Bobby Baker Options

[Pat Speer]

And, according to Mark Lane, Alex Jones, and TMWKK he went pretty much bananas near the end of his life. I'd like to have more details on that phase.

Does anyone know of a source that goes into detail on his mental demise?
I'd like to think he suffered horribly from guilt & fear over his crimes.

And I'm running a highly unscientific survey:
Who thinks LBJ was murdered to shut him up?

I don't really have an opinion; he did have a bad heart I believe.
But given the reputed deterioration of his mental state, I believe the conspirators were quite worried...

The historian Doris Kearns earned her rep by befriending LBJ towards the end of his life. I believe it was her book Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream that best captured LBJ's decline. He grew his hair long and withdrew from public life. She later married Richard Goodwin, a former JFK and LBJ aide who quit Johnson to work for Bobby. In 1966, he and Schlesinger became two of the first Kennedy people to call for a new investigation. It'd be interesting to get the Goodwins on camera and ask them what more they would need to see before they would consider LBJ a suspect.

This post has been edited by Pat Speer: May 3 2007, 10:18 PM

[Myra Bronstein]

And, according to Mark Lane, Alex Jones, and TMWKK he went pretty much bananas near the end of his life. I'd like to have more details on that phase.

Does anyone know of a source that goes into detail on his mental demise?
I'd like to think he suffered horribly from guilt & fear over his crimes.

And I'm running a highly unscientific survey:
Who thinks LBJ was murdered to shut him up?

I don't really have an opinion; he did have a bad heart I believe.
But given the reputed deterioration of his mental state, I believe the conspirators were quite worried...

The historian Doris Kearns earned her rep by befriending LBJ towards the end of his life. I believe it was her book Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream that best captured LBJ's decline. He grew his hair long and withdrew from public life. She later married Richard Goodwin, a former JFK and LBJ aide who quit Johnson to work for Bobby. In 1966, he and Schlesinger became two of the first Kennedy people to call for a new investigation. It'd be interesting to get the Goodwins on camera and ask them what more they would need to see before they would consider LBJ a suspect.

Ah, thank you for the info Pat.
I'll look for Kearns' book.

[Nathaniel Heiden...]

I found these paragraphs to be fascinating re: possible relationships between Watergate and the JFK Assassination. Was O'Brien in the know re Kennedys 1962 or 1963 Cuba policy. Also does anyone know of more about Rose Mary Woods and Bobby Baker? Did they have other contacts?

Nixon had a longstanding interest in Lawrence O'Brien. O'Brien had been a Kennedy political operative, both in Mass. (where Charles
Colson was an old adversayr) and in national politcs. Later he faithfully served Lyndon Johnson. Nixon also knew that O'Brien had been
retained by Howard Hughes as a secret lobbyist, although,unlike himslef , the Democrat hever had to answer politicaly for the link.
Nixon bitterly resented continuing Democratic efforts to connect him to Howard Hughes. efforts which included a Kennedy Justice Dept.
investigation in 1961, because of a Hughes loan to Nixon's family. Haldeman noted that when matters involved connections to Hughes,
"Nixon seemed to lose tough with reality." Partly because of the Hughes connection, Colson maintained a large folder of matterials on
Obrien, labeled "Political Statements by Lawrence F. O'Brien."

When George McGovern sought a Vice-Presidential candidate to replace Thomas Eagleton in the summer of 1972, the President advised
his aides to say nothing of Eagleton's problem, but "then hit the successor all out--esp. if it's O'Brien." Ehrlichman and Nixon discussed
O'Brien's taxes and a reputed loan from Hughes at some length on August 7, 1972, after Rose mary Woods had called Boby Baker for
information on the Democratic Chairman. Several weeks later, the President instructed Ehrlichman to get busy to "worry O'Brien," and
to work through John Dean In January, 1971, Nixon told Haldeman that "the time is approaching when Larry O'Brien is held accountable
for his retainer with Hughes." Perhaps, the President added, "Colson whould make a check on this." Haledeman, however, ordered Dean to
make a report. Word for word, he repeated the President's words (p,203-4, The Wars of Watergate).


This book is considered 'the definitive account of Watergate" or it was when it first came out in 1992. It has very little on the role of James McCord.
maybe nobody told the author it was Lobster Night at HoJo's?

[John Simkin]

I found these paragraphs to be fascinating re: possible relationships between Watergate and the JFK Assassination. Was O'Brien in the know re Kennedys 1962 or 1963 Cuba policy. Also does anyone know of more about Rose Mary Woods and Bobby Baker? Did they have other contacts?

There is an interesting connection with Jack Caulfield. He worked for the NYPD's Bureau of Special Service and Investigation (BOSSI). His assignments included escorting and guarding the security of world leaders and their families. People who Caulfield protected included Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev. He also investigated political groups including the American Nazi Party, the Fair Play For Cuba Committee (FPCC) and a terrorist group based in Canada.

According to Caulfield: "My multi-faceted, twelve-year BOSSI experience convinced me in late 1967 that Richard Nixon was going to run and likely win the Presidential election in 1968. I subsequently approached the Nixon people from the 1960 Presidential campaign (with whom I had worked as a BOSSI detective) and made it known I was available for candidate/staff security purposes during the 1968 campaign." After being interviewed by Rose Mary Woods and H. R. Haldeman he was appointed as Chief of Security for the Nixon Campaign Staff.

In April, 1969, Caulfield was appointed as Staff Assistant to the President. Soon afterwards Nixon decided that the White House should establish an in-house investigative capability that could be used to obtain sensitive political information. After consulting John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman the job was given to Caulfield.

Caulfield now appointed an old friend, Tony Ulasewicz, to carry out this investigative work. Over the next three years Ulasewicz traveled to 23 states gathering information about Nixon's political opponents. This included people such as Edward Kennedy, Edmund Muskie, Larry O'Brien, Howard Hughes and Jack Anderson. Ulasewicz's first task was to investigate the links between Bobby Baker and leading Democratic Party politicians. He was also ordered by Caulfield to set up a round-the-clock surveillance of Edward Kennedy.

I have argued for sometime that Watergate was about exposing Operation Gemstone in order to cover-up Operation Sand Wedge. Therefore, the following passage from Jeb Stuart Magruder, An American Life (1974) is very interesting: "Dean, Caulfield, and I had lunch at the White House Mess. Caulfield explained that he hoped to start a private investigation firm - codenamed Sand Wedge - that could do work for both CRP and the Republican National Committee, as well as for corporate clients. The firm would provide both security services and covert intelligence-gathering, Caulfield said. John Dean added that both Mitchell and Haldeman were interested in Sand Wedge. The plan had an extra boost in that one of Caulfield's partners was to be Joe Woods, the former sheriff of Cook County, who was Rose Mary Woods's brother."

[John Simkin]

James DiEugenio, review of Larry Hancock's Someone Would Have Talked (March, 2008)

http://www.ctka.net/someone_would.html

The above production flaws accentuate the tilt in the book that I noted earlier. Although it's a bit difficult to discern, the conspiracy I see Hancock postulating here is a kind of rogue, loosely knit, willy-nilly operation. A set of Cubans is at the bottom committing the crime (he points toward Felipe Vidal Santiago). The supervisor of this plot is Roselli, who Hancock terms the "strategist". Since Roselli has connections to the CIA, the implication is this is where Phillips and Morales come in. To top the machinations as depicted by Hancock -- and in a rather original stroke -- he brings in Roselli's friend and super Washington lobbyist Fred Black. He says Black is the guy who saw President Johnson right after he took office and had some blackmail material on him and this is why LBJ went along with the cover-up.

Where does this information appear to come from? Newly declassified ARRB files perhaps? Nope. It's from another rather questionable book that the author uses. This is Wheeling and Dealing, by the infamous Bobby Baker. Now again, to go into all the problems with using a book like this and with someone like Baker would take a separate essay in itself. Suffice it to say, Baker had such a low reputation and was involved with so many unsavory characters and activities that RFK pressed then Vice-President Johnson to get rid of him before the 1964 election. The Attorney General was worried some of these activities would explode into the press and endanger the campaign. Liking the protection his position with Johnson gave him, Baker resisted. He then fought back. One of the ways he fought back was by planting rumors about President Kennedy and a woman named Ellen Rometsch. The resultant hubbub, with daggers and accusations flying about, is the kind of thing that authors like Seymour Hersh and Burton Hersh make hay of in their trashy books. (I didn't think it was possible, but Burton Hersh's book Bobby and J. Edgar is even more awful than The Dark Side of Camelot. It is such an atrocity, I couldn't even finish it.) Suffice it to say, Baker was forced out in October of 1963. Researcher Peter Vea has seen the original FBI reports commissioned by Hoover about Rometsch and he says there is nothing of substance in them about her and JFK. I am a bit surprised that Hancock would try and pin the JFK cover-up on information furnished by the likes of Baker and Black.

This is all the more surprising since the author includes material from John Newman's latest discoveries about Oswald, James Angleton, the CIA and Mexico City. To me this new ARRB released evidence provides a much more demonstrable and credible thesis as to just how and why Johnson decided to actively involve himself in the cover-up.

To make his Black/Baker theorem tenable on the page, Hancock leaves out or severely curtails some rather important and compelling evidence. In 1996, Probe published a milestone article by Professor Donald Gibson entitled "The Creation of the Warren Commission" (Vol. 3 No. 4 p. 8). It was, and still is, the definitive account of how the Warren Commission came into being. And it was used and sourced by Gerald McKnight in the best study of the Warren Commission we have to date, Breach of Trust, published in 2005. According to this evidence declassified by the ARRB, there were three men involved in pushing the concept of the Warren Commission onto the Johnson White House. They were Eugene Rostow, Dean Acheson, and Joseph Alsop. (There is a fourth person who Rostow alluded to but didn't name in his call to Bill Moyers on 11/24. Ibid p. 27) This trio sprung into action right after Oswald was shot by Ruby. And they began to instantly lobby Moyers, Walter Jenkins, Nick Katzenbach, and President Johnson to create what eventually became the Warren Commission. To say that Hancock gives short shrift to Gibson's seminal account is a huge understatement. He radically truncates the absolutely crucial and stunning phone call between LBJ and Alsop of 11/25. One has to read this transcript to understand just how important it is and just how intent and forceful Alsop is in getting Johnson to do what he wants him to. (The Assassinations pgs. 10-15.) By almost eviscerating it, Hancock leaves the impression that it is actually Johnson who was pushing for the creation of a blue ribbon national committee and not Alsop! (Hancock pgs 327-328) I don't see how any objective person can read the longer excerpts and come to that conclusion. So when Hancock states (p. 322) categorically that "President Johnson was the driving force in determining and controlling exactly how the murder of President Kennedy was investigated," I am utterly baffled at how and why he can write this. The sterling work of both Gibson and McKnight show that this is a wild and irresponsible exaggeration.

[Larry Hancock]

James DiEugenio, review of Larry Hancock's Someone Would Have Talked (March, 2008)

http://www.ctka.net/someone_would.html

The above production flaws accentuate the tilt in the book that I noted earlier. Although it's a bit difficult to discern, the conspiracy I see Hancock postulating here is a kind of rogue, loosely knit, willy-nilly operation. A set of Cubans is at the bottom committing the crime (he points toward Felipe Vidal Santiago). The supervisor of this plot is Roselli, who Hancock terms the "strategist". Since Roselli has connections to the CIA, the implication is this is where Phillips and Morales come in. To top the machinations as depicted by Hancock -- and in a rather original stroke -- he brings in Roselli's friend and super Washington lobbyist Fred Black. He says Black is the guy who saw President Johnson right after he took office and had some blackmail material on him and this is why LBJ went along with the cover-up.

Where does this information appear to come from? Newly declassified ARRB files perhaps? Nope. It's from another rather questionable book that the author uses. This is Wheeling and Dealing, by the infamous Bobby Baker. Now again, to go into all the problems with using a book like this and with someone like Baker would take a separate essay in itself. Suffice it to say, Baker had such a low reputation and was involved with so many unsavory characters and activities that RFK pressed then Vice-President Johnson to get rid of him before the 1964 election. The Attorney General was worried some of these activities would explode into the press and endanger the campaign. Liking the protection his position with Johnson gave him, Baker resisted. He then fought back. One of the ways he fought back was by planting rumors about President Kennedy and a woman named Ellen Rometsch. The resultant hubbub, with daggers and accusations flying about, is the kind of thing that authors like Seymour Hersh and Burton Hersh make hay of in their trashy books. (I didn't think it was possible, but Burton Hersh's book Bobby and J. Edgar is even more awful than The Dark Side of Camelot. It is such an atrocity, I couldn't even finish it.) Suffice it to say, Baker was forced out in October of 1963. Researcher Peter Vea has seen the original FBI reports commissioned by Hoover about Rometsch and he says there is nothing of substance in them about her and JFK. I am a bit surprised that Hancock would try and pin the JFK cover-up on information furnished by the likes of Baker and Black.

This is all the more surprising since the author includes material from John Newman's latest discoveries about Oswald, James Angleton, the CIA and Mexico City. To me this new ARRB released evidence provides a much more demonstrable and credible thesis as to just how and why Johnson decided to actively involve himself in the cover-up.

To make his Black/Baker theorem tenable on the page, Hancock leaves out or severely curtails some rather important and compelling evidence. In 1996, Probe published a milestone article by Professor Donald Gibson entitled "The Creation of the Warren Commission" (Vol. 3 No. 4 p. 8). It was, and still is, the definitive account of how the Warren Commission came into being. And it was used and sourced by Gerald McKnight in the best study of the Warren Commission we have to date, Breach of Trust, published in 2005. According to this evidence declassified by the ARRB, there were three men involved in pushing the concept of the Warren Commission onto the Johnson White House. They were Eugene Rostow, Dean Acheson, and Joseph Alsop. (There is a fourth person who Rostow alluded to but didn't name in his call to Bill Moyers on 11/24. Ibid p. 27) This trio sprung into action right after Oswald was shot by Ruby. And they began to instantly lobby Moyers, Walter Jenkins, Nick Katzenbach, and President Johnson to create what eventually became the Warren Commission. To say that Hancock gives short shrift to Gibson's seminal account is a huge understatement. He radically truncates the absolutely crucial and stunning phone call between LBJ and Alsop of 11/25. One has to read this transcript to understand just how important it is and just how intent and forceful Alsop is in getting Johnson to do what he wants him to. (The Assassinations pgs. 10-15.) By almost eviscerating it, Hancock leaves the impression that it is actually Johnson who was pushing for the creation of a blue ribbon national committee and not Alsop! (Hancock pgs 327-328) I don't see how any objective person can read the longer excerpts and come to that conclusion. So when Hancock states (p. 322) categorically that "President Johnson was the driving force in determining and controlling exactly how the murder of President Kennedy was investigated," I am utterly baffled at how and why he can write this. The sterling work of both Gibson and McKnight show that this is a wild and irresponsible exaggeration.

From what we now know of his phone calls, contacts and activities immediately following the assassination (starting with the calls that night from Johnson’s aide to a variety of law enforcement people, including orders not to file any charge of conspiracy against Oswald) it seems to me that Johnson immediately began to suppress any suggestion of a conspiracy. His motive for doing that is debatable and I present two scenarios: i) that Johnson was manipulated by events and ii) that Johnson had some level of pre-knowledge and was a willing or at least partially willing participant.

For the second, speculative, scenario which does mention Fred Black, I use sources other than Baker’s book on the Baker scandal (certainly I would not consider him a reliable source on his own sins. More importantly, I discovered and present independent documentation of a possible connection between the Baker scandal, Fred Black and Johnson. That documentation is in the form of a Presidential Diary entry showing a meeting between Baker, Black, Johnson and a senior officer of the firm that was at the heart of the Baker influence pedaling scandal – the meeting occurred in Vice President Johnson’s office and there is no question that it connected Johnson to Black and presented the possibility of blackmail if the matter had been discussed with Black’s close personal friend, Johnny Roselli.

I present Johnson’s efforts to first simply accept the Hoover FBI report with no independent investigation at all. Then I describe his effort to convene a Texas Court of Inquiry which would certify the FBI report. Both those efforts occurred well before Johnson was forced into the concept of a Congressional committee and much of it is recorded in meetings and telephone calls in his own office diary. Johnson, in dialog with Hoover, was certainly responsible for the FBI’s marching orders but I will certainly revisit the wording in this area and see if I can improve it. My view is that Johnson was very heavily involved in ensuring that the “lone nut” view was presented to the American public and that the FBI “conclusion” of Oswald acting as the sole participant ended up as the official history of the murder.. It was inaccurate of me to suggest that he personally controlled all the elements of the investigation.

[John Simkin]

A lot of research has indeed been carried out since 1994 and in a sense the publication of that talk is embarrassing. On the other hand it is quite a good general intro to the story and that is what I thought then; the fact that we change our minds with experience and further reading should embarrass no-one. My current view is that expressed in my Who Shot JFK? The killing was done on behalf of LBJ to keep Johnson's political career alive. Fascinating though all the research into the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans, mafia and the entire Oswald-intelligence milieu is, all the trails peter out as we approach Dealey Plaza. JFK was bushwacked in Johnson's backyard; and Johnson was about to go down the pan through various corruption inquiries. The evidence supporting this is persuasive but not conclusive.

It is true that Lyndon Johnson had the best motive for wanting JFK dead. The testimony given by Don Reynolds to the Senate Rules Committee on the day that JFK died would have resulted in the impeachment of LBJ if he had survived. We also know from Evelyn Lincoln that JFK was going to drop LBJ as vice president for the 1964 presidential election. We also know that Carl Curtis, LBJ’s main critic on the Senate Rules Committee, that he was getting his information on LBJ and Bobby Baker from John Williams, who in turn was getting some of it from Robert Kennedy. Once he became president, LBJ was able to control the story by using Hoover and the media to smear his critics and to cover-up the Bobby Baker scandal.

LBJ not only had the motive for arranging the assassination of JFK but also organizing the cover-up. However, LBJ needed help from other powerful people in order to achieve this. We know that LBJ could manipulate Hoover and the FBI over this issue. Hoover, of course, had his own reasons, for covering-up some dubious FBI actions leading up to the assassination.

My problem with the LBJ theory concerns the role of the CIA in all this. We now know from the evidence that has emerged in recent years that senior CIA operatives played a major role in the cover-up (see for example, the testimony of John Whitten and Jeff Morley’s recent book on Win Scott). We also have some very good evidence that implicate CIA officers and contract workers in the assassination, such as David Morales, Carl E. Jenkins, David Phillips, Chi Chi Quintero, John Martino, Tony Cuesta, Herminio Diaz Garcia, etc., who were involved in anti-Castro operations.

My view is that LBJ did not instigate the assassination. However, the people who did, knew that LBJ would automatically take part in the cover-up. To guarantee this they probably planted the Mac Wallace finger-print on the 6th Floor of the Texas School Book Depositary. In my view, Mac Wallace was the last person he would have involved in the assassination as he was the one convicted murderer who could be traced back to LBJ. When LBJ was told that the FBI had the finger-print, he could not allow a full investigation of the JFK assassination to take place. However, the planting of the evidence also meant that LBJ would not be willing to carry out the final part of the plan, the ordering of the invasion of Cuba. LBJ knew that if this happened, there would be calls from all over the world for a full investigation into the evidence that Oswald was working for Castro. Any such investigation would have proved embarrassing for LBJ, the FBI and the CIA. LBJ went for the safe option, “Oswald was a lone-nutter”. The CIA/anti-Castro group was not in a position to argue and had to accept they only got rid of one instead of both of their targets.

[Thomas Graves]

A lot of research has indeed been carried out since 1994 and in a sense the publication of that talk is embarrassing. On the other hand it is quite a good general intro to the story and that is what I thought then; the fact that we change our minds with experience and further reading should embarrass no-one. My current view is that expressed in my Who Shot JFK? The killing was done on behalf of LBJ to keep Johnson's political career alive. Fascinating though all the research into the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans, mafia and the entire Oswald-intelligence milieu is, all the trails peter out as we approach Dealey Plaza. JFK was bushwacked in Johnson's backyard; and Johnson was about to go down the pan through various corruption inquiries. The evidence supporting this is persuasive but not conclusive.

It is true that Lyndon Johnson had the best motive for wanting JFK dead. The testimony given by Don Reynolds to the Senate Rules Committee on the day that JFK died would have resulted in the impeachment of LBJ if he had survived. We also know from Evelyn Lincoln that JFK was going to drop LBJ as vice president for the 1964 presidential election. We also know that Carl Curtis, LBJ’s main critic on the Senate Rules Committee, that he was getting his information on LBJ and Bobby Baker from John Williams, who in turn was getting some of it from Robert Kennedy. Once he became president, LBJ was able to control the story by using Hoover and the media to smear his critics and to cover-up the Bobby Baker scandal.

LBJ not only had the motive for arranging the assassination of JFK but also organizing the cover-up. However, LBJ needed help from other powerful people in order to achieve this. We know that LBJ could manipulate Hoover and the FBI over this issue. Hoover, of course, had his own reasons, for covering-up some dubious FBI actions leading up to the assassination.

My problem with the LBJ theory concerns the role of the CIA in all this. We now know from the evidence that has emerged in recent years that senior CIA operatives played a major role in the cover-up (see for example, the testimony of John Whitten and Jeff Morley’s recent book on Win Scott). We also have some very good evidence that implicate CIA officers and contract workers in the assassination, such as David Morales, Carl E. Jenkins, David Phillips, Chi Chi Quintero, John Martino, Tony Cuesta, Herminio Diaz Garcia, etc., who were involved in anti-Castro operations.

My view is that LBJ did not instigate the assassination. However, the people who did, knew that LBJ would automatically take part in the cover-up. To guarantee this they probably planted the Mac Wallace finger-print on the 6th Floor of the Texas School Book Depositary. In my view, Mac Wallace was the last person he would have involved in the assassination as he was the one convicted murderer who could be traced back to LBJ. When LBJ was told that the FBI had the finger-print, he could not allow a full investigation of the JFK assassination to take place. However, the planting of the evidence also meant that LBJ would not be willing to carry out the final part of the plan, the ordering of the invasion of Cuba. LBJ knew that if this happened, there would be calls from all over the world for a full investigation into the evidence that Oswald was working for Castro. Any such investigation would have proved embarrassing for LBJ, the FBI and the CIA. LBJ went for the safe option, “Oswald was a lone-nutter”. The CIA/anti-Castro group was not in a position to argue and had to accept they only got rid of one instead of both of their targets.

__________________________________________

I really like the scenario presented in this post and think it deserves to be kept on the first page at least a little longer. Therefore, I hereby "bump" it. --Thomas
__________________________________________

[Robin Ramsay]

My problem with the LBJ theory concerns the role of the CIA in all this. We now know from the evidence that has emerged in recent years that senior CIA operatives played a major role in the cover-up (see for example, the testimony of John Whitten and Jeff Morley’s recent book on Win Scott). We also have some very good evidence that implicate CIA officers and contract workers in the assassination, such as David Morales, Carl E. Jenkins, David Phillips, Chi Chi Quintero, John Martino, Tony Cuesta, Herminio Diaz Garcia, etc., who were involved in anti-Castro operations.

My view is that LBJ did not instigate the assassination. However, the people who did, knew that LBJ would automatically take part in the cover-up. To guarantee this they probably planted the Mac Wallace finger-print on the 6th Floor of the Texas School Book Depositary. In my view, Mac Wallace was the last person he would have involved in the assassination as he was the one convicted murderer who could be traced back to LBJ. When LBJ was told that the FBI had the finger-print, he could not allow a full investigation of the JFK assassination to take place. However, the planting of the evidence also meant that LBJ would not be willing to carry out the final part of the plan, the ordering of the invasion of Cuba. LBJ knew that if this happened, there would be calls from all over the world for a full investigation into the evidence that Oswald was working for Castro. Any such investigation would have proved embarrassing for LBJ, the FBI and the CIA. LBJ went for the safe option, “Oswald was a lone-nutter”. The CIA/anti-Castro group was not in a position to argue and had to accept they only got rid of one instead of both of their targets.

Do we? I know we have Morales reported as saying - implying - that he was involved; and Martino is said to have known something. But beyond that? Are any of these people reliably reported as being on Dealey Plaza? It may be that as Howard Hunt is reported to have said to his son just before he died that there were several plots, one by CIA people.

It still seems more likely to me that the Mac Wallace story is true; that LBJ's little criminal gang did it; that their little gang was seen by Roger Craig in the immediate aftermath. The idea that the Mac Wallace print was planted is implausible to me. If you are going to implicate him, why not do it with something more substantial? In any case the planted idea sounds like the classic move we all make to avoid having our theories falsified.

Mac Wallace had already got away with murdering Marshall - why would they not think they could do it again in LBJ's backyard?

[William Kelly]

My problem with the LBJ theory concerns the role of the CIA in all this. We now know from the evidence that has emerged in recent years that senior CIA operatives played a major role in the cover-up (see for example, the testimony of John Whitten and Jeff Morley's recent book on Win Scott). We also have some very good evidence that implicate CIA officers and contract workers in the assassination, such as David Morales, Carl E. Jenkins, David Phillips, Chi Chi Quintero, John Martino, Tony Cuesta, Herminio Diaz Garcia, etc., who were involved in anti-Castro operations.

My view is that LBJ did not instigate the assassination. However, the people who did, knew that LBJ would automatically take part in the cover-up. To guarantee this they probably planted the Mac Wallace finger-print on the 6th Floor of the Texas School Book Depositary. In my view, Mac Wallace was the last person he would have involved in the assassination as he was the one convicted murderer who could be traced back to LBJ. When LBJ was told that the FBI had the finger-print, he could not allow a full investigation of the JFK assassination to take place. However, the planting of the evidence also meant that LBJ would not be willing to carry out the final part of the plan, the ordering of the invasion of Cuba. LBJ knew that if this happened, there would be calls from all over the world for a full investigation into the evidence that Oswald was working for Castro. Any such investigation would have proved embarrassing for LBJ, the FBI and the CIA. LBJ went for the safe option, "Oswald was a lone-nutter". The CIA/anti-Castro group was not in a position to argue and had to accept they only got rid of one instead of both of their targets.

Do we? I know we have Morales reported as saying - implying - that he was involved; and Martino is said to have known something. But beyond that? Are any of these people reliably reported as being on Dealey Plaza? It may be that as Howard Hunt is reported to have said to his son just before he died that there were several plots, one by CIA people.

It still seems more likely to me that the Mac Wallace story is true; that LBJ's little criminal gang did it; that their little gang was seen by Roger Craig in the immediate aftermath. The idea that the Mac Wallace print was planted is implausible to me. If you are going to implicate him, why not do it with something more substantial? In any case the planted idea sounds like the classic move we all make to avoid having our theories falsified.

Mac Wallace had already got away with murdering Marshall - why would they not think they could do it again in LBJ's backyard?

I agree, while some evidence was planted, fingerprints don't fit that bill.

Also, it wasn't a coup if those who killed the President didn't take over the government.

BK

[John Simkin]

My problem with the LBJ theory concerns the role of the CIA in all this. We now know from the evidence that has emerged in recent years that senior CIA operatives played a major role in the cover-up (see for example, the testimony of John Whitten and Jeff Morley’s recent book on Win Scott). We also have some very good evidence that implicate CIA officers and contract workers in the assassination, such as David Morales, Carl E. Jenkins, David Phillips, Chi Chi Quintero, John Martino, Tony Cuesta, Herminio Diaz Garcia, etc., who were involved in anti-Castro operations.

Do we? I know we have Morales reported as saying - implying - that he was involved; and Martino is said to have known something. But beyond that? Are any of these people reliably reported as being on Dealey Plaza? It may be that as Howard Hunt is reported to have said to his son just before he died that there were several plots, one by CIA people.

It is of course extremely difficult, if not impossible, to identify the gunmen in Dealey Plaza. However, I do think that we have enough evidence to construct the conspiracy against JFK.

I believe that the conspiracy is similar to the one described by David Atlee Phillips in his unpublished novel. David Kaiser describes the novel's plot in his book The Road to Dallas (2008):

At some point before his death from cancer in 1988, he (Phillips) wrote an outline for another novel, entitled The AMLASH Legacy, dealing specifically with the Kennedy assassination.

The outline carefully identified the characters with the real figures on which they were based: Mexico City station chief Winston Scott, HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi, Antonio Veciana, long-time assassination conspiracists Mark Lane and Bernard Fensterwald, and Phillips himself, who went by the name of Harold Harrison. The novel focused on Harrison's son Don, who begins looking for his father's journal after his father's death. A Mexican woman who attended his father's funeral gives Don a letter written by his father. The letter explains that Harrison had been one of two case officers who recruited Lee Harvey Oswald, helped establish his credentials as a Marxist, and then attempted to send him to Cuba through Mexico City in order to assassinate Fidel Castro, using a sniper rifle from an upper floor of a high-rise to shoot Castro in his jeep. Harrison does not know whether Oswald was a double agent, the letter continues, but this was the same plan Oswald used to kill Kennedy. Allen Dulles, the letter stated, provided Harrison and the other unidentified agent with $400,000 to set up Oswald after he succeeded in assassinating Fidel.

In the novel, Harrison has the last laugh when is son discovers that his father's posthumous letter is a forgery concocted by the Fensterwald character and a KGB agent whom Harrison had repeatedly outwitted during, their spying careers. The real David Phillips might simply have concluded that since so many others had irresponsibly cashed in on the Kennedy assassination, he might as well do the same.

Yet his outline of this novel was the only document I know in existence before 1998 to suggest that Oswald might have been trying to go to Cuba to assassinate Castro. In that year, I wrote a short article to introduce the idea that - as "Leopoldo" suggested to Silvia Odio a few days before or a few days after Oswald's visit to Mexico City - Oswald's first assassination target may well have been the Cuban premier. We will probably never know whether Phillips was drawing on anything more than his imagination, but the plot of his novel, until the spectacular revelation at the end, tracks key events leading up to the Kennedy assassination almost perfectly.

In the novel the Harrison character states: "I was one of those officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald... We gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba... I don't know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the president's assassination, but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt."

In 1995 Gene Wheaton approached the Assassination Records Review Board with information on the death of JFK. Anne Buttimer, Chief Investigator of the ARRB, recorded that: "Wheaton told me that from 1984 to 1987 he spent a lot of time in the Washington DC area and that starting in 1985 he was "recruited into Ollie North's network" by the CIA officer he has information about. He got to know this man and his wife, a "'super grade high level CIA officer" and kept a bedroom in their Virginia home. His friend was a Marine Corps liaison in New Orleans and was the CIA contact with Carlos Marcello. He had been responsible for "running people into Cuba before the Bay of Pigs." His friend is now 68 or 69 years of age... Over the course of a year or a year and one-half his friend told him about his activities with training Cuban insurgency groups. Wheaton said he also got to know many of the Cubans who had been his friend's soldiers/operatives when the Cubans visited in Virginia from their homes in Miami. His friend and the Cubans confirmed to Wheaton they assassinated JFK. Wheaton's friend said he trained the Cubans who pulled the triggers. Wheaton said the street level Cubans felt JFK was a traitor after the Bay of Pigs and wanted to kill him. People "above the Cubans" wanted JFK killed for other reasons." It was later revealed that Wheaton's friend was Carl E. Jenkins. Wheaton also named Irving Davidson as being involved in the assassination.

In an interview with William Law and Mark Sobel in the summer of 2005, Gene Wheaton claimed that Carl E. Jenkins and Rafael Quintero were both involved in the assassination of JFK. Larry Hancock's research has shown that Jenkins (a man who had never previously been identified in any book on the CIA) was indeed involved in training anti-Castro Cubans in 1963.

I contacted Rafael Quintero via his close friend Don Bohning. Quintero refused to be interviewed but he did say that Gene Wheaton was telling the truth as "he knew it". His explanation of Wheaton's story was that he and Carl Jenkins had been lying to him when they said they were involved in the assassination. However, Quintero was once quoted as saying: “If I were ever granted immunity, and compelled to testify about past actions, about Dallas and the Bay of Pigs, it would be the biggest scandal ever to rock the United States.”

Then we have Fabian Escalante's statement at the Cuban Officials and JFK Historians Conference on 7th December, 1995:

Eladio Del Valle worked for two police services - military intelligence and the traditional police. He was in charge of narcotics. He was also a legislature in the government - a representative. He was from a little town from the south of Havana. He was a captain in the merchant marines. In 1958 he was doing business dealings with Santos Trafficante in a little coastal town south of Havana. There he brought in contraband whose destination was Santos Trafficante. When the revolution triumphed, he went to Miami. Eladio Del Valle went to Miami. He settled in Miami, we don't know the address and he allied himself with Rolando Masferrer and other Batista supporters and they formed an organization called the Anti Communist Cuban Liberation Movement. From that moment on, Eladio was involved in many project against Cuba. But as I told you yesterday, we managed to penetrate this organization. And we came to know of a lot of projects, efforts, for an invasion of Cuba in secret. In order to provide arms to internal rebel groups, they needed David Ferrie as the pilot on these flights. In 1962 Eladio Del Valle tried to infiltrate Cuba with a commando group of 22 men but their boat had an English key - a little island. In the middle of 1962. Of course, we knew this. I tell you about this, because one of our agents who was one of the people helping to bring this group to Cuba, was a man of very little education. They talked English on many occasions on this little island with Eladio Del Valle told this person, on many occasions, that Kennedy must be killed to solve the Cuban problem. After that we had another piece of information on Eladio Del Valle. This was offered to us by Tony Cuesta. He told us that Eladio Del Valle was one of the people involved in the assassination plot against Kennedy. As you know, he was taken prisoner and he was very thankful to be taken back - he was blind.

He asked that this information not be public. I am only saying it here, because he is already dead. It is finished. We didn't have any other kind of information to give. There are some things you must respect. He gave us this information and in 1978 we didn't know if it was true or not. In 1978, we were not aware of the participation of Eladio Del Valle. We didn't know who he was. Remember that I explained to you yesterday that when the Select Committee when they came to Havana - they didn't give us any specific information. They just came to question us. We didn't know the relationships.

Dick Russell, who was at this conference with Escalante, wrote about the story in the 2003 edition of The Man Who Knew Too Much:

The most intriguing news to come out of the Nassau conference, however, was Escalante's revelation about what another leader of the Alpha 66 group allegedly told him. As we have seen, Nagell would never reveal the true identities of "Angel" and "Leopoldo" - the two Cuban exiles who he said had deceived Oswald into believing they were Castro operatives. Instead, on several occasions when I prodded him, Nagell had cleverly steered the conversation toward a man named Tony Cuesta - indicating that this individual possessed the knowledge that he himself chose not to express. Cuesta, as noted earlier, had been taken prisoner in Cuba during a raid in 1966.

"Cuesta was blinded (in an explosion) and spent most of his time in the hospital," Escalante recalled. In 1978, he was among a group of imprisoned exiles released through an initiative of the Carter Administration. "A few days before he was to leave," according to Escalante, "I had several conversations with Cuesta. He volunteered, 'I want to tell you something very important, but I do not want this made public because I am returning to my family in Miami - and this could be very dangerous.' I think this was a little bit of thanks on his part for the medical care he received."

Escalante said he was only revealing Cuesta's story because the man had died in Miami in 1994. In a declaration he is said to have written for the Cubans, Cuesta named two other exiles as having been involved in plotting the Kennedy assassination. Their names were Eladio del Valle and Herminio Diaz Garcia.

Shortly before his death in 1975 John Martino confessed to a Miami Newsday reporter, John Cummings, that he had been guilty of spreading false stories implicating Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination. He claimed that two of the gunmen were Cuban exiles. It is believed the two men were Herminio Diaz Garcia and Virgilio Gonzalez. Cummings added: "He told me he'd been part of the assassination of Kennedy. He wasn't in Dallas pulling a trigger, but he was involved. He implied that his role was delivering money, facilitating things.... He asked me not to write it while he was alive."

Fred Claasen also told the House Select Committee on Assassinations what he knew about Martino's involvement in the case. Florence Martino at first refused to corroborate the story. However, in 1994 she told Anthony Summers that her husband said to her on the morning of 22nd November, 1963: "Flo, they're going to kill him (Kennedy). They're going to kill him when he gets to Texas."

All these sources suggest a combined CIA and Anti-Castro Cuban plot. Jeff Morley's new book about Win Scott shows that senior figures in the CIA, including Richard Helms, James Jesus Angleton and David Atlee Phillips, were deeply involved in covering-up the the story of Oswald's time in Mexico City.

[John Simkin]

My problem with the LBJ theory concerns the role of the CIA in all this. We now know from the evidence that has emerged in recent years that senior CIA operatives played a major role in the cover-up (see for example, the testimony of John Whitten and Jeff Morley’s recent book on Win Scott). We also have some very good evidence that implicate CIA officers and contract workers in the assassination, such as David Morales, Carl E. Jenkins, David Phillips, Chi Chi Quintero, John Martino, Tony Cuesta, Herminio Diaz Garcia, etc., who were involved in anti-Castro operations.

Do we? I know we have Morales reported as saying - implying - that he was involved; and Martino is said to have known something. But beyond that? Are any of these people reliably reported as being on Dealey Plaza? It may be that as Howard Hunt is reported to have said to his son just before he died that there were several plots, one by CIA people.

It is of course extremely difficult, if not impossible, to identify the gunmen in Dealey Plaza. However, I do think that we have enough evidence to construct the conspiracy against JFK.

I believe that the conspiracy is similar to the one described by David Atlee Phillips in his unpublished novel. David Kaiser describes the novel's plot in his book The Road to Dallas (2008):

At some point before his death from cancer in 1988, he (Phillips) wrote an outline for another novel, entitled The AMLASH Legacy, dealing specifically with the Kennedy assassination.

The outline carefully identified the characters with the real figures on which they were based: Mexico City station chief Winston Scott, HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi, Antonio Veciana, long-time assassination conspiracists Mark Lane and Bernard Fensterwald, and Phillips himself, who went by the name of Harold Harrison. The novel focused on Harrison's son Don, who begins looking for his father's journal after his father's death. A Mexican woman who attended his father's funeral gives Don a letter written by his father. The letter explains that Harrison had been one of two case officers who recruited Lee Harvey Oswald, helped establish his credentials as a Marxist, and then attempted to send him to Cuba through Mexico City in order to assassinate Fidel Castro, using a sniper rifle from an upper floor of a high-rise to shoot Castro in his jeep. Harrison does not know whether Oswald was a double agent, the letter continues, but this was the same plan Oswald used to kill Kennedy. Allen Dulles, the letter stated, provided Harrison and the other unidentified agent with $400,000 to set up Oswald after he succeeded in assassinating Fidel.

In the novel, Harrison has the last laugh when is son discovers that his father's posthumous letter is a forgery concocted by the Fensterwald character and a KGB agent whom Harrison had repeatedly outwitted during, their spying careers. The real David Phillips might simply have concluded that since so many others had irresponsibly cashed in on the Kennedy assassination, he might as well do the same.

Yet his outline of this novel was the only document I know in existence before 1998 to suggest that Oswald might have been trying to go to Cuba to assassinate Castro. In that year, I wrote a short article to introduce the idea that - as "Leopoldo" suggested to Silvia Odio a few days before or a few days after Oswald's visit to Mexico City - Oswald's first assassination target may well have been the Cuban premier. We will probably never know whether Phillips was drawing on anything more than his imagination, but the plot of his novel, until the spectacular revelation at the end, tracks key events leading up to the Kennedy assassination almost perfectly.

In the novel the Harrison character states: "I was one of those officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald... We gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba... I don't know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the president's assassination, but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt."

In 1995 Gene Wheaton approached the Assassination Records Review Board with information on the death of JFK. Anne Buttimer, Chief Investigator of the ARRB, recorded that: "Wheaton told me that from 1984 to 1987 he spent a lot of time in the Washington DC area and that starting in 1985 he was "recruited into Ollie North's network" by the CIA officer he has information about. He got to know this man and his wife, a "'super grade high level CIA officer" and kept a bedroom in their Virginia home. His friend was a Marine Corps liaison in New Orleans and was the CIA contact with Carlos Marcello. He had been responsible for "running people into Cuba before the Bay of Pigs." His friend is now 68 or 69 years of age... Over the course of a year or a year and one-half his friend told him about his activities with training Cuban insurgency groups. Wheaton said he also got to know many of the Cubans who had been his friend's soldiers/operatives when the Cubans visited in Virginia from their homes in Miami. His friend and the Cubans confirmed to Wheaton they assassinated JFK. Wheaton's friend said he trained the Cubans who pulled the triggers. Wheaton said the street level Cubans felt JFK was a traitor after the Bay of Pigs and wanted to kill him. People "above the Cubans" wanted JFK killed for other reasons." It was later revealed that Wheaton's friend was Carl E. Jenkins. Wheaton also named Irving Davidson as being involved in the assassination.

In an interview with William Law and Mark Sobel in the summer of 2005, Gene Wheaton claimed that Carl E. Jenkins and Rafael Quintero were both involved in the assassination of JFK. Larry Hancock's research has shown that Jenkins (a man who had never previously been identified in any book on the CIA) was indeed involved in training anti-Castro Cubans in 1963.

I contacted Rafael Quintero via his close friend Don Bohning. Quintero refused to be interviewed but he did say that Gene Wheaton was telling the truth as "he knew it". His explanation of Wheaton's story was that he and Carl Jenkins had been lying to him when they said they were involved in the assassination. However, Quintero was once quoted as saying: “If I were ever granted immunity, and compelled to testify about past actions, about Dallas and the Bay of Pigs, it would be the biggest scandal ever to rock the United States.”

Then we have Fabian Escalante's statement at the Cuban Officials and JFK Historians Conference on 7th December, 1995:

Eladio Del Valle worked for two police services - military intelligence and the traditional police. He was in charge of narcotics. He was also a legislature in the government - a representative. He was from a little town from the south of Havana. He was a captain in the merchant marines. In 1958 he was doing business dealings with Santos Trafficante in a little coastal town south of Havana. There he brought in contraband whose destination was Santos Trafficante. When the revolution triumphed, he went to Miami. Eladio Del Valle went to Miami. He settled in Miami, we don't know the address and he allied himself with Rolando Masferrer and other Batista supporters and they formed an organization called the Anti Communist Cuban Liberation Movement. From that moment on, Eladio was involved in many project against Cuba. But as I told you yesterday, we managed to penetrate this organization. And we came to know of a lot of projects, efforts, for an invasion of Cuba in secret. In order to provide arms to internal rebel groups, they needed David Ferrie as the pilot on these flights. In 1962 Eladio Del Valle tried to infiltrate Cuba with a commando group of 22 men but their boat had an English key - a little island. In the middle of 1962. Of course, we knew this. I tell you about this, because one of our agents who was one of the people helping to bring this group to Cuba, was a man of very little education. They talked English on many occasions on this little island with Eladio Del Valle told this person, on many occasions, that Kennedy must be killed to solve the Cuban problem. After that we had another piece of information on Eladio Del Valle. This was offered to us by Tony Cuesta. He told us that Eladio Del Valle was one of the people involved in the assassination plot against Kennedy. As you know, he was taken prisoner and he was very thankful to be taken back - he was blind.

He asked that this information not be public. I am only saying it here, because he is already dead. It is finished. We didn't have any other kind of information to give. There are some things you must respect. He gave us this information and in 1978 we didn't know if it was true or not. In 1978, we were not aware of the participation of Eladio Del Valle. We didn't know who he was. Remember that I explained to you yesterday that when the Select Committee when they came to Havana - they didn't give us any specific information. They just came to question us. We didn't know the relationships.

Dick Russell, who was at this conference with Escalante, wrote about the story in the 2003 edition of The Man Who Knew Too Much:

The most intriguing news to come out of the Nassau conference, however, was Escalante's revelation about what another leader of the Alpha 66 group allegedly told him. As we have seen, Nagell would never reveal the true identities of "Angel" and "Leopoldo" - the two Cuban exiles who he said had deceived Oswald into believing they were Castro operatives. Instead, on several occasions when I prodded him, Nagell had cleverly steered the conversation toward a man named Tony Cuesta - indicating that this individual possessed the knowledge that he himself chose not to express. Cuesta, as noted earlier, had been taken prisoner in Cuba during a raid in 1966.

"Cuesta was blinded (in an explosion) and spent most of his time in the hospital," Escalante recalled. In 1978, he was among a group of imprisoned exiles released through an initiative of the Carter Administration. "A few days before he was to leave," according to Escalante, "I had several conversations with Cuesta. He volunteered, 'I want to tell you something very important, but I do not want this made public because I am returning to my family in Miami - and this could be very dangerous.' I think this was a little bit of thanks on his part for the medical care he received."

Escalante said he was only revealing Cuesta's story because the man had died in Miami in 1994. In a declaration he is said to have written for the Cubans, Cuesta named two other exiles as having been involved in plotting the Kennedy assassination. Their names were Eladio del Valle and Herminio Diaz Garcia.

Shortly before his death in 1975 John Martino confessed to a Miami Newsday reporter, John Cummings, that he had been guilty of spreading false stories implicating Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination. He claimed that two of the gunmen were Cuban exiles. It is believed the two men were Herminio Diaz Garcia and Virgilio Gonzalez. Cummings added: "He told me he'd been part of the assassination of Kennedy. He wasn't in Dallas pulling a trigger, but he was involved. He implied that his role was delivering money, facilitating things.... He asked me not to write it while he was alive."

Fred Claasen also told the House Select Committee on Assassinations what he knew about Martino's involvement in the case. Florence Martino at first refused to corroborate the story. However, in 1994 she told Anthony Summers that her husband said to her on the morning of 22nd November, 1963: "Flo, they're going to kill him (Kennedy). They're going to kill him when he gets to Texas."

Then there is the case of David Morales. This is the passage from Gaeton Fonzi's, The Last Investigation (1993):

It was while sitting in the El Molino one night, that Ruben Carbajal told Bob Dorff and me about the times he and Bob Walton had gone to Washington to meet Morales and about the trip on which they met other high-ranking CIA officials. To obtain more details about those meetings, I suggested we talk to Walton. The next morning, a Saturday, Carbajal called him and Walton agreed to drive down from his home in Scottsdale to meet the three of us at the Holiday Inn.

Walton is in his mid-fifties, a pleasant, ruddy-faced fellow with Irish good looks and an easy, straightforward manner. He remembers their first trip to Washington as being in the spring of 1973. "I had had a coronary in November of 1972 and Rocky and I started talking about getting into business shortly after that. When you're from a dry climate like Arizona and you go back there in the summer you're just sweating like a pig. But I don't remember being uncomfortable, so I think it was early in the spring of 1973."

Walton corroborates the reason for the trip and the meeting with Morales: "We felt, or at least Rocky felt, that he could give us an inside track on who were the people who were for real and who were not. That was a big concern of mine because I had already been on one wild goose chase, spent an expensive week in Nassau waiting for a transaction to close and it never did."

Their evening with Morales, Walton remembers, was both very pleasant and, in more than one way, especially memorable. "We all went out for dinner, which was very nice. It was Rocky and his wife, me and my wife and Rocky's mother and father."

Morales, not someone who trusted strangers or even associates easily, obviously was impressed by Walton's character and, although their commodities business never took hold, he later called on Walton to represent him on a few matters back in Phoenix. It was something Morales said at one of those subsequent encounters in Phoenix that makes Walton put what had happened in Washington in a very special perspective.

"Morales was building a big, new house out near Willcox," Walton says. "Actually, it was in a little town called El Frita, which is about half-way between Willcox and the Mexican border. It's a remote area, I've only driven that road once in my life. It's an agricultural area, they grow the famous jalapenos peppers there. I never got to see the house, but he had just finished it and was describing it to me when he mentioned that he put in it the best security system in the United States. And I remember asking him, thinking he was worried about burglars or being robbed, 'What do you need so much security for? You're still thirty miles from the Mexican border.' And he said, 'I'm not worried about those people, I'm worried about my own.' "

That struck Walton as curious. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"I know too much," Morales said, then quickly dropped it.

Remembering that now, Walton views his first meeting with Morales in Washington as being far more significant than he realized. After dinner, the whole party went back to the Dupont Plaza Hotel. It was late and Carbajal's parents and his wife returned to their rooms and Ruben and Morales returned to the Waltons' room with them. "Didi ended up staying all night," Walton recalls. "My wife went to sleep somewhere around two in the morning and Rocky and I and Didi drank and talked from when we got back from dinner - maybe that was about eleven o'clock at night - until about six in the morning. "

The drinking got heavy. "We had consumed quite a bit of alcohol," remembers Walton. "At one point, between the three of us we had gone through a fifth of Scotch and we had to re-order. It was a real contest." He pauses and smiles. "Ah, my younger days, my misspent youth!" And as the night and the drinking go on, defenses come down and candid truths emerge. "You know," says Walton, "you get in a kind of position where you say, 'All right, I told you everything about me, what are you all about?' "

Morales began with his war stories. Walton remembers him talking about the killing in Vietnam and Laos, about being involved in the capture of Che Guevara in Bolivia, of hits in Paraguay and Uruguay and Venezuela. ("He said his wife was [in the country] with him and they had real trouble getting him out of town. They almost bought the farm on that one.")

The drinking and the talking continued. At one point, Morales began probing Walton for a bit of his own background. Walton had gone to Amherst College in Massachusetts and, as part of his developing interest in political science and politics, he had done some volunteer work for Jack Kennedy's Senatorial campaign. Later, at Harvard Law, Walton was head of a student group which invited then Senator Kennedy to speak at Cambridge.

Walton never got to explain the details of that association. At the first mention of Kennedy's name, he recalls, Morales literally almost hit the ceiling.

"He flew off the bed on that one," says Walton. "I remember he was lying down and he jumped up screaming, 'That no good son of a bitch motherf*****!' He started yelling about what a wimp Kennedy was and talking about how he had worked on the Bay of Pigs and how he had to watch all the men he had recruited and trained get wiped out because of Kennedy."

Walton says Morales's tirade about Kennedy, fueled by righteous anger and high-proof booze, went on for minutes while he stomped around the room. Suddenly he stopped, sat back down on the bed and remained silent for a moment. Then, as if saying it only to himself, he added:

"Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn't we?"

I looked at Ruben Carbajal, who had remained silent while Walton was telling me this. Carbajal looked at me and nodded his head. Yes, he was there, it was true. But, in all the long hours we had spent together and all the candid revelations he had provided, it was a remembrance he couldn't bring himself to tell me about his friend Didi.

All these sources suggest a combined CIA and Anti-Castro Cuban plot. Jeff Morley's new book about Win Scott shows that senior figures in the CIA, including Richard Helms, James Jesus Angleton and David Atlee Phillips, were deeply involved in covering-up the the story of Oswald's time in Mexico City.

[John Simkin]

In my opinion the Bobby Baker Scandal is vitally important in understanding the corruption of American political life. It also helps to explain the JFK assassination. Joachim Joesten, an investigative journalist, wrote in 1964: "The Baker scandal then is truly the hidden key to the assassination, or more exact, the timing of the Baker affair crystallized the more or less vague plans to eliminate Kennedy which had already been in existence the threat of complete exposure which faced Johnson in the Baker scandal provided that final impulse he was forced to give the go-ahead signal to the plotters who had long been waiting for the right opportunity."

Yet, if you do a search on the web at Google, the first website you get to is the one produced by Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Baker

Considering the importance of the case, it is a very poor explanation of the scandal. Especially the role played by LBJ in the scandal. Especially the award of a $7 billion contract for a fighter plane, the F-111, to General Dynamics, a company based in Texas. The testimony from Don B. Reynolds concerning the KTBC, Johnson's television station in Austin, is also missing.

Most of what is there has been taken from my web page on Baker, including the story about Baker's secretary, Nancy Carole Tyler, sharing an apartment with Mary Jo Kopechne. It is interesting to see what the editor at Wikipedia has decided to leave out.

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