LBJ

by Phillip F. Nelson

  The best possible theory of a “lone nut” scenario was represented by the Warren Report; a comparable, comprehensive scenario for a consensus theory of conspiracy has never previously been written. There are aspects of the story you are about to read that nearly defy belief. But as the story proceeds page by page and chapter by chapter, a common thread will emerge that seamlessly connects one to the other. That thread weaves together people, events, and defining points in Lyndon Johnson’s sixty-four-year lifeline; it follows his continual move up the political ladder that started when, as a young boy following his sometime-delegate father around the Austin Capitol Building, he first tasted the perquisites of political influence and power over others–a taste he became addicted to and relished for as long as he lived. The threads Lyndon Johnson wove as he put his plan together, starting three years before the assassination, are now faded and frayed, but many still remain as evidence of his omnipresence. Many more of them are visible from the day of the assassination through the critical period to the end of the following year, the publication of the Warren Report, and the 1964 election. In fact, when he left the White House, his ultimate base of power, he quickly languished into a pitiful shadow of his former self, dying almost exactly four years later—what would have been the end of his second term, if he hadn’t created the disaster of Vietnam during his first.

  As the new president Lyndon B. Johnson became more familiar to the American people, they also found out more and more about his background. Earlier stories about the TFX scandal had circulated for a couple of years and had not yet gone away. The Billie Sol Estes and Bobby Baker scandals had similarly surfaced later, only after Johnson was the vice president and able to insulate himself from his long-term involvement with his former friends-in-fraud. LBJ told his Senate friends that one should not be judged by the actions of others; he maintained that he “hardly knew” these men, Billie Sol and Bobby, even though they were both close friends and longtime associates, and with each of whom he had been criminally engaged, as will be examined in chapter 4. Before the scandals broke, however, Johnson had proudly announced to the whole world that if he had had a son, Bobby Baker would have been him and that “Bobby is my strong right arm. He is the last person I see at night and the first person I see in the morning.” Upon becoming president, the investigations into LBJ’s criminal past were immediately curtailed, and then quietly closed.

  The events and actions attributed to Lyndon Johnson were well hidden by him all along his lifetime journey. Through his many enablers—his attorneys, Ed Clark, Don Thomas, John Cofer, and even the famed but flawed Abe Fortas and his extensive staff of aides willing to do anything he asked—Johnson was able to keep himself distanced from the worst of the crimes. But the tendons that connected him to those crimes, from the financial frauds and stolen elections to the murders of anyone who stood in his way, lay just beneath the surface, such that they were even exposed on a number of occasions but caught in time and safely covered back up. In those instances, criminal activities originating in the 1950s, during which he was majority leader of the U.S. Senate before continuing into his term as vice president, started unraveling on the front pages of major newspapers: the TFX scandal, the Billie Sol Estes scandal, the Bobby Baker scandals. All of these played out in the national media of the day, sometimes even making the cover of Life and Time and the other news magazines. The aggregation of these lesser crimes gave Johnson the confidence and resolve that inexorably led to the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy and put himself into the office of the president of the United States.

  Lyndon B. Johnson was given the benefit of the doubt hundreds of times—by his mother first, then his peers in college, his constituents, his wealthy benefactors, his wife, his colleagues in the House and the Senate, and finally by his political appointees* and the judicial system itself, which he found was malleable enough in certain key areas to be controlled through bribery and extortion. His most effective tool was his unique, well-practiced talent for ingratiating himself with others; this as well as the rest of his methods will be closely examined throughout the book. Johnson’s criminal activities, including his brazenly illegal fund-raising controversies and the fraud connected to his elections, culminating in the famous “Box 13” bogus ballots that at the last minute materialized to give him his Senate seat in 1948, will be reviewed. His political future came close to crashing a number of times; one of the closest, which involved the stunningly high-risk legal gambit created by Abe Fortas to get Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to fix the legal impasse of the 1948 election by awarding it to Johnson on a jurisdictional technicality, will also be examined in detail. Finally, his astonishing accumulation of wealth during the period of his congressional service will be explored, all in the context of how he was able to get people to look the other way as they repeatedly gave him the benefit of the doubt.

  Then there were the seven early murders to which LBJ has been linked by his former partners in crime and his longtime mistress, with whom he fathered a child. He did not need a pass or forgiveness for these sins because they were swept under the rug; the people who were involved had to wait until Johnson died to step forward, after having kept quiet for years as a result of his intimidation. Even after his death, the silence of news media afraid to expose such dark secrets about someone they had protected for so long kept the secrets locked away. All of his many successes in his criminal conduct led Johnson to believe he was beyond the reach of the law, because he knew he could pull enough strings to avoid getting caught, as he always had. When he became president, he knew he would be in a position to fully control the investigation that would inevitably follow the assassination of his predecessor.

  In 1960, Johnson realized that his lifelong dream of becoming president of the United States was finally within his grasp if he planned it well. But he also realized that it would be impossible to achieve through the conventional process according to which he would stand for election to the office. He knew that it would require a few more years of intense planning and the help of some key individuals acting outside their official roles. He also knew that the biggest benefit of the doubt he would ever need had to come from the American people, who were still respectful of their leaders and willing to suspend any natural suspicions they may have had, to give the new president ample opportunity to continue the government as seamlessly as possible. By exploiting their fears, he would gain their confidence in due course, allowing him to be elected in his own right after “proving himself” through the passage of important legislation that he himself had impeded throughout Kennedy’s term; such a triumph would allow him to be portrayed in the months before his own election as a great leader, having just arrived in town on his white horse, ready to fix all the world’s problems.

  It is not difficult to understand how Johnson became deluded enough to have vigorously pursued his dream at the expense of the country generally and John F. Kennedy in particular. Time and time again, he cheated at the election box, collected hundreds of thousands (millions in the aggregate) of dollars under the table through kickbacks and bribery, and eventually, according to certain of his associates, ordered the murder of a number of people who got in his way—all to advance his career. The evolution of the LBJ character was a long, slow process entailing the maturation of distinctive personality traits into a singularly unique individual: Lyndon B. Johnson was a nominally educated cowboy gifted with the genius required to formulate complex schemes involving multiple participants; a master psychologist’s skill at seeing inside the soul of others to determine their every weakness; and finally, a charisma that could attract and hold vulnerable men and women, that could impel them to do his bidding almost without regard to the moral implications of their actions—notwithstanding the fact that many of these men and women were seemingly well-grounded people of high moral character; others were not. Johnson’s unique talent, practiced since his youth and perfected by the time he was in Congress, was his ability to take all of his associates as
close to the edge of their own ethical margins where each could venture before falling into their own abyss.

  Of all the possible candidates mentioned variously in hundreds of books and in all the unpublished theories, the logical starting point might be this: Who was the single likeliest person who made the final decision to take “executive action” and brazenly assassinate the thirty-fifth president of the United States? Specifically, who, among the many enemies of JFK, met all of the following criteria:

  a. Who had the most to gain?

  b. Who had the least to lose?

  c. Who had the means to do it?

  d. Who had the apparatus in place to subsequently cover it up?

  e. Who had the kind of narcissistic/sociopathic personality capable of rationalizing the action as acceptable and necessary, together with the resolve and determination to see it through?

  Only one person matches the above criteria completely: Lyndon Baines Johnson, the thirty-sixth president of the United States, who succeeded his predecessor by the most unique method possible. The office of the vice president has never been one to which an otherwise successful politician has aspired; it had always been there only as second place for an also-ran candidate, who might aspire to the presidency in a future term. But Johnson knew that at his age, he didn’t have any future terms to wait out, and when he realized he could not win the presidential nomination in 1960, he aggressively campaigned for the vice presidency, even though JFK had already picked Senator Stuart Symington for the position. Indeed, it can now be posited that John F. Kennedy’s fatal mistake occurred over three years before he died: his agonizing and reluctant decision to accede to the threat of blackmail by Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover on July 14, 1960, at the Democratic convention, allowed Johnson to be named as the vice presidential nominee. This action put Johnson next in line to succeed JFK, an essential step in his plot to become president of the United States.

  Johnson was uniquely matched to all the criteria noted above, as the most likely person behind JFK’s assassination. In the chapters ahead, it will become clear that he met each criterion set forth in subparts a, b, c, and d below. By the last section of this book, it will be clear that subpart “e” also applies, just as certainly as do the first four:

  a. The most to gain.

  LBJ’s lifelong dream—obsession, actually—was to become president of the United States. Each time he voiced this dream, his resolve to achieve it increased, and he mentioned it often to others; one can only speculate how many more times he repeated it to himself, but it probably became a daily mantra.

  b. The least to lose.

  Consider the alternative to LBJ’s not taking action: impending indictments, possible prison time, and the permanent loss of his presidential aspirations, which he viewed as his divine and inevitable destiny. He faced a choice with enormous consequences: either proceed with the plan and go to the White House or drop the plan and go to prison, running the risk of still more of his previous crimes coming to the public’s attention.

  c. The means to do it.

  There was no shortage of enemies of JFK who would eagerly participate in the objective in their own limited way. Johnson had been a friend to many of them, and their common wish was bound to surface during their social affairs. The conversations he had with his good friend and neighbor of nearly twenty years, J. Edgar Hoover, might have centered on this plan since the point at which he enlisted Hoover to help force Kennedy to accept him as the vice presidential nominee. His many back channels to the highest officials of the Pentagon and CIA, many of whom were increasingly desirous of replacing JFK as quickly as possible, would provide him with the devices he would need to execute the plan and its immediate cover-up.

  d. The apparatus in place to cover it up.

  Once he was sworn in as president, the entire federal government was his to run. All other governmental entities, including individual local officeholders such as Dallas Police Captain Will Fritz and the district attorney, Henry Wade, were under his control through the basic and natural deference with which people treated the president of the United States.

  e. The kind of narcissistic/psychotic/sociopathic/mendacious personality capable of rationalizing the action as acceptable and necessary, as the means to an ultimate end, as well as the resolve and determination to see it through.

  Only someone whose conduct was unconstrained by his conscience could generate an act as heinous as the murder of the president. Lyndon B. Johnson was such a person. He had engaged in numerous crimes during his political career, including stealing elections during his college days and even in the inconsequential “Little Congress” through his initial elevation to the Senate in 1948. Subsequently, he became involved with mobsters and was paid off by them for protecting their illegal activities; furthermore, his involvement with convicted con man Billie Sol Estes, who implicated Johnson in several murders, will be shown, in addition to him having had his own hit man, Malcolm “Mac” Wallace. Johnson managed to corrupt the Texas judicial system such that Wallace was given, incredibly, a five-year suspended sentence after being found guilty of first-degree murder. Additionally, two of LBJ’s aides in the White House, Bill Moyers and Richard Goodwin, became so concerned about his behavior that they independently consulted psychiatrists to discuss those concerns; both of them would resign in due course. Barr McClellan, who knew LBJ and worked for him as an attorney, called him “psychopathic” and said, “He was willing to kill. And he did.” Moreover, McClellan also stated that “his criminal career was capped with the assassination of President Kennedy.”4

  By lowering the threshold for giving LBJ the benefit of the doubt to an extremely circumspect level, it follows that all of those who have testified against him—or who have been thwarted in their efforts to do so, and the scores of assassination witnesses who were ignored (and/or threatened, injured, or killed) because their testimony was not congruent with the “official” version—should be simultaneously and retroactively validated in recognition of their courage and to compensate for almost five decades of abuse and ridicule. The testimony of otherwise ignored witnesses, like Jean Hill, will finally be given appropriate consideration. The solid evidence that has disappeared—the missing photographs of Oswald in Mexico City, the real autopsy photos of JFK that doctors and photographers have stated no longer exist, everything else that was systematically withheld from the Warren Commission—will be introduced as though it still exists and portrays what credible witnesses have stated it portrays. Evidence that has been fabricated will be scrutinized and examined in a way opposite to what was intended by the perpetrators. It also means that other witnesses, despite their own shadowy backgrounds or the fact that they have criminal convictions (like Billie Sol Estes), will be given the courtesy of at least as much credibility as has been extended to Lyndon Johnson all these years. It is only fair that these men and women, who were caught up in the crimes that he orchestrated over a period of many years, be given the same benefit of the doubt that he was granted over his entire lifetime and for four decades beyond. This kind of focused and critical reexamination of the facts is the only conceivable way to get to the truth of the JFK assassination. Much of the case against Johnson relies upon statements and assertions of specific individuals, including one of his mistresses, a lawyer employed by the Austin law firm that handled his political business, and his partners in crime or the cover-up, some of whom have not previously been given sufficient attention by other authors. The descriptions of Johnson’s behavior contained within are based upon numerous examples cited by historians and others—his peers, friends, neighbors, attorneys, aides, associates, lovers, and a few enemies—together with logical extrapolations reflecting the patterns he established over many years. The stories told by one of the lawyers who worked for him, Barr McClellan, also support this approach because of the compelling case he made regarding the extent of Johnson’s criminal history. While Johnson was never convicted for any of his criminal activities, in 1984 a T
exas grand jury concluded that he, his aide Cliff Carter, and hit man Mac Wallace were coconspirators to the murder of Henry Marshall.

  But for the obvious impossibility of a posthumous indictment, the historical record of Johnson’s career has never been put into the correct perspective. Instead of being remembered for the evil, conniving man he was, he is still revered by many of the most learned but ignorant educators, the most influential but predisposed news media, the political world’s leaders who refuse to face the enormity of his crimes—in short, in the highest social circles and within government institutions that run the United States of America. His name is on buildings and national parks, the space center near Houston, a big lake in Texas, and a Dallas expressway—all the markings of the beatification of a person being considered for sainthood.

  JFK, according to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., once described Johnson’s personality as that of a “riverboat gambler.”5 As chronicled in several biographies, his classmates had long ago called him Bull (for bullshit) Johnson.6 Another of his Texas nicknames was Lyin’ Lyndon.7 JFK once said “that Lyndon was a chronic liar; that he had been making all sorts of assurances to me for years and has lived up to none of them.”8 Robert Kennedy’s description of Johnson, which can be heard on the referenced website, was that he was “mean, bitter, vicious, an animal, in many ways; I think he’s got this other side to him that makes his relationships with other human beings very difficult, unless you want to kiss his be-hind all the time.”9 The fact is, Johnson had many followers willing to do just that and put up with his boorish and obnoxious behavior for many years, and afterwards, they still didn’t regret it. If the reader should become overtaken by a sense of disbelief, that the author has gone off the deep end and no one could have been this bad, it may be helpful to remember, even memorize, the above description of Robert Kennedy’s view of Lyndon Johnson.