JFK Assassination

Ok so these new interview tapes with Jackie O tapes were released, revealing interesting insight into her thoughts. The tapes show a surprising criticism of MLK Jr and antiquated views about women in politics in general. But what jumps out at me is the stuff about LBJ. Jackie O doesnt implicate him but Ive always thought that LBJ was suspicious in the assassination of President Kennedy. Some fascinating books have been written on this subject, its not a new topic but I'd like to hear more thoughts on this.

A couple excerpts from the Jackie O tapes:

"Bobby [Kennedy] told me this later, and I know Jack said it to me sometimes. He said, 'Oh, God can you ever imagine what would happen if Lyndon was president?' He didn't like that idea that Lyndon would go on and be president because he was worried for the country. Bobby told me that he'd had some discussions with him. I forget exactly how they were planning or who they had in mind. It wasn't Bobby but somebody. Do something to name someone else in '68."

By Jacqueline Kennedy's telling, her husband never really wanted Johnson on his 1960 ticket in the first place. She said he really wanted to choose Missouri Sen. Stuart Symington, and even indicated that Symington was his choice to a mutual friend, Clark Clifford, on the day of his nomination at the Democratic National Convention. In choosing among possible running mates in 1960, Kennedy and his close allies "liked Lyndon Johnson the least," Jacqueline Kennedy said. But Kennedy believed he needed to offer Johnson a spot on the ticket "to annul him as majority leader," she said, fearing that his "enormous ego" would have led Johnson to block Kennedy's agenda in the Senate as president if he felt slighted. "Everyone was even amazed that he accepted," she said. "Some other people can tell you about it, going down into his room and everything -- and I guess he was drunk, wasn't he?" Recorded in early 1964, Kennedy was seeking to shape her late husband's legacy at the same time that the new president was adjusting to the office in which he was suddenly thrust. She fretted that Johnson was currying favor with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, whom her husband, she said, planned to oust after the 1964 election.

Source: abcnews.go.com... yfM

Multiple sources indicate JFK intended to prevent LBJ from becoming POTUS by backing someone else for the nomination as his successor. And its a fact that JFK also wanted to oust J. Edgar Hoover from the intelligence community. It seems to me that the two people who directly gained the most from JFK's death would have to be LBJ and Hoover. They secured two of the most powerful and influential positions in the government, and would have been ousted from power at the hands of JFK.

As head of the FBI Hoover was in charge of investigating JFK's death (famously finding that the assassination was the work of a lone gunman). The House Select Committee on Assassinations reopened the investigation after Hoover's death, reporting that Hoover "failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President" and that Hoover's FBI "was deficient in its sharing of information with other agencies and department". There are a number of other suspicious circumstances surrounding the assassination, too much to even get into in this post. But if anybody had the means to pull off such a conspiracy, it would be Hoover with his intelligence network.

What do you all think?

Multiple sources indicate JFK intended to prevent LBJ from becoming POTUS by backing someone else for the nomination as his successor.

What I've always found interesting was Johnson wasn't only being dropped for the 1964 ticket and with being dropped Johnson was most probably going to find himself behind bars also. He was heavily involved in the Bobby Baker scandal which was going on at the time you see.

Here's a snippet from the Spartacus.schoolnet website:

In 1963 Johnson got drawn into political scandals involving Fred Korth, Billie Sol Estes and Bobby Baker. According to James Wagenvoord, the editorial business manager and assistant to Life Magazines Executive Editor, the magazine was working on an article that would have revealed Johnson's corrupt activities. "Beginning in later summer 1963 the magazine, based upon information fed from Bobby Kennedy and the Justice Department, had been developing a major newsbreak piece concerning Johnson and Bobby Baker. On publication Johnson would have been finished and off the 1964 ticket (reason the material was fed to us) and would probably have been facing prison time. At the time LIFE magazine was arguably the most important general news source in the US. The top management of Time Inc. was closely allied with the USA's various intelligence agencies and we were used after by the Kennedy Justice Department as a conduit to the public."

The fact that it was Robert Kennedy who was giving this information to Life Magazine suggests that John F. Kennedy intended to drop Johnson as his vice-president. This is supported by Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy's secretary. In her book, Kennedy and Johnson (1968) she claimed that in November, 1963, Kennedy decided that because of the emerging Bobby Baker scandal he was going to drop Johnson as his running mate in the 1964 election. Kennedy told Lincoln that he was going to replace Johnson with Terry Sanford.

Don B. Reynolds appeared before a secret session of the Senate Rules Committee on 22nd November, 1963. Reynolds told B. Everett Jordan and his committee that Johnson had demanded that he provided kickbacks in return for him agreeing to a life insurance policy arranged by him in 1957. This included a $585 Magnavox stereo. Reynolds also had to pay for $1,200 worth of advertising on KTBC, Johnson's television station in Austin. Reynolds had paperwork for this transaction including a delivery note that indicated the stereo had been sent to the home of Johnson. Reynolds also told of seeing a suitcase full of money which Baker described as a "$100,000 payoff to Johnson for his role in securing the Fort Worth TFX contract".

In the winter of 1963, Johnson invited John F. Kennedy to make a tour of Texas. While in Dallas on on 22nd November, Kennedy was assassinated and Johnson was immediately sworn in as president on on Air Force One while he travelled back to Washington.

As Johnson was now president Life Magazine decided not to use the story concerning his corrupt activities. James Wagenvoord later recalled: "The LBJ/Baker piece was in the final editing stages and was scheduled to break in the issue of the magazine due out the week of November 24th (the magazine would have made it to the newsstands on November 26th or 27th). It had been prepared in relative secrecy by a small special editorial team. On Kennedy's death research files and all numbered copies of the nearly print-ready draft were gathered up by my boss (he had been the top editor on the team) and shredded. The issue that was to expose LBJ instead featured the Zapruder film."

On 17th January, 1964, the Senate Rules Committee voted to release to the public the secret testimony of Don B. Reynolds. Johnson responded by leaking information from Reynolds' FBI file to Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson. On 5th February, 1964, The Washington Post reported that Reynolds had lied about his academic success at West Point. The article also claimed that Reynolds had been a supporter of Joseph McCarthy and had accused business rivals of being secret members of the American Communist Party. It was also revealed that Reynolds had made anti-Semitic remarks while in Berlin in 1953.

A few weeks later the New York Times reported that Lyndon B. Johnson had used information from secret government documents to smear Don B. Reynolds. It also reported that Johnson's officials had been applying pressure on the editors of newspapers not to print information that had been disclosed by Reynolds in front of the Senate Rules Committee.

(Source)

Some food for thought if anything. But Johnson was undoubtedly going to be dropped in 1964 but with the death of Kennedy this story simply went away. He gained a lot of Kennedy's death, he gained more than anyone else alive.

I haven't herd these Jackie tapes yet btw, although I do have them at home with me now. I'll be listening to them in full pretty soon I imagine.

reply to post by Rising Against

This included a $585 Magnavox stereo.

Johnson was the Vanity King. I was looking for a picture of him driving the white Caddy with the bull horns on the front in the mud on his ranch, but couldn't find it. This will have to do:


It always disturbed me that he insisted on holding Air Force One on the ground in Texas until a judge could come and swear him in to office. Then he insisted on having Mrs. Kennedy rousted from the on board bathroom in her still bloody dress to witness it. In my opinion, to gloat. There is no other reason, and no excuse for his behavior during the next 24 hours. Unless of course he is culpable.

To OP: Yep. Mr. Hoover was targeted by the Kennedy's, just one of a long list that they were trying to expose as corrupt and overdue for retirement. Could not have pulled off the assassination without the head of the FBI.

Enemies: foreign AND domestic... this nation has been on a different road ever since.

Originally posted by intrptr
reply to post by Rising Against

 

. . .

Enemies: foreign AND domestic... this nation has been on a different road ever since.

Interesting perspective. I've long believed the same. JFK's assassination was a CFR coup--literally:

The LBJ-CIA Assassination of JFK
. . .

A special word about the Council on [Foreign] Relations' role in the 1963 Coup d’Etat and cover up: no other organization has been more responsible for the murder and cover up of John Kennedy than the CFR. Elite CFR members such as Allen Dulles, Nelson Rockefeller and George Herbert Walker Bush were probably sponsors of the JFK assassination. Certainly leadership CFR members such as Allen Dulles, John J. McCloy, and Gerald Ford played the most critical roles in the Warren Commission farce. Add in cover up roles played by Nelson Rockefeller (CFR), Henry Kissinger (CFR), Richard Helms (CFR), William Colby CIA/CFR, McGeorge Bundy (CFR), Nicholas Katzenbach (CFR), Jack Valenti (CFR), Bill Moyers (CFR), William Coleman (CFR), James Reston (NY Times) (CFR), Anthony Lewis (NY Times) (CFR), Walter Cronkite (CBS) (CFR), Dan Rather (CBS) (CFR), Peter Jennings (ABC) (CFR), Daniel Schorr (CFR), Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (NY Times) (CFR), Kenneth Gilmore (Readers’ Digest) (CFR), Stephen Rosenfeld (Washington Post) (CFR), Bobbie Ray Inman (CFR), ... the list is almost endless. Note two things:

1) they are the key establishment players of BOTH major political parties spanning decades;

2) their power and influence is directly proportional to the fantastic whoppers they tell about in the 1963 Coup d’Etat. For the older CFR members it is a case of PARTICIPATION and COVER UP in the JFK assassination. For the younger ones such as George Will (CFR), Charles Krauthammer (CFR), Bill Kristol (CFR), David Gergen (CFR), John Segenthaler (CFR), Frank Sesno (CFR), Michael Beschloss (CFR) it is a case of WILLFUL IGNORANCE as they still push the Big Lie. Note: Chris Matthews of Hardball, another willfully ignorant man, is close friends with Richard Haass, current president of CFR. I have never seen the highly acclaimed political guru Michael Barone, a Bilderberger attendee, ever say anything credible on the JFK assassination.

Question: do we really expect the CFR to admit that some of its elite members slaughtered John Kennedy and many more played integral roles in the cover up? No, but it is important to highlight that the Council on Foreign Relations has stunk up the place with tremendous amounts of radioactive horse manure relating to the 1963 Coup d’Etat.

The 1963 Coup d’Etat was very similar to the 1992 election between George Herbert Walker Bush, Ross Perot and Bill Clinton. In 1963, there was a Texas Vice President, a desperate and dangerous Lyndon Johnson - supported by the CFR, the intelligence agencies, military contractors and the oil industry - who feared exposure of his criminality and was on the verge of political and personal annihilation. So Lyndon Johnson used the CIA to murder his political rival John Kennedy....

reply to post by Ex_CT2

Don't forget to include other coincidence in the formula. Another assassination in VietNam just prior to Kennedy's:

Wikipedia

Considering war was engaged shortly after Gulf of Tonkin incident in VietNam.

Then there was the Bay of Pigs, that pissed off the CIA and the Mob for allowing Castro to retain his fragile hold on the New Republic of Cuba:

Hunt's deathbed confession on JFK assassination

Then there is the Mob in regards to the RFK Senate hearings to impeach Jimmy Hoffa, deport Tropicante. etc.
Is there any other agency or entity that they did not go after? As an aside I took note of your honorable mention of Gerald R. Ford from the Warren Commission, who later went on to become president and pardon Richard Nixon just_like_that.

How about the ensuing assassinations of Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King soon after they too showed an antiwar stance in their campaigns? They are not and never will be forgotten for their sacrifice.

To this day this country continues to embroil itself in protracted invasions and conquest for financial gain just like back then. Like all empires thru all of recorded history.