By now, if you still believe Lee Harvey Oswald did it, you’re probably as much of a patsy as he said he was. Here’s the late Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s theory as to who conspired against her late husband, the president of the United States:
Jackie Onassis believed that Lyndon B Johnson and a cabal of Texas tycoons were involved in the assassination of her husband John F Kennedy, ‘explosive’ recordings are set to reveal.
The secret tapes will show that the former first lady felt that her husband’s successor was at the heart of the plot to murder him.
She became convinced that the then vice president, along with businessmen in the South, had orchestrated the Dallas shooting, with gunman Lee Harvey Oswald – long claimed to have been a lone assassin – merely part of a much larger conspiracy.
Texas-born Mr Johnson, who served as the state’s governor and senator, completed Mr Kennedy’s term and went on to be elected president in his own right.
The tapes were recorded with leading historian Arthur Schlesinger Jnr within months of the assassination on November 22, 1963, and had been sealed in a vault at the Kennedy Library in Boston.
The then Mrs Kennedy, who went on to marry Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, had ordered that they should not be released until 50 years after her death, with some reports suggesting she feared that her revelations might make her family targets for revenge.
Jackie’s not the only one who thought so. Here’s an episode from the banned series by Nigel Turner, The Men Who Killed Kennedy:
The notes at YouTube are interesting, to say the least:
The Men Who Killed Kennedy is a video documentary series by Nigel Turner that originally aired in 1988 in England with two one-hour segments about the John F. Kennedy assassination. The United States corporation, Arts & Entertainment Company, purchased the rights to the original two segments. Three one-hour segments were added in 1991. A sixth segment was added in 1995. Finally, three additional hourly segments were added by the History Channel in November 2003. The ninth segment, titled “The Guilty Men”, directly implicated Lyndon B. Johnson. Within days, Johnson’s widow, Lady Bird Johnson, more of his surviving associates, ex-President Jimmy Carter, and the lone, living Warren Commission commissioner and ex-President Gerald R. Ford immediately complained to the History Channel. They subsequently threatened legal action against Arts & Entertainment Company, owner of the History Channel. “The Guilty Men” segment was completely withdrawn by the History Channel. Also during the series, French prisoner Christian David named Lucien Sarti as one of three French criminals hired to carry out the assassination of Kennedy, when he was interviewed by author Anthony Summers. This claim is one of the most strongly investigated theories presented on the show.
I was able to purchase the original series, of six episodes, spanning from 1988 to 1995. In it, the Corsican mafia assassin, Lucien Sarti, who was shot dead in 1972 in Mexico City, is revealed as being one of at least three hired guns who set up a “crossfire” along the motorcade route. (The description above contains an error: The author who interviewed Christian David, the imprisoned mafioso who named Sarti, is not Anthony Summers, but Steve Revelle.) As well, Lee Harvey Oswald is definitively cleared by witnesses on the scene, including at least one Dallas motorcycle cop, as an assassin (and proven to be, as he said, a patsy). This DVD set still available, but when I got it, it was not that easy to find. I suspect it is easier to get in the US than in Canada!
The video above is from the later three, which are unavailable for purchase now. It’s not hard to see why; the claims this video makes, and the complaints they sparked, make it abundantly clear that something was not kosher with “Lyin’ Lyndon”. At the very least, he appears to have known what was going on, and though he was in a position to stop it, he did not. It appears that he had something on his conscience. Could that have been the reason for the well-paid psychiatrist who looked after him in the few years he lived after his last presidential term ended? And could Jackie Kennedy have been right when she pointed the finger at him?
The Daily Mail story contains a serious error in saying Lyndon Johnson was a former Governor of Texas. He was a Congressional Representative and Senator (both federal offices) but never held any state office.
I’ve heard this story before, and tend to discount it, JFK being more a pro-big business type than the New Dealer, LBJ, and Johnson definitely being more in favor of radical changes in U.S. racial policy. JFK was actually quite conservative, and LBJ about as close to a leftist as the U.S.has every had in a president.
I know Vietnam has soured the historical record, and LBJ was hardly the charming fellow that Kennedy was, but sorry… the theory on its face makes absolutely no sense.
I disagree that this theory makes no sense. Billy Sol Estes WAS a real person and a very close associate of LBJ’s. Billy Sol Estes was a crook who was so close to going to jail that he made a deal to save his ass. that both works for and against his credibility. The other figures mentioned in the story are all real people and the events that are named did REALLY happen.
The overriding question is: How do you tie them all together. Just be cause you are a leftist doesn’t make you a nice guy. Stalin Murdered millions of people. I do however, find the thread of this theory rather thin. The biggest string giving credence to it is that Jackie so firmly believed that LBJ murdered her husband. That tends to lead one to conclude that the “pillow talk” syndrome could easily have been that John told her that if he suddenly died, look at LBJ as the leader. It is true, and even J. Edgar Hoover acknowledged it, that Jackie and John had reconciled and were going to have another child. John had ceased his wanton philandering. So it would appear that if Jon was beginning to feel threatened, who is the first person a man talks to? His wife, of course.
Is it true? I don’t know! I don’t think anyone will ever know, short of finding a written confession from the gunmen who pulled the trigger(s) on that day. I do know that November 22, 1963 was a watershed day in my life. That was the day that, at my very tender age of 11, I ceased to trust things that the government told me and my father and I would never see eye-to-eye on anything relating to politics ever again.
PS. ‘Bina, please tell your brother that I am very sorry and that I wish that he would mark his dry sense of humor more clearly. I really like dry humor and looking at it that way as his being a sibling, it becomes even funnier. I don’t want to spend the night out in the mole holes again. And I promise to look at the name and see if I make the connection nest time and IM you to see!
I don’t think the surface of things tells us nearly enough about the JFK assassination. There are a LOT of things about this story that have been buried and covered up; here are a few key ones.
LBJ, for all his liberalism on racial issues, was still a hawk about Cuba and Vietnam, which JFK, on the other hand, was ready to wash his hands of, in both cases; he was pursuing a back-channel rapprochement with Castro, and ready to pull the troops out of ‘Nam. JFK was also outraged by the CIA and its ursurping of the powers of elected officials to declare wars and arrange assassinations; he was ready to gut it. LBJ, on the other hand, was cozy with them AND J. Edgar Hoover’s notoriously crooked FBI.
And being from Texas, LBJ was no doubt deep in the pockets of the Texan oil tycoons, like Clint Murchison, who is mentioned in the video I posted. They hated JFK because he wanted to cut their oil-depletion allowances. LBJ probably promised them that once HE was president, that wouldn’t happen. Murchison celebrated (in extremely bad taste, to say the least) when JFK was shot.
JFK was serious about cracking down on organized crime, as was his brother Bobby, his attorney general. And I wouldn’t doubt that ol’ Lyin’ Lyndon was also in cahoots with the Mafia, which had a LOT of connections in Texas, and especially right-wing Dallas — including, most significantly, to the Cuban mafia in Florida. Those mofos were so angry at JFK’s refusal to take things further after the Bay of Pigs that on JFK’s last trip to Miami, just days before Dallas, that he actually had to dispense with the planned motorcade and be helicoptered in to meet with local businessmen instead. It was deemed totally unsafe for him to appear before the public in Miami — local police had picked up “chatter” from a number of informants that right-wing conspirators were hoping to get a shot at him “from a building, with a high-powered rifle”. (This was in one episode of the DVD set I mentioned above.) It’s therefore quite surprising that a motorcade was arranged in Dallas, much less through Dealey Plaza, where there were tons of places snipers could hide out and escape unseen. And several key spots were left oddly unsecured; highly irregular, considering how the Secret Service usually nails everything down! There was a manhole at the foot of the underpass, for example; also a railroad bridge; and of course the picket fence on the infamous grassy knoll.
And if anyone WAS holed up with a rifle on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository, it was most certainly NOT Lee Harvey Oswald, who was on the second floor at the time, eating lunch. A minute and a half after the shots rang out, a Dallas motorcycle cop entered the lunchroom and saw Oswald there, calmly drinking a Coke he’d bought from the machine. There’s just no way he could have raced across the sixth floor around stacks of books and boxes, stashed his rifle, and run down four flights of stairs in just 90 seconds, AND been able to fish a coin from his pocket and get a Coke from the machine; his hands would have been shaking from adrenaline, and his face would have been red and he’d have been out of breath. The officer who saw him says he looked absolutely calm and unruffled, like nothing out of the ordinary was going on. So obviously he was NOT their man. But LBJ insisted that he was, and even called Parkland Hospital when Oswald was taken in, dying from Jack Ruby’s gunshot, and adamantly demanded of the emergency doctors that they take a “deathbed confession” from the accused. LBJ had his mind made up already as to who the killer was supposed to be, just a day or two after the shooting — and he was hellbent on interfering with the investigation in ways that NO ONE would do today. He even had the FBI stop the Dallas police’s investigation of the assassination (much to the chagrin of the Dallas chief), and would not allow the doctors of Parkland Hospital to perform the medico-legal autopsy on JFK, which Texas law stipulated must be the case. Instead, he had the body flown to Bethesda Naval Hospital, and all kinds of strange chicanery happened both along the way and afterwards. The Bethesda autopsy was done by doctors not competent in the procedure, and the brain was missing (probably because it was full of dumdum bullet fragments that had entered it from in front and to the right, which would have exonerated Oswald and his old World War II Italian rifle on the spot, as well as ruling out the theory that Oswald had shot from above and behind from the sixth floor of the book depository.) The president’s corpse was manipulated, apparently by a very skilled mortician, because the entry hole in his right temple was filled with mortician’s wax and the huge exit wound had been repaired to make it look like he’d been shot from behind. (That would make no sense, though, because his face was fully intact, and if a frangible bullet were to enter the back of the head, the face would be blown out.) The autopsy photos were also falsified, and the car in which JFK and Governor Connally were shot was spirited away to Dearborn, Michigan in the dead of night for “repairs” that conveniently wiped out all evidence of a bullet entering through the windshield on the right-hand side.
The Secret Service’s conduct the night before the motorcade was also irregular (there was a night of debauchery in an infamous Fort Worth bar, which would have led to impaired reflexes and fatigue in the special agents the next day), and their logbook records of that time were full of holes. None of this elaborate cover-up could have taken place without some very high-level connivance, and who but LBJ was in a position to sign off on all the orders?
Now, whether LBJ masterminded the scheme is not known. But certainly he had more than enough motives, means and opportunities to be involved in the crime at a very high level. And the fact that he spent the last few years of his life in a state of apparently extreme guilt, requiring the help of a psychiatrist, is rather telling. I’d say he had a LOT on his conscience, seeing that his entire political career was riddled with crimes up to and including murder. Even his own sister was not safe, as he was accused of ordering HER death, too.
President Kennedy’s widow was a smart woman. I do not think she would suspect LBJ if she did not believe it was based on something solid.