1952 Sam Smithwick prison murder - another one bites the dust
1961 June 3rd Henry Marshall murder ordered by LBJ; eyewitness Billie Sol
Estes
1961-1962 other Billie Sol Estes related murders.
1960 or 1961 - disappearance or murder of Dale Turner, black nanny for
Madeleine Brown
1963 - JFK murder
1967 - USS Liberty, totally ordered and orchestrated by LBJ - 34 murders,
171 wounded. June 8, 1967. LBJ wanted every single one of the 294 dead and on
the bottom of the sea. LBJ came very close to WWIII here.
1968 - MLK? Well, the King family certainly thinks so
1968 - RFK? LBJ was delighted about this murder for sure
God knows who else LBJ murdered. With that kind of a track record, there
*had* to have been more.
Sidenote: the US was trying to murder Charles DeGaulle in the 1960's. LBJ
hated DeGaulle and had to know about this. DeGaulle was acutely aware of the
truth of the JFK assassination and supported the book Farewell America. See
Operation Gladio for more. Link: http://www.amazon.com/Gladio-NATOs-Dagger-Heart-Europe/dp/1615776877/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371532194&sr=1-1&keywords=gladio+richard+cottrell
The family of Martin
Luther King has publicly stated that Lyndon Johnson was involved in the Murder
of MLK – June 1997
From Robert Morrow 512-306-1510
There sure are a lot of people who have called Lyndon
Johnson a murderer, eh? The first I know of was the sitting Governor of
Texas, Allan Shivers who directly accused LBJ in 1956 to his face for the Sam
Smithwick prison murder in 1952 (Smithwick was threatening to talk publicly
about the voter fraud in 1948 that put LBJ into office.) The King family
believes Lyndon Johnson was involved in the plot to murder MLK and they have
publicly stated this.
Did LBJ murder MLK? I don’t know. But I have absolutely
no doubt - none whatsoever - that Lyndon Johnson was capable of murdering
MLK, probably over his opposition to the Vietnam War, which LBJ impaled his
presidency on. Or maybe it was MLK’s Poor People’s campaign which he was then promoting.
Or even more ominously in the eyes of LBJ it could have been MLK’ secret
support for the hated Robert Kennedy (an LBJ arch enemy for obvious reasons -
LBJ murdered JFK). Just 19 days before he was murdered MLK, under intense
government surveillance, told an old friend Kelly Brown that RFK was his “secret
main man” in the race for president. Robert Kennedy ended up doing fabulously with
the black vote in the 1968 Democratic primary. RFK was himself assassinated
after winning the California Democratic primary on June 6, 1968. MLK was
murdered on April 4, 1968.
Here is William Pepper’s book on the MLK Assassination: http://www.amazon.com/An-Act-State-Execution-Updated/dp/B005B1KZBC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1371500822&sr=8-1&keywords=william+pepper+mlk
Below is a summary review of some of the many murders
Lyndon Johnson was involved in.
Son of Dr. King Asserts
L.B.J. Role in Plot
By KEVIN SACK
Published: June 20, 1997
Published: June 20, 1997
Three months ago, Dexter Scott King declared that he and
his family believed that James Earl Ray was not guilty of the murder of his
father, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Tonight, in a televised interview,
Mr. King asserted that President Lyndon B. Johnson must have been part of a
military and governmental conspiracy to kill Dr. King.
''Based on the evidence that I've been shown, I would
think that it would be very difficult for something of that magnitude to occur
on his watch and he not be privy to it,'' Mr. King said on the ABC News program
''Turning Point.''
Mr. King, who heads the
Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta,
suggested that the Army and Federal intelligence agencies were involved in his
father's assassination, in Memphis on April 4, 1968.
''I am told that it was part and parcel Army
intelligence, C.I.A., F.B.I.,'' he said in the interview. ''I think we knew it
all along.''
Mr. King's older
brother, Martin Luther King 3d, said in the television interview that Mr. Ray
had ''basically nothing to do with this assassination.''
Mr. Ray, 69, is dying of
liver disease in a state prison hospital in Nashville. He originally confessed
to the killing and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Several days later, he
recanted, saying that his lawyers had encouraged him to plead guilty to avoid
the death penalty.
A Congressional inquiry
and studies by several historians have concluded that Mr. Ray was almost
certainly involved in the killing, although others may have played a part in a
conspiracy.
The notion of a
conspiracy by the Army and intelligence agencies to kill Dr. King has long been
expounded by William F. Pepper, Mr. Ray's lawyer, who is seeking a trial for
his client. In recent months, Mr. King, his three siblings, and their mother,
Coretta Scott King, have apparently embraced Mr. Pepper's theories.
In the broadcast,
Forrest Sawyer of ABC undermined at least part of Mr. Pepper's theory by
introducing Mr. Pepper to Billy Eidson. Mr. Eidson is a retired Army officer
whom Mr. Pepper has described as the leader of a unit that was ready to kill
Dr. King if the assassin did not succeed.
Mr. Pepper has asserted
that Mr. Eidson was himself later assassinated. After being presented with Mr.
Eidson, Mr. Pepper said, ''I acknowledge that maybe I was provided with wrong
information.''
In March, Dexter King
traveled to Nashville to meet with Mr. Ray, and told him face to face that he
and his family believed Mr. Ray's declarations of innocence.
With the King family's
support, Mr. Pepper has won court approval for new ballistics tests on the
rifle linked to Mr. Ray and the killing of Dr. King. Mr. Pepper hopes that new
forensic methods will prove that the rifle did not fire the fatal shot. The
tests have been completed, but a hearing has yet to be held on the results.
In the ABC program, Mrs.
King and Andrew Young, formerly a top aide to Dr. King as well as a former
chief delegate to the United Nations and Mayor of Atlanta, called on President
Clinton to appoint a commission to investigate the killing again. Mrs. King
proposed that anyone with information about the assassination be granted
amnesty.
Neither Mr. Young nor
any of the Kings could be reached for comment today.
Let’s review some LBJ murders:
1952 prison murder of
Sam Smithwick, before he could talk with Coke Stevenson about the 1948 voting
fraud in Duval County that gave LBJ the Democratic nomination for Senate:
In 1956 Texas Gov. Allan Shivers
(privately & to LBJ’s face) accused Lyndon Johnson of having Sam Smithwick
murdered in prison to keep him from talking about the Precinct 13 ballot box scandal
“According to Johnson, in 1956, Governor Allan
Shivers of Texas accused him of having had Smithwick murdered. The charge
understandably enraged Johnson. [Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant, p. 347]
Texas Governor Allan Shivers directly accused Lyndon Johnson - to
his face - of the murder of the 1952 prison murder of Sam Smithwick
[Randall Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition, p. 250]
In
1948, a deputy sheriff in Alice named Sam Smithwick had become involved in a
dispute with a local radio commentator who was then denouncing him for
operating a string of beer joints. Hearing that the clean government crusader
was going to mention one of his children in a disparaging way, Smithwick sought
out his nemesis, pulled his .45, and shot him dead, a deed for which he was
sentenced to life in prison. In 1952, Smithwick wrote Coke Stevenson from
prison, insisting that five days before the shooting, two Mexican Americans had
delivered into his hands the contents of Box 13 from the famous 1948 senatorial
campaign. In return for leniency from the state, he was willing to produce
them. Stevenson set out immediately for Huntsville and the state prison. “I had
left the ranch and got as far as Junction,” Calculatin’ Coke recounted, “ when
I got the information that he was dead.”
Indeed,
the former deputy sheriff was found hanging from the bars of his cell. Shivers’s
friends began spreading the word that Johnson together with South Texas
political boss Archie Parr had had Smithwick murdered to cover up their theft
of the 1948 senatorial election. LBJ went so far as to confront Shivers over
the matter, but he, of course, denied it. “I think it was a psychopathic case -
an old, ignorant man about to die trying to get himself out of the pen, and
getting no answer, committed suicide.”
From
Washington LBJ sought to put the matter in perspective. “I don’t know what a
convicted murderer might have done prior to committing suicide in an attempt to
get release from prison,” but Stevenson’s (and Shiver’s) release of the letter
was “a continuation of a fight by a group of disgruntled, disappointed people.” Nevertheless, Johnson was
shocked. “Shivers charged me with murder,” he later told Ronnie Dugger with
incredulity. “Shivers said I was a murderer!”
[Randall Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition, p. 250]
LBJ’s personal hit man Malcolm Wallace
Then there is the case
of LBJ’s personal hit man Malcolm Wallace http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKwallaceM.htm
LBJ got him off of a
first degree murder CONVICTION with 5 years probation and NO TIME IN JAIL.
The 1961 Henry Marshall Murder and other Murders
related to the cover up of the Lyndon Johnson kickback connection with Billie
Sol Estes.
1) http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmarshallH.htm Henry Marshall murdered June 3, 1961
Billie Sol Estes said that LBJ fronted him $500,000. In
return he gave LBJ $10 million in kickbacks. Multiply that by 7 to get 2013 dollars: fronted $3.5
million; gave LBJ $70 million in kickbacks in 2013 dollars. That is why
LBJ wanted Agricultural investigator Henry Marshall pumped full of bullets.
The Billie Sol Estes revelations and all the
murders LBJ was involved in. (Note I do not believe LBJ murdered his sister
Josepha although LBJ did walk hand in hand with Satan his whole life.)
LETTER #2 - FROM DOUGLAS CADDY:
August 9, 1984 Mr. Stephen S. Trott
Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division
U.S. Department of Justice
Washington, D. C. 20530
RE: Mr. Billie Sol Estes
Dear Mr. Trott:
My client, Mr. Estes, has authorized me to make this reply to your letter of May 29, 1984. Mr. Estes was a member of a four-member group, headed by Lyndon Johnson, which committed criminal acts in Texas in the 1960's. The other two, besides Mr. Estes and LBJ, were Cliff Carter and Mac Wallace. Mr. Estes is willing to disclose his knowledge concerning the following criminal offenses:
I. Murders
1. The killing of Henry Marshall
2. The killing of George Krutilek
3. The killing of Ike Rogers and his secretary
4. The killing of Harold Orr
5. The killing of Coleman Wade
6. The killing of Josefa Johnson
7. The killing of John Kinser
8. The killing of President J. F. Kennedy.
Mr. Estes is willing to testify that LBJ ordered these killings, and that he transmitted his orders through Cliff Carter to Mac Wallace, who executed the murders. In the cases of murders nos. 1-7, Mr. Estes' knowledge of the precise details concerning the way the murders were executed stems from conversations he had shortly after each event with Cliff Carter and Mac Wallace.
In addition, a short time after Mr. Estes was released from prison in 1971, he met with Cliff Carter and they reminisced about what had occurred in the past, including the murders. During their conversation, Carter orally compiled a list of 17 murders which had been committed, some of which Mr. Estes was unfamiliar. A living witness was present at that meeting and should be willing to testify about it. He is Kyle Brown, recently of Houston and now living in Brady, Texas.
Mr. Estes, states that Mac Wallace, whom he describes as a "stone killer" with a communist background, recruited Jack Ruby, who in turn recruited Lee Harvey Oswald. Mr. Estes says that Cliff Carter told him that Mac Wallace fired a shot from the grassy knoll in Dallas, which hit JFK from the front during the assassination.
Mr. Estes declares that Cliff Carter told him the day Kennedy was killed, Fidel Castro also was supposed to be assassinated and that Robert Kennedy, awaiting word of Castro's death, instead received news of his brother's killing.
Mr. Estes says that the Mafia did not participate in the Kennedy assassination but that itparticipation was discussed prior to the event, but rejected by LBJ, who believed if the Mafia were involved, he would never be out from under its blackmail.
Mr. Estes asserts that Mr. Ronnie Clark, of Wichita, Kansas, has attempted on several occasions to engage him in conversation. Mr. Clark, who is a frequent visitor to Las Vegas, has indicated in these conversations a detailed knowledge corresponding to Mr. Estes' knowledge of the JFK assassination. Mr. Clark claims to have met with Mr. Jack Ruby a few days prior to the assassination, at which time Kennedy's planned murder was discussed.
Mr. Estes declares that discussions were had with Jimmy Hoffa concerning having his aide, Larry Cabell, kill Robert Kennedy while the latter drove around in his convertible.
Mr. Estes has records of his phone calls during the relevant years to key persons mentioned in the foregoing account.
II. The Illegal Cotton Allotments
Mr. Estes desires to discuss the infamous illegal cotten allotment schemes in great detail. He has recordings made at the time of LBJ, Cliff Carter and himself discussing the scheme. These recordings were made with Cliff Carter's knowledge as a means of Carter and Estes protecting them selves should LBJ order their deaths.
Mr. Estes believes these tape recordings and the rumors of other recordings allegedly in his possession are the reason he has not been murdered.
III. Illegal Payoffs
Mr. Estes is willing to disclose illegal payoff schemes, in which he collected and passed on to Cliff Carter and LBJ millions of dollars. Mr. Estes collected payoff money on more than one occasion from George and Herman Brown of Brown and Root, which was delivered to LBJ.
In your letter of May 29, 1984, you request "(1) the information, including the extent of corroborative evidence, that Mr. Estes sources of his information, and (3) the extent of his involvement, if any, in each of those events or any subsequent cover-ups."
In connection with Item # 1, I wish to declare, as Mr. Estes' attorney, that Mr. Estes is prepared without reservation to provide all the information he has. Most of the information contained in this letter I obtained from him yesterday for the first time. While Mr. Estes has been pre-occupied by this knowledge almost every day for the last 22 years, it was not until we began talking yesterday that he could face up to disclosing it to another person. My impression from our conversation yesterday is that Mr. Estes, in the proper setting, will be able to recall and orally recount a criminal matters. It is also my impression that his interrogation in such a setting will elicit additional corroborative evidence as his memory is stimulated.
In connection with your Item #2, Mr. Estes has attempted in this letter to provide his sources of information.
In connection with your Item #3, Mr. Estes states that he never participated in any of the murders. It may be alleged that he participated in subsequent cover-ups. His response to this is that had he conducted himself any differently, he, too, would have been a murder victim.
Mr. Estes wishes to confirm that he will abide by the conditions set forth in your letter and that he plans to act with total honesty and candor in any dealings with the Department of Justice or any federal investigative agency.
In return for his cooperation, Mr. Estes wishes in exchange his being given immunity, his parole restrictions being lifted and favorable consideration being given to recommending his long-standing tax leins being removed and his obtaining a pardon.
Sincerely yours,
Douglas Caddy
Bobby Baker was one of Lyndon Johnson’s
closest most inner circle friends and here is what Baker had to say on 1/20/61.
The Bobby Baker scandal of fall 1963 was the ammunition the Kennedys were going
to use to destroy Lyndon Johnson forever & LBJ was acutely aware of this.
JFK’s secretary of 12 years, Evelyn Lincoln, has said that.
Bobby Baker told Don Reynolds on 1/20/61 that the s.o.b. John
Kennedy would never live out his term and that he would die a violent death
Bobby Baker, one of Lyndon Johnson’s closest associates, said
this during the inauguration of John Kennedy
(11)
Edward
Jay Epstein, Esquire Magazine (December, 1966)
”In January of 1964 the Warren Commission learned that Don B. Reynolds, insurance agent and close associate of Bobby Baker, had been heard to say the FBI knew that Johnson was behind the assassination. When interviewed by the FBI, he denied this. But he did recount an incident during the swearing in of Kennedy in which Bobby Baker said words to the effect that the s.o.b. would never live out his term and that he would die a violent death.”
”In January of 1964 the Warren Commission learned that Don B. Reynolds, insurance agent and close associate of Bobby Baker, had been heard to say the FBI knew that Johnson was behind the assassination. When interviewed by the FBI, he denied this. But he did recount an incident during the swearing in of Kennedy in which Bobby Baker said words to the effect that the s.o.b. would never live out his term and that he would die a violent death.”
Lyndon Johnson made Dale Turner,
the black nanny of his mistress Madeleine Brown, disappear forever
Lyndon Johnson made Madeleine Brown’s black nanny Dale Turner disappear
forever because Dale had seen LBJ and Madeleine Brown together at a San Antonio
hotel (probably the Manger) (time period 1960-1961). Doug Caddy comment: LBJ would
have had her murdered and not thought twice about it.
Madeleine Duncan Brown thought that her boyfriend had her
family nanny Dale Turner murdered because she saw LBJ with Madeleine in a hotel
hall way. In any event, Madeleine never saw that nanny again EVER; and Dale
Turner had been with her family for 10 years.
Madeleine
Duncan Brown relates one incident when her long time African-American nanny
Dale Turner caught a glimpse of she and Johnson hugging in a hotel room with
the door open. Johnson saw Dale see them and told Brown, “I’ll have Ragsdale
replace her on Monday.” Despite Brown’s pleading Turner left work a few days
later and never returned. Brown wrote that Turner, “disappeared without a
trace. The boys cried for days. I notified the police, telephoned her family
and friends—all to no avail. To this day, I have not seen or heard from Dale
Turner. Never.”[10] In her interview Brown said that she believed Johnson had had her
killed.
Another interview with Madeleine Brown,
discusses the Dale Turner disappearance: http://www.21stcenturyradio.com/1314-presidents.html
OUR MATE CAME UP MISSING [Lyndon Johnson
gets rid of, probably murdered Madeleine’s nanny Dale Turner! … incident occurs
while LBJ is Vice President.]
"Dale Turner, our mate... came up missing and I've never found her since," says Madeleine of the woman who was basically the nanny to her two children and had been with Steven since he was born. She says LBJ spotted Dale observing the two of them together at a hotel in San Antonio and it upset him. "He covered his tracks very well," says Madeleine. "He didn't want anyone to know about our relationship, so after Dale saw him he told me that I would have to tell her goodbye. I said 'I can't do that, she's been with us ten years!' And he said, 'I said you'll have to tell her goodbye.' After we were returned to Dallas she called me at work and told me that she had some very important business, and I said, 'That's fine Dale, go take care of it, just take the boys to my mother's, [who] we lived close to.' I said, 'Take all the time you want.' She lived in with us and that was very convenient... Dale never did return. We had the "color law" in Texas in those years. If you did report a [missing] black, they could care less. It's very sad and tragic, but it did happen... Through the years I have tried to find her or find out what happened." She heard 'Mack Wallace' took care of her implying LBJ's orders caused the murder of the woman who had been the nanny of the President's son.
She says she wrote the book because she felt that after Lyndon was out of office that he should have come forth and recognize Steven. "At parties, he'd call him 'son', but he never did come out and say 'this is my son' or anything like that." Madeleine says he was hurt by it, but after Steven got sick with cancer, she decided to go public with the affair in this book. She hoped to have Steven take his place along with the Johnson girls as Lyndon's only son.
"Dale Turner, our mate... came up missing and I've never found her since," says Madeleine of the woman who was basically the nanny to her two children and had been with Steven since he was born. She says LBJ spotted Dale observing the two of them together at a hotel in San Antonio and it upset him. "He covered his tracks very well," says Madeleine. "He didn't want anyone to know about our relationship, so after Dale saw him he told me that I would have to tell her goodbye. I said 'I can't do that, she's been with us ten years!' And he said, 'I said you'll have to tell her goodbye.' After we were returned to Dallas she called me at work and told me that she had some very important business, and I said, 'That's fine Dale, go take care of it, just take the boys to my mother's, [who] we lived close to.' I said, 'Take all the time you want.' She lived in with us and that was very convenient... Dale never did return. We had the "color law" in Texas in those years. If you did report a [missing] black, they could care less. It's very sad and tragic, but it did happen... Through the years I have tried to find her or find out what happened." She heard 'Mack Wallace' took care of her implying LBJ's orders caused the murder of the woman who had been the nanny of the President's son.
She says she wrote the book because she felt that after Lyndon was out of office that he should have come forth and recognize Steven. "At parties, he'd call him 'son', but he never did come out and say 'this is my son' or anything like that." Madeleine says he was hurt by it, but after Steven got sick with cancer, she decided to go public with the affair in this book. She hoped to have Steven take his place along with the Johnson girls as Lyndon's only son.
Madeleine Brown’s book: Texas in the Morning: The Love Story of
Madeleine Brown and President Lyndon Baines Johnson:
The disappearance of black nanny Dale Turner, generated by Lyndon
Johnson, is discussed in detail in Chapter 22, entitled “Missing Person.”
Lyndon Johnson orchestrated the attack on the USS
Liberty on June 8, 1967, and wanted to Murder all 294 people on board.
LBJ wanted to create a false flag attack, blame
it on Egypt and then have the USA bomb, attack and take out Nasser of Egypt who
for the past 10 years had drifted into the Soviet camp.
Judy Morris wrote the article below. Here is her Facebook contact
info: https://www.facebook.com/LibertyCallingWithJudyMorris?ref=ts&fref=ts
James Bamford has a good list of high American officials who know
Israel intentionally attacked the USS Liberty. But even Bamford has not figured
out the very unpleasant and horrible reason why: http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/bamford.html The reality is
LBJ ordered them to do it and Israel, by attacking an American ship, was taking
a gargantuan risk and doing something against her national interest.
From Robert Morrow 512-306-1510
The USS Liberty, Israel & President Johnson’s Order to
Destroy the USS Liberty by Judy Morris
The USS Liberty,
Israel & President Johnson’s Order to Destroy the USS Liberty
By Judy Morris
By Judy Morris
Lyndon
Baines Johnson is a president who has escaped the scrutiny and judgment of
history despite considerable documentation that should make him an outstanding
candidate for historical review, critique and analysis. His primary biographer,
Robert Caro, consistently gets rave book reviews from mainstream media for his
disingenuous puff piece books on LBJ. It’s entirely possible that LBJ is the
most evil or one of the most evil presidents in US history.
Some researchers believe that LBJ was the
mastermind behind JFK’s assassination and researcher Phillip F. Nelson wrote a
book documenting his investigation on this issue: LBJ:
The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination.
However, one of greatest unknown chapters in LBJ’s presidency is that he personally gave the order to Israel to bomb and utterly destroy the USS Liberty and its entire crew of 294 Americans. Astoundingly, when the mission went awry and Sixth Fleet Commanders were ordering the rescue of the besieged and bloodied USS Liberty crew, LBJ ordered that rescue operations be called back, at least twice. Against all odds, the USS Liberty survived but after the attack, 34 Americans lay dead. Except for 4 worthless 50 caliber machine guns, the USS Liberty was unarmed and defenseless against the far superior firing power of the Israeli navel and air force armada that descended upon it with relentless and unspeakable terror.
However, one of greatest unknown chapters in LBJ’s presidency is that he personally gave the order to Israel to bomb and utterly destroy the USS Liberty and its entire crew of 294 Americans. Astoundingly, when the mission went awry and Sixth Fleet Commanders were ordering the rescue of the besieged and bloodied USS Liberty crew, LBJ ordered that rescue operations be called back, at least twice. Against all odds, the USS Liberty survived but after the attack, 34 Americans lay dead. Except for 4 worthless 50 caliber machine guns, the USS Liberty was unarmed and defenseless against the far superior firing power of the Israeli navel and air force armada that descended upon it with relentless and unspeakable terror.
Not a whole lot has been written about the
USS Liberty and its just another critically important issue that has been
buried in history but two extraordinary books document the truth. James M. Ennes Jr., a retired US
Navel Officer and a survivor of the USS Liberty who wrote a book on the USS
Liberty that documents his investigative disclosure of the truth, here.
Peter Hounam, an investigative journalist,
wrote Operation Cyanide, Why the Bombing of the USS Liberty Nearly
Caused World War III.
Hounam’s extraordinary book, published in 2003, relies heavily on the work of
Ennis and also documents numerous interviews that Hounam conducted with the USS
Liberty survivors as well as other folks in the US, British and Israel
governments.
The “official” story of the USS Liberty
according to the government and mainstream media version of the event is that
on June 8, 1967 the Israelis accidentally bombed the USS Liberty off the coast
of Egypt and killed 34 American sailors.
The real story is that President Johnson, who
was being battered in the polls over the Vietnam War and facing a general
election loss and even losing the DNC primary, ordered the Israelis to bomb the
USS Liberty to create a casus belli to secure
a Gulf of Tonkin style resolution to explode the world into war because in
America everybody loves an outraged and indignant president who will use the
full force of the military at the slightest provocation, even a government
planned false flag attack.
The USS Liberty, however, encompasses far
more than a murderous psychopathic American president resorting to hideously
evil deeds to get re-elected. In addition to ordering the total destruction of
the USS Liberty and sending 294 Americans to a watery grave in the
Mediterranean Sea, LBJ also ordered the nuclear bombing of Cairo, an event
specifically designed to create a nuclear war by blaming the entire USS Liberty
affair on Russia or Egypt. More horrifying, it’s documented that US planes were
on emergency standby orders as pilots waited on the runways in their planes
armed with nuclear weapons. The
nuclear bombing of Cairo was called off only 3 minutes before the nuclear bomb
drops.
As fate would have it, LBJ’s plan blew up in
his face and the world got a reprieve from a nuclear US induced holocaust. How
did it happen? First, it must be understood that the USS Liberty was supposed
to be destroyed and sunk within minutes and without any survivors.
The actual attack on the USS Liberty
commenced at 2:00 p.m. Israel time on June 8, 1967. The USS Liberty was 13
miles off the coast of Gaza and moving slowly at 5 knots. The crew had observed
several flyovers by Israeli reconnaissance planes earlier in the day.
When the USS Liberty was struck, it was
struck with an awesome force. According to USSLiberty.org, a website created by
the survivals to document and expose the truth, the ship was first struck by
Israeli fighter aircraft:
“Israeli fighter aircraft launched a rocket
attack on USS Liberty. The aircraft made repeated firing passes, attacking USS
Liberty with rockets and their internal cannons. After the first flight of
fighter aircraft had exhausted their ordnance, subsequent flights of Israeli
fighter aircraft continued to prosecute the attack with rockets, cannon fire,
and napalm. During the air attack, USS Liberty’s crew had difficulty contacting
Sixth Fleet to request assistance due to intense communications jamming. The initial targets on the ship were the
command bridge, communications antennas, and the four .50 caliber machine guns,
placed on the ship to repel boarders.
After the Israeli fighter aircraft completed
their attacks, three Israeli torpedo boats arrived and began a surface attack
about 35 minutes after the start of the air attack. The torpedo boats launched
a total of five torpedoes, one of which struck the side of USS Liberty,
opposite the ship’s research spaces. [20] Twenty-six Americans in addition to
the eight who had been killed in the earlier air attacks, were killed as a
result of this explosion.
Following their torpedo attack, the torpedo
boats moved up and down the length of the ship (both the port and starboard
sides), continuing their attack, raking the ship with cannon and machine gun
fire.[21] In Malta, crewmen were later assigned
the task of counting all of the holes in the ship that were the size of a man’s
hand or larger. They found a total of 861 such holes, in addition to
“thousands” of .50 caliber machine gun holes.“, link here.
USS Liberty Timeline, here.
0600: Israeli Nord 2501 Noratlas
(flying boxcar) reconnoiters Liberty….
0603: Reconnaissance aircraft reports
to Israeli naval headquarters that “GTR-5” is written on the ship, identifying
it as an NSA intelligence vessel.
0720: Fresh American flag is raised….
1000: Two unmarked, rocket-armed,
delta-winged jets circle Liberty three times. Liberty officers can count
rockets and see the pilots, but see no identifying marks on the plane. The jets
radio Israeli headquarters that the ship is flying an American flag….
1055: Pinchas Pinchasy, naval liaison
officer at Israeli air force headquarters, reports to Naval Headquarters that
the ship cruising slowly off El Arish is “an electromagnetic audio-surveillance
ship of the U.S. Navy, named Liberty, whose marking was GTR-5.”…
1100 & 1130: Israeli
reconnaissance aircraft again circle Liberty.
The above information is critically important
because it proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the Israelis were well aware
that the USS Liberty was a well marked US spy ship. US spy ships are extremely
easy to spot because as telecommunication vessels, they are loaded with wires,
antennas and other communication gear that are easily recognized and
identifiable (unlike Russian spy ships that were realistically camouflaged as
trawlers and fishing boats). The reason it’s important to understand this is
because the cover-up of of the USS Liberty incident was so flimsy and
fictitious that both the US and Israeli governments officially stated that the
USS Liberty was mistook for an Egyptian vessel that hauls horses. This is
simply impossible.
As the timeline unfolds, it’s clear that the
attack on the USS Liberty had two goals: 1. first destroy and disable all
communication capabilities and 2. sink the ship, her crew and guarantee that
there were no survivors. The timeline continues.
1358: Two unmarked delta-winged Mirage
jets attack Liberty. After taking out gun mounts, they target ship’s antennae
and bridge with heat-seeking missiles.
1424: Three French-built 62-ton
Israeli motor torpedo boats approach Liberty in attack formation.
1435: Torpedo boats launch five
German-made 19-inch torpedoes at Liberty. One torpedo strikes starboard
directly into NSA area, accounting for 25 of the 34 men who would be killed.
Torpedo boats then circle, machine-gunning the ship with armor-piercing
projectiles for another 40 minutes.
At this point, the USS Liberty was being
pummeled by air and sea with everything that attack planes and motorized
torpedo boats (MTB’s) could possibly throw at them. The decks were ablaze from
napalm fires, the ship was being torpedoed by the Israeli Navy and bombs and
rockets from the air rained down on them.
This is where the story turns extraordinarily
heroic from human ingenuity that pretty much killed LBJ’s grand plan. One of
the USS Liberty’s communication transformers had been down and not functioning,
something the Israeli’s must have known in advance because it wasn’t destroyed
or even hit. A courageous crew member managed to fix it by stringing long wires
across a burning deck and rendered it operable, and, of course, capable of
sending out a mayday message to numerous US aircraft that permeated the area.
However, the Israeli planes had high tech jamming equipment that successfully
jammed the signal. It’s probably also true that at that point the Israeli’s
were not much concerned with the USS Liberty sending out a message because they
believed that all communication equipment was knocked out permanently.
Peter Hounam writes in Operation Cyanide “Liberty radioman Richard Sturman concluded that the
attackers had carefully prepared for the attack with the specific intention of
preventing the ship communicating with the outside world. To do so effectively
they must have had prior knowledge from shore-based receivers of the five
frequencies being used by the ship, so that jamming gear could be tuned to
them. Sturman recalled his anger when he discovered that the international
distress frequency, used for Mayday messages, was also jammed”.
The astute crew however made a startling
discovery. The Israeli jamming capabilities did not work when they were
actually engaged bombing and the USS Liberty crew had windows of a few seconds
of opportunity in between strikes to send out a message.
Hounam writes “At first, the signalmen felt
their task was hopeless. Plane after plane was swooping in on the ship, firing
cannon, shooting missiles and dropping napalm….Then someone spotted that there
was a respite from the jamming, lasting just a few seconds, when the attacking
planes fired their missiles. Halman grabbed the opportunity and shouted into
the mike, ‘Any station, this is Rockstar. We are under attack by unidentified
jet aircraft and require immediate assistance!”. On the USS Saratoga (call-sign
‘Schematic’) the radioman picked up the message but it was garbled, possibly by
further jamming. ”Rockstar, this is Schematic,’ he said. ’Say again, you are
garbled.’”
Eventually, the USS Liberty message was
acknowledged and authenticated 10 minutes after the attack began. The USS
Saratoga confirmed Liberty’s message with ‘Roger, Rockstar. Authentication is
correct…’. The messaged bounced everywhere and was even acknowledged by 2 US
embassies in the region. Furthermore, it was impossible for the Pentagon not to
know of Liberty’s attack as all messages are also automatically routed to the
Pentagon and other government agencies. The Israeli’s must have also
intercepted the radio message.
The Liberty crew was relieved and believed
that help was on the way. Wrong! Although fleet commanders quickly ordered
rescue operations, twice the rescue missions were ordered called back by
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a close friend and trusted associate of
LBJ. In fact, it’s documented that during one of the conversations between the
the Sixth Fleet Commander and McNamara, LBJ got on the phone and roared ‘We
will not embarrass an ally’ to reinforce McNamara’s direct command from LBJ to
NOT to rescue the ailing USS Liberty and her crew.
According to James Ennes, the entire attack
lasted 1 hour and 15 minutes, although some crew members believe it was longer.
Unquestionably, the attack was sheer hell for those on board the USS Liberty
and the agony was prolonged by the fact that help from the Sixth Fleet never
arrived as expected.
Then something extraordinary happened. The
Israelis stopped attacking despite having more than enough firepower to finish
the job of sinking the USS Liberty and her crew. It’s been documented that the
Israelis had commando helicopter crews hovering above the USS Liberty with a
crew to finish the job. Clearly, the USS Liberty crew expected to die.
But with the message out and everybody
knowing about it, including the Russians who knew what was going because they
were close by in their own disguised spy ships as they intercepted the message
or possibly even observed the USS Liberty being attacked, the Israelis
panicked, called off the attack and never finished the job. Eventually, the
surviving crew was rescued and many were badly injured.
Hounam documents an interview with one of the
injured USS Liberty crew members, Joe Lentini.
I woke up, it was pitch-black and I
was in water. I tried to stand up and put my weight on my left leg and it
wouldn’t support me, obviously I fell back down; I didn’t know at the time I
had six broken ribs, a collapsed lung, a fractured skull, both tympanic
membranes in my ears were blown out, shrapnel all over me in my body…it never
occurred to me that I didn’t have a leg and it never occurred to me that I was
about to die.
Shockingly, the USS Liberty tragedy did not
begin at 2:00 p.m. Israeli time according to the sanitized official version. It
began earlier. According to Hounam, he interviewed a retired Air Force pilot, Jim Nanjo, who spent 20 years on
the H-bomb attack force. The job of such pilots who lived on US air bases was
to be READY to jump into a plane and carry out orders immediately.
Nanjo told Hounam about how he was awakened
on the morning of 6/8/67 between 2:00 a.m. and no later than and 4:00 a.m. by
an alert that told him an emergency situation existed and he need to man his
plane immediately. Others bomber pilots were also manning their planes and
revving up their engines waiting for the “go” order and their orders. They knew
nothing about their mission and Hounam writes:
Nanjo was in no doubt that the world
was near to Armageddon that day…
There was however one other
significance of his story that he had not spotted. The klaxons had woken him at
between 1 am. and 4 am; he was certain it was no later, but the Liberty was not
attacked until 5 am California time. How were the American military and their
commander in chief, Lyndon Johnson, able to anticipate the attack, and yet
apparently not know the Israelis were behind it.
Hounam also documents that Nanjo was aware
that other US Air Force bases were under the same HIGHEST alert in Guam,
Britain, Moron, Spain as well as in the US. What was Nanjo carrying? Hounam
writes:
Even after 35 years, he was reluctant
to provide details of the bombs carried by his squadron that morning.: ‘Other
than to say it was a weapon of mass destruction. I am not able to give you the
nomenclature.’. Thenhe confirmed that
they were carrying thermonuclear weapons – H-bombs…“
It’s well documented that LBJ and his trusted
Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, were deeply and personally involved in
the USS Liberty tragedy, the cover-up of the truth and even a scheme to explode
the world into nuclear warfare.
To comprehend the severity of the situation,
it’s imperative to understand the Cold War, the backdrop against which it was
played, the prevalent paranoia at the time of the Communist threat and the
incredible rise of America’s military industrial complex to the worlds sole
superpower. Many who knew LBJ well feared that he was unstable, mentally ill, a
psychopath or even worse. He was notoriously crude and vulgar. Denis Healey,
the Secretary of Defense in Britain so despised and distrusted LBJ that he
wrote in his memoirs:
Lyndon
Johnson was a monster….
[He was] one of the few politicians
with whom I found it uncomfortable to be in the same room. Johnson exuded a
brutal lust for power which I found most disagreeable. When he said, “I never trust a man unless I have his
pecker in my pocket“, he really meant it. He boasted about acting on the
principle, “Give me a man’s balls, and his heart and
mind will follow.“… Source: Operation Cyanide
That LBJ was mad is validated by his numerous
actions that fueled his personal ambitions over the decades and in the summer
of 1967 LBJ was obsessed with one thing and one thing only: reelection. He was
in grave danger of losing the presidency and his power. That he would do
anything to maintain that power is 100% consistent with the depth of his evil.
But LBJ was also an extraordinarily clever
master politician who profoundly understood how raucous game of geopolitics could
be played and manipulated to his own advantage, especially when it came to
courting the approval of the American people. Vietnam was already a whopper of
a failure and LBJ’s war was growing more unpopular by the second.
The Middle East has always been a disaster
(some things never change), at least since since oil came into play and the
modern nation state of Israel was created by the United Nations in 1948. The
rise of Arab nationalism was also heating up as Egyptian President Gamal Nasser
and the Marxist styled Baathist movements were flourishing. Syria and Iraq had
shed western imposed monarchs and were raising their own brand of dictators.
Israel was becoming America’s unofficial 51st state as the Evangelical movement
was rising in anticipation of fulfilling Biblical prophecy now that Israel
existed for the first time since Biblical times.
The bellicose rhetoric blossomed as Arab
leaders public vowed to destroy Israel. This was nothing new and even the
Israelis perceived that such utterances were an appeasement to the neurotic
Arab street rather than an actual threat. Still, that didn’t stop Israel from
launching the preemptive Six Day War.
The significance of the Six Day War as it
relates to the USS Liberty is that the USS Liberty was bombed on the 4th day of
the Six Day War that Israel had actually won during the first hour of the first
day of the Six Day War when it wiped out the entire Egyptian Air Force. The
geopolitical drama of the Middle East is acutely linked to the Cold War because
the Soviet Union was arming and funding Middle East regimes, notably Egypt and
Syria. The Middle East was a pawn on the chessboard of America vs. the Soviets
during the Cold War because influential dominance of the region was a key goal
of both nations. Of course, the obviously oily nature of Middle East natural
resources was considered a prize.
Israeli Prime Minster Yitzhak Rabin paid a
visit to former Israeli Prime Minster David Ben Gurion who is Israeli’s most
esteemed national hero, loved and respected by all. Ben Gurion was appalled at
the prospects of war with Egypt or anybody, and is reported to have told Rabin
“You made a mistake….You led the state into a grave situation. We must not go
to war”. Rabin was reportedly horrified that he didn’t have the blessing of Ben
Gurion for a preemptive war. Ben Gurion isn’t shy about war; in fact, he was
the leader of Israel’s War of Independence when Israel was the the target of
Arab military violence right after the UN declared Israel a nation. Though a
fighter and even a terrorist according to some, Ben Gurion preferred peace and
negotiation with his cantankerous Arab neighbors because war was always
hideously destructive.
Who was behind the Six Day War and why? It’s
highly unlikely that Israel unilaterally initiated the Six Day War without
specific instructions and support from the U.S. Some observers believe that the
US and LBJ engineered the Six Day War as part of America’s Cold War strategy to
humiliate the Soviet Union and and advance U.S. hegemony in the Middle East.
Furthermore, it’s ludicrous to accept that
Israel accidentally bombed the USS Liberty and it’s clearly obvious that the
official US/Israel version is so flimsy a cover-up that any citizen journalist
using his Google fingers could credibly research enough facts to blow that lie
to shreds.
However, the USS Liberty incident was far
more sinister. Nasser, other Arab leaders and Arab journalists tended to
believe that the U.S. and Britain were behind the Six Day War and actually
participated. The consensus in the Arab world was that the entire Israeli Air
Force wasn’t sufficient in numerical strength to accomplish the now infamous
Israeli aerial armada that struck the Egyptian Air Force with such a
devastating force that the entire Egyptian Air Force was demolished. Moreover,
it appears that the Arab world was clueless about US plans to start a war with
Egypt through its proxy Israel and/or that the nuclear bombing of Cairo was on
the table. Hounam writes:
Before Day Four of the war, Nasser had
been accusing the US and Britain of directly assisting Israel. After the
hot-line exchange about the Liberty, he was convinced of it. Of course, he was
not aware that the ‘reconnaissance planes’ had in fact been on their way to
bomb Cairo or…..that an atomic device could have been detonated.
Hounam interviewed a guy named Joe Sorrels
who back in the 1960′s was doing freelance special operations and intelligence
work for the U.S. and Britain. Sorrels was no ordinary technician with skills;
his function was sufficiently important that he personally met Meir Amit, head
of the Mossad, the Israeli secret service. Hounam writes:
From his viewpoint, it seemed the Israelis were responding to pressure
from the United States to eradicate Nasser; Israel was not the prime
mover….
According to Sorrels the war plans
went well, the driving force being the US…
Sorrels
described as ‘horse shit’ the commonly-held notion that Israel fought this war
on its own: ‘Anybody working
around intelligence knows it isn’t true’. He repeated that Operation Cyanide
was a secret plan to start a war against Egypt….
He
said Israel’s only motive was to grab territory, nothing more, and it was elements in the United States
who were pushing them to invade Egypt…”
The USS Liberty survivors had organized over
the years and met periodically to share research and contribute their version
of what happened on June 8, 1967. At a 5/4/2002 gathering, Hounam met with Moe
Schafer and shared his recollection of two important USS Liberty events.
Before the attack he was cleaning the
moon-bounce dish and watched as an Israeli plane flew low over the ship taking
photographs….it was confirmation of the testimony of other eyewitnesses that
Israel was well aware of the ship’s presence.
The second memory from after the
attack was much more significant. Moe said he was hurt by shrapnel during the
assault….Unlike most of the injured who had already been taken away to the USS
America, he was loaded into a helicopter and flown to the USS Davis, the
flagship of Sixth Fleet commander Admiral Martin. The next morning he was
sitting on his bunk with two or thee other injured men when Martin came in to
see them.
Shafer said he seemed to want to tell
someone about what had happened before he would be obliged through pressure
from above to clam up: ‘Not only did Admiral
Martin tell me that four jets were on their way to the Liberty with
conventional weapons [and were recalled]; he stated that four were on their way
to Cairo loaded with nuclear weapons. He stated they were three minutes from
bombing them [the Egyptians]. He also said that the jets could not land
back on the carrier with nuclear arms and they had had to land in Athens. He
stated this from my beside while on the Little Rock [the codename of the
flagship] after the attack.
The story told by Moe Schafer about Admiral
Martin confirming that the US planned to nuke Cairo is also a story that is
validated by Air Force pilot Jim
Nanjo in California and a member of the H-bomb attack force. Nanjo
didn’t know that Cairo was the target, only that he and other crews were on
standby to take-off and drop nuclear bombs. Nanjo could never understand why he
was called out of bed in the middle of the night on June 8, 1967 (California
time) BEFORE the USS Liberty was attack
by Israel. Nanjo also confirmed that he knew that other nuclear bomb units were
on under the same alert in Guam, Britain, Moron, Spain as well as in the US.
That a U.S. president would give an order to
nuke Cairo, explode the world into nuclear war and destroy an unarmed and
defenseless U.S. military vessel with a crew of nearly 300 is beyond
incomprehensibly evil. This is something that the USS Liberty survivors have
struggled with over the decades but the more they analyzed their own research
and eyewitness accounts, the more they were convinced that no other conclusions
could be drawn. The hardest thing for the survivors to accept relative to what
happened that day was the fact that their own government, the very same
government they swore an oath to serve as a matter of patriotism and duty to
their county, would do such a thing.
In the context of the red meat geopolitical
ramifications that occurred on June 8, 1967, there are several extraordinary
takeaways.
1. The USS Liberty crew member who string
wired a telecommunication device on the burning and napalmed deck of the ship
and facilitated Liberty’s ability to get a message out played a key role in
averting a disaster of Biblical proportions. Once the message got out,
everybody got it including the Israelis, the Pentagon, NSA, the White House,
the president, other U.S. intelligence and defense agencies, the State
Department, U.S. Embassies and the Soviets whose outstanding spy capabilities
didn’t miss a thing. The cat was out of the proverbial bag.
2. The Israelis acknowledged their role in
the USS Liberty attack and vigorously collaborated with the U.S. in the “it was
an accident” cover-up. Unquestionably, the Israelis do have blood on their
hands. But in a perverse sort of way, the Israelis may have deliberately
sabotaged the attack because they did indeed have the firepower to quickly sink
the USS Liberty and her crew but they didn’t. There are accounts about Israeli
pilots who were carrying out their orders by dropping their bombs into the
Mediterranean Sea on purpose. Whether they did it as a matter of conscience or
on direct orders, we’ll never know.
The Israelis were in fact terrified of an
Arab-Soviet alliance and they dreaded unleashing a global and regional nuclear
war because they believed they would indeed be a target for annihilation. The
Israelis were, however, motivated to engage in some level of warfare to expand
their own obsession with real estate. The Israelis wanted land and after the
Six Day War they indeed ended up with the West Bank, Jerusalem, Gaza and
Syria’s Golan Heights.
It’s entirely possible that the Israelis
thwarted LBJ and his draconian plans but it’s also true that Israel played
along with the U.S. but only to the extent that it could maneuver something out
of it for Israel. Israel is dependent on U.S. foreign aid and as an ally,
Israel’s goals and national interests do in fact collide with U.S. goals and
intentions. Israel cannot realistically refuse the U.S. anything which is
precisely why Israel is constantly gaming its relationship with the U.S.
3. The Soviets were well aware of what was
going on relative to the USS Liberty and probably even LBJ’s plan to spark a
US-Soviet confrontation through its proxies in the Middle East, especially
Egypt. There was considerable ‘buzz’ between DC and Moscow on June 8, 1967 and
it’s entirely possible that Moscow screamed to DC something that went like this
but in diplomatic language “Hey you idiots, we’re on to you, we know what you
did and if you take it any further we’ll tell the whole damn world about it and
expose your president for the murderous psychopath that he is”. The Soviets did
not want war.
4. Only the president of the United States
could give the order to launch warplanes loaded with nuclear bombs and only the
president could give the order to recall the order.
That LBJ was such a demented power mad
psychopath who directly and personally issued orders that brought the planet
within 3 minutes of a nuclear holocaust that would vaporize all or part of
Cairo, the largest city in the Arab world with 1960′s population of over 8
million (now 20 million), should be shocking for clueless Americans but it’s
not shocking for the very few journalists and folks who researched and dug for
the truth. However, what is even more shocking is that LBJ’s role in the Six
Day War and the USS Liberty, as well as his grand schemes to reorder the world
and even create a nuclear war to feed his ambitions, continues to be covered up
in the U.S.
LBJ didn’t do this alone and his close
associates in the Pentagon, CIA, State Department and intelligence agencies
were all complicit and willing partners. Furthermore, LBJ was indeed angry that
he was somewhat restricted by the Constitution and Congress. An Israeli
diplomat, Eppie Evron, recalled a meeting he had with LBJ on 5/26/67 as
documented by Hounam.
“Then he went on to say, “I, Lyndon Johnson, have to get
congressional approval if I want to act as President of the United States.
Otherwise, I’m just a six-foot-four Texan friend of Israel”. (That
description stuck in my memory.) “But
you and I, the two most powerful people in Washington, are going to get
Congress to pass another Tonkin resolution.”….
I thought, “He’s telling me that
Congress is never going to give him permission to use military force.”….
To be sure, LBJ was lamenting his own lack of
power and resented any accountability to anyone. For a power mad autocrat like
LBJ, consulting with Congress or requesting Congressional action was
humiliating and beneath him.
For more on the false flag Gulf Tonkin
Resolution, see De-classified Vietnam-era Transcripts Show Senators Knew Gulf Of
Tonkin Was A Staged False Flag Event.
The survivor of the USS Liberty have created
a website, USS Liberty Memorial, to honor the fallen and document the truth. Because the USS Liberty
has created a firestorm of raging anti-Semites and Jew haters, the website has
a disclaimer affirming that it has no connection with any of these groups.
The USS Liberty Memorial web site
abhors the racist and extreme positions taken by antiSemitic, Holocaust denial,
conspiracy theorist and other such groups which often seek to identify with us
and to usurp our story as their own. We have no connection with and do not
support or encourage support from any of these groups including National
Alliance, National Vanguard, The New Order, National Socialists, The French
Connection, Liberty Lobby, American Free Press, Republic Broadcasting, USS
Liberty Radio Hour, Storm Front or other such groups. We wish harm to no one
and encourage social justice and equality for everyone; we seek only
accountability for the criminal acts perpetrated against us and can do that
without help from hate-mongers.
On the Israeli side, the group of
pro-Israel, anti-American critics of our story, while small, persists in
launching loud, vicious ad hominem attacks on anyone who attempts to discuss
the deliberateness of the attack. These anti-American apologists refuse to
discuss the facts of the case. Instead, they rely on propaganda and charge
anyone who questions the Israeli position with being antiSemitic.
Sifting through the lies, propaganda and
disinformation definitely requires an open mind, diligence and the ability to
astutely decipher geopolitical consequences and intentions that are
deliberately obsfucated, twisted and distorted by government and the media.
We do in fact live under the cloud of a
dangerous, unaccountable, secretive and shadow government that plots
unspeakable evil.
The USS Liberty cost American taxpayers $40
million but was sold for scrap in 1970 – $101,000. Things only got worse for
LBJ and he announced on 3/31/68 that he would not seek re-election, probably
because he couldn’t bear losing in a primary or general election. LBJ dropped dead
of a heart attack on 1/22/73 and is still revered as one of America’s greatest
liberal progressive Democratic presidents despite his attempts to explode the
world into nuclear war, despite his direct orders to sink the USS Liberty,
despite murdering millions of Asians and despite being responsible for over
58,000 names on the Vietnam Memorial of Americans who died in Vietnam.
Barry
Chamish on the role of Lyndon Johnson in ordering Israel to sink the USS
Liberty and murder all 294 people on board on June 8, 1967
GIVE US
THE USS LIBERTY
by Barry Chamish
In my recent review of Jeff Gates very anti-McCain book, I cited his claim that:
- John McCain's father, led the government commission of inquiry which exonerated Israel for deliberately and with deadly purpose, almost sinking the USS Liberty in 1967.
The issue of the Liberty has deeply poisoned the American relationship with Israel. It is a far greater thorn than Israelis understand because, in fact, Israel did try to kill every sailor on board The Liberty. If I needed persuasion of that, I got it with the correspondence I began with two officers of the Liberty, as well as my personal meetings with British documentary maker, Peter Hounam, who made a highly damning of Israel film of the incident, shown on the BBC.
My conclusion, and it gibed well with Hounam's, was that Israel was creating another Lavon Affair, trying to lure the US into the war against Egypt, as it had done by bombing American targets in Cairo during the mid-50s. But one problem gnawed at me; The Liberty was hit on June 8, when Israel had already as good as won the Six Day War. In short, why bother?
The standard pro-Israel line was taken by the Loftus and Arons book, The Secret War Against The Jews. Within, the authors assert that the Liberty was intercepting Israeli military messages and funneling them to the Syrians. The two Liberty officers I had a dialog with vehemently denied the claim, and frankly, I believed them way more than Loftus and Arons. After all, they were there, while Loftus and Arons collected known public sources into a book filled with no shortage of errors.
That's how things stood until information arrived on the wave of my last article. Admiral McCain was not covering for Israel, he was protecting Pres. Lyndon Johnson, who ordered Israel to attack the Liberty. It all began when my reader, Maria, sent the following internet data:
www.echarcha.com/forum/showthread.php?t=24357
June 8, 1967 during the 6 day war between Israel and the Arab Nations President Lyndon B. Johnson sends the U.S.S liberty to collect electronic intelligence in the eastern Mediterranean. The clearly marked U.S. ship was 14 miles off the coast of Israel in international waters. Israel's aircraft identified the ship as an American vessel and an ally. At 2:00 PM that afternoon the U.S.S. Liberty was attacked by two unmarked Mirage 3 fighter bombers The U.S.S. Liberty was then attacked by three Israeli torpedo boats bearing Israeli flags. The torpedo boats opened fire with high caliber machine guns and launched torpedos. The torpedo boats then began strafing life-rafts in the water, an international war crime. During the attack the U.S.S. Liberty continually called the 6th fleet which was nearby begging for air support. Two groups of fighter aircraft were sent to defend the Liberty but unbelievably they were recalled by the White House. The Admiral in Command of the sixth fleet called Washington to confirm the recall order. Secretary of Defence MacNamara came on the line followed by the president himself who told the Admiral, "I want that G D Ship going to the bottom" Finally after 3 hours into the attack a Russian spy ship appeared so the Israelis withdrew because there were witnesses allowing the Liberty to limp home to safety. Here is what really took place. President Johnson had personal control over the ship, made a backroom deal with Israel to attack it with an order to kill everyone on board. Then the attack was to be blamed on Egypt and U.S. would enter the war and take over the entire Middle East.
If Johnson made Israel do the sinking, Israel is much of the way home to redemption. Cutting to the chase, it wasn't Israel's idea. Israel still did the killing, and muffed the attack with an amateurish show of its military prowess, but it wasn't the leader of the hit squad. That's far better than being left in the lurch as the mafia's don.
So I spoke with the author and broadcaster Dr. Stan Monteith, (www.radioliberty.com) who has long researched the Liberty attack and boasts a 4 CD set of interviews, including with the seamen and officers of the ship. He was direct: "Of course Johnson gave the order. But he received his orders from higher up."
"So the attack on The Liberty wasn't an Israeli decision?" I asked.
"It was an American action forced on Israel," he answered.
More research was necessary and this led to such an obvious scenario! The Americans sink ships to start wars. The Maine was sunk to get the Spanish American War rolling. The Lusitania and the attacks on the shipyard at Pearl Harbor were caused by provocation and deliberate military neglect, but they got the Americans to stumble awkwardly and reluctantly into two world wars. But Johnson himself was an active proponent of the sink a ship and go to war philosophy:
1964 The Gulf of Tonkin In the summer of 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson needed a pretext to commit the American people to the expanding covert war in south East Asia. So the Gulf of Tonkin incident was staged claiming that Vietnamese patrol boats had attacked a U.S. destroyer off the coast of Vietnam. This staged incident paved the way for 58,000 American deaths and over 1.500.000 Vietnamese.
The reason to sacrifice over 200 American sailors was the American, and actually accurate perception, that Egyptian President, Gamal Abdul Nasser had drifted into the Soviet camp and threatened to make much of the Middle East, Russian clients. As Johnson saw it, Nasser had to go and fast. A pretext for war was all that was necessary. But Israel just couldn't sink The Liberty and screwed up the best laid plans of the whole operation.
Nasser was not ideologically a communist. And America wanted him as an ally so much that the Eisenhower administration abandoned its allies Britain, France and Israel, who won the Sinai War of 1956, but excluded the US from the action and the spoils. It was over a dam that Nasser brought the Soviets to the most powerful country in the Middle East, with much communist mischief to follow. Following the Sinai Campaign, Nasser's grandiosity was so out of touch with reality, that he demanded the Americans build him a huge dam at Aswan and pay for it to boot.
American engineers went to work and foresaw a project that would hold back the Nile's silt, little by little collecting behind the dam, making the dam less efficient until it would serve no purpose at all; meanwhile killing off the small fish of the Nile delta which feed off the silt, ultimately destroying most of the fishlife of the Eastern Mediterranean. Back on land, farmers would be forced to turn to chemical fertilizers to replace the silt, much of the world's greatest storehouse of antiquities would be drowned, all the while Egypt had enough oil to provide electricity of the non-hydro variety just as cheaply.
The Americans said, no. And all the dire predictions came true. So, Nasser threw the Americans out of Egypt and brought Russian communism in, with promises to spread the ideology. All this happened because the Americans had betrayed their natural allies of the Suez Campaign, and they now felt humiliated and really ticked off. Especially when Israel used French planes to destroy the Air Forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan.
Sinking The Liberty would get rid of Nasser for good, and quickly create an American-led Egypt, with an obedient quisling like Anwar Sadat, though he would rise a few years later after Nasser was given a killing stroke at age 51. This point is not proven but when I told Peter Hounam my suspicions, he answered, "You know, a lot of Arabs think that."
And finally we have the reason Moshe Dayan turned into Israel's top traitor of his day. As Chief-0f-Staff of the IDF, Dayan HAD to have given the order for his Air Force to sink the Liberty. Johnson may have given the actual command, the American navy did nothing to rescue the stricken ship, but Dayan had the blood of 37 American sailors on his hands and if he didn't play major league ball, he and Israel would be turned into friendless lepers.
Dayan began quickly, by handing over control of the Temple Mount, won by Israel with buckets of blood, to the Jordanian Wakf, the consequences of which are felt deeply to this day. Then in October 1973, as Defence Minister, under the duress of Henry Kissinger, Dayan agreed to give Egypt and Syria a full day to regain lost territory. The consequence of not pre-empting the Yom Kippur War was over 2000 dead Jewish soldiers in two days. After Pres. Carter forced PM Begin to take Dayan into his cabinet as foreign minister in 1977, Dayan abused his position to sway Begin to accept an accord with Egypt, that gave up every square inch of the Sinai to Sadat. This decision led directlyto Egypt today allowing the Sinai to be a rocket funnel for Hamas.
There were endless debts to be paid, and America offered Israel $3.2 billion in annual aid to keep its mouth shut. But Israel bore the existential brunt of Dayan sinking close to the entire Egyptian navy, but accidentally keeping afloat one American ship too many.
Lest one think, all this work is borderline and there is no recognition in the controlled mainstream media, I saved one letter and did not tape one phone call from Peter Hounam of the BBC and Sunday Times. He read my book Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin and met me in Israel. In his case, we could be dealing with an objective reporter. He was the reporter who broke the Vanunu revelations in the Sunday Times. Nonetheless, he is convinced my reporting of the Rabin murder is the right version of the facts. I gave him a copy of my new tape, Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin, recorded at the last Rabin convention in Jerusalem. He phoned and told me it was a "tour de force." He has committed himself to pursuing the Rabin murder in whatever form he can expose the truth. Now this is not the first time an established journalist from a mainstream media has made the same commitment. In every other case, the projects were forcibly halted. But, you keep pushing anyway.
by Barry Chamish
In my recent review of Jeff Gates very anti-McCain book, I cited his claim that:
- John McCain's father, led the government commission of inquiry which exonerated Israel for deliberately and with deadly purpose, almost sinking the USS Liberty in 1967.
The issue of the Liberty has deeply poisoned the American relationship with Israel. It is a far greater thorn than Israelis understand because, in fact, Israel did try to kill every sailor on board The Liberty. If I needed persuasion of that, I got it with the correspondence I began with two officers of the Liberty, as well as my personal meetings with British documentary maker, Peter Hounam, who made a highly damning of Israel film of the incident, shown on the BBC.
My conclusion, and it gibed well with Hounam's, was that Israel was creating another Lavon Affair, trying to lure the US into the war against Egypt, as it had done by bombing American targets in Cairo during the mid-50s. But one problem gnawed at me; The Liberty was hit on June 8, when Israel had already as good as won the Six Day War. In short, why bother?
The standard pro-Israel line was taken by the Loftus and Arons book, The Secret War Against The Jews. Within, the authors assert that the Liberty was intercepting Israeli military messages and funneling them to the Syrians. The two Liberty officers I had a dialog with vehemently denied the claim, and frankly, I believed them way more than Loftus and Arons. After all, they were there, while Loftus and Arons collected known public sources into a book filled with no shortage of errors.
That's how things stood until information arrived on the wave of my last article. Admiral McCain was not covering for Israel, he was protecting Pres. Lyndon Johnson, who ordered Israel to attack the Liberty. It all began when my reader, Maria, sent the following internet data:
www.echarcha.com/forum/showthread.php?t=24357
June 8, 1967 during the 6 day war between Israel and the Arab Nations President Lyndon B. Johnson sends the U.S.S liberty to collect electronic intelligence in the eastern Mediterranean. The clearly marked U.S. ship was 14 miles off the coast of Israel in international waters. Israel's aircraft identified the ship as an American vessel and an ally. At 2:00 PM that afternoon the U.S.S. Liberty was attacked by two unmarked Mirage 3 fighter bombers The U.S.S. Liberty was then attacked by three Israeli torpedo boats bearing Israeli flags. The torpedo boats opened fire with high caliber machine guns and launched torpedos. The torpedo boats then began strafing life-rafts in the water, an international war crime. During the attack the U.S.S. Liberty continually called the 6th fleet which was nearby begging for air support. Two groups of fighter aircraft were sent to defend the Liberty but unbelievably they were recalled by the White House. The Admiral in Command of the sixth fleet called Washington to confirm the recall order. Secretary of Defence MacNamara came on the line followed by the president himself who told the Admiral, "I want that G D Ship going to the bottom" Finally after 3 hours into the attack a Russian spy ship appeared so the Israelis withdrew because there were witnesses allowing the Liberty to limp home to safety. Here is what really took place. President Johnson had personal control over the ship, made a backroom deal with Israel to attack it with an order to kill everyone on board. Then the attack was to be blamed on Egypt and U.S. would enter the war and take over the entire Middle East.
If Johnson made Israel do the sinking, Israel is much of the way home to redemption. Cutting to the chase, it wasn't Israel's idea. Israel still did the killing, and muffed the attack with an amateurish show of its military prowess, but it wasn't the leader of the hit squad. That's far better than being left in the lurch as the mafia's don.
So I spoke with the author and broadcaster Dr. Stan Monteith, (www.radioliberty.com) who has long researched the Liberty attack and boasts a 4 CD set of interviews, including with the seamen and officers of the ship. He was direct: "Of course Johnson gave the order. But he received his orders from higher up."
"So the attack on The Liberty wasn't an Israeli decision?" I asked.
"It was an American action forced on Israel," he answered.
More research was necessary and this led to such an obvious scenario! The Americans sink ships to start wars. The Maine was sunk to get the Spanish American War rolling. The Lusitania and the attacks on the shipyard at Pearl Harbor were caused by provocation and deliberate military neglect, but they got the Americans to stumble awkwardly and reluctantly into two world wars. But Johnson himself was an active proponent of the sink a ship and go to war philosophy:
1964 The Gulf of Tonkin In the summer of 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson needed a pretext to commit the American people to the expanding covert war in south East Asia. So the Gulf of Tonkin incident was staged claiming that Vietnamese patrol boats had attacked a U.S. destroyer off the coast of Vietnam. This staged incident paved the way for 58,000 American deaths and over 1.500.000 Vietnamese.
The reason to sacrifice over 200 American sailors was the American, and actually accurate perception, that Egyptian President, Gamal Abdul Nasser had drifted into the Soviet camp and threatened to make much of the Middle East, Russian clients. As Johnson saw it, Nasser had to go and fast. A pretext for war was all that was necessary. But Israel just couldn't sink The Liberty and screwed up the best laid plans of the whole operation.
Nasser was not ideologically a communist. And America wanted him as an ally so much that the Eisenhower administration abandoned its allies Britain, France and Israel, who won the Sinai War of 1956, but excluded the US from the action and the spoils. It was over a dam that Nasser brought the Soviets to the most powerful country in the Middle East, with much communist mischief to follow. Following the Sinai Campaign, Nasser's grandiosity was so out of touch with reality, that he demanded the Americans build him a huge dam at Aswan and pay for it to boot.
American engineers went to work and foresaw a project that would hold back the Nile's silt, little by little collecting behind the dam, making the dam less efficient until it would serve no purpose at all; meanwhile killing off the small fish of the Nile delta which feed off the silt, ultimately destroying most of the fishlife of the Eastern Mediterranean. Back on land, farmers would be forced to turn to chemical fertilizers to replace the silt, much of the world's greatest storehouse of antiquities would be drowned, all the while Egypt had enough oil to provide electricity of the non-hydro variety just as cheaply.
The Americans said, no. And all the dire predictions came true. So, Nasser threw the Americans out of Egypt and brought Russian communism in, with promises to spread the ideology. All this happened because the Americans had betrayed their natural allies of the Suez Campaign, and they now felt humiliated and really ticked off. Especially when Israel used French planes to destroy the Air Forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan.
Sinking The Liberty would get rid of Nasser for good, and quickly create an American-led Egypt, with an obedient quisling like Anwar Sadat, though he would rise a few years later after Nasser was given a killing stroke at age 51. This point is not proven but when I told Peter Hounam my suspicions, he answered, "You know, a lot of Arabs think that."
And finally we have the reason Moshe Dayan turned into Israel's top traitor of his day. As Chief-0f-Staff of the IDF, Dayan HAD to have given the order for his Air Force to sink the Liberty. Johnson may have given the actual command, the American navy did nothing to rescue the stricken ship, but Dayan had the blood of 37 American sailors on his hands and if he didn't play major league ball, he and Israel would be turned into friendless lepers.
Dayan began quickly, by handing over control of the Temple Mount, won by Israel with buckets of blood, to the Jordanian Wakf, the consequences of which are felt deeply to this day. Then in October 1973, as Defence Minister, under the duress of Henry Kissinger, Dayan agreed to give Egypt and Syria a full day to regain lost territory. The consequence of not pre-empting the Yom Kippur War was over 2000 dead Jewish soldiers in two days. After Pres. Carter forced PM Begin to take Dayan into his cabinet as foreign minister in 1977, Dayan abused his position to sway Begin to accept an accord with Egypt, that gave up every square inch of the Sinai to Sadat. This decision led directlyto Egypt today allowing the Sinai to be a rocket funnel for Hamas.
There were endless debts to be paid, and America offered Israel $3.2 billion in annual aid to keep its mouth shut. But Israel bore the existential brunt of Dayan sinking close to the entire Egyptian navy, but accidentally keeping afloat one American ship too many.
Lest one think, all this work is borderline and there is no recognition in the controlled mainstream media, I saved one letter and did not tape one phone call from Peter Hounam of the BBC and Sunday Times. He read my book Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin and met me in Israel. In his case, we could be dealing with an objective reporter. He was the reporter who broke the Vanunu revelations in the Sunday Times. Nonetheless, he is convinced my reporting of the Rabin murder is the right version of the facts. I gave him a copy of my new tape, Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin, recorded at the last Rabin convention in Jerusalem. He phoned and told me it was a "tour de force." He has committed himself to pursuing the Rabin murder in whatever form he can expose the truth. Now this is not the first time an established journalist from a mainstream media has made the same commitment. In every other case, the projects were forcibly halted. But, you keep pushing anyway.
Was Lyndon Johnson a Lunatic?
Scroll to the very
bottom and see his former national security advisor McGeorge Bundy compare
Lyndon Johnson to Joseph Stalin. Note Bundy was brought into manage the Six Day
War so he saw LBJ up close and personal during that dramatic crisis (including
the attack on the USS Liberty).
Longtime LBJ aide George Reedy on what a
Narcissist, Bully, Sadist & Lout Lyndon Johnson was
Reedy worked for LBJ from 1951-1965
George Reedy on LBJ:
"He was notorious
for abusing his staff, for driving people to the verge of exhaustion- and
sometimes over the verge; for paying the lowest salaries for the longest hours
of work on Capitol Hill; for publicly humiliating his most loyal aides; for
keeping his office in a constant state of turmoil by playing games with
reigning male and female favorites."
"There was no sense
in which he could be described as a pleasant man. His manners were atrocious-
not just slovenly but frequently calculated to give offense. Relaxation was
something he did not understand and would not accord to others. He was a bully
who would exercise merciless sarcasm on people who could not fight back but
could only take it. Most important, he had no sense of loyalty- at least, not
the kind of loyalty I learned on the Irish Near North Side of Chicago, where
life was bearable only because people who had very little in the way of wordly
goods had very much in the way of mutual trust. To Johnson, loyalty was a
one-way street: all take on his part and all give on the part of everyone else-
his family, his friends, his supporters."
[Reedy, p. x]
"He was cruel, even
to people who had virtually walked the last mile for him. Occasionally he would
demonstrate his gratitude for extraordinary services by a lavish gift- an
expensive suit of clothes, an automobile, jewelry for the women on his staff.
The gift was always followed by an outpouring of irreverent abuse (I believe he
thought his impulse was an example of weakness for which he had to atone) and a
few members of his entourage noted that gift was invariably tax deductible on
his part. Furthermore, some of the most lavish presents frequently went to
members who had performed no services other than adulation. And when his
personal desires were at stake, he had absolutely no consideration for the
situation in which other people found themselves. They were required to drop
everything to wait upon him and were expected to forget their private lives in
his interests. He even begrudged one of his top assistants a telephone call to
his wife on their wedding anniversary, which the assistant was spending on the
LBJ ranch and his wife at their home in Washington, D.C." [Reedy, xiv]
"He had a habit of
adopting all useful thoughts as his own, and often the originator of highly
important ideas would forget his or her own authorship in a matter of hours and
be ready to swear that the whole thing originated in the brain of "the
Leader." [Reedy, xvi]
"He had a
remarkable capacity to convince himself that he held the principles he should
hold at any given time, and there was something charming about the air of
injured innocence with which he would treat anyone who brought forth evidence
that he had held other views in the past. It was not an act. His whole life was
lived in the present and he was tenacious in his conviction that history always
conformed to current necessities." [Reedy, p. 2]
"To complicate the
picture, his own view of what had happened frequently shifted. To the
outside world, this appeared as a form of mendacity. It is my firm belief, from
close association over a number of years, that the man never told a deliberate
lie. But he had a fantastic capacity to persuade himself that the
"truth" which was convenient for the present was the truth and
anything that conflicted with it was the prevarication of enemies. He literally
willed what was in his mind to be reality and, as he was a master at imposing
his will upon the people, the society, and the world around him, he saw no
reason for history to be exempt from the process."
[Reedy, p. 3]
"That other man had
to be Robert Kennedy, whom he regarded as the focal point for all the forces
who sought the downfall of Lyndon Johnson." [Reedy, 6]
"As a rule, his
language colorful, pointed, and what can most charitably be described as
"earthy." His "humor" was based chiefly on the contents of
toilet bowls and he was addicted to "pie-in-the-face" practical
jokes. His favorite spectator sport was watching bovine copulation and he
gloried in summoning fastidious males to his bathroom, where conference and
excretion could be intermingled. His consumption of beverage alcohol was for
purposes other than sacramental and in quantities that did not accord St.
Paul's "a little wine for thy stomach's sake." [Reedy, p.34-35]
"They had to be
young, they had to be cheerful, they had to be malleable, and it helped if they
were slightly antagonistic to him at the outset. He dearly loved to convert an
anti-Johnson liberal with a slightly plump figure and a dowdy wardrobe into a
lean, impeccably clad female whose face was masked in cosmetics and who adored
the ground he walked on (or, at least, told him she adored the ground he walked
on). To her, he would pour out all his dreams and aspirations in what (as it
was described to me later by one woman with a sense of humor) was an incredibly
potent monologue. The motif was that he trusted her loyalty and needed her wisdom
and she had to come with him to occupy the top spot in his organization. It was
an offer rarely refused.
The reality was somewhat
different. The best the woman could hope for was a position as his private
secretary. She learned very quickly that it was not the post of a top
"advisor." He had no respect for the political intelligence of any
woman except his wife- and, unfortunately, he usually listened to her only when
he had done something stupid and had to find a bail-out manuever.
There were many compensations
for the reigning favorite. She could look forward to travel under plush
conditions, attendance at glamourous social functions with the Johnsons (he
would always find a "safe" male for an escort), expensive clothes,
and frequent trips to New York, where a glamorous make-up artist would initiate
her into the mysteries of advanced facial make-up, resulting in cosmetics so
lavishly applied that they became a mask."
[Reedy, p. 36]
"Very few reigning
favorites were allowed to run the office for any great length of time. One of
them, who held his attention longer than the rest and for whom he exhibited
some really deep feelings, was married off, probably because a continued
relationship was incompatible with the vice presidency.
The others dropped back
into the pool known to the male staff members (speaking under their breaths) as
"the harem." His greatest joy was traveling with a large number of
women over whom he could fuss- buying their clothes, supervising their diets,
and admonishing them at every public stop to "put on some fresh
lipstick." It was quite a show. He may have been "just a country boy
from the central hills of Texas" but he had many of the instincts of a
Turkish sultan of Istanbul."
[Reedy, p. 37]
"The result of all
of this was an office in a constant state of turmoil. A new reigning favorite
meant a period of several weeks in which workable routines would be upset;
morale would fall to all-time lows; efficiency would go out the window."
(Reedy, p. 37)
"He was rarely
candid, and when he spoke of personal matters his words were such a mixture of
fantasy, euphemism, and half-truth that it was impossible to separate out the
nuggets of revelation. In this case, however, the facts are compelling. As it became
clearer that inexorable forces were pushing him into the small circle of men
from whom the nation picks its chief executives, he developed a pattern of
conduct that indicated beyond a doubt a desire to revert to childhood. He
intermingled, almost daily, childish tantrums; threats of resignation (which I
realize in retrospect were the equivalent of the small boy who says he will
take his baseball and go home); wild drinking bouts; a remarkable nonpaternal
yen for young girls; an almost frantic desire to be in the company of young
people."
[Reedy, p. 56]
"A few weeks after
his heart attack in 1955, he summed up the whole problem when he told a
conference of doctors, gathered to evaluate his condition, that he enjoyed
nothing but whiskey, sunshine, and sex. Without realizing what he was doing, he
had outlined succinctly the tragedy of his life."
[Reedy, p. 56]
"The drinking bouts
became increasingly heavy and increasingly frequent. When he was with staff
members, there would usually be a point at which he would launch a tirade
reviling an assistant for a long series of fancied wrongs and assumed
inadequacies. ...
They were invariably
preceded by a wild drinking bout. He was not an alcoholic or a heavy drinker in
the commonly accepted sense of those words. But there were occasions when he
would pour down Scotch and soda in a virtually mechanical motion in rhythm with
the terrible tension building visibly within him and communicating itself to
his listeners. The warning signs were unmistakable and those with past
experience tried to get away before the inevitable flood of invective. As they
found out, it was rarely possible.
[Reedy 56-57]
"As the 1960
campaign drew closer, the drinking bouts surpassed all previous records.... The
1960 campaign was a nightmare for the staff- a weird collage of beratings,
occasional drunken prowls up and down hotel corridors, and frantic efforts to
sober him up in the mornings so he could make the speaking engagements. Here
again he came close to disaster. He spent a whole night in a hotel room in El
Paso pouring invective upon the head of a bewildered advance man...On the stump
he had very few peers. But in his rooms at night, the drinking patterns
continued as did the threats of leaving the campaign." [Reedy, pp. 58-59]
"Someone had told him about the theories of subliminal conditioning then making the rounds and his methodology was to mutter "sincere" over and over in the presence of journalists. When he could insert the word into a sentence, he would do so even when it had to be dragged in by the heels, kicking and screaming. When he could find no sentence that was suitable, he would repeat "sincere" under his breath, over and over to the absolute bewilderment of his audience. Fortunately, he dropped the effort before articles could appear questioning his sanity."
[Reedy, p. 68]
"This occurred when
he was vice president and obsessed with the idea that Bobby Kennedy was
directing an anti-LBJ campaign. His elevation to the presidency made absolutely
no difference. Brush after brush took place with the journalists who, in the
early days of his administration, accepted him as a miracle worker to be
treated with downright reverence. Eventually, however, his conviction that they
were opposed to him created an opposition- always the outcome of paranoia. He
did not attribute this to his own shortcomings but to the machinations of the
man he regarded as his arch foe. At this stage of the game, Bobby was helpless
to do him much mischief but LBJ still believed that there was a plot for which
the press was the principal instrument." [Reedy, p. 70]
"In a very
important sense, LBJ was a man who had been deprived of the normal joys of
life. He knew how to struggle; he knew how to outfox political opponents; he
knew how to make money; he knew how to swagger. But he did not know how to
live. He had been programmed for business and for business only and outside of
his programming he was lost." [Reedy, p. 81]
"I never fully
understood this or other similar episodes. In the back of his mind, it is possible
that he believed these visits were inspired by Bobby Kennedy as part of a
"plot" to delete the name LBJ from the ticket in 1964. This had
become an obsession with him- a conviction that peopled the world with agents
of the president's brother all seeking to do him in. Someone- I never found out
who- very actively fed this belief and kept him in a perpetual state of
anxiety. This reached major proportions with the outbreak of the Billy Sol
Estes and Bobby Baker scandals....
There was absolutely
nothing to keep Johnson's name in the Billy Sol Estes story except the LBJ
refusal to deal with the press. He covered up when there was nothing to cover
and thereby created the suspicion that he was involved somehow. His reasoning
was simple: The whole thing existed as a Bobby Kennedy plot and to talk about
it to the press was to help Bobby Kennedy.
About the same thing
happened in the Bobby Baker scandal except that in this instance he was really
close to the central figure in the expose. He had considered Bobby as virtually
a son and succeeded in promoting him to be secretary of the Senate Majority at
an age when Bobby should have been in knee britches."
[Reedy 134-135]
"But Johnson
refused to accept the obvious explanation. He insisted that it stayed in the
press because of conscious pressure from Bobby Kennedy, who, he claimed, was
holding daily briefings with the sole purpose of knifing LBJ in the back. He
was so convinced of the existence of these meetings that I made a personal
effort to check on them myself. There was not the least bit of evidence that
they were taking place or had taken place. I am not a master spy but it is
hardly likely that during that period the attorney general of the United States
could have engaged in such an organized effort without one of my newspaper
friends tipping me off.
This viewpoint did not
impress Johnson in the slightest. He merely said I was "naive" and
that he would demonstrate the truth to me. The next time the two of us were
together with a correspondent, he lectured the man on how wrong it was to ask
stooge questions and then said: "I know all about those briefings
downtown." It became apparent at once the correspondent did not know not
know about them but that did not stop LBJ. He continued his lectures to other
correspondents- a practice that led to some speculation as to his mental
stability. Fortunately, the speculation did not appear in print.
These episodes were
merely ludicrious. Much more serious was his interpretation of all his
relations with the administration as involved with "plots." He
resisted- to the point of hysteria- the round-the-world trip which later became
famous for his discovery of Bashir, the camel driver, in Karachi.... He raved,
at least to me, that Bobby Kennedy was trying to set him up.
[Reedy, pp. 136-137]
"Those of us who
had to deal with what few substantive matters characterized the vice presidency
found it increasingly difficult to secure decisions from him. The consumption
of booze increased as did the number of hours he would spend in bed at home
just staring at the ceiling and growling at anyone who came into the room...
There was some demon within the man himself that would have operated in any
position short of the presidency."
[Reedy, pp. 139-140]
"Why Jack Kennedy
offered Lyndon Johnson the vice presidency and why Lyndon Johnson accepted it,
I will never know. Frankly, I doubt whether anyone will ever know now
that the principal protagonists are dead. My guess is that it represented a
shrewd political judgement on Kennedy's part."
[Reedy, p. 141]
"Behind the scenes,
however, the campaign was grinding agony for a staff which felt a duty to the
campaign to keep the seamy side from showing. There were some terrible moments-
drunken, aimless wanderings through a hotel corridor in Chicago (fortunately
blocked off by police) in which he tried to crawl into the bed of the female
correspondent (I got the impression as we led him away that he was seeking
comfort, not sex); a wild drinking bout in El Paso in which he spent the night
cursing and raving at a good friend; continuous torrents of abuse directed at
his staff. It was amazing to watch him go out in public and make truly
compelling speeches off-the-cuff after such episodes."
[Reedy, p. 142]
"Whatever the
reality, however, the LBJ paranoia continued to mount. He was convinced that
Bobby Kennedy had virtual control over the nation's press and that this control
was being used to pave the way for a "dump LBJ" campaign in 1964.
This was a period in which he proceeded to "hang around" the outer
offices of the White House- something like a precinct captain sitting in the
anteroom of a ward leader hoping to be recognized. It was not a very
propossessing sight and certainly not worthy of a man of his stature."
[Reedy, p. 147]
"He was not a man
of thought and, instead, it became for him the period of intense misery. He
obviously had not found what he had expected to find in the vice presidency,
and while his intellect was keen, it was not of the variety that could grant
him inner serenity. What could have been to a philosopher an era of growth was,
in his eyes, a time of shame and failure.
[Reedy, p. 147]
"Johnson campaigned
as though there were a real contest with the outcome in doubt. In time I came
to understand that the act of campaigning had importance to him that was
totally unrelated to the goals. There was some form of vitalizing force in
frenzied crowds that drove him into a state of ectasy...
"What was even more
interesting was the scene that invariably followed a session with a crowd.
Despite his tapping technique, some people would always be able to grasp his
palm for a fleeting moment. In such instances, it would be necessary for him to
tear loose- leaving long scratches on the back of his hand. He loved those
scratches. A medical attendant aboard Air Force One was ready with some
soothing ointment for a gentle massage. LBJ would insist that everyone on the
plane cluster around during the massage period and he would point lovingly to
each scratch, describing in detail the person responsible for it. The first
time I witnessed the performance, it seemed to me that he was thinking in terms
of the Stigmata from the Cross. But the performance was much too sensual for
such an interpretation. There was something post-orgasmic about the scene. A
psychiatrist could have had a field day."
[Reedy, p. 152]
"The trouble was
that Johnson himself became a victim of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. It froze
him into a totally uncompromising position where he had no alternatives- or
thought he had no alternative- to feeding more and more draftees into the meat
grinder. He had never, in his entire life, learned to confess error, and this
quality- merely amusing or exasperating in a private person- resulted in cosmic
tragedy for a president. He had to prove that he had been right all along. And
this meant that he had to do more of what he had been doing despite the
demonstrable failure of his Vietnam policies."
[Reedy, p. 165]
"There were a few
key traits to his personality and it is unlikely that he shed them. As a human
being he was a miserable person- a bully, sadist, lout and egoist. He had no
sense of loyalty (despite his protestations that it was a quality that he
valued above all others) and he enjoyed tormenting those who had done the most
for him. He seemed to take a special delight in humiliating those who had cast
their lot in with him. It may well be that this was the result of a form of
self-loathing in which he concluded that there had to be something wrong with
anyone who would associate with him."
[Reedy, p. 171]
"His lapses from
civilized conduct were deliberate and usually intended to subordinate someone
else to his will. He did disgusting things because he realized other people had
to pretend that they did not mind. It was his method of bending them to his
designs.
[Reedy, pp. 171-172]
Arthur Schlesinger from his Journals
1952-2000
January 6 1963
The New Year opened
quietly, with the President [JFK] still in Florida. On Friday, January 4, I
went to the National Archives for the opening of an exhibition celebrating the
centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. Bobby gave the speech - it was
derived from a speech I had written for the President for use on January 1 by
television from Palm Beach, but which the President had decided not to use on
the grounds that a segregated city was hardly the best place from which to make
an emancipation speech. It was a good speech; and, at the end, Joe Rauh passed
me a note saying, "Poor Lyndon." I asked Joe what he meant. He said, "Lyndon
must know he is through. Bobby is going to be the next President."
[Schlesinger, Journals,
p. 185]
October 13 1963
Frank Wisner and Mac
Herter went into a long bit about how terrible it was for Jackie Kennedy to go
off on the Onassis yacht. Wisner said that "everyone" in Europe knew
that Lee Radziwill was having an affair with Onassis, and that Jackie was along
as cover. The gossip of the idle rich is exceedingly boring.
[Schlesinger, Journals,
p. 201]
March 25 1964
"There is nothing
more dangerous, so far as I can see, than being accepted by Johnson as one of
his own. I think he has been meticulously polite to those in the White House
whom he regards as Kennedy men. But, when he starts regarding them as Johnson
men, their day is over. He begins to treat them as Johnson men, which means
like servants. This is what is happening to Pierre Salinger. Of all the Kennedy
people, he seemed to make the transition most easily - which meant that LBJ
began shouting at him, ordering him around and humiliating him just as if he were
Jenkins or Valenti. Teddy White told me a terrible story in which Johnson made
Salinger eat a plate of bean soup at a White House luncheon out of pure delight
in the exercise of authority. As soon as people become Johnson men, he seems to
stop listening to them and to use them only as instruments of his own
desires."
[Schlesinger, Journals,
p. 225]
"June 16 1964
I went to New York on
Tuesday night for a dinner in honor of Jackie to thank contributors to the Library.
Afterward we went to the Smiths'. I had a long talk with JBK. She started to
tell me about the trip back from Dallas and the effort made to get her to
change her dress when Jim Fosburgh came up and we had a change of subject. A
few nights ago (June 5) at the French Embassy, Godfrey McHugh gave me a long
account of that ghastly afternoon. Godfrey told me that they did not know the
Johnsons were on Air Force One. He and Kenny kept asking the pilot to take off,
and were told that the plane had to wait for Mrs. Johnson's luggage - a
mysterious excuse, since none of them knew that the Johnson's were already
occupying the presidential apartments in the back of the plane. Godfrey also
said that LBJ was in a panic at the hospital, convinced that there was a
conspiracy and that he would be the next to go. Godfrey also gave me a
horrendous account of his visit to the LBJ Ranch before the [Ludwig] Erhand
visit in December - Johnson's crudeness, discourtesy, drunkenness, etc."
[Schlesinger, Journals,
p. 227-228]
July 23 1964
Bobby seemed
philosophical about the vice presidency. His thoughts are still turning to the
idea of spending a year at Oxford reading and writing.
We talked a good deal
about his relationshp to LBJ. Obviously Johnson's actions in the first 24 hours
after JFK's death left wounds which will take a long time to heal. Bobby
commented that Sarge Shriver had taken it on himself to harmonize the situation
then and had only made it worse. Bobby said, "I told Sarge that if I
wanted him to intervene I was capable of asking him to do so." His
references to Sarge were fairly cool, and he seemed scornful of the notion that
Sarge might be a serious possibility for the vice presidency.
After a silence Bobby
said, "You know the worst thing Johnson has said? ... Once he told Pierre
Salinger, 'When I was young in Texas, I used to know a cross-eyed boy. His eyes
were crossed, and so was his character. Sometimes I think that, when you
remember the assassination of Trujillo and the assassination of Diem, what happened
to Kennedy may have been divine retribution.'"
[Schlesinger, Journals,
p. 227-228]
[My note: John Kennedy
had a lazy eye and was a bit cross eyed.]
October 30 1966
"[RFK] talked a bit
about campaigning with Johnson. He said that, after a day together in New York,
he said to Johnson back at the hotel, "Did you enjoy the day?"
Johnson looked at him earnestly and said "Of all the things in life, this
is what I most enjoy doing." Bobby said it to us incredulously"
"Imagine saying that, of all the things in life, this is what you like the
most."
At Clark's we talked
about the [William] Manchester book [The Death of a President], and this
led on to a discussion of the autopsy photographs and then of the Warren
Report. RFK wondered how long he could continue to avoid comment on the report.
It is evident that he believes it was a poor job and will not endorse it, but
that he is unwilling to criticize it and thereby reopen the whole tragic
business."
[Schlesinger, Journals,
p. 254]
December 10 1967
Dick [Goodwin] suggested
that LBJ, if reelected, would use all his wiles and powers to prevent RFK's
nomination. (Bobby interjected, "He would die and make Hubert President
rather than let me get it.") Ted felt that he would try this, but his
capacity to do damage would be limited."
[Schlesinger, Journals,
p. 268]
March 13 1968
"I went to dinner
[Tuesday] at Ham Armstrong's - the Anthony Edens, Jack McCloys, Bill and Judith
Moyesr, Nin Ryan. I had a fascinating talk with Bill. He thinks that LBJ is now
well sealed off from reality; the White House atmosphere, he said, is
"impenetrable." He also feels that LBJ explains away all criticism as
based on personal or political antagonism; Bill used the word
"paranoid." He said that he had himself such a personal debt to
Johnson that it had taken him a long time to reach these conclusions, and even
longer to say them; but he felt that four more years of Johnson would be
ruinous for the country."
[Schlesinger, Journals,
p. 280]
April 4 1968
David Karr called today.
He had spent an hour yesterday with LBJ and says that it was
"terrifying." Johnson was, first of all, filled with self-pity. He
seemed very hurt over the Kennedy attitude toward him and kept talking about
his "partnership" with JFK. "Then my partner died, and I took
over the partnership. I kept on the eleven cowhands [the cabinet]. Some of the
tenderfeet [Arthur Schlesinger, Jr?] left me. But I kept on. If he is up there
in heaven looking down, I know that he knows what I have done."
He was bitter about RFK.
He said for example, "On civil rights I was stronger than he was,"
instancing some issue about the guarantee of home mortgage loans, which, he
said, Bobby would not put into the civil rights bill; ... He also talked about
Bobby in connection with the Bay of Pigs (with which Bobby had no connection)
and said that the credibility gap began then in the Kennedy administration and
not in the Johnson administration. And he kept talking about an alleged affair
RFK had with Candy Bergen in Paris.
[Schlesinger, Journals,
p. 286-287]
January 14 1969
I took part with Bill
Moyers, Jack Valenti, Eric Goldman and Ted Sorensen (in Kansas City) in a
National Education Television commentary. Afterward Bill and I went over to the
Algonquin for a drink. We talked a bit about
the problem of writing about Johnson. Bill said, as he has said to me before
(and Dick Goodwin has said even more often), that one great trouble was that no
one would believe it. He said that he could not see how one could write about
Johnson the private monster and Johnson the public statesman and construct a
credible narrative. "He is a sick man," Bill said. At one point he
and Dick Goodwin became so concerned that they decided to read up on mental
illness - Dick read up on paranoia and Bill on the manic-depressive cycle."
[Schlesinger, Journals,
p. 306]
January
15 1971
Last
night I spoke at the annual dinner of the Century. I sat next to Mac Bundy and
we discussed, among other things, the Khrushchev memoirs. I remarked on the
curious resemblance between Khrushchev's account of the life around Stalin -
the domineering and obsessive dictator, the total boredom of the social
occasions revolving around him, the horror when invited to attend and the even
greater horror when not invited - and Albert Speer's account of the life around
Hitler. Mac said, "When I read Khrushchev, I was reminded of something
else in addition - my last days in the White House with LBJ."
[Schlesinger,
Journals, p. 333]
LBJ and his epic mental instabilities: read Power Beyond Reason the Mental Collapse of
Lyndon Johnson by D. Jablow Hirshman (2002)
This is a must read book
on LBJ: http://www.amazon.com/Power-Beyond-Reason-Collapse-Johnson/dp/1569802432/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1371480175&sr=8-1&keywords=the+mental+collapse+of+lbj
It goes into detail on
what a "functional lunatic" and sometimes un-functional lunatic the
man was.
The governor of Texas
Allan Shivers called LBJ a murderer.
His national security
advisor McGeorge Bundy compared LBJ to Joseph Stalin.
His longtime aide George
Reedy calls LBJ sadistic, mean, cruel with the mentality of a Turkish Sultan.
Bill Moyers called LBJ a
sick man.
Richard Goodwin called
him paranoid.
Psychologists, consulted
by Moyers and Goodwin, gave a back of the envelop diagnosis of LBJ’s symptons
and said LBJ was a "paranoid in disintegration" that means falling
apart.
Arthur Schlesinger
called LBJ a monster.
Denis Healey, former
British Defense Minister, called LBJ a monster.
Robert Kennedy called
LBJ an animal.
Ed Tatro, respected JFK
researcher, has called LBJ an American Hitler.
Robert Morrow says
Lyndon Johnson walked hand in hand with Satan his whole life.
Robert Kennedy on LBJ: “mean, bitter, vicious, an animal, in many ways; I
think he’s got this other side to him that makes his relationships with other
human beings very difficult, unless you want to kiss his behind all the
time.". . . "Bobby later complained that Johnson ‘lies all
the time. I’m telling you, he just lies
continuously, about everything. In every conversation I have with him, he lies.
As I’ve said, he lies even when he doesn’t have to.’”
Here is Robert Caro on LBJ:
"And by 1941, also the major patterns of his entire life are established and clear. In attaining this influence, he has displayed a genius for discerning a path to power, an utter ruthlessness in destroying obstacles in that path, and a seemingly bottomless capacity for deceit, deception and betrayal in moving along it"
"And by 1941, also the major patterns of his entire life are established and clear. In attaining this influence, he has displayed a genius for discerning a path to power, an utter ruthlessness in destroying obstacles in that path, and a seemingly bottomless capacity for deceit, deception and betrayal in moving along it"
Roger Stone says Nixon “never flatly said who was responsible [for
the murder of JFK]. But he would say, ‘Both Johnson and I wanted to be president, but the only difference
was I wouldn’t kill for it.” When Stone would press Nixon on
who killed Kennedy Nixon “would shiver and say Texas.”
By 1973, Barry Goldwater was convinced that LBJ was behind the JFK
assassination.
Sen. Barry Goldwater (1973)
was convinced that Lyndon Johnson was behind the JFK assassination
Goldwater told Jeffrey Hoff that in October, 1973
At
the 2012 Dallas JFK Lancer conference I ran into JFK researcher Jeffrey Hoff of
Arizona. Jeffrey Hoff was a leadership position in the local Cochise County
Democratic Club from 1980-1983. He used to be a member of SDS in the 1960's.
Now he installs "off the grid" solar systems. I briefly interviewed
Hoff on Saturday, November 17, 2012 in Dallas, TX, at the JFK Lancer
conference.
Jeffrey
Hoff told me that in October, 1973 he met Barry Goldwater at a Republican
political picnic in Willcox in Cochise County, AZ. I asked him how he ended up
at a Republican picnic and he told me his friend Louise Parker, a friend and
"real estate lady" from an Arizona "pioneer" family, had
invited him. She said do you want to meet Barry Goldwater? Hoff said yes.
When Hoff met Sen. Barry Goldwater, Hoff, who had a keen interest in the
JFK assassination, brought up that topic.
Sen. Barry Goldwater told Hoff in October, 1973, that he (Goldwater) was
convinced that Lyndon Johnson was behind the JFK assassination and that the
Warren Commission was a complete cover up. Hoff got the impression
that Goldwater had told others privately the same thing. I asked Hoff how confident was Goldwater when he was
making these statements. Answer: Goldwater was very confident.
Jeffrey
Hoff currently (2012) lives about 35 miles from Pierce, AZ. Lyndon Johnson died
in January, 1973. J. Edgar Hoover had died in May, 1972. Allen Dulles died in
January, 1969.
What about Robert Kennedy? You can bet LBJ was gloriously
happy with that murder.
William Sullivan, the #4 man at the FBI, describes a high level
FBI meeting in spring, 1968. "Hoover was not present, and Clyde Tolson [FBI #2 and Hoover's
boyfriend] was presiding in his absence. I was one of eight men who heard
Tolson respond to the mention of [RFK's] name by saying, 'I hope someone shoots and
kills the son of a bitch.' This was five or six weeks before the California primary."
Jackie Kennedy in
her oral history: "Bobby told me this later, and I know Jack said it to me
sometimes. He said, 'Oh, God, can you imagine what would happen to the country
if Lyndon was president?'" ... "He didn't like the idea that Lyndon
would go on and be president because he was worried for the country. Bobby told
me that he'd had some discussions with him. I forget exactly how they were
planning or who they had in mind. It wasn't Bobby, but somebody. Do something
to name someone else in '68"
