The Man Who Killed Kennedy Read online

  Incredibly, a US Justice Department document provided by the FBI regarding Jack Ruby’s connection to Richard Nixon in the late 1940s proved Nixon’s recollection was correct.

  Some JFK researchers incorrectly discount this document because it has a Department of Justice buck slip, which has an address in Washington DC with a zip code. Zip codes were nonexistent in 1947. This buck slip is not part of the original record, but was attached in 1978 when the House Select Committee on Assassinations found and filed it as evidence, thus the zip code does not discredit the authenticity of this clear link between Nixon and Ruby … and LBJ.

  In the 1980s, former President Gerald Ford told Kennedy assassination researcher Jim Marrs that the memorandum was “probably legitimate.”12

  Ruby’s service to the House Committee on Un-American Activities is not surprising. In 1950, Ruby would serve as an informant for the Kefauver Committee, a probe of organized crime. According to Luis Kutner, counsel to the committee, Ruby “briefed the Kefauver Committee about organized crime in Chicago,” and his “staff learned” that Ruby was a “syndicate lieutenant” who had been sent to Dallas to serve as a liaison for Chicago mobsters.13

  Thus, Nixon figured out that Lee Harvey Oswald had been silenced by a longtime associate of Lyndon Johnson, linking LBJ directly to the Kennedy assassination. Nixon knew it from the moment he saw Ruby shoot Oswald on national TV along with millions of other Americans. Upon becoming president, he would seek proof.

  Johnson himself would be spotted alongside Ruby by Madeleine Brown, LBJ’s longtime mistress, and by Carousel Club dancer Shari Angel at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas only a few months before the assassination. Angel said that the Texas oilman and LBJ crony H.L. Hunt also attended (Hunt would later figure greatly in the Kennedy assassination). In the words of Angel, once billed as “Dallas’s own gypsy,” “Lyndon Johnson had it done.”14

  Indeed, Lyndon Johnson was prepared to kill to become president. In fact, prior to the Kennedy assassination, he had honed his talent in murder for financial and political gain, as this book will outline.

  Johnson’s life has been chronicled by Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Caro, who had had access to the same resources materials I used. Caro had had all the pieces of a complex puzzle, but he never put it together. He clearly delineates the motives for Johnson’s actions, the means, and the opportunity, but unlike Johnson, Caro would not “pull the trigger.”

  Johnson was a man of great ambitions and enormous greed, both of which, in 1963, would threaten to destroy him. In the end, Lyndon Johnson would use power from his personal connections in Texas, from the underworld, and from the government—including elements of the CIA, organized crime, and rightwing Texas oilmen desperate to retain the oil-depletion allowance, which JFK wanted to repeal—to escape an untimely end in politics and to seize even greater power. Lyndon Baines Johnson was the driving force behind a conspiracy to murder John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

  This is the story of why and how he did it.

  NOTES

  1. McPherson, A Political Education p. 450.

  2. Caro, Master of the Senate, p.117.

  3. Janos, The Atlantic Monthly; July 1973; The Last Days of the President; Volume 232, No. 1; 35–41.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Ibid.

  6. McClellan, Blood, Money, & Power, p. 274.

  7. Caro, Means of Ascent, xxiii.

  8. Beschloss, Reaching for Glory, p. 390.

  9. The Washington Post, September 5, 2006.

  10. Fulsom, Nixon’s Darkest Secrets, pgs. 43–44.

  11. Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, pg. 269.

  12. Ibid, 270.

  13. Waldon and Hartmann, Ultimate Sacrifice, pg. 486.

  14. www.jfklink.com/articles/Shari.html.

  CHAPTER ONE

  LYNDON JOHNSON—THE MAN

  Secretary of the Senate Bobby Baker, whom Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson called “my strong right arm,” predicted on the bitter cold January day of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration that the new president would die a violent death and would not finish his first term. Even though the LBJ Presidential Library has done a good job of cleansing Lyndon B. Johnson’s public image, he was in fact a crude, vicious, duplicitous, and cowardly man who sometimes lied when it would have been easier to tell the truth. To fully understand LBJ’s role in the Kennedy assassination, one must understand Johnson, the narcissist, the bully, the sadist, the man.

  Veteran JFK assassination researcher Robert Morrow correctly labels Johnson a “functioning lunatic.”

  Longtime aides and secret service agents are in agreement that even before his presidency, Johnson was known for doing whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, simply because he could. The Secret Service, the FBI, and the CIA did a commendable job of covering up Johnson’s true persona. And what an evil personality he had: vicious, mean spirited, vengeful, aggressive, arrogant, abusive, sex crazed … the descriptions of his vile actions go on and on.

  Ronald Kessler is an American journalist who authored nineteen non-fiction books about the Secret Service, the FBI, and the CIA. In 2006, he became the chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax; before that he was an investigative reporter for the Washington Post. He was one of the first journalists to gain the trust of these organizations to expose the indecent, immoral actions of presidents from Eisenhower to Obama.

  Kessler’s eighteenth book, In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes With Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect, was described by USA Today as a “fascinating exposé … high-energy read … amusing, saucy, often disturbing anecdotes about the VIPs the Secret Service has protected and still protects … [accounts come] directly from current and retired agents (most identified by name, to Kessler’s credit) … Balancing the sordid tales are the kinder stories of presidential humanity … [Kessler is a] respected journalist and former Washington Post reporter … an insightful and entertaining story.”

  In this book, Kessler explains that every source he interviewed described Johnson as completely and totally out of control. One unnamed source even stated “if this guy was not president, he would be in a mental hospital.” LBJ is as crude as the day is long became a common analogy during his time in office.

  In Kessler’s In the President’s Secret Service, Agent Taylor recounts escorting Johnson, who was then the vice president, with another agent from the US Capitol to the White House for a 4 p.m. meeting with Kennedy. Due to Johnson’s inability to leave the US Capitol on time (he was not ready to leave until 3:45 p.m.) and because of traffic along Pennsylvania Avenue, they were going to be late.

  “Johnson said to jump the curb and drive on the sidewalk,” Taylor said. “There were people on the sidewalk getting out of work. I told him, ‘No.’ He said, ‘I told you to jump the curb.’ He took a newspaper and hit the other agent, who was driving, on the head. He said, ‘You’re both fired.’”

  Fortunately, when Agent Taylor told Evelyn Lincoln, President Kennedy’s secretary, that the vice president had fired him, Lincoln informed him—while shaking her head in exasperation—that he was not going to be fired.

  Part of Johnson’s erratic, reckless behavior stemmed from his reluctance to be vice president. As Robert Dallek, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and American historian specializing in American presidents, explains in his biography Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961–1973, LBJ “had hoped and planned for the presidency, but fate or the limitations of his time, place, and personality had cast him in the second spot. And he despised it.”

  The book Protecting the President by Dennis McCarthy has a lot of anecdotes about what an epic jackass Lyndon Johnson was; how rude and abusive he was with Secret Service agents. McCarthy:

  “Johnson had not been very well liked by any of the agents on the detail. He treated us as if we were the hired help on his ranch, cursed at us regularly, and was generally a royal pain to deal with.”

  Johnson’s al
ienating egoism was not unknown to President Kennedy. “You are dealing with a very insecure, sensitive man with a huge ego,” JFK told close aide Kenneth P. O’Donnell.

  What Kennedy didn’t know was how deeply rooted Johnson’s desire was to be top dog. Johnson was used to bending people to his will through intimidation—an art form Washington journalists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak called “the treatment”—but he couldn’t control Kennedy. In fact, Kennedy often excluded Johnson from matters concerning foreign policy.

  Johnson was jealous and competitive of Kennedy’s womanizing ways. In Flawed Giant, Dallek described that when someone mentioned Kennedy’s many affairs, Johnson would bang the table and declare that he had more women by accident than Kennedy ever had on purpose. Due to his insatiable envy, LBJ might have given more women the “Johnson Treatment” than JFK, Harding, and Clinton combined.

  These extensive affairs began when Johnson was vice president, but very few of his paramours were around for any great length of time. While Johnson was vice president, one of the women “who held his attention longer than the rest and for whom he exhibited some really deep feelings, was married off, probably because a continued relationship was incompatible with the vice presidency,” said George Reedy, White House Press Secretary from 1964 to 1965.

  Johnson “filled himself with excessive eating, drinking, and smoking, and an affinity for womanizing—sexual conquests gave him temporary respites from feeling unwanted, unloved, unattended,” wrote Dallek.

  “He is the only person [president] I have seen who was drunk,” said Frederick H. Walzel, a former chief of the White House’s Secret Service Uniformed Division.

  “Johnson was often inebriated,” stated Kessler in his book In the President’s Secret Service. “One evening when Johnson was president, he came back to the White House drunk, screaming that the lights were on, wasting electricity.”

  One agent assigned to protect Johnson recounted that the president was “uncouth, nasty, and often drunk.” The agent went on to say that after Lady Bird Johnson caught LBJ having sex with a secretary in the Oval Office, Johnson ordered the Secret Service to install a buzzer to warn him of when his wife would be expected to stop by. The agent said that the First Lady was well aware of the buzzer’s existence, and was not naïve about her husband’s many liaisons.

  Air Force One crew members had similar experiences with Johnson, who often locked the door to his stateroom and spent hours alone behind closed doors with pretty secretaries, even when the First Lady was aboard.

  “Johnson would come on the plane [Air Force One], and the minute he got out of sight of the crowds, he would stand in the doorway and grin from ear to ear, and say, ‘You dumb sons of bitches. I piss on all of you,” Robert M. MacMillan, an Air Force One steward, told Kessler. “Then, he stepped out of sight and began taking off his clothes. By the time he was in the stateroom, he was down to his shorts and socks. It was not uncommon for him to peel off his shorts, regardless of who was in the stateroom.”

  Johnson didn’t care if women were around; he continued his indecent exposure without concern. “He was totally naked with his daughters, Lady Bird, and female secretaries,” McMillan recalled.

  Lyndon Johnson had absolutely no moral compass or control over his animal instincts. Dallek: “When the wife of television newscaster David Brinkley accepted an invitation to visit Lyndon and Lady Bird at the ranch on a weekend her husband couldn’t be there, Johnson tried unsuccessfully to get her into bed.”

  Sunshine Williams, today a real estate agent in Austin, tells the story of when she was a reporter for a radio station and a young fetching brunette on Election Day of 1964. She interviewed President Lyndon Johnson on the tarmac of the Houston airport; he had liquor on his breath, and he invited her to come to the LBJ Ranch as a guest, although his plane was full, and he would have to kick one of his entourage off to make room for her. Sunshine declined.

  When LBJ would get a girl back to the isolated and secluded LBJ ranch, it would inevitably become a game of “survival of the fittest” for the woman as she battled off Johnson’s inevitable advances. Austin used to have a music festival called Aquafest, which also crowned a beauty queen. These beauty queens (circa 1969) would be taken to the LBJ ranch to visit the retired President Johnson who would take them on jeep rides to secluded areas and then proceed to make advances on these poor girls.

  Whether drunk or sober, Johnson continued his abusive nature and apologized for none of it. George Edward Reedy served under him from 1951 to 1965 and was White House press secretary for the last year. In his book Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, Reedy was crystal clear describing Johnson’s notoriously unbalanced behavior. As president, Johnson was known for driving his staff “to the verge of exhaustion—and sometimes over the verge; for paying the lowest salaries for the longest hours of work on Capitol Hill; for publicly humiliating his most loyal aides; for keeping his office in a constant state of turmoil by playing games with reigning male and female favorites.”

  Reedy also had full knowledge of the president’s sexual escapades with secretaries and aides. “They had to be young, they had to be cheerful, they had to be malleable, and it helped if they were slightly antagonistic to him at the onset. He dearly loved to convert an anti-Johnson liberal with a slightly plump figure and a dowdy wardrobe into a lean, impeccably clad female whose face was masked in cosmetics and who adored the ground he walked on.”

  Johnson would “screw anything that would crawl, basically,” said William F. Cuff, the executive assistant in LBJ’s military office.

  According to Reedy, the president’s flavors of the month—who were often referred to as “the harem” by male staff members—enjoyed many compensations including lavish presents, “travel under plush conditions, attendance at glamorous social functions with the Johnsons … expensive clothes, and frequent trips to New York, where a glamorous makeup artist would initiate her into the mysteries of advanced facial makeup, resulting in cosmetics so lavishly applied that they became a mask.”

  Such an active and careless sexual life certainly had predictable results. Johnson was married to Lady Bird until the day he died; the couple had two daughters, Lynda and Luci. But the philandering politico had three other children outside his marriage. He admitted none.

  The first of the known Johnson illegitimate children is Steven Brown, born in 1950 to Madeleine Brown, Johnson’s sexual partner across two decades. Steven did not know the identity of his real father until the late 1980s. Until then, he thought his father might be Dallas attorney Jerome Ragsdale—a man charged with watching over one of LBJ’s oldest secrets.

  Steven Brown sued for paternity in 1987, lost, and died a suspicious death.

  LBJ loyalist Jack Valenti would do anything for his boss. The Texas advertising executive joined the Kennedy-Johnson team as a media liaison and later worked as President Johnson’s closest aide. But he served a far more important role as a standin father for Lyndon Johnson’s child.

  Valenti had been a longtime bachelor until, in 1962, at the age of forty-one, he married Mary Margaret Wiley, a former receptionist in Johnson’s Texas office, who had relocated to Washington. She was remarkably beautiful, and the president enjoyed talking to her for hours. She would be Johnson’s mistress and bear him one of at least three illegitimate children.

  In fact, Air Force Two pilot Ralph Albertazzie later attested to one of many whirlwind dates the vice president had had with Wiley—from Kansas City to Austin to New York City and back to Washington, all on a whim, all on the taxpayers’ expense. She was clearly special—so special that reporter Sarah McClendon alleged that Bill Moyers was brought on as a “religious aide” to prevent the talk of Johnson and his secretary, Sarah McLendon:

  Bill Moyers had just begun handling the press for Lyndon at that time. Moyers, who’d graduated from Southwest Theological Institute in Fort Worth, had been brought to Washington because of another rumor: There had been speculation that LBJ’s relationship with hi
s top secretary Mary Margaret Wiley had become an intimate as well as a professional one. Concerned, Lyndon had asked his good friend Harry Provence of the Waco Tribune and several other Texas editors to look for someone to prevent that kind of talk. And who better to give the vice presidential staff a more “sanctified” appearance than a young man headed for the ministry? So Moyers was hired on, ostensibly to deal with policy concerning religion and to answer letters that had a religious tone. In actuality, he was a chaperon who would travel with Lyndon and Mary Margaret to show that all was on the up-and-up.

  He often chaperoned their dates to discourage speculation.

  Many people thought that Jack Valenti was gay and surprised everyone when he married Mary Margaret. The couple had three children: John, Alexandra, and Courtenay Lynda Valenti (later Warner Bros. studio executive). Mary Margaret gave birth to daughter Courtenay three weeks before the JFK assassination. Courtenay garnered more attention from Lyndon Johnson than any of his other children. Photographs of her playing with the president in the White House were regularly published in the press.

  Ironically, the diminutive Valenti, who was 5’ 2” in cowboy boots, would have a long-term affair with a married woman who was a close friend of my wife, Nydia Bertran Stone. She said that Jack “had one of the biggest penises she had ever seen. It’s almost as big as he is.”

  Once, as Valenti prepared to end a long day at the White House, he noted to the president that he was eager to get home and play with his daughter. “Your daughter?” Johnson said, with a wry smile.

  A 2009 Washington Post story detailed declassified files showing that at the same time that Johnson was bedding Valenti’s wife, the FBI was investigating whether Valenti, who died in 2007, was gay. Although no proof was ever found, the files offer a new perspective on his marriage to Wiley. Many speculate that he married her to give his beloved president cover for an affair that lasted nine years —and resulted in another daughter Valenti would raise as his own.