The Man Who Killed Kennedy Read online

  In his excellent book The Bystander, author Nick Bryant wrote “In the summer of 1963, in the wake of the Birmingham riots and hundreds of other protests across the country, John F. Kennedy advanced the most far-reaching civil rights bill ever put before Congress. Why had he waited so long? Kennedy had been acutely aware of the issue of race—both its political perils and opportunities—since his first congressional campaign in Boston in 1946 … Kennedy’s shrewd handling of the race issue in his early congressional campaigns blinded him as president to the intractability of the simmering racial crisis in America. By focusing on purely symbolic gestures, Kennedy missed crucial opportunities to confront the obstructionist Southern bloc and to enact genuine reform. Kennedy’s inertia emboldened white supremacists and forced discouraged black activists to adopt increasingly militant tactics. At the outset of his presidency, Kennedy squandered the chance to forge a national consensus on race. For many of his thousand days in office, he remained a bystander as the civil rights battle flared in the streets of America. In the final months of his life, Kennedy could no longer control the rage he had fueled with his erratic handling of this explosive issue.”

  John Kennedy played a dangerous game. In the 1960 campaign, he actually ran to the right of Richard Nixon. Having been briefed by the CIA about the Eisenhower administration’s plan to invade Cuba, he used this knowledge in the presidential debates to attack the Eisenhower administration for not being aggressive enough in their plan to oust Castro. The hapless Nixon had no choice but to charge Kennedy with recklessness or publicly divulge the invasion, thus unmasking the administration’s plans. Nixon was boxed. Kennedy attacked the Eisenhower administration to engage in deficit defense spending. Kennedy was signaling to the defense contractors in the military-industrial complex that he would spend for the hardware they wanted. JFK even backtracked to take a harder line in the dispute with Red China over two small islands off the Chinese coast. That is why the military and intelligence establishments felt betrayed when Kennedy sought to cool tensions with the Soviets, secretly withdrew American missiles from Turkey in return for Soviet missiles from Cuba, refused to supply air support for the Bay of Pigs, and planned to withdraw US forces from Vietnam. Kennedy had run as a militant anti-communist.

  An excellent monograph by the Center of the Study of Intelligence sums up the way JFK sent false signals to the Military and Intelligence communities and used the formal confidential CIA briefing given him by Allen Dulles himself to outflank Nixon:

  Perhaps the most crucial foreign policy issue raised in the 1960 debates, which derived directly from US intelligence analyses, was the alleged gap between US and Soviet intercontinental missile production. Kennedy charged that the Soviets had “made a breakthrough in missiles, and by ‘61 they will be outnumbering us in missiles. I’m not as confident as he (Nixon) is that we will be the strongest military power by 1963.” Kennedy added, “I believe the Soviet Union is first in outer space. We have made more shots but the size of their rocket thrust and all the rest. You yourself said to Khrushchev, you may be ahead of us in rocket thrust but we’re ahead of you in color television, in your famous discussion in the kitchen. I think that color television is not as important as rocket thrust.”

  During three of the debates, Nixon attacked Kennedy for his lack of willingness to defend Quemoy and Matsu, the small Nationalist-held islands off the coast of communist China. The extensive discussion of the Quemoy-Matsu issue did not create any direct problem for the CIA, but it led directly to a controversial dispute between the candidates over policy toward Cuba, where a popular revolution had established a Soviet-supported communist government. The politically charged clash had a number of repercussions in the White House and at the CIA.

  Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. later described the relationship of these China and Cuba issues and the sequence of events in his memoir of the Kennedy administration, A Thousand Days “The Kennedy staff, seeking to take the offensive after his supposed soft position on Quemoy and Matsu, put out the provocative statement about strengthening the Cuban fighters for freedom.” The controversial press release, crafted late one evening in the Biltmore Hotel in New York City by speechwriter Richard Goodwin, said “We must attempt to strengthen the non-Batista, democratic, anti-Castro forces in exile, and in Cuba itself, who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro.” According to Goodwin, the policy statement was not shown to the sleeping Kennedy because of the late hour; it was the only public statement of the campaign not approved by the candidates.

  The ill-considered statement on Cuba received wide press play and was immediately attacked. The New York Times the next day ran the story as the lead item on the front page with the headline: “Kennedy Asks Aid for Cuban Rebels to Defeat Castro, Urges Support of Exiles and Fighters for Freedom.” James Reston wrote in The Times that “Senator Kennedy (has) made what is probably his worst blunder of the campaign.”

  Coming the day before the fourth presidential debate, the statement from the Kennedy camp put Nixon in what he found to be an extraordinarily awkward position. Many years later, Nixon wrote in his memoirs, “I knew that Kennedy had received a CIA briefing on the administration’s Cuba policy and assumed that he knew, as I did, that a plan to aid the Cuban exiles was already under way on a top secret basis. His statement jeopardized the project, which could succeed only if it were supported and implemented secretly.”

  Throughout the campaign, the two candidates had engaged in a spirited exchange about whether the Eisenhower administration had “lost” Cuba, and Nixon knew that the issue would be revived in the final debate, which was to be devoted solely to foreign affairs. Nixon has written that to protect the security of the planned operation he “had no choice but to take a completely opposite stand and attack Kennedy’s advocacy of open intervention.” And he did attack, saying, “I think that Senator Kennedy’s policies and recommendations for the handling of the Castro regime are probably the most dangerously irresponsible recommendations that he has made during the course of this campaign.”

  Former Kennedy advisors have underscored over the years that the statement on Cuba was released without Kennedy’s knowledge by staffers ignorant of the covert action planning under way at the time and was crafted solely to ensure that Kennedy would not again be put on the defensive about Communist expansionism. These same advisers differ among themselves, however, on the key question of whether Kennedy himself knew of the covert action plans. Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen said in 1993, “I am certain that at the time of the debates, Kennedy had no knowledge of the planned operation.” His reference to more assertive action regarding Cuba was put in by one of my assistants to give him something to say.

  The assistant was Richard Goodwin, whose memory is quite different. Goodwin asserts that, “As a presidential candidate, he (Kennedy) had received secret briefings by the CIA, some of which revealed that we were training a force of Cuban exiles for a possible invasion of the Cuban mainland.” Goodwin and Sorensen have both made clear that they were not in attendance at any CIA briefings.1

  The US Government’s planning for a covert action program intended to undermine Castro had been approved by President Eisenhower in March 1960 and was in progress throughout the period of the presidential campaign. Indeed, Nixon was spearheading the Cuban Initiative. Kennedy would use his CIA briefing to outflank Nixon on the right and falsely signal the generals and spooks at the CIA that he would be okay. This head-fake would help cost him his life and give Lyndon Johnson willing co-conspirators.

  I know that there are those who may try to ascribe political motives to my authoring of this book. I am a veteran of eight Republican presidential campaigns and have been a shrill partisan and political operative. Those who read ahead will see that Republicans Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, and Arlen Specter are not spared in this narrative. Nor do I pull my punches when it comes to rightwing Dallas oilmen like H.L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, Jr., Sid Richardson, or Senator Harry F. Byrd’s cousin
, D. H. Byrd. I am not the first person to assert, based on his research, that Lyndon Johnson arranged the murder of John F. Kennedy. I have built on the work of Phillip F. Nelson’s LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, Barr McClellan’s Blood, Money, and Power, Glen Sample’s and Mark Collom’s The Men on the Sixth Floor, and Craig Zirbel’s The Texas Connection. I have interpreted certain events differently from these authors and, in some cases, provided new information to bolster their original claims of Johnson’s complicity in Kennedy’s death.

  This book stands on the research of citizens who have doubted the government’s version of events as depicted by the Warren Commission, including:

  Vincent Salandria, Mark Lane, David Talbot, L. Flecher Prouty, John Kelin, Jim Marrs, Gaeton Fonzi, Seth Kantor, Harry Livingston, Gary Mack, Jack White, Fred Newcomb, Harold Weisberg, Sylvia Meagher, Penn Jones, Jr., Dr. Charles Crenshaw, Richard Belzer, Jesse Ventura, Peter Dale Scott, Joachim Joesten, David Lifton, Dan E. Moldea, William Turner, Jonn Christian, Russell Baker, James W. Douglass, Edward Epstein, Billy Sol Estes, Peter Janney, Robert Morrow, Edward Harrison Livingstone, Robert J. Groden, John M. Newman, Mark North, Frank Ragano, Gus Russo, Saint John Hunt, Lamar Waldron, and Thom Hartmann.

  Special thanks also go to Houston Attorney Douglas Caddy and to author J. Evetts Haley, whose trailblazing early book on LBJ sold more copies in Texas than any book other than The Bible.

  NOTE

  1. www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/cia-briefings-of-presidential-candidates/cia-6.htm.

  INTRODUCTION

  “I do understand power, whatever else may be said about me,” Lyndon Johnson had once remarked. “I know where to look for it, and how to use it.”1

  From the moment Air Force One touched down at Bergstrom Air Force Base in the Texas Hill Country just southwest of Austin in January 1969 on LBJ’s last flight from Washington, the power that he had cultivated and grown from Congress, through the Senate, and to the presidency—the power that at times seemed absolute—had begun to dissipate.

  Interestingly, the only Republican member of the Texas congressional delegation who went to Andrews Air Force base to see Johnson off was Houston Congressman George H. W. Bush. Bush’s show of respect would be repaid with treachery, as we shall see later.

  In the short time that followed his presidency, Lyndon Johnson had fallen into a despondency that would remain with him until his final day. These bouts with depression had come and gone routinely in his life, usually accompanied by heavy drinking, volcanic outbursts followed by dark moods, and long periods of ill health.

  The Cutty Sark scotch now went down with abandon. The girdle he wore as president to strap in his expanding gut was gone, as were the tailored suits. His well-groomed hair, famously brushed back and pasted to his skull with Sta-comb hair tonic, had grown unkempt, almost grazing his shoulders.2

  Johnson had been hospitalized in early 1970 after complaining of severe chest pains. The diagnosis was angina. His arteries were hardened and narrowed, there was not enough blood getting to his heart, and he was told to lose weight to take pressure off his ticker.3

  Johnson, however, was not looking to wind back the clock.

  In late 1970, he took up smoking again, a habit he had dropped years earlier following a near-fatal heart attack.

  “I always loved cigarettes, missed them every day since I quit. Anyway, I don’t want to linger the way Eisenhower did,” Johnson said shortly before his death. “When I go, I want to go fast.”4

  Without power or the prospect of it, Johnson was killing himself quickly. It was the final determined goal of a man of extreme ambition.

  He would reach that goal on January 22, 1973.

  Nearing the end, many times short of breath, he clung to an oxygen tank while he continued to smoke. Johnson was experiencing stomach pains due to diverticulitis, small pouches in the lining of the colon or large intestine, and sharp, daily chest pains caused by two completely blocked arteries.5

  The former president was racked not only with pain in his final days but guilt, undergoing psychotherapy in an attempt to unburden himself from a political past that included as many as eight murders and was ended in shame.6 Intimates said that Johnson had even smoked marijuana to deal with his demons—the pastime of the counter-culture that had driven him from the White House.

  From the moment he assumed the presidency, the ideals of John Kennedy’s New Frontier had become Johnson’s Great Society.

  Despite a legislative lifetime of leading the fight against integration, anti-lynching laws, and voting rights, Johnson championed civil rights, pushing through the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and made the war on poverty a top priority of the administration, although by the end of his time in office, the 1964 Johnson campaign motto “All the way with LBJ” had been cruelly morphed by war protestors to “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

  They were words Johnson couldn’t escape. Wherever he went, this reminder of his continued failure in Vietnam followed him. Even in the White House, he could hear the chant from the gates.

  In his short retirement, Johnson would coldly recall “young people by the thousands … chanting … about how many kids I had killed that day,” referring to the mantra as “that horrible song.”7

  In the biggest misstep of his presidency, Johnson backed and continued to double down on the war in Vietnam, an initiative made abhorrent with his knowledge that the war was unwinnable.

  “Vietnam is getting worse every day,” Johnson remarked to his wife Lady Bird in July, 1965. “I have the choice to go in with great casualty lists or to get out with disgrace. It’s like being in an airplane, and I have to choose between crashing the plane and jumping out. I do not have a parachute.”8

  In 1967, playwright Barbara Garson wrote MacBird! a political satire which overlaid the Shakespearean tragedy Macbeth with the assassination of the nation’s thirty-fifth president, John F. Kennedy. MacBird! proposed the idea that Johnson engineered the plot carried out on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.

  “People used to ask me then, ‘Do you really think Johnson killed Kennedy?’” Garson recalled. “I never took that seriously. I used to say to people that if he did, it’s the least of his crimes.”9

  Taken seriously, the supposition that Johnson was behind the plot to kill Kennedy is the key that unlocks the gate to the greatest of Johnson’s crimes, the knowing futility of a war that would eventually claim more than fifty-eight thousand American lives.

  Admissions and insights divulged in the recent past have begun to show Johnson in a role that was not only complicit but instrumental in the planning, organization, and coverup of the Kennedy assassination. These confessions have come from business associates, personal acquaintances, law enforcement officials, and top members of the government.

  Richard Nixon, no slouch in the use of power, knew Johnson well from their time in the Senate. Of less than modest means like Johnson (“up from dirt” Nixon would say to me), Nixon understood the hunger for power, which consumed Johnson. By 1961, they both resented Jack Kennedy’s wealth and privilege and sized him up a “rich kid whose father bought it for him.”

  “Johnson was vain, cruel, loud, devious, and driven,” Nixon told me.

  Many of the same Texas oilmen who wrote big checks for Dick Nixon also wrote big checks for Johnson.

  “He liked to squeeze their nuts,” Nixon said. “He would tell them the oil-depletion allowance was in trouble unless they coughed up cash—and milked ‘em.”

  “That was the difference between Lyndon and me,” Nixon snorted after a very dry martini in his Saddle River, New Jersey home. “I wasn’t willing to kill for it …” Nixon grew silent and pensive, staring into his martini. I knew from my years as a Nixon loyalist and “Nixon’s man in Washington” during his post-presidential years when a conversation with “RN” was over and when not to speak.

  Nixon stirred.

  “It�
�s a hell of a thing. I actually knew this Jack Ruby fella. Murray Chotiner brought him in back in ’47. Went by the name Rubinstein. An informant. Murray said he was one of Lyndon Johnson’s boys … we put him on the payroll,” Nixon’s voice trailed off.

  What went unsaid was that Nixon had realized the connection between Johnson and the execution of Lee Harvey Oswald. I knew Murray Chotiner had been the eminence grise of Nixon’s early political career. Chotiner was a Los Angeles mob lawyer who ran Nixon’s first campaign for Congress in 1946 and his 1950 campaign for the Senate. That Chotiner brought Ruby in was no surprise—his mob connections ran deep. Chotiner had strong connections with Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, and Mickey Cohen. He was also the middleman between Louisiana mob kingpin Carlos Marcello and Nixon.10

  “Murray and his brother were mob lawyers,” said 1968 Nixon campaign manager John Mitchell who went on to become Nixon’s attorney general. “He knew all the mob guys and knew damn well that, as attorney general, I couldn’t talk to them. He was close to Johnson through Marcello, so it’s logical that he brought ‘Rubinstein’ in.”

  Marcello held the strings of Jack Ruby, and he was allied with Tampa Mob boss Santo Trafficante. According to author Lamar Waldron in his book, Watergate: The Hidden History, Trafficante and Marcello would funnel a $500,000 secret campaign contribution to Nixon in 1960 to stop the federal prosecution of Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa.

  Nick Ruwe told me that, on November 24, 1963, he arrived at Nixon’s Fifth Avenue apartment—an address he shared with Nelson Rockefeller ironically—to accompany Nixon to a lunch with Mary Roebling, a New Jersey socialite and Nixon family friend at Cote Basque. It was 12:30. Ruwe came into the room as Nixon turned the TV off. He had just witnessed Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald. Ruwe told me, “The Old Man was white as a ghost. I asked him if everything was all right.” “I know that guy,” Nixon muttered. Ruwe said that Nixon didn’t elaborate. He knew better than to ask questions.