LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination by Phillip F. Nelson)
“The logistics of the “crime of the century” had been worked out by men who held some of the highest offices of the government and involved about a dozen; they also had access to an assortment of the best equipment available to carry out their mission. But most did not know any more than that which they needed to know to perform their own part. Only three at the top, another three or four in the middle, and as many again at the bottom, including the actual shooters, were aware of the real agenda. The others were part of the loosely accountable, compartmentalized world of covert operations and had no knowledge of the ultimate objective of their assignments. Many were veterans of “Operation Mongoose” and were now actively involved in ZR/RIFLE or “Operation 40,” but this operation was only supposed to be a failed assassination attempt, for vague purposes to them. The only unifying object of their diversionary mission was the promise of being the catalyst for a new and energized retaliatory attack on Cuba to finally achieve the permanent removal of Fidel Castro.
According to an interview conducted by Dick Russell, Gerry Patrick Hemming told him that “none again at the bottom, including the actual shooters, were aware of the real agenda. The others were part of the loosely accountable, compartmentalized world of covert operations and had no knowledge of the ultimate objective of their assignments. Many were veterans of “Operation Mongoose” and were now actively involved in ZR/RIFLE or “Operation 40,” but this operation was only supposed to be a failed assassination attempt, for vague purposes to them. The only unifying object of their diversionary mission was the promise of being the catalyst for a new and energized retaliatory attack on Cuba to finally achieve the permanent removal of Fidel Castro.
According to an interview conducted by Dick Russell, Gerry Patrick Hemming told him that the Cubans were brought into the picture in the middle of November 1963:8
The week before the assassination, Felipe Vidal Santiago told my group that some people had approached him to go to a big meeting in Dallas that week,” Hemming said. “We warned him and some other people not to go, that something funny was up. I’d heard of other meetings, where the conversation got steered around toward hitting JFK instead of Fidel. I’m talking about … some “Sometime after the shots were fired, it must have occurred to Oswald that he was being played as a “patsy,” and if he didn’t get out of there immediately, he would probably be shot dead upon capture. A “suspect description” of unknown origin, which loosely matched Oswald, was broadcast as an “All Points Bulletin” about then; Ruby might have been the source. It appears that Ruby had told him to meet him at the Texas Theater as soon as possible that afternoon but he had to go back to his apartment first to retrieve his pistol, for his own self-protection. Oswald headed back to his apartment to get it as well as change his shirt. The plan after that, he had been told, would then be to reconnoiter at Redbird Airport with pilots who would then fly him to Mexico with papers and visa for entry into Cuba to begin preparing for the coming U.S. invasion. Oswald thought that, finally, he would achieve his ultimate lifetime goal: becoming a full-time, well-paid spy just like his hero from I Led Three Lives. Ruby had expected that the police would track him to the theater and kill him “in charge of the operational and logistical end of the plan, took his orders from Bill Harvey who reported only to two men at the highest levels of the CIA, James Jesus Angleton and Cord Meyer. According to information furnished by E. Howard Hunt during negotiations related to a possible film expose—which was finally scuttled because of his excessive monetary demands—Harvey and the others were being guided primarily by Cord Meyer, operating out of his London CIA offices.10 In turn, David Ferrie and Guy Banister, the point men in New Orleans, were guided by Harvey to groom Oswald for his coming role in Dallas.11 Moreover, it is clear from the evidence cited that Oswald knew of his initial role in a simulated assassination with the intent of forcing Kennedy to invade Cuba.12 He knew that it was only for his own good that he did not know details on the overall mission; his objective was simply to perform his task well, and he would be whisked off to his next mission, assured of safe passage to Cuba and that his young family would be taken care of in his absence, probably better than he “David Atlee Phillips. Phillips, as did his peer David Morales, in charge of the operational and logistical end of the plan, took his orders from Bill Harvey who reported only to two men at the highest levels of the CIA, James Jesus Angleton and Cord Meyer. According to information furnished by E. Howard Hunt during negotiations related to a possible film expose—which was finally scuttled because of his excessive monetary demands—Harvey and the others were being guided primarily by Cord Meyer, operating out of his London CIA offices.10 In turn, David Ferrie and Guy Banister, the point men in New Orleans, were guided by Harvey to groom Oswald for his coming role in Dallas.11 Moreover, it is clear from the evidence cited that Oswald knew of his initial role in a simulated assassination with the intent of forcing Kennedy to invade Cuba.12 He knew that it was only for his own good that he did not know details on the overall mission; his objective was simply to perform his task well, and he would be whisked off to his next mission, assured of safe passage to Cuba and that his young family would be taken care of better than he would have done himself.
“The highest levels of the operation had set the “stage” in many ways, beginning with the virtually complete elimination of the normal protection given to the president. In addition to the absence of more than a few patrolmen, no effort had been made, as was the norm, to see to it that all the windows in the buildings around Dealey Plaza were closed and that normal security checks of personnel within those buildings had been made. The motorcade route—which could have alternately gone straight down Main Street to a temporary crossover onto the Stemmons Expressway and the Trade Mart—would require the limousine to go into a 120-degree turn at the Elm Street intersection, which ensured that the vehicle would slow to a crawl. Shortly after that, the driver would be instructed over the radio to slow down, even stop, at a place in the road next to a man with an open umbrella now marked with a big white X.
Meanwhile, as the limousine lurched to a brief halt, the snipers, including a Corsican sharpshooter and a Mafia hit man—expert shooters using expensive, highly accurate automatic rifles with equally precise telescopic sights—let loose a “a volley of at least five more shots, the first one at almost the same time as the missed shot, hitting Kennedy in the throat, the next hitting him in the back. As Kennedy reacted to that by leaning to his left, another similarly placed shot missed him and hit Connally in the back. The last volley consisted of one from the back, hitting Kennedy in the back of the head and causing his body to jerk forward; within a fraction of a second, the last shot was fired from behind the fence on the grassy knoll. This was the instantly fatal shot, which hit him in the right front side of his head, violently pushing it backward while exploding his skull and causing most of his brain tissue from the right splash backward, hitting the motorcycle policemen riding to the left rear corner of the limousine.*
Lee Bowers, watching from the railroad yard tower, told Mark Lane, “At the time of the shooting … there was a flash of light or, as far as I am concerned, something I could not identify, but there was something which occurred which caught my eye in this immediate area on the embankment. Now, what this was, I could not state at that time and at this time I could not identify it, other than there was some unusual occurrence—a flash of light or smoke or something which caused me to feel like something out of the ordinary had occurred there.”13 There was no question in the mind of Lee Bowers that a shot, possibly more than one, was fired from the area of the wooden stockade fence. It is interesting that Bowers also told of the men’s use of a walkie-talkie.
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“ It is the insightful observations by people such as Senator Yarborough that lend additional credence to the conclusions formed in this book about Johnson’s absolute control over all aspects of the cover-up operation; he was the final arbiter in the decisions of what evidence would be used and what would be discarded, what would be tagged for rebuilding or fabricating and what would be “inadvertently” lost or destroyed.
This evidence shows that Johnson and Hoover—and probably H. L. Hunt as well, since he had quickly departed Dallas for Washington DC after having been called there by J. Edgar Hoover—participated in directing the Z film alterations throughout the weekend following Kennedy’s murder. Johnson no doubt knew in advance—undoubtedly having even preplanned the general steps—the need for having body alterations made to support the favored “lone nut” theory if that option was selected, which it was, as described below. By the time the photos began coming in, Johnson must have also wished he could have also gotten to the Altgens photo a little earlier, to have his picture pasted into the spot where he should have been. It is obvious that the reason for his dissembling[ “contrived “testimony” to the Warren Commission was due to his absence in that photograph, as evidenced by his claim concerning agent Youngblood’s fictitious act of immediately slamming him to the floor. Based upon these stunning revelations, it should now be clear to all that there were three people—two following the script laid by the other—who were jointly orchestrating this particular vignette. But it was all according to the grand play—a masterpiece of design and execution—which had been developed over a period of nearly four years by the most brilliant, and evil, political force the country had ever seen: Lyndon B. (“Bull”) Johnson, determined at all costs to fulfill his lifelong dream, in the only realistic way possible for him to become president of the United States. P 512
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Excerpt From
LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination
Phillip F. Nelson
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“Dr. Perry to change his testimony.’ Moore said that in threatening Perry, he acted ‘on orders from Washington and Mr. Kelly of the Secret Service Headquarters.’ … Moore [admitted that he] ‘badgered Dr. Perry’ into ‘making a flat statement that there was no entry wound in the neck’ … [and said] ‘I regret what I had to do with Dr. Perry’ … [but] he had been given ‘marching orders from Washington … I did everything I was told, we all did everything we were told, or we’d get our heads cut off.’”66 In April 1992, almost twenty-nine years after the assassination, Dr. Crenshaw finally broke his own silence:
I believe there was a common denominator in our silence—a fearful perception that to come forward with what we believed to be the medical truth would be asking for trouble. Although we never admitted it to one another, we realized that the inertia of the established story was so powerful, so thoroughly presented, so adamantly accepted, that it would bury anyone who stood in its path … I was as afraid of the men in suits as I was of the men who had assassinated the President … I reasoned that anyone who[ “would go so far as to eliminate the President of the United States would surely not hesitate to kill a doctor.
After Crenshaw’s book rose to number one on the New York Times’ best-seller list, he was attacked mercilessly by people who were not interested in the truth being revealed. Ultimately, it was the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that leaped into the fray to attempt to discredit one of their members. They first tried to deny that Dr. Crenshaw was even in Trauma Room One with President Kennedy; that scurrilous charge was quickly addressed by records submitted by Dr. Crenshaw, including Warren Commission testimony establishing that five different doctors and nurses specifically mentioned seeing him working with them to revive the president. There is no question that he was there and in 1994, a court agreed, awarding Dr. Crenshaw and his coauthor, Gary Shaw, a sum of money and ordering JAMA to publish a rebuttal article. There is more to the story of JAMA’s egregious attempt to reinforce a discredited theory by attempting to deny the truth, but due to space limitations, and the fact that the point has now been adequately covered, the matter “will be suspended; enough has been said for the reader to ponder who was behind the motivation for the slanderous treatment of Dr. Charles Crenshaw.
But the real reason for the attempt to discredit Dr. Crenshaw had nothing to do with his involvement with other doctors working on John F. Kennedy; it was really about what he said regarding a telephone call received during the time he assisted Dr. Shires in trying to save Lee Harvey Oswald’s life. Dr. Crenshaw stated that Lyndon Johnson personally called the hospital about an hour after Oswald had been admitted, asking him to secure Oswald’s “deathbed confession.” Practically everyone in the country knew about Oswald’s shooting almost immediately after he was shot at 11:21 a.m. (12:21 p.m. in Washington), whether or not they personally saw it on live television in real time on Sunday morning. Johnson had heard about it on his way back from one of his rare appearances in a church, when Secretary of State Rusk informed him. The call which Johnson made to Dr. Crenshaw was made at the full height of his excited reaction to the news that the assassin had been shot, and he thought that “ getting Oswald’s “confession” would help to put a lid on any further investigation. . . “A quick whisper to his wife to excuse himself for a few minutes for whatever reason (e.g., a restroom stop) would have freed him to go there to use the telephone to make this short call; after Dr. Crenshaw took it, the call was over within half a minute. Johnson wanted Dr. Crenshaw to take a message to the operating surgeon, Dr. Shires. “I want a death-bed confession from the accused assassin. There’s”“a man in the operating room who will take the statement. I will expect full cooperation in this matter,” he said firmly.71 Such a call, made from a telephone in his office at the Capitol Building, would not have been placed through the White House switchboard; therefore no record of it would have existed. Not that the existence of records of Johnson’s telephone calls should matter regardless; he seems to have figured out ways to make calls that never appear in the official logs. For example, one such call, according to William Manchester, was made by him to J. Edgar Hoover at 7:25 p.m. on Friday evening.72 He also conferred with Hoover from 9:10 to 9:25 p.m. that evening.73 However, there is no record of either call in Johnson’s official diary, nor has a tape of either conversation been made public. There is no question but that Johnson and Hoover talked frequently by telephone throughout the first several days and weeks after the assassination and that only a few of their conversations were actually taped. Readers are urged to view the video interview of Dr. Crenshaw on YouTube.com to consider his veracity, as “compared to that of LBJ and his apologists. (See “LBJ’s Phone Call to Parkland Hospital.”)” p 621
Excerpt From
LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination
Phillip F. Nelson
