Joseph McBride

All this going over old ground that has been

covered in numerous books (etc.) is an apparent

goal of some disinformation operatives who frequent

this forum (and have been doing so

with more regularity lately) to waste time and distract attention

from genuine research. Most members here are

interested in doing genuine research that attempts

to advance the case, but not these other posters who

have infested the site.

Some here may recall that Jean Hill's comment

about a "little dog" in the backseat was not

wrong, since Jacqueline Kennedy had been

given a Lamp Chop puppet at Love Field and

had it with her in the back seat. It resembled a little dog.

Jean Hill was ridiculed unfairly for that. She made

many misstatements, but that was not one of them.

Someone who tries to overthrow the government

and kill the vice-president and the speaker of the House

while attacking the Congress while it is in session

to determine the outcome of a presidential election is not a conservative.

Long before the Kennedy

assassination, the Mannlicher-Carcano was jokingly known

as the "humanitarian rifle" because it 

was such a poor device for killing.

Gary Murr did the first study of the Tippit

case, THE MURDER OF DALLAS POLICE

OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT, a good, groundbreaking monograph in 1971 that

went unpublished but can be found online.

 Michael is trying quixotically to defend the indefensible

by leaving out many of the key facts, including why

we really were in Vietnam. Johnson himself in phone

conversations with Sen. Richard Russell in the first

part of 1964 admitted the war could not be won but

he was powerless not to expand it. Ask yourself why.

You can hear those conversations online. And Russell,

an expert on foreign affairs who knew about Vietnam,

unlike many others at the high levels in the US government,

correctly predicted the war would take ten years, cost

50,000 American lives, and would be lost. Johnson recklessly

forged ahead anyway, because that's what his backers

in the military-industrial complex put him in office to do. He

knew it was a tragic dilemma, and it wound up costing

him the presidency as well as many of his Great Society

programs. His failure to call for a tax increase to wage

the war until it was too late (because if he did

so, he would have had to admit what we were

doing there and would have exacerbated the

national debate that was belatedly brewing up) caused immense harm to

the American economy. And there were three or four million

Asian deaths for which he and later Nixon were responsible.

Michael should ask herself why Nixon prolonged the war

after being elected on hints (false) that he would end it.

I offered a partial answer earlier that Michael ignores.

I remember that Congressman Jack Brooks, who was in the

motorcade, said that the presidential limousine "just jumped

out of the road like a striped-ass ape." It maintained a

speed of 70 mph on the road to Parkland after the

Secret Service ordered it to go "fast but safe." I drove

that route in a convertible many times at 70 mph and just about always made

it to Parkland in four minutes.

What is a "debbie downer"?

Noam Chomsky's book speciously attacking JFK and Oliver Stone

does make a sound argument that the people in the military-industrial complex who backed

the Vietnam War "won" the war by making vast amounts

of money from it. They didn't care about the human toll.

So as Chomsky notes, the conventional wisdom that

the US lost the Vietnam War depends on one's perspective.

 

When I covered a speech in 1972 at the University of

Wisconsin, Madison, by Kissinger's aide William

H. Sullivan (who later became the US ambassador to Iran

and was serving in that capacity when the hostage crisis occcurred in 1979), 

a member of the audience asked Sullivan why we were

still in Vietnam. Sullivan said the US was fighting there

because it needed to control the oil

in the South China Sea.  Chomsky mentions that

motive in his book on JFK and Stone. Few other

historians mention the oil in the South China Sea

as a motive for Nixon continuing the war.

"Disinterested" means "neutral." I doubt most

of the people Michael mentions were

neutral on the subject of the assassination.

 

As you note, she suggested it herself to the WC.

There may be more; I'd have to dig back and check.

I found it highly suggestive, since Oswald's

framing was greatly aided by Ruth Paine and Marina.

deleted repetitive post -- I had trouble

posting what I wrote (or so I thought)!

deleted repetitive post

deleted repetition

I wrote in my 1988 reporting for The Nation about Poppy Bush of the CIA being the head

of the RNC when Nixon resigned, but Richard Lingeman, the editor

who revised my first Bush article, took it out because he said I

was "paranoid" to link the CIA to Watergate. That tells

you a lot about The Nation's mindset; Lingeman and

another member of the staff when I was there

had intelligence connections. The Nation

also refused to run my well-documented third

article about Bush and Parrott and the JFK assassination.

Editor Victor Navasky told me to avoid

writing about the assassination

because he said it is a "quagmire." So eventually I wrote about all those

episodes regarding Bush and The Nation in

INTO THE NIGHTMARE.

It's made clear in government documents that Marina

had the ability to forge Lee's signature.

See my book POLITICAL TRUTH how badly

the so-called liberal and leftist publications

have generally dealt with the JFK assassination.

At a book signing, I asked Cokie Roberts about what she

thought caused her father's death. She said,

"I have no conspiracy theories about my father's death,"

and went on to a long technical discourse she was taught

by some scientist about ice on the wings being the cause.

I think Roberts and her mother, Rep. Lindy Boggs, were intimidated into silence.

And part of that may have been payoffs, i.e., a House seat and an

ambassadorship (to the Vatican,

a first for the US) for Lindy Boggs and a lucrative TV gig for Roberts.

Speaking of good documentaries, I just watched

the six-part series WHO KILLED MALCOLM X? on Netflix. Superb

and eye-opening account of the dogged

research by Abdur-Rahman Muhammad that led to the exoneration

of two innocent men, Muhammad Aziz (previously

Norman 3X Butler) and Khalil Islam (Thomas 15x Johnson), unjustly convicted as assassins. And

the film identifies and shows footage of the

man who fired the shotgun that caused the

fatal wounds, William Bradley, who changed

his name to Al-Mustafa Shabazz. The series

deals extensively with the collusion of the

FBI and the NYPB with Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam

in the killing.

See quotes from that interview in my 2013 book INTO THE NIGHTMARE.

From my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE:

 

Kennedy’s supposed political allies seemed strangely indifferent as well. Mort Sahl, the political satirist who later suffered serious damage to his career when he began concentrating on trying to tell the truth about Dallas, says in a 1989 documentary film about his life,

 

The social democrats in this country have a lot of guilt. They didn't stand up to Vietnam. They didn't stand up to the encroachment of the intelligence community. And they walked away from Jack Kennedy. The most they could come up with after he was shot in the street like a dog was to say, “He wasn't that good a president anyway.” Yeah, let me tell you, he had a strange group of friends. Remarkably absent when he fell.

De Antonio had quite a lot of government opposition

to his documentary UNDERGROUND, about the Weather

Underground, which he filmed secretly. Many Hollywood

people came out in his support. I covered the controversy

for Daily Variety. He called me and asked me to conduct

a live interview with him on an LA TV station that ran

(as I recall) 90 minutes.

He said Variety had always been the

fairest publication toward him and his work, and when I

expressed surprise, he explained it was because Variety

had to report factually on what a film contained, because

exhibitors and others needed to know. So the paper couldn't

afford to distort things as other media do.

Unfortunately,

that all changed after the Silverman family sold the paper

to a British conglomerate and they got rid of our editor on Daily Variety,

Tom Pryor, a feisty man with great integrity, and replaced

him with the dubious Peter Bart. A representative of

the new ownership candidly told Tom that they brought in

Bart to increase advertising revenues (Bart would

make deals with advertisers to kill or alter stories and so forth). After the PATRIOT GAMES/Paramount

controversy between me and Bart, Premiere magazine

sarcastically chose us as "Showbiz Couple of the Year."

After resigning from Variety with a settlement due to Bart's misbehavior,

I went to Dallas to do further research for INTO THE NIGHTMARE.

Acquilla Clemmons (as I spell her name, although it sometimes is spelled Clemons; her

unusual first name derives from "Eagle," which befits her courage and patriotism)

was never seen again after doing the interview with Mark Lane at her home in North Oak Cliff on March 23, 1966, for RUSH TO

JUDGMENT. I found the unedited transcript of that interview in the papers of

the film's director, the radical documentarian Emile de Antonio. I and other

researchers have tried to find Mrs. Clemmons. I found some indications

that she may have moved to Philadelphia. But given her age at the time of the assassination

and the murder of Officer Tippit (she told Lane she was about 55 and had lived

in Dallas since she was 15), she would be around 111 if she survives. It is disturbing that she

disappeared, let's hope not violently but perhaps having to flee the white supremacist atmosphere

of Dallas and the threats against her from the DPD. De Antonio said

in an interview with him and Lane for Film Comment's Winter 1966-67 issue that when they went to Dallas

to film RUSH TO JUDGMENT, all the tension was around the Tippit

murder, not the events in Dealey Plaza. Mrs. Clemmons was a brave

woman to keep speaking out about two men she saw as involved

in the Tippit murder. She was one of the people to whom I dedicated

INTO THE NIGHTMARE. The true heroes of this case are the

courageous, honest civilian witnesses who have spoken out

in contradiction of the official myth, as well as

some insiders such as Roger Craig and the medical

personnel in Dallas and Bethesda.

From my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE:

 

SENATOR YARBOROUGH’S OBSERVATIONS

 

One of the other people I interviewed for my Bush articles was former Senator Ralph W. Yarborough, who fought off the challenge from Bush in the 1964 U.S. Senate race. Yarborough commented in our June 24, 1988, interview from his office in Austin that he didn’t know about Bush’s CIA background at the time of their campaign (“I never heard anything about it”) but that he always wondered how Bush could have become the CIA chief in 1976 supposedly without an intelligence background. As for Bush’s early CIA connections, the former senator said, “It doesn’t surprise me. What surprised me was they picked him for director of Central Intelligence -- how in hell he was appointed head of the CIA without any experience and knowledge -- that they would have picked a man with no intelligence experience, no assassination experience, no experience smearing people -- all those things the CIA is good at.”

Hoover’s memo, said Yarborough, “explains something to me that I’ve always wondered about. It does make sense to have a trained CIA man, with experience, appointed to the job. That opens a lot of road of understanding. Even if I was not a Democrat I wouldn’t want a CIA director in the White House. I don’t like to put professional assassins in the White House. I don’t want a bunch of assassins running it.”

This was echoed, in more circumspect terms, by Tom Wicker, who wrote the first-day banner story from Dallas about Kennedy’s assassination for the New York Times. Wicker commented in the April 1988 Times column I quoted in my first article for The Nation on Bush:

 

Do the American people really want to elect a former director of the CIA as their President? That’s hardly been discussed so far; but it seems obvious that a CIA chief might well be privy to the kind of “black” secrets that could later make him -- as a public figure -- subject to blackmail. Given the agency’s worldwide reputation for covert intervention and political meddling, moreover, one of its former directors in the White House certainly would be the object of suspicion and mistrust in numerous parts of the globe. And well he might be.

 

 

“THE ONLY ONE WHO DUCKED”

 

While I was interviewing Senator Yarborough about Bush, I took the opportunity of discussing with him the events of the Dallas motorcade. He offered an important revelation he also made over the years to some other researchers, and gave me some possibly significant insights into Lyndon Johnson’s state of mind that day. Yarborough was riding in the second car behind Kennedy’s, sitting behind the driver in the back seat of a convertible with Vice President and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson. In the front seat were the driver from the Texas Highway Patrol, Hurchel Jacks, and the VP’s Secret Service agent, Rufus Youngblood. LBJ sat directly behind Youngblood, and Lady Bird between her husband and Yarborough. Directly ahead of their car was the Secret Service presidential followup car, the “Queen Mary.”

Senator Yarborough, who had “a lifetime of handling arms,” described for me his reactions to the shots fired in Dealey Plaza, giving an eyewitness and earwitness account that matched that of numerous other witnesses but is, like theirs, at odds over some details with what can now be seen in the altered Zapruder film:

 

The first shot I heard I thought was a rifle shot. The second shot, the motorcade almost came to a halt. They said later that the president‘s car slowed to something like five miles an hour. I wondered what the hell they were stopping for when somebody is shooting. People were jumping out of the car in front of me [the Secret Service followup car] and running to the president‘s car. I thought maybe somebody had thrown a bomb in there. The third shot I heard was a rifle shot.

 

When I asked Yarborough if he thought there was a gunman on the Grassy Knoll, he said,

 

I believe I would have heard or picked the shot up. I just don’t [think so]. I didn’t think so at the time. There’s one possibility -- I don’t think there was a second gunman, but if somebody else fired a shot at the identical time as the gunman in the School Book Depository, if two shots were fired instantly, it would be hard to differentiate them. I know that when I’ve gone deer hunting, if I fire my rifle at the same time as somebody else fires his, you can’t tell the two shots apart. I agree with John Connally that it’s foolish to say that only two shots were fired [Yarborough apparently is alluding to the single-bullet theory, which Connally never accepted].

I’ve talked to Dallas policemen who told me that the people from Washington gave them an awful grilling. They came down with a theory in mind and they didn’t want to hear anything else that might not match up with their theory. I have the suspicion this fellow Ruby knew somebody about it, with his criminal connections. Oswald went by his room in Oak Cliff, to get his gun or something, and the direction he was walking in was the direction of Ruby’s apartment. I think it was a conspiracy, of course, but I don’t know who the conspirators were. Anyway, too many people wanted Kennedy dead.

 

The official story put forth by Lyndon Johnson after the assassination was that when the shots were fired, Secret Service Agent Youngblood heroically vaulted over the seat and covered the VP with his body. Although Johnson arranged to have Youngblood receive the Treasury Department’s highest honor, the Exceptional Service Award, on December 4, 1963, and the agent was eventually promoted to Special Agent in Charge of the White House Detail and then deputy director of the Secret Service, Youngblood’s 1964 Warren Commission testimony contained significant qualifiers. He said that after hearing the first shot and seeing unusual crowd movement as well as movement in the Secret Service followup car behind the president’s limousine, “I turned around and hit the Vice President on the shoulder and hollered, get down, and then looked around again and saw more of this movement, and so I proceeded to go to the back seat and get on top of him. I then heard two more shots. But I would like to say this. I would not be positive that I was on that back seat before the second shot. But the Vice President himself said I was.” Asked to describe his movements further, Youngblood added another qualifier: “Well, the Vice President says that I vaulted over. It was more of a stepping over. And then I sat on top of him, he being crouched down somewhat.”

Yarborough scoffed at that story. He said Youngblood never left the front seat. The back seat was so full, as photographs of the car in the motorcade confirm, that there would not have been room for the agent along with three other people; Yarborough would have known if a large man was sharing the seat with them. Yarborough’s description of Johnson’s reaction after the shots were fired was  suggestive:

 

Absolutely motionless. Said nothing. You know that tale Johnson liked to tell about Youngblood, the Secret Service man, jumping over the front seat when the shots were fired and shielding him with his body? Well, that’s as big a cock-and-bull tale as the time he told the Marines in Da Nang that his great-grandfather had fought at the Alamo. [Actually, Johnson told servicemen at Camp Stanley in Korea, “My great-great-grandfather died at the Alamo.”] Youngblood never jumped over the seat. Johnson sat there stoically. The only time they moved was when we were going through the Triple Overpass, and Youngblood leaned over the seat -- he had a small radio receiver in his hand -- and Johnson leaned over, they were about six inches apart, and they listened to some transmission together on the radio. [A photograph indicates Johnson had ducked earlier: See below.]

I asked them what happened, and they didn’t say anything. They were afraid somebody might tell the truth. They knew damn well what happened, because when the cars pulled up at the hospital, the Secret Service men swarmed all around Johnson, and one of them said, “Mr. President.” They left Mrs. Kennedy alone in the car with the body, grieving over it. They knew he was dead instantly, because his head was blown off. Mrs. Kennedy was holding onto him and wouldn’t let him go until they put a suit coat around him to cover his head [Secret Service Agent Clint Hill did that].

 

It isn’t entirely clear from the transcript of our interview what Yarborough meant by saying, “They were afraid somebody might tell the truth.” Agent Youngblood that day was carrying a large walkie-talkie radio from a shoulder strap (it can be seen in the photograph of him escorting Johnson out of Parkland Hospital). The Secret Service was communicating on two frequencies in Dallas, Baker and Charlie. The Baker frequency was for transmissions between cars in the motorcade, including those between the vice president’s car and his followup car, but the Charlie frequency had much broader links among the Trade Mart, Air Force One and Two, the president’s limousine, its followup car, the lead car in the motorcade, and the rest of the motorcade, via the temporary White House Communications Agency Center setup at the Sheraton Hotel, which was itself linked directly to the White House. Youngblood told the Warren Commission that after the shots were fired, he radioed his followup car, “I am switching to Charlie”; but perhaps he and LBJ had been listening on Charlie all along, to follow the larger picture.

One wonders if the behavior of Johnson even before the shots were fired meant he had some kind of premonition of trouble. Penn Jones always said that “Johnson was the only one who ducked” in the motorcade. He based this on the famous James Altgens panoramic photo of Elm Street during the shooting, in which it appears that Johnson is leaning sharply forward (possibly to duck for safety, possibly also to listen to Youngblood’s walkie-talkie) while Lady Bird and Yarborough smile and wave, momentarily oblivious to the gunfire. When I asked Yarborough what Johnson’s mood had been during the motorcade from Love Field before the shooting started downtown, the former senator said,

 

He hardly spoke. The crowd would holler at him on the street, and even though he was a politician he did not smile or wave, he just looked straight ahead all day long. Johnson was worried about some revelations that were supposed to come out that day before a congressional committee in Washington about Bobby Baker, Johnson’s bagman. Johnson was scared to death it was going to blow that very day. I wondered why he was being so dour in the car, when the crowds were giving him so good a response. I tried to butter him up and said, “Mr. Vice President, why don’t you wave at them? Look how fond of you they are.” He never would respond, not a word.

 

Senator Yarborough made it clear in our interview that what he thought Johnson was worried about came from his later knowledge of what was happening in the congressional committee at the time. Johnson was indeed very worried about the testimony being given at that exact moment in Washington by Maryland insurance man Donald Reynolds before a closed hearing with the staff of the Senate Rules Committee. As Robert A. Caro writes in the fourth volume of his Johnson biography, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power (2012), “[O]n that Friday, for the first time a Lyndon Johnson financial transaction was going to be described by a witness, seated beside his lawyer, to representatives of the United States Senate.” This is Caro’s description of the atmosphere in the car when the motorcade began at Love Field: “Lady Bird, sitting between Yarborough and her husband, tried to make conversation but soon gave up. The two men weren’t speaking to or looking at each other -- the only noises in the car came from the walkie-talkie radio that Youngblood was carrying on a shoulder strap -- as the motorcade pulled out.”

Reynolds was accusing Johnson to the Senate Rules Committee of taking bribes, sometimes disguised as demands for needless advertising on his and Lady Bird’s monopolistic Austin, Texas, television station, and other corrupt activities, and was providing the committee with documentation. Reynolds reportedly also was discussing details of the burgeoning Bobby Baker scandal, involving Johnson’s protege and legman, the recently resigned secretary of the Senate, in corrupt activities. Life magazine in its November 8, 1963, issue emblazoned across a cover photo of Baker at a Washington masquerade party the words “CAPITAL BUZZES OVER STORIES OF MISCONDUCT IN HIGH PLACES: THE BOBBY BAKER BOMBSHELL.” Its cover story, “THAT HIGH-LIVING BAKER BOY SCANDALIZES THE CAPITAL,” wrote of the fixer, “He was known as ‘Lyndon’s boy.’” In a caption under a full-page photo of a grinning Johnson with his arm around Baker, the magazine declared, “LEGMAN AND LEADER: For Lyndon Johnson when he was Senate majority leader -- and for Mike Mansfield, his successor -- Bobby was an indispensable confidant. He was a messenger, a pleader of causes, a fund-raiser and a source of intelligence.” Life’s extensive coverage of the Baker scandal in the weeks immediately leading up to the assassination also included a highly detailed article by Keith Wheeler “(and a LIFE task force)” in the issue dated November 22, ominously entitled “SCANDAL GROWS AND GROWS IN WASHINGTON.” That issue was already out at the time of the assassination. Both the November 8 and 22 articles in the widely read Luce publication prominently featured Johnson’s involvement in Baker’s rise and strong insinuations of his involvement in Baker’s corrupt activities, which included rampant influence-peddling and a prostitution ring involving members of Congress and prominent businessmen, among them some in the Texas oil business and in defense contracting. The growing scandal, Life warned in its November 22 issue, “might well wreck a few individuals in the next election.”

If the investigation of Reynolds’s charges and the rest of the complex investigation into Baker’s activities had gone forward, Johnson might not only have had to resign his vice presidency but might have gone to prison as well. Life reportedly was acting with the help of tips supplied by Robert Kennedy, who was trying to use the growing and extremely sleazy Baker scandal to help his brother push Johnson off the 1964 ticket. In his last press conference on November 14, 1963, President Kennedy was asked about the scandals involving Baker and Fred Korth, who had resigned as Secretary of the Navy in October over accusations of financial impropriety in regard to the awarding of the contract for the TFX (Tactical Fighter Experimental) plane to the Fort Worth defense contracting firm General Dynamics. After  differentiating the two scandals, Kennedy replied:

 

Now, if you are talking about -- there are always bound to be in the Government, the newspaper business, labor, and so on, farmers -- there are always going to be people who can't stand the pressure of opportunity, so that -- but the important point is what action is taken against them.

I think that this administration has been very vigorous in its action, and I think that we have tried to set a responsible standard. There are always going to be people who fail to meet that standard, and we attempt to take appropriate action dealing with each case.

But Mr. Baker is now being investigated, and I think we will know a good deal more about Mr. Baker before we are through. Other people may be investigated as time goes on. We just try to do the best we can. And I think that -- the governmental standards, let me say, on the whole I think compare favorably with those in Washington, with those in some other parts of America.

The president’s comment that “Other people may be investigated as time goes on” must not have given comfort to his vice president. JFK’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln writes in her 1968 book Kennedy and Johnson that the president told her on November 19, 1963, “You know if I am reelected in sixty-four, I am going to spend more and more time toward making government service an honorable career. . . . To do this I will need as a running-mate in sixty-four a man who believes as I do.” She asked, “Who is your choice as a running-mate?,” and Kennedy replied, “At this time I am thinking about Governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina. But it will not be Lyndon.” Lincoln later told Caro that “the ammunition to get him off was Bobby Baker.” In an early edition on November 22, the Dallas Morning News prominently featured an interview with the visiting Richard Nixon headlined, “Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop Johnson.”

The assassination not only interrupted Reynolds’s testimony but it also, according to Caro in The Passage of Power, interrupted a meeting that day in New York of members of a Life investigative team with the magazine’s managing editor about plans for a major series on “Lyndon Johnson’s Money,” digging into Johnson’s dubious fortune, corrupt business history, and intimate involvement in the Baker scandal. The head of the nine-man team, Associate Editor William Lambert, had said of Johnson to managing editor George P. Hunt, “This guy looks like a bandit to me.” Life was considering a multipart investigation that would broaden the coverage to include the fullest possible details of Johnson’s largely unreported financial history and net worth, with the first installment under consideration to run in the next issue. 

Life’s ambitious plans to extensively scrutinize Johnson’s corruption were immediately scrapped when gunfire brought him the presidency, and the magazine instead became a leading proponent of the lone-gunman theory, while giving favorable treatment to the new president. The next issue did not feature Johnson’s money but instead a black-bordered cover portrait of the late President Kennedy and articles on Kennedy’s death and the transference of power, illustrated with frames from the Zapruder film. Life, however, eventually ran a report on Johnson’s net worth on August 21, 1964, estimating it at $14 million, much higher than the White House estimate of $3,484,000 but considerably lower than the figure Johnson’s principal Texas financial representative, attorney Edward A. Clark, gave Caro of the new president’s net worth at the time of the assassination, about $25 million. Johnson had accumulated that fortune while serving in public office since the mid-1930s.

The congressional investigations of Johnson’s finances were effectively aborted by the new president, but not without further testimony by Reynolds and strong resistance from some Republicans in Congress. Johnson’s ascension to the presidency also helped him fend off accusations of involvement in other illegal activities including the early-1960s scandals involving Texas financier Billie Sol Estes and General Dynamics of Fort Worth, which would make a fortune building its fighter planes for the Vietnam War. Another Fort Worth firm with connections to Johnson that benefited greatly from the war was the Bell Helicopter Company, which built the Huey helicopters used in Vietnam (Michael Paine, the supposedly estranged husband of Marina Oswald’s CIA handler Ruth Paine, worked as a research engineer for Bell at the time of the assassination).

Although Senator Yarborough told me he didn’t know who the conspirators in the assassination were, he mentioned as possible suspects the Teamsters chief Jimmy Hoffa and the Mafia, but Yarborough seemed more focused on people angered by JFK’s plans to “pull out of Vietnam. The big boys, the big contractors, knew what was involved [in the plans to withdraw], because they had the inside knowledge. That was bigger money than [organized] crime.” Yarborough didn’t think Johnson was involved in the assassination, however: “I don’t think he’d take that risk. He would have known if he had, too many people would talk.”

If the assassination saved Johnson from being dropped from the 1964 ticket by President Kennedy or being removed from office, and even from going to prison, it also greatly enriched him and his backers in what President Eisenhower had called the “military-industrial complex.” As Caro extensively documents in his multivolume Johnson biography, since the 1930s, Johnson had effectively been owned and operated by the Houston construction firm Brown & Root, which funneled huge sums of money to him for his own use and for distribution to his political colleagues, serving as the basis for his national political influence. In return, Brown & Root, which was absorbed into the Dallas-based oil field services company Halliburton Energy Services in December 1962, received giant government contracts.

These ranged from a huge dam in Texas during the late 1930s Depression era, the first major LBJ payback to Brown & Root that Caro details, to membership in a consortium of four companies awarded an astounding “97 percent of the construction work in [Vietnam] during the seven years they operated there [1965-72],” according to Dan Briody’s 2004 book The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money.

 

. . . The group, which came to be known collectively as RMK-BRJ, went on to do more than $2 billion worth of work in Vietnam, of which Brown & Root took a 20 percent cut. The contract was cost plus 1.7 percent, meaning that the consortium would be reimbursed all costs, plus an additional 1.7 per cent profit, a method of contracting that encourages the contractor to markedly increase costs, thereby increasing their profit. The world would be reintroduced to this concept nearly 40 years later when Kellogg Brown & Root [as the Halliburton subsidiary had been renamed] won the same type of contract in Iraq. [U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney served as chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000.]

RMK-BRJ literally changed the face of Vietnam, clearing out wide swaths of jungle for airplane landing strips, dredging channels for ships, and building American bases from Da Nang to Saigon. As part of the single most lucrative contract the company had ever entered into, Brown & Root was in Vietnam from 1965 to 1972 pulling down $380 million in revenue in the process.

 

Russ Baker reports in Family of Secrets that around 1 p.m. on November 22, the time when President Kennedy was officially declared dead at Parkland Hospital, Johnson was in a secluded part of the hospital making a telephone call to his personal tax lawyer in Houston, J. Waddy Bullion, lamenting, “Oh, I gotta get rid of my goddamn Halliburton stock.” Most likely Johnson ultimately did not have to do so, for as the Wall Street Journal reported in August 1964 (and Caro confirms in detail in the first volume of his Johnson biography, The Path to Power), Johnson’s so-called “blind trust” as president was a mockery because he had telephone hot lines in the Oval Office and at the LBJ Ranch that he used frequently to confer with his financial advisers on trades involving his stock holdings. Waddy Bullion was one of the trustees. Caro reports that Ed Clark told him that Johnson “sometimes spent several hours a day during his Presidency conducting personal business.”

Johnson had an unusually friendly relationship with the Republican George H. W. Bush, as Baker and others have reported. LBJ is said to have privately favored the rightwing Bush over Yarborough, John Connally’s enemy and the leader of the liberal wing of the Texas Democratic Party, in the 1964 Senate race. Yarborough, who said he had to campaign with “meager money,” told me,

 

I had the feeling that somebody was in the background working against me. I thought it was Johnson, but I learned since then from Bobby Kennedy that it was Connally. Bobby Kennedy told me after [the campaign] that he saw Bush during the campaign in the Yale Club in New York and asked him, “George, why do you want to run? You can’t win against Yarborough, you can’t win with Johnson running for president.” And Bush said, “Governor Connally is going to help me in the race.” Bobby ran into him again at the Yale Club after he lost, and he said, “I thought Connally was going to help you.” Bush said, “I’m satisfied he did everything he could under the circumstances.” Connally couldn’t come out for him publicly, because it would have split the ticket, and Johnson wouldn’t brook anything that would have cut his vote down, but they did everything they could.

 

Bush reciprocated with conspicuous favors for Johnson, unusual for someone from the opposite political party. To represent the Zapata oil firm in Medellín, Colombia, Bush hired Zapata County, Texas, Judge Manuel B. Bravo, who was instrumental in Johnson’s theft of the 1948 U.S. Senate race. And when Johnson left Washington from Andrews Air Force Base in 1969 to return home to Texas after Richard Nixon’s inauguration, Poppy Bush was the only well-known Republican there to help give the former president a ceremonial sendoff.

“Soon thereafter, [Bush] was a guest at the LBJ ranch,” Russ Baker reports in Family of Secrets. “There is no public record of what the two men talked about.”

 

All Jonathan does on the forum is nay-say people.

It would be good if he posted research and insights

like other members. That would make his posts

worth reading.