?

Mr. H: That’s correct.

Clarence: Why did he want Yarborough dead?

Mr. H: He said Yarborough had been a thorn in his side forever.

Clarence: How did he feel about Connally?

Mr. H: Connally was his protégé. He brought him along, schooled him to that point.

Clarence: How and when did he want you to remove Yarborough?

Mr. H: How and when was my choice.

Clarence: But you intended not to?

Mr. H: That’s correct. I told him I would, though.

Mr. H. was asked why he told Johnson he would do the job when he intended not to do it. He said that he hated Johnson because he suspected that he had something to do with Kennedy’s murder and he felt Johnson needed something to worry about, meaning not knowing when he was going to “do” Yarborough, or him for that matter. When the events of the interview were recapped, Mr H revealed and confirmed that he was with the Central Intelligence Agency and that he left the agency in December 1965. He was asked if he had received orders from the Kennedys during that time period, but before President Kennedy was murdered.

Mr. H: Yes, I definitely did.

Clarence: During that time did you visit Victoria Peak?

Mr. H: On those two occasions I spoke of.

Clarence: With President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson and not long after that with Bobby Kennedy, Connally, and Johnson and other people.

Mr. H: That’s correct.

Clarence: The second time that you were in the basin did Johnson say anything about what he wanted to do with the gold?

Mr. H: Johnson had planned to take this gold, what amount I had no idea how much he planned to take out at that point. He said he was taking that to his domain. Johnson had mentioned his domain many times in the past as his ranch.

Clarence: Is his ranch in Texas?

Mr. H: Yes, it is… Johnson City.

Clarence: Did Connally say anything during that day?

Mr. H: Very little. Connally was like a little boy following his dad around.

Clarence: This thing that Johnson asked you to do [murdering Sen. Ralph Yarborough]; did Yarborough ever become aware of it?

Mr. H: No, he did not… to my knowledge.

Mr. H. said that he had informed the Agency about Johnson’s request to have him assassinate Senator Yarborough. He said that he had advised Tracy Barnes. He said, “Tracy was my immediate.” The subject of the conversation between Mr. H and Johnson involving Yarborough was on the interview videotape, but not all of that particular conversation. Later, Mr. H said that when Johnson asked him to kill Yarborough, he replied, “You are the President, my President, and your wish is my command.” Mr. H claimed that he liked Yarborough and he had no intention of harming him. During the same conversation he claimed that Johnson said, “Bobby Baker has been part of the family since we were kids, but that son-of-a-bitch could bury me. You might as well include him.”

[John Clarence & Tom Whittle, The Gold House: The True Story of the Victorio Peak Treasure: The Lies, The Thefts, p. 198-199]

Edited by Robert Morrow
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LBJ and JFK: The Night Before the Assassination

Gary North - July 16, 2013

www.garynorth.com


This video is remarkable. It has two interviews.

The first is with a woman who says LBJ whispered something in her ear at a party the night before the assassination. This is not what I would call reliable stand-alone evidence.

The confirming interview impresses me. The woman confirms the existence of the party. That is important. But more important is her reference to J. Edgar Hoover. She said that she had been told that someone important was scheduled to attend. She said he was code-named "bulldog."

I grew up in an FBI agent's household. There is no doubt that this was how Hoover was referred to among insiders. My father often spoke of Hoover as "the bulldog." This is not surprising, given the shape of his face.

The woman said that she did not attend. She had never heard of Hoover. This adds credibility to her story. She got feedback from the black chauffeur who drove him to the airport: no tip.

There is a site devoted to proving that LBJ was behind the assassination, along with other murders. it is comprehensive -- fixated.

But some of these stories were known 40 years ago. They made sense then.

They still do. http://lyndonjohnsonmurderedjfk.blogspot.com

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If memory serves and mine sometimes does not, the interviews in question were from the history channel special on LBJ that got pulled....at the time I was very interested in it but tied up with a book. As far as I recall nobody ever tracked down the employees and did further interviews with them, that seems like a lost opportuny. If anyone did so I'd like to hear about it. I was also struck by the remark about Hoover flying back to DC after the party, which would have been a very late flight out of Love Field....also wonder if anyone ever checked to see if such flights really existed at the time? Even today you find few flights from midnight to early morning...and again my recollection is that Hoover was confirmed in a breakfast meeting in DC the following day.

If anyone has any follow up on those points, it would be appreciated. Larry

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If memory serves and mine sometimes does not, the interviews in question were from the history channel special on LBJ that got pulled

The programme was called The Guilty Men and looked at the possibility that Lyndon B. Johnson, Malcolm Wallace and Edward A. Clark were involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The programme used evidence from the book Blood, Money and Power: How LBJ Killed JFK by Barr McClellan. It also used other sources such as the testimony of Madeleine Brown and Billie Sol Estes and the research of Walt Brown, Ed Tatro, Glen Sample, and Gregory Burnham (one of our members).

You can see a clip from here:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKturnerN.htm

Cliff Carter, one of those mentioned in the film, needs further research:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKcarter.htm

I am not convinced this party took place the night before the assassination. That sort of thing only happens in films. I think research has shown that J. Edgar Hoover could not have been at the party. I suspect May Newman is mistaken on the date of the party. Hoover was definitely a friend of Murchinson and he was definitely pleased by the death of JFK because of the proposed end to the Oil Depletion Allowance:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKoildepletion.htm

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Guest Robert Morrow

Robert Dallek in 1998 had a pretty good essay on LBJ in Atlantic Monthly. However, Dallek left out the murders committed by Johnson, a slew of them; but he does touch on LBJ's depressions, mental instabilities and well documented bizarre behavior.

Things like the 1952 prison murder of Sam Smithwick, the 1952 trial of LBJ crony Malcolm Wallace where he got off murder scot free, the 1961 Henry Marshall murder, the 1963 JFK assassination, the 1967 LBJ-directed attack on the USS Liberty - those radioactive topics are completely off limits for an establishment historian like Dallek.

"Three New Revelations about LBJ" http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/98apr/lbj.htm

URINATING in a sink, inviting people into his bathroom, showing off his abdominal scar, exposing his private parts: after a while nothing surprises a biographer of Lyndon Baines Johnson. After fourteen years of research for a two-volume biography, of which the second volume, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press, I have, however, found some new evidence, in three areas, that even by Johnson standards is surprising.

First, I discovered that even as he decided to escalate the war, Johnson had deeper and more clairvoyant doubts about Vietnam than contemporaries could possibly have imagined. He believed his own rhetoric about the need to fight in Vietnam. At the same time, however, he could see the makings of the quagmire ahead.

When, in May of 1964, Senator Richard Russell told Johnson that Vietnam was "the damn worst mess I ever saw," LBJ replied, "That's the way I've been feelin' for six months." Shortly after, he told McGeorge Bundy, his national-security adviser, "The more I stayed awake last night thinking of this thing, the more ... it looks to me like we're gettin' into another Korea.... I don't think it's worth fightin' for and I don't think we can get out. It's just the biggest damned mess.... What the hell is Vietnam worth to me? ... What is it worth to this country?"

After increasing U.S. combat troops in Vietnam in July of 1965, Johnson expressed doubts that he had done the right thing. "Light at the end of the tunnel?" he told his press secretary, Bill Moyers. "We don't even have a tunnel; we don't even know where the tunnel is."

Lady Bird Johnson remembers the President's pain over the war. "He had no stomach for it," she told me, "no heart for it; it wasn't the war he wanted. The one he wanted was on poverty and ignorance and disease, and that was worth putting your life into." She added, "It was just a hell of a thorn stuck in his throat. It wouldn't come up; it wouldn't go down.... It was just pure hell and did not have that reassuring, strong feeling that this is right, that he had when he was in a crunch with civil rights or poverty or education. It didn't have that 'We'll make it through this one; win or lose, it's the right thing to do.' So, uncertainty ... we had a rich dose of that.... True, you can 'bear any burden, pay any price' if you're sure you're doin' right. But if you do not know what is right ..." Her voice trailed off. The opposition provoked in the United States by the expanding war spoke to Johnson's hesitation and forebodings, but criticism made him more rather than less reluctant to consult his own doubts.

Johnson had "an unfillable hole in his ego," Moyers says. Feelings of emptiness spurred him to eat, drink, and smoke to excess. Sexual conquests also helped to fill the void. He was a competitive womanizer. When people mentioned Kennedy's many affairs, Johnson would bang the table and declare that he had more women by accident than Kennedy ever had on purpose.

Acknowledging the failure of a policy that by 1969 had cost 30,000 American lives was more than someone with so fragile an ego could manage.

Second, escalation of the war against his own misgivings made Johnson irrational almost to the point of disability. He told Richard Goodwin, a White House aide, that opponents of the war were close to being traitors. He told his staff that "the communists already control the three major networks and the forty major outlets of communication." He complained to Moyers that "the communist way of thinking" had infected everyone around him.

Moyers described Johnson to me as "paranoid" and "depressed," and never more so than in 1965. Moyers attributes this dark passage to "the realization about which he was clearer than anyone -- that [Vietnam] was a road from which there was no turning back." Johnson saw the decision to send troops as potentially marking the end of his presidency. "It was a pronounced, prolonged depression," Moyers adds. "He would just go within himself, just disappear -- morose, self-pitying, angry.... He was a tormented man," who described himself to Moyers as being in a Louisiana swamp that was "pulling me down." "When he said it," Moyers remembers, "he was lying in bed with the covers almost above his head."

I asked Moyers if others in the White House were as troubled by Johnson's behavior as he and Goodwin. Yes, Moyers replied, and "when they were deeply concerned about his behavior, they would call me -- Cabinet officers and others. Rusk would call me and tell me about some exchange he just had with the President that was very disturbing, and he would say that he seemed to be very depressed."

I asked Moyers if Johnson was so continually depressed as to be incapable of rational judgments on Vietnam. No, he answered. Johnson was erratic. One day he would be down and the next he would be upbeat. "But always when he returned to the subject of Vietnam, this cloud in his eyes and this predictably unpredictable behavior" would recur.

Third, Johnson's role in the 1968 presidential campaign was more central to its outcome than previously known, or even suspected. In August, after Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated and Hubert Humphrey, the likely Democratic nominee, hinted that he would make a quick end to the war, Johnson tried to come back into the presidential race and arrange a draft for himself at the Chicago convention. He asked John Connally to discuss his nomination with southern governors. A negative response from the governors, combined with the riot at the convention between anti-war demonstrators and Mayor Richard J. Daley's police force, ended such thoughts. Resigned to Humphrey's candidacy, Johnson pressed his Vice President throughout the campaign not to stray too far from the Administration's position on Vietnam.

Humphrey largely complied. But at the end of September, when he showed greater flexibility than the White House on how to end the war, Johnson reacted angrily. He told Clark Clifford that he doubted Humphrey's ability to be President. He lacked the guts for the job. After Humphrey had become Vice President and expressed doubts about the war, the White House, according to a Humphrey aide, Ted Van Dyk, had arranged for wiretaps on Humphrey's office phones. Van Dyk learned this from two Secret Service agents on the vice-presidential detail. Neither Van Dyk nor Humphrey was surprised. Though Johnson in principle disliked taping and wiretaps, he secretly taped more than 7,500 of his own telephone conversations as President. Moreover, during the 1964 campaign, after a visit to the White House, Richard Russell wrote, "Hoover has apparently been turned loose and is tapping everything.... [Johnson] stated it took him hours each night to read them all (but he loves this)." The speed with which Johnson had information about Humphrey's presidential campaign suggested to Van Dyk that the White House was still tapping Humphrey's phones in 1968. Johnson apparently wanted the taps to gain advance notice and a chance to dissuade him should Humphrey decide to break away on the war.

With Richard Nixon sending word to Johnson, through Billy Graham, that as President he would give Johnson "a major share of credit" for a settlement in Vietnam and would "do everything to make you ... a place in history," Johnson secretly favored Nixon in the campaign. "You know that Nixon is following my policies more closely than Humphrey," LBJ told his longtime friend Jim Rowe, a prominent Washington attorney, in October. When Humphrey persuaded Johnson to have a fence-mending talk at the White House and then showed up late from a campaign rally, Johnson refused to see him. Humphrey was furious. He told Van Dyk, "That bastard Johnson.... I saw him sitting in his office. Jim Jones [a member of the White House staff] was standing across the doorway, and I said to him: 'You tell the President he can cram it up his ass.' I know Johnson heard me."

At this charged moment in the campaign Elias P. Demetracopoulos, a Greek journalist who had fled Athens in 1967 after the colonels' coup, provided the President with a chance to damage, if not sink, Nixon's campaign. Demetracopoulos had learned that Greece's military dictators had funneled more than half a million dollars into the Nixon-Agnew campaign. He gave this information to Larry O'Brien, Humphrey's campaign manager. Demetracopoulos urged O'Brien to put this potentially incendiary news before Johnson; CIA Director Richard Helms, Demetracopoulos said, could confirm its accuracy. O'Brien took the story to the President, but Johnson, according to what O'Brien told Demetracopoulos, refused to act on it. He would neither ask Helms to investigate the report nor leak it to the press should it prove to be true. Johnson wanted something to use against Nixon if the Nixon Justice Department started to comb the Johnson Administration for scandal, and Nixon's Greek connection would serve that purpose handsomely.

Only in the final days of the campaign -- when Nixon destroyed Johnson's last chance of reaching a peace settlement as President by secretly persuading the Saigon government not to participate in peace talks and thus not to allow an October surprise that could give Humphrey the election -- did Johnson try to help Humphrey.

Johnson left it to Humphrey to decide whether to leak Nixon's "treason" on Vietnam. In what the journalist Theodore White called an uncommon act of political decency, Humphrey chose not to make Nixon's sabotaging of peace a last-minute issue in the campaign. Humphrey feared that should Nixon win anyway, accusations against him could provoke a constitutional crisis. Besides, Humphrey and Johnson would need to explain how they had learned of Nixon's actions. They didn't want to reveal the wiretaps and bugs that had brought them the information about Nixon's undermining of the peace talks.

If LBJ had run again in 1968, can there be any doubt that, unlike Humphrey, he would have used Nixon's skulduggery against him in the closing days of the campaign? How different our national perspective would be had Johnson, rather than Nixon, served from 1969 to 1973.

Robert Dallek is a professor of history at Boston University. His article in this issue is based on research for his book Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973, to be published this month by Oxford University Press.


Edited by Robert Morrow
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Guest Robert Morrow

Here is a nice essay (2007) by Mick Gregory about what the MSM never told us about Lyndon Johnson and the JFK assassination. It has some Robert Caro on LBJ's early ruthlessness & amorality.

Note this specific Caro paragraph as Caro specifically absolves LBJ of murder and coups:

"At each previous stage of his career, then, Johnson’s election tactics had made clear not only a hunger for power but a willingness to take (within the context of American politics, of course; the coups and assassinations that characterize other countries’ politics were not and never would be included in his calculations) "

(Robert A. Caro, *The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent,* 397-98).

What the mainstream media hid about LBJ

http://sadbastards.wordpress.com/2007/08/09/what-the-mainstream-media-hid-about-lbj/

The Story The Mainstream Media Never Reported

By Mick Gregory

We will never be told the truth about JFK’s assassination. In fact, the FBI has film they will not release. But the truth is coming out in pieces. There are enough pieces to complete most of the puzzle and make out the subject.

This is what we know now:

A decade after LBJ’s death, a friend of Estes, a federal marshal, talked Estes into coming forward with what he knew about Henry Marshall’s death. Then on August 9, 1984, following Billie Sol Estes’ grand jury testimonyregarding Mac Wallace’s murder of Henry Marshall, Estes’ attorney, Douglas Caddy sent a letter to Stephen S. Trott, Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division, of the US Department of Justice. The letter reads:

Lyndon’s scandalous wheeling and dealing from his Senate days were catching up with him even faster than the Billie Sol Estes affair, and it would bring the whole Democratic party down with it if the key players weren’t thrown overboard. Estes and to a lesser degree Johnson were the primary benefactors of their doings, while everyone on Capitol Hill knew Bobby Baker, and every lawyer, lobbyist, and lawmaker wanted a piece of the action — and Bobby was LBJ’s boy. The dealings had been too many to keep quiet with a quick “Texas suicide.” LBJ wasn’t just looking at the end of his political career; he was looking at hard time.

Dear Mr. Trott:

My client, Mr. Estes, has authorized me to make this reply to your letter of May 29, 1984.

Mr. Estes was a member of a four-member group, headed by Lyndon Johnson, which committed criminal acts in Texas in the 1960s. The other two, besides Mr. Estes and LBJ, were [White House aide] Cliff Carter and Mac Wallace. Mr. Estes is willing to disclose his knowledge concerning the following criminal offenses:

1. Murders

1. The killing of Henry Marshall

2. The killing of George Krutilek

3. The killing of Ike Rogers and his secretary

4. The killing of Harold Orr

5. The killing of Coleman Wade

6. The killing of Josefa Johnson

7. The killing of John Kinser 8. The killing of President J. F. Kennedy

Mr. Estes is willing to testify that LBJ ordered these killings, and that he transmitted his orders through Cliff Carter to Mac Wallace, who executed the murders. In the cases of murders nos. 1-7, Mr. Estes’ knowledge of the precise details concerning the way the murders were executed stems from conversations he had shortly after each event with Cliff Carter and Mac Wallace.

In addition, a short time after Mr. Estes was released from prison in 1971, he met with Cliff Carter and they reminisced about what had occurred in the past, including the murders. During their conversation, Carter spoke of a list of 17 murders which had been committed, some of which Mr. Estes was unfamiliar with. A living witness was present at that meeting and should be willing to testify about it. He is Kyle Brown, recently of Houston and now living in Brady, Texas. . .

It continues for several more pages, detailing many other crimes Estes had knowledge of, including illegal cotton allotments and payoffs.

Estes’ testimony was conditional on certain demands, including immunity from prosecution, a full pardon, and absolution of past income tax debts. Talks between the Justice Department and Billie Sol Estes broke off later in the year.

On June 19, 1992, US Marshall Clint Peoples told a friend of his that he had documentary evidence on one of the shooters in Dealey Plaza. On June 23rd, Peoples, a former Texas Ranger and a onetime friend of Henry Marshall, was killed in a mysterious one-car automobile accident in Texas.

Investigator Harrison Livingstone spoke to Kyle Brown, named as a witness in the letter, at length in 1993, and Brown backed up everything Livingstone had heard. Kyle Brown, to this day, is one of Billie Sol Estes’ closest friends.

On March 12, 1998, a 1951 fingerprint of Malcolm “Mac” Wallace was positively matched with a copy of a fingerprint labeled “Unknown,” a fresh print lifted on November 22, 1963, from a carton by the southeast sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. This carton was labeled “Box A,” and also contained several fingerprints identified as those of Lee Harvey Oswald. The identification was made by A. Nathan Darby, a Certified Latent Print Examiner with several decades experience.

Mr. Darby is a member of the International Association of Identifiers, and was chosen to help design the Eastman Kodak Miracode System of transmitting fingerprints between law enforcement agencies. Mr. Darby signed a sworn, notarized affidavit stating that he was able to affirm a 14-point match between the “Unknown” fingerprint and the “blind” print
card submitted to him, which was the 1951 print of Mac Wallace’s. US law requires a 12-point match for legal identification; Darby’s match is more conclusive than the legal minimum. As cardboard does not retain fingerprints for long, it is certain that Malcolm E. Wallace left his fingerprint on “Box A” on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository early on November 22, 1963.

The FBI currently has custody of the Mac Wallace fingerprint, Nathan Darby’s sworn affidavit, and several hundred pages of corroborative evidence developed by Texas research group which is currently remaining anonymous. Brown has received permission from the group to release the name of one eyewitness to some of the covert business dealings between Lyndon B. Johnson and members of the assassination plot. This is Barr
McClellan of Houston, Texas, onetime attorney for the law firm led by Ed Clark, which had represented Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s.

Biographer Robert A. Caro, author of two volumes to date in the
groundbreaking series *The Years of Lyndon Johnson* writes:

“Because Lyndon Johnson would have been only sixty-seven years old, when, in 1975, I began my research on his life, most of his contemporaries were still alive. This made it possible to find out what he was like while he was growing up from the best possible sources: those who grew up with him. And it also makes it possible to clear away . . . the misinformation that has surrounded the early life of Lyndon Johnson.

“The extent of this misinformation, the reason it exists, and the
importance of clearing it away, so that the character of our thirty-sixth President will become clear, became evident to me while researching his years at college. The articles and biographies which have dealt with these years have in general portrayed Johnson as a popular, even charismatic, campus figure. The oral histories of his classmates collected by the Lyndon Johnson library portray him in the same light. In the early stages of my research, I had no reason to think there was anything more to the story. Indeed, when one of the first of his classmates whom I interviewed, Henry Kyle, told me a very different story, I believed that because Kyle had been defeated by Johnson in a number of campus encounters, I was hearing only a prejudiced account by an embittered man, and did not even bother typing up my notes of the interview.

“Then, however, I began to interview other classmates. . . . When I found them, I was told the old anecdotes that had become part of the Lyndon Johnson myth. But over and over again, the man or woman I was interviewing would tell me that these anecdotes were not the whole story. When I asked for the rest of it, they wouldn’t tell it. A man named Vernon Whiteside could have told me, they said, but, they said, they had heard that Vernon Whiteside was dead.

“One day, however, I phoned Horace Richards, a Johnson classmate who lived in Corpus Christi, to arrange to drive down from Austin to see him. Richards said that there was indeed a great deal more to the story of Lyndon Johnson at college than had been told, but that he wouldn’t tell me unless Vernon Whiteside would too. But Whiteside was dead, I said. “Hell, no,” Richards said. “He’s not dead. He was here visiting me just last week.

“. . . I traced Mr. Whiteside to a mobile home court in Highland Beach, Florida . . . flew there to see him, and from him heard for the first time many of the character-revealing episodes of Lyndon Johnson’s years at San Marcos at which the other classmates had hinted. And when I returned to these classmates, they confirmed Whiteside’s account; Richards himself added many details. And now they told additional stories, not at all like the ones they had told before . . . [a]nd the portrait of Lyndon Johnson at San Marcos that finally emerged was very different from the one previously sketched.

“The experience was repeated again and again during the seven years spent on this book. Of the hundreds of persons interviewed, scores had never been interviewed before, and the information these persons have provided – in some cases even though they were quite worried about providing it – has helped form a portrait of Lyndon Johnson substantially different from all previous portraits” (Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path
to Power, 769-70).

This passage demonstrates the power that Lyndon Baines Johnson wielded over people; even people who hadn’t seen him in fifty years; even people who knew nothing of him but his childhood and teen years — people who knew no secrets of state, no political ammunition, little more than gossip; people who continued to fear him and “his people” even after Lyndon Baines Johnson, in fact, was dead.

Caro continues:

“Prior to his entrance into campus politics at San Marcos, ‘no one,’ as another student recalled, ‘cared about campus politics.’ Elections — for class offices or the Student Council — were casual affairs. But Johnson saw in those elections an opportunity to obtain a measure of control, small but pivotal, over the fate of some of his fellow students. At this ‘poor boys’ school,’ a diploma was for many students the only hope of escape from a life of poverty and brutal physical toil on their families’ impoverished ranches and farms, and in the Depression, campus jobs, with
their tiny cash stipends, represented the only means by which these young men could stay in school and obtain their diplomas. Johnson saw a method by which the victors in campus politics could obtain authority to dispense those jobs. And to obtain this power that no one else had focused on, he did what no one else on the sleepy campus had done: created, out of a small social club, a disciplined and secret political organization. And when, because of his personal unpopularity, the club could not, despite his organizing, win elections, he taught unsophisticated farm boys how to steal elections (and how to win them by other methods: ‘blackmailing’ a popular rival woman candidate out of a race over a meaningless indiscretion, for example; ‘things we would never have dreamt of if it hadn’t been for Lyndon’). College Hill’s pattern was repeated on Capitol Hill in 1933 and 1934. The ‘Little Congress’ of congressional aides was a social organization. But Lyndon Johnson saw in its presidency a means of entree to men of power. Again there were repeated complaints, this time from fellow Little Congress members, that he had ‘stolen’ elections (‘Everyone said it: “In that last election that damn Lyndon Johnson stole some votes again”‘). When, in 1933 and 1934, Johnson was accused of ‘stuffing’ a ballot box, he was not yet represented by Abe Fortas, and his accusers succeeded in accomplishing what Fortas prevented Johnson’s 1948 accusers from accomplishing: opening
the ballot box. When the Little Congress box was opened, it was found that the accusations against Johnson were true. Again, as at college, what he had done was unprecedented: no one had ever stuffed a Little Congress ballot box before. (And, perhaps no one would ever stuff one again, for after his departure the organization quickly reverted to its easygoing social role; ‘My God, who would cheat to win the presidency of something like the Little Congress?’) In his first campaign for the Senate, he stole thousands of votes, and when they proved insufficient (‘He ['Pappy' 'Daniel] stole more votes than we did, that’s all’), his reaction was to try to steal still more, and his failure in this attempt was due only to [an] irredeemable tactical error, not to any change in the pattern . . . At each previous stage of his career, then, Johnson’s election tactics had made clear not only a hunger for power but a willingness to take (within the context of American politics, of course; the coups and assassinations that characterize other countries’ politics were not and never would be included in his calculations) whatever
political steps would be necessary to satisfy that hunger. Over and over again, he had stretched the rules of the game to their breaking point, and then had broken them, pushing deeper into the ethical and legal no-man’s-land beyond them than others were willing to go. Now, in 1948 . . . he was operating beyond the loosest boundaries of prevailing custom and political morality. What had been demonstrated before was now underlined in the strongest terms: in the context of the politics that was his life, Lyndon Johnson would do whatever was necessary to win. Even in terms of the most elastic political morality — the political morality
of 1940s Texas — his methods were amoral”

(Robert A. Caro, *The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent,* 397-98).

Lyndon Johnson could not have acted without the assistance of his best friend, the most powerful law enforcement agent in the world, J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI. An operation such as this could not be run without enormous cash reserves, businesses in which to launder funds and transmit orders, to set up trusts for beneficiaries at a later date; the kind of money that H. L. Hunt had; the kind of money that Clint Murchison had. In 1963, oilman H. L. Hunt was literally one of the richest men in world, estimated to be worth five billion dollars.

H. L. Hunt had the kind of money that could buy trucks, jeeps, guns, and explosives for the Minutemen and the John Birch Society; could fund a radio station making daily broadcasts interpreting the day’s news in light of the terrible “Communist threat” in the inner corridors of Washington; could build munitions plants and helicopter factories just in case a war should suddenly erupt; could keep active men with valuable connections such as Sergio Arcacha Smith and Jack Ruby on the payroll.

Hunt and his sons had a private intelligence agency up and running to combat the Communist threat, having hired intelligence agents away from their government positions to charge for their loyalties by the hour. Their man in charge was Paul Rothermel, an ex-FBI agent presiding over a host of ex-FBI agents, and ex-CIA assets could also be counted on to keep their mouths shut. Hunt’s top aide for many years, John Curington, eventually left the organization, fed up playing cops and robbers without a badge.

He told Harrison Livingstone that not only was Lamar Hunt chatting with Ruby on November 21st, but shortly after Oswald’s arrest, H. L. himself requested that Curington personally take a stroll over to DPD headquarters to see how tight security was around the suspect. He added that Curington should make a point to check out the elevators they were using to transport the prisoner. Curington strode into the building, rang for the elevator, and when the doors opened he found himself face to face with Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald’s police escort introduced the two men
(Livingstone, *Killing the Truth,* 502).

His employer was pleased to learn that security around the prisoner was rather lax.

Curington saw Marina Oswald depart from a private meeting with H. L. Hunt one evening in December 1963. “Hunt asked me to lock everything up and prevent anyone from coming upstairs on the elevator. As I waited, an elevator came down and Marina Oswald came out of it, left the building, and got into a waiting car. I’m absolutely sure it was her” (Livingstone, 501). Marina first denied the story, but has conceded that she met with many people she didn’t know after the assassination.

Eventually, the Hunt “security” agency became so intricate that the
billionaire’s billionaire son, Nelson Bunker Hunt, would feel the need to institute his own counterintelligence program to weed out intruders and turncoats; it would cost him. Paul Rothermel, the former G-man, went public with incredible charges against the younger Hunt, whom, Rothermel charged, asked him to help start a private army to be called the American Volunteer Group (AVG), drawn from the ranks of General Edwin A. Walker’s John Bircher brigade. Hunt’s goal was a top-secret paramilitary based in southern California that could be called upon to act when Communists and liberals got too pushy. Like father, like son; just before November 22, 1963, H. L. Hunt told a gathering of compatriots that the only way to get Communists like the Kennedy brothers out of office is to “shoot ‘em out.”

When Rothermel refused to participate, he found himself spied upon and his phone tapped. Nelson Bunker Hunt would eventually plead guilty “to a misdemeanor stemming from a massive wiretapping conspiracy in which he’d hired a Houston detective agency to eavesdrop upon his own security force, a force composed largely of former FBI agents” (Jim Hougan, *Spooks,* 74-75). Hunt denied the AVG charge, however, journalist Peter
Noyes confirmed that the AVG was up and running for at least a brief period of time. His sources were a number of active California Minutemen, a group which had been tapped by the Hunts for recruits, but who found the Hunts a bit extreme even for their taste (Hougan, 75).

H. L. Hunt once wrote a novel called Alpaca, about a utopian democracy that based citizenship rights on property ownership and educational qualifications. (Hunt dropped out of school in the sixth grade.) Elections in this best of all possible worlds were determined by the amount of taxes one paid; the more you pay, the more votes you get.

A source requesting anonymity told Harry Livingstone, “H. L. had every lawyer in Dallas doing something for him. He’d give them all a little piece of the pie, and nobody could find a lawyer big enough to stand up to him.” Madeleine Brown – Lyndon B. Johnson’s longtime mistress and mother of his illegitimate son Steven, as well as a personal friend of the Hunts for a number of years — said, “If they didn’t play his game, they went in and took it. They pulled no punches. They had no morals. They had no rules. It was strictly power. They were absolutely ruthless”
(Livingstone, 496-7). Madeleine has come to regret merely standing by and watching.

John Curington told Livingstone that H. L. Hunt had a personal line to Lyndon Johnson through their mutual friend Boothe Mooney (Livingstone, 500).

If Hunt and LBJ were birds of a feather, Johnson also flocked around his close friend J. Edgar Hoover’s generous benefactors, the family of oil baron Clint Murchison. Murchison is now well known to have hosted the FBI director for any number of paid vacations both to his home and private race track as well as other glamorous jaunts, often hobnobbing with the gangsters the FBI would presumably be prosecuting were they not devoting all their manpower to fighting the Red Menace. Hoover had been arguably
the most powerful man in Washington for some decades, and it was common knowledge that JFK was going to put him out to pasture following the 1964 election, just as Kennedy was going to do to Lyndon.

Within 24 hours of the assassination, Lyndon Johnson called Captain Will Fritz, chief of the Homicide Bureau of the DPD, and personally informed him he had his man in custody and the investigation was over. Johnson aide Cliff Carter phoned the same message to Texas DA Waggoner Carr, who was none too pleased to receive it. When Lee Harvey Oswald lay dying in Parkland Hospital on November 24, 1963, Dr. Charles Crenshaw was
astonished to pick up a phone call and find himself talking to the
President of the United States, who said he wanted a confession from Oswald; he didn’t get it. Johnson created the Warren Commission, which answered only to him, thereby preempting the numerous proposed investigations in Texas and on Capitol Hill. Then Johnson locked up as much of the evidence as he could, all with the help of J. Edgar Hoover, who buried or destroyed any evidence that threatened to upset the apple cart; the Hunts and Murchisons and their enormous cash and influence, and certain rogue elements of the intelligence community who resented Kennedy for both his foreign policy and his attempts to curb the CIA’s massive and wholly unconstitutional power.

The intelligence community has long hidden in the shadows of the
assassination, between the more obvious suspects as well as the “false sponsors” they intentionally drew into the operation to shield themselves – Castro, the anti-Castro Cubans, the Mob. That was their most important contribution; though they routinely interfaced with the Texans and undoubtedly played a role in the events of Dealey Plaza, their most valuable asset was the one which was needed most: the unfathomed capability of certain of their ranks to confuse and deceive. More than getaway planes and unmarked cars, the plotters needed smoke and mirrors to blind and mislead, to confuse and disorient. They had planned for such
a need; they had masters of propaganda at key points, allies in the
press, and for their greatest trick, a certain “Harvey” rabbit to produce from a hat and then make disappear on cue.

It may be pure conjecture, but given Hunt’s organizational ties and
unholy alliances, his personal spies and private law, one wonders if it doesn’t strain credulity to the breaking point to think there wasn’t someone else we know to have been in Dallas who couldn’t have somehow stumbled into this snakepit; someone who Hunt’s chief staff assistant John Curington admitted he “had run across . . . before the assassination” (Dick Russell, “The Man Who Knew Too Much,* 317).

It was John Curington who turned over a previously unknown slip of paper to the FBI, a brief note the handwriting of which has been authenticated by numerous independent handwriting analysts. The only part of the note disputed is the signature, which appears to be misspelled. But the purported author was not immune to misspelling his own name, even on a very deliberately executed, typewritten document (CE 908, 18 H 97); see
Reitzes, “Alik and Marina.”

Edited by Robert Morrow
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Guest Robert Morrow

Study: LBJ Was Most Narcissistic President: http://www.newsmax.com/US/lbj-narcissistic-presidents-study/2013/11/13/id/536462

Wednesday, November 13, 2013 02:16 PM

By: Bill Hoffmann

When it comes to gargantuan egos in the White House, nobody beats President Lyndon B. Johnson, says a new study of presidents' personalities.

Psychologists from Emory University and the University of Georgia say Johnson, who was thrust into the presidency in 1963 with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, ranked highest in "grandiose narcissism."

"Johnson was assertive, and good at managing crises and at getting legislation passed. He also had a reputation for being a bit of a bully and antagonistic," said Scott Lilienfeld, a professor of psychology at Emory, according to futurity.org.

"In U.S. history, there is an enormous variety in presidential leadership style and success. One of the greatest mysteries in politics is what qualities make a great leader and which ones make a disastrous, failed leader. Grandiose narcissism may be one important part of the puzzle."

Following Johnson were Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Kennedy.

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, is titled "The Double-Edged Sword of Grandiose Narcissism: Implications for Successful and Unsuccessful Leadership Among U.S. Presidents."

Forty-two presidents were included in the study, from George Washington to George W. Bush.

The article says grandiose narcissism in presidents is associated with superior overall greatness, public persuasiveness, and crisis management. But it can also be associated with unethical behavior.

Grandiose narcissism, according to futurity.org, is "characterized by an extroverted, self-aggrandizing, domineering, and flamboyant interpersonal style."

Among those presidents with the lowest ratings for grandiose narcissism were Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore.

During his time in the White House, Johnson was an outsized personality who often shocked and amazed reporters.

He once raised eyebrows by proudly showing off his appendix scar in public, and angered animal lovers by lifting his pet beagle by the ears.

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