JFK

By Christopher Chandler

The 1991 movie “JFK” begins with the famous speech by President Eisenhower warning of the growing power of the “military industrial complex,” and the effects this will have on the soul of America. It relates the valiant efforts by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, played by Kevin Costner, to unravel the conspiracy behind the assassination of the president, pursuing men with ties to the CIA and the mob.

Towards the end, Garrison interviews a “Black Ops” agent, played by Donald Sutherland, who lays out the whole picture. The assassination was carried out by a conspiracy that involved the highest levels of government.

But of all the documentary clips Stone uses, he was apparently unaware of CBS news footage of Jack Ruby, who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, telling the press it was Lyndon Johnson, the vice president, who succeeded Kennedy just days before, who had arranged the killing.

“The world will never know the true facts of what occurred,” he says to reporters, in footage found in the National Archives by researcher Dennis Mueller for the documentary “The Grassy Knoll.”

“I want to correct what I said before about the vice president,” Ruby tells reporters. “The vice president?” a reporter asks. “When I mentioned about Adlai Stevenson,” Ruby replies. “If he was the vice president there would never have been an assassination of our beloved president Kennedy.”

“Would you explain again?” a reporter asks. “Well, the answer is the man in office now.”

This is just one piece of evidence in the picture that is finally emerging of how Johnson orchestrated the assassination. There are many more, including:

–  The Billy Sol Estes federal court filing, in which the long time Johnson business partner lists seven men who were killed because they got in Johnson’s way. The last name on the list was John F. Kennedy.

—  The deathbed confession of E. Howard Hunt, the CIA operative involved in the Bay of Pigs and later arrested in the Watergate break in. He drew a diagram for his son of those involved in the assassination of Kennedy, and at the top of the pyramid was Johnson.

—   The book by a chief investigator for the Congressional Investigation which documents how Johnson micromanaged every detail of Kennedy’s visit to Dallas, including trying to change the seating in the presidents limo, and calling Oswald’s doctor to tell him to get a deathbed confession. The investigator, Douglas P. Horne, also documents how the Secret Service deliberately destroyed protective survey reports sought by the Assassination Records Review Board in 1995.

Bits and pieces of evidence are finally coming to light. Hundreds of books have been written about the assassination, tracing CIA and mob connections, and demonstrating the falsifying of evidence by the Warren Commission. But until recently little was written about who might have led the conspiracy.

The context of the assassination is provided by “JFK and the Unspeakable, and Why It Matters” by James W. Douglass, a book Oliver Stone calls “The best account I have read of this tragedy and its significance.” Douglass proves, with painstaking research, that president Kennedy was carrying out a radical change in American foreign policy. He had already ordered the withdrawal of 1,000 troops from Vietnam, and was planning a full exit. He was working with Russia’s Nikita Khrushchev on a joint flight to the moon, as a symbol of the end of the cold war. He was a severe threat to the military industrial complex.

He was a threat to the CIA. After the Bay of Pigs, he fired CIA director Allen Dulles and planned to transfer Black OP’s to the Chiefs of Staff. He was a threat to the mob, with Attorney General Bobby Kennedy pursuing it relentlessly. He was planning to accept Hoover’s resignation. He had many enemies, but he was a popular president bound for reelection.

“L.B.J.: The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination,” makes a strong case that Johnson orchestrated the whole thing. It details LBJ’s ruthless rise to power and documents his serious mental problems. A revised edition is to be published Nov. 22. We will see what further revelations it contains.

The key to the whole conspiracy might be found in a meeting the night before the assassination between Johnson, Hoover and Nixon. It was at a party in the home of billionaire Clint Murchison. Dallas reporter Penn Jones Jr. first wrote about the meeting. Here we have the vice president and would be successor, the man who would be in charge of any investigation, and the leader of the opposition party.

Johnson’s mistress, Madeleine Brown, described the event as a party honoring Hoover. Johnson arrived late and a small group went into a private meeting. Others in the meeting included the host, Murchison, and John J. McCloy of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and a representative of Rockefeller interests. Brown says that after the meeting, a tense LBJ told her, “After tomorrow, those Goddamn Kennedy’s will never embarrass me again.”

When this meeting and other evidence of Johnson’s involvement were described in the final episode of  a series on the History Channel in 2003, there was a public outcry from Johnson supporters. The history channel withdrew the program, appointed three historians who found it lacked credibility, and issued a public apology.

But if that meeting took place, and it is corroborated in different ways by a number of witnesses, I think we have reached the heart of the conspiracy. Johnson was going over the final plans for the assassination and the cover up. He would be president the next day.

Within days of the assassination he canceled the troop withdrawal from Vietnam and assured generals the Communists would never win on his watch. He assured Hoover he had a permanent job. He appointed Allen Dulles, the CIA director Kennedy had fired, to the Warren Commission.

There is one final piece to the puzzle. In 1968 Johnson announced he would not seek the nomination of his party, and the history books take him at his word. But there is strong evidence that Johnson was planning on coming to the Democratic Convention and being renominated by acclaim.

Emmett Dedmon, the editor the the Chicago Sun-Times during the convention, wrote in the revised version of his book on Chicago history of a conversation he had with former Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley many years later when they were dining at the Tavern Club with their wives. Dedmon asked Daley how much of the decision to have police crack down on anti war protestors at the Convention was his, and how much was Johnson’s. The images of police beating demonstrators in front of the Hilton Hotel, broadcast to a nationwide audience, had been a disaster for the Democratic party.

“Daley’s answer was in the character of the man. ‘Emmett,’ he said, ‘ I was raised in the Eleventh Ward and taught party loyalty. Whatever it was, they will never hear it from me.” But then he added, in one of the few moments that it might be said he was ever off guard, “But I will tell you that twice I had to tell the president of the United States that he could not come to Chicago—once when he was sitting in Air Force One on the runway with the engines running.” This later reference, of course, was the night of the president’s birthday, when Johnson had obviously anticipated coming before the convention for an ovation and, hopefully, a nomination by acclamation.”

But he couldn’t be renominated if he was greeted by anti war protestors. The street in front of the Hilton had to be cleared.

So Johnson announces he’s not running, Bobby Kennedy is assassinated, and Johnson plans to run again. Kennedy was shot the night he won the California primary and was assured of the Democratic nomination. He was way ahead in the polls and no doubt would have been our next president.

It would be the same basic conspiracy that killed JFK; Nixon to enjoy the removal of an unbeatable candidate, billionaires sighing in relief, and Black Ops to make it happen. The removal of a man who as president would have ended the Vietnam war, and got to the bottom of his brother’s assassination.

And what of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King? And Malcolm X? Who controls the Black Ops today? To what extent is that same basic conspiracy still in place? In two years it will be the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death. We will honor him if the truth can finally emerge.