Reclaiming History (287 page)

So if we’re to believe Miss Brown, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who by common consensus was one of the most shrewd men ever to ponderously grace (an oxymoron?) this nation’s political stage, decided not only to murder President Kennedy, but also to tell others about it. The man whose photograph could be alongside words like
sly
,
wily
, and
clever
in the dictionary was intent on advertising his part in the conspiracy to his girlfriend, to Jesse Kellam, and to God knows how many other people. I wouldn’t believe a story like that if you shouted it in my ears for one hundred years. Yet, as one example among many, Craig Zirbel writes in the
Texas Connection
that it’s “crystal clear that Johnson was aware that Kennedy was going to be murdered…He told his girlfriend it was going to happen.”
²⁵
In his 1992 book,
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, which came out five years before Brown’s book, Dick Russell quotes Brown telling him about LBJ’s threat vis-à-vis Kennedy before the assassination, and does not question her veracity at all.
²⁶

Brown hardly deserves this rebuttal, but she says that LBJ was at the Murchison party in Dallas the evening before the assassination, but he couldn’t have been if he had wanted to because he was in Houston that night, about 225 miles away. “I was chairman of a huge dinner in Houston honoring Albert Thomas that Thursday night,” LBJ aide Jack Valenti says, and “the two speakers were the vice president and the president. I rode in a car with LBJ to the [Houston] airport and we flew on Air Force Two to Fort Worth, where we talked at the Texas hotel until one in the morning [1 a.m., November 22, 1963].”
²⁷

What about Hoover? Hoover would have had a difficult time making it to the party. His daily log shows that he was at his office starting at 8:57 in the morning of November 21, 1963, and left the office at 5:14 p.m. On Friday morning, he was back in his office at 9:00 a.m., leaving at 6:01 p.m.
²⁸
If someone wants to believe that on Thursday evening, after leaving his office at 5:14 p.m., Hoover raced to the airport to catch a flight to Dallas for the alleged party with Murchison, Nixon, and others, then took a red-eye (did they have red-eyes back then?) back to Washington, D.C., that night or caught a 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. flight the next morning, I guess there’s nothing I can do to stop him.

And as far as Nixon was concerned (Nixon was a partner in a New York City law firm that represented Pepsi and he was in town attending a soft drink bottler’s convention), if he came to the party he had to be a very late show because on the night before the assassination, he had a “ringside” seat with a group from Pepsi that included actress Joan Crawford, the wife of Pepsi’s CEO, listening to a performance by French singer Robert Clary in the Empire Room of Dallas’s Statler Hilton.
²⁹
Tony Zoppi, the entertainment writer for the
Dallas Morning News
, was there that night, and told Gary Mack, the Sixth Floor Museum’s curator, that when he left the Empire Room around a quarter to eleven to file his story before deadline for the next morning’s edition, Nixon was still there with this group.
³⁰

Indeed, Dallas assassination researcher David Perry has conducted a very extensive investigation into all of Brown’s allegations, and there is no question in his mind that not only weren’t LBJ and Hoover at the party, but there was no such party. Perry gathered several pieces of evidence debunking Brown’s “party” story. For one, he learned that Clint Murchison Sr., at whose home the party allegedly took place, was in ill health at the time, dating from a stroke in 1958, and had moved out of his Dallas home four years earlier, turning over the ownership of the home to one of his three sons, John, and John’s wife Lupe. In 2002, Perry interviewed Mrs. Eula Tilley, the wife of Clint Sr.’s chauffeur, Warren Tilly, who could not speak at the time because of throat cancer. She told Perry, “Both Warren and I worked for Mr. Murchison for a long time. He had seven houses, you know…I know he wasn’t at any party when Kennedy was shot. He did not have a home in the Dallas area. He was at his Glad Oaks Ranch between Athens and Palestine [Texas, about 120 miles southeast of Dallas]. I’m not sure how long before the assassination we were at the ranch but it was more than a few days. I remember because I was serving lunch to Mr. Murchison and his neighbor Woffard Cain. One of them said Kennedy had been shot.”
³¹

Additionally, a party the likes of which Brown spoke of, with luminaries such as Nixon, LBJ, and Hoover attending, would have automatically made the next morning’s newspapers—at least the entertainment and society sections if not the daily news. Perry therefore scoured the papers (
Dallas Morning News
and
Dallas Times Herald
) but found no reference to any such party.
³²
Perry makes the telling point that after all of his investigation, “The only person I know of who claimed [he or] she was actually at the [alleged] party was the late Madeleine Brown.”
³³

Perry, in fact, questions whether Brown even had an affair with Johnson, finding her story of the alleged relationship riddled with fabrications, inconsistencies, and unconfirmed allegations. For instance, the first time Brown went public with her story was nearly twenty years after the assassination, at a Dallas news conference on November 5, 1982, saying she “was the mistress of Lyndon Baines Johnson” and had decided to “clear the record.” And she never said anything about having a child by him.
³⁴
That extremely important embellishment would come much later.

Perry also notes that in Brown’s book, she said she first met Johnson at a grand party attended by Dallas’s high and mighty at Dallas’s Adolphus hotel “three weeks” before LBJ’s Senate victory party in Austin on October 29, 1948.
³⁵
*
But Perry checked all the local newspapers for several days on both sides of October 8–9, 1948 (three weeks earlier), and there was no reference to any such high-powered and high-society party. Indeed, Perry confirmed that LBJ was in Washington, D.C., around this time, the first time that LBJ came to Dallas that October being on October 22 to give a luncheon speech to the Dallas Reserve Officers’ Association.
³⁶

Apparently, Brown has so little credibility that in the three volumes historian Robert A. Caro has written thus far on LBJ (only the volume on his presidency remains unpublished), Brown wasn’t entitled to a single word of mention. And it’s not because Caro refrained from discussing LBJ’s alleged extramarital affairs—for example, his relationship with Alice Glass.
³⁷
It appears Caro found Brown simply too ludicrous and her claims too unfounded to dignify with even one word.

Brown, by the way, has gone far beyond her absurd allegation about LBJ’s supposed admission to being behind Kennedy’s murder, proving beyond all doubt that she is not a person worthy of any belief. Among her incredible pronouncements, she told conspiracy author Harrison Livingstone in 1992 that “Lyndon Johnson did not die naturally.” His own Secret Service killed him, she alleged. “They hated him.” Also, “There were three plots to kill Kennedy, and the other two were backup plots. One of them was LBJ’s plot, which took JFK out with the KGB’s help”; “Billie Sol [Estes] knows all three shooters” who killed Kennedy; “Why do you think that John J. McCloy and Richard Nixon were there when Kennedy died?…They put aside their warfare and came together to kill Kennedy”; “[H. L.] Hunt called Ruby and ordered him to kill Lee Harvey Oswald.”
³⁸

Madeleine Brown, naturally, has been publicly embraced by the conspiracy community, and prior to her death often attended its conventions, such as the November 19–23, 1998, one in Dallas. On November 6, 1992, Brown was convicted of forging a relative’s will back on September 2, 1988. The conviction was reversed on appeal in 1994 on a procedural error. Brown died in 2002.

O
ne question about LBJ for the conspiracy theorists: If he was part of a plot to kill Kennedy, and the Warren Commission thereafter officially concluded there was no plot, wouldn’t he be very happy and likely to keep quiet? Would he be likely to say more than once that, as he told the
Atlantic
in 1973, “I never believed that Oswald acted alone although I can accept he pulled the trigger”? Indeed, if LBJ were complicit in the assassination, why would he appoint a blue-ribbon commission to investigate the assassination (the Warren Commission)
*
consisting of seven men of impeccable reputation and unquestioned probity,
five of whom were Republicans
? Wouldn’t he know that the likelihood he could get such a group to protect him and cover up for him would be substantially diminished? I mean, even as to Chief Justice Warren alone, are we to believe that Johnson established the Warren Commission by executive order to “ascertain all the facts relating to the assassination,” but then, as I told the jury in London, “took Warren aside and said, ‘However, Chief, if you really do find out the facts, you keep those facts under your robe. Okay, Chief?’”

And a final question for Miss Brown, wherever her soul is today: You dedicated your book “in loving memory” of your son and Lyndon Johnson. If accusing Johnson of having Kennedy murdered is a part of your “loving” memory of him, what in the world would you be saying about him if you hated him? That it was he, not Hitler, who was responsible for the Holocaust?

If it is possible to write a sillier book than Madeleine Brown’s alleging that LBJ was behind Kennedy’s murder, it is Barr McClellan’s 2003 book,
Blood, Money and Power: How LB
J
Killed
J
FK
. After taking us through more than two hundred pages of his dreamy fairy tale, as we saw earlier, the author has LBJ confessing to the murder when he was about to die, thinking that his honesty in admitting to having murdered Kennedy would actually improve (?!!?) his poor reputation with the American people.

Just as present-day Cuba and Fidel Castro are synonymous with each other, the thinking that Cuba was behind JFK’s murder is synonymous with saying that Castro was behind it. And the theory that the Cuban government had Kennedy killed always focuses exclusively on Castro.

Suspicion of Cuban complicity in the assassination reached its high-water mark shortly after the assassination, when the American people learned that Oswald revered Castro and had sought to go to Cuba just two months earlier. Also, there was known hostility between the U.S. and the Cuban leadership, starting with the Cuban cabinet’s authorization on July 6, 1960, of the expropriation of all U.S.-owned property in Cuba. President Eisenhower responded that same day by ordering a reduction in the amount of sugar to be imported from Cuba, and then ended diplomatic relations with Cuba on January 2, 1961. Our support of the Bay of Pigs invasion on April 17, 1961, and the Cuban missile crisis in the fall of 1962 contributed to the belief among many that Castro somehow had a hand in the president’s murder. Indeed, as an internal memorandum of the supersecret National Security Agency (NSA), the federal intelligence agency charged with the electronic eavesdropping and deciphering of messages to and from foreign adversaries, says, “Immediately after the assassination, NSA initiated a large-scale manual and machine
review
of SIGINT [Signals Intelligence], including all U.S./Cuba traffic [around the time of the assassination]. A computer search was initiated using Oswald’s name as the minimum for research criteria. Additionally, all traffic between Cuba/New Orleans and Cuba/Dallas was manually reviewed.” The electronic eavesdropping disclosed that “Cuban military forces went on alert immediately after the assassination.” The NSA concluded that “a thorough review has revealed no intelligence material revealing or suggesting Cuban involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy.”
¹

This conclusion by the NSA is in keeping with the conclusion of every other investigative body that has evaluated the issue. And today, although the belief still persists among some, the overwhelming majority of Americans as well as most conspiracy theorists have discarded the theory that Cuba was behind the assassination. It should be noted, however, that as late as 1978, fifteen years after the assassination, the question of Cuban complicity in Kennedy’s murder was apparently of sufficient concern for three members of the HSCA and three staff members to make two trips to Cuba to investigate the issue, which included a four-hour, tape-recorded interview with Castro on April 3, 1978, in Havana.

The few conspiracy theorists who still cling to the theory of Cuban complicity in the assassination always cite as one of their principal authorities former president Lyndon Johnson, who told many people that he believed Castro had Kennedy murdered. Joseph Califano Jr., an LBJ aide from 1965 to 1969, told the
Wall Street
J
ournal
, “Johnson believed, as he said to me, that Fidel Castro was responsible for Kennedy’s assassination. In a reference to attempts by the Kennedy brothers to assassinate Castro, Johnson told me, ‘Kennedy tried to kill Castro, but Castro got Kennedy first.’”
²
But unless a president, because of his position, was privy to information about Castro’s having Kennedy killed—which Johnson never claimed or intimated he was—his reasoning and opinion on the matter are no more apt to be authoritative than anyone else’s. And Johnson’s belief is bereft not only of evidence but of common sense.
*

One of the chief proponents of LBJ’s reasoning was Italian-born mobster Johnny Roselli (real name, Filippo Sacco). When the CIA first decided to assassinate Castro in August of 1960, it gave the assignment to former FBI agent Robert Maheu, at the time a top aide in Las Vegas to Howard Hughes. Maheu, in turn, passed the contract on to Roselli, who in turn enlisted Mafia kingpins Santo Trafficante Jr. and Sam Giancana to carry it out.
³
†

The HSCA noted that it was significant that public revelations by Roselli (through his Washington lawyer, Edward P. Morgan, contacting syndicated columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson) about the plots to kill Castro “corresponded with his efforts to avoid deportation in 1966 and 1971 and to escape prosecution for illegal gambling activities in 1967. It was Roselli who managed the release of information about the plots and who proposed the so-called turnaround theory of the Kennedy assassination (Cuban exiles hired by the Mafia as hit men, captured by Castro, were forced to ‘turnaround’ and murder President Kennedy). The committee found it quite plausible that Roselli would have manipulated public perception of the facts of the plots, then tried to get the CIA to intervene in his legal problems as the price for his agreeing to make no further disclosures.”
⁴

The first two articles alluding to the turnaround theory, a syndicated column by Jack Anderson on March 3, 1967, and one by Drew Pearson on March 7, 1967, did not mention Roselli by name and did not attract too much attention. But an article by Anderson and Les Whitten on September 7, 1976, in the
Washington Post
did attract attention because of the recent Church Committee revelations of the CIA-mob plot to kill Castro and because of the discovery of Roselli’s dismembered body on August 7, just one month before the article was printed. And it did mention Roselli by name, saying that “before he died, Roselli hinted to associates that he knew who had arranged President Kennedy’s murder. It was the same conspirators, he suggested, whom he had recruited earlier to kill Cuban Premier Fidel Castro. By Roselli’s cryptic account, Castro learned the identity of the underworld contacts in Havana who had been trying to knock him off. He [Castro] believed, not altogether without basis, that President Kennedy was behind the plot.” Castro then “enlisted the same underworld elements” to kill Kennedy.
⁵

In addition to the fact that there is no evidence that Castro ever learned the identity of the Cubans supposedly enlisted by the mob between 1961 and 1963 to kill him, Roselli’s turnaround theory is irrational on its face. Even if Castro had decided to kill Kennedy, how could Castro, from his base in Cuba,
force
hit men for the mob to come back to this country (where he’d immediately lose physical control of them) to kill Kennedy? And even if Castro, an intelligent person by all accounts, had the irrational thought he could do this, he would still have to know that they would never be as dependable to carry out such an assignment as his own agents would be. Needless to say, the HSCA did not find Roselli’s turnaround theory credible.
⁶

Also, there is a predicate for the turnaround theory that has never been proved. There’s no evidence that hit men for the mob were ever captured by Castro. Further, Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratiano, a West Coast organized-crime figure, said that Roselli told him there was no truth to his theory, and Roselli acknowledged in his testimony before the Church Committee on April 23, 1976, that he had “no facts” to support it.
⁷

On July 28, 1976, Roselli disappeared in Miami. On August 7, three fishermen found his butchered body, with his legs sawed off, inside an oil drum on the edge of a sandbar in Dumfoundling Bay, Key Biscayne, Florida. The drum had been weighted down by chains but gases created by the decomposition of Roselli’s body gave the drum enough buoyancy for it to rise to the surface. An unnamed Mafia figure told the
New York Times
that two men, one an old friend, the other a visitor from Chicago, had lured Roselli aboard a private boat at a nearby marina. Out on the water, while Roselli sipped a vodka, the man from Chicago grabbed him from behind and held his hand tightly over Roselli’s nose and mouth until he was asphyxiated, not a difficult feat since the seventy-year-old Roselli had emphysema.
⁸
Though conspiracy theorists claim he was silenced because of his knowledge of a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, there simply is no evidence, anywhere, that he was a part of or had any knowledge of any such conspiracy, and the Justice Department concluded that Roselli’s murder and the murder of Sam Giancana
*
were unrelated to the CIA-mob plots to kill Castro.
⁹
Such a conclusion makes sense. If Roselli’s or Giancana’s killers were trying to silence them because of their knowledge of the CIA-mob plots to kill Castro, why not also kill Florida mob boss Santo Trafficante, to whom both went to actually carry out the job? And why not kill Roselli
before
he testified before the Church Committee, which he first did on June 24, 1975 (the first of three times, the last time being on April 23, 1976, a little over three months before his murder), at which time he spilled all the beans there were to spill about the CIA-mob plot to kill Castro?

Purported support for the belief that Castro was of a mind to kill Kennedy was an informal discussion Castro had with two American reporters following a reception at the Brazilian embassy in Havana on the evening of September 7, 1963. Castro spoke, per usual for him, on a wide range of subjects, one of which was Kennedy. The UPI reporter, whose article was published in the
New York Times
, quoted Castro as saying that “Kennedy is a cretin,” the “Batista of his time and the most opportunistic American president of all time. Kennedy is thinking more about re-election than the American people.”
¹⁰
The AP reporter, Daniel Harker, took something far more explosive away from the three-hour meeting. He wrote, “Bitterly denouncing what he called recent U.S.-prompted raids on Cuban territory, Castro said: ‘United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.’”
¹¹
Did Castro thereby suggest, as Harker says, that if there were such plots, he would retaliate in kind? Even if he did, it would most likely be only loose swagger on his part, in no way negating the fact that there’s no evidence he had Kennedy killed, and that he was well aware that such an act would be the most reckless, unwise, and suicidal action he could ever take. (See later text.)

But I personally doubt that Castro said specifically what Harker quotes him as saying. I learned many years ago the truth of the observation that “quotation marks don’t make a quote,” as most lay people assume they do. I myself have often been quoted incorrectly, several times substantially so. In the first place, if Castro had threatened a retaliatory assassination, it is very hard to believe that the UPI reporter who was present would not have found such a statement sufficiently important to include in his fourteen-paragraph story on the meeting, which he did not do. Just as important was Castro’s response when the HSCA interviewed him in Havana on April 3, 1978. If Castro had been involved in the assassination and had told Harker what Harker quoted him as saying, the likelihood that Castro would have admitted telling Harker anything remotely close to what Harker wrote would obviously have been nil. We could have expected Castro to say that Harker either was a liar or had grossly misquoted him. The fact he said neither at least goes in the direction of his recollection of the incident having credibility. Castro said, “I don’t remember literally what I said, but I remember my intention in saying what I said and it was to…let the United States government know that we knew about the existence of…plots against our lives…I said something like those plots start to set a very bad precedent, a very serious one…that could become a boomerang against the authors of those actions. That to set those precedents of plotting the assassination of leaders of other countries would be…very negative” (i.e., it could result in one or more of the victim nations retaliating in kind). Castro added that “I didn’t say it as a threat. I did not mean by that that we were going to take measures, similar measures, like a retaliation for that.” Castro said he would say the same thing today as he said back then “because I didn’t mean a threat by that.”
¹²
I, for one, believe Castro.

Another related story that Castro flatly denies, and with good reason, was the one told by British tabloid journalist Comer Clark. In an October 1967 edition of the
National Enquirer
, he wrote that on July 15, 1967, he had an exclusive interview with Castro late one night in a Havana pizzeria. He quotes Castro as saying, “Lee Oswald came to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City twice. The first time, I was told, he wanted to work for us. He was asked to explain, but he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t go into details. The second time he said something like: ‘Someone ought to shoot that President Kennedy.’ Then Oswald said—and this was exactly how it was reported to me—‘Maybe I’ll try to do it.’ This was less than two months before the U.S. President was assassinated…Yes, I heard of Lee Harvey Oswald’s plan to kill President Kennedy. It’s possible I could have saved him. I might have been able to, but I didn’t. I never believed the plan would be put into effect.”
¹³
The HSCA learned that Clark, who died in 1972, “wrote extensively for the sensationalist press in England. His articles include such items as ‘British Girls as Nazi Sex Slaves’ [and] ‘I Was Hitler’s Secret Love.’”
¹⁴
When the HSCA asked Castro on April 3, 1978, about Clark’s allegation, he responded in a blizzard of denunciatory words. Among them: “This is absurd. I didn’t say that…It has been invented from the beginning until the end…It’s a lie from head to toe. If this man [Oswald] would have done something like that, it would have been our moral duty to inform the United States.” Denying that he had ever met Clark or been interviewed by him, he said, “How could [this man] interview me in a pizzeria? I never go to public restaurants…I would never have given a journalist an interview in a pizzeria…What is the job of that journalist? What is he engaged in?…You should…find [out] who he is and why he wrote it.”
¹⁵

In yet another example of good investigative journalism on his part, conspiracy theorist Anthony Summers interviewed Clark’s widow and assistant. The widow told Summers that Clark had never mentioned interviewing Castro. Most importantly, Summers writes that the assistant, Nina Gadd, said that “
she
generated the story, without even going to Havana, on the basis of allegations made to her” by an unnamed Latin American foreign minister.
¹⁶