Madness in the White House

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

(tpc@mcn.org)

“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 40^th 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 285^th 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:

www.john-f-kennedy.net  &  www.JFKmurdersolved.com

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