Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (46 page)

The
Life
magazine issue that hit the newsstands on November 18, 1963, the Monday of the week JFK left for Texas, contained the second bombshell on the Bobby Baker scandal. Entitled, “The Bobby Baker Scandal: It Grows and Grows as Washington Shudders,” the article disclosed to readers that
Life
had assigned a nine-member team to investigate
Bobby Baker.
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This second piece exposed in-depth Bobby Baker’s corrupt business dealings and his sleazy use of sex, employing what amounted to nothing more than prostitutes employed as “hostesses” to escort lobbyists, legislators, and businessmen so Bobby Baker could rack up political favors and make lucrative business deals. “But in the peculiar Washington world here under review, wives were not the only women involved in social activity,” the article read. “This may have been because simple congeniality often carried the burdens of business. The lines between having fun and furthering important actions were often hard to draw.”
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The article continued: “Girls, a former Baker business associate said, were often around as business adjuncts. As he put it, in describing one planning session, ‘They had a bunch of girls who, they say, work in the government and during their lunch hour they make a little extra money.’”
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Life
magazine made clear that everything about Bobby Baker led back to Lyndon Johnson. Noting the US Senate was “Baker’s base of operations,”
Life
pointed out that the Senate was controlled by a small group of southern senators and conservative Republicans called the “Establishment.” At the center of the Establishment,
Life
found LBJ. “In a very real sense the present Establishment is the personal creation of Lyndon Baines Johnson who, from the day he took over as majority leader until he went to the Vice Presidency, ruled it like an absolute monarch,”
Life
wrote.
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In his 2012 book,
The Passage of Power
, Robert A. Caro, the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of LBJ noted that following the publication of this second article, Wheeler and Lambert scheduled a meeting with Hunt.
⁶⁸²
The
Life
investigation that started with the Bobby Baker scandal had morphed to focus on LBJ. As Robert Caro explained, it was clear “that the Bobby Baker case was inevitably going to become the Lyndon Johnson case as well.”
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The meeting was scheduled for late Friday morning, November 22, 1963, in the managing editor’s office, at which all the members of the team who were in New York were invited to attend.

With these two
Life
magazine articles appearing as JFK was preparing to leave for his trip to Texas, the Bobby Baker scandal and the political future of LBJ were very much at the center of attention. John Kennedy knew Lambert well enough from the McClellan hearings to appreciate that Lambert was like a bulldog, in that he was loathe to let go of a story once he sank his teeth into it. With the resources of
Life
magazine behind him,
Lambert was at the pinnacle of his career, able to leverage the magazine’s immense popularity and prestige to provide his investigative journalism with a stage nearly unequalled in the world of publishing at the time. Now, with the increasing backing of the magazine’s managing editor, Lambert was on track to use the same dogged investigative research methods he had used in Portland, Oregon, to put the organized crime penetration of the Teamsters Union onto front pages of newspapers across the nation. This time, he was on track to use the good graces of the ever-popular
Life
magazine to bring down not only the well-connected, powerful, and wealthy Bobby Baker, but also very possibly the vice president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

So who put
Life
magazine on the Bobby Baker story in the first place? The first suspect would have to be the president’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. From the Los Angeles Democratic National Convention in 1960 where Jack beat out Lyndon for the presidential nomination, to the end of his life, Bobby Kennedy’s enmity for LBJ was impossible to overestimate.

All it took for J.B. Elkins to bring down Dave Beck and go after Jimmy Hoffa was a casual word or two in a coffee shop in Portland, Oregon. “What’s the matter, J.B.?” Lambert or his partner Wallace Turner would ask. “Nothing,” a downtrodden J.B. would respond. “Except maybe for those Teamsters.” That led to hundreds of hours of wiretaps, a Pulitzer-Prize series Lambert and Turner wrote for the
Oregonian
, and Senate crime hearings that springboarded Jack to national status, positioning JFK for a 1960 run for the presidency.
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Now, with Lambert positioned as an associate editor at
Life
magazine, Robert Kennedy knew he could play the J.B. Elkins game on his own, dropping comments in casual with the goal of putting Lambert on the trail of Baker. After Lambert got started, RFK was ready to spoon feed leads to Lambert, acting as a “deep throat” source willing to hand over information from within the Justice Department and FBI, all the while calculating the story would necessarily lead to LBJ’s downfall.

What worried Robert Kennedy was that Jack, left to his own devices, might have settled to keep LBJ on the ticket a second time, preferring if possible to avoid the political uproar a scorned LBJ would most certainly cause. What Robert Kennedy figured was that the LBJ lion’s roar would
be a lot tamer with the Bobby Baker thorn placed painfully in the lion’s paw. But certainly after the first article was published, LBJ was aware
Life
magazine was gunning for him. Rather than sit idly by waiting for the disclosures to ruin his political career, LBJ’s political instincts demanded he protect himself. While the Kennedy administration took pains to keep from the public the assassination plots that had been stymied in Chicago and Tampa, surely LBJ was aware the talk of assassinating Kennedy was in the air in November 1963. While the proof is not definitive, assassination researchers insist that in the Dallas motorcade on November 22, 1963, LBJ ducked down in his seat as the follow-up car he was riding in, trailing JFK’s limo, moved into the kill zone by turning left from Houston Street onto Elm Street. In the famous photograph taken by Associated Press photographer Altgens, Lady Bird Johnson can be clearly seen in the open car following JFK’s limo. Curiously, LBJ, a physically large man, is not apparently visible. Many observers have suspected LBJ knew the motorcade was entering the pre-determined kill zone, and he ducked down as his car turned the corner in order to stay out of the crossfire.

Robert Caro reported in his 2012 book,
The Passage of Power,
that on Wednesday, November 13, 1963, JFK convened the first major planning session for the 1964 campaign in the Cabinet Room at the White House.
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The meeting included White House staff advisors, the chairman of the DNC, and a few trusted political advisors. Not invited was Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson or any member of his staff. The main subject of the meeting, Caro reported, was JFK’s chances in the South in 1964, along with a broader discussion of the future of the South in Democratic Party plans. Already evident was the voter realignment that would ultimately materialize as the “moral majority,” which 1968 presidential candidate Richard Nixon molded into a “Southern strategy.” The meeting also included intense speculation over whether LBJ would be on the ticket since the primary reason he had been chosen in 1960 was that he would be influential in winning southern states and Texas. The intense Democratic Party infighting in Texas, a primary reason JFK scheduled the upcoming trip to Dallas, brought into question whether LBJ could be as
effective in 1964 as he had been in 1960. Even with LBJ on the ticket in 1960, Jack Kennedy won Texas by fewer than forty-eight thousand votes of the approximately 1.3 million votes cast.

None less than Arthur Schlesinger Jr. dismissed the notion that dumping LBJ was seriously considered at the campaign strategy meeting. “Johnson’s absence stimulated a curious story that the Kennedys intended,” Schlesinger wrote in
A Thousand Days
. “These stories were wholly fanciful. Kennedy knew and understood Johnson’s moodiness in the Vice-Presidency, but he considered him able and loyal. In addition, if Goldwater were to be the Republican candidate, the Democrats needed every possible asset in the South.” Schlesinger wrote to leave no doubt the November strategy meeting convened at the White House “assumed John’s renomination as part of the convention schedule.”
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Clearly, what Schlesinger wrote was the official line. Robert Caro, however, saw it differently. Caro pointed out that even in 1960, there had been no serious discussion about putting LBJ on the ticket, not even with Robert Kennedy, until Jack Kennedy “suddenly announced, to the astonishment of everyone, that he was doing so.”
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Caro reported that the morning after the November strategy meeting, JFK’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln was reviewing material from the meeting when JFK came over to her desk. She commented that the 1964 Democratic convention would not be as exciting as the 1960 convention had been “because everyone knows what’s coming.” According to Lincoln JFK responded, “Oh, I don’t know, there might be a change in the ticket.” She also reported that about a week later, when JFK was sitting in a chair in her office, he commented that his running mate in 1964 would probably be a moderate southerner, maybe even the young governor of North Carolina, Terry Sanford, but it would not be LBJ.
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LBJ loyalists dismissed these recollections, insisting JFK never seriously considered dumping LBJ. But Caro was not so sure. He wrote that in his conversation with Evelyn Lincoln, she repeated the conversation, explaining she wrote down word-for-word in her diary what Jack said about LBJ and that she used those notes when writing her 1968 book,
Kennedy and Johnson
. Caro specifically noted that in his conversation with Evelyn Lincoln, she insisted JFK wanted LBJ off the ticket, explaining JFK had implied “the ammunition to get him off was Bobby Baker.”
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JFK left the White House for Texas having made two important
decisions: first, that he would begin a withdrawal from Vietnam by the end of 1963, and second, that he would find a replacement for LBJ as his 1964 running mate. The Diem decision weighed heavily in JFK’s decision to withdraw from Vietnam, given his conclusion that the nation was in such internal turmoil there could be no confidence the people in South Vietnam were sufficiently motivated to fight for and win their own freedom. The decision to dump LBJ was motivated by the Bobby Baker scandal. JFK was concerned that, when
Life
magazine got finished investigating and reporting on LBJ, an unfortunately large segment of the voting public would now see LBJ to be nothing more than a corrupt politician who had enriched himself at public expense. What Kennedy had not yet resolved was how best to explain these decisions to voters across the nation, so as not to give impetus to a Goldwater candidacy from the conservative right.

In response to a 1976 Freedom of Information Act request, the CIA released documents 632–796 confirming for the first time that a professional assassin was apprehended in Dallas on November 23, 1963. The CIA memo mentioned Jean Souetre, a.k.a. Michel Roux, a.k.a. Michel Mertz—a world-renowned Corsican hit man with a long history as an accomplished assassin and with ties to the French Connection drug trade stretching from Southeast Asia to Marseilles, France, to New Orleans. The memo, stamped “SECRET” and dated April 1, 1964, read as follows:

Jean SOUETRE aka Michel Roux aka Michel Mertz—On March 5, Dr. Papich advised that the French had hit the Legal Attaché in Paris and also the SDECE man had queried the Bureau in New York City concerning subject stating that he had been expelled from the U.S. at Fort Worth or Dallas 48 hours after the assassination. He was in Fort Worth on the morning of 22 November and in Dallas in the afternoon. The French believe that he was expelled to either Mexico or Canada. In January he received mail from a dentist named Alderman living at 5803 Birmingham, Houston, Texas. Subject is believed to be identical with a Captain who is a deserter from the French Army and an activist in the OAS. The French are concerned because of de Gaulle’s planned visit to Mexico. They would like to know the reason
for his expulsion from the U.S. and his destination. Bureau files are negative and they are checking in Texas and with the INS [U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service]. They would like a check of our files with indications of what may be passed on to the French. Mr. Papich was given a copy of CSCI-3/776,742 previously furnished the Bureau and CSDB-3/655,207 together with a photograph of Captain SOUETRE.
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What was a Corsican assassin doing in Dallas on the day JFK was assassinated? The obvious assumption would be that Jean Souetre should have been placed at the top of the list of suspects in the JFK assassination. If not a shooter, the possibility remains this Corsican assassin was in Dallas to observe, oversee, or perhaps even to direct and supervise the shooters hoping to catch JFK in a cross fire. Assassination researchers Brad O’Leary and L. E. Seymour in their 2003 book,
Triangle of Death
, suggest the “Mr. Papich” mentioned in the document may have been a CIA asset working in the legal attaché’s office as a surveillance operator, or simply as an employee who served as a liaison for the US embassy.
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The SDECE is the
Service de Documenation Extérieure et Contre-Espionage
, the French equivalent of the CIA. The OAS, or
Organization de l’Arm
ée Secrétée, was a right-wing extremist group opposed to French President Charles de Gaulle that engaged in acts of terrorism and assassination and opposed France’s policy to grant the African nation of Algeria its independence from French rule.