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John Simkin
QUOTE (Ron Ecker @ Jan 6 2005, 07:48 PM)
Were you aware that at the time of the assassination, Cliff Carter’s brother, General Marshall S. Carter, was deputy director of the CIA?
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I knew about both men but did not know they were brothers.

Here are pictures of Cliff and Marshall Carter.
William Reymond
QUOTE (John Simkin @ Jan 6 2005, 10:59 PM)
QUOTE (Ron Ecker @ Jan 6 2005, 07:48 PM)
Were you aware that at the time of the assassination, Cliff Carter’s brother, General Marshall S. Carter, was deputy director of the CIA?
*


I knew about both men but did not know they were brothers.

Here are pictures of Cliff and Marshall Carter.
*




If i'm right, Marshall and Cliff were not relatives.
Tim Gratz
QUOTE (William Reymond @ Jan 7 2005, 04:33 AM)
QUOTE (John Simkin @ Jan 6 2005, 10:59 PM)
QUOTE (Ron Ecker @ Jan 6 2005, 07:48 PM)
Were you aware that at the time of the assassination, Cliff Carter’s brother, General Marshall S. Carter, was deputy director of the CIA?
*


I knew about both men but did not know they were brothers.

Here are pictures of Cliff and Marshall Carter.
*




If i'm right, Marshall and Cliff were not relatives.
*



This probably should be easy to check. I suspect they each have on-line bios that list their place of birth and probably their parents.
Ron Ecker
According to the Mary Ferrell database, General Marshall Sylvester Carter was the “brother of Clifton C. Carter.” Cliff Carter is also referred to in the Warren Report as Clifton C. Carter (pp. 47, 52, 57), and in the online Arlington obituary of General Carter’s father, the father’s other son is referred to as Clifton Coleman Carter.

Here's an interesting tidbit I've found on General Carter. William Pawley called him when he wanted CIA help for the Bayo-Pawley mission. General Carter told him that the CIA could not help directly, but that he would try to find him three good men. The men who reported for duty were Rip Robertson and two others. (Deadly Secrets, pp. 192-193)

Ron
Tim Gratz
QUOTE (Ron Ecker @ Jan 7 2005, 09:04 AM)
According to the Mary Ferrell database, General Marshall Sylvester Carter was the “brother of Clifton C. Carter.” Cliff Carter is also referred to in the Warren Report as Clifton C. Carter (pp. 47, 52, 57), and in the online Arlington obituary of General Carter’s father, the father’s other son is referred to as Clifton Coleman Carter.

Here's an interesting tidbit I've found on General Carter. William Pawley called him when he wanted CIA help for the Bayo-Pawley mission. General Carter told him that the CIA could not help directly, but that he would try to find him three good men. The men who reported for duty were Rip Robertson and two others. (Deadly Secrets, pp. 192-193)

Ron
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The Arlington on-line obituary seems convincing to me that they were brothers.
William Reymond
QUOTE (Tim Gratz @ Jan 7 2005, 10:24 AM)
QUOTE (Ron Ecker @ Jan 7 2005, 09:04 AM)
According to the Mary Ferrell database, General Marshall Sylvester Carter was the “brother of Clifton C. Carter.” Cliff Carter is also referred to in the Warren Report as Clifton C. Carter (pp. 47, 52, 57), and in the online Arlington obituary of General Carter’s father, the father’s other son is referred to as Clifton Coleman Carter.

Here's an interesting tidbit I've found on General Carter. William Pawley called him when he wanted CIA help for the Bayo-Pawley mission. General Carter told him that the CIA could not help directly, but that he would try to find him three good men. The men who reported for duty were Rip Robertson and two others. (Deadly Secrets, pp. 192-193)

Ron
*


The Arlington on-line obituary seems convincing to me that they were brothers.
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They were. I mean Clifton Coleman Carter and Marshall Sylvester Carter were brothers. But LBJ's aide was Clifton Crawford Carter. Clifton Coleman Carter did graduate from West Point in 1926. Cliff Carter was born in Texas in 1918 and he never been to West Point.
James Richards
William is right, LBJ aide Cliff Carter and Marshall Carter are not related.

FWIW.

James
Ron Ecker
William and James,

Thanks for clearing this up. I'm surprised to see Ferrell and Palamara both make this mistake. I wonder if Palamara got his info from Ferrell or what.

I'm also surprised to find that LBJ's Cliff Carter is such a biographical non-person on the internet. I've looked in vain for a biography, and I looked in vain for what the middle C stood for. I figured it had to be Coleman, based on Ferrell's and Palamara's wrong info.

Ron

Correction: I did find John's biography of Carter, but there's actually little about Carter outside of the Estes case. I got the impression that John was also able to find out little about Carter the person. (I was looking in particular for his middle name and something on what I was sure was his kinship to General Carter. Turns out there was no such kinship.)
John Simkin
QUOTE (Ron Ecker @ Jan 7 2005, 11:55 PM)
I'm also surprised to find that LBJ's Cliff Carter is such a biographical non-person on the internet. I've looked in vain for a biography, and I looked in vain for what the middle C stood for. I figured it had to be Coleman, based on Ferrell's and Palamara's wrong info.

Correction: I did find John's biography of Carter, but there's actually little about Carter outside of the Estes case. I got the impression that John was also able to find out little about Carter the person. (I was looking in particular for his middle name and something on what I was sure was his kinship to General Carter. Turns out there was no such kinship.)
*


You are right, there are few references to Cliff Carter on the internet. I have not helped matters by forgetting to add Carter’s name to my JFK index page. This creates problems for most search-engines.

I have had great difficulty finding information on Carter. However, after you reminded me about the defects of my biography, I decided to do a bit more research into him. Amazingly, there is only one reference to Carter in Robert Caro’s massive biography of LBJ (over 2,000 pages in two volumes). The one reference though is very interesting. It points out that Carter, along with Bobby Baker, Edward A. Clark and Walter Jenkins, were responsible for collecting money from the Suite 8F Group and other lobbyists in Texas and taking it to Johnson in Washington.

Most other biographies of LBJ also make no references to Carter. It is also significant that in his book Wheeling and Dealing, Bobby Baker, despite their close relationship, only mentions him once. Alfred Steinberg (Sam Johnson's Boy) is one of his few biographers who does mention Carter. He claims that LBJ used him to smear political rivals such as Ralph Yarborough.

Carl Curtis, the senator who carried out a long investigation into LBJ’s corrupt activities does mention him in his book, Forty Years Against the Tide. He states that during his research he discovered that Carter knew a great deal about LBJ’s confidential affairs. However, Carter was unwilling to talk. Curtis was keen for Carter to be indicted in the case of Henry Marshall. He thought that if this had happened, Carter would have plea-bargained and that all would have been revealed.

As you have already said, Carter is closely linked to the Billie Sol Estes case. Barr McClellan covers this in some detail in Blood, Money and Power. However, recent books on the Suite 8F Group such as Cronies and the Halliburton Agenda do not mention him.

There is one interesting references to Carter in a little well known book on LBJ (The Accidental President by Robert Sherrill). He claims that Carter had close links with Matthew H. McClosky. I have been interested in McClosky for some time. He was the man that Baker was accused of getting a £12,700,000 construction contract in 1961. The reason I am interested in McClosky is that he was a member of JFK’s Irish Mafia. McClosky, like Grant Stockdale, was one of the main figures involved in raising money for JFK’s 1960 campaign. McClosky was in fact Democratic National Treasurer in 1960. McClosky replaced Stockdale as US Ambassador to Ireland in 1962. This was the same time that Baker and McClosky were being investigated for corruption.

The point I am trying to make is that Baker appeared to be working for JFK as well as LBJ. Carter and Walter Jenkins (another interesting character who I will return to later) appear to be the link people in this. I think this explains why RFK decided to pull back over the investigation of Baker. It also helps to explain RFK’s response to the assassination of JFK.
Tim Gratz
Excellent research, John!

As they say, the plot thickens!
James Richards
Given the discussion on Cliff Carter, I post the following image purely as a curiosity. It is a rarely published photograph taken just before the swearing in ceremony on AirForce One and before Jackie Kennedy's arrival. I would love to have been a fly on the wall.

Left to right, Judge Sarah T. Hughes, LBJ, Evelyn Lincoln (background), Homer Thornberry, Jack Brooks (arms folded), Cliff Carter and Bill Moyers.

James
Ron Ecker
James,

Do you know who the uniformed military man is, shown between Hughes and Johnson? Air Force aide Godfrey McHugh made a big deal about staying with the casket.

Ron
James Richards
Do you know who the uniformed military man is, shown between Hughes and Johnson? (Ron Ecker)

Hi Ron,

That would be General Clifton.

Image below shows Clifton, Jesse Curry, Lady Bird and LBJ.

James
John Simkin
Here are a couple on interviews that Robert Kennedy gave about the LBJ scandals. Both appeared in Robert Kennedy: His Own Words (1988).

(1) Kennedy was interviewed by John Martlow Martin in April 1964.

John Martlow Martin: The Bobby Baker case broke in November. Do you want to go into the Bobby Baker case?

Robert Kennedy: I can go into it. I really didn't follow it particularly or get into it very much. The newspapers had a number of articles, The Washington Post particularly. I had always heard stories about Bobby Baker, about all his money and free use of money. My relationship with him always had been reasonably friendly, although I didn't have much to do with him. Even though he was opposed to President Kennedy - he was working for Lyndon Johnson - he was always quite reasonable about it. He certainly didn't create any bitterness on our part. So I was reasonably friendly toward him. Our first involvement in it came, I suppose, in a conversation I had with Ben Bradlee (then the Washington Bureau Chief of Newsweek), who had some information. I can't remember exactly what it was, but they printed it in Newsweek. He asked me if we would look into it, and I said we would look into it.

Subsequently, there were a lot of stories that my brother and I were interested in dumping Lyndon Johnson and that I'd started the Bobby Baker case in order to give us a handle to dump Lyndon Johnson. Well, number one, there was no plan to dump Lyndon Johnson. That didn't make any sense. Number two, I hadn't gotten really involved in the Bobby Baker case until after a good number of newspaper stories had appeared about it. There really wasn't any choice but to look into some of the allegations, which were allegations of violations of law. Some weeks after that, I called (Baker) - I suppose sometime in November - and said that I just wanted to assure him that he'd get a fair shake. If there were any problem, he could send his lawyer to the Department of Justice and he would be fairly treated. Abe Fortas was his lawyer. There were a lot of stories then, after November 22, that the Bobby Baker case was really stimulated by me and that this was part of my plan to get something on Johnson. That wasn't correct.

(2) Robert Kennedy was interviewed by Anthony Lewis in December 1964.

Anthony Lewis: Speaking of Mr. Hoover, did you ever have the feeling, in dealing with Mr. Hoover, that he knew a very great deal about you personally? I mean, did he ever make this evident? This is, at least by way of story, of legend, something he's supposed to do?

Robert Kennedy: I suppose every month or so he'd send somebody around to give information- on somebody I knew or a member of my family or allegations in connection with myself. So that it would be clear whether it was right or wrong-that he was on top of all of these things and received all of this information. He would do this also, I think, to find out what my reaction to it would be.

Anthony Lewis: What do you mean by that?

Robert Kennedy: I suppose that, if there were an allegation regarding a friend or something, whether I would ask to have it investigated. If it were an allegation regarding me, what I would do. I remember on one occasion that he said that my brother and I had a group of girls on the twelfth floor-he didn't say it; but Senators, somebody-a group of girls on the twelfth floor of the LaSalle Hotel and that, I think, the President used to go over there once a week and have the place surrounded by Secret Service people, and then go up and have assignations on the twelfth floor of the LaSalle. I suppose the idea was whether you'd have it investigated or what you'd do about it.

Anthony Lewis: Did you ever do anything?

Robert Kennedy: Yes, I always used to have them go over and find out what was going on, on the twelfth floor or whatever it might be. There was something else going on in the Georgetown Inn or something. A lot of it was so far-fetched that, even on the face of it, it didn't make any sense. I mean, if you were going to do that kind of thing, you wouldn't go on over to the LaSalle Hotel with the Secret Service surrounding the place. It was ridiculous on the face of it. But I think that the idea was just so that you would know that they (the FBI) were continuously getting this information.

Then, people that you knew: a report that somebody had been out drinking or something; you know, so-and-so's father is a member of the Communist party; or so-and-so's brother was picked up for strange activities or something like that. You'd have that kind of information so that it was quite clear that all of this kind of information was available to him and to the FBI. At the time of the Bobby Baker case and that German girl who was deported.

Anthony Lewis: Ellie Rometsch.

Robert Kennedy: Ellie Rometsch. Clark Mollenhoff wrote an article that she had been tied up with people at the White House, which was, in fact, incorrect. But in doing that I had looked into the files, what she had said-and she had been tied up with a lot of people at the Capitol!

Anthony Lewis: You looked into the FBI files?

Robert Kennedy: I got all the information she had. It was found out that she was associated with a number of other girls, all of whom had run operations up on Capitol Hill. This is a little bit off the point, but it's rather an interesting sidelight. In any case, I put together the information regarding all the girls and then the members of Congress and the Senate who had been associated with the girls-and it got to be large numbers on both ways.

Anthony Lewis: "Both ways" meaning girls and Congressmen?

Robert Kennedy: Yes. Also, all political parties.

Anthony Lewis: Oh, yes?

Robert Kennedy: They (the FBI) were started down that road at that time. I went to see the President, and I said that I thought that it was very damaging to the reputation of the United States. I spoke to the President about it-and it didn't involve anybody at the White House-but I thought that it would just destroy the confidence that people in the United States had in their government and really make us a laughingstock around the world. I suggested that maybe Hoover should meet with (Senate Majority Leader) Mike Mansfield and (Senate Minority Leader) Everett Dirksen and explain what was in the files and what information they had. So that was arranged at Mike Mansfield's apartment one noon for lunch. I guess it was a shock to both of them.

Anthony Lewis: Were you present?

Robert Kennedy: No. The President talked to them afterwards. From then on, there was less attention, up until the last week, on that aspect of the investigation. Some of the Senators had Negro girlfriends and all kinds of things which were not very helpful.

Anthony Lewis: You were convinced of the accuracy of the stuff?

Robert Kennedy: Well, a lot of that stuff, a lot of that material was accurate. Some of it wasn't accurate. Some of the girls just obviously told lies about it, which was brought out. Some of it I had to look into further to determine the truth or the falsehood of it. And some of it was all lies. But in any case, going back to your point, he has all of that information and that material. But we had it under control. At that time we weren't using it for any purpose. I would say the idea, really, now, is that you can use that information and that material.

Anthony Lewis: Why?

Robert Kennedy: I saw it during the time of the Walter Jenkins case. Lyndon Johnson was up here during the Walter Jenkins case, and I talked to him about the case. His response on the Walter Jenkins thing was to try to develop information on Republican Senators and to develop information regarding Barry Goldwater ... being involved in something-that Barry Goldwater was closely identified with Walter Jenkins. He gave me some information about certain Senators and Congressmen that [he thought] he should bring out, and I knew it had come from the FBI because it was the same material that I had had a year or fourteen months ago. I said that I didn't think that he should do that. My advice to him at that time was that he should answer Walter Jenkins by talking about foreign policy, that he should have a meeting of the National Security Council, that he should go on television and talk about the explosion in China-and not try to answer these things. He had prepared a statement that he was going to give-which he showed me in the car driving out-which hit, sort of indirectly, at Barry Goldwater because Barry Goldwater knew Walter Jenkins.

Anthony Lewis: He was his commanding officer.

Robert Kennedy: Yes. That was all going to be done on that basis. Every time I have any conversation in which there's any attack on Bobby Baker, the response always is: "We should bring this out about such-and-such a Senator." The night before he was up here, he told me, he had , spent all night sitting up and reading the files of the FBI on all of these people. And Lyndon talks about that information and material so freely.

Anthony Lewis: You think it's bound to?

Robert Kennedy: It's going to get out. Bob McNamara, who's having his problems with him now, is convinced that he tried to put a tap on his telephone because he's opposed to him.

Anthony Lewis: You mean because the President thinks McNamara is opposed to him?

Robert Kennedy: No, because Hoover feels that McNamara is opposed to him.

Anthony Lewis: That Hoover put the tap on?

Robert Kennedy: Hoover. To get information, because he thinks that there's a conspiracy by McNamara and me to get rid of Hoover.
John Simkin
Until yesterday I had not come across anyone who agrees with the idea that LBJ was blackmailed into passing the Civil Rights Act. However, last night I was reading Deborah Davis’ book, ‘Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post’. (1) The book is about the role the Washington Post played in Operation Mockingbird and does not cover the assassination of JFK.

Davis appears to be well informed about these events. Although she rarely reveals her sources. Davis worked for Ramparts when it became a target of Operation Mockingbird. At the end of 1966 Desmond FitzGerald, head of the Directorate for Plans, was informed that Ramparts, a left-wing publication, had discovered that the CIA had been secretly funding the National Student Association. FitzGerald ordered Edgar Applewhite to organize a campaign against the magazine. Applewhite later told Evan Thomas for his book, The Very Best Men: "I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing. The people running Ramparts were vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried off." (2)

This dirty tricks campaign failed to stop Ramparts publishing this story in February, 1967. As well as reporting CIA funding of the National Student Association it exposed the whole system of anti-communist front organizations in Europe, Asia, and South America was essentially blown.

In her book Davis briefly covers LBJ’s reasons for advocating the 1965 Civil Rights Act. She believes the pressure (she does not use the word blackmail) came from the CIA and the FBI. Davis argues that the CIA main preoccupation was to prevent the spread of communism. The CIA (and the FBI) were aware that “dangerous kinds of radicals” were playing an important role in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements.

According to Davis “Communists were working in American to try to create chaos, a belief that Katharine shared not only with the president, but with the directors of the FBI and the CIA, army intelligence and navy intelligence, all of whom a few years later blamed the Soviets for the rise of Black Power” (3)

The Military Industrial Congressional Complex (MICC) could not compromise over the Vietnam War. However, it could undermine the work being done by communists working via the Civil Rights movement. In doing so, the MICC (as reflected in the Suite 8F Group) switched its support from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. The alliance between the Northern liberals and Southern racists had been destroyed. The 1965 Civil Rights Act made no difference at all to the MICC’s financial objectives.

I think this also helps to explain the assassinations of Malcolm X (4) and Martin Luther King (5). You need to look very closely at the political direction they were taking at the time they were murdered.

In the early 1960s. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King offered two very different approaches to the civil rights issue. This resulted in a divided movement. This would have given great pleasure to those opposed to racial equality. However, in March, 1964, Malcolm X made a pilgrimage to Mecca. On his return, he began to change his views on the subject. In the weeks preceding his murder, he rejected his former separatist beliefs and advocated world brotherhood. Malcolm now blamed racism on Western culture and urged African Americans to join with sympathetic whites to bring it to an end. If Malcolm X had lived he had the potential to unite those who wished to change American society.

After the passing of the 1965 Civil Rights Act Martin Luther King became increasingly involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement. He also got involved in trade union struggles. J. Edgar Hoover was now convinced that King was a communist agent.

In March 1968, James Lawson asked King to visit Memphis, Tennessee, to support of a strike by the city's sanitation workers. On 3rd April, King made his famous I've Been to the Mountaintop speech. The following day, King was killed by a sniper's bullet while standing on the balcony of the motel where he was staying.

After the death of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy the left fragmented. The Military Industrial Congressional Complex was back in full control. Today, with George Bush in the White House, the MICC must feel it is invincible. After all, who would have thought it would have survived the fall of communism in the late 1980s? It did so by creating another threat. The fear of international terrorism.

Notes

1. Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post (1979)

2. Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA (1995) page 330

3. Deborah Davis (pages 237-238)

4. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAmalcolmX.htm

5. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAkingML.htm
Adam Wilkinson
John and others, if you have not already, I suggest you read a book called The Texas Connection: the assassination of John F. Kennedy by Craig I. Zirbel, an excellent read with some intriguing information.
Tim Gratz
Adam, for your information, John has read it and did not particularly care for it. I found it interesting, however.
John Simkin
You will find some extra information on this at:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=565
Robert Howard
QUOTE (John Simkin @ Nov 24 2004, 10:52 AM) *
QUOTE (James Richards @ Nov 23 2004, 08:54 PM)
Meet Malcolm Wallace.
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I knew you would not let me down. The one I uploaded is only a photocopy of Wallace and appears in all the books. These are new to me. Where do they come from?

I just had to share this photograph, after looking at it I thought about the old adage "A picture is worth a thousand words, I mean is it just me or are there not some intruiging glances being exchanged in this photo? I guess this post is a little self-indulgent, but I couldn't resist.
Bruce Campbell Adams
Was LBJ set up as a Patsy? Whoever suggested such a thing is directing the public in the opposite way of the truth. LBJ was friends with George H.W. Bush and George de Mohrenschildt.

Can anyone explain why LBJ and de Mohrenschildt are writing to one another a week after the Walker Shooting?

Can Mr. Simkin explain why LBJ and de Mohrenschildt are meeting in April and May of 1963?

If he can then I will listen.

Bruce Campbell Adamson tomatoes.gif
Tim Carroll
QUOTE (Bruce Campbell Adams @ Nov 20 2005, 12:26 PM) *
Can anyone explain why LBJ and de Mohrenschildt are writing to one another a week after the Walker Shooting? Can Mr. Simkin explain why LBJ and de Mohrenschildt are meeting in April and May of 1963?

Can Mr. Adams provide proof that LBJ and deMorenschildt met and/or corresponded in the spring of '63?

T.C.
Tim Gratz
I notice Tim is still waiting for his answer!
John Simkin
QUOTE (Nathaniel Heidenheimer @ Dec 22 2005, 12:47 AM) *
The words he used -- again I could be wrong, because he didn't go into detail-- suggest that he might be buying the line about the WC going along with the lone nut in order to flush the far right "communists did it " argument from public perception, thereby preventing a possible nuclear war. I personnaly see this argument-- which was also offered by Michael Bechloss, the acceptable liberal historian on PBS-- to be a planned patch in the cover up quilt: the conspirators knew that by playing up the threat of nuclear war they could get many different parts of the political spectrum involved in the cover up. Most of these, of course were not involved in the assasination itself.


I agree. This was the only excuse that LBJ could come up with after he decided not to go along with the Castro did it theory being pushed by the FBI and the CIA. It is complete nonsense of course. There was no way that the Soviets would have launched a nuclear war if the US invaded Cuba. It is for the same reason that the US did not launch a nuclear attack when the Red Army marched into Hungary in 1956. It was all to do with sphere of interest policy. It this policy was not kept, the Cold War would have quickly become a Hot War (and I mean hot). This provides the key clue to why LBJ launched a cover-up. It makes no sense at all unless you consider what might have happened following an invasion of Cuba.

The whole world would have demanded to see the evidence for the charge that Castro organized the assassination of JFK. The only evidence for this was evidence manufactured by the FBI and the CIA. Anyone with any political understanding of the Cold War knew that it was not in the political interests of Castro to kill JFK. Questions would have been asked about LBJ’s willingness to believe this story. Was he in someway involved in the assassination? Why was it important that he became president in November, 1963? People would have begun to look closely at the Bobby Baker scandal that had been emerging at that time. Don B. Reynolds testimony about LBJ and the General Dynamics TFX contract, given in a closed session of the Senate Rules Committee on the day of the assassination would have become public. Even if LBJ was not guilty of organizing the assassination, most people would have believed this was the case.

LBJ was a shrewd politician who always kept risks to the minimum. His safest course was to force Hoover and McCone to come up with the lone gunman theory. Then it would be case-closed and he would then be in a position to use his power to cover-up the Bobby Baker scandal. The clue to this concerns the first person they had to kill after the assassination. E. Grant Stockdale on 2nd December, 1963.
John Simkin
This article is well woth reading.

http://www.acorn.net/jfkplace/03/JA/DR/.dr14.html

Yellow Roses by Dave Reitzes

Malcolm E. "Mac" Wallace came to Washington to work for Senator Lyndon B.
Johnson before being appointed as an economist to the Department of
Agriculture. Wallace was the convicted murderer of John Douglas Kinser, a
professional golfer then dating Senator Lyndon B. Johnson's sister,
Josefa Johnson. The murder had taken place on October 22, 1951. Wallace
shot Doug Kinser five times with a .25 caliber automatic handgun. When
the case came to trial in the 98th District Court of Travis County before
Judge Charles O. Betts, Wallace was represented by Lyndon Baines
Johnson's longtime personal lawyer, John Cofer. On March 27, 1952,
Wallace was convicted of "murder with malice aforethought" -- murder in
the first degree -- for which he received a five year suspended sentence.
He walked away essentially a free man (J. Evetts Haley, *A Texan Looks at
Lyndon,* 107-8).

In 1961, State Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation official Henry
Marshall was investigating a broad series of fraudulent government
subsidies -- amounting to figures in the seven or eight digit range --
allotted to Billie Sol Estes, a close personal friend of Senate Majority
Leader then Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson. Marshall had uncovered a
paper trail that was leading him closer and closer to Johnson himself.

On June 3, 1961, Mac Wallace knocked Henry Marshall unconscious with a
blunt object, fed the unconscious man carbon monoxide from a hose
attached to Wallace's pick-up truck, then shot him five times with a
bolt-action .22 caliber rifle and dumped him in a remote corner of
Marshall's farm near Franklin, Texas. Justice of the Peace Lee Farmer
pronounced the death a suicide and ordered Marshall buried without an
autopsy -- over the protests of Marshall's widow. The verdict remained
unchanged until 1984, when Billie Sol Estes, under a grant of immunity,
told a grand jury that Wallace had been Marshall's killer, and that the
order came from Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson through White House aide
Cliff Carter. Based on Estes' testimony and supporting evidence, the
grand jury changed the earlier ruling of suicide to murder. Mac Wallace
could not be indicted; he died in an automobile accident in Pittsburgh,
Texas, on January 7, 1971.

On December 25, 1961, LBJ's sister, Josefa Johnson, was found dead in bed
at her Fredericksburg, Texas home at 3:15 am. The cause of death was
stated to be a brain hemorrhage. Josefa Johnson had returned home at
11:45 pm from a Christmas party at Lyndon Johnson's ranch. There was no
autopsy and no inquest; the death certificate was executed by a doctor
who was not present to examine the deceased. Ms. Johnson was embalmed on
Christmas Day and buried on December 26th (Walt Brown, "The Sordid Story
of Mac Wallace," *JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly,* July 1998).

A Pecos doctor, John Dunn, picked up Henry Marshall's investigation.
Despite filing his report on Johnson and Estes with numerous law
enforcement agencies and US congressmen and senators, Dunn could not
convince a single press outlet to report his findings, and no one in
Washington would take any action. Out of desperation, Dunn and an
associate bought their own newspaper, the Pecos Independent and
Enterprise, and began running the Johnson-Estes stories on February 12,
1962. A month later, Billie Sol Estes was in jail; he would receive a
light sentence with the help of Johnson's ever-helpful John Cofer. The
Senate Investigations Subcommittee chaired by John McClellan conducted a
brief and superficial series of hearings that swiftly exonerated Johnson
of wrongdoing without any substantial investigation. Dr. John Dunn was
soon disbarred from practicing medicine and charged with malpractice and
claims that he had taken advantage of a patient, a young black woman, all
of which Dunn vigorously denied (Haley, 119-24).

"On the night of April 4, 1962, at the western end of Texas, a ranchman
came upon the body of George Krutilek in the sandhills near the town of
Clint, slumped in his car with a hose from his exhaust stuck in the
window. He had been dead for several days, and the El Paso County
pathologist, Dr. Frederick Bornstein , held that he certainly did not die
from carbon monoxide poisoning (San Angelo *Standard Times,* April 5,
1962; Haley, 137).

"Krutilek was a forty-nine-year old certified public accountant who had
undergone secret grilling by FBI agents on April 2, the day after Billie
Sol Estes' arrest. . . . Krutilek had worked for Estes and had been the
recipient of his favors, but he was never seen or heard of again after
the FBI grilling until his badly decomposed body was found" (Haley, 137).

Harold Eugene Orr was the president of the Superior Manufacturing Company
of Amarillo, Texas when he was indicted for his role in Estes' fraudulent
enterprises, and sentenced to a ten-year prison term. On February 28,
1964, just before Orr was to begin his prison term, he was found dead of
carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage. It was ruled an accidental
death. A few weeks later, Howard Pratt, the Chicago office manager of
Commercial Solvents, a supplier of farm products for Billie Sol Estes,
was also found dead in his car, a victim of carbon monoxide poisoning.
This strange series of carbon monoxide deaths was discussed in an
Amarillo *Globe-Times* article of March 26, 1964, by reporter Clyde
Walters (Haley, 137-38).

Coleman Wade was a building contractor out of Altus, Oklahoma, who had
contracted with Billie Sol Estes for many of Estes' storage facilities.
In early 1963, Wade was flying home from Pecos, Texas, in his private
plane when the craft went down in the area of Kermit, Texas, its
occupants instantly killed. "Government investigators swept in and
instead of expeditiously cleaning up the wreckage in their routine way,
kept the area roped off for days" (Haley, 141).

When Lyndon Johnson's friend, Mayor Tom Miller of Austin, died, Johnson
flew down for the funeral. During his return flight, he made an
unscheduled stop in Midland, Texas, where Billie Sol Estes and an
unidentified lawyer were quietly escorted on board. The men met for an
hour while the plane was guarded by Secret Service men. When reports of
this secret meeting leaked out from eyewitnesses, an investigator tried
to obtain the flight records for the Midland airport. He found the
records were sealed by government order (Haley, 147).

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 testimony
regarding 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:


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 orally compiled a list of 17 murders which had been committed,
some of which Mr. Estes was unfamiliar [sic]. 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 that Mac Wallace was 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 above 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' O'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. The 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.

Lyndon's scandalous wheeling and dealing with Bobby Baker 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.

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."




Nov. 8, 1963

Dear Mr. Hunt,

I would like information concerding [sic] my position.

I am asking only for information. I am suggesting that we discuss the
matter fully before any steps are taken by me or anyone else.
Thank You,
Lee Harvy [sic]
Oswald*
Tim Gratz
John, as you know the supposed LHO letter to Hunt has long ago been exposed as a forgery. I also do not believe it came from Currington.

Otherwise a lot of meat in the article.
Mark Stapleton
John,

Very interesting article. The more information that comes to light about LBJ, the worse he looks. There's more than one skeleton in his closet. It's looking more like an entire cemetary.

It appears that he had a unique talent for surrounding himself with very powerful people and the whole LBJ group--Texas oil men, corrupt officials, media allies, business leaders--acted with a unity of purpose which intimidated others into acceptance and acquiescence. It was quite a bizarre period in American political history, IMO.

If Curington's story is true, there's no doubt Hunt strongly influenced Ruby to murder LHO. If so, Hunt's role in the assassination seems a stronger possibility, although the actual assassination and the silencing of individuals with dangerous knowledge might have been two entirely separate operations. Just speculating.
Robin Ramsay
QUOTE (John Simkin @ Jul 23 2008, 12:39 PM) *
(1) On page 86 of your book, Politics and Paranoia, you point out: “The Kennedy assassination was the lens through which I, along with other people, first began to study American politics.” What do you mean by this statement?


I mean that having got interested in the assassination literature - in my case circa 1976 - I found myself following other trails which led off from the assassination: the cold war; Cuba; the CIA; Cointelpro etc. Without the interest in Dallas I might never have gone down these roads. Also I mean that stumbling into what became known as parapolitics – exemplified by Peter Dale Scott – influenced the way I then looked at American and British politics and, eventually, history. Whoever one choses as the assassination group on Dealey Plaza, that event was the climax of a great many elements within American cold war history and specifically Democratic Party politics. And the subsequent failure of the political-media system to do a half-decent investigation of the event said a great deal about the nature of political power in America.

QUOTE (John Simkin @ Jul 23 2008, 12:39 PM) *
(2) The date of your article on the JFK assassination is 1994. A lot of research has been carried out since then. What are your current views on the subject?


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.
John Simkin
QUOTE (Robin Ramsay @ Jul 24 2008, 07:07 AM) *
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.
Robin Ramsay
QUOTE (John Simkin @ Jul 26 2008, 07:41 AM) *
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?
John Simkin
QUOTE (Robin Ramsay @ Jul 28 2008, 07:16 AM) *
QUOTE (John Simkin @ Jul 26 2008, 07:41 AM) *
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
Great YouTube video on LBJ by Mack Royal:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlCvs-l_oBk
John Simkin
Several YouTube videos of LBJ here:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAjohnsonLB.htm
John Simkin


In 1963 Johnson got drawn into political scandals involving Fred Korth, Billie Sol Estes and Bobby Baker. According to James Wagenvoord, the editorial business manager and assistant to Life Magazines Executive Editor, the magazine was working on an article that would have revealed Johnson's corrupt activities. "Beginning in later summer 1963 the magazine, based upon information fed from Bobby Kennedy and the Justice Department, had been developing a major newsbreak piece concerning Johnson and Bobby Baker. On publication Johnson would have been finished and off the 1964 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 intelligence agencies and we were used after by the Kennedy Justice Department as a conduit to the public."

The fact that it was Robert Kennedy who was giving this information to Life Magazine suggests that John F. Kennedy intended to drop Johnson as his vice-president. This is supported by Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy's secretary. In her book, Kennedy and Johnson (1968) she claimed that in November, 1963, Kennedy decided that because of the emerging Bobby Baker scandal he was going to drop Johnson as his running mate in the 1964 election. Kennedy told Lincoln that he was going to replace Johnson with Terry Sanford.

Don B. Reynolds appeared before a secret session of the Senate Rules Committee on 22nd November, 1963. Reynolds told B. Everett Jordan and his committee that Johnson had demanded that he provided kickbacks in return for him agreeing to a life insurance policy arranged by him in 1957. This included a $585 Magnavox stereo. Reynolds also had to pay for $1,200 worth of advertising on KTBC, Johnson's television station in Austin. Reynolds had paperwork for this transaction including a delivery note that indicated the stereo had been sent to the home of Johnson. Reynolds also told of seeing a suitcase full of money which Baker described as a "$100,000 payoff to Johnson for his role in securing the Fort Worth TFX contract".

As Johnson was now president Life Magazine decided not to use the story concerning his corrupt activities. James Wagenvoord later recalled: "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 24th (the magazine would have made it to the newsstands on November 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 the top editor on the team) and shredded. The issue that was to expose LBJ instead featured the Zapruder film."
William Kelly
While the purpose of the assassination was to eliminate JFK and put LBJ into power, and was therefore a classic coup, those who engineered what happened at Dealey Plaza included the element of blaming the murder on Castro/Cuba, part of a Northwinds plan that was designed to spark an invasion of Cuba.

At some point, early in the proceedings, after Oswald was arrested, and it became apparent that this part of the plan was unacceptable, it was decided to drop the Communist/Cuba conspiracy angle, and pin the blame on Oswald as a Lone-nut assassin.

Of course this doomed Oswald, a living witness as well as a suspect, but this change in strategy also required the falsification of the autopsy and other evidence to adjust to the forgone conclusion that there was only one assassin and no conspiracy.

As suggested by LBJ's presenting Teddy White with a transcript of the unedited Air Force One radio transmissions, the idea that Oswald was the lone assassin and there was no conspiracy, was first determined, not in Dallas, but in Washington, when National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy reported from the White House Situation Room.

Is there any other record, besides the AF1 radio transmissions (which have disappeared), that there were discussions of these issues in Washington and/or Dallas, and who made this decision to pin the blame for the assassination on the Lone-nut rather than investigate the full, true conspiracy.

Of course LBJ used the possibility of a nuclear war developing out of the conspiracy scenario, as presented by the plan laid out by those actually responsible for the assassination, in order to convince the Warren Commissioners of the necessity of the cover-up.

But my question is who made this decision and when, if it was made before the landing of AF1 at Andrews, and the Bethesda autopsy?

BK

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