Reclaiming History (381 page)

† Kennedy tried to discourage Martin Luther King from holding the march, “fearing that it would lead to violence, looting and—more important—a mark against his Administration.” Despite the entreaties of King and other civil rights leaders, Kennedy did not participate in the march. However, when the march, which was peaceful and did not ignite any violence, was over, he invited King and others to the White House “where he congratulated them—in private” (
Los Angeles Times
, November 22, 1993, p.A11).

‡ Indeed, it went further than that. One of the biggest apparent misconceptions that has developed about the passage of these two acts is that they were pushed through Congress only by the strength of Johnson’s personality and the deepness of his commitment. Neither Johnson’s congressional magic nor his strong support for civil rights can be denied, but according to those who should know—the congressional leaders of both parties—this simply was not true. Though unquestionably the assassination speeded up the passage of Kennedy’s legislative program (not just the civil rights bill, but the proposed tax cut to stimulate the economy, both of which were being delayed—the civil rights bill by the House Judiciary Committee, the tax-cut bill by the Senate Finance Committee), they say Kennedy’s bill would have passed, with or without Johnson.
Among a plethora of Kennedy initiatives in the areas of mental illness, trade, mass transportation, juvenile delinquency, antipoverty (Kennedy started the movement to eradicate poverty in America three days before his assassination, calling it an “attack on poverty,” Johnson changing the name to the “war on poverty”), the biggest ones at the moment of his death were his civil rights bill and tax reduction bill. Speaking primarily of these two bills, Senator Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.), the leader of the Senate majority, said in November of 1964, “The assassination made no real difference. Adoption of [Kennedy’s] tax bill and the civil rights bill might have taken a little longer, but they would have been adopted.” His counterpart in the Senate, Everett M. Dirksen (R-Ill.), said, “This program was on the way before November 22, 1963. Its time had come.” In the House, Representative Carl Albert (D-Okla.), the leader of the House majority said, “The pressure behind this program had become so great that it would have been adopted in essentially the same form whether Kennedy lived or died.” His counterpart, Representative Charles A. Hallek (R-Ind.), said, “The assassination made no difference. The program was already made.”
The head of Kennedy’s legislative team, Lawrence F. O’Brien, who carried on in the same capacity for Johnson, said, “If we were ever sure of anything, it was that the tax bill and the civil rights bill would be passed.” (Wilson, “What Happened to the Kennedy Program?” pp.117–121; delay by House Judiciary Committee and Senate Finance Committee: Reeves,
President Kennedy
, p.658) Without slighting LBJ’s considerable contributions in the least, it is hard to ignore the reality that LBJ was carrying out the vision and reform agenda of JFK.

^*
Emblematic of right-wing extremism in parts of Dallas and the South prior to the assassination, Walker gave a speech to the Annual Leadership Conference of the White Citizens’ Council of America in Jackson, Mississippi, a little less than a month before the tragedy in Dealey Plaza. A few excerpts: “The Kennedys have liquidated the government of the United States. It no longer exists. The nation has no government. The Constitution is well on the way to destruction…Ladies and gentlemen, your State Department is…well infiltrated with Communists…and it has been for a long time, Republican or Democrat, Eisenhower or Kennedy…The best definition I can find today for Communism is ‘Kennedy liberalism,’ or ‘Kennedy socialism’…[Kennedy] is the greatest leader of the anti-Christ movement that we have had as a president of the United States…I have seen this country being sold out, lock, stock, and barrel by a bunch of sophisticated, professor, Harvard liberals…It’s interesting that the Communists killed first the people that helped them in their revolution…So we’ve got something to look forward to, ladies and gentlemen [i.e., the Communists taking over and killing the Kennedys]…Now, I’m not a fanatic, but I do get mad and angry when the truth can’t be told in this country. And I’m not an extremist either.” Walker said that when people ask him why he went to Mississippi, his response is, “I’ll go to Kalamazoo next or Alaska, if that’s where the Russians and Communists want to enter next. It just happened that they entered Mississippi and then they entered Alabama.” (Transcript of Walker’s speech in Jackson, Mississippi, on October 25 or 26, 1963, published in the
Fourth Decade
, January 2001, pp.17–19, 21, 26–27)

† “Messages were crisscrossing this town [Dallas] that something was going to happen and the right wing was going to be blamed for it,” General Walker would later recall to a Texas reporter. “I made sure I was out of Dallas that day. It drove them [the authorities] crazy that I was in New Orleans, Oswald’s old stomping ground. I was on a plane flying from New Orleans to Shreveport when the pilot announced that Kennedy had been killed. I’ve got the plane and everyone who was on it, if you want to check.” Walker added, “They asked me if I wanted to cancel my speech that night, and I said ‘Hell, no.’” (Cartwright, “Old Soldier,” p.59)

^*
In desperation, the conspiracy theorists have tried (e.g., Shaw with Harris,
Cover-Up
, p.167) to connect Hunt to Kennedy’s murder by pointing out that one of his sons, Nelson “Bunker” Hunt, admitted to the FBI that he contributed between two and three hundred dollars toward payment of the negative “Welcome Mr. Kennedy” advertisement in the
Dallas Morning News
on the morning of the assassination, which asked Kennedy twelve “why” questions (see earlier text) (CE 1885, 23 H 690, FBI interview of Nelson Bunker Hunt on May 15, 1964; CE 1031, 18 H 835). You see, Bunker was probably in on the conspiracy himself, and being so, he wanted to advertise his complicity by helping to pay for the advertisement. By the way, the advertisement was a reasonably dignified criticism of Kennedy’s policies, which the ad suggested gave aid and comfort to international Communism. The ad was signed by one Bernard Weissman, “chairman” of the “American Fact-Finding Committee.” Weissman had recently been discharged from the U.S. Army in Germany, where he and two men who served with him agreed to form a politically conservative organization when they returned to the states. (WR, p.295; 5 H 489–497, WCT Bernard Weissman)

† Although Hunt was a “social Darwinist” who believed minorities, like blacks, did not do well because they were innately less advantaged, he had no reputation for racial hatred, and certainly was no fanatic about keeping the black man down (Hurt,
Texas Rich
, pp.30–31).

^*
Accompanying the letter was a typed note in Spanish saying that the sender, who signed his name as “P.S.,” had sent a copy of the letter to the FBI in late 1974 but had not heard back from the bureau. “Señor P.S.,” as the sender became known, said that fearing what might happen to him, he intended to go into hiding for awhile, but left a return address of “Insurgentes Sud, No. 309, Mexico, Df, Mexico.” Number 309 South Insurgentes in Mexico City at the time was a four-story white stone apartment building containing a number of lower-middle-class flats. On the first floor of the building were low-quality clothing stores and a shop that sold lottery tickets. Two other assassination researchers, Harold Weisberg and Howard Roffman, also received copies of the handwritten letter to Hunt in the mail. Each wrote letters to the Mexico City return address on the envelope, but received no answer, though their letters were not returned as undelivered. (
New York Times
, April 4, 1977, p.50)

^*
To their credit, Gary Shaw and Larry Harris, in
Cover-Up
, did not.

^*
The FBI report of the interview on November 27, 1963, says that “Milteer emphatically denies ever making threats to assassinate President Kennedy or participating in any such assassination. He stated he has never heard anyone make such threats…He stated he does not know, nor has he ever been in the presence of Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby” (CD 20, p.1, December 1, 1963).

^*
JFK biographer Richard Reeves writes that “more than once the President had chewed out his own people for making fun of Johnson” (Reeves,
President Kennedy
, p.118). Sam Houston Johnson, LBJ’s brother, wrote in his book that the Kennedy people made his brother’s stay in the vice presidency “the most miserable three years of his life. He wasn’t the number two man in the administration; he was the lowest man on the totem pole…I know him well enough to know he felt humiliated time and time again, that he was openly snubbed by second-echelon White House staffers who snickered at him behind his back and called him ‘Uncle Cornpone’” (Johnson,
My Brother Lyndon
, p.108). And at the center of it all, LBJ believed, was RFK, whom he disliked not just for Bobby’s notorious brusqueness (LBJ, coarse in his own right, was nonetheless a highly sensitive soul), but for his lack of respect for him. Bobby rarely invited Johnson to the frequent social gatherings of the Kennedy clan and administration at his Hickory Hill estate in McLean, Virginia. Johnson was particularly resentful of Bobby’s access to the president. “Every time they have a conference,” LBJ complained to a reporter for the Associated Press, “don’t tell me about who is the top adviser. It isn’t McNamara, the chief of staff, or anybody like that. Bobby is first in, last out. And Bobby is the boy he [JFK] listens to.” (Shesol,
Mutual Contempt
, pp.107–110)
On the other hand, though LBJ’s and RFK’s animus for each other was mutual and well known (“[Robert] Kennedy’s hatred of LBJ was…primitive and unreasoning” [Thomas,
Robert Kennedy
, p.292]), it is not clear that there was hostility between Johnson and the president himself, as opposed to the president’s staff. Indeed, JFK assistant and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who should know, says, “John Kennedy always had a certain fondness for Lyndon Johnson. He saw his Vice President, with perhaps the merest touch of condescension, as an American original, a figure out of Mark Twain…The President, Ben Bradlee observed in 1963, ‘really likes his roguish qualities, respects him enormously as a political operator.’” And a prominent political analyst at the time, William S. White, said that LBJ “had a cordial relationship with President Kennedy.” How did LBJ feel about Kennedy? Schlesinger says Johnson told Dean Rusk, “He’s done much better by me than I would have done by him under the same circumstances. Kennedy always treated me fairly and considerately.” (Schlesinger,
Robert Kennedy and His Times
, pp.621–622; William White observation: NBC News,
Seventy Hours and Thirty Minutes
, p.107) And LBJ was under the impression that JFK “likes me,” but knew that RFK did not (Thomas,
Robert Kennedy
, p.278).

^*
Conspiracy researcher Vincent Palamara makes the same allegation as Zirbel, stating that Yarborough said that Secret Service agent Rufus W. Youngblood “and LBJ were listening to a walkie-talkie with the volume set too low for the Senator to hear what they were picking up” and that presidential assistant Dave Powers “agreed with Yarborough” (Vince Palamara, “The ‘Breakdown’ of the Infrastructure of the Secret Service on November 22, 1963,”
Fourth Decade
, September 1997, p.20). And Palamara, as opposed to Zirbel, does give a source, but the source he gives doesn’t support what he says. Palamara’s source, page 166 of
The Death of a President
by William Manchester, reads, “According to Johnson, Rufus Youngblood hurled him to the floor before the fatal shot. Youngblood himself doubts that he moved that quickly. Ralph Yarborough goes further: he insists that Youngblood never left the front seat. It is the Senator’s recollection that the agent merely leaned over the seat and talked to Johnson in an undertone. He contends that there was insufficient space in the rear for Youngblood. Dave Powers, who glanced back, confirms the Senator.” Where Palamara gets his “listening to a walkie-talkie” from this quote, I don’t know.

^*
On June 18, 1987, the son, Steven Mark Brown, filed a $10.5 million lawsuit against Lady Bird Johnson, claiming, “My legal birthrights have been violated and a conspiracy was formed to deprive me of my legal heirship.” The suit was dismissed in 1989 when Steven, then a naval operations specialist, “failed to appear in court.” (Dave Perry, “Texas in the Imagination,” self-published article, October 26, 2002, pp.10–11;
Dallas Morning News
, June 19, 1987, p.34A;
Dallas Morning News
, October 3, 1990, p.A33, obituary of Steven Mark Brown)

^*
Brown says LBJ invited her to attend the victory party at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, which she did. “He had an apartment in the Driskill,” she said, “and we routinely started having an affair.” (Brown,
Texas in the Morning
, pp.9, 14; affair at Driskill: Affidavit by Madeleine Brown in lawsuit filed by her son against Mrs. Johnson,
Dallas Morning News
, June 19, 1987, p.34A) She said the affair continued until 1969 (
Dallas Morning News
, October 3, 1990, p.A33).

^*
“I was there,” says Jack Valenti, a former top aide to LBJ, “when President Johnson ruminated about the assassination, and the urgency to enlist the most prestigious citizens within the Republic to inspect this murder carefully, objectively, swiftly” (Bernard Weinraub, “Valenti Calls [movie] ‘J.F.K.’ ‘Hoax’ and ‘Smear,’”
New York Times
, April 2, 1992, pp.C15, C24).

^*
Though LBJ blamed Castro for Kennedy’s murder, if the Kennedy family ever entertained such thoughts, the sentiment was never picked up by JFK Jr., an extreme unlikelihood if the family had such beliefs. JFK Jr. sought out and had a social dinner with Castro at the Council of Ministers in Havana on the evening of October 27, 1997. And at the end of the very long evening, during which the Bearded One delivered one of his rambling but eloquent multi-hour performances, for which he is famous, JFK Jr. thanked Castro for the evening and said, “I’ll bring my wife the next time I come.” Does one have such a dinner and conversation with someone he suspects of having had his father murdered? The only reference to the assassination Castro made to JFK Jr. came at the end, when they were leaving the dining room. “You know, Lee Harvey Oswald was trying to come here,” Castro said, half a question, half declaration. (As we know, in late September 1963 Oswald had applied for a visa at the Cuban consulate in Mexico City, but his request had been denied.) “Yes, I did know that,” JFK Jr. replied. Castro paused, then said, “It was a difficult time, and you know we didn’t let many Americans into Cuba.” “Yes,” JFK Jr. said quietly. It would clearly appear that Castro was offering a veiled apology. He knew that if Oswald had been allowed into Cuba when he applied for the visa, almost assuredly he would not have been in Dallas less than two months later. (
George Magazine
, October 1999, p.158 et seq.)