Back in 2019 a prominent public figure—whose name is widely known—came to Palo Alto to have a private dinner with me. Apparently he’d become aware of my controversial writings the previous year on the JFK Assassination and in the wake of the Jeffrey Epstein revelations, he’d concluded I was probably correct that Israel and its Mossad had likely been heavily responsible for the death of our 35th president. As we discussed the issue that evening, I endorsed elements of his reasoning and explained that the Mossad had also played the central role in the 9/11 Attacks, something that greatly surprised him since he’d apparently never looked into those matters.

But although I emphasized that there was very strong evidence implicating the Mossad in the 1963 events in Dallas, a possibility still only whispered about in most JFK Assassination circles, I felt that that the strongest evidence of all implicated President Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s own immediate successor and the most obvious beneficiary of the crime.

The continuing near-total silence surrounding the probable role of Mossad is hardly surprising given the momentous geopolitical consequences if such a belief in Israeli guilt became widespread among Americans. Recent months have demonstrated the staggering political and media power of the Israel Lobby and there would surely be very severe repercussions for anyone who leveled such incendiary charges against the Jewish State.

By contrast, LBJ has long since passed into history, dying more than fifty years ago in 1973, and nearly all of his committed partisans have also long since departed the scene, often decades ago. For most Americans today, Johnson is probably just a name in the history books, a political figure more like a McKinley or a Coolidge rather than someone who arouses any fierce present-day emotions. So the near-total unwillingness to consider the very strong evidence of his guilt in the death of his predecessor must be due to other factors.

Although America has had many conspiratorial controversies over the last one hundred years, I think that the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy has received more attention than any other.

Perhaps a thousand or more books have been published on that topic, the vast majority of them challenging the official narrative, and many of those works have become bestsellers, sometimes even reaching the #1 spot on the national lists. Oliver Stone is regarded as one of our greatest directors and his star-studded 1991 film JFK devoted more than three hours to presenting the story of that alleged conspiracy, winning an Oscar and drawing huge audiences. Across the last three decades, his gripping drama has surely been seen by many tens of millions in this country and around the world. Years earlier when our House Select Committee on Assassinations issued its 1978 final report, that official document proclaimed that Lee Harvey Oswald had not acted alone, thereby declaring that our 35th president had died at the hands of a conspiracy.

Despite all of this, the establishment media blockade against such theories has remained in place for more than six decades. Tucker Carlson was the most popular host in the history of cable during late 2022 when he declared to his millions of viewers that JFK had indeed died in a conspiracy heavily involving elements of the CIA, a presentation that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. immediately praised as the most courageous newscast in sixty years. But despite Carlson’s stellar ratings, he was purged by FoxNews a few months later, with many suspecting that his JFK segment had been an important contributing factor.

There are numerous historical controversies today that are harshly stigmatized as “conspiratorial” by the media, but I can think of no other example that has been so widely promoted across mainstream channels of information while also receiving an official government endorsement. So although adherence to a JFK Assassination plot is regularly pilloried as the stereotypical example of “conspiratorial” thinking, it is unique in having received such major distribution and authoritative endorsements.

Yet oddly enough, until just a dozen years ago, I never suspected that any such serious historical controversy even existed, having spent my entire life completely ignorant of the issue.

I’d obviously known that JFK had been assassinated and also that some people claimed a conspiracy had been responsible. But I’d always regarded those latter individuals as merely cranks and crackpots lacking any evidence for their strange beliefs, fringe activists similar to those obsessed with UFOs or Scientology or ESP, and I’d never paid the least attention to them.

The reason for such decades of my total unawareness was the mainstream media cocoon in which I existed, one that only provided very limited or distorted facts, while always seeming to snicker at such conspiratorial beliefs and their deluded advocates. I’d always known that the media was dishonest about certain matters, but I had never imagined that such dishonesty extended to those fatal 1963 events in Dallas, which I had always assumed were too important to have long remained hidden.

Others have probably been far less naive over the years, though they cautiously remained silent. A couple of months ago I was having a cup of coffee with a mainstream academic friend of mine who was quite aware of the many “conspiratorial” articles I had published in recent years and he casually remarked that he’d always been extremely skeptical of the official JFK Assassination story. One of his secondary school textbooks had included the famous photo of Oswald being shot by Jack Ruby in a Dallas police station, and even as a high school student he’d concluded that the killing of the supposed presidential assassin soon after his capture and under the very noses of the local police seemed obvious evidence of a plot. By contrast, I’d probably just gullibly nodded my head when I came across such facts in my schoolbooks and then merely turned the page to the next subject.

Shrewd observers have emphasized that people are much more likely to fall for big lies than smaller ones, and this was certainly part of the reason that I’d never questioned the official JFK narrative. The early 1960s marked the High Noon of the American Century, as our national power and prosperity seemed to reach a peak, with no major domestic storm clouds on the horizon. JFK had become the youngest President in our history and with his attractive young wife Jackie, they were almost a movie star couple compared to the dowdy Eisenhowers, while greatly benefitting from the powerful new medium of television and the colorful spreads they received in influential photograph-laden weeklies such as Life Magazine. The violent death of an American President seemed almost unimaginable at that time, with the last such case having been when an anarchist had slain William McKinley in 1901, more than sixty years earlier at the very dawn of the twentieth century. When I later came of age, I’d always vaguely regarded the Kennedys as America’s own royal family, so it seemed unthinkable to me that the entire American media could have long concealed the fact that his death had been the result of a conspiracy.

Once I discovered that the universally-portrayed reality of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi WMDs had merely been a media hoax, I became much more suspicious of other matters, and the growth of the Internet had made me aware of many conspiratorial claims, whose reality I gradually began to suspect. But the possibility of an actual JFK Assassination plot was not one of these, and that became among the last of the major modern conspiracies that I eventually concluded might be true.

Even when I finally moved in that direction, I found it difficult to accept such a possibility. After stumbling across some anomalous facts that raised my suspicions, I carefully read Brothers by David Talbot and JFK and the Unspeakable by James Douglass, which provided a great wealth of persuasive evidence. But I still found it difficult to absorb the possibility that such an enormous historical fact had remained hidden in plain sight throughout my entire life.

As I later explained:

Having read a couple of books that completely upended my settled beliefs about a central event of twentieth century history, I simply didn’t know what to think. Over the years, my own writings had put me on friendly terms with a well-connected individual whom I considered a member of the elite establishment, and whose intelligence and judgment had always seemed extremely solid. So I decided to very gingerly raise the subject with him, and see whether he had ever doubted the “lone gunman” orthodoxy. To my total astonishment, he explained that as far back as the early 1990s, he’d become absolutely convinced in the reality of a “JFK conspiracy” and over the years had quietly devoured a huge number of the books in that field, but had never breathed a word in public lest his credibility be ruined and his political effectiveness destroyed.

Few other revelations in recent years have so totally overturned my framework of reality. Even a year or two later, I still found it very difficult to wrap my head around the concept, as I described in another note to that same well-connected friend of mine:

BTW, I hate to keep harping on it, but every time I consider the implications of the JFK matter I’m just more and more astonished.

The president of the US. The heir to one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in America. His brother the top law enforcement officer in the country. Ben Bradlee, one of his closest friends, the fearless crusading editor of one of the nation’s most influential media outlets. As America’s first Catholic president, the sacred icon of many millions of Irish, Italian, and Hispanic families. Greatly beloved by top Hollywood people and many leading intellectuals.

His assassination ranks as one of the most shocking and dramatic events of the 20th century, inspiring hundreds of books and tens of thousands of news stories and articles, examining every conceivable detail. The argument from MSM silence always seemed absolutely conclusive to me.

From childhood, it’s always been obvious to me that the MSM is completely dishonest about certain things and over the last dozen years I’ve become extremely suspicious about a whole range of other issues. But if you’d asked me a couple of years ago whether JFK was killed by a conspiracy, I would have said “well, anything’s possible, but I’m 99% sure there’s absolutely no substantial evidence pointing in that direction since the MSM would surely have headlined it a million times over.”

It took me several more years to fully digest these shocking realizations. Once I did so, they played an important role in convincing me that many of the other historical anomalies I’d come across over the years were actually real rather than merely being a product of my own overactive imagination. So when I eventually launched my lengthy American Pravda series cataloging and analyzing many of those, a pair of my earliest articles described my belated discovery and analysis of the JFK Assassination conspiracy, with those pieces released almost exactly six years ago.

By the time I published those articles I’d read perhaps a dozen books on the JFK Assassination and they had easily convinced me many times over that the killing had been the product of a conspiracy. The Talbot and Douglass books had been favorably discussed in the elite mainstream media and together they effectively summarized a half-century of conspiracy-research, providing an enormous wealth of detailed evidence. But just a few years earlier much of that material would have seemed almost something out of a paranoid fantasy to me:

Oswald seems to have been working with various anti-Communist groups and also had significant connections to U.S. intelligence, while his purported Marxism was merely a very thin disguise. With regard to the assassination itself, he was exactly the “patsy” he publicly claimed to be, and very likely never fired a single shot. Meanwhile, Jack Ruby had a long history of ties to organized crime, and surely killed Oswald to shut his mouth.

Many others may have suffered a similar fate. Conspirators daring enough to strike at the president of the United States would hardly balk at using lethal means to protect themselves from the consequences of their action, and over the years a considerable number of individuals associated with the case in one way or another came to untimely ends.

Less than a year after the assassination, JFK mistress Mary Meyer, the ex-wife of high-ranking CIA official Cord Meyer, was found shot to death in a Washington DC street-killing with no indications of attempted robbery or rape, and the case was never solved. Immediately afterwards, CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton was caught breaking into her home in search of her personal diary, which he later claimed to have destroyed.

Dorothy Kilgallen was a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist and television personality, and she managed to wrangle an exclusive interview with Jack Ruby, later boasting to her friends that she would break the JFK assassination case wide open in her new book, producing the biggest scoop of her career. Instead, she was found dead in her Upper East Side townhouse, having apparently succumbed to an overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills, with both the draft text and the notes to her Jack Ruby chapter missing.

Shortly before Jim Garrison filed his assassination charges, his top suspect David Ferrie was found dead at age 48, possibly of natural causes, though the DA suspected foul play.

During the mid-1970s, the House Select Committee on Assassinations held a series of high-profile hearings to reopen and investigate the case, and two of the witnesses called were high-ranking mafia figures Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli, widely suspected of having been connected with the assassination. The former was shot to death in the basement of his home one week before he was scheduled to testify, and the body of the latter was found in an oil-drum floating in the waters off Miami after he had been subpoenaed for an additional appearance.

These were merely a few of the highest-profile individuals with a connection to the Dallas assassination whose lives were cut short in the years that followed, and although the deaths may have been purely coincidental, the full list is rather a long one.

At the time I wrote those words in 2018, the name Dorothy Kilgallen meant nothing to me, but I later discovered that for many years she’d been one of America’s most powerful female journalists, writing an influential column and enjoying regular weekly appearances on a popular national television show. That last factor may have led to her untimely demise, since she’d successfully deployed her media stature to persuade the star-struck local Dallas jailors to violate their orders and allow her an exclusive interview with Ruby. Soon afterwards, she began boasting to her elite New York City social circle that she would break the JFK case wide open, giving her the biggest story of her long career. Her highly-suspicious sudden death and the simultaneous disappearance of her JFK manuscript and files may have served as a potent warning to others of her profession. Only many decades later did a book finally appear documenting her important background and her sudden death, and when I read The Reporter Who Knew Too Much a couple of years ago, I found quite detailed and persuasive.

Another book published around the same time has received much greater attention in JFK conspiracy circles though I haven’t yet read it myself. Mary’s Mosaic by Peter Janney told the story of longtime JFK mistress Mary Meyer, who met a violent death in an unsolved street killing the year after the assassination. As the former wife of high-ranking CIA official Cord Meyer and also the sister-in-law of Washington Post editor and close JFK friend Benjamin Bradlee, Meyer had been a leading member of DC society, and once again the details of her important story only finally appeared in print more than a half-century after her death.

The NYC and DC worlds of elite journalism and politics were small ones and I strongly suspect that the sudden deaths of Kilgallen and Meyer severely damped the eagerness of their former friends and colleagues to question the public verdict established by the Warren Commission. Back in those pre-Internet days of highly-centralized media control, it was extremely difficult for alternative viewpoints to gain any public traction under the best of circumstances, so the successful intimidation of a relatively small number of prominent individuals could have an enormous impact upon the public discussion.

As I explored the elements of a gigantic story that I had so casually ignored throughout my entire life, some huge ironies became apparent to me. I was struck by the tremendous ease with which our entire political and media establishment fell into line behind so implausible an official cover story. Indeed, I explained that although there eventually appeared widespread public skepticism that President Kennedy had been slain by a deranged lone gunman, such controversial ideas may have been lucky to initially get off the ground.

Our reality is shaped by the media, but what the media presents is often determined by complex forces rather than by the factual evidence in front of their eyes. And the lessons of the JFK assassination may provide some important insights into this situation.

A president was dead and soon afterward his supposed lone assassin suffered the same fate, producing a tidy story with a convenient endpoint. Raising doubts or focusing on contrary evidence might open doors better kept shut, perhaps endangering national unity or even risking nuclear war if the trail seemed to lead overseas. The highest law enforcement officer in the country was the slain president’s own brother, and since he seemed to fully accept that simple framework, what responsible journalist or editor would be willing to go against it? What American center of power or influence had any strong interest in opposing that official narrative?

Certainly there was immediate and total skepticism overseas, with few foreign leaders ever believing the story, and figures such as Nikita Khrushchev, Charles DeGaulle, and Fidel Castro all immediately concluded that a political plot had been responsible for Kennedy’s elimination. Mainstream media outlets in France and the rest of Western Europe were equally skeptical of the “lone gunman theory,” and some of the most important early criticism of U.S. government claims was produced by Thomas Burnett, an expatriate American writing for one of the largest French newsweeklies. But in pre-Internet days, only the tiniest sliver of the American public had regular access to such foreign publications, and their impact upon domestic opinion would have been nil.

Perhaps instead of asking ourselves why the “lone gunman” story was accepted, we should instead be asking why it was ever vigorously challenged, during an era when media control was extremely centralized in establishmentarian hands.

Oddly enough, the answer may lie in the determination of a single individual named Mark Lane, a left-liberal New York City attorney and Democratic Party activist. Although JFK assassination books eventually numbered in the thousands and the resulting conspiracy theories roiled American public life throughout the 1960s and 1970s, without his initial involvement matters might have followed a drastically different trajectory.

From the very first, Lane had been skeptical of the official story, and less than a month after the killing, The National Guardian, a small left-wing national newspaper, published his 10,000 word critique, highlighting major flaws in the “lone gunman theory.” Although his piece had been rejected by every other national periodical, the public interest was enormous, and once the entire edition sold out, thousands of extra copies were printed in pamphlet form. Lane even rented a theater in New York City, and for several months gave public lectures to packed audiences.

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After the Warren Commission issued its completely contrary official verdict, he began working on a manuscript, and although he faced huge obstacles in finding an American publisher, once Rush to Judgment appeared, it spent a remarkable two years on the national bestseller lists, easily reaching the #1 spot. Such tremendous economic success naturally persuaded a host of other authors to follow suit, and an entire genre was soon established. Lane later published A Citizens Dissent recounting his early struggles to break the total American “media blackout” against anyone contradicting the official conclusion. Against all odds, he had succeeded in sparking a massive popular uprising sharply challenging the narrative of the establishment.

According to Talbot, “By late 1966, it was becoming impossible for the establishment media to stick with the official story” and the November 25, 1966 edition of Life Magazine, then at the absolute height of its national influence, carried the remarkable cover story “Did Oswald Act Alone?” with the conclusion that he probably did not. The next month, The New York Times announced it was forming a special task force to investigate the assassination. These elements were to merge with the media furor soon surrounding the Garrison investigation that began the following year, an investigation that enlisted Lane as an active participant.

However, I explained that a powerful media counterattack was already being launched from behind the scenes:

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In 2013 Prof. Lance deHaven-Smith, past president of the Florida Political Science Association, published Conspiracy Theory in America, a fascinating exploration of the history of the concept and the likely origins of the term itself. He noted that during 1966 the CIA had become alarmed at the growing national skepticism of the Warren Commission findings, especially once the public began turning its suspicious eyes toward the intelligence agency itself. Therefore, in January 1967 top CIA officials distributed a memo to all their local stations, directing them to employ their media assets and elite contacts to refute such criticism by various arguments, notably including an emphasis on Robert Kennedy’s supposed endorsement of the “lone gunman” conclusion.

This memo, obtained by a later FOIA request, repeatedly used the term “conspiracy” in a highly negative sense, suggesting that “conspiracy theories” and “conspiracy theorists” be portrayed as irresponsible and irrational. And as I wrote in 2016,

Soon afterward, there suddenly appeared statements in the media making those exact points, with some of the wording, arguments, and patterns of usage closely matching those CIA guidelines. The result was a huge spike in the pejorative use of the phrase, which spread throughout the American media, with the residual impact continuing right down to the present day.

This possible cause-and-effect relationship is supported by other evidence. Shortly after leaving The Washington Post in 1977, famed Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein published a 25,000 word Rolling Stone cover story entitled “The CIA and the Media” revealing that during the previous quarter century over 400 American journalists had secretly carried out assignments for the CIA according to documents on file at the headquarters of that organization. This influence project, known as “Operation Mockingbird,” had allegedly been launched near the end of the 1940s by high-ranking CIA official Frank Wisner, and included editors and publishers situated at the very top of the mainstream media hierarchy.

For whatever reason, by the time I came of age and began following the national media in the late 1970s, the JFK story had become old news, and all the newspapers and magazines I read provided the very strong impression that the “conspiracy theories” surrounding the assassination were total nonsense, long since debunked, and only of interest to kooks on the ideological fringe. I was certainly aware of the enormous profusion of popular conspiracy books, but I never had the slightest interest in looking at any of them. America’s political establishment and its close media allies had outlasted the popular rebellion, and the name “Mark Lane” meant almost nothing to me, except vaguely as some sort of fringe-nut, who very occasionally rated a mention in my mainstream newspapers, receiving the same sort of treatment accorded to Scientologists or UFO activists.

As I digested a number of the major recent JFK assassination books, I found that they presented a very persuasive reconstruction of events. Summarizing a half-century of conspiracy research, the works by Talbot, Douglass, and others provided an overwhelming case that a conspiracy had been responsible, and sketched out the identities of some of the likely lower- or middle-ranking participants, fingering members of organized crime, elements of the CIA, and anti-Castro Cubans, with all of these groups often intermingled and overlapping. All of this was useful and absolutely necessary given that their authors were challenging a uniform, decades-long campaign of denial by the mainstream media.

But once they had convinced me five or six times over of the reality of that conspiracy, I became much more interested in the “Who” and the “Why” of the ultimate organizers rather than merely in the “How” of those who implemented the plan, and I was often disappointed in this regard. Most of these books seemed to ignore that issue or vaguely suggested that the plot had been hatched by shadowy right-wingers, perhaps including hard-line anti-Communist American generals or ruthless Texas oil millionaires, but they provided little solid evidence or logic to support those suspicions.

Sometimes a neophyte may notice things that readily escape the attention of those who have already spent many years or decades in a field, and I later explained what I considered to be a very curious omission:

If a husband or wife is found murdered, with no obvious suspect or motive at hand, the normal response of the police is to carefully investigate the surviving spouse, and quite often this suspicion proves correct. Similarly, if you read in your newspapers that in some obscure Third World country two bitterly hostile leaders, both having unpronounceable names, had been sharing supreme political power until one was suddenly struck down in a mysterious assassination by unknown conspirators, your thoughts would certainly move in an obvious direction. Most Americans in the early 1960s did not perceive their own country’s politics in such a light, but perhaps they were mistaken. As a total newcomer to the enormous, hidden world of JFK conspiracy analysis, I was immediately surprised by the mere sliver of suspicion directed towards Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, the slain leader’s immediate successor and the most obvious beneficiary.

The two Talbot books and the one by Douglass, totaling some 1500 pages, devote merely a few paragraphs to any suspicions of Johnson’s involvement. Talbot’s first book reports that immediately after the assassination, the vice president had expressed a frantic concern to his personal aides that a military coup might be in progress or a world war breaking out, and suggests that these few casual words demonstrate his obvious innocence, although a more cynical observer might wonder if those remarks had been uttered for exactly that reason. Talbot’s second book actually quotes an apparent low-level conspirator as claiming that Johnson had personally signed off on the plot and admits that Hunt believed the same thing, but treats such unsubstantiated accusations with considerable skepticism, before adding a single sentence acknowledging that Johnson may indeed have been a passive supporter or even an accomplice. Douglass and Peter Dale Scott, author of the influential 1993 book Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, apparently seem never to have even entertained the possibility.

Ideological considerations are probably an important reason for such remarkable reticence. Although liberals had grown to revile LBJ by the late 1960s for his escalation of the unpopular Vietnam War, over the decades those sentiments have faded, while warm memories of his passage of the landmark Civil Rights legislation and his creation of the Great Society programs have elevated his stature in that ideological camp. Furthermore, such legislation had long been blockaded in Congress and only became law because of the 1964 Democratic Congressional landslide following JFK’s martyrdom, and it might be difficult for liberals to admit that their fondest dreams were only realized by an act of political parricide.

Kennedy and Johnson may have been intensely hostile personal rivals, but there seem to have been few deep ideological differences between the two men, and most of the leading figures in JFK’s government continued to serve under his successor, surely another source of enormous embarrassment to any ardent liberals who came to suspect that the former had been murdered by a conspiracy involving the latter. Talbot, Douglass, and many other left-leaning advocates for an assassination conspiracy prefer to point the finger of blame towards far more congenial villains such as hard-line, anti-Communist Cold Warriors and right-wing elements, notably including top CIA officials, such as former director Allan Dulles.

An additional factor helping to explain the extreme unwillingness of Talbot, Douglass, and others to consider Johnson as an obvious suspect may be the realities of the book publishing industry. By the 2000s, JFK assassination conspiracies had long become passé and were treated with disdain in mainstream circles. Talbot’s strong reputation, his 150 original interviews, and the quality of his manuscript broke that barrier, and attracted The Free Press as his very respectable publisher, while later drawing a strongly positive review by a leading academic scholar in the New York Times Sunday Book Review and an hour long television segment broadcast on C-Span Booknotes. But if he had devoted any space to voicing suspicions that our 35th president had been murdered by our 36th, surely the weight of that extra element of “outrageous conspiracy theory” would have ensured that his book sank without a trace.

However, if we cast off these distorting ideological blinders and the practical considerations of American publishing, the prima facie case for Johnson’s involvement seems quite compelling.

Consider a very simple point. If a president is struck down by an unknown group of conspirators, his successor would normally have had the strongest possible incentive to track them down lest he might become their next victim. Yet Johnson did nothing, appointing the Warren Commission that covered up the entire matter, laying the blame upon an erratic “lone gunman” conveniently dead. This would seem remarkably odd behavior for an innocent LBJ. This conclusion does not demand that Johnson was the mastermind, nor even an active participant, but it raises a very strong suspicion that he at least had had some awareness of the plot, and enjoyed a good personal relationship with some of the principals.

A similar conclusion is supported by a converse analysis. If the plot succeeded and Johnson became president, the conspirators must surely have felt reasonably confident that they would be protected rather than tracked down and punished as traitors by the new president. Even a fully successful assassination would entail enormous risks unless the organizers believed that Johnson would do exactly what he did, and the only means of ensuring this would be to sound him out about the plan, at least in some vague manner, and obtain his passive acquiesce.

Based on these considerations, it seems extremely difficult to believe that any JFK assassination conspiracy took place entirely without Johnson’s foreknowledge, or that he was not a central figure in the subsequent cover-up.

My impression is that until the last dozen years or so, merely a sliver of the books and articles on the JFK Assassination ever even hinted at the possible role of LBJ, apparently regarding the notion as too radioactive to mention and ignoring the obvious logical case for his involvement. But even in the very early days, when conspiracy-researchers concentrated almost entirely upon challenging the “lone gunman” narrative enshrined by the Warren Commission, I think that dark suspicions may have privately circulated.

For example, I recently discussed this matter with an elderly liberal activist in her mid-80s, someone who until recently had never read a single JFK Assassination book. Having never paid much attention to the controversy, she was shocked to discover that the conspiratorial case was as strong as it was. But she also mentioned that in the aftermath of Kennedy’s death, she and her friends had sometimes wondered whether Johnson might have been involved, but then rejected that possibility as being too horrific to contemplate, fearing that if such beliefs gained traction, they might lead to national rioting and the complete destabilization of America’s democratic political system.

As the Vietnam War escalated and President Johnson became an object of intense hatred in leftist circles, I think that suspicion of his personal role in the death of his predecessor may have gradually spread. In 1966 a young Berkeley anti-war activist named Barbara Garson reworked the treachery and regicide of Shakespeare’s MacBeth into a modern day sketch involving the recent death of our own president at the hands of his successor, in which the murderous usurper was finally avenged and slain by the character representing Robert F. Kennedy. MacBird! first appeared in Ramparts, a leading antiwar publication of the Left, and it was soon developed into a play, running for many hundreds of performances in New York City, Los Angeles, and elsewhere despite pressure from the authorities. But that short work of allegorical, almost satirical fiction aimed at Johnson seems to have been very much the exception to the pattern.

Johnson never received even a hint of suspicion in Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning 1991 film and a closely-related book endorsed by that famed director took a similar position. Col. L. Fletcher Prouty had been an important Pentagon official during the early 1960s, serving as liaison officer to the CIA, and he became intensely suspicious of the circumstances of his President’s death. Prouty’s theories inspired Stone’s film for which he served as a technical advisor, while his real-life role in that drama was played by Donald Sutherland. In 1992 Prouty published JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, with Stone providing a lengthy, glowing introduction, hailing the author as a historic figure. I recently read that book, noting that the author similarly blamed the killing upon elements of our national security “Deep State” while devoting relatively little attention to Johnson, who was portrayed as a completely innocent bystander.

The appearance of JFK Assassination books has tended to come in waves. The tremendous success of Stone’s 1991 film led publishers to open their doors, and another such wave followed in the wake of Talbot’s 2007 best-seller, further boosted by the considerable sales success and favorable reviews of Douglass’ 2009 work. But this latter period finally saw the appearance of several important books arguing that Johnson had been the central figure in the plot.

The first and most important of these works was LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, a hefty 2011 volume running well over 600 pages by Phillip F. Nelson, a retired Texas businessman. Nearly fifty years had elapsed since Johnson’s death, and Nelson did an excellent job of collating and compiling the overwhelming evidence of Johnson’s long and extremely sordid political career, a career that allegedly culminated in the murder of his predecessor.

Johnson had been a product of Texas politics and during the first half of the twentieth century his state seems to have borne a strong resemblance to a corrupt Third World country, whose vast oil wealth and lucrative federal programs offered enormous financial opportunities for those clever and ruthless enough to take advantage of them. Thus, Johnson was born dirt-poor, held low-paying government jobs throughout his entire life, yet in 1963 he took the oath of office as the wealthiest president in modern American history, having accumulated a personal fortune of over $100 million in present-day terms, with the financial payoffs from his corporate benefactors laundered through his wife’s business. Johnson’s striking wealth is so little remembered these days that a prominent political journalist with Texas roots expressed total disbelief when I mentioned those facts to him fifteen-odd years ago.

Johnson’s political and financial rise had relied upon stolen elections and massive government corruption schemes and these sometimes placed him in legal jeopardy. Given such difficulties, Nelson makes a strong case that the future president may have protected himself by arranging a long series of murders, with some of the stories being absolutely astonishing but apparently true. For example, in one bizarre 1961 incident that strangely foreshadowed the Warren Commission’s “lone gunman” finding, a federal government inspector investigating a huge Texas corruption scheme involving a close LBJ ally rejected various attempts to buy him off and was then found dead, shot five times in the chest and abdomen by a rifle; but his death was officially ruled a “suicide” by the local authorities, and reported as such with a straight face in the pages of the Washington Post.

Many of these murders may have been committed by a certain Malcolm “Mac” Wallace, whom Nelson identifies as Johnson’s personal hitman, kept on the federal payroll of the Department of Agriculture between his periodic lethal assignments. In one remarkable 1951 incident, Wallace shot dead in broad daylight a local celebrity golf pro who was involved in a messy affair with Johnson’s troublesome sister Josefa, leading a jury to convict him of first degree murder. Although under Texas law such a verdict would normally carry a mandatory death penalty, Wallace instead astonishingly escaped with a suspended sentence allowing him to immediately walk free, courtesy of Johnson’s massive political influence. Texas of that era seemed to share characteristics similar to those of Chicago during the reign of Al Capone.

Although he operated much more cautiously away from his Texas domain, Johnson seems to adopted similarly ruthless methods in DC, heavily relying upon corruption and blackmail to solidify his power base in the U.S. Senate over which he reigned during much of the 1950s. He also immediately recognized the power wielded by J. Edgar Hoover, whom he enlisted as one of his closest political allies, shrewdly buying a house just a few doors down from the longtime FBI director and living as a close neighbor for nearly twenty years.

After spending the years of Eisenhower second term widely regarded as the most powerful Democrat in America, Johnson decided to seek the Presidency in 1960, hardly regarding the much younger Kennedy, whom he greatly outranked in political stature and somewhat despised, as a serious threat. His confidence was reinforced by the fact that no Catholic had been nominated by a major party since Al Smith’s epic 1928 disaster.

Unfortunately for Johnson’s political plans, patriarch Joseph Kennedy had already spent a quarter century as a powerful political figure, relentlessly plotting his own family’s path to the White House. His liquid wealth was far greater than Johnson’s and he was willing to freely spend it on his son’s nomination drive, swamping all other candidates in the bribes and secret payoffs that determined the voting outcomes in some of the crucial but very corrupt primary states such as West Virginia. So by the time of the Democratic convention, the younger Kennedy had the nomination all locked up and Johnson had been politically humiliated.

At this point, matters took a strange turn. Both Kennedy and his younger brother Robert detested Johnson and they had already selected Sen. Stuart Symington as the Vice Presidential nominee when suddenly at the last moment Johnson was placed on the ticket instead. Both Nelson and Seymour Hersh in The Dark Side of Camelot told this story and strongly argued that heavy use of personal blackmail was responsible for this sudden change of political plans rather than geographical ticket-balancing or any other legitimate factor. But Kennedy’s paper-thin 1960 victory would have been far more difficult without Texas narrowly falling into the Democratic column, and the massive election fraud orchestrated by Johnson’s powerful political machine had been crucial in achieving that result.

Johnson had begun 1960 as the most powerful Democrat in America and he reasonably believed that his efforts had been crucial in winning the November race, so he naturally expected that he would play a major role in the new administration, even issuing grandiose demands for a huge political portfolio. But instead he was immediately sidelined and treated with complete disdain, soon becoming a forlorn figure in DC with no authority nor influence. With Johnson having lost his longtime power-base in the Senate, the Kennedys eventually made plans to get rid of him, and just a few days before the assassination, they were already discussing whom to place on the 1964 reelection ticket in his stead. They recognized that once purged, Johnson might become a dangerous and vindictive political foe, so they decided to remove that possibility by using the record of his massive corruption and many crimes in Texas to completely destroy him.

The recent fall of Bobby Baker, Johnson’s key political henchman in the Senate, presented an excellent opportunity. So the Kennedys began orchestrating a media campaign to expose Johnson, intended to result in his political destruction and perhaps a lengthy prison sentence. James Wagenvoord was then the 27-year-old assistant to Life Magazine‘s executive editor, and in early November 2009 he emailed a note breaking his long decades of silence and telling the story of the massive expose against Johnson that had been pulled at the very last moment. Nelson quoted this astonishing revelation at length, only correcting minor typos and errors:

Beginning in later summer 1963 [Life] magazine, based upon information fed from Bobby Kennedy and the Justice Department, had been developing a major newsbreak piece concerning Johnson and Bobby Baker. On publication Johnson would have been finished and off the ’64 ticket ([the] reason the material was fed to us) and would probably have been facing prison time. At the time Life magazine was arguably the most important general news source in the United States. The top management of Time Inc. was closely allied with the USA’s various intelligence agencies and we were used…by the Kennedy Justice Department as a conduit to the public…The LBJ/Baker piece was in the final editing stages and was scheduled to break in the issue of the magazine due out the week of November 24 (most likely one of the next scheduled editions, November 29th or December 6th, distributed four or five days earlier than those dates). It had been prepared in relative secrecy by a small special editorial team. On Kennedy’s death research files and all numbered copies of the nearly print-ready draft were gathered up by my boss (he had been the top editor on the team) and shredded. The issue that was to expose LBJ instead featured the Zapruder film. Based upon our success in syndicating the Zapruder film I became Chief of Time/Life editorial services and remained in that job until 1968. (emphasis added.)

Thus, by mid-November 1963, Johnson seemed a des