Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (45 page)

Only four days after JFK was shot, on November 26, 1962, LBJ signed National Security Action Memorandum Number 273. Contrary to moviemaker Oliver Stone’s contention that by signing this document LBJ reversed JFK’s withdrawal policy on Vietnam, the second point in National Security Action Memorandum 273 makes clear that, “the objectives of the United States with respect to the withdrawal of U.S. military personnel remain as stated in the White House statement of October 2, 1963.” That document was a public White House statement of policy recommendations received from Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, and
Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. The key paragraph of the White House statement of October 2, 1963, read as follows:

Secretary McNamara and General Taylor reported their judgment that the major part of the U.S. military task can be completed by the end of 1965, although there may be a continuing requirement for a limited number of U.S. training personnel. They reported that by the end of this year, the U.S. program for training Vietnamese should have progressed to the point where 1,000 U.S. military personnel assigned to South Vietnam can be withdrawn.
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Even though Kennedy made public on October 2, 1963, the recommendations he received from McNamara and Taylor, Kennedy kept secret that he agreed with the recommendation.
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He assured his decision would remain secret by designating Security Action Memorandum Number 263 as top secret, and specifying in a cover letter that no formal announcement of the presidential decision to withdraw one thousand US military personnel from Vietnam would be made before the end of 1963.
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The military obviously had the ear of LBJ, even though LBJ’s escalation of the Vietnam War did not begin in earnest until after the 1964 election. LBJ made a few alterations in the draft of National Security Action Memorandum Number 273 that had been prepared for JFK’s review. The draft prepared by JFK national security advisor McGeorge Bundy for JFK’s review allowed for maritime operations against North Vietnam, but only by the government of South Vietnam. Johnson changed this, realizing South Vietnam really had no navy of any consequence. Johnson allowed American naval vessels to be involved in missions against North Vietnam. This resulted in what was called OPLAN 44, specifying attacks be undertaken by fast patrol boats manned by South Vietnamese sailors, with the support and preparations undertaken by Americans. Included in the mission specification were US destroyers offshore North Vietnam monitoring enemy actions through electronic surveillance. These patrols, code-named DESOTO, resulted in what became known as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in which three North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the US Navy destroyer
Maddox
on August 2, 1964. Although the North Vietnamese launched a torpedo attack, the total damage done to the
Maddox
consisted of one bullet through the hull. LBJ leveraged the
incident into the congressional resolution known as the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that was subsequently utilized as constitutional authority for allowing the president to wage the Vietnam War.
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LBJ’s first Vietnam meeting as president was held in the White House at 3:00 p.m., on November 24, 1963, the Sunday that JFK’s body lay in state for public viewing in the Rotunda of the Capitol. In attendance at the meeting in the White House were Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of State Robert McNamara, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, Undersecretary of State George Ball, CIA Director John McCone, and Ambassador Lodge. John Newman in his 1992 book,
JFK and Vietnam,
reported that LBJ made several dramatic statements about the course of the Vietnam War. “I am not going to lose Vietnam,” Johnson said. “I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”
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Newman believed that JFK “would never have placed American combat troops in Vietnam.”
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The problem, according to Newman, was that by the time JFK ruled out once and for all sending U.S. combat troops to Vietnam, “the size of the Viet Cong had grown to the point where there was little hope that the South Vietnamese Army could contain it.”
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Newman argued the most tragic consequence of JFK’s assassination was the subsequent escalation of the Vietnam War.
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In a daring passage, Newman derided that conventional wisdom had placed off limits for serious political scientists and historians an examination of the conspiratorial possibility JFK had been assassinated precisely to reverse his decision to withdraw from Vietnam. “The implication seems to be that any study that dares examine the possibility of a recent conspiracy is somehow un-American,” Newman wrote. “Yes, in fact, it is
that
idea that is un-American. That we the people not only have the right but the duty to examine such questions is a basic assumption of our most treasured institutions.”
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Kennedy concluded, unfortunately, that he could not win reelection in 1964 if he served up to his Republican challengers the argument the United States should withdraw from Vietnam. Former vice president Nixon was already calling for bombing North Vietnam as a strategy to win the war, and Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, JFK’s most likely presidential challenger in 1964, would gain perhaps decisive political advantage in painting JFK as ineffective in foreign policy, having been embarrassed at the Bay of Pigs, unable to stop Khrushchev from erecting
the Berlin Wall, and now, having abandoned South Vietnam to Communism. But, as Newman pointed out, JFK also concluded correctly that a retreat from Vietnam could not happen unless he was reelected in 1964.

One of the more controversial sagas concerning LBJ involves Madeleine Duncan Brown and her claim to have been a long-time mistress to LBJ who bore him a son out of wedlock. In her 1997 book,
Texas in the Morning
, Brown describes attending a party at the home of Texas oilman Clint Murchison on Thursday, November 21, 1963, the night before JFK was assassinated. “It was my understanding that the event was scheduled as a tribute honoring his longtime friend, J. Edgar Hoover, whom Murchison had first met decades earlier through President William Howard Taft, and Hoover’s companion and assistant, Clyde Tolson,” Brown wrote.
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She claimed that other guests attending the party included former Vice President Richard Nixon who was in Dallas to attend a Pepsi-Cola convention, Texas oilman H. L. Hunt, lawyer and former World Bank president John J. McCloy, Houston construction company entrepreneur George R. Brown, and philanthropist and former Dallas mayor Robert L. Thornton.

She described how LBJ arrived unexpectedly just as the party was breaking up. “Tension filled the room upon his arrival,” Brown wrote. “The group immediately went behind closed doors. A short time later Lyndon, anxious and red-faced, re-appeared. Squeezing my hand so hard it felt crushed from the pressure, he spoke with a grating whisper—a growl into my ear not a love message, but one I will always remember: ‘
After tomorrow those goddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again
—
that’s no threat
—
that’s a promise
.’”
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The clear implication was that LBJ was part of a cabal that was planning JFK’s demise the following day. In a final meeting with the co-conspirators, including both Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, evidently confirmation of the attempt to be made the next day on JFK’s life was given.

The problem with this spectacular revelation is that it is unlikely to be true. On the evening of Thursday, November 21, 1963, JFK and LBJ attended a testimonial dinner honoring Texas Congressman Albert
Thomas held in the Houston Coliseum. William Manchester in his 1967 book,
The Death of a President
, noted it was after 9:30 p.m. when JFK and the presidential party including LBJ left the head table to travel to Dallas.
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Manchester noted it was 11:07 p.m. when Air Force One and the other two airplanes in the presidential party touched down at Carswell Air Force base in Fort Worth. When the presidential party arrived at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, JFK and Jackie went immediately to retire for the night in Suite 850, while LBJ entertained guests in the hotel’s Will Rogers Suite. It is difficult to imagine how LBJ slipped away from Fort Worth, drove to Dallas, showed up while guests were still at the Murchison estate, and returned to Fort Worth, all the while unnoticed that he was gone. The same goes for Richard Nixon, especially when Dallas newspapers noted he was out late in the evening dining with actress Joan Crawford at a well-known Dallas dinner nightclub, with both of them very visible guests at the Pepsi-Cola convention.

Madeleine Brown may well have been an LBJ mistress, but her claim that LBJ was the father of her son was called into question when his lawsuit seeking rights as an LBJ heir was dismissed because son Stephen failed to appear in court. Madeleine also did permanent damage to her own reputation when she was convicted of fraud in 1988 for forging the will of a relative, only to have the conviction reversed on appeal in 1994 because of a procedural error.
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Her claims of a late-night celebration in Texas among the co-conspirators in the JFK assassination, including LBJ and Richard Nixon, lack any supporting documentary evidence. Criminal conspirators obviously need to get together to plan their dirty deeds, but do they need to break away from the guests at a party, where everyone is looking, so they can go into a backroom, only to come out and announce what they have been plotting? Still, it is highly possible, as we will soon discuss, that LBJ had some advanced warning that a plot to assassinate JFK was in the works, just as it is possible some wealthy Texans on the radical right might have provided funds to make sure LBJ would be president sooner rather than later. Yet, the idea of a grand cabal meeting for a celebratory pre-assassination party at the home of a wealthy Texas oil family on the eve of the JFK assassination lacks solid documentary proof and strains credibility.

In November 1963, the scandal that most threatened LBJ’s political future involved Bobby Baker, a Senate page who rose to the position of being secretary to Lyndon Johnson when Johnson was Senate Majority Leader. After LBJ became vice president, Baker continued as his personal secretary and close private advisor. The crux of the Bobby Baker scandal involved a vending machine company, Serve-U Corporation, from which Baker was deriving an annual gross income of $3.5 million at a time when his compensation from the Senate was under twenty thousand dollars a year. Serve-U Corporation had links to Texas oil millionaire Clint Murchison, as well as ties to mobsters Sam Giancana and Meyer Lansky. The company derived most of its earnings by placing vending machines in aerospace companies dependent upon the government for contract work.

What made the Bobby Baker scandal particularly titillating was a sex scandal involving what was known in Washington as the “Quorum Club,” a hostess affair Bobby Baker helped create. The Quorum Club was run out of the Carroll Arms Hotel near the Senate Office buildings on Capitol Hill. Basically, the “Q Club” operated to provide call girls to prominent lobbyists and influential members of Congress, with Baker positioned centrally, ready to advance his career politically and financially by trading on sex and power.

The Bobby Baker scandal broke wide open with a
Life
magazine cover story published on November 8, 1963, only three weeks before JFK was killed. That issue of
Life
featured a front-page photograph of Bobby Baker in a costume with his mask lifted to show his laughing face at an unspecified Washington masquerade party. A yellow banner across the cover of the magazine proclaimed: “Capitol Buzzes over Stories of Misconduct in High Places.”
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The article explained that “a Senate committee was investigating Bobby Baker.” The second page of the article featured a full-page photograph of a smiling LBJ with his arms around the shoulder of Bobby Baker. The caption under the photo noted that Bobby Baker was “an indispensable confident … a messenger, a pleader of causes, a fund-raiser and a source of intelligence.”
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A two-page spread featured a picture of scantily clad waitresses sitting on bar stools, waiting to greet guests during the opening of the Carousel motel for the 1962 summer
season in Ocean City, Maryland.
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The
Life
article cleverly placed next to the waitresses a photo of Bobby Baker greeting newly elected Senator Daniel Inouye, from Hawaii, and Ted Kennedy, who had just taken over his brother John’s Senate seat. The photograph was taken in the office of Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, with Mansfield shown in the part of the photograph that continued past the magazine fold to adjoin the photo of the leggy ladies sitting on the Carousel motel’s barstools. The article pointed out that in addition to his interest in the vending-machine business, Baker was half owner of the Carousel motel and nightclub in Ocean City, Maryland, as well as having business interests in a law firm, a travel agency, an insurance agency, and a Howard Johnson motel. Commenting that Baker had just resigned from the Senate under fire,
Life
asked how his $19,612 annual salary had provided him sufficient resources to permit his family, consisting of wife, Dorothy, and five children ages ten to one, with the youngest named Lyndon Baines Johnson after the then-Senate majority leader, to move into the $124,500 Washington home a short walk from where LBJ and his family lived.

The
Life
exposé escalated in seriousness when
Life’s
associate and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist William Lambert sought out George P. Hunt, the magazine’s managing editor, to explain that the nine-person investigative team assigned by
Life
to look into Bobby Baker had expanded the inquiry to look into how LBJ acquired his fortune.
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Lambert explained to Hunt his concern that LBJ had used his public office to enhance his private wealth. Lambert asked for permission to expand the investigative team to pour over LBJ’s entire financial picture. Lambert wanted to know how LBJ had managed to accumulate millions in personal net worth when he had been on the public payroll ever since he got out of college. Hunt authorized Lambert to put together a “task force.”
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