Lyndon Johnson’s Role in the JFK Assassination
Ever since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a question has naturally arisen: What role, if any, did Vice-President Lyndon Johnson play in the assassination?
With the publication of Douglas P. Horne’s massive 5-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, the national-security establishment’s role in the assassination has now been established beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s because Horne meticulously detailed the fraud in the autopsy that the U.S. military carried out on Kennedy’s body on the very evening of the assassination. Horne served on the staff of the ARRB in the 1990s.
Examples of autopsy fraud set forth by Horne (which are summarized in my book The Kennedy Autopsy) include (1) sneaking JFK’s body into the Bethesda Naval morgue before the official start of the autopsy in order to perform pre-autopsy surgery designed to hide evidence of shots having been fired from Kennedy’s front and (2) two separate brain examinations, the second of which involved someone else’s brain rather than Kennedy’s. Horne’s findings have now been reinforced and built upon in a new book, The Final Analysis by David Mantik, M.D., Ph.D. and Jerome Corsi, Ph.D.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. It necessarily means criminal culpability of the national-security establishment in the assassination itself. There is no way around that. That’s how we can definitively conclude that the JFK assassination was one of the national-security establishment’s patented regime-change operations based on what have become the two most important words in the American political lexicon — “national security.” See FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated.”
But what about Johnson? Was he just an innocent beneficiary of the assassination? Actually not. The circumstantial evidence establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that Johnson himself was up to his neck in the assassination. Johnson had three primary roles in the assassination.
The first role was to get JFK’s body out of Dallas and deliver it into the hands of the military. Keep in mind that JFK’s murder was a state criminal offense. At that time, it was not a federal crime to assassinate a president. Therefore, no federal agency had any jurisdiction over the crime. That includes the Pentagon, the CIA, and the FBI.
Under Texas law, the Dallas County Medical Examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, was required to perform an autopsy on JFK’s body. Immediately after JFK was declared dead, Rose announced that he was going to perform the autopsy. A team of Secret Service agents immediately declared that no such autopsy would be permitted. Headed by a Secret Service agent named Roy Kellerman, who was brandishing a Thompson sub-machine gun, the Secret Service team began screaming, yelling, and cussing as they began forcing their way out of Parkland Hospital with the president’s body, which had been placed in a heavy casket. Rose refused to give ground, insisting, correctly so, that Texas law required him to perform the autopsy before the body could be released. One Secret Service agent physically picked up Rose, carried him to a nearby wall, and wagged his finger in his face. The others pulled back their suit coats to brandish their guns, thereby threatening to use deadly force against anyone who got in their way.
Kellerman declared that he and his team were simply following orders. There is only one person who could have issued such an extraordinary order to Kellerman — Lyndon Johnson, either directly to Kellerman or indirectly through one of Kellerman’s superiors. Who else would have dared to issue an order that violated state criminal law?
In fact, Johnson’s own actions confirm that he was the person who issued the order. Once JFK was declared dead, Johnson headed to Love Field, where he ordered seats to be removed from the back of Air Force One to make room for the big casket in which JFK’s body had been placed. Johnson had absolutely no intention of waiting at Love Field for the 2-3 hours that would have been needed to complete the autopsy. He was removing those seats in the full expectation that the casket and the body would be arriving shortly. How would he know that? Because he had to have been the one who issued the order to Kellerman to get the body out of Parkland at all costs and deliver it to Johnson at Love Field.
The second role that Johnson had was to conjure up the prospect of World War III by suggesting that the assassination might be the first step in a nuclear attack on the United States by the Soviet Union. He first raised this possibility while he was waiting at Parkland Hospital for Kennedy to be declared dead. He raised it again on the way to Love Field.
Yet, when Johnson arrived at Love Field, his actions belied any such concern. Rather than get up in the air immediately in order to direct America’s defenses and counterattacks to a possible Soviet nuclear attack, he instead lollygagged at Love Field, waiting, first, for a federal judge to arrive and swear him in as president and, second, for JFK’s body to be delivered to him. In fact, JFK was declared dead at 1 p.m. and LBJ waited until 2:47 to take off. That was the action of a person who knew for certain that the assassination could not possibly have been the first stage of a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States. The only way that Johnson could have been so certain is that he knew that it was not the Soviets who committed the assassination.
Once Johnson arrived at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, he dutifully delivered JFK’s body into the hands of the military, notwithstanding the fact that the military had absolutely no jurisdiction whatsoever to conduct such an autopsy.
It was not the last time that LBJ conjured up the possibility that the Soviets or the Cubans had assassinated JFK, however. When he began inducing people to join what became known as the Warren Commission, he once again conjured up the possibility that the assassination had been committed by the Soviet Union or Cuba. Why would he do that? Because that was the way that the plotters were able to get the investigation into the assassination shut down immediately — in order to ostensibly avoid World War III and all-out nuclear war that would come with it.
How did this ingenious strategy play out? As I detail in my book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, the plot called for shots being fired from the front and the back. That would establish a conspiracy with the supposed communist, Lee Harvey Oswald, a U.S. intelligence agent who the national-security establishment was setting up to take the fall. The only people with whom Oswald would have been supposedly conspiring were the Soviet Union and Cuba. That was the purpose of setting up Oswald in New Orleans and Mexico City as a supposed communist agent.
Keep in mind that JFK and his brother RFK had initiated Operation Mongoose, whose aim was to oust Cuban leader Fidel Castro from power. Keep in mind also that the CIA had repeatedly tried to assassinate Castro. Thus, Johnson’s second role was to assert that the communists had gotten to JFK first and that if the United States responded to their assassination of JFK, World War III would occur. Therefore, the only way to obviate going to war based on what the Kennedy brothers had started was to immediately shut down the investigation and hide the fact that shots had been fired from the front.
The third role that LBJ had was to ensure that there would never be an official investigation that could lead to the national-security establishment, including, of course, with respect to the military’s fraudulent autopsy. That was the purpose of appointing former CIA Director Allen Dulles to the Warren Commission. Dulles, who Kennedy had fired after the Bay of Pigs disaster and who loathed Kennedy, ensured that the commission stayed on track with the official lone-nut narrative.
Finally, it should be noted that if JFK had not been assassinated, it was a virtual certainty that LBJ would have been removed from office, indicted, and convicted for political corruption. In fact, it is also a virtual certainty that Johnson knew that Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, who loathed Johnson, was furnishing evidence of Johnson’s corruption to LIFE magazine. Thus, LBJ, who had a lifelong obsession to become president, had a choice: Go to jail or participate in the assassination of JFK and become president. He chose the latter course of action and, after being elected president in the 1964 election, gave the U.S. national-security establishment what Kennedy had refused to do–its war in Vietnam.
