My friend Tom Cahill has given me permission to republish his letters home from his voluntary exile in France. This is the third in the series. It will be daily until I have caught up and then as I receive them. This is a lengthy piece on Tom's theory that LBJ was involved in the Kennedy assassination. Tom's obsession with the assassination is not one of his most endearing traits to me, but I think it would be inappropriate for me to not include this.
Madness in the White House
LBJ And His Role In The Murder Of JFK
By Bro. Tom Cahill
“Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.”
Shakespeare, Hamlet
“There are professionals and programs in place
to deal with a president’s physical illness
but no machinery to deal with mental illness.”
D.
Jablow Hershman
Author
of Power
Beyond Reason:
The Mental
Collapse of Lyndon Johnson
July 1, 2012 A Work-in-Progress since
2004. Not
Copyrighted
Please post
especially where prohibited. 14,859 Words (33
Pages)
INTRODUCTION
Creepy
and cloying—as in sickeningly sweet—was the taped
telephone conversation Dec. 2, 1963,
between Pres. Lyndon Johnson who made the recording and Jacqueline Kennedy
newly-widowed by the assassination of her husband ten days earlier. “Darling”
and “sweetie” is what LBJ called her in what sounded to me like he was making
sexual advances to the bereaved woman as in some Shakespearean drama about a
mad king.
The tape catches
Jackie in her breathless, baby-talk manner of speaking affected by women who
thought themselves powerless in a time before the women’s liberation movement
took hold. Ending another taped
conversation five days later, Pres.
Johnson tells Jackie to give the children a hug for him and, “Tell them I’d like to be their daddy.”
Only now can we
fully understand the terror and disgust Mrs. Kennedy must have felt toward
Lyndon Johnson at that time. Revealed in
early August 2011 is another tape—an interview made a few months after the
assassination in which Mrs. Kennedy told historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. that
she believed then U.S.
Vice-Pres. Lyndon Johnson and his friends had her husband killed in Dallas the previous Nov.
22. Fearful for her family, Mrs. Kennedy
did not want the tape or other material about the assassination released for
fifty years after her death. But for
some reason, her daughter, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg chose to release this
bombshell now, according to Liz Thomas in the London Daily
Mail, August
8, 2011.
What gives extra
credence to this latest tape is Mrs. Kennedy’s admission to Schlesinger of
having affairs of her own in retaliation for her husband’s flings.
Why did Mrs.
Schlossberg release the tape in 2011, only seventeen years after her mother’s
death? Now—a year later—I still haven’t
read or heard any repercussions due to this information leak to the media.
Lyndon Johnson’s
vices might have been, but not necessarily in this order, “Alcohol, women,
slaughtering wild animals for no good reason, wild rides in his convertible
driving with a beer or scotch in his hand and other reckless behaviour,
financial corruption and ‘pay for play’ sales of political influence,”
according to Phillip F. Nelson in his book LBJ:
Mastermind Of JFK’s Assassination (2010).
LBJ’s own press secretary,
George Reedy, said of his boss, “As a human being, he was a miserable person—a
bully, sadist, lout, and egotist. He had
no sense of loyalty . . . and he enjoyed tormenting those who had done the most
for him,” according to Nelson
Just look at any
photo of LBJ and you can see the vanity and arrogance in his face. This includes one I took myself Election Day
1964 that the Johnson’s liked and used as an “unofficial” White House photo,
the negative of which is now in the LBJ Library.
It is not necessary to bury the truth.
It is sufficient merely to delay it until nobody cares.
Napolean Bonaparte
Pres. Barak
Obama is no anomaly.
His administration is no real departure from the direction in which the
U.S. government has been going since the advent of the National Security State
in 1947 and especially since the Democratic Party, organized labor and
democracy itself died in Dallas with John Kennedy almost a half century ago. Enough time has now lapsed for us to see that
the Obama administration is obviously taking the very same route as its
predecessors despite the President’s 2008 election campaign promises to the
contrary.
Michael Parenti, one of America’s leading left-wing
dissidents and long-time articulate critic of the Warren Commission, describes most governments
in history as having a “gangster nature.”
I would add to this, most people serving at high level in government are
criminally insane by the strictest definition of the term. George W. Bush and Lyndon Johnson, for me,
are perfect examples.
“Understand Dallas,
that is the start of the cure of the cancer on the presidency,” wrote Carl Oglesby in The Yankee And Cowboy War, way back in 1976 with “Watergate” in mind. In
the past quarter plus century since this book was published, much in American
politics has changed and . . . for the worse.
“CONNECT THE DOTS”
Conspiracy in the
assassination of John Kennedy may not seem so far-fetched if we “reverse
engineer” major politico/economic events from the “Wall Street Meltdown” of coincidentally late in election year
2008 and the following trillion-
dollar bail-out, back to the fraudulent presidential elections of 2004 and
2000, to the 9/11 “false flag” attack on the US and America’s war on Islam for
oil that immediately followed, to Iran-Contragate’s drugs-for-guns scam and the
S & L bail-out that on a graph, helped make Reagan’s deficit look like a
skyscraper towering over cottages and cabins of previous administrations. Then there were Nixon’s “Watergate” and his
totally fraudulent “War on (some) Drugs” that had nothing whatsoever to do with
health and everything to do with crushing the New Left and expanding and
further politicizing the criminal justice system. And in the end, LBJ’s war on SE Asia was in direct opposition to JFK’s plans for
withdrawing from the “quagmire” that both
five-star Generals Eisenhower and
MacArthur warned Pres. Kennedy it would become.
Just “connect the dots” and/or “follow the money trail” to see who
won and who lost during these unnatural occurrences
and history-changing events. For a
brilliant seven-minute course in recent US history, politics and economics,
Google: You Tube “Who killed economic growth?” by Richard Heinberg.
The assassination
of Pres. Kennedy was a sharp turn to the right and Lee Harvey Oswald was NOT
then nor ever at the helm of the US ship-of-state. As of now, every presidential administration
since that of LBJ has helped cover-up the assassination of Pres. Kennedy. What the USA needs is a Truth and
Reconciliation Commission that worked so well for South Africa when that country transitioned
to democracy.
Dwell in the past and you lose an eye.
Ignore the past and you lose both eyes.
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
“Even more than the
rest of the South, Texas
has been the buckle on the U.S.
gun belt,” wrote Kevin Phillips in American
Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Policy of Deceit in the House of Bush (2004).
“Texans, in particular, have had an extra hawkish chromosome or two,
likewise caring little whether the rest of the world agreed or disagreed,”
wrote Phillips.
Then Vice-President
Lyndon B. Johnson was a “central figure” in the
conspiracy to assassinate Pres. John Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. This is the verdict of recently published
books and a TV documentary aired in November 2003, the 40th
anniversary of the gun shots heard ‘round the world.
Unimportant ancient history? Perhaps.
But have you noticed how over the past four decades, the Democratic
Party has drifted further and further to the right under the domination of the big
corporations, the military, and the intelligence community--together known
infamously as the “military-industrial complex.” This now famous euphemism for fascism was of course a warning coined
by Pres. Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell address, January
17, 1961. Except
for Pres. Kennedy who tried to downsize and control the complex, Ike’s warning
has been virtually ignored to the present day.
Four decades after the assassination, the USA had another
president who polarized the country with
an unpopular war and--like LBJ--his sanity as well as motives were questioned
by growing numbers of people, according to
books and polls. Did the murder
in Dallas lay
the groundwork for the present hostile takeover of the country by neo-fascists
and neo-liberals? Or was the murder of
John Kennedy a coup d’etat since
which time the “banksters” have been getting simply more arrogant, more
avaricious and more transparent? This is
why solving the murder of JFK may be as important today as it was almost a half
century ago.
So is it that
outrageous or radical to say that
since Nov. 22, 1963,
the USA has been a corporate
dictatorship in which a few faces at the top change every four or eight years
to maintain the illusion of democracy?
(And remember, Benito Mussolini preferred to call fascism . . . corporatism.) Many now are wondering if Pres. Obama is a willing tool or a hostage of
the corporatists?
Several books have been written about Lyndon Johnson’s emotional
condition and in the 2003 documentary it was mentioned that LBJ’s psychiatrist
was offered $1 million to not reveal
anything the then ex-president told him during his treatment for severe
depression not long before Johnson’s death in 1973. That decade since Pres. Kennedy’s murder was
for Johnson a time of increasing emotional torture.
But for me, the
best evidence that Johnson was sick and sinister enough to at the very least
help cover-up JFK’s assassination is
well-documented in the book by D. Jablow Hershman, Power
Beyond Reason: The Mental Collapse of Lyndon Johnson (2002).
“There are
professionals and programs in place to deal with a president’s physical illness
but no machinery to deal with mental illness,” writes Hershman.
In the very first sentence of chapter one, Hershman
writes, “A Texan is president again and this country is fighting a war
again.” But I sharply disagree with her
second sentence when she observes, “Beyond that, there seems to be few
parallels between the Vietnam War and the war on terrorism in which we are currently engaged.” Fast-moving events since she wrote the book
may have changed her mind. Iraq and now Afghanistan
may be Arabic for Vietnam, all unwinnable
quagmires that enrich and empower the
top one percent of corporatists and the financial elite.
BUSH ON THE COUCH
Like the “wartime
president” more than four decades ago, Pres. George W. Bush’s integrity and
mental state were questioned and monitored by an increasing number of
citizens. Bush’s earlier life of alcohol
and drug use if not abuse was examined closely, especially during the period
when this “officer and gentleman” allegedly flew multimillion dollar jet
fighters in the Texas Air National Guard, then “disappeared,” went “AWOL,” or
“deserted” for awhile.
Early in Bush’s White House residency,
Dr. Helen Caldicott, the Australian physician, environmentalist and
anti-nuclear activist, said the President required “psychiatric intervention.”
Later, on June 4, 2004,
Doug Thompson wrote in Capitol Hill Blue (www.capitolhillblue.com), “President
George W. Bush’s increasingly erratic behaviour and wide mood swings has the
halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express concern over
their leader’s state of mind.” Continued
Thompson, “In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the
President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against
the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as ‘enemies of the
state.’” This is not only reminiscent of
LBJ but also Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in their final days in the White
House.
That same year,
Harper Collins published a book by
Justin A. Frank, MD, titled Bush On The Couch: Inside the Mind of the President (2004). It’s a 272-page
psychoanalysis of George W. Bush.
Megalomania, paranoia, untreated alcohol abuse, thought disorders, and
even sadism are some of the emotional problems of the President explored by Dr.
Frank who is Director of Psychiatry at George Washington
University.
”President George W. Bush is taking powerful antidepressant drugs to
control his erratic behaviour, depression and paranoia,” according to Teresa
Hampton, editor of Capitol Hill Blue, July 28, 2004. White House physician, Col. Richard J. Tubb, prescribed the drugs after a recent
incident. Asked about his relationship
with Enron exec Ken Lay at a press conference July 8, 2004, the President stormed out of the room and
screamed at an aide backstage, “Keep those motherfuckers away from me. If you can’t, I’ll find someone who can.”
LBJ ON THE COUCH
Without medical
credentials such as those of Dr. Frank but with her own experience with bipolar
illness, Hershman contends LBJ was the worst kind of manic depressive—an “irritable
manic”--and got sicker as he got older and acquired more power. His last decade of life was a living hell for
him and everyone within his very wide range.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, she believes he was paranoid to boot.
I, too, have been
diagnosed bipolar but much less severe--probably a “euphoric manic”--and I may
be close to healed since I have had episodes of neither mania nor depression
since about 2000. After reading
Hershman’s book, with my own experience
to call upon, I think Hershman makes a very convincing diagnosis of Pres.
Johnson. And, in his introduction to Power Beyond Reason, Dr. Gerald Tolchin,
professor of psychology at Southern Connecticut
State University, also agrees with the author.
In her 1983
bestseller, Lyndon Johnson and The American Dream, Doris Kearns Goodwin
wrote of LBJ’s “extreme oscillations of mood,”
his “obsessional, delusional thinking,” and his “mercurial
temperament.” Before at least three elections,
he got so depressed he considered withdrawing.
Before another three elections, he had to be hospitalized.
“The votes were
for him expressions of love,” according to Goodwin who quoted Johnson saying in
1968, perhaps the worst year of his life, “If the American people don’t love
me, their descendants will.”
In a profile of LBJ
titled “Hey! Hey! LBJ…” in Esquire, December
1983, Tom Wicker wrote, “In everything he did, good and bad, Johnson was a man
of excess—excessive energy, determination, and ability; excessive vanity,
pettiness, and greed; excessive ambition, vision, and drive . . .
“His hooded eyes,
his secretive ways gave the idea he trusted no one, used everyone,” continued
Wicker.
Just one symptom of
LBJ’s paranoid bipolar illness was his bold-faced lies and his dangerous
manipulation of Congress and the people.
“On September 25, 1964,
in Eufaula, Oklahoma, campaigning against Barry
Goldwater, Lyndon Johnson poured it on. ‘We
don’t want American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. We don’t want to get involved with seven
hundred million people and get tied down in a land war in Asia,’”
Wicker quoted LBJ in his Esquire article.
Johnson, the “peace candidate,” had pictured Goldwater as too belligerent to
have his “finger on the button,” wrote Wicker.
Another
example of LBJ’s illness was the fiction he himself created of the North
Vietnamese attack on US warships in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964 that led to a major escalation of the most controversial and divisive conflict in US history.
Long before the ”incident,” Johnson had
been carrying the text of his resolution
around in his pocket waiting for the opportunity to make sure of its passage,
wrote Wicker.
This duplicity eventually led youngsters to chanting, sometimes
within earshot of the President who claimed he was deeply pained by it, “Hey,
hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
The first time Wicker heard the vicious “Hey! Hey!”
chant in late 1965 or early 1966 outside the Waldorf in New York, “I could hardly believe my ears,”
wrote the then Washington
correspondent for The New York
Times. “I was not accustomed to such
anger and hostility in American politics,” he wrote in his Esquire piece.
And when LBJ announced on March
31, 1968, he would not seek a second term, many of the
same young people sang, from The Wizard
of Oz., “Ding, dong, the witch is
dead, the wicked old witch is dead.”
Wrote Horace Busby,
a long-time aide and friend of LBJ, in
his book, The Thirty-First of March (2005), Johnson “almost hissed the words”
as he gave what he considered “the biggest reason” for withdrawing from the
1968 race--”I want out of this cage.”
Revelations by Hershman as
well as others about Johnson in recent
years now give even more credence to Barbara Garson’s 1965 play, MacBird.
In this parody of Shakespeare’s MacBeth,
a tale of a man goaded by his ruthlessly ambitious wife into murdering the king to gain the crown for
himself, Garson accuses Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, of orchestrating the
assassination of Pres. John Kennedy. The
play was an instant hit since early on many shared Garson’s suspicions. And why not?
Cui bono? Who profited most
from JFK’s death.
Yet all along, together with his employer, The New York Times, Tom Wicker
supported the Warren
Commission, according to Michael Parenti.
“CONSPIRACISM”
“Conspiracies Are Us” is the flippant title of an
article in The New York Times, April 30, 2011
by Kate Zernike lumping together us JFK “conspiracists” with the “Birthers,”
those extreme right-wing ideologues who believe Barak Obama is foreign-born and
thus not qualified to be president of the USA.
Among those Zernike quotes is Robert Alan Goldberg, professor of history
at the University
of Utah and author of Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in
America first published in September 2001, mind you, within weeks after the
attack on the World
Trade Center
and the Pentagon. As if academicians are
an unimpeachable source, in a review of this same book in The New York Times December 18, 2001 (note dates above), Sam
Roberts asks, “Why are conspiracy theories so credible?” He then lets Prof. Goldberg answer, “Each
player in the real or imagined plots—the seekers of secrets and the keepers of
secrets—inevitably performs to character, favoring what Professor Goldberg
explains is the requisite confrontation that conspiracism (my italics) demands.”
Continuing, Roberts writes, “Contradictions and consistency each are seized
upon as evidence by Byzantine conspiracies that become as difficult to disprove
as to prove. The establishment press
dutifully parrots the government line.
Ham-handed officials repress dissent and plant informers, feeding the
siege mentality in which paranoid plots flourish.”
First I’d like to point out what is not obvious to
enough people, that all the “establishment
press” is not only corporate-owned, is fast becoming a monopoly, and has a
rather large stake in the business of
government. Then, as any whodunit fan
knows, there are no coincidences,
contradictions, or inconsistencies in
detective work. Every lead, every clue
must be followed to an acceptable conclusion or a district attorney could not
prosecute the case.
If conspiracism has
become an “industry” in America
as Warren
Commission supporters argue, so has debunking us “conspiracy nuts.”
“Apparently ‘conspiracy stuff’ is
now shorthand for unspeakable truth,” wrote Gore Vidal in Dreaming War (2002).
NECROPHILIA IN THE WHITE HOUSE
Two years after
Garson’s play stunned some politically-minded people, 60s icon Paul Krassner so outraged many
especially in government that he was denounced from the floor of Congress in
1967 for publishing in his magazine, The Realist, a spoof about Jackie Kennedy having
discovered on Air Force One returning
to Washington from Dallas “LBJ copulating
with the neck wound in JFK’s body.”
It has been
suggested to me by a number of readers of this essay that, in the interest of
good taste and credibility, I remove the preceding paragraph. I unequivocally refuse. In far worst taste is the successful
conspiracy to murder a sitting president and the cover-up of the crime by so many
especially the corporate media and including
the Kennedy family.
Krassner could not
have known the details at the time but in a way, his satire was right on the
mark. Two days after the assassination, on Sunday, Nov. 24, 1963, while JFK’s
body was still lying in state in the Capitol rotunda, LBJ approved the reversal
of Kennedy’s National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263 beginning the
withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam over a two year period, according to Peter Dale Scott in his book, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993).
Johnson’s NSAM 273
finalized on Tuesday, Nov. 26, launched the build-up that over the next decade
cost millions of lives in Southeast Asia
and tens of thousands of American
military personnel killed, missing and wounded.
But the conflict also made some Americans very happy. “The Vietnam War alone generated ‘business’
to the value of $200 billion,” according to Matthew Smith in his book Say Goodbye To America: The Sensational and Untold Story Behind the
Assassination of John F. Kennedy (2001
& 2003).
Adding insult to
injury, two weeks after the assassination, Dec.
6, 1963, Pres. Johnson awarded the dead Kennedy a
posthumous Medal of Freedom. The still
traumatized Bobby Kennedy, knowing LBJ’s role in his brother’s death, received
the medal for the family. This is of
course reminiscent of Mafia dons solemnly
handing gratuity-filled envelopes to the grieving widow at the funeral of the capo they just had bumped-off.
“The interests of the intelligence community, organized crime and
megabuck corporations overlap in
concentric self-serving circles,” wrote Warren Hinckle and William W. Turner in
The Fish is Red: The Secret War Against
Castro (1981). The book linked the CIA, the Mafia, and the military/industrial complex
with the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Kennedy
assassination, the Vietnam War, Watergate and the massive illegal drug trade in
South Florida at the time of publication. Hinckle, with very progressive credentials,
was a long-time columnist for the San
Francisco Chronicle and later the Examiner. Turner is a former FBI agent fired by Hoover, and author of
many books, some critical of the FBI as well as the Warren Commission.
LYNDON’S LEGACY,
THE VIETNAM
WAR AND THE ‘MIAs’
Under-reported
news--even by the alternative media--in May 2010 was about the American “MIAs”
(Missing in Action) of the Vietnam War.
According to Sidney Schanberg, the US government in general, the Pentagon,
the CIA, Senators John Kerry (a
Democrat mind you) and John McCain, and
the US corporate media all conspired to
cover-up the execution of about 600 American prisoners of war (“MIAs”) by the
Vietnamese because the US reneged on paying $3 billion war reparations.
No doubt you’ve seen the black and white flags, bumper-stickers,
pins etc. with the silhouette of a man’s head, a guard tower behind, and
lettered above “POW * MIA” and below “You are not forgotten.” Obviously the MIAs have not been forgotten by
family, friends, veterans’ groups and right-wingers, but their country, both
major political parties and the media has obviously betrayed them and for decades.
Sidney Schanberg, the journalist who broke this story
that has been covered-up for decades,
if you recall, is a Pulitzer prize-winning former reporter
for The New York Times and
author of a series of articles on the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia that led to the making of
the movie The Killing Fields (1984).
In the late 1950s, when the Vietnamese kept hostage
French prisoners of that colonial war for what was then called “Indochina,” the
French government made the demanded payment for war reparations and the
prisoners were released, reports Schanberg.
Three billion dollars
war reparations is spare change to the United States of America, the richest
nation in the history of the world,
made wealthy over a long period by exploiting smaller, poorer countries as well
as most of its own citizens.
Of special interest
here is the fact that both Senators John Kerry, a Democrat, and John McCain, a
Republican, are both combat veterans of the US war on Vietnam. McCain was even a POW himself for seven
years. And to make this betrayal worse,
the corporate media helped cover-up this story for decades.
Of
course Schanberg tried to get his expose published in the corporate media, but
to no avail. His piece was finally
published in a far-rightwing paper, The
American Conservative in a special issue titled “The Men the Media Forgot”
in support of a far-right “Tea Party” candidate campaigning for McCain’s
Arizona senate seat. The corporate
media rarely fails to report the inane shenanigans of
the Tea Party but has thus far ignored this shocking story.
If Schanberg’s
reporting is correct--and it rings true for me--is not this atrocity far, far
worse than the infamous “Malmedy Massacre” of 86 prisoners from the 285th
US Army Field Artillery Observation Battalion by German SS panzer grenadiers of
Kampfgruppe Peiper during the “Battle of the Bulge” at the Baugnez
crossroads near the village of Malmedy in Belgium,
Dec. 17, 1944? After WW II, some of the SS men were even
executed for this outrage.
And never to be forgotten is the
cold-blooded murder of mostly children,
women and old men in and around the village of My Lai, Vietnam, by American GIs
in 1968 that was as Nazi an atrocity as any perpetrated by Adolph Hitler’s SS
troops.
A popular bumper
sticker during the Vietnam
conflict was “War is Good Business, Invest Your Son.” Posters were illustrated
with Michelangelo’s Pieta.
Yet decades later,
the corporate media was still trying to include JFK in the blame for the Vietnam
debacle. In a Sept. 12, 1995, letter to The New York Times, former Secretary of
Defence under JFK and LBJ, Robert McNamara, took “strong issue with a charge in
an earlier op-ed piece that the groundwork was being laid for our tragic
escalation of the war before (author’s
italics) President Kennedy was killed,” wrote Ray McGovern in an article in Truthout, Nov. 27, 2009, titled “Obama’s Profile
in Courage, or Cave-in?” McGovern was a CIA analyst for twenty-seven years. And on Dec. 1, 2009, Pres. Obama indeed caved-in to the corporatists when he announced
the escalation of the war on Afghanistan.
In a review of the Academy
Award-winning documentary film, The Fog
of War by Errol Morris (2003), about the life and times of the former
Secretary of Defence who died in 2009, McNamara is said to have believed that “had
Kennedy lived, events in Vietnam
would have been different. It was
Kennedy’s stated policy that
the United States
should withdraw from Vietnam
by the end of 1965. Instead under
Johnson, we committed more than 175,000 men by that date.”
This writer insists
the entire world would be a different, more just and peaceful place had JFK
lived through a second term.
THE GUILTY MEN
In early 2004, Pres.
Johnson and his widow, then 91, were back in the news . . . about the
assassination. Mrs. Johnson, former
Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and former LBJ aides Jack Valenti and
Bill Moyers joined together to demand an investigation of facts presented in a
TV documentary about Johnson’s role in the murder of JFK.
Called “The Guilty
Men,” the documentary was a segment of a
series titled, “The Men Who Killed Kennedy” during “JFK Week” on the History Channel in November 2003,
commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the assassination. Matthew Smith, author of Say Goodbye to America was a consultant to the series.
The documentary is “the greatest, most damaging accusation ever made
against a former vice president and president in American history,” wrote Pres.
Gerald Ford in a letter Jan. 23, 2004,
according to the Associated Press, Feb. 3, 2004.
Pres. Ford was the
last surviving member of the Warren
Commission who assisted Arlen Specter with the “magic bullet” theory and author
of Portrait of the Assassin (1965). The book was of course about Lee Harvey
Oswald in support of J. Edgar Hoover’s “lone leftist nut” conclusion although
“it has never been legally established that Oswald was the assassin,” according
to Alan Weberman and Michael Canfield
in Coup
d’Etat in America
(1975 and 1992).
Ford was “a close friend of J. Edgar Hoover,” wrote
John H. Davis in his book, The Kennedy
Contract; The Mafia Plot To Assassinate The President (1993).
“He (Ford) was our
man, our informant on the Warren
Commission,” wrote William C. Sullivan
in his memoirs, The Bureau: Thirty Years
In Hoover’s FBI. Sullivan, during
this period was deputy director of the FBI under Hoover, second to Clyde Tolson in line of succession to the Director.
Sullivan, in turn, “was
secretly on the CIA payroll,
according to CIA operative Robert
Morrow,” wrote Michael Parenti in his book Dirty
Secrets (1996). Continuing Parenti
wrote, “He (Sullivan) was scheduled to appear before the House Select Committee
on Assassinations (HSCA) but before he could do so, he was shot by a man who
claimed to have mistaken him for a deer.”
In 1971, after
three decades with the FBI and as number three man with the Bureau, Sullivan
was fired by Hoover
for insubordination and disloyalty, according to Wikipedia. Robert Novak, the conservative commentator,
reported that a year later, in June 1972, Sullivan told him, “I probably would
read about his (Sullivan’s) death in some kind of accident, but not to believe
it. It would be murder.”
Five years later,
on Nov. 9, 1977,
shortly before he was to testify before the HSCA about the JFK assassination,
Sullivan was shot and killed near his home in New Hampshire. Robert Daniels, Jr., 22, son of a police
officer, shot Sullivan through the neck.
According to Novak, Daniels had a telescopic sight on his rifle. And Sullivan was wearing a bright fluorescent
orange jacket hunters wear to avoid such accidents according to Wesley Searingen
in his book To Kill A President. Ruled an accident, Daniels was fined $500 and
lost his hunting license for ten years.
Born in 1955,
Robert Daniels would be in his mid fifties now.
It would be most interesting to read his resume since the “accident.”
Sullivan was one of
six current or former FBI officials who died in a six-month period that year
(1977), according to Wikipedia.
“I’m puzzled,
bewildered, that a distinguished enterprise like the History Channel would put
on the air such garbage, such ugliness.
It makes one sick,” said Jack Valenti soon after the documentary aired
in November 2003. Valenti is author of a
book about LBJ titled, A Very Human
President (1975). Yet this same man,
Valenti, once said LBJ was a “mean bully” who “could humiliate you , both publicly and privately,”
according to Hershman.
Although the documentary was thoroughly fact-checked before
broadcast, “The History Channel apologized to its viewers and to Mrs. Johnson
and her family for airing the show,” according to the Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2004. The public declaration was made April 7, 2004, in a
televised rebuttal called “The Guilty Men:
An Historical Review” in which
three historians agreed LBJ’s
involvement in the assassination was “entirely unfounded and does not hold up
to scrutiny.” One of the historians,
Professor Robert Dallek of Boston
University and author of Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times
1961-1973 (1998) said the documentary was “corrupt, dishonest and
deceitful.” Yet it was admitted that of
the more than eighty percent of the American public who believe there was a
conspiracy to kill JFK, almost twenty percent
think LBJ was involved. Silly us!
In an editorial Feb. 13, 2004, The New York Times, called the
documentary “harebrained,” “what-if fantasizing,” and the “stuff” of “Texas conspiratorial
satires.” America’s “newspaper of record” has
all along supported the conclusion of the Warren
Commission despite polls that show an overwhelming majority of the American
people across the political spectrum reject the investigation controlled by
Pres. Johnson and FBI Director Hoover soon
after the murder that obviously changed--and quickly--the course of US and
world history.
HOUSE SELECT COMMITTEE ON ASSASSINATIONS
But of what value
is public opinion? More damaging to the
credibility of the corporate media that has long supported the Warren Commission was the finding of the
House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). In 1979, under the weight of new
evidence--including a Dallas
police dictabelt--the HSCA as much as admitted the Warren Commission was a cover-up. The Committee’s feeble finding--couched in legalese and
bureaucratic gobbledygook--there was “probably” a conspiracy, but too much time
had elapsed and the trail to the killers was too cold. Of course this revelation has not received
much media exposure over the past two and
a half decades that The New York Times has consistently supported the Warren Commission.
ARLEN SPECTER
In his memoir, US Senator Arlen Specter (R to D-PA)
writes of his time as an investigator for the Warren Commission. He’s the one who came up with the “magic
bullet” theory that he calls the “single bullet conclusion,” the idea that one
bullet ricocheted around inside Pres. Kennedy’s body, paused, then entered Gov.
John Connally and was found in “pristine” condition on a gurney in Parkland
Memorial Hospital in Dallas. This was to
support Oswald as the “lone nut assassin.”
Otherwise there would have to be more than one shooter. Brilliant, eh?
The bullet had to
be magic to have done such harm. It
accounted for seven of the wounds of Pres. Kennedy and Gov. Connally, according to David R. Wrone in his book The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK’s
Assassination (2003).
Specter’s defense
of a single assassin has since been proven false by among others Prof. James
Fetzer author of Assassination Science (1998)
and Murder in Dealy Plaza (2000).
Specter drafted seventy-eight
questions to ask Pres. Johnson “who would, under other circumstances, have been
considered a prime suspect.” But he
never asked the questions because he didn’t think LBJ had anything to do with
the crime.
But Specter
demonstrates his real chutzpah in the
title of his autobiography—Passion For
Truth (2000). Whoaaaaa!
When Sen. Specter
switched from the GOP to the Democratic Party in April 2009, Glenn Greenwald
wrote in Salon.com, “Arlen Specter is one of the worst, most soul-less, most
belief-free individuals in politics. The
moment most vividly illustrating what Specter is: prior to the vote on the Military Commissions
Act of 2006, he went to the floor of the Senate and said what the bill ‘seeks to do is set back basic rights by some
900 years’ and is ‘patently unconstitutional on its face.’ He then proceeded to vote YES on the bill’s
passage.”
THE ‘SMOKING GUN’
My personal doubts
about Oswald’s guilt began Nov. 23, 1963,
the day after the assassination, when I
saw on television a Dallas
County deputy sheriff
hold over his head the alleged murder weapon so a group of reporters could see
the vintage, Italian-made, Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5x52 mm carbine. The weapon was easily traced to Oswald who
bought it from a mail-order firm for something like $12.
I was amazed
because at the time, I had one just like
it that I paid about $8 for at a military surplus store in Austin, Texas,
where I was living then. I had been
invited on my first hunting trip by a co-worker, Sam Smith, at Texas Electric Co-ops
where I worked on the monthly magazine. City-reared
and a soft-hearted leftist, I had no intention of killing a deer but wanted a
cheap weapon to carry to “fit in” with the guys.
The salesman at the
gun store told me that at the price, it was a great WW II collector item but
recommended that I have it checked out by a gunsmith before trying to fire
it. A “gun nut” friend looked-up the
carbine in a book he had and discovered it was “the worst small arm
manufactured by any country during WW II.”
Because it was poorly-made, unreliable, inaccurate, and sometimes even
dangerous to the shooter, it was called by Italian troops the “humanitarian
rifle.” An old design (1891), it was
short-barrelled for close-range fighting, and slow-firing because of the bolt
action. Little wonder Oswald and I paid so little for our carbines in
1963.
Since that time
much doubt has been reported about this alleged “murder weapon” as well as
Oswald’s marksmanship. FBI expert
shooters could not facsimilate the shots.
Neither could three of the US Army’s best, rated as “masters,”
even after the carbine and firing conditions were altered to favour them,
according to David Wrone. None could hit
a moving target under the best conditions.
The Marine Corps rated Oswald as
a poor shot and a boot camp buddy reported that once on the firing range, Oswald
got “Maggie’s Drawers,” a red-flag meaning a complete miss of the target.
Michael Parenti says Oswald joined a gun club at the factory in the USSR where
he worked for a time and was such a poor shot, another club member would fire
at his target without his knowledge or they would be there all day
To top this, tests made of Oswald’s skin, indicate he never fired
the Mannlicher-Carcano carbine or any other gun in the year leading up to his
arrest on suspicion of killing the President, according to Wrone.
‘MEDIA POWER IS POLITICAL POWER’
Needless-to-say,
but please indulge me anyway, The New
York Times is arguably the most influential newspaper of the major,
corporate-owned, for-profit media which in turn is collectively the Ministry of
Propaganda for the US military-industrial complex.
Especially in this
most critical phase of US history, an accusation that a vice-president of the United States and member of the
Democratic Party conspired with members of the far right to kill a sitting
president also of the Democratic Party will not play well with voters who in
increasing numbers believe conspiracy is synonymous with politics. One need only look at how under
Republican leadership, the Democrats--with an able assist of the major
media--in 2003 helped literally “sell”
to the American public the war on Iraq.
Less than a year later, with the “liberation” going badly, Democrats and
the major media began leaving the sinking ship of state. The New
York Times even apologized for helping promote the war by not asking enough
“hard questions” especially relating to Saddam’s mythical weapons of mass
destruction. Wouldn’t it be lovely if
one day The New York Times would likewise ask some hard questions
about the Kennedy assassination. Yes, of
course there is a Santa Claus,
Virginia. But don’t hold your breath,
dear, for the truth from the corporate media about who killed Jack Kennedy and
why.
In a series of
articles in the early 90s, Jerry Policoff expertly detailed the corporate media’s
help in covering-up the assassination of JFK.
He especially cited The New York
Times as part of this long, on-going crime-in-progress. As I did, simply Google: “Jerry Policoff, media
critic” to read some of these well-documented and sometimes footnoted articles.
As for the
controversial assassination documentary, The
Guilty Men, of great interest to me is how it got aired in the first place
since the History Channel is part of the major media consortium. The Central Intelligence Agency, for
instance, has misinformation, disinformation, and infotainment down to a science,
thoroughly refining the work of Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of
propaganda, who in turn learned his craft from early American spin masters like
Edward Bernays, called “the father of public relations.” (Recommended: “The
Century of the Self,” a BBC
documentary first aired in 2002).
For this reason, it
is necessary for any seeker of the truth to develop and fine tune his or
her critical detector, also known as the
shit detector.
TV REBUTTAL TO THE
GUILTY MEN
In the interest of “fairness
and accuracy,” not long after “The Guilty Men” was aired on the History Channel
in November 2003, the same TV network televised a rebuttal by three history
professors, Stanley Kutler of the University of Wisconsin, Thomas Sugrue of the
University of Pennsylvania, and Robert Dallek of Boston University who was also
at the time president of the Society of American Historians. The show
was moderated by Frank Sesno.
The men spoke in generalities, none addressed specifics, none
questioned testimony or witnesses.
Instead they mainly attacked the “conspiracy industry.” At one point Prof. Dallek claimed to have “documentary
evidence” that LBJ had nothing to do with the assassination of John
Kennedy. But it wasn’t until later in
the show we learned he got his
information from an unimpeachable source--the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“The Warren Commission Report, for all
its flaws, is still the best and most comprehensible study of the Kennedy
assassination,” said Prof. Sugrue. And
all three agreed that most of their fellow historians agreed. Prof. Dallek added that he supported Gerald
Posner’s theory in his book Case Closed that
Oswald acted alone, period. Posner has long
been discredited by most assassination sleuths.
One day perhaps
Historians Without Borders will investigate these professors as well as what
many of us consider a “cold case”—the murder of John F. Kennedy.
Could “The Guilty Men” have been aired so its theory could then be shot down by “experts,”
further discounting us “conspiracy nuts?”
Or could this TV program and some supporting books be a “limited hangout”
which is spy jargon for misinforming the public by admitting, sometimes even
volunteering some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and
more damaging facts, according to Victor Marchetti in The Spotlight, Aug. 14, 1978.
Marchetti is a former CIA
official turned CIA critic and
co-author with John Marks of The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1973). “The public, however, is usually so intrigued
by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further,” says
Marchetti as reported by Wikipedia.
And remember, it
was the corporate media that in early 2004 badly wounded Howard Dean, at
the time front-runner for the Democratic Party nomination, not long after he
pledged to break up major media control of information in America.
“Yellow journalism”
is nothing new. Remember how William
Randolph Hearst rushed to judgment about the sinking of the US battleship Maine
in 1898 and stirred up such high emotions in his newspapers
nationwide, that the US ended up
colonizing the former Spanish possessions of Cuba and the Philippines and at the time even grabbed Hawaii
which was an independent monarchy. Many
decades later, in an investigation led by Admiral Hyman Rickover, the US Navy
discovered the ship--fueled by coal--was blown apart not by a Spanish mine or
torpedo but by an accidental explosion
of coal dust.
In his book, The
Media Monopoly (1983), Ben Bagdikian, a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote, “Media power is political
power.” And the fifty corporations, that at
that time (in 1983) dominated the major print and electronic media, helped set the national agenda, he
warned. Conflict of interest abounds
within these corporations where public information has become an industrial by-product. The US is endangered by the spreading
truth blackout, Bagdikian insisted.
Two decades later,
only five and perhaps as few as three major corporations now control
most of the information that Americans
depend on to make important decisions like who gets the lease on the White
House and for how long. And since November 22, 1963, it
has been the major media that has rarely failed to denigrate us JFK
assassination sleuths as crackpots.
The corporate media’s role in the cover-up of the JFK assassination
is “perhaps the most major propaganda lie in American history,” wrote Harrison
Livingstone in The Radical Right and the Murder
of John F. Kennedy.”
One such
investigator of the JFK murder, Ed Tatro, a college professor in Massachusetts, was one of five researchers featured in the History Channel
documentary. He has been writing a book
about the assassination since soon after it occurred. The reason he hasn’t finished the book is
because new and important information keeps surfacing, the same reason I’ve
been working on this thesis since 2004.
When in a telephone conversation early in 2004 , I told him I thought
LBJ was at the very pinnacle of the pyramid of the conspiracy, he told me he
wouldn’t go as far as that. But, he
said, since 1968 he has believed Johnson was “a central figure in the
assassination. “
A “well-placed
informant in Dallas”
told Harrison Livingstone in 1996, “Allen Dulles was a traitor to America. He came to Texas to talk with Lyndon after the Bay of Pigs failure when Kennedy fired him, and from then
on he was part of the plot to get Kennedy.” Dulles was, of course, the director of the CIA fired by JFK because of his mishandling of the
invasion of Cuba. Some researchers and analysts believe Dulles
deliberately botched the invasion to embarrass Kennedy and thus gain some
control over the President . . . and JFK knew this. Prof. James Fetzer thinks Allan
Dulles was at the very top of the conspiracy.
I’ll buy that and place LBJ and
J. Edgar Hoover just below Dulles at the top of the pyramid.
LBJ’S ‘MURDER INC.’
Another
assassination sleuth featured in the History Channel documentary in November 2003
is Barr McClellan, an attorney who worked for LBJ in the late Sixties. Much of the film was based on his book, Blood, Money and Power: How LBJ Killed JFK (2003).
McClellan claims two men close to Johnson helped arrange for him
more than a dozen murders including that of LBJ’s own sister,
Josefa, and . . . John Kennedy.
One of the men was Ed
Clark, LBJ’s top confidant known as the “secret boss of Texas” with ties to big oil moguls as well
as the Brown brothers of Brown and Root Construction Company (now called Kellogg,
Brown, and Root with big US
military contracts in the Mid East).
The other was Clifton
C. Carter, a close aide to LBJ and later executive director of the Democratic
National Committee.
CLIFTON C. CARTER
In his book, LBJ: Mastermind Of JFK’s Assassination, Phillip Nelson wrote, “His
(LBJ’s) political genius was rooted in his people-manipulation skills,
especially his ability to pick subordinates who he could depend upon to forfeit
their own values completely and, apparently, become extensions of his own
amorality; there were degrees, of course, and the most plainly illegal chores
were reserved for the two men who he decided were the right matches for such
assignments: Cliff Carter and Malcolm Wallace.”
Carter was the uncle by marriage
of my late ex-wife, the former Mary Sue Howse.
Carter married Mary Sue’s aunt, Mary Jane Garrett, in 1942 and the
couple had five children of whom the second oldest was named
Lyndon. Mary Sue’s first husband,
Don Shepard, also worked, but briefly, for then Sen. Johnson in the late
Fifties. Mary Sue, who
changed her name to Sedonia Cahill when we married in 1970, was the
granddaughter of Bill Garrett of Kerrville, Texas, who was an early and
influential supporter of Johnson. In the
late Thirties, both Garrett and Johnson were rare--for Texas--FDR, New Deal, liberal Democrats. But while Johnson abandoned the progressive
wing of the Democratic Party after WW II, Garrett remained. It may have been Garrett who introduced his
son-in-law, Carter, to LBJ at some time.
As executive
assistant to then Vice Pres. Johnson, Carter was riding in a car with Secret Service men immediately behind LBJ in
the motorcade in Dallas,
Nov. 22, 1963, according
to Secret Service Special Agent Jerry D. Kivett. According to another source at “The Education
Forum,” Carter may have been handling communications from the car. Later, Kivett saw Carter at the hospital
where JFK died.
At Parkland Hospital, Carter took charge of the
bloodied clothing of Texas Gov. John Connally, according to San Antonio
Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez as told to Harrison Livingstone. Connally, of
course, was also shot along with Pres.
Kennedy. It was Carter who months later
had Connally’s clothes laundered before turning them over to the Warren Commission,
clearly tampering with evidence.
“At the moment that
Kennedy died at Parkland Hospital in Dallas,
Cliff Carter was perhaps the second most powerful man in the United
States, one might argue, as Johnson’s number one assistant,” according to
Harrison Livingstone in his book The
Radical Right and the Murder of John F. Kennedy (2004).
Billy Sol Estes was
a major donor to LBJ’s fortune. He was
convicted of defrauding the US
government of many millions of dollars, much of which he kicked-back to
Johnson. He spent about ten years in
prison and was released in 1971.
On or about September 20, 1971,
less than a year and a half before LBJ died, Cliff Carter met with Estes who was newly-freed
from prison. Included in their
discussion were eight murders by Estes’ count and seventeen murders by Carter’s count. And, at that meeting in 1971, Carter
expressed fears for his own life. Two days later, Carter died at his home
in Arlington, Virginia, unexpectedly,
according to McClellan; of natural causes, according to
Livingstone; of pneumonia according
to Nelson; and in his sleep, according to Sedonia. He was 53.
Kyle Brown who
worked for Estes was at that September 1971 meeting and according to Phillip
Nelson, Brown said that Cliff Carter “regretted working for Johnson in the
criminal activities including murder.”
Brown described Carter as “remorseful, very sad, and very much ‘down,’
apparently attempting to clear his conscience, but was simultaneously warning
Estes that Johnson was becoming more and more paranoid,” reported Nelson.
In 1984, Estes had
his lawyer, Douglas Caddy, write on his behalf to the Department of Justice in
an attempt to gain “favourable considerations,” according to Livingstone. Estes blew the whistle on LBJ and his murderous
gang. Among other things, Estes related
that he taped meetings with Carter and LBJ.
“These recordings were made with Cliff Carter’s knowledge as a means of
Carter and Estes protecting themselves should LBJ order their deaths,” Caddy
wrote. While Carter has been dead almost
four decades, Estes—as of 2011—is still alive.
That same year, 1984, before a
grand jury in Texas,
Estes told of the eight murders he knew LBJ ordered. And he implicated Carter as well as Malcolm
(Mac) Wallace, the shooter of some of the victims and whose fingerprint was found in
the Dallas Book
Depository after the assassination of JFK.
According to a
number of sources at www.educationforum.ipbhost.com,
Clifton Carter served
under Ed Clark in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Italy in WW II.
The OSS
was, of course, the forerunner of the CIA. Born in 1918, Carter was in his mid twenties
at the time. Also serving in Italy then was James Hugh Angleton, and his son, James Jesus Angleton, a year older than
Carter and who went on to head CIA counterintelligence until he was fired or
forced to resign in 1975 for his role in surveillance of anti-Vietnam War
protestors which was well outside of the Agency’s purview. Under its charter from the Truman
Administration, the CIA was
mandated with only collecting
intelligence and only abroad.
It was Angleton who
recruited Oswald into the CIA
while still in the Marines in Japan. And Angleton was Oswald’s “chief handler”
until the young man was shot to death by Jack Ruby, according to Phillip
Nelson.
Are you sitting
down? One of Carter’s brothers,
Marshall, became deputy director of the CIA
in 1962 when Air Force General (four stars) Charles Pearre Cabel was fired by
JFK along with Alan Dulles for the Bay of Pigs
debacle. Marshall was a West
Point graduate who made it to lieutenant general (three stars). Marshall’s and Cliff’s father, Clifton
Carroll Carter, retired as a US Army
brigadier general (one star). Marshall
was DDCIA until 1965 when LBJ promoted him to director of the National Security
Agency where he served until 1969.
(In a posh
restaurant somewhere in the East Bay of San Francisco, not long after we were
married, about 1970 or 71, Sedonia, her three children and I had dinner with
some of her visiting relatives including a retired Army general whose name
escapes me. It was surreal in that both
Sedonia and I were in our best hippy attire with both of us wearing brass peace
symbols on leather cords around our necks. All were gracious to us and the
General and I got along fine chatting about WW II. I wonder now if it could have been Lt. Gen.
Marshall Carter.)
Thus Cliff Carter was well-connected to America’s dark
side, a don or capo in Mafia speak.
A native Texan,
Carter began working for LBJ soon after WW II.
Early on his specialty was smearing political rivals of Johnson such as
Sen. Ralph Yarborough, a stalwart, life-long liberal. In 1948, then thirty-year-old Carter, ran LBJ’s
Senate campaign and may have been responsible for the infamous ballot “Box 13” scandal in Duval County
that mysteriously and timely appeared
with just enough votes for Johnson to win.
Another important specialty
of Carter was “fundraising.” According
to Sen. Yarborough, Carter was Johnson’s bagman. “He was a very sharp operator. Lyndon could trust him to pick up the money
and keep his mouth shut.,” said the Senator.
After the assassination of Pres. Kennedy, Carter
became LBJ’s chief fundraiser as
executive director of the Democratic National Committee until 1966 when he was
forced to resign because of his methods of acquiring money for Pres. Johnson.
Clifton Carter was up to his ears
in the assassination of Pres. Kennedy. He was so close to LBJ, Carter even named a
son after his mentor. He was an important supporting actor in the drama that
unfolded in Dallas, Texas, Nov. 22, 1963.
THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF LBJ’S SISTER, JOSEFA
It was Mac Wallace
who shot to death John Kinser, a golf pro, Oct.
22, 1951, claiming Kinser was having an affair with his
wife. This may have been so, but Kinser
may also have been blackmailing LBJ for a “loan” for his (Kinser’s) golf
course. Johnson’s sister, Josefa, then
39, had been dating Kinser and may have supplied him with sensitive information
about her big brother.
A “wild child,” twice divorced, Josefa was so
promiscuous she may have been a prostitute for a time at Hattie Valdez’s “private
club” for politicos in Austin. She was by 1951 an alcoholic and drug addict,
with a keen interest in politics having worked on some of her brother’s
campaigns. She also had an obvious
inferiority complex and penchant for shooting off her mouth to impress others
especially about her brother who three years earlier in 1948 had won election
to the US Senate, some say, by stealing votes in Duval County. Because of the famous (ballot) “Box 13” incident, Johnson’s detractors and even some friends
called him “Landslide Lyndon.”
During the Wallace trial in Feb. 1952, with nothing
better to do, Sen. Johnson sequestered himself in a hotel near the courthouse. Wallace was found guilty. One juror argued for life in prison while the
remaining eleven argued for the death penalty.
But the judge sentenced Wallace to five years in confinement, then
abruptly suspended the sentence and Wallace “walked.” Even by Texas justice, this was a stretch.
According to Barr McClellan, it had been Ed Clark who
arranged for Wallace to kill Kinser obviously for Sen. Johnson.
Fast forward a decade…at 3:15 AM, Dec. 25, 1961,
Josefa Johnson, age 49, was found dead.
Embalmed later that Christmas day,
she was buried Dec. 26 despite neither autopsy nor inquest as required by Texas law. Her death certificate was signed by a doctor
who was not present to examine her body.
Cause of death on the certificate—“brain hemorrhage.”
In 1984, in a letter to Stephen S. Trott of the US
Department of Justice, Douglas Caddy, on behalf of Billie Sol Estes, claimed
that Estes, Cliff Carter, Mac Wallace
and Lyndon B. Johnson had been involved in the murders of a number of people
including John Kinser, Henry Marshall and…Josefa Johnson.
JFK, The Last
Standing Man is the title of a book Estes wrote
with the help of William Reymond. It was
published in France
in 2003 as JFK, Le Dernier Temoin. Reymond is a French investigative
reporter who also wrote JFK, An Autopsy
of a Crime of State (JFK, Autopsie d’un
Crime d’Etat).
MALCOLM (MAC)
WALLACE & HENRY MARSHALL
It
was Henry Marshall of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration who in 1960
first discovered the fraudulent wheeling and dealing of Billy Sol Estes. Because of Estes’ involvement with then Sen.
Johnson who was a candidate that year for President, Estes met with LBJ and
Cliff Carter to quiet Marshall,
according to Estes. When Marshall refused to be
silenced with a promotion, the trio met again January
17, 1961. (Coincidentally
this was the same day of Pres. Eisenhower’s farewell address in which he
exposed the “military/industrial complex.”) At the meeting this
time was Mac Wallace who Estes described as a hitman. “It looks like we’ll just have to get rid of
him (Marshall),” said then Vice Pres. Johnson, according to Estes who added,
Wallace was given the assignment.
On June 3, 1961,
Henry Marshall was found dead on his own Robertson
County, Texas ranch,
shot five times with his own .22 caliber rifle. First Sheriff Howard Stegall, then
Judge Lee Farmer ruled the death suicide.
The outcry of foul play eventually reached the ears of Pres. Kennedy and
his brother, the Attorney General, both
of whom, of course, disliked Johnson.
A year later, in June 1962, a Grand Jury was
convened. One of the jurors was Pryse
Metcalfe, son-in-law of Sheriff Stegall, who “was as strong in the support of
the suicide verdict as anyone,” and who pressured other jurors to agree, said another
juror, Ralph McKinney. But also
supporting the suicide verdict was FBI Special Agent Tommy G. McWilliams.
Despite overwhelming evidence of homicide, the jury
found it “inconclusive to substantiate a definite decision at this time, or to
overrule any decision heretofore made,” according to John Simkin, a researcher
in England
writing in the Education Forum, Jan. 31, 2006.
Probably before another grand jury in Texas, this time in
1984, Billy Sol Estes testified that soon after Henry Marshall was killed, he
met with Mac Wallace and Clifton
Carter at Estes’ home in Pecos. Wallace described how he waited for Marshall at his
ranch. His plans to make Marshall’s death look
like a suicide failed when Marshall
put up a struggle. Estes then quoted
Carter as saying Wallace “sure did botch it up.” Vice Pres. Johnson was then forced to use his
influence to get Texas
authorities to cover-up the murder.
Thus began an epidemic of suicides and mysterious deaths
eventually tracked to Vice President Lyndon Johnson who must have known that
his top political rival, Pres. Kennedy, was surely privy to this mayhem through
his brother the Attorney General. Later,
in the same year, 1971, Mac Wallace,
Cliff Carter, and Gen. Charles Cabell
died.
BOBBY BAKER
By September 1963, pressure on Vice Pres. Johnson
became extreme when media across the country reported even minutia of another
growing investigation, this time into influence peddling and business dealings
with members of organized crime by Bobby Baker known in some circles as “Lyndon
Junior.” And there was another mysterious death. This time it was the wife of a government
accountant investigating Baker, according to Joachim Joesten in The Dark Side of Lyndon Baines Johnson (1968). Her autopsy was inconclusive, thus no
criminal investigation was made.
Earlier, on August 21, Johnson met with Baker and two
other men involved in illegal activities concerning vending machines. Just knowledge of this meeting could have
ended LBJ’s political career and perhaps put him behind bars, according to
Larry Hancock in his book Someone Would
Have Talked; The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Conspiracy
to Mislead History (2006).
“On Nov. 1, the Senate voted $50,000 to fund an
expanded investigation of the Baker scandal and a major Congressional hearing
was scheduled for the morning of Nov. 22,” wrote Larry Hancock. Perhaps the first thing LBJ did upon
returning to Washington
after the assassination was to quash the committee.
The Bobby Baker affair together with that of Billy Sol
Estes may have made even the Kennedys fear taking the fall with LBJ. Thus many believe the Kennedys may have been
planning to remove the Vice President as soon as December 1963, safely in
advance of the 1964 re-election campaign.
In November 1963, Lyndon Johnson’s chickens were coming home to haunt
him.
A ‘SOCIAL’ IN DALLAS
In The New York Times hit piece on the
History Channel documentary, the editorial trashed McClellan and others stating,
“The book is rich in patently unhistorical touches, insisting that Johnson was
at a shadowy meeting on the eve of the assassination...” Of everything about the assassination of JFK,
this combination of party and meeting, so far reported by only two persons of
low rank, is a stretch of my imagination.
But if true, in the annals of crime, the Dallas meeting makes
insignificant by comparison the historic Mafia summit in Apalachin, New York, November 14, 1957,
when about one hundred Mafia leaders met at the home of Joseph “Joe the Barber”
Barbara to heal slights and better organize their nefarious business
enterprises. Almost by accident, members
of local law enforcement raided the home and arrested sixty.
“The direct and
most significant outcome of the Apalachin meeting was that it helped to confirm
the existence of the American Mafia, which some—including J. Edgar Hoover—had
long refused to acknowledge,” according to Wikipedia. Thus the most significant outcome of the
Dallas meeting might be that all along the USA has been ruled by the unelected—a
combination oligarchy and plutocracy.
Many of us who haven’t yet healed from the trauma of
the very public execution of young Jack Kennedy, and have hung on every word
written or spoken about the deed, have long known about the party in honor of
J. Edgar Hoover, reported by, among others, Madeline Brown in her book Texas In The Morning: The Love Story of
Madeline Duncan Brown and Lyndon Baines-Johnson (1997).
CLINT MURCHISON
The “social,” as Madeline Brown called it, was at the North Dallas home
of , Clint Murchison the night of November
21, 1963—coincidentally
the very eve of the assassination. (Reminder
: in detective work, there are no coincidents.
Every clue must be thoroughly
investigated.)
Murchison was a right-wing Texas oil baron purported to be at least
bi-sexual. For years, he lavishly
entertained his dear, old friend--the FBI boss who was definitely, totally gay
and a gay-basher to boot.
J. EDGAR HOOVER
So Hoover
was of course present along with his long-time lover and number two man at the FBI,
Clyde Tolson.
The couple flew in and out the same night on an FBI aircraft.
Now known to
history as a loathsome blackmailer, vicious racist and anti-Semite, far-right fascist,
gay-bashing closet queen, prudish
hypocrite, mean-spirited megalomaniac,
and more, Hoover’s reputation is
even worse to some of us survivors of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s Counter
Intelligence Program against the New Left in the late Sixties and early
Seventies. Two memos from my FBI files
indicate it may have been COINTELPRO that set me up to be beaten, gang-raped
and otherwise tortured while jailed for civil disobedience in Texas in 1968
because of my activism against the war in Vietnam. With what is known of Hoover today, it was probably The Director
himself who thought up the idea of
neutralizing activists by sexual assault, the humiliation of which is so
great especially for heterosexual males, that few survivors report this
particular brutal crime.
Bobby Kennedy, when
he was JFK’s attorney general and Hoover’s boss, once called the director, a
“mean, bitter, vicious animal” that fit perfectly Hoover’s mug and moniker, “Bulldog.”
In his review of
Noel Twyman’s book, Bloody Treason (1998),
about the assassination of JFK, John Kelin writes, “It is amusing, in a sick sort
of way, that Hoover
seems to be the one person who had no redeeming qualities.” He then quoted Twyman, “I have searched the
literature and . . . if there is something likeable about him I haven’t found
it.”
And on the far
right, Lawrence
Silberman, after discovering Hoover’s secret files in
1974 said, “J. Edgar Hoover was like a
sewer that collected dirt. I now believe
he was the worst public servant in our history.” Silberman was deputy Attorney General in the
Nixon and Ford administrations. Later he
was made a federal judge by Reagan and was part of the Federalist Society that
screened Pres. Bush’s judicial nominees.
In the Nigel Turner documentary,
May Newman speaks about the party and Hoover’s
attendance. From 1962 to 1997 she was a
seamstress and companion of Clint’s wife, Virginia. “The mood in the Murchison family home was
very joyous and happy for a whole week after.
There was champagne and caviar every day of the week,” testified
Newman. “I was the only one in the
household at the time that felt any grief for his assassination,” she
concluded.
On Saturday, Nov. 23, 1963—the day after the assassination of JFK—Hoover and his lover, Clyde, grieved
the loss of their President at their favourite pastime, betting on horses at
the Pimlico Racetrack in Baltimore,
Maryland, not far from Washington, DC. “The day of celebrating the death of JFK was
not one of total jubilation,” since Clyde had
a heart attack and they had to leave the track early, according to Darwin Porter in his book
J. Edgar Hoover And Clyde Tolson:
Investigating The Sexual Secrets Of America’s Most Famous Men And Women (2012).
Five years later, the
shooting deaths of two other men the couple disliked intensely—Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy—were mourned in the exact same manner
at Pimlico, according to Porter.
Like many associated with the JFK assassination and LBJ’s Murder
Inc., Hoover
died “unexpectedly” on May
2, 1972. Physically fit at
age 77, his cause of death was listed as, “undiagnosed heart disease.”
Four decades later,
despite full knowledge of the way J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI like his personal
crime family and with ties to
organized crime, his gross megalomania,
his unconstitutional methods of suppressing dissent, his role in the
political witch hunts of post WW I and post WW II, his homosexuality and outing of gays he didn’t
like, etc., FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, is still named after him.
H.L. HUNT
Also at the “social” was H.L. Hunt, even further to
the right of Murchison and perhaps the
richest man in the world at that time. It
was Hunt who paid for a full-page denouncement of Kennedy in the Nov. 22, 1963, edition of
the Dallas
Morning News. It had a bold black
border that would otherwise be used in an obituary. He stood to lose millions if JFK did away
with the oil depletion allowance as the President proposed.
In a letter to his brother, Edgar, dated Nov. 8 1954, Pres. Eisenhower
expressed his dislike for Hunt and other Texas
oil millionaires and called them “stupid” for their extreme right-wing
politics.
GEORGE R. BROWN
George R. Brown, one of the Brown brothers of Brown
and Root Construction, was there. During the late Sixties and early Seventies,
Brown and Root Inc. constructed bases in Vietnam and helped make Johnson the
richest president ever, far more wealthy than JFK.
The firm is now called Kellogg, Brown and Root or KBR and
is a “global engineering, construction, and services company supporting the
energy, petrochemicals, government services, and civil infrastructure.” It employs almost 60,000 worldwide and in the
US,
KBR is the biggest non-union construction company.
JOHN J. McCLOY
Another at the
party was John McCloy, an international banker who traded with the Nazis before
and during WW II and afterward was high commissioner for Germany. According to John H. Davis in The Kennedy Contract, McCloy was “the
incarnation of the ‘sound’, statesman-businessman,” and “could be counted on to
look after the interests of the military-industrial complex.” After the assassination of JFK, he served on
the Warren
Commission which “was controlled and guided through the titular ‘chairman’ of
the Eastern Establishment, John J. McCloy,” according to Harrison Livingstone. He was
also chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, a director of Chase
Manhattan Bank and an agent of the Rothchilds.
RICHARD M. NIXON
“Tricky Dick” Nixon, who years later may have ordered the Watergate break-in
to find out what the Democrats knew
about the assassination, was at the “social.”
For many years Nixon denied ever being in Dallas at the time of the
assassination. But as an attorney for
Pepsi Cola, he was placed in Dallas then at a meeting of the company, as
reported in an article in the Dallas
Morning News Nov. 22, 1963, just hours
before perhaps the most history-changing murder in modern times.
Still seething two
weeks after he lost the 1960 election to JFK, Richard Nixon called J. Edgar
Hoover, according to Darwin
Porter in his outing of Hoover
and Tolson. “The Kennedys taught me a
thing or two about dirty tricks, and I thought I was the master. One day I’ll get my revenge. I’ll teach the fucking bastards what dirty
tricks are all about. Watch me go,”
Porter quoted Nixon.
SEN. PRESCOTT BUSH & SON, GEORGE H.W. BUSH
According to
Nixon’s driver and also Hoover’s
chauffeur (the first black FBI agent),
then US Sen. Prescott Bush (R-Conn) and his son, George (H.W.) were at
the very same gathering. At one time,
George had worked for Murchison in Haiti. The elder Bush, who died in
1972, was a former Wall Street banker and so moralistic, he would leave the
room if someone used vulgar language. He
was also a six foot four Brahmin, fond of quoting Granville Rice, “It matters
not how you play the game so long as you never lose.”
Along with some
infamous robber barons of the time such as Rockefeller, Morgan, Du Pont, Pew
and Mellon, Prescott Bush has been implicated in a plot to violently overthrow
Pres. Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration in 1934, the year FDR first took
office. (Recommended: The Plot to Seize
the White House: The Shocking True Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR, Jules
Archer , 1973 & 2007.)
(Savoir of the day for democracy was then retired US
Marine Corps Major General and twice-winner of the Medal of Honor, Smedey D.
Butler, who blew the whistle on the conspirators who foolishly tried to recruit
him to lead the coup d’etat. Two years earlier in 1932, Gen. Butler very
publicly supported the “Bonus Expeditionary Forces,” military veterans seeking
relief from the Great Depression and led by Walter W. Walters. In his book, War Is A Racket, (1935 & 2003), Butler also implicates the US Army’s
highest-ranking, active-duty officer, Gen. Douglas MacArthur in the plot. It was MacArthur who led the raid with tanks
and cavalry on the encampment of the Bonus Army at Anacostia Flats near
Washington, DC, July
28, 1932, when the demonstrators swelled to almost 20,000 vets,
wives and children, many of whom where homeless and starving. Many of the ragtag protestors were injured
and a baby was killed in the rout. Then
Major George Patton led the cavalry with drawn swords.)
Like McCloy, Prescott
Bush also traded with the Nazis before WW II and well into 1942 when Pres.
Roosevelt put a stop to the treason but
without penalty. To polish his tarnished
image, Prescott
Bush got himself appointed chairman of the United Service Organization (USO)
and helped raise $33 million of other people’s money that year for entertaining
servicemen and women.
Another
source claims Prescott Bush didn’t stop doing business with the Nazis until six
years after the war when he helped in
the flight of Nazi capital from Germany to Switzerland, Panama, Argentina, and Brazil. And until 1951, Bush even aided the escape of
Nazi war criminals abroad, according to John Buchanan and Stacy Michael in The New Hampshire Gazette, Nov. 7, 2003.
LYNDON JOHNSON
Madeline Brown,
died in 2002--but after she was
videotaped by Nigel Turner, producer of “The Guilty Men.” In the documentary, she tells how a surprise
late arrival at the party was her long-time lover. Immediately after Johnson stepped in the
door, a group of men including those named above, sequestered themselves in
another room for awhile. When Johnson
emerged, he went to her, squeezed her hand tightly and whispered, “After
tomorrow, those blankety-blank Kennedys will never embarrass me again. That’s not a threat; that’s a promise,” said Brown on camera. In her book, she quoted her paramour as
using the more profane, “goddam Kennedys.”
In another video
titled “The Clint Murchison Meeting,” copyrighted by RIE and Robert Gaylon Ross
Sr. and available at prisonplanet.tv and youtube, Madeline Brown was
interviewed for an hour and twenty minutes in September 2000. At this time she spoke about the “8F Group”
and named others at the alleged crime summit—Cliff Carter; Gen. Charles Cabel
former DDCIA; the General’s brother, Earle, then mayor of Dallas; Texas Governor John Connally; US Marshall
Clint Peoples; Dallas Sheriff Bill Decker; Jack Ruby, Carlos Marcello and other
Mafiosi; Malcolm Wallace, LBJ’s personal hitman; and other lesser known suspicious characters
including some members of the media.
Long-time White House press correspondent Helen Thomas may have written
about the party/meeting.
A friend and former
researcher for the House Select Committee on Assassinations told me the man a
number of us agree was at the top of the pyramid of the conspiracy to kill
JFK—Allen Dulles—was at the social.
Perhaps The New
York Times was right. Maybe the party/meeting
was another bit of fiction, another
attempt to lead us away from the truth.
On the other hand, the men alleged to be at the Murchison home November 21, 1963, could
arguably be called psychopaths who often, because of their illness, get careless. They all probably had high IQs but definitely
low EQs and even lower MQs. EQ is a
measure of emotional health as described
by Dr. Daniel Goleman in his book, Emotional
Intelligence; Why it can Matter more than IQ (1995). MQ is moral intelligence, a term used by the
late historian, Howard Zinn, to describe high-minded, altruistic people
compared to the emotionally and spiritually ill. On Democracy
Now July 7,
2009, Zinn told Amy Goodman, we have to downplay IQ and upgrade
moral intelligence.
‘POST-HIT PARTIES’
As if this social wasn’t revealing enough, “There were three pre-planned,
post-hit parties in Dallas at private
homes of wealthy Texas aristocrats the night Kennedy was taken out,” according
to Professors James Fetzer and Don Jacobs in their book American Assassination; The Strange Death of Senator Paul Wellstone
(2004). Dr. Fetzer is a leading
assassination sleuth and author of three books about the JFK murder. Placed at one of the parties celebrating the death of Kennedy was George H. W. Bush, then an oil company owner
and, since 1960, a CIA operative
who played an important role in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961.
“I mean think about
it, the President of the United
States was just murdered and here they are
sipping champagne like it was New Year’s Eve.
It was a very creepy, surreal atmosphere that still haunts me to this
day,” according to one source at one of the parties as reported by Fetzer and
Jacobs.
And there was
celebration in at least one CIA
station when JFK’s death was announced, reports Hinckle and Turner in The
Fish is Red.
Thus far the
scenario that may come closest to the murder in Dallas is the movie Executive Action released in 1973 and starring Burt Lancaster and
Robert Ryan. Writers for the film
were Donald Freed, Dalton Trumbo, and Mark Lane who was one of the
earliest assassination sleuths. The movie disappeared for many years, but
has resurfaced in recent years. The film
portrays the oily, sinister types who were at the parties in Dallas the night before and after the
assassination.
Just how many coincidences does it take to make a conviction. “How many coincidences does it take to make a
conspiracy,” asked the late Mae Brussell, long-time assassination sleuth. Many people have been executed in America on
far, far thinner evidence. And who’s soft on crime?
THE ‘SEXUAL PREDATOR’
LBJ called Madeline
Brown “Miss Pussy Galore” and “threatened to brand her in bed like a cow,”
according to Jan Jarboe Russell in her book,
Lady Bird (1999). In 1950, Brown had a son by Johnson. Child support payments for Steven Mark Brown from Lyndon Johnson stopped after the
President’s death in 1973. In 1987,
Steven filed a $10.5 million law suit against Lady Bird, claiming she denied
him his “legal heirship.” Not long after
being arrested by the US
Navy and hospitalized under mysterious circumstances, Steven died before trial September 28, 1990. He was 39 years old.
Russell describes LBJ as a “robust lover” and a
“sexual gorilla.” In her book, Hershman describes Johnson as a
sexual predator whose hobby was
humiliating people--including Lady Bird--sexually and in public. Once while driving his Lincoln on his ranch
with two aides in the back, Lady Bird on the right front seat, and a female
friend in the middle, Johnson had his hand up the woman’s dress, according to
Russell.
In a conversation
not long after we were married, Sedonia, who was especially beautiful and
genteel, painfully alluded to Johnson’s
sexual proclivities which may have been the reason her first husband quit then
Sen. Johnson’s staff and the young couple returned to Texas after a short time
in Washington, a city both liked very much.
Just by the expression on her face,
I knew Sedonia well enough by then
to not ask for details.
In the sci-fi
movie, Time Quest: What if JFK had lived?
(2002), a visitor from the future tells the Kennedy brothers that
Jack would be murdered twice, once by
gunmen (plural) and later by character assassination...by the media exposing
every detail possible about his womanizing.
While LBJ’s promiscuity is only
now being revealed, JFK may have been
the first president whose sex life was made public, and soon after his
death. It was as if J. Edgar Hoover who taped many of JFK’s amorous telephone conversations
starting while he was in the Navy in WW II, was waiting in the wings for Kennedy’s death to tattle on him.
SOME REASONS JFK WAS ASSASSINATED
I maintain a long
list of reasons, seventeen to date, available on request, why Pres. Kennedy was
murdered. I would place close to the top, a fact that The New York Times cannot dispute.
On Nov. 21,
1963--the day before the assassination, mind you--The New
York Times was the first to
report on NSAM 263, Pres. Kennedy’s order bringing home 1,000 troops from
Vietnam by Christmas and the gradual de-escalation of US involvement in the
Vietnam conflict.
In the RIE/Ross
interview, Madeline Brown is heard to say, “The Vietnam situation went on as long
as it did because of the money involved.” But the late historian, Howard Zinn, had the
last word on that conflict, “When the United States
fought in Vietnam,
it was organized technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings
won.”
Another eye-opener
should be the fact the Kennedy team
was going to dump LBJ for the 1964 election campaign and Johnson knew it. As if that wasn’t bad enough for Johnson’s
massive ego, his chickens were coming home to roost. Johnson knew that Atty. Gen. Kennedy was
aware of much of the fraud and murders in Texas connected to him and he feared he would die in prison.
The Kennedy’s were also going to force into retirement
J. Edgar Hoover after the ‘64
election and Hoover—a
master control freak--knew this.
To people where I live in Northern
California, an important reason for the assassination was that
Kennedy might have at least decriminalized marijuana had he lived. Pres.
Kennedy “actually planned on legalizing ‘marijuana’ during his second
term,” according to Jack Herer in his book The
Emperor Wears No Clothes published in seventeen editions from 1985 to
2007. “Close acquaintances of John F.
Kennedy, such as entertainers Morey Amsterdam and Eddie Gordon say the
president used cannabis regularly to control his back pain” while still a
senator and later in the White House, wrote Herer. Industries that conspired against hemp
production in the 1930s such as newspapers, oil, chemical, pharmaceutical,
banking, etc. stood to lose millions if not billions in profits. So much for free trade.
Anyone who enjoys
murder mysteries knows to look for motive,
means and opportunity. John Kennedy
was far more popular with the voters than when he first ran for the
presidency. But he had made a lot of
very dangerous enemies among the rich and the powerful. An old saying in Texas is, “Fuck with the
bull, you get the horn.” To the
military, members of the vast intelligence community, the oil magnates and
other industrialists and financiers, Lyndon Johnson was the absolutely perfect
replacement for the “radical” from Massachusetts.
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY, R.I.P.
OR REFORM
Lyndon Johnson may have been America’s first
dictator. And exactly like another
world-class tyrant, Johnson was a loquacious know-it-all, a crashing bore who
could pontificate for hours, and a crude and ill-mannered boor. He was irascible, suspicious and vindictive. And above
all, just
like Adolph Hitler, Johnson was the consummate actor. LBJ made up his mind about something, then
bribed, bullied or blackmailed others to go along.
With his huge bulk
towering over his adversary, LBJ would
grab the man, drive a rigid finger into the man’s chest each time he made a
point, and to further rattle his prey, with his own knees, he would bang those
of the man often leaving them black and blue.
This was called the “Johnson treatment,”
according to Alfred Steinberg in Sam Johnson’s Boy; A Close-up Of The
President From Texas
(1968).
More than a decade
before Sen. Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunt unjustly devastated America’s
left wing, LBJ--the former liberal, FDR “New Dealer”-- was red-baiting in Texas
where he was also known as “Lyin’ Lyndon” for stealing the US Senate election
of 1948. Early in his career, LBJ
wrapped himself in the American flag and under the umbrella of national
security, he bilked the nation for all he could. He became
a “political general” and the “senator from the Pentagon,” according to Ronnie Dugger
in his book, The Politician; The Life And Times Of Lyndon Johnson (1982).
At a White House
party Christmas Eve 1963--little over a month after the assassination--Johnson
told the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Just
get me elected, and you can have your war,” according to Scott in Deep
Politics and the Death of JFK. Three
years later Johnson claimed, “If it (the
Vietnam War) belongs to anyone, it’s my war,” Hershman reports in Power Beyond Reason. And on one occasion, writes Hershman, “Johnson became exasperated with the
reporters who kept asking why the US was fighting in Vietnam. The President unzipped his pants, extracted
his penis and announced, ‘This is why.’”
Johnson’s work to
control--or kill--the Democratic Party began in earnest in the critical year of
1952 when the Party passed into the hands of the big corporations, according to
Dugger. Then Senate majority leader, Johnson
helped sell the country mainly to big oil and the defence industry. Johnson’s cynicism was unlike anything known
before in American history, wrote Dugger who knows Texas and national politics like few others
and is now a guiding light of the Alliance
for Democracy.
In essence, Lyndon
Johnson finalized the sale of America
to the big corporations. In business
speak, he “closed” the deal. Today a
company is selling U.S.A.
flags that in place of stars are corporate logos symbolizing “the allegiance to
and dominance by Corporate America.” They cost $25.95 at www.corporateamerica.com.
“The Kennedy assassination remains...the best route
into recent American history, “ wrote Robin Ramsay in his book, Who Shot JFK? (2002). If the Democratic Party doesn’t soon purge
itself of the same big corporations that own and operate the GOP, then we can truly
wave farewell to the America we once knew and loved.
‘LYIN’ LYNDON’
Lyndon Johnson didn’t have a
sincere molecule in his huge (6’4”) body.
Like he used patriotism, he used Christianity. In his book, Dugger describes God’s late
night visits to Pres. Johnson in the
White House which sound much like Pres. Bush’s relationship with the deity. As scary then as now, US presidents have the power to destroy much of the world.
Probably just grandstanding, then Sen. Johnson said in 1948, nuclear warfare is “ours to use, either to Christianize the world or pulverize
it.” Could Johnson have cued Bush from
beyond the grave?
Arrogant to the
max, especially as president, Johnson exercised his rank and one of his
favorite past times of humiliating people to the extreme. Outdoors on a trip once, a Secret Service man
complained to Pres. Johnson that he was urinating on the agent’s leg, LBJ
replied, “I know I am. It’s my prerogative,”
writes Hershman. Jack Valenti, does this
sound like A Very Human President?
Whether Johnson
led or participated in (1) the coup d’etat or (2) just the cover-up or
neither, his war on Vietnam was a
sharp turn to the right for America from
which not only the Democratic Party but also organized labor and democracy
itself has yet to recover.
“Make no mistake, the United States suffered nothing
less than a coup d’etat when
President Kennedy was killed,” wrote Matthew Smith in Say Goodbye to America: New
Perspectives in the JFK Assassination (2001). Smith further expresses his belief that the President was murdered on orders
from big business which he was in the “process of divesting of power in favour
of promoting a government which put the people and their needs first.”
Johnson, as good a prevaricator and master of the
half-truth as anyone, was asked later in his administration who he thought was
responsible for the death of his predecessor.
According to Matthew Smith, “. .
. President Johnson replied, ‘It was the oil men and the CIA.’” In
spook speak, this is called “limited hangout,” the release of truthful
information in order to prevent a greater exposure of more important
details. And of course LBJ excluded
himself of responsibility.
‘DING, DONG, THE WITCH IS DEAD . . .’
Exactly like J. Edgar Hoover was no real friend of
Lyndon Johnson, the Texan was no genuine friend of Hoover.
They both used each other like the psychospiritually ill politicians
both were. Before leaving the White House
in January 1969, outgoing Pres. Johnson called the FBI director, “I want extra
protection from the FBI, not just the Secret Service. I’ve looked after you. Now you’ve got to look after me. I’m the most hated man in America because
of the Vietnam War, and I need your help,” wrote Darwin Porter in his book J. Edgar Hoover & Clyde
Tolson (2012).
Hoover assured his old pal--with whom he used to trade
titillating sexual secrets of the Washington and Hollywood crowds—that he would
see to LBJ’s security but actually “J. Edgar had little concern for his
longtime friend now that he was losing his power. All his attention was focusing on the newly
elected president from California,
Richard Milhouse Nixon,” wrote Porter.
In a cover story
titled “Pastor in Chief,” about Billy Graham’s ministry to presidents since
Harry Truman, Time magazine reported Aug. 20, 2007, “Lyndon
Johnson was obsessed with his own mortality.”
Approaching the height of his unpopularity in 1967, he had an actuarial
study done to predict his life expectancy.
“He was always a little bit scared of death,” Graham said and wanted a
minister close by, like the time LBJ talked Graham into flying with him because
of bad weather.
Johnson even scripted his own funeral, asking Graham to preach his eulogy. “Somewhere in there, you tell ‘em a few
things I did for this country,” the President asked the minister.
With a long history
of heart disease, LBJ had a fatal attack Jan. 22, 1973, at his ranch on the Pedernales River.
The ultimate alpha male was 65.
Years later,
according to Tom Wicker, Richard Nixon, another disgraced president, observed of LBJ, “Till the very last, he
thought he could win (his critics). I
think President Johnson died of a broken heart.
I really do.”
Lyndon Johnson died
“ embittered and tormented, hated by his Secret Service managers and
guards. A nasty rumour circulated for a
long time that he was poisoned,” wrote Harrison Livingstone.
“When he died,
Johnson was in fact an old man, twisted by the failure of the Vietnam War and
the chaos of civil unrest, his hair long and with speckled brown spots on his
flesh. He had become his own worst
nightmare,” wrote Jan Jarboe Russell.
Meanwhile John
Kennedy’s ghost will forever haunt each anniversary of his passing and each
presidential election campaign at least until the truth of his murder satisfies
the majority. And Lyndon Johnson may
carry forever the epithet “the ugliest American.”
# # #
A lie can travel halfway around the world
while the truth is putting on its shoes.
Mark
Twain
For more information on the JFK assassination, try:
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Sen. Paul Wellstone
(D-Minn.)
who , except for his “untimely” death on Oct. 25, 2002,
might have been the Democratic frontrunner for President in 2004.
(Recommended : American
Assassination: The Strange Death of Sen. Paul Wellstone,
Professors James Fetzer and Don Jacobs, 2004)
Bro. Tom Cahill
Tom Cahill was
born in New Jersey, Feb.
14, 1937, at a time when fascism could have been stopped in Spain and WW II
averted. While still a teenager, he was
an analyst in U.S.
Air Force intelligence in Germany
and in 1957, he tried unsuccessfully—fortunately for him--to organize a union
of fellow disgruntled enlisted men.
Afterward he studied journalism at the University of Texas
at Austin and
since 1963, has been an advocacy journalist and photographer as well as a
firefighter, small boat instructor, and
groundskeeper.
In the late 60s,
Cahill published an underground newspaper called Inferno in Spanish and English in what he calls “America’s most
fascist city”—San Antonio, Texas.
Memos from his FBI files indicate COINTELPRO may have set him up to be
beaten, gang-raped and otherwise tortured while jailed for civil disobedience
in 1968 to “neutralize” him because of his “anti-Vietnam (war) activities.”
In early 2003,
Cahill served as a volunteer “human shield” at a water treatment plant near Baghdad during the
bombing and invasion. Later that same
year, he witnessed Pres. George W. Bush sign into law the Prison Rape Elimination
Act. He was invited to the signing
ceremony in the Oval Office because he was a survivor and the activist who
worked on the issue longest. He accepted
the invitation because of “curiosity” and describes the experience as “more surreal
than any acid trip I ever took .”
In 2001, Cahill
received an award from Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch for his decades of
work trying to halt the rape of prisoners.
In 2005, he was nominated along with Cindy Sheehan for the Agape
Foundation Peace Prize. The next year,
an annual human rights fellowship was named for him by Just Detention
International (formerly Stop Prisoner Rape), an organization with which he has
long been associated. Some other groups
he has worked with are the International Workers of the World, Earth First,
Amnesty International, Alliance
For Democracy, the American Civil Liberties Union,
and Veterans For Peace.
Cahill has
written about sexual assault behind bars, the fraudulent War on Drugs, the
assassinations of Pres. John Kennedy and possibly of his son, the U.S. use of radioactive munitions
and armor in Iraq and other countries since 1991, and other issues including
spiritual. He is currently researching
F.E.M.A. prison camps for American dissidents.
He has been a self-ordained syncretist priest since 1984. He
lives in a small community of
mostly aging hippies like himself on the North Coast
of California where he enjoys kayaking, sailing and collecting nautica.
Bro. Tom Cahill
Pastor, First Syncretist
Church of the Holy Pariahs
tpc@mcn.org
