Reclaiming History (286 page)

Somersett: “He did?”

Milteer: “Oh yes. He followed him for miles and miles, and couldn’t get close enough to him.”

Somersett: “I never asked Brown about his business or anything, you know just what he told me, told us, you know. But after the conversation, and the way he talked to us, there is no question in my mind who knocked the church off in Birmingham, you can believe that, that is the way I figured it.”

Milteer: “That is right, it is the only way you can figure it.”

Somersett: “That is right.”

Milteer: “Not being there, not knowing anything.”

(Brown obviously fed Somersett and Milteer a line of hooey about Birmingham. Within days of the church bombing there, the FBI arrested four suspects, all members of the Ku Klux Klan, and these four, to this day, are the only ones believed to have been involved. None are named Brown. Their names are Robert E. “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Thomas Blanton Jr., and Herman Frank Cash.)
³⁴

Somersett: “But from his conversation, as you and me know him, but if they did, it is their business, like you say.”

Milteer: “It is up to the individual.”

Somersett: “That is right. They are individual operators, we don’t want that within the party. Hitting this Kennedy is going to be a hard proposition, I tell you, I believe, you may have figured out a way to get him. You may have figured out the office building, and all that. I don’t know how them Secret Service agents cover all them office buildings, or anywhere he is going. Do you know if they do that or not?”

Milteer: “Well, if they have any suspicions, they do that, of course. But without suspicion, chances are that they wouldn’t. You take there in Washington, of course. It is the wrong time of year, but you take pleasant weather, he comes out on the veranda, there, and somebody could be in a hotel room across the way there, and pick him off just like—(fades out).”

(Since Kennedy was scheduled to come to Miami in nine days, and the tape-recorded conversation took place in Miami, it appears that Somersett’s speculation was probably about Kennedy being killed in Miami, not Dallas. Yet Milteer responds about Washington, D.C., not Dallas. In any event, it’s clearly just speculative, loose talk by Milteer.)

Somersett: “Is that right?”

Milteer: “Sure, disassemble a gun, get on out. You don’t have to take a gun up there. You can take it up in pieces, all those guns come knock[ed] down. You can take them apart…”

Somersett: “Boy, if that Kennedy gets shot, we have got to know where we are at. Because, you know, that will be a real shake, if they do that.”

Milteer: “They wouldn’t leave any stone unturned there, no way. They will pick up somebody within hours afterwards, if anything like that would happen, just to throw the public off.”

(Henry Hurt didn’t tell his readers that immediately after Milteer said, “They will pick up somebody within hours afterwards,” his very next words were “
if
anything like that would happen,” words clearly showing that Milteer was not saying Kennedy was about to be murdered, but rather, what would happen
if
he were.)
³⁵

Somersett: “Oh, somebody’s going to have to go to jail, if he gets killed.”

Milteer: “Just like that Bruno Hauptman in the Lindbergh case, you know.”
³⁶

Such is the lifeblood of the conspiracy theorists’ movement—deliberate (or terribly incompetent) distortion of the official record, the precise thing they all accuse the Warren Commission of.

Miami police turned the transcript of the Somersett-Milteer conversation over to the Secret Service on November 12, and it was furnished to the Service’s advance agents for the president’s upcoming trip to Miami Beach on November 18. There is no indication that the Secret Service took Milteer’s words seriously, although Special Agent Robert Jamison of the Miami Secret Service had Somersett call Milteer in Valdosta on November 18, before Kennedy arrived in Miami that day, to verify Milteer was there, not in Miami. When Somersett verified he was and further advised the Secret Service that he did not know of any violence-prone associates of Milteer’s in the Miami area, the Protective Research Section of the Secret Service closed the case and didn’t notify the Washington, D.C., Secret Service detail in charge of the upcoming Dallas trip or the Secret Service in Dallas of Milteer’s remarks.

In the late afternoon on the day after the assassination, Somersett met Milteer at the Union train station in Jacksonville, Florida, and journeyed with him to Columbia, South Carolina, to meet with four members of the Ku Klux Klan. With all of Milteer’s clear speculation turning out to have actually occurred, it was easy for him to
now
sound as if he really knew. “Everything ran true to form,” he said (not on tape) to Somersett during the train trip. “I guess you thought I was kidding you when I said he
would
be killed [as we have seen, this was not what Milteer had said] from a window with a high-powered rifle.” When Somersett asked Milteer whether he had originally been guessing, Milteer replied, “I don’t do any guessing.”
³⁷

T
he HSCA investigated an allegation that two Dealey Plaza photographs, one by James Altgens, the other by Mark Bell, showed Milteer in the motorcade crowd, but three forensic anthropologists for the HSCA concluded the man was not Milteer. Among other things, the man in the photo was “substantially taller” (almost six inches) than Milteer, who was five feet four inches.
³⁸
To the allegation that Milteer called a friend
from
Dallas on the morning of the assassination, the HSCA said it “could find no evidence that Milteer was
in
Dallas on the day of the assassination.”
³⁹

The FBI interviewed Milteer
*
and investigated the entire Milteer story, concluding he was not a suspect in the assassination.
⁴⁰
And the HSCA, conducting its own investigation, was unable to find any connection between Milteer’s statements and the assassination. Indeed, a thorough HSCA investigation found no connection between any of Milteer’s associates and Oswald or Ruby, or with any of the latters’ associates.
⁴¹

The Milteer tape story first surfaced publicly in an article by reporter Bill Barry in the
Miami News
on February 2, 1967. Milteer died in February of 1974.

T
he argument that the right wing was behind Kennedy’s assassination suffers, like all other conspiracy theories, from the inconvenient and stubborn reality that there is no evidence of its involvement. Moreover, since we know Oswald killed Kennedy, the only way for right wingers to have been involved in the assassination would be if they had gotten Oswald to kill Kennedy for them. But why would the Far Right even think that an avowed Marxist (someone, by the way, who just five months earlier had attempted to murder one of its own, right-wing icon Major General Edwin Walker) would be willing to murder someone whom the right wing viewed as very liberal? Indeed, why would Oswald, who detested the Far Right, even think of doing its bidding?

Parenthetically, if the Far Right had decided to kill Kennedy, it is hard to believe they would have picked Dallas, a roiling center of ultraconservative activity, as the locus for the assassination, for they would have to know that such a locus would immediately attract suspicion to them, which is precisely what happened prior to Oswald’s arrest. It is also very hard to believe that liberals on the Warren Commission and its staff, like Chief Justice Warren and Assistant Counsel Norman Redlich, would cover up the assassination (as almost all conspiracy theorists believe they did) for the Far Right.

Because LBJ, above all others, profited the most from the assassination of Kennedy, a death that enabled him to achieve his lifetime goal, many in the conspiracy community have always suspected his involvement in the alleged plot. And according to a 2003 Gallup Poll, an astonishing 18 percent of Americans, nearly one out of every five people, also suspect him of being involved.
¹
The rumor that Kennedy was going to replace Johnson—weakened by the burgeoning bribery and influence-peddling scandal involving his Senate aide and friend Bobby Baker—on the 1964 ticket has served to fortify these suspicions. Indeed, an article in the
Dallas Morning News
on the day of the assassination was captioned “Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop Johnson.”

It is curious how this rumor gained traction when just a little over three weeks earlier, Kennedy had said he wanted LBJ to run with him again. At an October 31 news conference, a reporter, referring to “talk that Lyndon B. Johnson would be dumped next year,” asked the president if he wanted Mr. Johnson on the ticket and if he expected that he would be on the ticket. “Yes to both those questions,” the president said, “That’s correct.”
²

Arthur Schlesinger, a member of Kennedy’s inner circle and later a chronicler of the Kennedy presidency, called the belief that Kennedy would jettison Johnson “wholly fanciful. Kennedy…considered [Johnson] able and loyal. In addition, if Goldwater was to be the Republican candidate, the Democrats needed every possible asset in the South.” Within the Kennedy administration at the time of the assassination, “Johnson’s renomination” was “assumed.”
³
The president told a confidant in October of 1963 that the idea of dumping Johnson was “preposterous on the face of it. We’ve got to carry Texas in ’64 and maybe Georgia.”
⁴
And in April of 1964, Robert F. Kennedy said that there had been no intention of dropping Johnson from the ticket.
⁵

It has also been alleged (certainly true) that Johnson, the Texas hillbilly with the boorish manners and pedestrian education (who also happened to be extraordinarily complex and talented), was never comfortable in a presidential administration dominated by Ivy League intellectuals, many with bluish blood coursing through them. He deeply resented their poorly veiled condescension toward him and being the butt of their jokes,
*
cementing the view, in the eyes of conspiracy theorists, that Johnson just
had
to be, in some way, complicit in the tragedy of Dealey Plaza.

It cannot be disputed that Johnson achieved much enduring good during his presidency and had some good and honorable qualities to his makeup. I find it difficult to believe that men of substance and unquestionable character like Bill Moyers would have devoted their energies so wholeheartedly to his service if he did not. But he was also a carnivorous political animal who crossed moral and ethical lines from time to time in his ascent to power. Acclaimed biographies of LBJ, such as Robert A. Caro’s three volumes (
Path to Power
in 1982,
Means of Ascent
in 1990, and
Master of the Senate
in 2002), eliminate all doubt as to this point. Robert Dallek captured the essence of Johnson well in the two-word title to his LBJ biography:
Flawed Giant
. In 1978, when Tom Snyder on the
Tomorrow Show
asked LBJ friend and respected confidant Jack Valenti, “Was Lyndon Johnson an honest man?” Valenti smiled and answered wryly, “He was an honest man except when honesty didn’t suit the situation.”
⁶

I guess it all started with LBJ’s highly controversial runoff win over Texas governor Coke Stevenson in the 1948 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate. Johnson had supposedly lost by 113 votes until a “corrected” vote came in from the now infamous Precinct 13 ballot box in Alice, Texas, giving Johnson 202 additional votes and Stevenson only 1. “Landslide Lyndon” defeated Stevenson by 87 votes statewide, and the suspicion of fraud, and LBJ’s complicity or knowledge therein, was immediate.
⁷
Indeed, the subtitle of J. Evetts Haley’s 1964 book,
A Texan Looks at Lyndon
, is
A Study in Illegitimate Power
. However, the notion that LBJ would actually decide to have Kennedy murdered (or be a party to such a plot by others) is not one that, to my knowledge, any rational and sensible student of the assassination has ever entertained for a moment.

But conspiracy theorists are not rational and sensible when it comes to the Kennedy assassination. The first conspiracy author to accuse Johnson of complicity in a book was the German-born American Communist Joachim Joesten, who wrote in his 1968
Dark Side of Lyndon Baines
J
ohnson
that there was a “grand conspiracy to kill the President of the United States…It was an all-American plot in which Lyndon B. Johnson, acting in cahoots with the Dallas oligarchy and with the local branches of the CIA, the FBI, and the Secret Service, played the leading part.”
⁸

Joesten spawned many successors. “Students of the assassination cannot discount the idea that Johnson, in some way, played a role in the Dallas tragedy,” writes conspiracy theorist Jim Marrs in
Crossfire
.
⁹
“Lyndon Johnson” is one of the “prime suspects in the JFK assassination,” Ralph D. Thomas says in his book
Missing Links in the
J
FK Assassination Conspiracy
.
¹⁰
The evidence suggests, conspiracy theorists J. Gary Shaw and Larry Harris write in their book
Cover-Up
, that Johnson “might have had prior knowledge of the assassination” or that “he might have made an agreement to protect Kennedy’s killers.”
¹¹
“It is now very easy to suspect that a mutuality of purpose between LBJ and powerful sources in Texas…had much to do with the behind-the-scenes doings that led to the gunfire in Dealey Plaza,” says Walt Brown in his book
Treachery in Dallas
. Johnson knew, Brown says, that his political life “depended on John Kennedy’s political death.”
¹²
Conspiracy author Noel Twyman writes in
Bloody Treason
, “Recognizing that Lyndon Johnson was part of the conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy is something that I have come to reluctantly.”
¹³
The outrageous lawyer-author Barr McClellan says, “Stated simply, LBJ killed JFK.”
¹⁴
New Orleans DA Jim Garrison also weighed in on this point. In a speech on November 14, 1967, before the Radio and Television News Association of Southern California in Los Angeles, he accused LBJ of exerting pressure on state officials not to extradite witnesses in Garrison’s investigation and of concealing evidence from the American people. The fact, Garrison said, that Johnson “has profited from the assassination more than any other man makes it imperative that he see that the evidence is released so that we can know that he is not involved.”
¹⁵

A contention of some conspiracy theorists is that Johnson “lured” Kennedy into coming to Texas, the implication being that he was part of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. But
U.S. News
&
World Report
, whose comprehensive coverage of the assassination through the years has stood out, investigated this issue by interviewing several witnesses who would know, and found that actually Johnson was “against” JFK’s trip to Texas.
¹⁶

Although conspiracy theorists never require any evidence as a condition precedent to their imputing guilt to some person or group in Kennedy’s murder—motive or
cui bono
(who gained?) is always enough—they obviously are overjoyed when they actually come up with evidence that supports their theory. But as is the situation with every other conspiracy theory, the LBJ-did-it devotees are hard-pressed to come up with anything. However, they do have some arrows in their quiver. How about Jean Hill (the witness, the reader will recall from earlier in the book, who, after twenty-three years, suddenly remembered seeing a gunman behind the picket fence firing at Kennedy) telling conspiracy researchers, “Isn’t it odd that the Vice President crouched down before the first shot?”
¹⁷
Not only is there no evidence that Johnson had crouched down, but if Johnson had, he must not have had too much confidence in the hit man he and his group allegedly hired to kill Kennedy, since Johnson’s limousine was two cars behind the president’s car.

Then we have in many conspiracy books a statement like the following from Craig Zirbel’s
Texas Connection
: “Before Kennedy was buried, Johnson ordered the assassination limousine…to be shipped to Detroit for complete refurbishing.” Zirbel, an Arizona lawyer, says that this is “the deliberate destruction of evidence” by the “prime suspect.”
¹⁸
What citation of authority does Zirbel give for Johnson’s alleged order? As is perhaps the favorite tradition of the conspiracy community, he simply cites another conspiracy theorist as his authority, in this case, Jim Marrs and his book
Crossfire
. Marrs says, “Within seventy-two hours of Kennedy’s death—at Johnson’s order—the Presidential limousine…was shipped to Detroit where the body was replaced and the interior completely refurbished.”
¹⁹
Of course, Marrs doesn’t bother to cite any authority for this information either. Penn Jones Jr., the conspiracy theorist who started the “mysterious deaths” allegation that survives, even though it is pure nonsense, to this very day, was perhaps the first theorist to allege (again, without any citation of authority) that right after the assassination, Johnson ordered that the car be completely refurbished, a “blatant act of destruction of evidence,” he cried.
²⁰

This argument by the critics has no demonstrable merit. Not only couldn’t I find any documentation that Johnson personally ordered that the limousine be rebuilt, but before the limousine was sent back to Detroit, where it was manufactured, FBI and Secret Service agents examined and photographed the car in great detail at the White House garage in Washington, D.C., on the evening of November 22 through the early morning hours of November 23, and removed every piece of conceivable evidence from it.
²¹
More important, the limousine was not, as the buffs allege without any supporting authority, immediately rebuilt. The rebuilding of the car did not commence until over a year later in Detroit, and it wasn’t complete until May 11, 1964, a year and a half after the assassination.
²²

But don’t despair. The theorists have more evidence against LBJ. According to Craig Zirbel in his
Texas Connection
, Texas senator Ralph Yarborough, who was in LBJ’s car in the motorcade, told someone (Zirbel doesn’t say whom) that at the exact time of the assassination Johnson had his ear up against a small walkie-talkie, listening to the device, which was “turned down real low.” Yarborough had a reputation for sometimes being a little flaky in his observations and positions, but I have been unable to find his saying this in any of the statements he has made about the assassination. And, as before, Zirbel neither quotes a source nor cites a document.
²³
*
Nor did Johnson or any of the other occupants of the car ever say this in their testimony or affidavits to the Warren Commission. But if Johnson were, indeed, listening to a walkie-talkie “turned down real low” moments before the assassination, it wouldn’t surprise me. He obviously had to be in last-minute radio contact with his man in the sixth-floor window and the other shooters who were about to get Kennedy in a triangulation of fire. If any reader thinks it’s silly for me to be writing about such silliness, I must remind him or her that this silliness is what
all of
the conspiracy allegations are about, the same silliness that has caused most of the American people to believe Kennedy was killed as a result of a high-level conspiracy, and the same silliness that has prompted the writing of this book.

Perhaps the crown jewel in the tiara of allegations by conspiracy theorists that LBJ was behind Kennedy’s murder is the statement of his alleged mistress, Madeleine Brown, that the night before the assassination, Johnson, in so many words, admitted his guilt. In her 1997 book,
Texas in the Morning: The Love Story of Madeleine Brown and President Lyndon Baines
J
ohnson
, the attractive redhead, an advertising account executive who associated with a crowd in Austin and Dallas of easy circumstances, and clearly knew most of the political players in the Democratic Party, describes her passionate romance with the then congressman, commencing in 1948 while she was separated from her husband, and continuing on into his presidency. She said she had a son, Steven (who died of lymphatic cancer in 1990), by LBJ, and the son does bear a resemblance to the former president.
*
Yet she is unable to offer any letter or document to substantiate her claim of a relationship with LBJ, and the one photo she submits in her book as evidence of being in LBJ’s presence shows her and her son seated at a party and a man standing nearby with his back to the camera. She claims the man is Johnson, but he does not appear to be, at least to me. In any event, to say that the story Miss Brown comes up with strains credulity is to be much too magnanimous.

Brown says that on the evening before the assassination, she attended a social event at the Dallas home of Texas oil magnate Clint Murchison. “It was my understanding,” she said, “that the event was scheduled as a tribute honoring his long time friend, J. Edgar Hoover, whom Murchison had first met decades earlier through President William Howard Taft.” Hoover, she says, was at the party, as was John McCloy (who ended up on the Warren Commission), Richard Nixon (who
was
in town that night, leaving Dallas from Love Field at 10:05 a.m. on American Airlines Flight 82 on the morning of the assassination), H. L. Hunt (the right-wing oil baron), and a host of other Dallas luminaries. Because of his hectic schedule, Johnson, she says, wasn’t supposed to be at the party, but he made an unscheduled appearance as the party was breaking up. “I knew how secretively Lyndon operated. Therefore, I said nothing…not even that I was happy to see him. Squeezing my hand so hard it felt crushed from the pressure, he spoke with a grating whisper—a quiet growl into my ear, not a love message, but one I’ll always remember: ‘After tomorrow those goddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again—that’s no threat—that’s a promise.’” The following morning around 11:00 a.m., she says, Jesse Kellam, LBJ’s close friend and political operative in Austin who was organizing an Austin fund-raiser for Kennedy that night, which Brown was assisting with, called her to confirm her schedule. He told her, she says, that she probably would not be able to see Lyndon that night for more than fifteen minutes. Recalling that flashes of wild lovemaking danced in her head, she said she responded, “Jesse, for any time I have with Lyndon, I am grateful.” But Jesse warned, “Lyndon is in a terrible mood, screaming about the Kennedys. All he can say is, ‘Those goddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again after today.’”
²⁴