The Man Who Killed Kennedy Read online

  A third child thought to be Johnson’s progeny is Lyndon K. Boozer, daughter of LBJ secretary Yolanda Boozer. “It was July 19, 1963. Yolanda Garza Boozer had given birth to a boy at the Columbia Hospital for Women in Washington, DC. Her boss, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, stopped by to visit the new mother and her husband, a Treasury official.”

  Secret Service agents attested that Johnson was sleeping with five of his eight secretaries. Based on the fact that he was using his secretarial pool as a harem at the time Boozer gave birth to a boy named after Lyndon, it is not difficult to surmise Lyndon is the son of LBJ. Those who know him say he is a spitting image of the late president.

  History has been kind to Lyndon Johnson through all his philandering. One biographer has a very good reason to write a glowing tribute to the former president—Doris Kearns Goodwin had a curiously intimate relationship with the president, especially in his retirement. She had a peculiar relationship with him, which made many tongues wag. Washington Post reporter Sally Quinn described this in 1974:

  “Johnson was terribly possessive of her time, more and more as he came closer to death. She was seeing many men at this point in her life but had no real attachments until she met Richard Goodwin six months before Johnson’s death.”

  Kearns later admitted that Lyndon Johnson used to crawl into bed with her and just talk, but with nothing else going on. Kearns Goodwin told authors Richard Harwod and Haynes Johnson, that Lyndon would confess his love to her, court her aggressively, ask her to marry him, and act jealously about her lovers.

  Not surprisingly, Doris Kearns Goodwin has long been the subject of rumors that she was having sex with the subject of her fabulously successful first book Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.

  Aside from being a philanderer of the highest order, Lyndon Johnson’s sense of humor revolved “chiefly on the contents of toilet bowls,” Reedy recounted. Rather than interrupt himself, Johnson would continue his train of thought on the toilet surrounded by his aides. Johnson particularly enjoyed the discomfort this caused among the Ivy League aides of JFK. Ronald Kessler’s research confirmed this: “He would sit on the toilet and defecate in front of aides. During press conferences on his Texas ranch that included female journalists, he would urinate in front of them,” Kessler noted in his book In The President’s Secret Service.

  If that were not lewd enough, Reedy recalled Johnson’s “favorite spectator sport was watching bovine copulation, and he gloried in summoning fastidious males to his bathroom, where conference and excretion could be intermingled.”

  LBJ was also fond of literally waving his member—which he affectionately nicknamed “Jumbo”—around in public. Perhaps his “pecker humor” combined with the many instances when he would expose himself dubbed him the Secret Service code name of “Volunteer.” One time in particular, he exposed himself to Japanese reporters in a bathroom, opining that they probably didn’t see “them” that size back in Japan.

  In Flawed Giant, Dallek writes, “During a private conversation with some reporters who pressed him to explain why we were in Vietnam, Johnson lost his patience. According to Arthur Goldberg, LBJ unzipped his fly, drew out his substantial organ and declared, ‘This is why!’”

  Mack White, who in 1977 used to work at the LBJ Library where he transcribed oral histories, has a revealing essay about LBJ on the Internet. It is entitled “See the LBJ Robot.”

  Mack White: “I worked at the library for about a year. It was easy work, and interesting. I would cue up the tapes on a reel-to-reel player, put on a pair of headphones, and, working a foot pedal to rewind, pause and fast-forward, transcribe interviews that had been conducted with people who had known Johnson at different times of his life.

  “Most of the interviewees spoke glowingly of him. Even those who were critical of him—Kennedy staffers, most notably—went to some pains to soften their criticism and try to find something nice to say. And yet, despite everyone’s best efforts, what emerged from this Citizen Kane-style composite of interviews was not pretty. It was not said in so many words—in fact, was left entirely unsaid—but nothing could obscure the picture: Lyndon Johnson was an overbearing, coarse, ruthless, sociopathic, low-life, power-mad monster. Yes, he was a consummate politician, therefore could charm people when he had to, but the mask could easily slip, and often did.”

  Stories about LBJ’s unhinged and outrageous behavior abound. Marshall Lynam, a top aide to Texas congressman and LBJ friend Jim Wright, tells this one:

  “ … Johnson also could be downright cruel. One incident was described to me by a friend of thirty years, a retired US Air Force colonel who flew as an escort officer on a Johnson trip to space installations around the United States. My friend swears he saw Johnson, then vice president, throw a Cutty Sark and soda into the face of an Air Force steward. The reason? The sergeant had failed to use a freshly-opened bottle of soda in mixing the drink.”

  Though the Secret Service kept most of the president’s unruly character relatively unknown to the American public, no one could stop Johnson from being himself in front of the camera. In 1964, LBJ created controversy while taking his beagles, Him and Her, on a walk with the press. A photo was snapped of the president lifting Him up by the ears. The image led to public outrage of animal abuse. Johnson claimed that the move was for the beagles’ benefit because “it lets them bark.” However, animal lovers were not convinced. He had to apologize to animal rights organizations for his cruelty.

  In addition to being a true maniac, Johnson was also known to show no bounds when cursing profusely. Kessler shared some of LBJ’s jaw-dropping racial slurs in a book called Inside the White House. An Air Force One crew member stated that the president had his own opinions about the Civil Rights Movement, ones that were the complete opposite of his public actions to make America a “Great Society,” and he blatantly shared them with anyone in earshot: “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days, and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now, we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.” In a meeting aboard Air Force One, shortly after signing the Civil Rights Act, he was pleased to promise two governors: “I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.”

  Though Johnson may have been “just a country boy from the central hills of Texas,” George Reedy likened LBJ’s antics to “a Turkish sultan of Istanbul.”

  And this particular Turkish sultan of Istanbul possessed a staggering ego, which knew no bounds. “To Johnson, loyalty was a one-way street: All take on his part, and all give on the part of everyone else—his family, his friends, his supporters,” Reedy explained.

  When a truly horrific person, devoid of any redeeming qualities, also harbors scathing jealousy towards the president—enough so to covet his position—this person with a history of no moral compass might, in all likelihood, use his established powers of intimidation to orchestrate the plan to assassinate JFK, and succeed.

  Lyndon Johnson’s oddly disturbing decisions and complete lack of concern for the future of the country just hours after Kennedy’s assassination only solidifies the fact that he had put the plan in motion and covered it up. Investigative journalist Russ Baker discloses several events involving LBJ that cannot be conceived as anything other than incriminating in his book Family of Secrets.

  “Pat Holloway, former attorney to both Poppy Bush and Jack Crichton, recounted to me an incident involving LBJ that had greatly disturbed him,” wrote Baker. “This was around 1 p.m. on November 22, 1963, just as Kennedy was being pronounced dead.” As Holloway was leaving the office, he passed through the reception area, and the switchboard operator noted that she was patching Johnson through from Parkland Hospital to Holloway’s boss and the firm’s senior partner, Waddy Bullion, who was also the vice president’s tax lawyer. The operator asked if Hollo
way wanted to listen in.

  “I heard him say: ‘Oh, I gotta get rid of my goddamn Halliburton stock.’ Lyndon Johnson was talking about the consequences of his political problems with his Halliburton stock at a time when the president had been officially declared dead. And that pissed me off,” Holloway recalled. “It really made me furious.”

  A few days later, on the evening of November 25th, LBJ was speaking to Martin Luther King and said, “It’s just an impossible period—we’ve got a budget coming up.” Baker also exposes how Johnson also told Joseph Alsop later that morning: “The president must not inject himself into, uh, local killings,” to which Alsop immediately responded, “I agree with that, but in this case, it does happen to be the killing of the president.”

  On this same day, Johnson also instructed Hoover: “We can’t be checking up on every shooting scrape in the country.”

  These conversations show the epitome of an egomaniac—a sultan—an arrogant, vengeful man unable to exercise the slightest baseline of loyalty or sensitivity. More precisely, he was a cold-blooded murderer who would stop at nothing to survive and seize power.

  Even toward the end of his life, Lyndon Johnson stayed true to the principles that he had demonstrated during his time in the White House: “If I can’t have booze, sex, or cigarettes, what’s the point of living?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  LANDSLIDE LYNDON

  To understand Lyndon Johnson’s actions on November 22, 1963, one must first understand how he got to the US Senate in 1948. After a previous failed Senate bid, Johnson’s Senate election was stolen with nonexistent votes by a cabal of patrons who knew how to “vote the Mexicans.” Whether or not those Mexicans had to have special incentive to vote, stayed home on Election Day, or had been dead for years; if they were needed, their votes were counted. No patron was more effective in getting those key votes to Lyndon Johnson in ’48 than George Parr.

  George Parr had been a key figure in Lyndon Johnson’s political ascendency. The powerful patron controlled the Democratic political machines, which dominated Duval and Jim Wells counties. His nickname was the “Duke of Duval.” Parr would later become the focus of the infamous “Box 13” scandal, which allowed Lyndon Johnson to steal the 1948 US Senate race from former Texas governor Coke Stevenson.

  Parr lorded over the large swath of southern Texas, running a political machine inherited from his father Archer in the vein of Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall or Richard Daley’s Chicago. It was a system of controlling elections, public officials, the citizens of the county, and their tax money. Above all, Parr knew how to “vote the Mexicans” and would use a combination of violence and bribery to run up vote totals for “his” candidates. Of course, Parr contended that he was simply a rancher who made a little money from oil struck on his land. In truth, if it happened within the boundaries of his rule, it went through Parr, Patrón, Boss.

  “The niceties of the democratic process weren’t part of the immigrant experience,” Mike Royko wrote of Daley’s Chicago. “So if the machine muscle offended some, it seemed like old times to many more.”1

  For the immigrants in Parr’s machine, the system of dependence on a local leader was a custom started long ago in Mexico, and carried generationally into the United States.

  Gordon Schendel, writing for Collier’s Weekly in 1951, reported the vast disparity between living conditions of Parr and that of his vassal-like constituency. Whereas Parr lived in a mansion with, “lushly landscaped grounds,” servant quarters, multiple garages, and a private racetrack, those who lived under his hand were domiciled in “extensive treeless, grassless sections of dilapidated one-and two-room shacks crazily crowded together, frequently without plumbing or electricity—which are the prominent eyesores of every south Texas town.”2

  Schendel found no record of Parr ever using his wealth to improve the squalid living conditions of those who lived, voted and worked for him.3

  “We had the law to ourselves there,” Luis Salas, a deputy sheriff and enforcer who had worked for Parr said. “It was a lawless son-of-a-bitch. We had iron control. If a man was opposed to us, we’d put him out of business. Parr was the godfather. He had life or death control.”4

  At 6’1”, and 210 pounds, Salas cut an imposing figure as one of Parr’s top soldiers. Salas began work for Parr after fleeing Mexico following a bar brawl in which he had left a man fatally wounded.5 In Parr’s territory, Salas became the main enforcer of the thirteenth precinct of Jim Wells County, the most impoverished Mexican district in Alice, Texas.6

  The thirteenth precinct would be the focus of the “Box 13” election fraud in Lyndon Johnson’s 1948 senatorial bid and intrinsically link Parr, Salas, and Johnson in stealing the election—a matter that would go all the way to the US Supreme Court.

  A survey of Johnson’s 1948 campaign, prior to its renowned “Box 13” conclusion, highlights the lengths to which he would go to reach a desired goal. As every other political venture in Johnson’s career, too much would be at stake to leave the election to chance or virtue, and failure was not an option. Lying, cheating, and stealing are so commonly attributed to politicians that they are clichés. When hung on Lyndon Johnson, each of these acts is given new life.

  The image of Johnson as a war hero was one of the main themes of his 1948 campaign; it would follow the common narrative thread strung throughout his life, one of verbose elaborations and outright lies.

  To see Johnson, who was never actually in the armed services, embellish a war record of 1942 was to watch one of the great hucksters of American politics in action. Johnson had seen action during World War II, as a civilian observer on the Heckling Hare, a B-26 Marauder flown by Lieutenant Walter H. Greer. The mission was an air raid on a Japanese airfield in Papua New Guinea, and out of the eleven B-26 Marauders, only nine would return after staving off heavy enemy fire. The raid would begin and end Johnson’s wartime combat experience.7

  For his part in the air raid, Johnson was awarded the Silver Star, the third-highest award issued to a member of any branch of the United States Armed Forces for combat valor. Johnson, as an observer, would be the only member of the mission to receive a medal, a sentiment he feigned to claim he didn’t deserve.

  In a letter Johnson drafted, he renounced the decoration. “My very brief service with these men and its experience of what they did and sacrificed makes me all the more sensitive that I should not and could not accept a citation of recognition for the little part I played for a short time in learning and facing with them the problems they encounter all the time.” The letter was never mailed.8

  Similar observer missions had been granted to journalists during the war. Walter Cronkite, accompanying a raid in which seven bombers were lost, wrote that he had “gained the deepest admiration for the bombardiers and navigators, as well as the pilots and gunners on this trip.”9 If the journalist was objective in his retelling, Johnson’s recounting would be close to obscene.

  When asked shortly after his return if he had engaged in combat, Johnson started to bedeck the truth. “I was out there in May, June, and part of July,” Johnson replied. In Johnson’s retellings, the actual number of Japanese planes shot down by his squadron (one) had risen to fourteen, and the squadron members had nicknamed him “Raider Johnson.”10

  Johnson began to accept the earning of the Silver Star and worked it into his appearances, going so far as to hold ceremonies where he was receiving the decoration as if for the first time.11

  The Silver Star would become the most important part of Johnson’s attire in the 1948 campaign, and he always made sure it was affixed to his lapel.

  “That’s the Silver Star. General MacArthur gave it to me,” Johnson echoed on campaign stops, often yanking, tugging, or pointing at the pin for effect. “I said that if war was declared, I’d go to war beside them, and I did.”12

  Johnson embellished not only his own war record but spun the war tales of staffers. Petey Green, a sound technician for Johnson’s stump stops, had been
knocked unconscious in Caserta, Italy, during WWII when a German shell exploded nearby. Green was kept overnight at an aid station, then released. Johnson would weave the Petey Green war story to mythological heights.

  “Skull shattered on Monte Cassino. Brains exposed to the raw, icy cold winds sweeping off the Appenines of Italy. For all purposes, a dead man. But he stands here today. Almost normal. Like you and me,” Johnson said at a stump speech in Llano. “Almost. But not quite. That skull is not pure bone. A quarter of his head is a silver plate to keep the brains from oozing out. He came back. He’s still giving all that’s in him. This time on behalf of democracy on the home front. Giving of himself just as freely as he gave those brains he left behind in Italy.”13

  The tale of Petey Green changed from stop to stop. Sometimes the silver plate in Petey’s head became gold, steel, or platinum; sometimes Pete lost a quarter of his brain, and other times half. In reality, Green’s skull was not only undamaged but completely unmarked.14

  As Johnson was pumping up his campaign with grandiose falsities, he was attempting to take the air out of his opponents.

  Even though Johnson was a man adept at spinning a yarn, his opponent in the Democratic Primary, former Governor Coke Stevenson, was like a character out of the pages of American folklore. Stevenson was a deeply conservative Bourbon Democrat of the Texas variety. Largely a Texas designation, Bourbon Democrats, including Stevenson, favored segregation and were protectors of the petroleum industry and agricultural interests. Stevenson was revered for his integrity, rectitude, and character. He had rooted out substantial corruption as governor and was respected for his honesty.