Dr. Feelgood (16 page)

Meanwhile, as the Kennedy inner circle and Pentagon command fretted over what the Soviet reaction would be, the U.S. Air Force prepared for the possible bombing of North America by alerting its interceptor squadrons to fly to their failsafe points off the coast of Alaska to await the Soviet bomber fleet. These fighters were equipped with nuclear air-to-air missiles, and they were flying over US territory. This was a deadly serious game and one of the closest moments the United States would ever come to a nuclear war. Kennedy was about to undo all that Ike had accomplished during his eight years in office trying to defuse the nuclear threat. And the CIA watched in horror.

It was a president on drugs, out of control, and through his own inexperience, ineptitude, and psychological vulnerabilities, bringing the United States to the brink of a nuclear war. Something had to be done before a catastrophe occurred and things ended up very badly. What card could the CIA play?

After Kennedy agreed to remove US missiles from Turkey, thereby placating Khrushchev by offering a face-saving way out of the situation, Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay still advocated for an invasion of Cuba. But Kennedy refused. Kennedy then made plans to withdraw American military advisors from Vietnam, which included the CIA’s own personnel. Now the US military was concerned as well because, in addition to seeing Vietnam as a bulwark against the spread of Communism, the military saw that JFK was taking the United States out of contention for possession of the valuable deepwater port of Haiphong in North Vietnam, a port vital to oil tankers transporting oil from drilling operations in the South China Sea. All of this might have been tangential to Kennedy’s addiction to Jacobson’s methamphetamines, but the results were cumulative. The CIA and the military now had similar issues at stake while the young president, under the influence of drugs, was in multiple compromising sexual affairs.

During the last year of the Eisenhower administration, as the CIA planned for the invasion of Cuba, it had forged links in south Florida with local organized crime capos with ties to the Cuban expatriate community. The crime cartels, which had been instrumental in helping the United States Army and its intelligence command infiltrate and conquer Sicily in World War II, had sought to exert their influence in Cuba as Castro’s forces assembled in the mountains. Indeed, crime boss Lucky Luciano had moved to Cuba in 1956 to establish himself as the gambling czar, but President Eisenhower had demanded that he leave. The CIA kept in close contact with Luciano as well as organized crime bosses Santos Trafficante and Carlos Marcello. The CIA urged Kennedy to order the assassination of Fidel Castro using mob-controlled hit men, which Marilyn Monroe had referred to in her threatening message to Bobby Kennedy, and in the wake of the Bay of Pigs disaster, Kennedy had given them the green light. The CIA forged additional links with local organized crime bosses, including Sam “Momo” Giancana, who had negotiated with JFK’s father, Joseph Kennedy, Sr., for the delivery of the Cook County, Illinois, vote. Joe Kennedy had promised Giancana that his sons would leave the mob cartels alone, but Bobby Kennedy, as attorney general, refused to play along, and held Senate hearings on mob infiltration of legitimate businesses. And President Kennedy, it was clear, had blabbed highly confidential information to his mistress. This information flow had to stop.

Removing an out-of-control and potentially self-destructive head of state was no easy task; however, it had been attempted in recent history, according to Bert E. Park, M.D., in World War II. Adolf Hitler had a doctor, Theodore Morell, on whom Max Jacobson might have modeled his experiments with methamphetamines. Morell injected Hitler as well as Eva Braun with high doses of liquid methamphetamines. These doses, in the thirty to forty milligram range, distorted Hitler’s perception and increased his feelings of paranoia and grandiosity. Hitler’s delusions of self-grandeur, his frequent psychotic breaks, and his decision to invade the Soviet Union, which resulted in the collapse of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, so alarmed his general staff that they plotted his assassination. Led by Claus von Stauffenberg, the generals plotted to blow up a conference led by Hitler in July 1944. But the plot failed. This famous episode almost a year before the Allied capture of Berlin and the German surrender was well-known in American intelligence circles.

None of this should be construed as a comparison of JFK to Hitler. It is simply an illustration of what can happen when a powerful leader is clearly having psychotic reactions to methamphetamines. JFK was not only receiving injections of thirty to forty milligrams of methamphetamines from Dr. Jacobson, but also was self-injecting huge doses on top of the painkillers Dr. Janet Travell was administering.

Admiral George Burkley, the doctor who would sign Kennedy’s death certificate, forced Travell out of the White House because he believed that she was giving the president too many injections of Provocaine. Burkley also wanted Jacobson banned from the White House because he understood the devastating effects of methamphetamine, especially the types of psychotic reactions, hypersexuality, hypergrandiose paranoia, and chemical addiction that came with it, but JFK persisted and continued to receive treatments from Jacobson.

In addition to these injections, President Kennedy was also taking marijuana and LSD, which Army Intelligence had used as a form of mind control as early as the 1950s. LSD, because it was first developed by doctors for the purposes of curing addictive behavior such as alcoholism, might have been effective in weaning the president off Max Jacobson’s meth injections, some CIA operatives believed. But it only seemed to exacerbate Kennedy’s drug dependency and libido. Either the president’s drug addiction or Addison’s disease was likely to prove fatal in the end. CIA operatives saw real danger on the horizon.

The question confronting the CIA was what to do. CIA director Allen Dulles was already an enemy of the White House. With the CIA officially out of Vietnam, there was no more funding from narcotraffickers. What assets could the CIA muster?

Looking at the groups forming a critical mass of not just opposing where the Kennedy administration was going, but actually seeking revenge against the president, the CIA could have been looking for someone to hold this unholy, soon-to-be alliance together. And that someone was vice president Lyndon Johnson, who hated the Kennedy clan as much as anyone, felt that he had been overwhelmed by Kennedy money during the Democratic primary, and chafed at being a vice president with a civil rights agenda he wanted to pursue and no way to put it into action. LBJ was likely to be pushed off the ticket by Bobby Kennedy, and possibly put under federal investigation for corruption or racketeering. Then there was J. Edgar Hoover, a power-hungry bureaucrat with his own skeletons in the closet. He hated the CIA because he believed they trampled all over his turf, but, as a Washington insider who had kept his grip on power ever since the Palmer Raids in 1924, he knew when to go along.

Like most aspects of a well-concealed homicide, evidence lurks in the corners, usually in plain sight, but almost always is overlooked, except by those who know where the corners are. For example, why would Max Jacobson’s name come up at all if the CIA hadn’t believed he was the cause of JFK’s ultimate drug-induced psychosis? Had JFK not been suffering the side effects of drugs that threatened his mental stability, there might have been no need to assassinate him.

Had Kennedy stabilized after the Vienna Summit and the Cuban missile crisis, worries about his psychological condition might have abated. Had JFK not been on methamphetamines, and had he not been suffering from the side effects of drugs that threatened his mental stability, perhaps there would have been no assassination plot. But he only got worse. And his psychotic breakdown at the Carlyle Hotel was an example of what Jacobson’s drugs could do and was a portent of worse things to come. What if word leaked out about the president’s instability? What kind of leverage would that give the KGB? There was too much at stake, and the CIA had to make its point: Don’t cross us.

Now even LBJ knew about JFK’s life-threatening conditions and his reliance on drugs. He was told about it by Richard Nixon and understood what the conspirators wanted from him: in the wake of an assassination, a quick, down-and-dirty investigation to throw the blame on the anointed lone gunman and close the case down. Johnson agreed, and the plot was put into motion.

In most difficult homicide investigations, especially serial killer investigations, a good detective begins with no presuppositions or prejudgments, but often will look for the earliest witnesses to get first impressions of what people saw. Beginning with that premise, one should ask what the most credible eyewitness saw, one of the individuals closest to the crime. That would be retired Secret Service Special Agent Paul Landis, assigned to the First Lady’s detail. He guarded Jackie and the children. In his interview with the authors and in his statement to the Warren Commission, he gave a minute-by-minute account of the events of November 22, 1963, from the arrival of the First Family at Love Field in Dallas to the shots that rang out across Dealy Plaza.

Special Agent Landis described how the presidential motorcade wound its way toward Dealy Plaza and passed by the Texas Book Depository as the crowds gathered to get a glimpse of the president. That’s when the first shot, sounding like a crack in the distance over Landis’s right shoulder, reverberated as if in an echo chamber. Landis knew immediately what it was, but did not see the president react. Maybe it had been a firecracker. At least that’s what other members of the Secret Service detail seemed to think. Then there was a second shot.

Landis said, “My reaction at this time was that the shot came from somewhere towards the front, but I did not see anyone on the overpass, and looked along the right-hand side of the road.” Then he saw a man running across “a grassy section towards some concrete steps and what appeared to be a low stone wall.” And this is how the theory of the “grassy knoll” came into being.
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This is the key point of Paul Landis’s observation. If the subsequent gunshots at the president came from the front of the motorcade, then there was a second shooter, and possibly a third shooter. If there were other shooters, it was a conspiracy of like-minded felons. And if there was a conspiracy, the crime could not be brushed away as the deranged act of a lone gunman. If there was no lone gunman, the investigation could not stop at Lee Harvey Oswald. But it only took a day after President Johnson returned from Dallas for his FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, to point that out during a conversation in the Oval Office.

When, in 1997, Ladybird Johnson, the former first lady, released the tapes her husband had recorded in the Oval Office, LBJ’s machinations during the assemblage of the investigative commission came to light. First, of course, was the conversation between him and J. Edgar Hoover, during which Hoover advised LBJ that his investigation revealed there was more than one Lee Harvey Oswald. In fact, records from the United States Passport Office reveal that another Lee Harvey Oswald, not matching the person shot and killed by Jack Ruby, was surveilled by the CIA during a visit to the Soviet embassy in Mexico. LBJ acknowledged Hoover’s statement and on the tape advises that he and Hoover not bring it up to Allen Dulles or to the CIA. Under Texas law, controlling law at the time of the assassination, this was a conspiracy entered into by the president of the United States and the nation’s chief federal law enforcement officer to obstruct justice by concealing facts. They were accessories after the fact in a capital murder case.

The LBJ tapes were even more revealing. In recorded conversations with chief justice Earl Warren of the United States Supreme Court, President Johnson said that what was most important after the assassination was to find Lee Harvey Oswald guilty as the lone gunman, entertain conspiracy theories, especially those that might point to the USSR, and close the case down. Kennedy was dead, and turning over rocks wouldn’t bring him back. LBJ pushed Earl Warren until he agreed to chair the commission. And thus the cover-up operation was set into motion.

There were, of course, records from the Parkland Hospital emergency room that revealed the location of Kennedy’s gunshot wounds. The Warren Commission solution was not to examine the Parkland Hospital records directly. Instead, the Commission relied on the records of the autopsy from Bethesda Naval Hospital, where Kennedy’s body was taken after Parkland. In other words, whatever the records from the immediate examination of the president’s wounds at Parkland, those records were ignored in favor of a second examination at Bethesda, an examination that would actually alter the medical records. Researchers have argued that there are questions regarding the nature of JFK’s gunshot wounds, as noted by doctors at Parkland, compared to the wounds noted by doctors at the Bethesda autopsy, the only records that the Warren Commission examined.

Once the president was brought to Parkland still breathing, the doctor performed a tracheotomy to establish an airway through the gunshot wound in JFK’s throat. The bullet entry wound was still recognizable after the tracheotomy, however. Nevertheless Admiral Burkley, the same doctor who wanted Jacobson removed from any connection to the president, did not make note of that wound nor the tracheotomy performed at Parkland. This was a major inconsistency, because a gunshot wound from the opposite direction of the Book Depository establishes another shooter, and the tracheotomy establishes that doctors at Parkland noticed that wound. Doctors at Bethesda noticed the throat wound, because they actually contacted Parkland to confirm that a tracheotomy had been performed.

But it gets worse.

Doctors at Parkland, as well as the Catholic priest who performed the last rites over the president’s body, noticed what they referred to as an “entrance wound” above the president’s left front temple. An entrance wound means that a bullet had entered from the front of the motorcade, which is what Secret Service Special Agent Paul Landis believed he perceived. There was a news briefing at Parkland in which that head entrance wound was described, but the Secret Service never provided records of that briefing to the Warren Commission. In fact, the Warren Commission, supposedly a homicide investigation, did not receive the JFK medical exam records from Parkland, which in the real world of homicide investigations would be an absolutely mandatory set of data. An oversight? We think not.