THE ROMAN POET JUVENAL ASKED, “QUIS
CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES?” (“WHO WILL GUARD THE GUARDS THEMSELVES?”)
During the month of April, 1963, a number of strange events (or
metaphoric “threads”) occurred that, when woven together, suggest that they had
much in common, in the context of the evolving plot to murder President Kennedy
and ensure that a major change in the direction of the United States would be effected:
A military/intelligence take-over of the U.S. foreign policy was the immediate
goal of the forces behind the 1963 coup d’état. Domestic policy was the
secondary, albeit inseparable, goal.
The following list includes some of the most notable events that
took place over a two-week period of that month:
Wednesday, April 10TH:
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Someone – to this day
it is not clear who – shot a bullet through the window of retired General Edwin
Walker, a staunchly-conservative veteran of World War II and the Korean
War. Walker, despite having been appointed by President Eisenhower to
successfully lead the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in 1957,
later became associated with segregationists and members of the right-wing
organization the John Birch Society. In 1961 he became the only Army
general to resign after his controversial actions related to allegedly
indoctrinating troops under his command in Germany with materials that claimed
that communists were in control of much of the government and were behind the
racial integration program.
In 1961-62, Walker
began making numerous public speeches and, with the backing of the oil
billionaire and radio-host H. L. Hunt, he began a campaign to run for governor
of Texas, but finished last in the Republican primary election to John
Connally. On December 4, 1961, his photo appeared on the front cover
of Newsweek magazine under the title, “Thunder on the
Right.” It had become widely known in the area that Walker lived on
Turtle Creek Drive near downtown Dallas.
The bullet hit the
wooden window frame, which deflected it away from Walker. Many
researchers believe that it is unlikely that Oswald was involved in that
shooting, given that at least one eyewitness stated that there were two men on
the scene during the shooting, who escaped in separate cars immediately afterward;
Walker himself stated that, after going upstairs to get a pistol, he came back
down the stairway and, through a front window: “I saw a car at the bottom of
the church alley just making a turn onto Turtle Creek. The car was
unidentifiable. I could see the two back lights . . . I could see it moving out
. . . [it] would have been about at the right time for anybody that was making
a getaway.”[i] Oswald did not have routine access
to a car.
Many, if not most,
researchers have not only discounted the notion that Oswald fired the shot at
Walker but believe that it was part of the plan, intentionally designed to set
him up as a patsy as a specific instance of his supposed capacity for
violence. Given General Walker’s reputation as an arch-enemy of the
Kennedys, especially their efforts to pass civil rights reforms, it is possible
that he volunteered his assistance in such a caper. That Jack Ruby had
casually “fingered” Oswald soon after the event conveniently helped the
commission to make a case of violent behavior for a man not otherwise known for
that.
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As noted below, at least before Marina Oswald told the Warren
Commission that she believed that Lee was the shooter (the pressure on her —
including threats of deportation — must be considered regarding everything she
said), Walker suspected others of the act, specifically a neighbor of George De
Mohrenschildt named Dr. William Wolf. As noted below, Wolf would die nine days
later in a fire in his apartment.
Easter Weekend, April 13-14:
LBJ Reordered Security: From
JFK to Himself
White House aide Joseph W. Shimon worked in the highest security
levels of the Kennedy administration as a liaison with the Justice Department,
the CIA and the DC Metropolitan Police Department. He had many contacts at the
MPD, as that is where he started his law enforcement career decades earlier.
His college-age
daughter, Toni, who usually lived on Long Island with her mother, spent the
Easter weekend with her father, who lived across the Potomac River, in
Arlington, Virginia. According to researcher/author Peter Janney, on a walk
that weekend, Shimon told her about something that had been bothering him:[ii]
“The vice president [Lyndon Johnson] has asked me to give him
more security than the president,” said Shimon. As they continued walking,
Toni’s mood began to darken. There was something ominous in her father’s voice,
she remembered feeling.
“What’s he afraid of, Dad?” she asked her father.
“What do you think?” Her father responded, wanting to see if she
understood and connected the dots. There was an awkward silence. She knew she
was being tested. Toni would remember that moment and the darkness that had
come over her that day.
“Something’s coming down, Dad,” she said. “Does President
Kennedy know about this?”
“I haven’t mentioned
it,” she remembered her father telling her. “What do you think?” her father
asked again.
“Something’s going to happen and Johnson knows about it,” Toni
immediately responded.
That incident may have
been first sign of a continuing pattern that lasted the next seven months. It
was no coincidence that all local, state and federal law enforcement officers,
were removed in Dallas, unlike any other motorcade. The last vestiges of
President Kennedy’s protection stopped at the corner of Houston and Elm Streets
as the limousine entered Dealey Plaza. The fact that the only remaining
motorcycle escorts – which were supposed to be flanking the rear quarter-panels
of the limousine – had backed themselves completely away from the presidential
limousine and began riding alongside the Secret Service car after the turn on
Elm Street is proven by a photograph taken moments before JFK was hit for the
first time by Phillip Willis.[iii]
This point was of course ignored by the Warren Commission, along
with numerous other such indications of their complicity in the cover-up of
JFK’s assassination.
Another marker for the
same point, according to fifty-nine (59) witnesses, was their certainty that
the limousine slowed, and either nearly stopped, or came to a complete
momentary stop, as the head shots were fired.[iv] The fact that the brief stop
was not apparent in the Zapruder film indicates that at a number of frames had
been removed from it to achieve that result; and that could only have been
accomplished by both preplanning and post-manipulation of that film, suggesting
that it was not a spontaneous after-thought that Mr. Zapruder was positioned
there for that purpose.
Certain agents stated that the reason for reducing the number of
motorcycle escorts in the motorcade, and cutting two agents who normally rode
on the back bumper of the presidential limousine, was because President Kennedy
wanted to get “closer to the people” and that he had suddenly objected to the
noise of too many motorcycles around him, despite the fact that nothing of the
sort impeded the motorcades in San Antonio and Houston the day before the
Dallas event.
Yet neither of those
assertions had ever been expressed by JFK before, and many of Kennedy’s staff,
including his primary advance man Jerry Bruno, had expressed concern about the
level of hostility towards the President by right wing extremists in Dallas.
According to the long-time JFK assassination researcher Edgar Tatro,
Jerry Bruno had become so upset about the overall security risks in the Dallas
motorcade – as planned by John Connally at Johnson’s direction leading to
Bruno’s utter frustration – he had effectively been forced to step aside,
replaced by LBJ sycophant Bill Moyers who naturally approved everything that
Bruno had objected to. Tatro said: “Bruno was enraged when he testified to the
House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA); he said ‘Connally didn’t care
about Kennedy, he was a son-of-a-bitch’.”[v] Indeed the HSCA Report indicated
that Bruno testified that the decision was finally made when, “I met with
O’Donnell and Moyers who said that Connally was unbearable and on the verge of
cancelling the trip. They decided they had to let the Governor have his way.”
The conversation of Mr. Shimon with his daughter seven months
before the Dallas trip, described by author Peter Janney, should put to rest
any remaining doubt about the real source of the request for the reduced
presidential protection that took place in the Dallas motorcade: The planning
for that particular motorcade – and only that one – was managed entirely by
Vice President Lyndon Johnson and his sycophantic assistants, including Cliff
Carter, Bill Moyers and US attorney (later promoted to Federal Judge) Barefoot
Sanders, who resided in Dallas.
April 18:
On behalf of Lyndon Johnson, his highest-level aide at that
point, Walter Jenkins, wrote a letter to George DeMohrenschildt (then acting as
Lee Harvey Oswald’s “best friend”) in response to his request to get an
appointment with Johnson:
April 19:
Mr. and Mrs George
DeMohrenschildt left Dallas.
Having served his purpose as the enigmatic “handler” of Lee
Harvey Oswald during the period of his stay in the Ft. Worth-Irving-Dallas area
of Texas, it appears that CIA officials moved him into other positions,
probably to exit him from the play then underway. George would visit Washington
briefly before making an appearance at one of the most exclusive men’s clubs in
New York City – the Knickerbocker Club.
There he met with a
CIA operative code-named WUBRINY at a meeting attended by C. Frank Stone III,
head of the CIA’s European clandestine section, and M. Clemard Joseph Charles,
the banker who de Mohrenschildt would become closely identified with in Haiti.
From New York he returned to Washington, where, in the process of setting up
mineral concessions and arranging to acquire a sisal plantation in Haiti, de
Mohrenschildt and Charles would meet, mysteriously, with Lyndon Johnson’s
military advisor Howard Burris, to set up a meeting with Johnson himself by his
highest-level assistant, Walter Jenkins.[vi] Due to Johnson’s customary secrecy
measures, it is not clear when and where that meeting was held or what was
discussed, but that kind of secrecy suggests the subject was of a sinister
nature.
According to Penn
Jones, DeMohrenschildt “may have been rushed away due to the strange death of
his next door neighbor, Dr. William T. Wolf, who burned to death in his
apartment on that day. General Edwin Walker said he suspected Wolf in
relation to the Walker shooting attempt.”[vii]
April 23-24:
- Adele Edisen’s Strange Encounter — the Mysterious Jose Rivera
– The Title of Chapter 3 of H.
P. Albarelli Jr.’s book Secret Order:
Investigating the High Strangeness and Synchronicity in the JFK
Assassination, recounts in lengthy detail bizarre
encounters Ms. Edisen had with a very strange man named Dr. Jose A.
Rivera. By her account, on April 23rd in
Washington DC, Rivera made numerous comments that strongly suggested he
had been briefed extensively on plans to assassinate President
Kennedy. These assertions, given that they had not previously met
each other (except briefly the previous week at a medical conference in
Atlantic City), were brazenly candid and suggested that he had very
recently been exposed to what were supposed to be top secret and highly
classified planning documents or oral briefs. One example of such a
comment was, as they drove past the White House on April 23rd, “I wonder what Jackie will do when her
husband dies.” After Adele replied “What!”, Rivera said, “Oh, oh, I
meant the baby. She might lose the baby.” Even more bewilderingly,
he asked her to call Lee Harvey Oswald at 899-4244. “Write down this name:
Lee Harvey Oswald. Tell him to kill the chief.” Rivera then said, “No, no,
don’t write that down. You will remember it when you get to New Orleans.
We’re just playing a little joke on him.” The following day, she
asked him about his comments and he warned her not to say anything about
them to anyone, or she “would be very, very sorry.”[viii]
- Lee Harvey Oswald suddenly left Dallas and
traveled to New Orleans, where he would remain for five months before
going to Mexico, then returning to Dallas. Two
weeks prior to this, General Edwin A. Walker had narrowly missed being
shot, an act that the Warren Commission portrayed as being done by Lee
Harvey Oswald, conveniently marking him as a very violent malcontent.
- Within that two-week period, Madeleine Brown —
LBJ’s mistress and mother of his only son, whom he knew about but never
acknowledged – claimed that she had been to Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club and
heard Jack Ruby state that Oswald had been the man who shot at
Walker. She had also stated that it was well known around Dallas
that Oswald and Ruby knew each other and was surprised to learn that
“officially they were not supposed to be connected.”[i]
- Jack Ruby began making a series of telephone calls to
his Mafia contacts around the country, particularly Chicago.
- Vice President Lyndon Johnson went to Dallas to
give a speech to two thousand civic and business leaders there at the
Crystal ballroom in the Baker Hotel. In that speech, according to Penn
Jones Jr.,[ii] LBJ made this very strange
statement:
The President of the United
States is like a pilot and the election is when the nation picks an airplane
and pilot for the next four years. Once you pick him, and you’re flying across
water in bad weather, don’t go up and open the door and try to knock him in the
head. He’s the only pilot you have and if the plane goes down, you go
with it. At least wait until next November before you shoot him down.
- Johnson also leaked a story on that same date to the Dallas
Times Herald which was printed the next day
under a full banner headline on the front page: “LBJ Sees Kennedy Dallas
Visit—One-Day Texas Tour Eyed.” He undoubtedly did this to ensure that
Kennedy would then feel obligated to make the trip and not back out of it
later.
The bizarre nature of Vice President Johnson’s actions –
possibly related to his propensity of drinking too much Scotch whiskey –
suggest that he, too, had recently been involved in a “touchstone” meeting back
in Washington, or Langley, Virginia, before showing up in Dallas at that
curious point in time. But the context here is not merely his actions, it
is the totality of these numerous activities, probably many others unaccounted
for as well, that belie a continuum of events playing out, all initiated well
before April of 1963.
These events were most likely merely the result of an interim
check-point whereby all the participants were given a “green light”, as if to
say “everything on track for The Big Event,” proceed according to plan.
[i] WC Testimony, Vol XI, P. 405
[ii] Janney, Peter, Mary’s Mosaic, pp. 253-254
[iii] See Phillip Willis photo taken
moments before JFK was shot (Richard Trask, Pictures of the Pain,
p. 171)
[iv] See Palamara, Vince, 59 Witnesses: Delay on Elm Street: http://www.jfk-info.com/palam1.htm
[v] Ed Tatro, “LBJ’s Incriminating Loose
Ends,” JFK Conference, Dallas, 2015 DVD (24:40 -24:57); See also HSCA Report,
Vol. XI, p. 518. Also see HSCA Report, Vol. I, pp. 47-48 for Connally’s lies
and backpedaling testimony.
[vi] Baker, Russ, Family of Secrets, pp. 105–107
[vii] Jones, Penn, Forgive My Grief, Vol. IV, p.1
[viii] See this Google Books link for further
details on that chapter of Albarelli’s book. Also see this
page on the Spartacus Educational website.
[ix] Marr, Jim, Crossfire, p. 404
[x] Jones, Penn, Jr., Forgive My Grief,
Vol IV, p. 2
Reprinted with the author’s
permission.
Phillip
F, Nelson [send
him mail] is the author of Who REALLY Killed Martin Luther King Jr.? The Case
Against Lyndon B. Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover. His previous books
include LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, LBJ: From Mastermind to The Colossus,
and Remember the Liberty.
Copyright © Phillip F.
Nelson