Back in 2019 a prominent public figure—whose name is widely known—came to Palo Alto to have a private dinner with me. Apparently he’d become aware of my controversial writings the previous year on the JFK Assassination and in the wake of the Jeffrey Epstein revelations, he’d concluded I was probably correct that Israel and its Mossad had likely been heavily responsible for the death of our 35th president. As we discussed the issue that evening, I endorsed elements of his reasoning and explained that the Mossad had also played the central role in the 9/11 Attacks, something that greatly surprised him since he’d apparently never looked into those matters.
But although I emphasized that there was very strong evidence implicating the Mossad in the 1963 events in Dallas, a possibility still only whispered about in most JFK Assassination circles, I felt that that the strongest evidence of all implicated President Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s own immediate successor and the most obvious beneficiary of the crime.
The continuing near-total silence surrounding the probable role of Mossad is hardly surprising given the momentous geopolitical consequences if such a belief in Israeli guilt became widespread among Americans. Recent months have demonstrated the staggering political and media power of the Israel Lobby and there would surely be very severe repercussions for anyone who leveled such incendiary charges against the Jewish State.
By contrast, LBJ has long since passed into history, dying more than fifty years ago in 1973, and nearly all of his committed partisans have also long since departed the scene, often decades ago. For most Americans today, Johnson is probably just a name in the history books, a political figure more like a McKinley or a Coolidge rather than someone who arouses any fierce present-day emotions. So the near-total unwillingness to consider the very strong evidence of his guilt in the death of his predecessor must be due to other factors.
Although America has had many conspiratorial controversies over the last one hundred years, I think that the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy has received more attention than any other.
Perhaps a thousand or more books have been published on that topic, the vast majority of them challenging the official narrative, and many of those works have become bestsellers, sometimes even reaching the #1 spot on the national lists. Oliver Stone is regarded as one of our greatest directors and his star-studded 1991 film JFK devoted more than three hours to presenting the story of that alleged conspiracy, winning an Oscar and drawing huge audiences. Across the last three decades, his gripping drama has surely been seen by many tens of millions in this country and around the world. Years earlier when our House Select Committee on Assassinations issued its 1978 final report, that official document proclaimed that Lee Harvey Oswald had not acted alone, thereby declaring that our 35th president had died at the hands of a conspiracy.
Despite all of this, the establishment media blockade against such theories has remained in place for more than six decades. Tucker Carlson was the most popular host in the history of cable during late 2022 when he declared to his millions of viewers that JFK had indeed died in a conspiracy heavily involving elements of the CIA, a presentation that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. immediately praised as the most courageous newscast in sixty years. But despite Carlson’s stellar ratings, he was purged by FoxNews a few months later, with many suspecting that his JFK segment had been an important contributing factor.
There are numerous historical controversies today that are harshly stigmatized as “conspiratorial” by the media, but I can think of no other example that has been so widely promoted across mainstream channels of information while also receiving an official government endorsement. So although adherence to a JFK Assassination plot is regularly pilloried as the stereotypical example of “conspiratorial” thinking, it is unique in having received such major distribution and authoritative endorsements.
Yet oddly enough, until just a dozen years ago, I never suspected that any such serious historical controversy even existed, having spent my entire life completely ignorant of the issue.
I’d obviously known that JFK had been assassinated and also that some people claimed a conspiracy had been responsible. But I’d always regarded those latter individuals as merely cranks and crackpots lacking any evidence for their strange beliefs, fringe activists similar to those obsessed with UFOs or Scientology or ESP, and I’d never paid the least attention to them.
The reason for such decades of my total unawareness was the mainstream media cocoon in which I existed, one that only provided very limited or distorted facts, while always seeming to snicker at such conspiratorial beliefs and their deluded advocates. I’d always known that the media was dishonest about certain matters, but I had never imagined that such dishonesty extended to those fatal 1963 events in Dallas, which I had always assumed were too important to have long remained hidden.
Others have probably been far less naive over the years, though they cautiously remained silent. A couple of months ago I was having a cup of coffee with a mainstream academic friend of mine who was quite aware of the many “conspiratorial” articles I had published in recent years and he casually remarked that he’d always been extremely skeptical of the official JFK Assassination story. One of his secondary school textbooks had included the famous photo of Oswald being shot by Jack Ruby in a Dallas police station, and even as a high school student he’d concluded that the killing of the supposed presidential assassin soon after his capture and under the very noses of the local police seemed obvious evidence of a plot. By contrast, I’d probably just gullibly nodded my head when I came across such facts in my schoolbooks and then merely turned the page to the next subject.
Shrewd observers have emphasized that people are much more likely to fall for big lies than smaller ones, and this was certainly part of the reason that I’d never questioned the official JFK narrative. The early 1960s marked the High Noon of the American Century, as our national power and prosperity seemed to reach a peak, with no major domestic storm clouds on the horizon. JFK had become the youngest President in our history and with his attractive young wife Jackie, they were almost a movie star couple compared to the dowdy Eisenhowers, while greatly benefitting from the powerful new medium of television and the colorful spreads they received in influential photograph-laden weeklies such as Life Magazine. The violent death of an American President seemed almost unimaginable at that time, with the last such case having been when an anarchist had slain William McKinley in 1901, more than sixty years earlier at the very dawn of the twentieth century. When I later came of age, I’d always vaguely regarded the Kennedys as America’s own royal family, so it seemed unthinkable to me that the entire American media could have long concealed the fact that his death had been the result of a conspiracy.
Once I discovered that the universally-portrayed reality of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi WMDs had merely been a media hoax, I became much more suspicious of other matters, and the growth of the Internet had made me aware of many conspiratorial claims, whose reality I gradually began to suspect. But the possibility of an actual JFK Assassination plot was not one of these, and that became among the last of the major modern conspiracies that I eventually concluded might be true.
Even when I finally moved in that direction, I found it difficult to accept such a possibility. After stumbling across some anomalous facts that raised my suspicions, I carefully read Brothers by David Talbot and JFK and the Unspeakable by James Douglass, which provided a great wealth of persuasive evidence. But I still found it difficult to absorb the possibility that such an enormous historical fact had remained hidden in plain sight throughout my entire life.
Having read a couple of books that completely upended my settled beliefs about a central event of twentieth century history, I simply didn’t know what to think. Over the years, my own writings had put me on friendly terms with a well-connected individual whom I considered a member of the elite establishment, and whose intelligence and judgment had always seemed extremely solid. So I decided to very gingerly raise the subject with him, and see whether he had ever doubted the “lone gunman” orthodoxy. To my total astonishment, he explained that as far back as the early 1990s, he’d become absolutely convinced in the reality of a “JFK conspiracy” and over the years had quietly devoured a huge number of the books in that field, but had never breathed a word in public lest his credibility be ruined and his political effectiveness destroyed.
Few other revelations in recent years have so totally overturned my framework of reality. Even a year or two later, I still found it very difficult to wrap my head around the concept, as I described in another note to that same well-connected friend of mine:
BTW, I hate to keep harping on it, but every time I consider the implications of the JFK matter I’m just more and more astonished.
The president of the US. The heir to one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in America. His brother the top law enforcement officer in the country. Ben Bradlee, one of his closest friends, the fearless crusading editor of one of the nation’s most influential media outlets. As America’s first Catholic president, the sacred icon of many millions of Irish, Italian, and Hispanic families. Greatly beloved by top Hollywood people and many leading intellectuals.
His assassination ranks as one of the most shocking and dramatic events of the 20th century, inspiring hundreds of books and tens of thousands of news stories and articles, examining every conceivable detail. The argument from MSM silence always seemed absolutely conclusive to me.
From childhood, it’s always been obvious to me that the MSM is completely dishonest about certain things and over the last dozen years I’ve become extremely suspicious about a whole range of other issues. But if you’d asked me a couple of years ago whether JFK was killed by a conspiracy, I would have said “well, anything’s possible, but I’m 99% sure there’s absolutely no substantial evidence pointing in that direction since the MSM would surely have headlined it a million times over.”
It took me several more years to fully digest these shocking realizations. Once I did so, they played an important role in convincing me that many of the other historical anomalies I’d come across over the years were actually real rather than merely being a product of my own overactive imagination. So when I eventually launched my lengthy American Pravda series cataloging and analyzing many of those, a pair of my earliest articles described my belated discovery and analysis of the JFK Assassination conspiracy, with those pieces released almost exactly six years ago.
- American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part I – What Happened?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 18, 2018 • 4,800 Words • 1,257 Comments - American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part II – Who Did It?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 25, 2018 • 8,000 Words • 1,034 Comments
By the time I published those articles I’d read perhaps a dozen books on the JFK Assassination and they had easily convinced me many times over that the killing had been the product of a conspiracy. The Talbot and Douglass books had been favorably discussed in the elite mainstream media and together they effectively summarized a half-century of conspiracy-research, providing an enormous wealth of detailed evidence. But just a few years earlier much of that material would have seemed almost something out of a paranoid fantasy to me:
Oswald seems to have been working with various anti-Communist groups and also had significant connections to U.S. intelligence, while his purported Marxism was merely a very thin disguise. With regard to the assassination itself, he was exactly the “patsy” he publicly claimed to be, and very likely never fired a single shot. Meanwhile, Jack Ruby had a long history of ties to organized crime, and surely killed Oswald to shut his mouth.
Many others may have suffered a similar fate. Conspirators daring enough to strike at the president of the United States would hardly balk at using lethal means to protect themselves from the consequences of their action, and over the years a considerable number of individuals associated with the case in one way or another came to untimely ends.
Less than a year after the assassination, JFK mistress Mary Meyer, the ex-wife of high-ranking CIA official Cord Meyer, was found shot to death in a Washington DC street-killing with no indications of attempted robbery or rape, and the case was never solved. Immediately afterwards, CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton was caught breaking into her home in search of her personal diary, which he later claimed to have destroyed.
Dorothy Kilgallen was a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist and television personality, and she managed to wrangle an exclusive interview with Jack Ruby, later boasting to her friends that she would break the JFK assassination case wide open in her new book, producing the biggest scoop of her career. Instead, she was found dead in her Upper East Side townhouse, having apparently succumbed to an overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills, with both the draft text and the notes to her Jack Ruby chapter missing.
Shortly before Jim Garrison filed his assassination charges, his top suspect David Ferrie was found dead at age 48, possibly of natural causes, though the DA suspected foul play.
During the mid-1970s, the House Select Committee on Assassinations held a series of high-profile hearings to reopen and investigate the case, and two of the witnesses called were high-ranking mafia figures Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli, widely suspected of having been connected with the assassination. The former was shot to death in the basement of his home one week before he was scheduled to testify, and the body of the latter was found in an oil-drum floating in the waters off Miami after he had been subpoenaed for an additional appearance.
These were merely a few of the highest-profile individuals with a connection to the Dallas assassination whose lives were cut short in the years that followed, and although the deaths may have been purely coincidental, the full list is rather a long one.
At the time I wrote those words in 2018, the name Dorothy Kilgallen meant nothing to me, but I later discovered that for many years she’d been one of America’s most powerful female journalists, writing an influential column and enjoying regular weekly appearances on a popular national television show. That last factor may have led to her untimely demise, since she’d successfully deployed her media stature to persuade the star-struck local Dallas jailors to violate their orders and allow her an exclusive interview with Ruby. Soon afterwards, she began boasting to her elite New York City social circle that she would break the JFK case wide open, giving her the biggest story of her long career. Her highly-suspicious sudden death and the simultaneous disappearance of her JFK manuscript and files may have served as a potent warning to others of her profession. Only many decades later did a book finally appear documenting her important background and her sudden death, and when I read The Reporter Who Knew Too Much a couple of years ago, I found it quite detailed and persuasive.
Another book published around the same time has received much greater attention in JFK conspiracy circles though I haven’t yet read it myself. Mary’s Mosaic by Peter Janney told the story of longtime JFK mistress Mary Meyer, who met a violent death in an unsolved street killing the year after the assassination. As the former wife of high-ranking CIA official Cord Meyer and also the sister-in-law of Washington Posteditor and close JFK friend Benjamin Bradlee, Meyer had been a leading member of DC society, and once again the details of her important story only finally appeared in print more than a half-century after her death.
The NYC and DC worlds of elite journalism and politics were small ones and I strongly suspect that the sudden deaths of Kilgallen and Meyer severely damped the eagerness of their former friends and colleagues to question the public verdict established by the Warren Commission. Back in those pre-Internet days of highly-centralized media control, it was extremely difficult for alternative viewpoints to gain any public traction under the best of circumstances, so the successful intimidation of a relatively small number of prominent individuals could have an enormous impact upon the public discussion.
As I explored the elements of a gigantic story that I had so casually ignored throughout my entire life, some huge ironies became apparent to me. I was struck by the tremendous ease with which our entire political and media establishment fell into line behind so implausible an official cover story. Indeed, I explained that although there eventually appeared widespread public skepticism that President Kennedy had been slain by a deranged lone gunman, such controversial ideas may have been lucky to initially get off the ground.
Our reality is shaped by the media, but what the media presents is often determined by complex forces rather than by the factual evidence in front of their eyes. And the lessons of the JFK assassination may provide some important insights into this situation.
A president was dead and soon afterward his supposed lone assassin suffered the same fate, producing a tidy story with a convenient endpoint. Raising doubts or focusing on contrary evidence might open doors better kept shut, perhaps endangering national unity or even risking nuclear war if the trail seemed to lead overseas. The highest law enforcement officer in the country was the slain president’s own brother, and since he seemed to fully accept that simple framework, what responsible journalist or editor would be willing to go against it? What American center of power or influence had any strong interest in opposing that official narrative?
Certainly there was immediate and total skepticism overseas, with few foreign leaders ever believing the story, and figures such as Nikita Khrushchev, Charles DeGaulle, and Fidel Castro all immediately concluded that a political plot had been responsible for Kennedy’s elimination. Mainstream media outlets in France and the rest of Western Europe were equally skeptical of the “lone gunman theory,” and some of the most important early criticism of U.S. government claims was produced by Thomas Burnett, an expatriate American writing for one of the largest French newsweeklies. But in pre-Internet days, only the tiniest sliver of the American public had regular access to such foreign publications, and their impact upon domestic opinion would have been nil.
Perhaps instead of asking ourselves why the “lone gunman” story was accepted, we should instead be asking why it was ever vigorously challenged, during an era when media control was extremely centralized in establishmentarian hands.
Oddly enough, the answer may lie in the determination of a single individual named Mark Lane, a left-liberal New York City attorney and Democratic Party activist. Although JFK assassination books eventually numbered in the thousands and the resulting conspiracy theories roiled American public life throughout the 1960s and 1970s, without his initial involvement matters might have followed a drastically different trajectory.
From the very first, Lane had been skeptical of the official story, and less than a month after the killing, The National Guardian, a small left-wing national newspaper, published his 10,000 word critique, highlighting major flaws in the “lone gunman theory.” Although his piece had been rejected by every other national periodical, the public interest was enormous, and once the entire edition sold out, thousands of extra copies were printed in pamphlet form. Lane even rented a theater in New York City, and for several months gave public lectures to packed audiences.
After the Warren Commission issued its completely contrary official verdict, he began working on a manuscript, and although he faced huge obstacles in finding an American publisher, once Rush to Judgment appeared, it spent a remarkable two years on the national bestseller lists, easily reaching the #1 spot. Such tremendous economic success naturally persuaded a host of other authors to follow suit, and an entire genre was soon established. Lane later published A Citizens Dissentrecounting his early struggles to break the total American “media blackout” against anyone contradicting the official conclusion. Against all odds, he had succeeded in sparking a massive popular uprising sharply challenging the narrative of the establishment.
According to Talbot, “By late 1966, it was becoming impossible for the establishment media to stick with the official story” and the November 25, 1966 edition of Life Magazine, then at the absolute height of its national influence, carried the remarkable cover story “Did Oswald Act Alone?” with the conclusion that he probably did not. The next month, The New York Times announced it was forming a special task force to investigate the assassination. These elements were to merge with the media furor soon surrounding the Garrison investigation that began the following year, an investigation that enlisted Lane as an active participant.
However, I explained that a powerful media counterattack was already being launched from behind the scenes:
In 2013 Prof. Lance deHaven-Smith, past president of the Florida Political Science Association, published Conspiracy Theory in America, a fascinating exploration of the history of the concept and the likely origins of the term itself. He noted that during 1966 the CIA had become alarmed at the growing national skepticism of the Warren Commission findings, especially once the public began turning its suspicious eyes toward the intelligence agency itself. Therefore, in January 1967 top CIA officials distributed a memo to all their local stations, directing them to employ their media assets and elite contacts to refute such criticism by various arguments, notably including an emphasis on Robert Kennedy’s supposed endorsement of the “lone gunman” conclusion.
This memo, obtained by a later FOIA request, repeatedly used the term “conspiracy” in a highly negative sense, suggesting that “conspiracy theories” and “conspiracy theorists” be portrayed as irresponsible and irrational. And as I wrote in 2016,
Soon afterward, there suddenly appeared statements in the media making those exact points, with some of the wording, arguments, and patterns of usage closely matching those CIA guidelines. The result was a huge spike in the pejorative use of the phrase, which spread throughout the American media, with the residual impact continuing right down to the present day.
This possible cause-and-effect relationship is supported by other evidence. Shortly after leaving The Washington Post in 1977, famed Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein published a 25,000 word Rolling Stone cover story entitled “The CIA and the Media” revealing that during the previous quarter century over 400 American journalists had secretly carried out assignments for the CIA according to documents on file at the headquarters of that organization. This influence project, known as “Operation Mockingbird,” had allegedly been launched near the end of the 1940s by high-ranking CIA official Frank Wisner, and included editors and publishers situated at the very top of the mainstream media hierarchy.
For whatever reason, by the time I came of age and began following the national media in the late 1970s, the JFK story had become old news, and all the newspapers and magazines I read provided the very strong impression that the “conspiracy theories” surrounding the assassination were total nonsense, long since debunked, and only of interest to kooks on the ideological fringe. I was certainly aware of the enormous profusion of popular conspiracy books, but I never had the slightest interest in looking at any of them. America’s political establishment and its close media allies had outlasted the popular rebellion, and the name “Mark Lane” meant almost nothing to me, except vaguely as some sort of fringe-nut, who very occasionally rated a mention in my mainstream newspapers, receiving the same sort of treatment accorded to Scientologists or UFO activists.
As I digested a number of the major recent JFK assassination books, I found that they presented a very persuasive reconstruction of events. Summarizing a half-century of conspiracy research, the works by Talbot, Douglass, and others provided an overwhelming case that a conspiracy had been responsible, and sketched out the identities of some of the likely lower- or middle-ranking participants, fingering members of organized crime, elements of the CIA, and anti-Castro Cubans, with all of these groups often intermingled and overlapping. All of this was useful and absolutely necessary given that their authors were challenging a uniform, decades-long campaign of denial by the mainstream media.
But once they had convinced me five or six times over of the reality of that conspiracy, I became much more interested in the “Who” and the “Why” of the ultimate organizers rather than merely in the “How” of those who implemented the plan, and I was often disappointed in this regard. Most of these books seemed to ignore that issue or vaguely suggested that the plot had been hatched by shadowy right-wingers, perhaps including hard-line anti-Communist American generals or ruthless Texas oil millionaires, but they provided little solid evidence or logic to support those suspicions.
Sometimes a neophyte may notice things that readily escape the attention of those who have already spent many years or decades in a field, and I later explained what I considered to be a very curious omission:
If a husband or wife is found murdered, with no obvious suspect or motive at hand, the normal response of the police is to carefully investigate the surviving spouse, and quite often this suspicion proves correct. Similarly, if you read in your newspapers that in some obscure Third World country two bitterly hostile leaders, both having unpronounceable names, had been sharing supreme political power until one was suddenly struck down in a mysterious assassination by unknown conspirators, your thoughts would certainly move in an obvious direction. Most Americans in the early 1960s did not perceive their own country’s politics in such a light, but perhaps they were mistaken. As a total newcomer to the enormous, hidden world of JFK conspiracy analysis, I was immediately surprised by the mere sliver of suspicion directed towards Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, the slain leader’s immediate successor and the most obvious beneficiary.
The two Talbot books and the one by Douglass, totaling some 1500 pages, devote merely a few paragraphs to any suspicions of Johnson’s involvement. Talbot’s first book reports that immediately after the assassination, the vice president had expressed a frantic concern to his personal aides that a military coup might be in progress or a world war breaking out, and suggests that these few casual words demonstrate his obvious innocence, although a more cynical observer might wonder if those remarks had been uttered for exactly that reason. Talbot’s second book actually quotes an apparent low-level conspirator as claiming that Johnson had personally signed off on the plot and admits that Hunt believed the same thing, but treats such unsubstantiated accusations with considerable skepticism, before adding a single sentence acknowledging that Johnson may indeed have been a passive supporter or even an accomplice. Douglass and Peter Dale Scott, author of the influential 1993 book Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, apparently seem never to have even entertained the possibility.
Ideological considerations are probably an important reason for such remarkable reticence. Although liberals had grown to revile LBJ by the late 1960s for his escalation of the unpopular Vietnam War, over the decades those sentiments have faded, while warm memories of his passage of the landmark Civil Rights legislation and his creation of the Great Society programs have elevated his stature in that ideological camp. Furthermore, such legislation had long been blockaded in Congress and only became law because of the 1964 Democratic Congressional landslide following JFK’s martyrdom, and it might be difficult for liberals to admit that their fondest dreams were only realized by an act of political parricide.
Kennedy and Johnson may have been intensely hostile personal rivals, but there seem to have been few deep ideological differences between the two men, and most of the leading figures in JFK’s government continued to serve under his successor, surely another source of enormous embarrassment to any ardent liberals who came to suspect that the former had been murdered by a conspiracy involving the latter. Talbot, Douglass, and many other left-leaning advocates for an assassination conspiracy prefer to point the finger of blame towards far more congenial villains such as hard-line, anti-Communist Cold Warriors and right-wing elements, notably including top CIA officials, such as former director Allan Dulles.
An additional factor helping to explain the extreme unwillingness of Talbot, Douglass, and others to consider Johnson as an obvious suspect may be the realities of the book publishing industry. By the 2000s, JFK assassination conspiracies had long become passé and were treated with disdain in mainstream circles. Talbot’s strong reputation, his 150 original interviews, and the quality of his manuscript broke that barrier, and attracted The Free Press as his very respectable publisher, while later drawing a strongly positive review by a leading academic scholar in the New York Times Sunday Book Review and an hour long television segment broadcast on C-Span Booknotes. But if he had devoted any space to voicing suspicions that our 35th president had been murdered by our 36th, surely the weight of that extra element of “outrageous conspiracy theory” would have ensured that his book sank without a trace.
However, if we cast off these distorting ideological blinders and the practical considerations of American publishing, the prima facie case for Johnson’s involvement seems quite compelling.
Consider a very simple point. If a president is struck down by an unknown group of conspirators, his successor would normally have had the strongest possible incentive to track them down lest he might become their next victim. Yet Johnson did nothing, appointing the Warren Commission that covered up the entire matter, laying the blame upon an erratic “lone gunman” conveniently dead. This would seem remarkably odd behavior for an innocent LBJ. This conclusion does not demand that Johnson was the mastermind, nor even an active participant, but it raises a very strong suspicion that he at least had had some awareness of the plot, and enjoyed a good personal relationship with some of the principals.
A similar conclusion is supported by a converse analysis. If the plot succeeded and Johnson became president, the conspirators must surely have felt reasonably confident that they would be protected rather than tracked down and punished as traitors by the new president. Even a fully successful assassination would entail enormous risks unless the organizers believed that Johnson would do exactly what he did, and the only means of ensuring this would be to sound him out about the plan, at least in some vague manner, and obtain his passive acquiesce.
Based on these considerations, it seems extremely difficult to believe that any JFK assassination conspiracy took place entirely without Johnson’s foreknowledge, or that he was not a central figure in the subsequent cover-up.
My impression is that until the last dozen years or so, merely a sliver of the books and articles on the JFK Assassination ever even hinted at the possible role of LBJ, apparently regarding the notion as too radioactive to mention and ignoring the obvious logical case for his involvement. But even in the very early days, when conspiracy-researchers concentrated almost entirely upon challenging the “lone gunman” narrative enshrined by the Warren Commission, I think that dark suspicions may have privately circulated.
For example, I recently discussed this matter with an elderly liberal activist in her mid-80s, someone who until recently had never read a single JFK Assassination book. Having never paid much attention to the controversy, she was shocked to discover that the conspiratorial case was as strong as it was. But she also mentioned that in the aftermath of Kennedy’s death, she and her friends had sometimes wondered whether Johnson might have been involved, but then rejected that possibility as being too horrific to contemplate, fearing that if such beliefs gained traction, they might lead to national rioting and the complete destabilization of America’s democratic political system.
As the Vietnam War escalated and President Johnson became an object of intense hatred in leftist circles, I think that suspicion of his personal role in the death of his predecessor may have gradually spread. In 1966 a young Berkeley anti-war activist named Barbara Garson reworked the treachery and regicide of Shakespeare’s MacBeth into a modern day sketch involving the recent death of our own president at the hands of his successor, in which the murderous usurper was finally avenged and slain by the character representing Robert F. Kennedy. MacBird! first appeared in Ramparts, a leading antiwar publication of the Left, and it was soon developed into a play, running for many hundreds of performances in New York City, Los Angeles, and elsewhere despite pressure from the authorities. But that short work of allegorical, almost satirical fiction aimed at Johnson seems to have been very much the exception to the pattern.
Johnson never received even a hint of suspicion in Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning 1991 film and a closely-related book endorsed by that famed director took a similar position. Col. L. Fletcher Prouty had been an important Pentagon official during the early 1960s, serving as liaison officer to the CIA, and he became intensely suspicious of the circumstances of his President’s death. Prouty’s theories inspired Stone’s film for which he served as a technical advisor, while his real-life role in that drama was played by Donald Sutherland. In 1992 Prouty published JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, with Stone providing a lengthy, glowing introduction, hailing the author as a historic figure. I recently read that book, noting that the author similarly blamed the killing upon elements of our national security “Deep State” while devoting relatively little attention to Johnson, who was portrayed as a completely innocent bystander.
The appearance of JFK Assassination books has tended to come in waves. The tremendous success of Stone’s 1991 film led publishers to open their doors, and another such wave followed in the wake of Talbot’s 2007 best-seller, further boosted by the considerable sales success and favorable reviews of Douglass’ 2009 work. But this latter period finally saw the appearance of several important books arguing that Johnson had been the central figure in the plot.
The first and most important of these works was LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, a hefty 2011 volume running well over 600 pages by Phillip F. Nelson, a retired Texas businessman. Nearly fifty years had elapsed since Johnson’s death, and Nelson did an excellent job of collating and compiling the overwhelming evidence of Johnson’s long and extremely sordid political career, a career that allegedly culminated in the murder of his predecessor.
Johnson had been a product of Texas politics and during the first half of the twentieth century his state seems to have borne a strong resemblance to a corrupt Third World country, whose vast oil wealth and lucrative federal programs offered enormous financial opportunities for those clever and ruthless enough to take advantage of them. Thus, Johnson was born dirt-poor, held low-paying government jobs throughout his entire life, yet in 1963 he took the oath of office as the wealthiest president in modern American history, having accumulated a personal fortune of over $100 million in present-day terms, with the financial payoffs from his corporate benefactors laundered through his wife’s business. Johnson’s striking wealth is so little remembered these days that a prominent political journalist with Texas roots expressed total disbelief when I mentioned those facts to him fifteen-odd years ago.
Johnson’s political and financial rise had relied upon stolen elections and massive government corruption schemes and these sometimes placed him in legal jeopardy. Given such difficulties, Nelson makes a strong case that the future president may have protected himself by arranging a long series of murders, with some of the stories being absolutely astonishing but apparently true. For example, in one bizarre 1961 incident that strangely foreshadowed the Warren Commission’s “lone gunman” finding, a federal government inspector investigating a huge Texas corruption scheme involving a close LBJ ally rejected various attempts to buy him off and was then found dead, shot five times in the chest and abdomen by a rifle; but his death was officially ruled a “suicide” by the local authorities, and reported as such with a straight face in the pages of the Washington Post.
Many of these murders may have been committed by a certain Malcolm “Mac” Wallace, whom Nelson identifies as Johnson’s personal hitman, kept on the federal payroll of the Department of Agriculture between his periodic lethal assignments. In one remarkable 1951 incident, Wallace shot dead in broad daylight a local celebrity golf pro who was involved in a messy affair with Johnson’s troublesome sister Josefa, leading a jury to convict him of first degree murder. Although under Texas law such a verdict would normally carry a mandatory death penalty, Wallace instead astonishingly escaped with a suspended sentence allowing him to immediately walk free, courtesy of Johnson’s massive political influence. Texas of that era seemed to share characteristics similar to those of Chicago during the reign of Al Capone.
Although he operated much more cautiously away from his Texas domain, Johnson seems to have adopted similarly ruthless methods in DC, heavily relying upon corruption and blackmail to solidify his power base in the U.S. Senate over which he reigned during much of the 1950s. He also immediately recognized the power wielded by J. Edgar Hoover, whom he enlisted as one of his closest political allies, shrewdly buying a house just a few doors down from the longtime FBI director and living as a close neighbor for nearly twenty years.
After spending the years of Eisenhower’s second term widely regarded as the most powerful Democrat in America, Johnson decided to seek the Presidency in 1960, hardly regarding the much younger Kennedy, whom he greatly outranked in political stature and somewhat despised, as a serious threat. His confidence was reinforced by the fact that no Catholic had been nominated by a major party since Al Smith’s epic 1928 disaster.
Unfortunately for Johnson’s political plans, patriarch Joseph Kennedy had already spent a quarter century as a powerful political figure, relentlessly plotting his own family’s path to the White House. His liquid wealth was far greater than Johnson’s and he was willing to freely spend it on his son’s nomination drive, swamping all other candidates in the bribes and secret payoffs that determined the voting outcomes in some of the crucial but very corrupt primary states such as West Virginia. So by the time of the Democratic convention, the younger Kennedy had the nomination all locked up and Johnson had been politically humiliated.
At this point, matters took a strange turn. Both Kennedy and his younger brother Robert detested Johnson and they had already selected Sen. Stuart Symington as the Vice Presidential nominee when suddenly at the last moment Johnson was placed on the ticket instead. Both Nelson and Seymour Hersh in The Dark Side of Camelot told this story and strongly argued that heavy use of personal blackmail was responsible for this sudden change of political plans rather than geographical ticket-balancing or any other legitimate factor. But Kennedy’s paper-thin 1960 victory would have been far more difficult without Texas narrowly falling into the Democratic column, and the massive election fraud orchestrated by Johnson’s ruthless political machine had been crucial in achieving that result.
Johnson had begun 1960 as the most powerful Democrat in America and he reasonably believed that his efforts had been crucial in winning the November race, so he naturally expected that he would play a major role in the new administration, even issuing grandiose demands for a huge political portfolio. But instead he was immediately sidelined and treated with complete disdain, soon becoming a forlorn figure in DC with no authority nor influence. With Johnson having lost his longtime power-base in the Senate, the Kennedys eventually made plans to get rid of him, and just a few days before the assassination, they were already discussing whom to place on the 1964 reelection ticket in his stead. They recognized that once purged, Johnson might become a dangerous and vindictive political foe, so they decided to remove that possibility by using the record of his massive corruption and many crimes in Texas to completely destroy him.
The recent fall of Bobby Baker, Johnson’s key political henchman in the Senate, presented an excellent opportunity. So the Kennedys began orchestrating a media campaign to expose Johnson, intended to result in his political destruction and perhaps a lengthy prison sentence. James Wagenvoord was then the 27-year-old assistant to Life Magazine‘s executive editor, and in early November 2009 he emailed a note breaking his long decades of silence and telling the story of the massive expose against Johnson that had been pulled at the very last moment. Nelson quoted this astonishing revelation at length, only correcting minor typos and errors:
Beginning in later summer 1963 [Life] magazine, based upon information fed from Bobby Kennedy and the Justice Department, had been developing a major newsbreak piece concerning Johnson and Bobby Baker. On publication Johnson would have been finished and off the ’64 ticket ([the] reason the material was fed to us) and would probably have been facing prison time. At the time Life magazine was arguably the most important general news source in the United States. The top management of Time Inc. was closely allied with the USA’s various intelligence agencies and we were used…by the Kennedy Justice Department as a conduit to the public…The LBJ/Baker piece was in the final editing stages and was scheduled to break in the issue of the magazine due out the week of November 24 (most likely one of the next scheduled editions, November 29th or December 6th, distributed four or five days earlier than those dates). It had been prepared in relative secrecy by a small special editorial team. On Kennedy’s death research files and all numbered copies of the nearly print-ready draft were gathered up by my boss (he had been the top editor on the team) and shredded. The issue that was to expose LBJ instead featured the Zapruder film. Based upon our success in syndicating the Zapruder film I became Chief of Time/Life editorial services and remained in that job until 1968. (emphasis added.)
Thus, by mid-November 1963, Johnson seemed a desperate political figure at the absolute end of his rope. But a week later he was the President of the United States, and all those swirling scandals were suddenly forgotten, with the huge block of magazine space reserved for the story of his political destruction apparently instead filled by the coverage of the assassination that placed him in the White House.
These crucial facts about Johnson’s desperate personal situation address a criticism commonly raised by conspiracy skeptics, such as establishmentarian historian Stephen Ambrose. By 1992, Oliver Stone’s very successful film had unleashed a flood of JFK Assassination books and Ambrose published a lengthy 4,100 word review and rebuttal of these in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, emphasizing the very long list of the alleged anti-Kennedy conspirators across those different volumes, including elements of the Mafia, the CIA, the Pentagon, J. Edgar Hoover, Vice President Johnson, Texas oil millionaires, Southern racists, Defense contractors, and international bankers. But Kennedy’s extremely narrow 1960 victory had heavily relied upon an overwhelmingly solid Democratic South, and given his subsequent tilt towards black Civil Rights, this was unlikely to recur, placing his reelection prospects in serious doubt. The 1964 vote was less than a year away, and Ambrose plausibly argued that all those bitter Kennedy enemies would surely have focused their efforts on removing him through the ballot-box, perhaps by revealing his numerous sexual indiscretions, rather than taking the unprecedented risk of organizing a Presidential assassination. But although that argument applied to the roster of Kennedy’s other powerful enemies, LBJ was the obvious exception since his political life and personal freedom were hanging by a thread. So in that long list, only Johnson had the motive to strike immediately.
Johnson and his close allies entirely controlled the city of Dallas and Nelson explained how the Vice President lured Kennedy there to his doom. During that fatal motorcade, Johnson occupied a vehicle following Kennedy’s and Nelson devoted more than a dozen pages to discussing the photographic and eye-witness evidence demonstrating Johnson’s awareness of the shooting that was about to take place, with the very nervous Vice President making repeated excuses to lower his head as his vehicle approached the target area and then reacting before anyone else in the procession, completely ducking down in his car the moment the first shot was fired. Although this hardly proves that Johnson was the central mastermind of the plot, the evidence of his direct foreknowledge of the planned shooting seems overwhelmingly strong.
Nelson further reported the striking detail that more than three decades after the assassination, a previously unknown fingerprint on a box in Oswald’s alleged sixth floor sniper’s nest in Dallas Book Depository was finally identified by an expert as being that of Mac Wallace, Johnson’s longtime hit man. Wallace himself may not have been one of the shooters and Nelson actually suggested that his role had instead been to place the shells and clean up the scene, but this obviously greatly strengthens the evidence of Johnson’s involvement in the killing.
The success of Nelson’s lengthy, heavily documented volume prompted others to come forward as well. Longtime Republican political operative Roger Stone had gotten his start under Richard Nixon and on the fiftieth anniversary of the JFK assassination, he drew on Nelson’s ground-breaking research to publish his own book The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ, co-authored by Mike Colapietro and similarly implicating Johnson. The Stone book became a national bestseller and by reading it in 2016 I first encountered Nelson’s analysis, years before I read the latter’s own book on the subject. Stone successfully brought Nelson’s material to the attention of a much wider audience, but he also added several important items of his own as I explained in 2016:
Aside from effectively documenting Johnson’s sordid personal history and the looming destruction he faced at the hands of the Kennedys in late 1963, Stone also adds numerous fascinating pieces of personal testimony, which may or may not be reliable. According to him, as his mentor Nixon was watching the scene at the Dallas police station where Jack Ruby shot Oswald, Nixon immediately turned as white as a ghost, explaining that he had personally known the gunman under his birth-name of Rubenstein. While working on a House Committee in 1947, Nixon had been advised by a close ally and prominent mob-lawyer to hire Ruby as an investigator, being told that “he was one of Lyndon Johnson’s boys.” Stone also claims that Nixon once emphasized that although he had long sought the presidency, unlike Johnson “I wasn’t willing to kill for it.” He further reports that Vietnam Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and numerous other prominent political figures in DC were absolutely convinced of Johnson’s direct involvement in the assassination.
Stone has spent more than a half-century as a ruthless political operative, a position that provided him with unique personal access to individuals who participated in the great events of the past, but one that also carries the less than totally candid reputation of that profession, and individuals must carefully weigh these conflicting factors against each other. Personally, I tend to credit most of the eyewitness stories he provides. But even readers who remain entirely skeptical should find useful the large collection of secondary source references to the sordid details of LBJ’s history that the book provides.
Although Stone’s book had already given me a second-hand account of much of Nelson’s ground-breaking research, in late 2021 I finally read the original work and found it extremely detailed and persuasive, while it also provided many important elements that Stone had excluded from his considerably shorter and more personal volume. I’d certainly rank Nelson’s book as one of the dozen or so crucial texts that should be read by anyone seriously interested in the JFK Assassination.
As a consequence of that very favorable impression, I recently read Nelson’s equally long 2014 sequel LBJ: From Mastermind to “The Colossus,” which extended his coverage to Johnson’s White House years. But I found it provided relatively few major new revelations, and the text was very poorly edited, with various claims and descriptions repeated numerous times, suggesting that the volume had been rushed into print to take advantage of an opportunity.
Aside from everything else, Nelson spent a couple of pages arguing that Johnson had substantial secret Jewish ancestry, and perhaps as a result that belief has become very widespread in conspiratorial circles, but the evidence seems extremely thin. Nelson noted Johnson’s long record of support for Zionism and Israel as well as the claim in a local Jewish newspaper widely quoted across the Internet that two of Johnson’s maternal great-grandparents who had immigrated from Germany during the mid-18th century had been Jewish. However, the only evidence cited for that last item was that their last names—Huffman and Perrin—were allegedly common Jewish ones, something that seems a wild exaggeration since I’ve never heard of any Jews with those names. Moreover, their first names of John and Mary were exceptionally rare among European Jews in that era, so much so that I can’t think of a single example, while nothing in their family activities or employment suggests Jewish origins. Meanwhile, the obvious reason for Johnson’s extreme philo-Semitism and pro-Israel views was the wealth and political influence of the Jewish community, just as it explained his equally strong support for Texas oil millionaires and numerous business interests.
A very different supplement to these heavily-footnoted LBJ works on Johnson came in a much slimmer volume. Texas in the Morning was published in 1997 by Madeleine Duncan Brown, one of Johnson’s longtime Texas mistresses, who allegedly gave birth to his son in 1950. Although readers must decide for themselves the reliability of her tell-all memoirs, written a quarter-century after LBJ’s death, I found her account reasonably credible myself. Her son did seem to closely resemble his putative father and most of her claims fit with everything else I’d read about that powerful and ruthless political figure.
Although the author claimed to still deeply love her deceased paramour, many of the stories she passed along were hardly favorable to the latter, with one of them especially sticking in my memory. Soon after Johnson became Vice President, she took her two young children to visit him in DC, naturally bringing along her black maid and nanny, who after ten years of close personal service had become a member of the family. But when that nanny brought the two children into the hotel suite for the long-awaited rendezvous, Johnson became very fearful and agitated, concerned that she had discovered his identity, something particularly dangerous given his recent political elevation. He immediately urged Brown to “get rid of her” but she balked at discharging someone who had almost become the surrogate mother of her two children. Then not long after their return to Texas, the nanny said she had to take an afternoon off to meet someone on an important personal matter and she permanently disappeared, never again seen by anyone, including friends, family, or relatives. This led Brown to suspect the worst, a conclusion strongly reinforced by the detailed accounts of other such incidents provided by Nelson, Stone, and others.
These many books provided an enormous amount of hard factual information, but nearly all of it seems to have been ignored in the leading mainstream accounts of Johnson’s life and career. Beginning soon after LBJ’s 1973 death, biographer Robert Caro has spent decades producing a massively exhaustive series entitled The Years of Lyndon Johnson, with four very thick volumes already published and the 88-year-old hoping to complete his fifth and last. Yet although his magisterial work has achieved enormous critical acclaim, based upon all the many reviews I have read, he has chosen to completely exclude nearly all the “controversial” elements from his more than 3,500 pages of text, an extremely strange decision since so many of them seem so solidly documented.
Most of Caro’s volumes have become top national bestsellers and I assume that they have together sold many hundreds of thousands of copies. Yet oddly enough, a short, cheaply produced paperback published by an obscure author a decade before Caro even began his monumental research probably provides a far more realistic view of our 36th President. Even more oddly, that slim, self-published volume, lacking any index or bibliography, has vastly outsold Caro’s series, with some 7.5 million copies in print.
Sixty years ago on the eve of the 1964 elections, J. Evetts Haley, a conservative Texas Democrat and historian who had himself unsuccessfully run for governor in 1956, released A Texan Looks at Lyndon, a scathing attack against the occupant of the White House, which focused entirely upon the dark side of an extremely dark political figure, presenting many of the same facts and plausible suspicions regarding massive corruption and multiple murders that would be documented in such considerable detail by Nelson almost a half-century later. According to a short and hostile retrospective 1987 account in the liberal Texas Monthly, no publisher would touch Haley’s book and under pressure from Johnson’s allies, it was eventually banned from newsstands and airports, but at one point sales still reached 50,000 per day, becoming the most successful political book of all time.
Haley was a long-time member of the right-wing John Birch Society and some of his accusations of Communist influence do seem considerably exaggerated, but according to the dismissive verdict of that mainstream Texas reviewer writing in the late 1980s:
In his most outrageous claim, Haley insinuated that Johnson was involved with the Kennedy assassination. The problem was that Haley’s polemic lost touch with reality.
Thus, it’s rather strange to discover that for sixty years a reasonably accurate account of LBJ’s nefarious activities has probably been sitting on millions of private bookshelves across America while being almost totally ignored by our entire political and media class. During 1966 and 1967 liberal activists had become intensely hostile toward Johnson and sometimes quietly speculated that he had gained the White House through murder, but very few of them would ever open the pages of a book published just a couple of years earlier that provided so many of the crucial details, rejecting that work as having been written by a zealous Bircher and ardent Goldwater supporter.
Meanwhile, I suspect that few right-wingers paid much attention to Haley’s speculations regarding the JFK assassination. In March 1964 Prof. Revilo Oliver, a very influential Far Right figure who had co-founded the John Birch Society and edited its monthly magazine, had published “Marxmanship in Dallas,” blaming the assassination upon the Communists, and that became the widely-accepted narrative in such ideological circles.
Ironically enough, Johnson himself took the same position in his own private conversations with top American political leaders, regularly diverting suspicion towards the Soviet Communists, and there is considerable evidence that this clever ruse had been a planned element of the assassination plot from the very beginning.
John Newman spent twenty years in Military Intelligence and afterward became a professor of history at the University of Maryland. Over the last several decades he has applied the technical skills he honed in his many years of government service to analyzing the bureaucratic minutia of declassified government files and in 1993 he published Oswald and the CIA, an important work whose revised 2008 edition contained a new epilogue, summarizing some of his crucial conclusions.
Prof. Newman makes a very strong case that in the months prior to the killing a false intelligence trail was deliberately created suggesting that Oswald might have been a Soviet agent. This allowed Johnson to use such misinformation to compel the leading figures of the Warren Commission to suppress all evidence of any conspiracy in Dallas in order to avoid “kicking us into a war that can kill forty million Americans in an hour.” While Newman’s important findings do not prove that Johnson had been part of the plot, they are obviously very consistent with that hypothesis.
Although Johnson was certainly not the only important conspirator, there seems overwhelming evidence that he was one of the central figures, which has momentous implications for our understanding of modern American history.
We are forced to admit that at the very height of the hallowed American Century, one of our Presidents gained his office by arranging the assassination of his predecessor. Moreover, this act of highest treason was subsequently protected and concealed both at the time and long afterwards by almost our entire political and media establishment, with nearly all of JFK’s Cabinet members continuing to serve under the man who had murdered and replaced him.
Once I fully digested this shocking reality, I searched my memory for any parallel examples in other major countries during modern times and came up empty. America and its relentlessly cheerleading media has always portrayed the U.S. as unique among the nations of the world, but the uniqueness I discovered was of a much less praiseworthy sort. Across the last several centuries no example came to mind of anything similar occurring in Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, or Russia, notwithstanding their occasional revolutions, purges, or military coups.
We have often looked down upon the dozens of Latin American countries and their turbulent politics, stigmatizing many of them as “banana republics.” Given that Bolivia alone has endured 190 different military coups since it first gained independence in 1825, such an attitude may sometimes be warranted, and perhaps some of their individual national histories have seen such similar events.
But the only possible case that came to my mind was the 1983 elevation of Panama’s Manuel Noriega following the death of his predecessor Gen. Omar Torrijos in a suspicious plane crash, and the evidence seems far from strong. Regardless, if the closest analogy to the story of JFK and LBJ could only be found in the Narco-state military dictatorship of one of Latin America’s smallest and most corrupt countries, Americans surely cannot take great pride in their system of governance.
I suspect this factor more than any other explains the almost total continuing silence we still see more than sixty years after LBJ became President by orchestrating JFK’s assassination. The overweening pride of the American political and media establishment cannot easily survive admitting that they tolerated that situation and then worked to conceal those events from the American people during the sixty years that followed.
The week after publishing my original JFK Assassination articles, I’d opened the next installment of my American Pravda series with the following relevant paragraphs.
…I never had any interest in 20th century American history. For one thing, it seemed so apparent to me that all the basic political facts were already well known and conveniently provided in the pages of my introductory history textbooks, thereby leaving little room for any original research, except in the most obscure corners of the field.
Also, the politics of ancient times was often colorful and exciting, with Hellenistic and Roman rulers so frequently deposed by palace coups, or falling victim to assassinations, poisonings, or other untimely deaths of a highly suspicious nature. By contrast, American political history was remarkably bland and boring, lacking any such extra constitutional events to give it spice. The most dramatic political upheaval of my own lifetime had been the forced resignation of President Richard Nixon under threat of impeachment, and the causes of his departure from office—some petty abuses of power and a subsequent cover-up—were so clearly inconsequential that they fully affirmed the strength of our American democracy and the scrupulous care with which our watchdog media policed the misdeeds of even the most powerful.
In hindsight perhaps I should have asked myself whether the coups and poisonings of Roman Imperial times were accurately reported in their own day, or if most of the toga-wearing citizens of that era might have remained blissfully unaware of the nefarious events secretly determining the governance of their own society.
