There is hardly any doubt of the passive complicity of the Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), whose career at the time of his election was already strewn with several hidden corpses. In 1959, Johnson tried to remove Kennedy from the race for the Democratic nomination by stealing his medical records in order to expose his Addison's disease; at least, he was suspected by the Kennedys to have commissioned the burglaries at his two doctors’ offices (with no result). Soon afterward, Johnson imposed himself as Kennedy’s running mate, in part thanks to privileged access to the secret files of FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover, his long time neighbor and friend. Hoover, nicknamed Puppetmaster by his biographer Richard Hack, was a well-seasoned expert in blackmail: his resources drawn from cabinets of incriminating secrets allowed him to remain at the head of the FBI for 48 years, spanning nine presidents from 1924 until his death at age 72. As soon as Kennedy became president, Hoover wasted no time in reminding him of his own irreplaceability: in February 1962, for example, feeling the threat of forced retirement, he reported to his supervisor Attorney General Robert Kennedy, that he had happened across evidence of sexual relations between his brother, the President, and the mistress of mobster Sam Giancana, Judith Campbell Exner.

 

“You know, we had never considered Lyndon”, Kennedy apologized one day to his assistant Hyman Raskin, “but I was left with no choice ... those bastards were trying to frame me. They threatened me with problems and I don’t need more problems”. Kennedy never said more. To the questions of Pierre Salinger, he replied: “The whole story will never be known. And it's just as well that it won’t be”. We can, however, trust the account of his personal secretary of twelve years, Evelyn Lincoln: “Jack knew that Hoover and LBJ would just fill the air with womanizing”. Kennedy would justify the situation, as his friend Kenneth O'Donnell remembers, by saying: “I’m forty-three years old, … I’m not going to die in office. So the vice presidency doesn’t mean anything”.[ii] Johnson of course saw things differently: to Clare Boothe Luce, who asked him why he had accepted a post clearly less strategic than the Majority Leader in the Senate which he held prior to his nomination, he replied: “One out of every four presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin’, and this is the only chance I got”.[iii] Therefore, some investigators such as Phillip Nelson see Johnson as The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination, and believe that when he was taking over the vice-presidency by blackmail, Johnson was already planning to take over the presidency by assassination. Most recently, Roger Stone, former political consultant for Nixon and Reagan, has also pointed to LBJ as The Man Who Killed Kennedy (2013).

 

Three years after his election, having repeatedly borne hostility from parts of his administration and threats to his life, Kennedy’s greatest fear was to see Johnson, that “riverboat gambler” as he called him,[v] take his seat. In her Historic Conversations recorded in 1964 but only released in 2011, his wife Jackie quoted him: “Jack said it to me sometimes. He said, ‘Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president’”.[vi] Likewise, Robert Kennedy remembered his brother complaining about Johnson’s incompetence at running the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (against racial discrimination) that he had entrusted him, adding: “Can you think of anything more deplorable than him trying to run the United States? That’s why he can’t ever be president”.[vii] John Kennedy was therefore determined to change the vice-presidential name on the ticket for his reelection campaign in 1964. A few days before his fatal trip to Dallas, again confiding in his secretary Evelyn Lincoln, he justified that decision by his desire to work toward “making government service and honorable career”.[viii]

 

Johnson had been implicated in three corruption scandals dating back to his tenure as a Texan senator, between 1949 and 1960. One of his close Texan associates, the Navy Secretary Fred Korth, had to resign after the Justice Department implicated him in a fraud involving the Texan company General Dynamics in a $7 billion contract for the construction of TFX military aircrafts. Johnson’s personal secretary, Bobby Baker, was charged in the same case, and one of his associates, Don Reynolds, testified against him on November 22 before the Senate Rules Committee; he attested to have seen a suitcase with $100,000 in kickbacks intended for Johnson, and further claimed to have been offered bribes for his silence.[ix] Baker's indictment took the headlines of the weekly magazine Life, just days before November 22: “The Bombshell Bobby Baker: [...] Scandal grows and grows in Washington”.[x] A more devastating article was scheduled for the next issue, as James Wagenvoord would reveal as the then Chief Assistant to the Publishing Projects Director of Life: “It was going to blow Johnson right out of the water. We had him. He was done [...] Johnson would have been finished and off the 1964 ticket, and would have probably been facing prison time”.[xi] Instead of this article, however, Life published 31 images of the Zapruder film, but in a modified order that strategically presented the images as a validation of what would be the official story: that the shooting came from behind.

 

Kennedy’s death propelled Johnson to the head of the state and, in the atmosphere of national crisis thus created, enabled him to bully both justice and the press while achieving his life’s ambition. Many Americans immediately suspected Johnson’s involvement in the assassination, especially in Texas where his methods and character were better known. But the population was somehow reassured by the fact that the new leader of the White House kept intact his predecessor’s government. Besides, no relatives of Kennedy publicly challenged the official story. Who could imagine that all those ministers and advisers, some close friends of Kennedy, could have betrayed their hero? They themselves, in fact, could not believe the culpability of Johnson, and were convinced to stand united under the auspices of national interest: “I need you now more than President Kennedy needed you”, Johnson repeated to each of them.[xii] After all, Edgar Hoover himself assured the nation that Oswald had acted on his own initiative. The case was closed. It was necessary to ensure the continuity of government, at least until the end of the presidential term, a year later.

 

Several people directly implicated Johnson in the Dallas crime, starting with Jack Ruby who didn’t mince his words in a press conference from his prison cell in March 1965: “if [Adlai Stevenson] was vice president there would never have been an assassination of our beloved President Kennedy”.[xiii] Ruby was less ambiguous in a letter of sixteen pages he managed to get out of jail, shortly before being struck down with cancer in 1967.[xiv] One of Johnson’s mistresses, Madeline Brown, would tell anyone who will listen what Johnson had told her November 21, 1963: “Tomorrow those goddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again; that’s no threat, that’s a promise”.[xv] It is true that the main witnesses against Johnson are somewhat unreliable. Included among them is Billie Sol Estes, a rogue Texas businessman who tried in vain to negotiate leniency from his judges in exchange for information on five other killings by Johnson, including Johnson’s own sister.

 

All things considered, it seems unlikely that Johnson is the mastermind behind the assassination plot. But it is unthinkable that the conspirators acted without prior assurance of his protection, and it is quite possible that Johnson personally intervened in preparations for the ambush in his own State. After all, Kennedy was assassinated in Texas to put a Texan in power, and we still see Texas’s enduring sense of foreignness vis-à-vis Washington and the East Coast elite, a century after the Civil War.

 

Johnson maintained a close relationship with certain agents of the Secret Service, who were responsible for the route of the motorcade and guilty of many of the day’s security oversights. One such agent, Joseph Shimon, confided to his daughter in the spring of 1963, “The vice president has asked me to give him more security than the president”, leading her to believe that, “Something is going to happen and Johnson knows about it”.[xvi]

 

Most importantly, after Dallas, Johnson placed all the weight of his newly acquired authority to affirm the lone gunman theory. He ordered the Dallas police to stop any investigation from November 22nd, and even called Dallas Hospital on November 24th to order the surgeon, in the midst of trying to save Oswald’s life, to rather retrieve from him “a death-bed confession”.[xvii] In his personal determination to keep the lid on the truth, Johnson received the full support of Edgar Hoover, who released his findings to the press even before the Warren Commission could get to work: no one could contradict Hoover. This was not Hoover’s first cover-up: had he not, as late as 1956, denied the existence of organized crime, even while it dominated the political life of megacities like Chicago?[xviii]

 

 

Johnson’s role of obscurest politics surrounding the Dallas crime raises a more general question about the role of the Vice President in U.S. policy. His function is so poorly defined and poorly controlled that some analysts see it as a fatal constitutional flaw. The Vice President has no official executive role as long as the President is in office, and can, therefore, easily escape direct liability. This has allowed some Vice Presidents to exert hidden influence without accountability, and use their position as a backdoor to the supreme power. At the outset, the choice of Vice President largely escapes voters, and is rather a result of backdoor negotiations after the primaries. So, in case of the President’s death, the American people find themselves governed by a man not democratically chosen and largely unfamiliar. And if the elected President ends his term, the Vice-President, as a White House insider, has had every opportunity to ensure an advantage in the next presidential race, while securing the blessing of the previous President; it means that the Vice-Presidency is a position deeply coveted by those seeking expedited avenues to power. It is a historical fact that U.S. Presidents passed through the Vice-Presidency have all shown a penchant for conspiracy and concealment. Three of them hold key roles in the present narrative: Richard Nixon, George Bush Sr., and Dick Cheney. The first two are linked to the Dallas coup and its repercussions, while the third practically replaced his President without having to kill him. As said Bruce Fein, a former Associate Deputy Attorney General, “Dick Cheney exercises all the power of the Presidency. That has never happened. Ever.”[xx]

 

 

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[i] quoted in Phillip Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination, XLibris, 2010, p. 17.

 

[ii] Nelson, LBJ, op. cit., p. 318-20.

 

[iii] Mahoney, The Kennedy Brothers, op. cit., p. 64.

 

[iv] Jeff  Shesol, Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade, WW Norton & Co, 1997, 2012, p. 95.

 

[v] Benjamin Bradlee, Conversations with Kennedy, 1975, Pocket Books, 1976, p. 17.

 

[vi] Jacqueline Kennedy, Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, Hyperion, 2011, p. *

 

[vii] Shesol, Mutual Contempt, op. cit., p. 73.

 

[viii] Nelson, LBJ, op. cit., p. 372).

 

[ix] Russ Baker, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years, Bloomsbury Press, 2009, p. 183.

 

[x] Nelson, LBJ, op. cit., p. 370.

 

[xi] Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, op. cit., p. 259).

 

[xii] Kenneth O’Donnell et David Powers, Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye: Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Little, Brown & Co, 1970, p. 38.

 

[xiii] L’extrait peut être visionné sur YouTube, « Jack Ruby Talks ».

 

[xiv] Nelson, LBJ, op. cit., p. 604-7.

 

[xv] Nelson, LBJ, op. cit., p. 376.

 

[xvi] Toni Shimon interviewed in 2007 by Peter Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, op. cit., p. 214.

 

[xvii] Nelson, LBJ, op. cit., p. 585.

 

[xviii] Hack, Puppetmaster, op. cit., p. 285.

 

[xix] Nelson, LBJ, op. cit., p. *

 

[xx] Lou Dubose et Jake Bernstein, Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, Random House, 2006, p. 223.

According to his biographer Robert Caro, Johnson was a man thirsting for power, “for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will […], a hunger so fierce and consuming that no consideration of morality or ethics, no cost to himself — or to anyone else — could stand before it”.[i]

While leaving Love Field airport at Dallas, Secret Service agent Henry Rybka shows his disbelief when asked not to stand on the running board of the presidential limousine, as was standard rule.

Roger Craig, a police officer on duty in Dallas on November 22nd, was bothered by the order he and all his colleagues received “to take no part whatsoever in the security of that motorcade”. He had seen too much to believe in the lone gunner theory. Refusing to silence his doubts, he was fired in 1967, escaped three attempts on his life which left him handicapped, and was finally found dead on May 15th, 1975, just before he was du to testify in front of the HSCA. His death was ruled a suicide.

Johnson insisted to be sworn in office right after John Kennedy was declared dead, in the presidential plane Air Force One still in Dallas. He managed to drag Jacqueline Kennedy by his side, for a picture that strongly contributed to his legitimacy in public opinion. On the second shot, taken seconds after the first, some believe that Johnson is winking to Senator Albert Thomas.[xix]

“Johnson lies all the time. I’m just telling you, he just lies continuously, about everything. In every conversation I have with him, he lies. As I’ve said, he lies even when he doesn’t have to”. This is one of the many remarks made by Robert Kennedy on Johnson, recorded in Jeff Shesol, Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade (1997).[iv]