The Death of JFK: Could LBJ Have Been Involved

In a recent book, Barr McClellan claims that LBJ, one month before his death, told his friend Don Thomas that he had instructed Edward A. Clark to arrange Kennedy’s assassination. It should be noted that Clark was an enemy of McClellan. A Clark operative recruited Lee Harvey Oswald as a shooter and patsy. Clark and Johnson were also responsible for the murder of the Department of Agriculture agent who was investigating Billy Sol Estes. Even if this scenario has value, the C.I.A. would have had knowledge of the plot through Oswald and could have acted to make certain it was successful. The account’s only strength is that a 14 point identification of a print belonging Clark’s shooter, Malcolm “Mac” Wallace, has been found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

A letter on behalf of Billy Sol Estes by his attorney Douglas Caddy seems to confirm parts of the McClellan theory. Billy told Caddy that LBJ admitted to him an involvement in the plot to kill Kennedy. Estes claimed Cliff Carter engineered the assassination. Wallace’s fingerprint was identified in 1998. Estes claimed that Johnson was involved in the Kennedy murder and in conspiring to commit eight others, including that of USDA investigator Henry Marshall, who turned up evidence damaging to Johnson and Estes.

Two women, one LBJ’s main mistress and the other Oswald’s lover have offered some information that confirmed parts of De Mohrenschildt’s story about the involvement of big oil. Madeleine Duncan Brown, LBJ’s mistress, told an interviewer that Lyndon Johnson started planning Kennedy’s death after the Democratic convention of 1960. Brown claimed that the final decision to kill Kennedy was made he night of November 21, at a party hosted by Clint Murchison. Present were Dallas oil men ( including H.L. Hunt), F.B.I. and C.I.A. leaders like J. Mc Cloy and J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson, and mob bosses. Also present were Richard Nixon who was in town for a Pepsi Cola meeting, George Brown of Brown and Root, and Jack Ruby, who could arrange entertainment for people.

After LBJ arrived, some of the guests went into a conference room. When Johnson came out he allegedly squeezed hard the hand of his mistress Madeleine Duncan Brown and said that after tomorrow JFK would no longer be a problem, “ After tomorrow those goddamn Kennedys would never embarrass me again - that's no threat - that's a promise.'".” According to Brown, LBJ called her the next morning and repeated these words. However, some writers have demonstrated that Johnson was in Houston the night of November 21 and that Nixon was in Dallas but not at Murchison’s house. Some claim there was not even a party there. She said the event was documented by the society editor of the Dallas Times Herald , but the story cannot be found. While there is evidence that Nixon and Hoover were in Dallas then, there is no evidence that there was a Pepsi Cola board or stockholders meeting. On some occasions, Nixon has said he could not remember where he was when Kennedy died. Possible the only other person in America who has said that is George H.W Bush. She claimed that she often walked with H.L. Hunt, and that he would brag about the Kennedy matter, saying, 'Well, we got him out of office.' That was it."

It is always possible that Mrs. Brown mistakenly placed the party on another day, or that other factors explain the discrepancies in her story. Former C.I.A. contract operative Robert D. Morrow backed her account of the evening of November 21. He said a topic of discussion was the political futures of Hoover and Nixon if JFK were assassinated. Morrow says that David Ferrie came up with the suggestion that Lee Harvey Oswald be used as a patsy. While Oswald was in Minsk, Robert Morrow was a C.I.A. contract agent working for Permindex, a firm partly funded through the Centro Mondiale Commerciale, a CIA backed trade association in Rome that funded Italian politicians. . He was then ordered to go to Paris to pick up for the C.I.A. some papers from an American couple in Minsk and mentioned a Harvey of Minsk. Of course, Marina was not an American.

Morrow thought the C.I.A.’s main reason for going after Kennedy was that JFK was working with Robert McNamara to reign in the agency. Morrow ordered the rifles and transceivers for the assassination team, and Ferrie picked them up. He knew there was planning to kill Kennedy but they thought these weapons were for the assassination of Juan Bosch. At the end of the book, he described how Nixon made a deal with Warrren Commission member Ford to conceal Nixon’s role. Three months before the assassination C.I.A. contract pilot was seen in public with Oswald and Clay Shaw.