The Man Who Killed Kennedy

by Roger Stone, Mike Colapietro

  Johnson knew that Nixon had his own connections to Mob boss Carlos Marcello. In 1960, Marcello had declined to contribute to the Kennedy–Johnson ticket and make a $500,000 donation to the Nixon campaign instead.30 It is reasonable to assume that Johnson was concerned that Nixon was in a position to “hear things.”

  Madeleine Brown insists that Nixon, who was in Dallas the week of the assassination for a Pepsi-Cola company board meeting, also met LBJ privately on the afternoon of November 21 at a suite at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas. Neither Johnson nor Nixon ever publicly acknowledged the Adolphus Hotel meeting or what was discussed. In fact, during the conversation, a seed was planted with Nixon that was intentionally designed to mislead him.

  To misdirect Nixon, Johnson told him of his concern for the president’s safety due to the atmosphere of hate in Dallas. Johnson warned Nixon of the dangerous rightwing cauldron that boiled in the city. Only weeks before US Ambassador to the UN and former presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson had been attacked in the street by an angry mob, which spat on him and knocked him to the ground

  Johnson had tried to use this line before. On November 4, 1960, he and Lady Bird were in Dallas at the Adolphus Hotel to rally support for Kennedy when the two were confronted by a rightwing mob holding signs that read “LBJ sold out to Yankee Socialist” and “Beat Judas.” Johnson alleged that conservative Republican Congressman Bruce Alger organized the riot (a claim Alger later vehemently denied). Using the protestors to his advantage, Johnson turned the event into an extravaganza.

  “LBJ and Lady Bird could have gone through the lobby and got on that elevator in five minutes,” said D. B. Hardeman, an aide to House Speaker and Texan Sam Rayburn, “but LBJ took thirty minutes to go through that crowd, and it was all being recorded and photographed for television and radio and the newspapers, and he knew and played it for all it was worth. They say he never learned how to use the media effectively, but that day he did.”31

  Johnson would later cite the same congressman who he claimed ginned up the “mink coat mob” to intentionally misdirect Nixon, setting him up for the death of the president, which took place only a day later. Johnson first thanked Nixon for a statement that the former vice-president had released in Dallas urging the courteous treatment of the president. The vice president then asked him to contact Congressman Alger, who Johnson said had been whipping up rightwing enmity in Dallas, to suggest Alger tone it down.

  With this clever deflection, LBJ laid the groundwork for Nixon’s subsequent conclusion that a rightwing cabal had killed JFK. He even enlisted him in a solution.

  In fact, Johnson sent Nixon on a wild goose chase—Alger attended the Murchison party only hours after Nixon and Johnson had met privately at the Baker Hotel. Although a virulent right winger, Alger carried water in Washington for the same oil barons who funded LBJ’s ambitions.

  After his midday conversation with Johnson, Nixon stopped by early at Murchison’s rightwing bash and was no doubt peppered with anti-Kennedy sentiment. LBJ arrived at the party long after Nixon had left, and his ploy to amplify rightwing hatred in Dallas had worked. It is not surprising that Nixon dialed Hoover in the hours after Kennedy’s death to ask if JFK had been killed by “one of the rightwing nuts.”

  Shortly following Kennedy’s death, Nixon was “very shaken,” said writer Stephen Hess. “He took out the Dallas morning paper, which had a story about the press conference he had had the day before. He had talked about how the people of Dallas should have respect for their political adversaries… . He was saying to me in effect, ‘You see, I didn’t have anything to do with creating this.’ He was very concerned that Kennedy had been assassinated by a rightwinger, and that somehow, Nixon would be accused of unleashing political hatred.”32

  Clearly the former vice president was stunned when Hoover told him a left-leaning communist was the sole gunman.

  The coincidental timing of Nixon’s trip to Dallas and the assassination is made a bit more suspicious by the conflicting stories that Nixon told of how he had learned of the assassination. One version had him in New York, taking a cab from the airport following his return from Dallas.”We were waiting for a light to change when a man ran over from the street corner and said that the president had just been shot in Dallas,” Nixon told Readers Digest in 1964. Another version also occurred in the cab ride, but the cab driver “missed a turn somewhere, and we were off the highway … a woman came out of her house screaming and crying. I rolled down the cab window to ask what the matter was, and when she saw my face, she turned even paler. She told me that John Kennedy had just been shot in Dallas.”33

  A third story had the former vice president returning from his trip to his New York apartment when the building doorman informed him of the assassination. Nixon’s confusion as to his whereabouts could be attributed to LBJ’s misdirection.

  Lyndon Johnson would later try, in vain, to derail Nixon’s 1968 comeback bid by calling a halt to the bombing in Vietnam and for three-party talks with North and South Vietnam. In fact, the Paris Peace Talks with the North Vietnamese had yielded no development to justify Johnson’s gambit. As Election Day neared, Nixon’s carefully crafted comeback was stalled while Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee, was gaining. Johnson figured that the peace feeler could give Humphrey a two-point bump as Democrats who had supported McCarthy or RFK came home to him.

  It is important to stress that Johnson’s announcement was pure politics poorly cloaked as foreign policy. Nixon saw it as a political maneuver to deny him the presidency a second time. Johnson knew that Nixon was boxed into publicly supporting his “peace talks” proposal.

  That is why Nixon launched a back-channel dialogue through campaign manager John N. Mitchell and Anna Chennault, the notorious dragon lady whose husband, Claire Chennault, had founded the Flying Tigers airline after their wartime exploits. Chennault was in touch with the South Vietnamese ambassador and passed a discreet message to President Thieu that the South should hold out for a better deal and refuse the three-party talks.

  Unfortunately, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI learned of Chennault’s back channel and advised Johnson, who was furious. An angry Johnson called Nixon to confront him, but Nixon denied any knowledge of the maneuver. Nixon aide H. R. Haldeman later remembered that Nixon, he, and traveling aide Dwight Chapin dissolved in hilarious laughter after hearing Nixon’s side of the conversation with Johnson and seeing him hang up.

  Thieu, sensing a double-cross from LBJ, was happy to comply. His announcement deflated the last-minute swing to Humphrey, and Nixon had the final successful chess move in his rivalry with Johnson.

  Nixon avoided risk and played it safe in the final weeks as his claim to a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam conflict without revealing any of the specifics began to hurt him with voters. His own polling showed Humphrey gaining rapidly, and he knew that the last-minute dagger from Johnson could be fatal. In the end, Nixon moved to counter Johnson’s potentially fatal thrust.

  Liberal critics would later charge Nixon with treason because Johnson’s maneuver was cloaked in US government policy. Nixon knew that LBJ was no closer to peace in Paris, and that it was a gambit. Johnson himself muttered that Nixon’s private diplomacy was “treasonous.”

  If Nixon was confused on the day of the assassination, Johnson was angered and impatient. According to a Dallas Morning News report that day, Nixon questioned Johnson’s future in the Kennedy administration. According to Nixon, Johnson had lost his biggest asset to the administration: the Southern states. Johnson was now “becoming a political liability in the South, just as he is in the North.”

  Reading through the paper that morning in Dallas though, one would see that Johnson was certainly not alone in the South.

  Kennedy had been handed an advertisement taken out in the Dallas Morning News. The ad, bordered in black, symbolic of an announcement of mourning, questioned many of the president’s policies, domestic and abroad. It was paid for by an organization cal
ling itself “The American Fact-Finding Committee,” whose most prominent member was Nelson Bunker Hunt, the son of oil magnate and Suite 8F member H.L. Hunt.

  The ad intended to voice the views of Dallas, expounding that the city was:

  A CITY so disgraced by a recent Liberal smear attempt that its citizens have just elected two more conservative Americans to public office.

  A CITY that is an economic “boom town,” not because of federal handouts, but through conservative economic and business practices.

  A CITY that will continue to grow and prosper despite efforts by you and your administration to penalize it for its non-conformity to New Frontierism.

  A CITY that rejected your philosophy and policies in 1960 and will do so again in 1964—even more emphatically than before.34

  President Kennedy jokingly incorporated his romanticized love of spy lore with the gravity of the ad in an attempt to put Jackie at ease, whose mood had taken a downward turn upon viewing it.35

  “You know, last night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a president,” Kennedy said. “I mean it. There was the rain, and the night, and we were all getting jostled. Suppose a man had a pistol in his briefcase.”

  Pointing his fingers like a gun, Kennedy then pulled an imaginary trigger.

  “Then he could have dropped the gun and the briefcase and melted away in the crowd.”36

  At 11:38 a.m. on November 22, Air Force One, carrying the president and his wife, touched down at Love Field. Kennedy was ebullient, staring out the window of the plane at the throngs of Dallas well-wishers.

  “This trip is turning out to be terrific,” the president said to Kenny O’Donnell. “Here we are in Dallas, and it looks like everything in Texas is going to be fine.”37

  The morning, which had begun drizzly and overcast, had cleared for sunshine.

  “Kennedy weather,”38 aide Larry O’Brien called it.

  Lyndon and Lady Bird arrived on Air Force Two a few moments later.

  Johnson, after a long night, was looking at an even longer day ahead. That he was viewed as “dour and perfunctory”39 that morning is no surprise.

  Dour and perfunctory were two attributes that Johnson embraced in his long, powerless time as vice president. The previous months, with charges and potential jail time now on the horizon only dampened his mood. Johnson was, by this time, an afterthought in the world of politics.

  That morning, he already knew that the laughter at, indifference to and charges against him would disappear. Despite the clearing weather forecast, Kennedy did not give the order to remove the top off of the presidential limousine. That order was given by Johnson aide Bill Moyers, who claimed to be echoing the wishes of the president. Moyers ordered his assistant Betty Harris to “get that Goddamned bubble off unless it’s pouring rain.”40

  Descriptions of the removable top following the assassination would give the erroneous impression that it resembled a clear, plastic bubble, which was not bulletproof and did not pose an impediment to assassination. In fact, the top was more box-shaped, and, aside from the side windows and a small decorative rear window, was covered in black vinyl, which would make it impossible for a sniper to see through from a high vantage point. Its removal was essential to a clear shot.

  Moyers, with a vital role in the assassination, would later use his considerable media influence and political connections to quickly extinguish any connection of Johnson to the killing of Kennedy. The Guilty Men, a program that aired on the History Channel in November 2003, postulated that Johnson was the major player in the assassination. Moyers quickly enlisted the help of ex-Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter as well as Johnson’s widow Lady Bird to move against the History Channel. The incident “is a strange one,” wrote Bruce Weber of The New York Times, “not least because of the people involved, who seem to have brought a great deal of thunder to bear on a controversy that might well have disappeared of its own accord. But it was important, Mr. Moyers said, to put the public record straight.”41 Indeed, Moyers wants anything but the truth. “Gerry Ford was always up Lyndon’s ass,” Nixon told me. Ford had been House Minority Leader during Johnson’s presidency. Perhaps that’s why it’s not surprising that Ford was among those who called on the History Channel not to air the nine-part series.

  The Men Who Killed Kennedy included The Guilty Men and had aired in the United Kingdom to critical acclaim. The series pointed the finger directly at LBJ.

  Before leaving Love Field, Johnson’s secret service ally, Director James Rowley, had one more measure enacted to ensure a clear shot from all sides: The police motorcycles were moved from the side of the presidential limousine to the rear. B. J. Martin, a motorcycle officer in the motorcade testified that “they instructed us that they didn’t want anyone riding past the president’s car, and that we were to ride to the rear, to the rear of his car, about the rear bumper.”42

  With the clock nearing noon, the twenty-two-car motorcade, extending more than a half-mile, began the nine-and-a-half-mile trip from Love Field to the Trade Mart. Jesse Curry and two secret service agents rode in the lead car. Curiously, two members of John Crichton’s Army Reserve unit —Deputy Police Chief George L. Lumpkin of the 488th Military Intelligence Detachment and Lieutenant Colonel George Whitmeyer, the East Texas Army Reserve commander—rode in the “pilot car” of the motorcade, a quarter mile ahead of the lead. It has been reported that the men bullied their way into the motorcade at the last minute. Crichton, a close friend of Lyndon Johnson and Texas oil tycoons, who was also a comrade and the 1964 running mate of George H. W. Bush, will be fleshed out in his relation to the assassination later in this narrative.

  Five cars back was the presidential limousine, code named SS-100-X by the Secret Service, which carried Governor Connally and his wife, Nellie, in the jump seats. President Kennedy was seated directly behind the governor with Jackie on his left.

  “Mr. President, remember when you’re riding in the motorcade downtown to look and wave only at people on the right side of the street,” presidential aide Dave Powers told Kennedy before the motorcade began rolling. “Jackie, be sure that you look only at the left side and not to the right. If both of you ever looked at the same voter at the same time, it would be too much for him.”43

  Following the presidential limousine was the “Queen Mary,” the Secret Service follow-up car carrying six agents and Kennedy aides Powers and O’Donnell. The next car was a rented 1961 Lincoln convertible, in which Johnson, Lady Bird, and Senator Yarborough occupied the back seat, while Rufus Youngblood, the Secret Service agent assigned to the vice president rode in the front. Lady Bird, seated between the vice president and the senator, acted as a buffer between the two feuding politicians.44

  As the motorcade snaked through downtown Dallas, Johnson’s peculiar temperament continued. He did not bother to look at the crowds that lined the streets but only “stared glumly, straight ahead.”45 At one point during the motorcade, Kennedy stopped the procession to shake hands with an onlooker. Johnson was visibly annoyed by the interruption.46

  When the motorcade turned into Dealey Plaza, onto Houston from Main Street, a perfect unobscured shot on the presidential limousine was offered to Mac Wallace, who was situated on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Wallace would have to forgo that clean shot because it would have stopped the procession before it reached the ambush site. Wallace would also have to hold when the motorcade took the 120-degree turn on to Elm Street. At this point, the presidential limousine was slowed to a crawl, allowing the clearest and shortest range shot to a sniper situated on the sixth floor of the depository.

  As the “Queen Mary” made the turn onto Elm Street, O’Donnell, concerned about the day’s agenda, inquired about the time.

  “It’s just 12:30,” Powers said. “That’s the time we’re due to be at the Trade Mart.”

  “Fine,” said O’Donnell. “It’s only five minutes from here, so we’re only running five minutes behind schedule.” />
  Precisely after this exchange, O’Donnell and Powers heard shots ring through Dealey Plaza and saw the violent reaction by the injured President.

  The first shots were fired as the vice-presidential limousine was making its turn onto Elm Street. Officer B. J. Martin, one of the police officers assigned to the presidential escort, later heard reports from officers in the motorcade who were treated to the curious sight of Johnson crouched down in his seat, reacting before any shots were fired. “According to the guys who were escorting his car in the motorcade, our new president is either one jumpy son of a bitch or he knows something he’s not telling about the Kennedy thing … he started ducking down in the car a good thirty or forty seconds before the first shots were fired.”47

  Parade-goers who lined the street offered a similar recollection. “Wasn’t that rather odd that Johnson was on the floor before the shot sounded?” one witness recalled.48

  The witness claims were validated by a photograph taken by Associated Press photographer Ike Altgens, who captured the vice-president’s Lincoln as it turned onto Elm Street one to three seconds after the first shot was fired.49 In the picture, Lady Bird and Senator Yarborough are seen clearly, riding and smiling to the crowd. The picture allows a clear viewing lane to Johnson’s seat, but the vice-president is nowhere to be seen. In his place, onlookers are seen to the left and back of the Lincoln.50

  Johnson would later combat the story of his preemptive duck and cover by claiming that Agent Youngblood immediately shoved Johnson and then jumped on him to protect him. This account was disputed by Senator Yarborough. “It just didn’t happen … It was a small car. Johnson was a big man, tall. His knees were up against his chin as it was. There was no room for that to happen.”51

  Yarborough also claimed to smell gunpowder as the shots rang out. “I thought, ‘Was that a bomb thrown?’ And then the other shots were fired,” he told assassination researcher Jim Marrs. “And the motorcade, which had slowed to a stop, took off. A second or two later, I smelled gunpowder. I always thought that was strange because, being familiar with firearms, I could never see how I could smell the powder from a rifle high in that building.”52