excerpts from the book

LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK's Assassination

by Phillip F. Nelson

Xlibris Press, 2010, paperback

p41
Lyndon Johnson, describing himself to a friend.

I'm just like a fox. I can see the jugular in any man and go for it, but I always keep myself in rein. I keep myself on a leash, just like you would an animal.

p47
The single most important thing [Lyndon] Lyndon learned in college was how to control powerful men who were flattered by his exceedingly deferential, sycophantic treatment of them... he became more and more adept in his skills in the manipulation of people ... These skills ... were the most essential defining points of his personality throughout his life.

p47

a Lyndon Johnson college classmate, Mylton Kennedy, describing Lyndon Johnson's unctuousness to John biographer Robert Caro

Words won't come to describe how Lyndon acted toward the faculty--how kowtowing he was, how suck-assing he was, how brownnosing he was.

p75
Among [Lyndon Johnson's] clients was ... the Mafia.

p77
When he was first "elected" to the Senate, Johnson established a close relationship with the twenty-year-old Senate Page Bobby Baker, as revealed by Baker himself in his book: "The drawling voice on the telephone said, 'Mr. Baker. I understand you know where the bodies are buried in the Senate. I appreciate it if you'd come by my office and talk to me." Baker would become more than an aide or protégé to Johnson; their relationship would become so close that Johnson would say that if he had a son, it would be Bobby Baker.

... Baker would become, along with Walter Jenkins, John Connally, Cliff Carter and Ed Clark, one of many "bagmen" and intermediaries between Johnson and shady businessmen and mobsters. Johnson was smart enough to know that he could never be tied directly to criminals and mobsters, so these ties were obfuscated by his use of intermediaries.

p77
There were] extended relationships between many men at the lower levels of the hierarchy headed by Lyndon Johnson, the ultimate dispenser of political influence, and his closest associate, Bobby Baker. The next level in the "triangle of influence" connected Baker, Clint Murchison, and James Hoffa directly to Carlos Marcello, the Mafia chieftain of New Orleans, as well as his longtime lobbyist Irving Davidson.

... Davidson was connected to everyone in Baker's influence-peddling empire as well as Jimmy Hoffa and a number of people in organized crime.

... Irving Davidson was one of the first Washington superlobbyists; his many clients ranged from the Coca-Cola Company to the CIA and a number of third-world dictators, including the Somozas of Nicaragua, the Duvaliers of Haiti, and the Trujillos of the Dominican Republic. As the registered lobbyist for the Teamsters Union (he was also a close friend of Jimmy Hoffa), he "was deeply involved in a Murchison business deal that provided funds for Lyndon Johnson's bagman, Bobby Baker." He represented both Carlos Marcello and Clint Murchison and would also become involved in their efforts to keep Jimmy Hoffa from going to prison, an initiative that eventually led to Hoffa being pardoned by Richard Nixon, another close friend of Davidson. But in the period of 1961-1963, he was deeply involved in handling illegal bribes and payoffs for Lyndon Johnson with his old neighbors Bobby Baker and Fred Black, all while being simultaneously protected by his other friend and neighbor, J. Edgar Hoover. The tentacles of these relationships can be traced further to Las Vegas (from Baker through his associates Eddie Levinson and Ben Siegelbaum to former FBI agent turned Mafia lawyer Robert Maheu and Johnny Rosselli), Miami (through Rosselli to Santos Trafficante), and Dallas (through Murchison, H. L. Hunt, and Mafia boss Joseph Civello to many policemen as well as Dallas County Sheriff Bill Decker and Jack Ruby). In neighboring Fort Worth, W C. Kirkwood hosted Hunt, Murchison, Sam Rayburn, and Lyndon Johnson at his sprawling complex named the Four Deuces.' Moreover, there were many links to several of these men-Rosselli and Jack Ruby in particular-back to the "Chicago Outfit" and Sam Giancana, their lawyer Sidney Korshak, and finally to financier Henry Crown, who happened to be the major stockholder (20 percent) of Fort Worth's General Dynamics Corporation.

Lyndon Johnson also had deep ties to Carlos Marcello in New Orleans, through Jack Halfen and Irving Davidson; Halfen was Johnson's original connection to the Mafia, funneling campaign funds to him since the late 1940s. The finances flowing from illegal slot machine profits and bookies using the Marcello racing wire services throughout Texas were a major part of the foundation of Johnson's rise to the top of the political empire. Many other "tentacles" of these groups [include] Meyer Lansky, who were among the few top crime figures never wiretapped or bugged by the FBI (except for the investigation of Las Vegas "skim"), even as Robert Kennedy's Justice Department aggressively pursued Mob figures throughout the rest of the United States. The reason for the FBI's reticence had less to do with insufficient cause than it did with the Mob's coercive power over the vulnerable director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover.

p95
Many men dream of becoming president and lay out complex plans to achieve their dream, but no one has ever been more obsessed with that goal than Lyndon Johnson was. His goal to become president was clearly something more than the mere word obsession would connote. It was something so absolute that it would be in practically all of his thoughts, awakened or not. He considered it his destiny, and nothing--least of all any other person--could get in his way to make it happen.

p95
[Lyndon Johnson's] political genius was rooted in his people-manipulation skills, especially his ability to pick subordinates who he could depend upon to forfeit their own values completely and, apparently, become extensions of his own amorality.

p95
The traces and echoes of Lyndon Johnson's character reverberated throughout his lifetime of ill-begotten triumphs, from his first election fraud as a college student to his achievement of the highest office of his country... It was his genius planning ability that finally allowed him to manipulate other men, using his insights into their psyche to motivate and manipulate them to do exactly what he wished them to do through the use of every tool in his huge storehouse of custom paraphernalia.

p98
Robert Kennedy

[Lyndon] Johnson had this ability 'to eat people up, even people who are considered rather strong figures ... He's mean, bitter, vicious-animal in many ways.

p98
Robert Kennedy

[Lyndon Johnson] lies all the time... he just lies continuously about everything. In every conversation I have with him, he lies... he lies even when he doesn't have to.

p99
one of Lyndon Johnson's classmates

[Lyndon Johnson] was a man who just could not tell the truth.

p99
Most men would be embarrassed to be caught in a lie, but not Johnson: men who knew him in Texas agreed that even when caught in a lie, he wouldn't flinch; he would resume lying again about the same thing, almost immediately.

p100
[Lyndon Johnson's] single most fundamental attribute, an opinion consistently shared by friends and foes alike, was his capacity for lying. He was somehow able to succeed on his trip up the political ladder in spite of his lack of credibility.

p112
Lyndon Johnson's former press secretary, George Reedy

As a human being he was a miserable person--a bully, sadist, lout, and egotist. He had no sense of loyalty, and he enjoyed tormenting those who had done the most for him. He seemed to take a special delight in humiliating those who had cast in their lot with him. It may well be that this was the result of a form of self-loathing in which he concluded that there had to be something wrong with anyone who would associate with him.

p112
John Connally, one of LBJ's closest aides and friends

[LBJ] was cruel and kind, generous and greedy, sensitive and insensitive, crafty and naive, ruthless and thoughtful, simple in many ways yet extremely complex, caring and totally uncaring; he could overwhelm with kindness and turn around and be cruel and petty toward those same people.

p113
President Lyndon Johnson to Senator Hubert Humphrey

I want people around me who would kiss my ass on a hot summer's day and say it smells like roses.

p116
Arthur Krock, The New York Times, October 3, 1963

The CIA growth was like.. . a malignancy which... [JFK] was not sure even the White House could control ... any longer. If the United States ever experiences [an attempt at a coup to overthrow the Government] it will come from the CIA and not the Pentagon. The agency represents a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone.

p116
James Angleton, CIA Chief of Counterintelligence

Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Carmel Office and Frank Wisner were the grand masters. If you were in a room with them you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.

p117
President Dwight Eisenhower, in his Farewell Address, January 17, 1961

[He was originally planning to describe the phenomenon as the "Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex", however, "Congressional," was dropped from the speech at the last minute, and it was simply referred to as the "Military-Industrial Complex"]

We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the Federal Government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist... We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.

p118
The CIA was established in 1947, but its mission was not defined until 1949 when Public Law 81-110 was passed; the prevailing attitude in Congress and the other branches of government was that an open-ended license to conduct its shadowy business was necessary in order to match the capabilities of the Soviet Union's intelligence agency, the KGB, which operated similarly. Thus, "the Agency" was free to use confidential fiscal and administrative processes to achieve its ends. The act exempted it from having to disclose anything about its organization, functions, officials, titles, salaries, whatever. Given such a broad mandate, it is not surprising that congressional scrutiny was, for practical purposes, nonexistent. The director of Central Intelligence during most of this period, Allen Dulles, fostered the sense of autonomy and independence throughout all of its sections. Its leaders, including [Allen] Dulles, Richard Helms, Richard Bissell, James Jesus Angleton, William Colby, and Cord Meyer.

p119
For the last sixty-odd years, the CIA has somehow managed to maintain reputation despite its checkered past... Its global reach enabled it to extend its umbrella over the entire hemisphere and attempt to reshape the world by discreetly manipulating--and worse, forcefully changing--the ideologies of sovereign nations.

p121
During 1960, even before the presidential election came into full swing, the CIA--acting at the behest of Vice President Nixon (as proxy for President Eisenhower)--recruited ex-FBI agent Robert Maheu, who would later become a top aide to the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes in Las Vegas, to ask Johnny Rosselli and Sam Giancana for help in murdering Castro. Although the Mafia did not manage to successfully kill Castro with the poison pills they were given by the Agency to accomplish this, that proved to be only the start of an association between the nation's leading intelligence agency and an underworld organization that the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation claimed did not even exist.

p123
The pressure from the Pentagon resulted in the Kennedy Administration increasing the number of American military personnel in South Vietnam from 685 in January 1960 to 16,732 in October 1963. However, despite this increase in military advisers and material support, Kennedy was still not fully supportive of further increases in troop levels, or of any introduction of combat troops.

p124
John Kennedy told his assistant secretary of state, Roger Hilsman

The Bay of Pigs has taught me a number of things. One is not to trust generals or the CIA, and the second is that if the American people do not want to use American troops to remove a Communist regime 90 miles away from our coast [Cuba], how can I ask them to use troops to remove a Communist regime 9,000 miles away [Vietnam].

p125

Author and former CIA operative Robert Morrow described a dramatic scene shortly after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in which he was invited by chief of the Miami (JM/WAVE) station Tracy Barnes to meet with the CIA's General Charles Cabell and Richard Bissell. In that meeting he was purportedly shown a letter, handwritten on the official stationery of the vice president of the United States and signed by the man who wrote it, using only his initials: "LBJ." He said the letter was written to "My Dear Charles," and started with ... a number of critical, self-serving comments about the intention of the President and his brother to build a Kennedy dynasty in the White House." Then the content of the letter next explained how he had learned "strictly by accident" of the secret directives Kennedy had given to Defense Secretary McNamara, ordering him to usurp all CIA control over its extant activities; he was further authorized to establish an alternative intelligence agency that would be assigned the functions formerly given to the CIA. This would all be done in conjunction with the firing of Director Dulles and Deputy Directors Bissell and Cabell. It would include a repudiation of the CIA charter and put control over all intelligence activities under the auspices of the soon-to-be-established DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency).

p125
Lyndon Johnson ... decided on his own to warn the entire CIA organization that their days were numbered as long as Kennedy remained president, and the Agency was about to be "torn into a thousand pieces."

Johnson would extend his clandestine activities to his military friends as well, working to develop his own "back channel" to key people in the Pentagon as well as at Langley. One of the military men-who clearly also had direct connections to key men in the CIA-who he personally brought into his inner circle was Col. Howard Burns f whom we will turn our attention in subsequent chapters), and another he would undoubtedly recruit was General Curtis LeMay who shared many of Johnson's attitudes, especially about the president, whom he regarded as an indecisive coward and avowed socialist.

p137
In the test-ban talks, which followed the [Cuban] missile crisis [1962], the Pentagon and the State Department weren't included in the negotiations; instead, a direct communication link between Washington and Moscow was established and a treaty was negotiated to ban nuclear testing, except for underground tests.

... At the same time that Kennedy was engaged in the test-ban negotiations and attempting to settle the strained relationship with Khrushchev the Joint Chiefs were pressing for a renewed buildup of strategic forces, arguing for achieving a first strike capability. On November 2, 1962, they sent a memorandum to Secretary McNamara that stated that such a capability is "feasible and desirable." The previous year he had attended an NSC meeting in which this idea was first broached, and he asked a series of questions about such an attack's likely damage to the USSR and its impact on American citizens, such as how long they would have to remain in fallout shelters afterward. Deputy Secretary of Defense Gilpatric duly noted in his minutes that "finally Kennedy got up and walked right out in the middle of it, and that was the end of it." Against the backdrop of mistrust, paranoia, and mutual derision, Jack Kennedy had begun to form his own ideas as to how to handle the multiple hot spots around the world: Berlin, Cuba, and Vietnam. In almost every aspect, they were positions at odds with those held firmly by the military and intelligence chiefs and of his own vice president. In a series of speeches and executive actions, JFK effected changes, which, for that era, were regarded by many people-the Joint Chiefs of Staff in particular-as belying a radically left-wing attitude. JFK's biographer Richard Reeves observed, "By moving so swiftly on the Moscow negotiations, Kennedy politically outflanked his own military on the most important military question of the time." Kennedy himself mused about the irony that he and Khrushchev were in essentially the same position within their respective governments; both were trying to prevent nuclear war, but they were both under "severe pressure from [the] hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement.

... In his ongoing battles with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and many of his own appointees at the highest levels of the executive department, the schism between the "government" in its largest context and himself was growing deeper and wider as summer turned into fall. Kennedy was rapidly losing control of his administration and of the entire government it was supposed to direct... The larger point was that it was a message the CIA was sending to the president, who was being told who was really in control of his government, and it wasn't John Kennedy" But the shock he felt this time was nothing compared to what he would later experience when he discovered that his own government had done an end run around him and his administration with the coup d'etat in Vietnam and the assassination of Diem and his brother. Only then did he realize how little control he had over the CIA and the combined military organizations symbolized and headed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

p147
Three months after Kennedy took office, on April 17, 1961, the CIA invasion of Cuba was executed. It was an unmitigated disaster. Getting word of the impending invasion, Castro's army routed the fifteen hundred Cuban exiles that landed at the Bay of Pigs.

... The CIA had begun plotting the assassination of Castro in August 1960, headed by Richard M. Bissell Jr. Moreover, Allen Dulles had gone to see President Eisenhower as early as March 1960 seeking approval to develop a plan to overthrow Castro. The original idea for using Mafia figures to assist the CIA in this plan originated as early as 1960.

p151
Neither the president nor the "assistant president" (RFK) were widely respected at the Pentagon or in Langley.

That vacuum was filled, somewhat, by the vice president [Lyndon Johnson], someone who better "understood" the military mentality not through his own expertise so much as his deference to theirs: he was easier to deal with because of his inclination to let them establish policy, not lead them to a position at odds with their conventional positions. This allegiance to the vice president by the military and intelligence leadership of the country came at the expense of their relationship to the president. Over the course of the next two years, those relationships would continue growing even further apart and become so well established that it could be argued that in the larger scheme, Lyndon B. Johnson had assumed the mantle of commander-in-chief.

p162
[Nikita] Khrushchev had expected to be able to have the missiles installed [in Cuba] and the nuclear warheads ready to be deployed before any of it was discovered, presenting the United States with a fait accompli, and no realistic way to undo it. The Kennedy administration, he believed, would "swallow this bitter pill. I knew that the United States could knock out some of our installations, but not all of them. If a quarter or even a tenth of our missiles survived--even if only one or two big ones were left--we could still hit New York, and there wouldn't be much of New York left."

... On October 16, 1962, Kennedy was given irrefutable U-2 photographic evidence of a Soviet ballistic site in Cuba.

... Two weeks before the November congressional elections, at 7:00 p.m. October 22, 1962, the president addressed the nation by television from the Oval Office, saying that we now had "unmistakable evidence" that offensive missile sites were being prepared in Cuba, for both MRBMs and IRBMs. This represented, the president said, an explicit threat to the peace and security of the Americas and was directly in contrast to the "repeated assurances" by Soviet spokesmen who had maintained that the buildup in Cuba was of a defensive nature. He attacked Foreign Minister Gromyko for misrepresenting their intentions and demanded that the Soviets withdraw or eliminate the missiles. He stated that a "strict quarantine" was being imposed on all offensive military equipment being shipped to Cuba and warned that further actions would be justified if these shipments continued.

... Nikita Khrushchev had begun secret, "back-channel" direct communication with John Kennedy in September, 1961; it had been used by both leaders for one year as a means to communicate directly, around the normal diplomatic channels and would now play an important part in the settlement of the crisis.

... John Kennedy dispatched Robert [Kennedy] to meet secretly with Ambassador Dobrynin to personally convey the president's concerns. His message, according to Khrushchev, was that "the President is in a grave situation... and he does not know how to get out of it. We are under very severe stress. In fact we are under pressure from our military to use force against Cuba... We want to ask you, Mr. Dobrynin, to pass President Kennedy's message to Chairman Khrushchev through unofficial channels... Even though the President himself is very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will... If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power."

p176
President John F. Kennedy

If the United States ever experiences an attempt at a coup to overthrow the government, it will come from the CIA. The agency represents a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone.

p176
John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, though now venerated by many for their public-spirited idealism and the aggressiveness with which they tackled the great issues of their time, were nonetheless hated viscerally by their enemies for the same qualities. Their political enemies on the right felt that their risk-taking aggressiveness was reckless and their idealism was putting the country at risk of being overcome by its Communist enemies. Their enemies in the Mafia, who felt they had been ambushed by John and Robert, after having helped their father get them elected in 1960, thought they had been used and abused by them. The oilmen of Texas had given at least partial support for the Democratic ticket because of Johnson's presence, but then felt they were being double-crossed as well. Unfortunately for JFK, his decision to allow Lyndon B. Johnson to be his partner put the primary leader of his opposition--the military and the intelligence agencies, the oil barons, the defense contractors, even the Southern segregationists--into the White House.

p176
From the very first days of the Kennedy administration, behind the scenes in the Oval Office, Lyndon Johnson had acquired the services of a Secret Service agent to spy on the president.

p177
[Lyndon] Johnson had ostensibly written a letter to General Charles Cabell alerting him to Kennedy's plans to do away with the CIA and move its functions to a new agency--the DIA--to be housed within the Pentagon. The import of this cannot be overemphasized: Johnson was already plotting--only three months into JFK's administration--with his friends in the CIA, against his nominal boss the president. The CIA contact said that "LBJ is our inside man in the Kennedy Administration. Every morning he walks to his office through the White House. If his friend in the Secret Service has any information, he meets him on his morning walk and supplies him with all the latest inside dirt to come out of the Oval Office.

p178
John Kennedy told an Kenneth O'Donnell

I'm forty-three years old, and I'm the healthiest candidate for president... I'm not going to die in office. So the vice presidency doesn't mean anything... I won't be able to live with Lyndon Johnson as the leader of a small Senate majority. Did it occur to you that if Lyndon becomes the vice president, I'll have Mike Mansfield as the Senate leader, somebody I can trust and depend on?

p178
John F. Kennedy had come to terms with putting a man he deeply, distrusted into the vice presidency [Lyndon Johnson], not because he thought he could be an effective member of his administration, but to put him into what he considered a dead-end position and "out of the way" so that he could achieve his legislative objectives with someone more reliable on Capitol Hill .

... In fact, Kennedy had been forced into accepting [Lyndon] Johnson, because he was blackmailed by the aging, duplicitous, and conniving director of the FBI [J. Edgar Hoover], who was enlisted by Johnson for that very purpose.

p176
After World War II, a group of people involved in Washington journalism, politics, and covert intelligence began meeting on a regular basis in the long-trendy area of Washington known as Georgetown, thus becoming a group that was referred to as the "Georgetown crowd." Many of them had gone to the same Ivy-League universities or worked together; others had been members of the military-intelligence agency OSS (Office of Strategic Services) during the war. Many of the OSS alumni eventually became employed at the highest levels of the Central Intelligence Agency.

... The Alsop brothers--Stewart and Joseph--having returned from service in both of the respective theaters of World War II in 1946, became Georgetown fixtures as well as collaborators in their syndicated newspaper columns and as Saturday Evening Post feature writers. Their political influence, based in large part by their ubiquitous presence at Georgetown dinner parties, was directed toward containing communism in general and Soviet expansionism in particular. Their frame of reference was grounded by a common goal of bringing order to the chaos in countries left ravaged or destroyed by the war. The biggest fruit of their work with key statesmen in Washington was the Marshall Plan; some of the statesmen with whom they collaborated were Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson, Robert Lovett, John McCloy, George Kennan, and Chip Bohien, who were considered among the original "best and brightest." Joseph Alsop became their leading chronicler, identifying with them in all their causes. Unfortunately, his association with them led him to follow the "groupthink" attitude into some areas where its simplistic and uncritical application-absent a thorough vetting from an honest debate-produced tragic results.

... The "Georgetown crowd" included Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Cord Meyer, Richard Helms, Desmond FitzGerald, Tracy Barnes, Philip Graham, Clark Clifford, Walt Rostow, Eugene Rostow, William Bundy, William Averell Harriman, John McCloy, Felix Frankfurter, John Sherman Cooper James Reston, Allen W Dulles, Paul Nitze, Adlai Stevenson, James Forrestal, William 0. Douglas, Dean Acheson, and George Kennan.

... An assortment of other politicians also socialized with these people, even some whose diplomatic and social skills would seem to be rather incongruent with the Ivy League background of many of the above names, probably caused by a kind of "moth to a fire" phenomenon--men like Lyndon B. Johnson and Joseph McCarthy, for example.

... Although the Georgetown group generally supported Truman's policies, they believed he was not sufficiently proactive regarding national security concerns, specifically his anti-Communist strategy. This caused Frank Wisner and George Kennan to create, with Secretary of Defense James Forrestal's approval, the Office of Special Projects in 1948; it was later renamed the office of Policy Coordination (OPC), which became the espionage and counterintelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency.

... One of the Georgetown regulars, Frank Wisner, was made the original director of OPC, charged with the creation of "propaganda", economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world." His organization evolved and became the agency's "Plans Division" in 1951, when Wisner succeeded Allen W Dulles as head of the Plans Division. In the 1950s, Frank Wisner was intent on establishing direct contacts between the agency and the "Fourth Estate"-the American press-journalists and book publishers who would willingly assist the CIA to communicate their view of any national or international political or military issue in a favorable light. he principal responsibility of both the OPC and the Plans Division was the conduct of secret political operations, in contrast to the other agency functions of gathering intelligence and making analysis. In 1951, Wisner established Operation Mockingbird, a program to influence the American media. "Wisner recruited Philip Graham (Washington Post) to run the project within the industry... By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles.

... Lyndon Johnson had struggled with recurrent bouts of depression since he was a child; but he was not alone among the men of the Georgetown crowd to have this burden. Phil Graham was one of Wisner's first recruits; he was the publisher of the Washington Post, until his own death by a gunshot to the head in 1963 stemming from a long and brutal fight with himself as a manic-depressive (in the vernacular of the time; the modern term, of course, is bipolar disorder). Frank Wisner, ironically, suffered from the same disease as his friend and collaborator Graham.

... Two years after Graham shot himself, so did Wisner.

... One of Phil Graham's best friends was Lyndon Johnson, who--unbeknownst to both of them--also shared similar psychological issues.

... By the early 1950s, Wisner had implemented his plan and owned respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all, according to a former CIA analyst. By 1953 the CIA, through Wisner and Graham, had a major influence over 25 major newspapers and wire agencies... Other former members of the OSS such as Arthur Schlesinger worked closely with this group. To make Operation Mockingbird work effectively, Wisner realized that he could not rely only on journalists and publishers like Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, who shared the Georgetown crowd view of the world. He therefore set out to recruit conservatives like William Paley (CBS), C. D. Jackson and Henry Luce (of Time and Life magazines). According to Alex Constantine (Mockingbird: The Subversion of the Free Press by the CIA), in the 1950s, "Some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts." One of the most important journalists under the control of Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, whose articles appeared in over three hundred different newspapers. Other journalists willing to promote the views of the Central Intelligence Agency included Stewart Alsop (New York Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York Times), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), Herb Gold (Miami News) and Charles Bartlett (Chattanooga Times).

... After his second breakdown, Graham finally began to have misgivings about the CIA's manipulation of journalists; by 1963 he saw that the former CBS newsman, Edward R. Murrow, now employed as the director of the United States Information Agency (USIA), was deeply involved in mobilizing support for the Vietnam War.

... In August 1952, the CIA reorganized itself again, merging the Office of Policy Coordination and the Office of Special Operations (the espionage division) into the new Directorate of Plans (DPP). Wisner was put in charge of the new, much larger organization, and Richard Helms became its chief of operations. The DPP being run by Wisner represented 60 percent of the personnel within the CIA.

p185
The truth about J. Edgar Hoover had been well hidden throughout his forty-eight-year term as the head of the FBI. Although many people had long suspected that he was far more enigmatic than he appeared, most of the nation still held him in high esteem, as the ultimate protector of core American values, by the time of his death in 1973.

p185
former assistant FBI director William Sullivan, in December 1975 Time magazine article

He was a brilliant chameleon. But he was also a master con man. That takes intelligence of a certain kind, an astuteness, a shrewdness. He never read anything that would broaden his mind or give depth to his thinking. I never knew him to have an intellectual or educated friend.

p186
Joseph P. Kennedy had known how to handle J. Edgar Hoover because they were of the same age and shared many friends and values; they were a lot alike. Many of their mutual friends were key Mafia leaders. Ironically, the thirty-five-year-old son of Joseph in 1961 became the attorney general and boss over the sixty-eight-year-old Hoover; Bobby Kennedy had already targeted some of these same friends of his father in his quest to "clean up" organized crime. The vitriol between Hoover and John and Robert Kennedy is wide, deep.

p186
The chief of the FBI--a demagogue and bully, unbeknownst to most people at the time--was running his own autonomous fiefdom within a federal government agency that he thought virtually belonged to him.

p187
Anthony Summers

"Mr. G-Man" J. Edgar Hoover was a closet homosexual and cross-dressing transvestite in his private life. He was also closely associated with a number of leading Mafia gangster from time spent at the racetracks and the month-long free annual vacations at a La Jolla, California resort... Mafia boss Meyer Lansky had obtained photos of Hoover that would have ruined his career if they had been revealed. He used the photos to blackmail Hoover to lay off the Mob; they allegedly showed Hoover engaging in oral sex with his chief deputy, Clyde Tolson...Hoover's own closet homosexuality and transvestism had compromised his ability to fight the Mafia, whose very existence he not only denied but in fact he was arguably their number one patron.

p187
J. Edgar Hoover used his huge cache of "official and confidential" files, a generic term, since there were also files of even greater secrecy, called "Personal and Confidential," "Sex Deviate," "Cointelpro," and others of less secrecy, all the way down to "Confidence Man File," "Anonymous Letter File," not to mention the "Do Not File" system, "so named to keep reports on illegal bureau break-ins out of the central record system' to blackmail anyone whom he deemed necessary, including congressmen, senators, high-level officials in every department or agency up to and including a succession of presidents, from Roosevelt to Nixon.

p190
Even as other politicians of lesser note would be censured for illegally converting campaign funds to their personal use, Lyndon Johnson--the most prolific campaign fund abuse practitioner in history, bar none--would escape such scrutiny; doubtlessly because too any others were indebted to him and/or justifiably afraid of him.

p190
JFK's predilection for sexual relations with a wide variety of young women is essential to the understanding of his vulnerability to other high-ranking government and military officials. Unfortunately, it became such a major part of his character that he allowed it to become a direct threat to his fitness for office, at least in the opinion of many men within the federal government bureaucracy, military establishment, and the intelligence community. If it had not involved a series of high-risk affairs with suspected spies, it might not have risen to the level that threatened his life. But it did involve very high-risk liaisons with the wrong women.

... J. Edgar Hoover had known all about Kennedy's affairs with numerous women, and he made sure that both JFK and RFK knew that he knew all about them. Hoover's agents had documentation on JFK liaisons with as many as thirty-two women during his presidency. Although most of the president's sexual conquests were with women who posed no "national security" threats ... there were several others who posed a serious threat. Those included women who were suspected spies ... and finally, the glamorous Marilyn Monroe, who had threatened, only days before her own demise, to hold a press conference to reveal the details of her intimate affairs with the president and the attorney general, as well as the secrets of the international affairs that she had learned.

... Altogether, four of the people involved in JFK's affairs--Kennedy himself Dorothy Kilgallen (who had never met any of the others, yet became exposed to them all through her work), Mary Meyer and Marilyn Monroe--would eventually die of very unnatural causes.

... For the president and his attorney general brother, there were obvious risks of having been involved with a famous Hollywood sex symbol. Unfortunately, for all concerned, this one was a lady whose hold on rationality was tenuous at best: The most glamorous movie star of all time was now threatening to expose her affairs by conducting a news conference to announce her experiences with both of the Kennedys and to disclose her knowledge of major national secrets... Marilyn [Monroe] was murdered fifteen months before JFK was assassinated; Mary [Meyer] was killed eleven months later. Kilgallen would die the year after Meyer. The three women did not know each other, but they had one thing in common: They were all "Women Who Knew Too Much." Their knowledge of Kennedy's secrets (in Kilgallen's case, secrets obtained about Lyndon Johnson from Jack Ruby) might have been the cause of their murders.

p203
In his official capacity as the attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy had undertaken an ongoing battle with organized crime, a personal war that he started in 1956 as an investigator for his brother's Senate committee investigating this issue. Yet despite the intensity of Kennedy's drive to eradicate organized crime throughout the country, the FBI, which reported to him, somehow avoided ever wiretapping Meyer Lansky, Carlos Marcello, or Santos Trafficante, the only three high-level crime figures who were not tapped. The reason for Lansky's excusal was due to the secrets he used to control Hoover for over a decade already. In the cases of Marcello and Trafficante, the reason could only be that, despite RFK's pursuit of mobsters in general, the CIA gave both men necessary cover and protection by involving them in the plan to assassinate Fidel Castro. Lyndon Johnson's (and J. Edgar Hoover's) long-time relationship with Marcello, through his lieutenants in Texas was another reason for the absence of wiretaps in his case.

Despite being protected by Johnson and Hoover, these same men were being pursued aggressively by Bobby Kennedy: On the morning of November 22, 1963, RFK was conducting a conference to review the progress and establish the priorities for the ongoing battle. His top four targets were Sam Giancana of Chicago, Santos Trafficante of Florida, labor boss Jimmy Hoffa, and Carlos Marcello of New Orleans.

p205
The CIA's plan to assassinate Fidel Castro, which emanated from the Eisenhower administration's 1960 planning, under Vice President Richard Nixon's tutelage, had involved Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli.

... Noel Twyman pieced together the relationships between the CIA and Rosselli, Giancana, Marcello, Trafficante, David Ferrie, and Jack Ruby.

... Within three weeks of Kennedy's murder, a team of FBI agents had uncovered evidence connecting all of the above names in an apparent conspiracy to assassinate the president... Then, suddenly, on December 18, 1963, all FBI investigations ceased. No mention of David Ferrie or Carlos Marcello was made to the Warren Commission in its supplemental report of January 13, 1964. Hoover obviously realized, only three weeks after the assassination, that if he did not put an immediate stop to any further investigation of the murder of the president, then he and Johnson would run the risk of one of his own investigators finding out about the real plot.

p227
The USDA was a repository for CIA agents around the world, because of the "perfect cover" it provided for its agents to embed themselves into offices and operations under the guise of being agricultural workers, agronomy scientists, or weather specialists; whatever masquerade might be necessary to suit the need was readily accommodated.

p228
Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy hated each other with a passion. J. Edgar Hoover also hated Robert Kennedy, possibly even more than Johnson did, and Kennedy reciprocated at the same level.

p228
Clint Murchison and Lyndon Johnson had been feeding off each other for many years, Murchison providing practically unlimited financial support and Johnson providing practically unlimited political influence and legislative favors. Johnson's rapid rise in power, especially after he was in the Senate, was directly related to his ability to raise money and dole it out to other politicians, who would thereafter be in his debt. Early on, wealthy Texans realized that, through Johnson, they could increase their leverage in the Senate beyond that which would come from only the two senators they were allotted. Murchison considered Lyndon Johnson his personal agent in Washington, knowing that he was in a position of enormous influence for the Senate at large, and the entire Capitol for that matter. His primary interest, and that of the other Texas oilmen, was in Johnson's ability to protect their 27.5 percent oil depletion allowance, a direct tax credit that allowed them to continue saving hundreds of millions of dollars from their federal taxes--revenue lost from the government coffers that would have to be made up for by other taxpayers.

p229
[Lyndon] Johnson's most important fund-raisers were Tommy Corcoran, George and Herman Brown, John Connally--who gathered cash from Sid Richardson and H. L. Hunt--and Ed Clark, who funneled money from Clint Murchison among others. Johnson received payoffs not only from men like Murchison, but also from Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa, another enemy of Robert Kennedy. For years, men came into Johnson's office and handed him envelopes stuffed with cash. John Connally and Ed Clark spoke freely to Robert Caro about taking envelopes stuffed with cash to Washington inside the breast pockets of their suit jackets.

p299
John F. Kennedy to Kenny O'Donnell

I'm forty-three years old. I'm not going to die in office. So the vice presidency doesn't mean anything.

p299
Lyndon B. Johnson to Clare Boothe Luce

One out of every four presidents has died in office. I'm a gambling man, darling, and this is the only chance I got.

p299
Lyndon Johnson had a lifelong, obsessive dream to become the presided of the United States, yet he realized that his chances of winning a national election as a Southerner running for the presidency were practically nil... Knowing the available time to achieve that dream was very limited, and that between John and Robert Kennedy, it would be unlikely that he could even mount an effective campaign before he was sixty-eight years old ... LBJ had an overwhelming motive to fulfill his lifetime goal. As the new president, Johnson knew he would have the power to control the subsequent investigation; he would use it immediately to derail attempts find the truth into a well-coordinated, intensive cover-up.

p301
Lyndon Johnson's military aide, Col. Howard Burns was told by a high-ranking Kennedy insider

Johnson served his purpose in 1960. He's not going to be on the ticket.

p315
JFK's personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln

[Lyndon Johnson] had been using all the information [FBI Director J. Edgar] Hoover could find on Kennedy--during the campaign [1960], even before the convention. And Hoover was in on the pressure on Kennedy at the convention... about womanizing, and things in Joe Kennedy's background, and anything he could dig up.

p316
The combination of Hoover's extensive files of compromising information on Kennedy's numerous sexual affairs and health records, including his history of Addison's disease, together with Lyndon Johnson's propensity for using brazen and brutal force to achieve his ends, would put enormous pressure on JFK to accede to LBJ's demands.

p340
The tentacles of [Lyndon] Johnson's arm's length reach into the underworld--through his close associations with such men as Bobby Baker, Mickey Weiner, Fred Black, Billie Sol Estes, Cliff Carter and Irving Davidson--led ultimately to Carlos Marcello, the head of the mafia in New Orleans. The very same Carlos Marcello who had been targeted by Bobby Kennedy in an all-out campaign of prosecution.

p341
Bobby Kennedy had a thick file on his desk which documented [Lyndon] Johnson's long criminal history on many fronts: Bobby Baker, Billie Sol Estes, and Jack Halfen, the legendary bagman go-between who connected Lyndon Johnson directly to Carlos Marcello.

p341
By November 21, 1963, then Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was caught in a web of legal and political troubles that threatened to remove him from politics forever and likely cause him to spend time in prison. The Senate investigations had now reached the point of no return: Left to their natural and inevitable course, not only would he lose his position as vice president the following year, but he might even be in jail by then. The only way to change the course was for him to become president. He had to become president immediately, or his destiny would never be achieved. In his mind, the only conceivable option was to proceed with the plan he had worked on at least since July 15, 1960, arguably even well before then. His own "executive action" plan for eliminating JFK created a new singular timeline and a nexus between the twin objectives of ending the current Senate investigations and simultaneously starting a long-term cover-up that would immediately ensue. Johnson knew where all the skeletons were buried, but just as importantly, he knew how to rattle the right bones whenever anyone stepped out of line.

p345
[The assassination of JFK] was a multiple-part, carefully prepared and coordinated plan involving elements of the Mafia, the Cuban exile community, international professional assassins, and renegades from the intelligence community.

... The top level of [Lyndon Johnson's] secret "task force" would have to comprise only men who shared his hatred of the Kennedys enough to act on it, with full knowledge of the risks and implications of being caught. It was imperative that all the "renegades" picked for this assignment were the best and could be trusted to keep the secret. Some were recruited for planning a simulated assassination that the Secret Service was supposedly planning as a pretext for the removal of all protection when the motorcade arrived in Dealey Plaza. These men could be trusted to "sign on" to Phase II without a missed step. It was also understood that certain men of the Dallas Police force would have to be called in as necessary, and ... would need to be extensively investigated beforehand in order to get any negative information on them to force their cooperation in event they resisted.

... J. Edgar Hoover, would be enlisted to help... Hoover's unique abilities for dissembling, evidence tampering, stealing, and fabrication of evidence would eventually be manifested... Hoover knew that if Kennedy was reelected in 1964, his ability to retain his directorship might be in jeopardy.

... Other high-level and like-minded officials of the government, who Johnson knew were either personally beholden to him or whose own hatred of John and/or Robert Kennedy was at least as great as his own, had been recruited one by one to handle key aspects of the plan... For everyone else farther down in the hierarchy. a successively smaller span of knowledge of the entire plan would be maintained; most would become unwitting participants simply because they were overtly forced to, or were misled by a superior into unwittingly taking an action that facilitated the series of acts which culminated in the assassination. For example, the need to control the Secret Service--to provide for a complete breakdown of all the normal security elements during a motorcade--would only need the actions of one man at the top: the head of the Secret Service, James Rowley, who was a good friend of Johnson, as well as Hoover, his former boss.'

... The key to the assassination, according to [Vice-President Lyndon] Johnson's plan, concerned the order to the Dallas Police and Sheriff's Departments to end their protection of the JFK motorcade at the corner of Main and Houston, under the disinformation that the Secret Service would take over at that point. Johnson would be in daily contact with his Washington staff, both the official one and the rogue group that was already finalizing the operational plans for the assassination. The real team in charge of Dealey Plaza that day had fake Secret Service identification, which they would successfully use to ward off any efforts by real policemen to investigate the source of the shooting. Johnson had specifically instructed ... the Dallas officials to end their protection at the intersection of Main and Houston streets.

... The fact that Dealey Plaza had been selected as the scene for the crime of the century was due to the phantom organizer's realization that it was the perfect location for multiple snipers.

... All of the orders to "stand down" were to be presented to subordinates downstream as coming directly from JFK, who, allegedly, was irritated by the noise of the motorcycles and the presence of Secret Service agents, who "came between him and the people." (These were among the most publicized lies perpetrated upon the Warren Commission by the Secret Service and the Dallas Police and have been conclusively debunked by later testimony).

p368
[The assassination of JFK was] an intricately managed plan simultaneously invoked through several government agencies and at multiple levels within them. The ultimate masterstroke was that all contingencies were covered and redundancy would guarantee a satisfactory result; Johnson's power as the new president would ensure complete control over the ensuing investigation, yet the upper reaches-all the way to himself-would be protected through "compartmentalization" and the rigorously applied precepts of plausible deniability. The idea that such a complex plan could be executed by a single "lone nut" considered to be a poor shot with a good rifle, yet who somehow successfully shot multiple rounds from a poorly made antique Italian rifle with a cheap unadjustable scope, was laughable.

p377
The order for JFK's assassination could only have come from his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. No other possible candidate for the key man of the assassination-not Santos Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, or Sam Giancana; not H. L. Hunt or Clint Murchison; not James Angleton, Bill Harvey, or David Morales; not Curtis LeMay, Charles Willoughby, or John McCloy; not even J. Edgar Hoover, and certainly not Lee Harvey Oswald-had the motive, the means, the opportunity, the demonstrated pattern of previous criminal, even murderous, conduct and the overall demented resolve to see it through. Only one man met all of the criteria required for the murder of John F. Kennedy: Lyndon B. Johnson. He not only had the most to gain with Kennedy's assassination, he had the most lose if JFK had not been murdered.

p614
John F Kennedy

[When we pull out] of Vietnam in 1965: I'll become one of the most unpopular presidents in history. I'll be damned everywhere as a communist appeaser. But I don't care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have a Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I'm reelected. So we had better make damned sure that Jam reelected.

p614
Lyndon B. Johnson to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at a 1963 Christmas party

Just get me elected, and then you can have your war.

p651
Lyndon Johnson liked to say that "he wanted men around him who were loyal enough to kiss my ass in Macy's window and say it smelled like a rose." He proved over and over again that there were plenty of men who would willingly do exactly that, figuratively or not. As difficult as it may be to comprehend how Johnson could control other men so completely, one need only reflect on the fawning sycophancy he expected from his associates or subordinates, especially after becoming president, when practically everyone was considered his subject.

p653
JFK's secretary Evelyn Lincoln wrote a letter in October 1994, seven months before her death

It is my belief that there was a conspiracy [to kill JFK] because there were those that disliked him and felt the only way to get rid of him was to assassinate him. These five conspirators, in my opinion, were Lyndon B. Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, the Mafia, the CIA and the Cubans in Florida.

p660
By 1958, at the age of fifty, Lyndon B. Johnson had accomplished a nearly unbelievable rise to the pinnacle of political power in the United States, yet he had come to believe that the chasm between where he was-the Majority Leader of the U. S. Senate-and where he aspired to be, was practically an impossible hurdle. His mentors in Congress, Representative Rayburn and Senator Russell, had convinced him that his Southern ties would prevent him from winning the presidency. By this time, his constant battles with the highs and lows brought on by his bipolar disorder-which grew unchecked by medical attention for the entire course of his political career-left him with a great fear of rejection, afraid to run for the office he had always been obsessed with achieving.

In 1960, he so feared losing the nomination for the presidency that he didn't announce his candidacy, and did no campaigning, until five days before the Democratic convention. Even then, he seemed to know that the campaign was over before it started; his only hope of beating John Kennedy was exposing his health problems, however that did not work inasmuch as he could not produce the "proof" that it required; that would risk revealing his source for the information. Other than the most negative attacks on JFK and his father, Johnson's presidential "campaign" was virtually nonexistent.

In contrast to his presidential "non-campaign," his campaign for the vice presidential nomination was stunning in its ferocity. The array of armaments he deployed in Los Angeles-for a position no one had ever before striven for-was formidable, unmistakably well planned, and precisely executed. He used every tactic imaginable, from the persuasive powers of Phil Graham and Sam Rayburn to the blackmail material from the files of J. Edgar Hoover to the use of threats and intimidation by Johnson himself: he vowed to kill any legislative initiatives Kennedy might ever send to the Hill. The overpowering blitz was so effective that it became an offer Kennedy "could not refuse." Lyndon Johnson desperately wanted the vice presidential nomination-arguably a "step down" from his position as Majority Leader-because he knew it would be the only means by which he would ever reach the White House. In 1960, he was fifty-two years old; if Kennedy had lived and been re-elected in 1964, by the end of his term in 1968, Johnson would have been sixty years old, almost the end of his expected life given his family history. That wouldn't do; he knew he had to create another plan to ensure his ascendancy before then.

During his almost three-year term as the vice president, Johnson would do everything he could to sabotage Kennedy behind his back: In foreign affairs, it included disagreements on Cuba and the Soviet Union and, most significantly, Vietnam. In the domestic arena, the primary issue was how he attempted to slow the progress of civil rights legislation and keep it as ineffective as possible only months before he would reverse course and force congress to pass the most sweeping reforms in history.

His real objectives during the period 1961-63 were focused on taking high level risks to continue his side businesses of selling the value of his political influence through associates, underworld figures, and lobbyists. He even compromised other administration officials to assist him to perpetuate these scandals, in one instance persuading Orville Freeman, the secretary of agriculture, to relax regulatory rules in order for his friend and benefactor Billie Sol Estes to carry out massive financial fraud. The traces of Johnson's hand in the criminal activity of a number of men, culminating in that of Estes and Bobby Baker-including the murders of several men uniquely vulnerable to the will of only one man, Lyndon B. Johnson-lead to the inescapable conclusion that he was capable of the most heinous crimes imaginable. In Dallas that day, he had key men pre-positioned in place, such that they would be available at the right times and the right places to ensure the plan was well executed. Only two of them-Cliff Carter and Malcolm Wallace-would know what was really going on; the others on hand, Connally, Moyers, Jack Puterbaugh, and a few lesser aides-would not. They were only following what might have been, for anyone else, strange and inexplicable orders, such as one that appears to have been assigned to Moyers, noted elsewhere: "Get that God-damned bubble off unless it pouring rain."

Johnson's behind-the-scenes manipulation of "his men" to prepare for the complete suspension of ordinary protection of the president-and his secretive charter of men to be selected by Angleton and his associates, purposely done with limited knowledge of operational details on his own part-would create the scene of the crime and presence of the assailants on the last day possible for salvaging his career. His plans for "Phase II" were designed to sew up the investigation and use the Texas judicial system to pronounce the designated "lone nut" the guilty party. At any later time, his nemesis, Bobby Kennedy, would have closed in on him and served an indictment, rather than merely feeding information to congressional committees and LIFE magazine. His last day for achieving his lifetime obsession was, ironically, also the last day for him to thwart his grandmother's prognostication. Rather than end his lifetime in prison, as she had predicted, he would end it in the White House, in accordance with what he had always believed was his rightful destiny.

He had always favored the "lone nut" option, since it would avoid the risk of World War III, an event which would certainly have carried with it the possibility of nuclear war, and of course the Soviets could be expected to aim their first missiles at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. However, there were many men at the highest levels of the military and intelligence organizations who preferred a head-on confrontation with these enemies, promising to annihilate them with a "first strike." To keep that option on the shelf, multiple trails to the assassin would be planted in Dallas, New Orleans and Mexico City to justify an immediate invasion of Cuba; this would serve the purpose of Plan B (required in the event that a "conspiracy" was undeniable) but would need to be covered over in the event that Plan A prevailed.

Other trails-the supposed mail order purchase of guns which were allegedly shipped to Oswald's post office box in Dallas (even though he had given no authorization for mail to "A. Hidell" at that location), and the newly created allegation that Oswald was the "shooter" of the retired right wing General Walker-were so immediately established as to create the impression that they were just a little too convenient for reality. Since Oswald had not been immediately killed-and his voice, which had now been recorded, was clearly different than the "Oswald" voice recorded by the CIA-it quickly became apparent that the Castro-inspired conspiracy option had to be scuttled. As the new president settled in for the flight back to Washington, an impromptu decision was made which officially deemed Oswald the assassin; Phase II, the Cover-Up, was redirected to prove that the assassin was a poor misguided communist "lone nut" and Castro had nothing to do with it.

Cliff Carter had already begun calling the Dallas authorities to tell them as much, starting with the instruction that "you have your man" and no further investigation is necessary. Allen Dulles, probably knowing the real source of the assassination, stood ready to lead the charge that it was indeed merely a "lone nut" who killed the president when he prepared his notes for the first meeting of the presidential commission. In the meantime, it was time to "heal the country" and put the matter aside while the official government commission did its work. The citizens were assured that the government was in good hands, and the leaks from the commission performed their function of mollifying an entire population. The presidential commission dutifully returned its verdict: the dastardly deed was merely the work of a misguided fool and he had been killed by another misguided but patriotic citizen and now, all the rest were safe from both of them. With that, the case was, almost, closed. The fact that it was not is testimony to the relentless work of hundreds of researchers and authors previously cited, who have successfully dismantled the lie piece by piece.

The objectives set forth at the beginning of this book have been completed; Lyndon B. Johnson uniquely met every one of the criteria for evaluating who might have been behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy:

* Who had the most to gain?

* Who had the least to lose?

* Who had the means to do it?

* Who had the apparatus in place to subsequently cover it up? and

* Who had the kind of narcissistic / sociopathic personality capable of rationalizing the action as acceptable and necessary, together with the resolve and determination to see it through?

The massive body of information about the Kennedy assassination-including the hundreds or thousands of books, the materials collected by researchers for more than four decades, the partially released secret government files-have produced a more complete understanding of the forces which culminated in Kennedy's murder. Some of the evidence has been there all along, including the Altgens photograph taken two to three seconds after Kennedy was hit in the throat in one of the first shots. Most of the rest of it, as attested to by the books listed in the bibliography, have spanned the forty-five-year period 1964-2009, and it has emerged very slowly despite the best efforts of many people to obfuscate facts and cloud the memories of those who witnessed the actual event.

How does one begin to explain the persona of Lyndon Johnson? To start a description by saying he was the thirty-sixth president of the United States automatically evokes the respect normally accorded to a person who achieved that high and majestic office. That the path he took to achieve it was different than any other man before (or after) him is worthy of more than an asterisk. His ascendancy came on the back of John F. Kennedy, just as his engineered (albeit flawed) "legacy" was bought with IOUs from JFK's bank of favors. His legacy should reflect his real persona: an egomaniacal, duplicitous politician dedicated only to his pursuit of the presidency; worse, it was only to satisfy his own vanity rather than for any altruistic, public spirited, or patriotic reasons, though he sought to convince his "subjects" otherwise. His character should be at least partially defined by the ever higher stolen elections all along the way-from his college days on, through his clearly fraudulent election to the Senate in 1948-all of the steps in his ascendancy were tainted by fraud. His reputation as a magnanimous and gregarious respected world leader was as bogus as the voter fraud, illicit fund raising, and influence peddling activities that "won" him his high offices. Historians credit him with his "people skills" but if one looks beneath the semipolished veneer-beyond the Texas colloquialisms, past the bluntness and sarcasm, the gross and demeaning behavior to others, and the ruthless disregard for legal and moral boundaries-the man should be known for what he was: a world-class criminal, whose own grandmother had him pegged since he was a child when she predicted that he would one day end up in the penitentiary.

p668
Lyndon B. Johnson, at the very least, had foreknowledge of John F. Kennedy s assassination. More than any other person, he had the means, motive, and opportunity to have been the singular key conspirator-instigator and the mastermind of the operation. The factual evidence presented here renders the long-debated official "conclusions" suspect because so much of it is simply part of the lie created by Johnson. Accepting this premise means that many of the cover-up actions once considered as too unbelievable must now be considered as the most plausible accounts. Such factually supported assertions can be summarized as follows:

* A widely based conspiracy existed to assassinate Kennedy, including the involvement of a number of Secret Service personnel-as well as a number of "fake" Secret Service agents-to eliminate normal protection of the president in the Dallas motorcade.

* The Zapruder film, and other films and photographs, were altered for the purpose of showing that Kennedy was shot only twice from behind, through deletion of frames showing his brains being blown out the back of his head, which was the same footage that showed how the limousine stopped momentarily as the fatal shots hit Kennedy's head-false debris was "painted in" to attempt to portray the brain matter being ejected upward instead.

* Johnson ordered his personal aide Carter to pressure Dallas Assistant DA Alexander and DA Wade to not charge Oswald with "conspiracy." It was at this point that he clearly had reached a decision to drop the "Castro did it" option, for which much evidence had been created, and go with the "lone nut" option.

* The body of JFK was taken at gunpoint-as only a "presidential" directive could have assured-away from Parkland Hospital before a real autopsy could be performed then later removed from the heavy bronze funeral casket and subjected to alterations to also show that shots came only from the rear.

* Autopsy records, photographs, and x-ray film have been destroyed and replaced with fabrications on Johnson's orders. As Larry Hancock

pointed out, "In a [1967] conversation with attorney General Ramsey Clark, Johnson expressed his displeasure with Dr. James Humes' referring to a photograph that did not officially exist.*

* Also as shown by Larry Hancock, Johnson "personally issued orders to place Bethesda personnel under a gag order in regard to the autopsy; Captain John Stover, commanding Officer of the National Naval Medical School, reportedly received this instruction from Admiral Buckley on orders from the White House."

* As previously documented, much of the "evidence" used by the Warren Commission was fraudulent, just as many of the witnesses it used threatened to provide incorrect testimony to support its predetermined verdict. Only a well-defined comprehensive plan established well in advance of the operation could possibly have ensured this result.

* In the aftermath of the assassination, the "invisible hand" quickly produced a "verdict" for the hapless "patsy," followed by a curtailed and corrupted "investigation," which was given over to a commission which completely accepted the tainted FBI reports, added their own distorted analysis, and fabricated evidence based largely on the most incredible witnesses-creating fanciful if outrageously absurd "theories" in the process-and dutifully added the imprimatur of the U. S. government to its report back to the instigator of the entire crime; only Lyndon B. Johnson was in a position to control every aspect of the pre-and post-assassination conspiracies.

p670
Lyndon B. Johnson's "accidental presidency" should be ... regarded for what it was: a coup d'etat; a deeply insidious subversion of the democratic process, the result of a criminal enterprise with other men who, deluded to think that their actions were patriotic, conspired to murder the thirty-fifth president of the United States, John F. Kennedy.

p673
Encarta Dictionary on "personality disorder" reads as follows:

People with antisocial personality disorder act in a way that disregards the feelings and rights of other people. Antisocial personalities often break the law, and they may use or exploit other people for their own gain. They may lie repeatedly, act impulsively, and get into physical fights. They may mistreat their spouses, neglect or abuse their children, and exploit their employees. They may even kill other people. People with this disorder are also sometimes called sociopaths or psychopaths ... Antisocial personalities usually fail to understand that their behavior is dysfunctional because their ability to feel guilty, remorseful, and anxious is impaired. Guilt, remorse, shame, and anxiety are unpleasant feelings, but they are also necessary for social functioning and even physical survival. For example, people who lack the ability to feel anxious will often fail to anticipate actual dangers and risks. They may take chances that other people would not take. Antisocial personality disorder affects about 3 percent of males and 1 percent of females. This is the most heavily researched personality disorder, in part because it costs society the most. People with this disorder are at high risk for premature and violent death, injury, imprisonment, loss of employment, bankruptcy, alcoholism, drug dependence, and failed personal relationships.

p673
Lyndon B. Johnson met every one of the criteria of "personality disorder"... Lyndon B. Johnson was paranoid and a sociopath who suffered from manic depression.

p674
Gerald Tolchin, PhD and professor of psychology

[Lyndon] Johnson may well have been the most psychologically unstable person ever to assume the presidency... It appears likely that Lyndon Johnson suffered from bipolar (manic-depressive) disorder throughout his life, a condition that grew worse as he grew older, peaking just as he reached the zenith of his influence and power.

p675
D. Jablow Hershman in her book "Power Beyond Reason: The Mental Collapse of Lyndon Johnson"

The United States was being led by a man who already was or rapidly was becoming psychotic. LBJ's grandiosity, megalomania and paranoia reached dimensions that could no longer pass for normalcy. Signs of grandiosity and paranoia were present before LBJ became President, but assuming responsibility for the war in Vietnam appears to have been more stress than he could bear as 1966 wore on... LBJ's manic furies and incapacitating depressions, his pathological ego, megalomania and paranoia were products of his manic depression.

p677
[Lyndon] Johnson's disease was as responsible for his political success in the early years as it was responsible for his self-destruction as president. It accounted for his single-minded obsessiveness in wanting more and more power, money, and glory and his turn to the criminal activities necessary to attain those goals. It contributed to his crude, vulgar, and obnoxious behavior to others and his condescending, belittling, and arrogant treatment of his subordinates. the worst, of course, was that it fueled his compulsion to become president at all costs, including the murder of John F. Kennedy because he was the only person standing in the way.

p678
Lyndon B. Johnson could be made a case study for future psychological textbooks--in the sections dealing with extreme narcissism, egomania, paranoia, bi-polar and sociopathic disorders, and the compound effect of multiple disorders--and how a person, left untreated for decades, could take over the government not only in a third world country but in a superpower nation.

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