Robert Ross interviewed Lyndon
Johnson’s mistress, Madeleine Duncan Brown what Ross titled, “The Clint
Murchison Meeting in Dallas November 21, 1963.” The interview took place sometime
before her death on June 22, 2002. The content is revealing, and she comes
across as very credible as it is obvious she still had feelings even then for
the late president. She also had a credible motive for opening up to the
American people. So in watching the interview, I did not view it as just
another conspiracy theory; I paid attention. Sometimes the truth finally
emerges in plain sight, rather than through complicated theories as in Oliver Stone’s
film, JFK (1991). The most revealing facts
to emerge from the interview are that Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald just two
days after the assassination, had been at the meeting at Murchison’s mansion on
the night before the assassination, and that LBJ told Madeleine while leaving
Murchison’s house after the meeting, “After tomorrow, those SOB’s will never
embarrass me again.” That the official narrative from the Warren Commission
would still carry weight as the default account at least in the first two
decades of the next century astounded me. At the very least, all of Madeleine’s
knowledge of the players should have caused at least a tremor when the
interview was made public. The status quo has that much inertia. Even so, the American public can gleam from Brown’s
account just how different the reality of the power-brokers in (and outside of)
the U.S. Government can be from what the public knows. Unfortunately, the
patina or gloss even of acting can have incredible staying-power even in the
face of the facts revealed. Members of the political elite and their companions
may want to protect their legacies in old age, or want the freedom of
conscience that comes from the impunity that can only come with death. The
resulting piecemeal facts must justify themselves, however, whereas the long-standing
official version often has the benefits of not only protective power and
entrenchment that comes with having been the default for so long, but also a
coherent (i.e., contrived) narrative.
Madeleine had met LBJ in 1948.
By her reckoning, she and Lyndon had a “wonderful relationship.” Johnson
fathered Madeleine’s son, Steve Brown, who had died of cancer by the time of
the interview. In spite of having cancer, Steve had sued to get part of Johnson’s
estate. Madeleine was hurt by the way the power structure in Texas had handled
Steve by preventing him from appearing in court. “I probably would never have
opened my mouth, but the way they handled my son. They can’t take anything from
me now. The public needs to know.” Essentially, she says in the interview that
the assassination of Kennedy was the result of a domestic plot that been
planned since the 1960 Dem Convention.
Joe Kennedy and H. L Hunt met
three days before the convention and they cut a deal: Johnson would be the VP.
At the time, Hunt told Madeleine, “We may have lost a battle but we’re going to
win the war.” On the day of the assassination, he would tell her, “We won the
war.” Madeleine concluded the assassination was “a political crime for
political power.” H.L. Hunt, the richest man in the world at the time, and
others “mapped a plot to get rid of John Kennedy” from just after the
convention. The 8-f group included oil men such as Clint Murchison and Hunt,
Texas politicians such as John Connally, and even occasionally J. Edgar Hoover.
Meeting the night before the
assassination at Clint Murchison’s house on Nov 21, 1963 were Lyndon Johnson, Edgar
Hoover, John McCloy, H.L. Hunt (who had had flyers “Wanted for Treason:
John F. Kennedy” passed out in downtown Dallas), John Currington, George Brown,
Richard Nixon, Amen J. Carter, Jr, Texas Gov. John Connally, Earle
Cabell (mayor of Dallas, whose brother Kennedy had fired after the botched Bay
of Pigs invasion), W. O. Bankston, Clint Peoples, Bill Dicker (sheriff of
Dallas county), Cliff Carter, Malcom Wallace, and, representing the mafia,
Carlos Marchellas, Joe Civilla, and Jack Ruby (an old buddy, Madeleine
remarks). I submit that the mafia had a motive to kill the president whose
brother Robert had turned the U.S. Department of Justice on the mob, including
very mobster in Chicago, Sam Giancana, who is said to have put Illinois over
the top in voting for Kennedy. It is particularly relevant, therefore, that
Ruby, who would later he killed Oswald out of anger for assassinating the
president, was at a meeting with such notable insiders on the night before the
assassination. Also, the inclusion of the FBI and the sheriff of Dallas County
fit with the obvious need to cover-up the crime. That Richard Nixon, who had
lost the 1960 election to Kennedy—unfairly according to the man known as
“tricky Dick”—would be in a meeting with Johnson supporters should also raise
some eyeballs; it would make sense, however, if the Democrats wanted assurances
that the other party would not try to uncover the plot. It is therefore
significant that Nixon was already in town; he and Johnson had met two days earlier.
At any rate, the social party at
the mansion, for which Madeleine had been invited, broke up at 11 p.m. when the
Vice President arrived. He and others went into a conference room. Jack Ruby
brought a call-girl, Shirley, to the meeting. When Johnson came out of the
meeting at its conclusion, he told Madeleine: “After tomorrow, those SOB’s
[i.e. sons of bitches] will never embarrass me again.” Johnson was angry. “The
Irish mafia, I think,” Madeleine says in the interview when Ross asks her whom
Johnson was referring to. However, in her book written five years earlier, Madeleine wrote
that Johnson had told her, “After tomorrow, those goddamned Kennedy’s will
never embarrass me again.”[1]
Because she looks like her mind is going astray at that point in the interview—she
would, after all, die soon—I suspect she confused Lyndon’s antipathy at the
Irish mob with his loathing of the two Kennedy brothers.
Even if Johnson didn’t
get along with a mobster, his frustrating relationship with the Kennedy
brothers in the White House is well documented. Regardless of whomever he was
angry at, that Lyndon Johnson knew that something would be very different for
him on the next day—the day of the assassination—suggests that he knew of it
beforehand. In fact, that he made such a statement with such strident certainty
just after the meeting suggests to me that its purpose had been to decide on
whether to go ahead with the plan. If indeed Lyndon Johnson had at the very
least been aware of the assassination beforehand, the way in which he publicly reacted after it can be seen
in a different light—as being acted out
rather than authentic. By implication, the American people had no clue as
to what was actually going on behind the
scenes. The sheer difference ought to be of concern from the standpoint of
democracy, because the sheer degree of acting
can be used on an ongoing basis to hoodwink the electorate.
People on the periphery of the
plotting group were in an interesting predicament, being let into at least some
of the inside information and yet not truly part of the group. Hence they could
be expected to share at least one of their points of reference with the public
and thus feel guilty enough to speak, or finally turn on the insiders by divulging
the tidbits of information even in the face of a seemingly overwhelming public
narrative. Clint Murchison’s secretary, for instance, committed suicide days
after the assassination. Even though Madeleine still had feelings for Johnson
(i.e., they had not ended on a bad note), she was convinced that he had been in
on the assassination and yet she said nothing of this publicly until she was
old, after her sons had died so she had nothing to lose. For one thing, she says
in the interview that if Kennedy had not been assassinated when he was, Johnson
would have faced “serious political problems when he returned to Washington.”
He had been involved in the Billy Sol Estas and the Billy Baker scandals, and
Kennedy was already looking for another VP candidate for 1964, according to
Kennedy’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln.[2]
At the time of the assassination, a U.S. House committee was planning to indict
Johnson. A man, who would later be shot, was going to testify that Johnson had
taken kick-backs from agricultural programs. When Lyndon was president, he kept
the Vietnam War going on for so long because he was getting kickbacks on
military contracts to his business friends.
Johnson’s real mentality, however, went deeper than corruption. According to
Madeleine, Malcolm “Mac” Wallace was Johnson’s hit-man. In a letter to the
Department of Justice in 1984, Douglas Caddy, the lawyer for Billie Sol Estes, claimed
to have evidence that Johnson order hits on eight men, including Kennedy.[3]
Johnson “had no qualm about having someone killed,” the still-smitten Madeleine
says in the interview. “Whatever it takes to get a job done,” she says of
Lyndon’s mentality. She agrees with Ross in his conclusion that Johnson must
have thought the end justified the means. Madeleine points out that Johnson even
had an innocent woman who had seen Madeleine and Johnson together in a hallway
killed. Even just to conceive that a U.S. president had a hit man is difficult;
to a public kept largely in the dark, such a thing—and that the American
electorate voted for a mafia-like man in 1964—must seem inconceivable, or else
fiction, like the series, House of Cards.
Hence the vulnerability lodged in American democracy wherein the electorate is
left with mere superficial or artificial perceptions of the candidates and
office-holders remains largely hidden from view.
All of the above hitherto
hidden from view does not even count the stealth
role of corporations in influencing Congress, the
President, and even the
regulatory agencies that regulate the specific corporations or industries. The
relationship can indeed be quite cozy
in spite of the conflicts
of interest that should be
obvious. The allowance of “dark
money” contributions to political campaigns affirmed by the U.S. Supreme
Court in its Citizens
United case is just one
indication of how the real relationship between business and government in the
U.S. can be deliberately hidden from plain view, and especially this
disinfectant effect of sunlight. If sunlight is essential for the
popular sovereign (i.e., the People) to hold its government officials
accountable, then representative democracy in the U.S. is seriously flawed. To
get caught up in debating who shot Kennedy may be just what the political elite
wants because not only such myopic investigations tend to be premised on the
Warren Commission’s report as the default narrative to be disproven, but also
the obsession of one historical event comes at the expense of uncovering the
true nature of the current office-holders
in government and the real relationship between business and government.
[1]
Madeleine Duncan Brown, Texas
in the Morning: The Love Story of Madeleine Brown and President Lyndon Baines
Johnson (Conservatory Press, 1997).
[3]
Ibid.
