Madness in the White House
LBJ and His Role in The Murder of JFK
By Bro. Tom Cahill
‘Madness in great
ones must not unwatched go.’
-Shakespeare, Hamlet
‘There
are professionals and programs in place to deal with a president’s physical
illness but no machinery to deal with mental illness.’
-D. Jablow Hershman
Author of Power Beyond Reason:
The Mental Collapse of Lyndon Johnson
July
1, 2012 A Work-in-Progress since 2004. Not Copyrighted Please post
especially where prohibited. 14,859 Words (33 Pages)
INTRODUCTION
Creepy and cloying-as in sickeningly
sweet-was the taped telephone conversation Dec. 2, 1963, between
Pres. Lyndon Johnson who made the recording and Jacqueline Kennedy
newly-widowed by the assassination of her husband ten days earlier.
‘Darling’
and ‘sweetie’ is what LBJ called her in what sounded to me like he was making
sexual advances to the bereaved woman as in some Shakespearean drama about a
mad king.
The tape catches Jackie in her
breathless, baby-talk manner of speaking affected by women who thought
themselves powerless in a time before the women’s liberation movement took
hold. Ending another taped conversation five days later, Pres. Johnson
tells Jackie to give the children a hug for him and, ‘Tell them I’d like to be
their daddy.’
Only now can we fully understand the
terror and disgust Mrs. Kennedy must have felt toward Lyndon Johnson at that
time. Revealed in early August 2011 is another tape-an interview made a few
months after the assassination in which Mrs. Kennedy told historian Arthur
Schlesinger Jr. that she believed then U.S. Vice-Pres. Lyndon Johnson
and his friends had her husband killed in Dallas the previous Nov. 22.
Fearful for her family, Mrs. Kennedy did not want the tape or other material
about the assassination released for fifty years after her death. But for some
reason, her daughter, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg chose to release this
bombshell now, according to Liz Thomas in the London Daily
Mail, August 8, 2011.
What gives extra credence to this latest
tape is Mrs. Kennedy’s admission to Schlesinger of having affairs of her own in
retaliation for her husband’s flings.
Why did Mrs. Schlossberg release the tape
in 2011, only seventeen years after her mother’s death? Now-a year later—I
still haven’t read or heard any repercussions due to this information leak to
the media.
Lyndon Johnson’s vices might have been,
but not necessarily in this order, ‘Alcohol, women, slaughtering wild animals
for no good reason, wild rides in his convertible driving with a beer or scotch
in his hand and other reckless behaviour, financial corruption and ‘pay for
play’ sales of political influence,’ according to Phillip F. Nelson in his
book LBJ: Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination (2010).
LBJ’s own press secretary, George Reedy,
said of his boss, ‘As a human being, he was a miserable person-a bully, sadist,
lout, and egotist. He had no sense of loyalty and he enjoyed tormenting those
who had done the most for him,’ according to Nelson.
Just look at any photo of LBJ and you can
see the vanity and arrogance in his face. This includes one I took myself
Election Day 1964 that the Johnson’s liked and used as an ‘unofficial’ White
House photo, the negative of which is now in the LBJ Library.
It is not necessary
to bury the truth.
It is sufficient
merely to delay it until nobody cares.
-Napoleon Bonaparte
Pres. Barak Obama is no anomaly. His
administration is no real departure from the direction in which the U.S.
government has been going since the advent of the National Security State in
1947 and especially since the Democratic Party, organized labor
and democracy itself died in Dallas with John Kennedy almost a half century
ago. Enough time has now lapsed for us to see that the Obama administration is
obviously taking the very same route as its predecessors despite the President’s
2008 election campaign promises to the contrary. Michael Parenti, one
of America’s leading left-wing dissidents and long-time articulate critic
of the Warren Commission, describes most governments in history as
having a ‘gangster nature. ‘I would add to this, most people serving at high
level in government are criminally insane by the strictest definition of the
term. George W. Bush and Lyndon Johnson, for me, are perfect examples.
‘Understand Dallas, that is the start of
the cure of the cancer on the presidency,’ wrote Carl Oglesby in The
Yankee and Cowboy War, way back in 1976 with ‘Watergate’ in mind. In the
past quarter plus century since this book was published, much in American
politics has changed and for the worse.
‘CONNECT THE DOTS’
Conspiracy in the assassination of John
Kennedy may not seem so far-fetched if we ‘reverse engineer’ major
politico/economic events from the ‘Wall Street Meltdown’
of coincidentally late in election year 2008 and the
following trillion-dollar bail-out, back to the fraudulent presidential
elections of 2004 and 2000, to the 9/11 ‘false flag’ attack on the US and
America’s war on Islam for oil that immediately followed, to Iran-Contragate’s
drugs-for-guns scam and the S & L bail out that on a graph, helped make
Reagan’s deficit look like a skyscraper towering over cottages and cabins of
previous administrations.
Then there were Nixon’s ‘Watergate’ and his totally
fraudulent ‘War on (some) Drugs’ that had nothing whatsoever to do with health
and everything to do with crushing the New Left and expanding and further
politicizing the criminal justice system. And in the end, LBJ’s war on SE
Asia was in direct opposition to JFK’s plans for withdrawing from the ‘quagmire’
that both five-star Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur warned
Pres. Kennedy it would become. Just ‘connect the dots’ and/or ‘follow the money
trail’ to see who won and who lost during these unnatural occurrences
and history-changing events. For a brilliant seven-minute course in
recent US history, politics and economics, Google: You Tube ‘Who
killed economic growth?’ by Richard Heinberg.
The assassination of Pres. Kennedy was a
sharp turn to the right and Lee Harvey Oswald was NOT then nor ever at the helm
of the US ship-of-state. As of now, every presidential administration
since that of LBJ has helped cover-up the assassination of Pres. Kennedy. What
the USA needs is a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that worked so
well for South Africa when that country transitioned to democracy.
Dwell in the past
and you lose an eye.
Ignore the past and
you lose both eyes.
-Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
‘Even more than the rest of the
South, Texas has been the buckle on the U.S. gun belt,’ wrote
Kevin Phillips in American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Policy of
Deceit in the House of Bush (2004). ‘Texans, in particular, have had an extra
hawkish chromosome or two, likewise caring little whether the rest of the world
agreed or disagreed,’ wrote Phillips.
Then Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson was
a ‘central figure’ in the conspiracy to assassinate Pres. John Kennedy
in Dallas in 1963.This is the verdict of recently published books and
a TV documentary aired in November 2003, the 40th anniversary of the gun
shots heard ‘round the world.
Unimportant ancient history? Perhaps. But
have you noticed how over the past four decades, the Democratic Party has
drifted further and further to the right under the domination of the big
corporations, the military, and the intelligence community—together known
infamously as the ‘military-industrial complex.’ This now famous euphemism
for fascism was of course a warning coined by Pres. Dwight Eisenhower
in his farewell address, January 17, 1961. Except for Pres. Kennedy who
tried to downsize and control the complex, Ike’s warning has been virtually
ignored to the present day.
Four decades after the assassination,
the USA had another president who polarized the country with an
unpopular war and—like LBJ—his sanity as well as motives were questioned by
growing numbers of people, according to books and polls. Did the murder
in Dallas lay the groundwork for the present hostile takeover of the country
by neo-fascists and neo-liberals? Or was the murder of John Kennedy a coup
d’état 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 a while.
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 ‘conspiracist’s’ 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, favouring 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,60’s 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 ‘businesses 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 ‘MIA’s’
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-right-wing paper, The American Conservative in a
special issue titled ‘The Men the Media Forgot’ in support of a far-right ‘Tea
Party’ candidate campaigning for McCain’s Arizona senate seat. The corporate
media rarely fails to report the inane shenanigans of the Tea Party but has
thus far ignored this shocking story.
If Schanberg’s reporting is correct—and it
rings true for me—is not this atrocity far, far worse than the infamous ‘Malmedy
Massacre’ of 86 prisoners from the 285th US Army Field Artillery
Observation Battalion by German SS panzer grenadiers of Kampfgruppe Peiper during
the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ at the Baugnez crossroads near the village of Malmedy
in Belgium, Dec. 17, 1944? After WW II, some of the SS men were even executed
for this outrage.
And never to be forgotten is the
cold-blooded murder of mostly children, women and old men in and around the
village of My Lai, Vietnam, by American GIs in 1968 that was as Nazi an
atrocity as any perpetrated by Adolph Hitler’s SS troops.
A popular bumper sticker during
the Vietnam conflict was ‘War is Good Business, Invest Your Son.’
Posters were illustrated with Michelangelo’s Pieta.
Yet decades later, the corporate media
was still trying to include JFK in the blame for the Vietnam debacle.
In a Sept. 12, 1995, letter to The New York Times, former
Secretary of Defence under JFK and LBJ, Robert McNamara, took ‘strong issue
with a charge in an earlier op-ed piece that the groundwork was being laid for
our tragic escalation of the war before (author’s italics) President
Kennedy was killed,’ wrote Ray McGovern in an article in Truth out, 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’état 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 ‘hare-brained,’ ‘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 Dealey 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 Pollicoff 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 Pollicoff,
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 Mainein 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—fuelled
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 lies 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 Cabell 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 A.M., 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 haemorrhage.’
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’état).
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 coincident. 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 Rothschild’s.
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’état. 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 millions 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 a while.
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 Cabell
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 elections 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 1930’s 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’état 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’état 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 psycho spiritually 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 long-time friend now that he was losing his power. All his attention was
focusing on the newly elected president from California, Richard Milhouse
Nixon,’ wrote Porter.
In a cover story titled ‘Pastor in Chief,’
about Billy Graham’s ministry to presidents since Harry
Truman, Time magazine reported Aug. 20, 2007, ‘Lyndon Johnson
was obsessed with his own mortality. ‘Approaching the height of his
unpopularity in 1967, he had an actuarial study done to predict his life
expectancy. ‘He was always a little bit scared of death,’ Graham said and
wanted a minister close by, like the time LBJ talked Graham into flying with
him because of bad weather.
Johnson even scripted his own funeral,
asking Graham to preach his eulogy. ‘Somewhere in there, you tell ‘em a few
things I did for this country,’ the President asked the minister.
With a long history of heart disease, LBJ
had a fatal attack Jan. 22, 1973, at his ranch on
the Pedernales River. The ultimate alpha male was 65.
Years later, according to Tom Wicker,
Richard Nixon, another disgraced president, observed of LBJ, ‘Till the very
last, he thought he could win (his critics). I think President Johnson died of
a broken heart. I really do.’
Lyndon Johnson died ‘embittered and
tormented, hated by his Secret Service managers and guards. A nasty rumour
circulated for a long time that he was poisoned,’ wrote Harrison Livingstone.
‘When he died, Johnson was in fact an old
man, twisted by the failure of the Vietnam War and the chaos of civil unrest,
his hair long and with speckled brown spots on his flesh. He had become his own
worst nightmare,’ wrote Jan Jarboe Russell.
Meanwhile John Kennedy’s ghost will
forever haunt each anniversary of his passing and each presidential election
campaign at least until the truth of his murder satisfies the majority. And
Lyndon Johnson may carry forever the epithet ‘the ugliest American.’
A
lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its
shoes.
-Mark Twain
For more information on the JFK
assassination, try:
This essay is dedicated to the memory of
Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) who, except for his ‘untimely’ death on Oct.
25, 2002, might have been the Democratic frontrunner for President in 2004.
(Recommended: American Assassination: The
Strange Death of Sen. Paul Wellstone, by 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 60’s, 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 syncretize 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 Syncretize Church of the Holy Pariahs
32000 Ten Mile Camp 2 Road
Fort Bragg, CA 95437
707/964-0820 tpc@mcn.org
Articles, essays, and works-in-progress
by Bro. Tom Cahill available on request pro bono publico.
·
Madness in The White
House about then Vice-Pres. Johnson’s role in the murder of Pres.
Kennedy
·
Eighteen Reasons JFK Was
Assassinated Why the murder is still important today.
·
Murder Most Foul? About the
possible assassination of John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1999.
·
The Corporate
Dictatorship about who has been running the US since Nov.
22, 1963.
·
War Is Good Business about
the U.S. ‘terror-industrial complex.’
·
The War On Drugs about one
of the greatest and longest-lasting frauds on America.
·
Torture in The American
Gulag about institutionalized sexual assault in U.S. jails and prisons.
·
Iraq Is Arabic for
Vietnam about the essayist’s time in Iraq as a ‘human shield.’
·
Beyond Treason about
the U.S. use of radioactive munitions since the Balkans war.
·
Bling-Bling
Capitalism about unregulated greed in the world and how to stop it.
·
Renaissance II about the
rise in consciousness today that gives hope to the world.
·
Who Are You? An exploration of inner
space-self-awareness.
·
Around The World in A Pocket
Yacht-About some adventures & misadventures in a collapsible sailing canoe
in the South Pacific, Mid-East & Europe in 1979-80.
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