The Man Who Killed Kennedy

by Roger Stone, Mike Colapietro

  59. Ibid.

  60. CNN.com, April 28, 2012. “RFK assassination witness tells CNN: There was a second shooter.”

  61. Ibid.

  62. Turner & Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, pgs. 185–186.

  63. Witcover, 85 Days, pg. 306.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CUI BONO

  Cui prodest scelus, est fecit

  The one who derives advantage from the crime is the one who committed it.

  Out of respect for John F. Kennedy, who had been treated in Trauma Room One, Lee Harvey Oswald was wheeled into Trauma Room Two at Parkland Hospital after he being mortally wounded by Jack Ruby. Similar to the life-saving efforts performed on Kennedy, the effort expended on Oswald by the medical staff at Parkland was fruitless. The bullet had cut through vital organs, and Oswald had severe internal bleeding. The rescue attempt was, to Dr. Charles Crenshaw, similar to “preventing a boat from sinking when it’s taking on water, with part of the crew bailing and others plugging holes.” Looking on during the emergency operation was a man in a scrub suit whom no one in the room recognized. He had a gun protruding from his back pocket.1

  As Dr. Crenshaw continued the operation in vain, an important call came in to the hospital. Crenshaw recalls the phone conversation in his book, Trauma Room One:

  “This is Dr. Crenshaw, may I help you?”

  “This is President Lyndon B. Johnson,” the voice thundered. “Dr. Crenshaw, how is the accused assassin?”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The very first thought that I had was, how did he know when to call?

  “Mr. President, he’s holding his own at the moment,” I reported.

  “Would you mind taking a message to the operating surgeon?” he asked in a manner that sounded more like an order.

  “Dr. Shires is very busy right now, but I will convey your message.”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied, and the telephone went dead.”2

  It is suspicious that the president of the United States would personally call a hospital to ask for a confession from a dying alleged assassin. It is implausible that Johnson would have armed muscle at Parkland to take the confession. Still, the call and the armed visitor are proven facts, backed up by several employees at Parkland Hospital that day.

  “I vividly remember someone said … the White House is calling, and President Johnson wants to know what the status of Oswald is,” recalled Dallas neurosurgeon Phillip E. Williams. “I heard the statement in the operating room, and it was not Dr. Crenshaw’s book or anyone else who revived my thoughts about this because I have said this for years.”3

  Phyllis Bartlett, the chief telephone operator at Parkland Hospital that day, took the call and transferred it to the operating room. She stated that the man had had a loud voice and said he was Lyndon Johnson.4

  The armed visitor presiding over the operation was a federal agent. Dr. Paul Peters, present at the operation, remembered the presence of multiple agents vividly. “There were Secret Service men intermingled with the operating room personnel … some were dressed in green clothes as the surgeons … two or three shouted in his ear, ‘Did you do it? Did you do it?’”

  Johnson’s desperate attempt to force or coerce a statement out of a dying man was clearly the move of someone trying to tie loose ends, pin all guilt on Oswald, and separate himself further from the crime. Over the years, some of those still alive and connected to the assassination have come forward or have been routed out of hiding. Slowly, Johnson’s connections to the event have made their way to the surface.

  I had the opportunity to see Richard Nixon up close because I was the youngest senior staff member of his 1972 election campaign. As a political director in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 and 1984 campaigns, I carried Nixon’s messages on strategy and tactics to the Reagan high command. I did his political chores in Washington in his post-presidential years. I learned politics at Nixon’s knee.

  Nixon told me that former Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark had told him that LBJ had asked him to head a Texas state inquiry into Kennedy’s death and that “Clark wanted no part of it” fearing the public outcry over containing the investigation. Nixon intimated that “Johnson’s people convinced him a Texas-based investigation wouldn’t fly.”

  Over the years, Nixon would make veiled references to Johnson’s complicity in the Kennedy assassination. One of the more notable references was an off-the-cuff remark during the famed Frost–Nixon interviews of 1977. Nixon was touching on a comment made by Johnson’s Press Secretary George E. Christian regarding Nixon’s escalation of bombing in Vietnam.

  “We were meeting in the Oval Office, I saw the morning news report, and I just happened to catch it, and I mentioned it to George. I said, ‘Well I’ll betcha that President Johnson is gonna be real pleased when he finds that now they’re calling me the number-one.’ George Christian said, ’Oh, don’t be too sure, you know LBJ. He never likes to be number two.’”5

  At the end of the anecdote, Nixon’s smile curls into a knowing grin.

  In addition to his admission are the many witnesses in recent years who have come forth linking President Johnson to the murder of John F. Kennedy and others.

  The family of Martin Luther King, Jr. is publicly on record saying that Lyndon Johnson was part of the plot to murder Dr. King, the most revered civil rights leader of his time.

  Dexter Scott King, Dr. King’s son, told ABC News that President Lyndon B. Johnson must have been part of a military and governmental conspiracy to kill his father.

  “Based on the evidence that I’ve been shown, I would think that it would be very difficult for something of that magnitude to occur on his watch and he not be privy to it,” he said on the ABC News program Turning Point.”

  A possible motive for LBJ? Johnson knew how pivotal King had been in the election of JFK in 1960. He feared that Robert F. Kennedy would challenge him for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination and that King would back such a move. King and Bobby Kennedy had both emerged as critics of LBJ’s policies in Vietnam.6

  Johnson’s mistress, Madeleine Brown, and Murchison family maid, May Newman, confirmed the secret party thrown with heads of government and Big Oil leaders on the eve of the assassination. Texas Governor Allan Shivers accused Johnson of murdering Sam Smithwick who had written to Coke Stevenson and said that he was ready to talk about the 1948 voting fraud that had given LBJ the Democratic nomination over Stevenson.

  Before Stevenson could make it to the prison to interview the man, Smithwick was found dead and hanging in his cell. LBJ later told journalist Ronnie Dugger, “Shivers charged me with murder. Shivers said I was a murderer!”

  The first person to call Lyndon Johnson a murderer was not a JFK assassination researcher or an 1960s anti-war protester. It was a Tory Democrat governor of Texas who knew Lyndon Johnson and his deformed character and utter ruthlessness quite well.

  Johnson associate Billy Sol Estes, in a letter to the Department of Justice, connected Johnson with the deaths of eight people including John F. Kennedy. Texas Ranger Clint Peoples had knowledge of Johnson with his hand in a number of murders. George de Mohrenschildt was a link between Johnson, his Texas cronies, and the CIA. Before his death, E. Howard Hunt also helped provide links between Johnson and the CIA.

  All of the groups involved benefited tremendously from the assassination. Johnson avoided political exile and incarceration; the CIA had their war in Vietnam; Big Oil had a politician in office to legislate in their favor; and the Mob had someone to call off the dogs. Indeed, J. Edgar Hoover had his mandatory retirement waived by Johnson and was declared director of the FBI for life.

  Although Johnson avoided punishment for his actions, the presidency would be his penance. His power, which he had long sought, was an illusion. Johnson was now accountable to those groups that had helped him capture the office. The war in Vietnam did not belong to Johnson—it belonged to the CIA and Texas businessmen. And Johnson was a figurehead. Although he profited
greatly from Vietnam, it tore his spirit to pieces. He was crucified by the public for the war and spent his post-presidential years at the LBJ ranch racked with mental and physical maladies.

  He died before the war ended

  The destruction of the Kennedys would “bring to the foreground two vice presidents who had never been more than the shadows of other shadows,” wrote James Hepburn in Farewell America, referring to Nixon and Johnson. “For four years, Lyndon Johnson ran the country as his background and obligations required, concealing his conservatism beneath minor racial and social reforms.”

  Kennedy’s murder would clear the way for LBJ to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. It also paved the road there for his rival Richard Nixon.

  The assassination, noted Hepburn, was “rooted in a system that had produced a senator named Lyndon Johnson, and it was suppressed by the same system, now presided over by the same Lyndon Johnson.”

  Companies such as Brown and Root, Bell Helicopter, and oil tycoons such as Clint Murchison, H. L. Hunt, and D. H. Byrd had used Johnson to get favorable government contracts. And Johnson used them to get elected. With him as president, the oil-depletion allowance was allowed to continue untouched, and no one company in the country would benefit more from Vietnam than Brown and Root. Decades later, merging with Haliburton, they continued to reap wartime profits in Iraq.

  The obstruction blocking the truth had been the Warren Commission, a clever dog-and-pony show set up to obfuscate the facts and connections involved. Nevertheless, some facts have come into view.

  The following are all facts: Mac Wallace killed John Kinser. Mac Wallace knew Lyndon Johnson. Johnson’s attorney, John Cofer, the same lawyer who represented Johnson in 1948 and Billy Sol Estes in 1962, got Wallace a suspended sentence for the murder of Kinser. That sentence was eventually dismissed. Following the suspension of the case, Wallace acquired a job with Dallas defense contractor Temco, owned by D. H. Byrd, who also owned the Texas School Book Depository building.

  While investigating Wallace’s acquisition of the job at Temco, a Navy intelligence officer told Texas Ranger Clint Peoples that “the vice president”7 got Wallace clearance for the government contractors. Following the assassination of Kennedy, the fingerprints of Wallace were found on a cardboard box in the snipers nest and identified by an expert as indisputable.

  The CIA’s recruitment of Mafia chieftains to help dispose of Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro sounds imagined, but it is also a part of American history. Both the CIA and the Mafia relied on each other for survival in the face of the Kennedy administration.

  Lyndon Johnson, whose freedom and future were also threatened by the Kennedys, looked to allies in the FBI, CIA, and Mafia to help him. Big Oil, which had a tangible connection to the CIA through Johnson and Oswald’s handler, George de Mohrenschildt, was already in the bag for Johnson and vice versa.

  Inasmuch as Johnson needed elements from the government and the underworld to help him actuate the plan, they needed him. Johnson is the key to the Kennedy assassination. Johnson, and only Johnson, had the means to bury the facts.

  It is also astounding how many witnesses and those believed intimately connected to the Kennedy assassination met untimely and abnormal deaths. In his recent work, Hit List, which contextualized the many bizarre circumstances of deaths surrounding the assassination, Richard Belzer estimated that in the fourteen years following the incident, out of the approximately 1,400 witnesses, seventy have died unnaturally.8 The odds of this happening has been mathematically calculated as 1 in 715 million trillion trillion.9 Lyndon Johnson, as a psychopathic serial murderer, is not a pleasant topic to think about for establishment liberals who like to think of him as a belated champion of civil rights, voting rights, and a slew of Great Society programs. In fact, acknowledging the JFK assassination for what it was—a coup d’état—is discrediting to the narrative of the United States as a beacon of democracy, freedom, and justice as well as a place that is morally superior to banana republics and third-world dictatorships. Establishment conservatives, just like the liberals, choke on that bone in unison.

  Historians have found themselves in a prime position to bury the facts. Mac Wallace is absent from the exhaustive four-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro. Wallace, such an integral piece of the Johnson story, does not get as much as a mention in any of the books. Also missing is any information from Madeline Brown, Johnson’s mistress, who made herself readily available for assassination research over the years. Information supplied by Billy Sol Estes, who accused Johnson of eight murders. The phone call Johnson made to Parkland Hospital during the Oswald operation is unaccounted for or simply overlooked.

  Even today, the coverup continues. The newest Nixon tapes are rife with deletions—segments censored by the US government for “national security” reasons. Most of these edits occurred during discussions involving the Bay of Pigs, E. Howard Hunt, and John F. Kennedy. On the White House tape, recorded in May of 1972, Nixon told White House counsel, “Why don’t we play the game a bit smarter for a change. They pinned the assassination of Kennedy on the right wing, the Birchers. It was done by a communist, and it was the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated.” Nixon is clearly talking about the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald was a communist. The Left had tried to blame the Right until the government laid out the “Oswald was a Red” line. Nixon had known since 1963 that Oswald was not a communist but a CIA pawn in the grand conspiracy yoked by Lyndon Johnson and abetted by the Mob.

  Books like those written by Gerald Posner and Vincent Bugliosi are as threatening to the truth as the Warren Commission. They distort the official record, lay out brass tacks, and throw on a layer of varnish. In a way, Posner and Bugliosi have not only taken the safe but also the smart road. Anyone who asks probing questions, no matter how sound, are dismissed as crackpots. Courageous Americans who have dedicated their lives to seeking the facts of the assassination—citizens like Mark Lane, Vincent Salandria, Robert Morrow, Raymond Marcus, and Mary Ferrell—have earned this flaky distinction. Many who questioned the official story were branded as treasonous. Today, years later, they are tagged by some in the mainstream media as just plain nuts.

  It is no wonder Caro chose not to interview important people in Johnson’s life, who held convictions and information connecting him to the assassination. Caro was certainly correct in following this avenue if his goals were respect and profit—he has earned both from the literary community. But in terms of spine and veracity, Caro fails.

  Bill O’Reilly put up a similar smokescreen in his recent interpretation of the assassination, Killing Kennedy.

  “This is a fact-based book, so we don’t chase any conspiracy theories,” O’Reilly said during the book’s promotion.10

  Mr. O’Reilly, pegging Oswald as the lone assassin, knows that the facts are not on his side, so he dodges them. He doesn’t register that Oswald was deemed a “rather poor shot” in his last rifle test before the assassination. In the O’Reilly book, Oswald, as a former Marine Corps sharpshooter, “knows how to clean, maintain, load, and aim the weapon.”11 Reinforcing Oswald as a professional marksman, O’Reilly’s Oswald shows up at the Sports Drome Rifle Range a week prior to the assassination for target practice, and Sterling Wood, a thirteen-year-old boy, identifies him later to the Warren Commission. O’Reilly uses this testimony to build a case for Oswald’s presence at the range.

  The testimony of Malcolm Howard Price, however, is absent from O’Reilly’s account. Price, a retiree, who sometimes helped out at the rifle range, saw the man who resembled Oswald show up on several occasions. The man whom Price saw drove an old Ford; the real Oswald could not drive a car. Price also testified that he had seen the man show up at the range following the assassination:

  MR. PRICE: That’s right, I was down there for the turkey shoot we had.

  MR. LIEBELER: You saw him at the rifle range that day?

  MR. PRICE: Yes.

  MR. LIEBELER: Well, the last Sun
day before Thanksgiving was after the assassination.

  MR. PRICE: It was after?

  MR. LIEBELER: Yes. And you saw this man at the rifle range, you saw Oswald at the rifle range after the assassination?

  MR. PRICE: I believe I did because that was the last time I went down there.12

  For reasons unknown, O’Reilly includes Wood’s recollection of the Oswald look-alike gathering the bullet casings after each round and putting them in his pocket, a move indicative of a methodical planner. Contrarily, the bullet casings on the sixth floor of the Book Depository were haphazardly left behind.

  O’Reilly neglects to mention the paraffin test, which came back negative on the cheek of Oswald and does not mention that the recreations of the shooting with expert marksmen were unsuccessful. The Magic Bullet Theory, which defies logic, science, and sworn testimony, is blindly accepted in Killing Kennedy. The book concludes that only three shots were fired in Dealey Plaza—the HSCA’s Dictabelt recording test proved that at least six shots had been fired.

  Killing Kennedy paints Oswald as frantic following the shooting. “He races to get out of the depository,”13 writes O’Reilly. This depiction is at odds with every eyewitness who saw Oswald on his way out of the building. When Roy Truly and Officer Marrion L. Baker first confront Oswald immediately after the assassination, Oswald is not on his way out—he is in the second floor cafeteria drinking a soda. When Mrs. Robert Reid later confronts him on the second floor, Oswald is “moving at a very slow pace,”14 and not racing anywhere.

  O’Reilly’s version of the assassination mirrors that of the Warren Commission. Both reach faulty conclusions.

  “There was not another gunman,” O’Reilly recently opined on the talk show, The View. “He [Oswald] was the gunman.”15 This assessment is completely erroneous. At least one shot was proven by the HSCA to have come from the grassy knoll.

  It is difficult for O’Reilly to assemble the impaired facts of the assassination to support his thesis. It is even harder for him to find a motive for Oswald to kill the president. O’Reilly’s Oswald devours literature on Kennedy, likes the president, and wants to be like him. The reasoning that O’Reilly provides for Oswald’s actions are an unharmonious home life and a longing to “be a great man.”