Roger Stone asserts Lyndon B. Johnson masterminded JFK's assassination to avoid prosecution for corruption, bribery, and voter theft, allegedly orchestrating the event with CIA anger over the Bay of Pigs and mob revenge. Stone claims Malcolm Wallace fired the fatal shots while Oswald was a patsy, citing blocked documentaries like Nigel Turner's that allege Johnson ordered the limousine bubble top removal. The discussion details Johnson's alleged use of the FBI to target gay Republicans, his profiteering from Vietnam via Halliburton, and his manipulation of the Warren Commission, painting him as an amoral psychopath whose rise was Kennedy's greatest mistake. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
Time
Text
The Case Against LBJ00:03:39
Hi, this is Dark Journalist.
Today I have a very special report for you as we take another look at history in the JFK assassination with political insider and author Roger Stone.
Now, Roger has written a challenging new book, The Man Who Killed Kennedy, The Case Against LBJ.
In the book, he paints a stunning portrait of Johnson as a cunning, power hungry, treacherous enemy of JFK.
He also asserts that Johnson worked with shady elements of the intelligence community and oil millionaires to mastermind the assassination.
Now, Roger Stone was once inside the secret world of attack politics as an advisor to President Nixon.
He has a reputation for playing hardball in this double dealing arena where manipulation is king.
Perhaps he can shed some light on the covert actions that took place and changed the world.
We're going to find out.
Here we go.
Roger Stone, LBJ, the architect of the JFK assassination.
I can't honestly say that I've ever been completely relieved of the fact that there might have been international connections.
I know, as attorney for Lyndon Johnson, that he murdered John Kennedy.
He's got the power to give the CIA what it wants as president, as opposed to Kennedy, who they feared.
He, in my opinion, had an almost maniacal.
Urge to become president.
And he did it out of a corruption of power that is unequaled in our history.
Roger, it's great to have you here.
Let me first say that your book is very interesting and covers a great deal of material that is not widely known or reported.
Thank you.
It is, you know, I consider myself an alternative historian, and I think the truth about John F. Kennedy's Murder and the power politics of the 1960s is never been fully told to the American people.
Instead, we have the mainstream media version of what happened in that decade.
And, you know, I don't think that's the truth.
So, my agenda here is really not ideological.
It's just, you know, it's the agenda of truth.
Yeah, well, you have that experience of being in that political world and understanding how it works on the inside in a real sense.
So, I think your years working alongside people like Nixon and Reagan and those campaigns gives you some extra insight into these kinds of matters.
I'm curious how you came to write about the Kennedy assassination and really dive into some of this deep research.
What were the key factors that caused you to arrive at the conclusion that LBJ was responsible?
Well, in 1964, I was a volunteer on Senator Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign.
I was very young, obviously, as a child.
But I was a reader, and during that campaign, I read a book entitled A Texan Looks at Lyndon, which is an early paperback that exposed some of the just the beginnings of the horrific corruption of Lyndon Johnson.
Johnson's Hidden Motives00:15:15
This is a man who regularly stole elections and whose corruption in terms of taking bribes for legislation and federal contracts was of biblical proportions.
Johnson and his right hand man, U.S. Senator, Senate Secretary Bobby Baker, literally extorted millions of dollars in cash payments for all of the legislation that Johnson moved through the Senate in the 60s, and equally so of defense contracting properties, all the while taking huge cash payoffs for protecting the oil depletion allowance,
the tax treatment that allowed very wealthy right wing oil men to.
You know, evade millions of dollars of taxes.
Right.
Well, how did Johnson, if you bring it back to the 1960 election, you do an interesting job of saying how he got on the ticket.
Can you go into that a little bit?
Yeah, I think the historical record really shows that JFK was wary of Johnson.
Johnson had run a very dirty campaign in the nomination phase.
Johnson, in fact, authorized the break in at the doctors who were treating, the offices of the doctors who were treating JFK.
For his Addison's disease, and then induced two of his allies, Governor John Connolly and Democratic National Vice Chairman India Edwards, to hold a televised press conference accusing JFK of having Addison's and therefore being too incapacitated to be president.
So it was a very dirty campaign.
There was a lot of bitterness between the Kennedy and the Johnson people.
And Johnson had essentially decided on Missouri Senator.
Stuart Symington, for vice president, had offered Symington the job.
Symington had accepted.
And at the last minute, Lyndon Johnson and House Speaker Sam Rayburn appeared at Kennedy's hotel room late at night.
They had with them a dossier on Jack Kennedy's sex life, courtesy of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, who was a close ally of Johnson's, a next door neighbor of Johnson's, and a man who used to spend his Saturday evenings watching stag flicks.
With his next door neighbor, LBJ.
So, Kennedy wanted no trouble from Johnson.
The threat was clear.
If he didn't put Johnson on the ticket one heartbeat away from the presidency, Johnson and Hoover would simply leak the sex file on JFK to the Nixon forces and the election would be over.
So, Kennedy folded.
In the end, it was probably the best decision that he made, only because it is only Johnson's voter theft in Texas in the 1960 election that allows.
JFK to become president.
Those critics who say the 1960 election was not stolen from Nixon in Chicago are only partially right.
The 1960 election was stolen from Nixon in both Illinois and Texas.
In Texas, Johnson's cronies burned 100,000 Nixon Lodge ballots before they could even be recounted.
And the Democrats only carried Texas by about 46,000.
So, It would end up both electing Kennedy and in the end costing his life because, as you know, Johnson would soon have heavy motive to bump off JFK.
Right.
So his experience at election fraud could come in handy, but it came with a very high price.
Now, tracking this back, how do you think the assassination plot got started?
What were LBJ's motivations and what kind of reward would make him participate in something like that?
Johnson's motivations are obvious.
The Justice Department and the U.S. Senate Rules Committee are both investigating Johnson for corruption.
Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, who despises Johnson, going back to the Johnson forces accusing JFK of having Addison's disease publicly, has launched the full power of the Justice Department on Johnson.
A SWAT team of nine investigative journalists from Life magazine are on the ground pouring over real estate records in Texas.
And what they have learned is that Lyndon Johnson has become very, very wealthy as a congressman and U.S. senator.
His public salary is almost nothing, but he's worth millions in real estate and other business holdings.
Right.
And LBJ's aide, Bobby Baker, went to jail later for running a call girl ring and for accepting political bribes during this time.
Yeah, he essentially took the fall for Johnson.
In any event, the indictment of Johnson was imminent.
Robert Kennedy had already been telling people, don't worry about Johnson, he's going to prison.
JFK tells his personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, just on the day he leaves for Dallas, that LBJ will be dropped from the ticket.
Now, I've learned that the nationally syndicated columnist Drew Pearson had a column already written for Sunday, the 24th, accusing Johnson of taking a $10,000 bribe to deliver a defense contract for General Dynamics out of Fort Worth.
So, Johnson had two choices.
He could kill Kennedy and grab control of the government, or he would be summarily, publicly humiliated, dropped from the ticket, and prosecuted by Robert Kennedy, who would tell anybody who would listen.
That he was sending Lyndon Johnson to jail.
Okay, so that's definitely enough motivation for Johnson to get involved.
What about the other conspirators?
The others in the plot had their own motives, although they weren't as immediate as Johnson's.
The CIA, furious about the Bay of Pigs operation, where Kennedy failed to order air support for the Cuban rebels who were cut down on the beaches, and even more angry about the Cuban Missile Crisis, which now, almost 50 years after the fact, we learn that.
Nikita Khrushchev cut a secret deal with Jack and Bobby Kennedy to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey and Italy.
You see, the Pentagon and the CIA, of course, knew about the removal of our missiles.
The American people did not know.
Right.
And there was great anger in the military industrial complex over that negotiation.
So we can see there was a consensus building inside the covert branch of the national security structure to remove JFK and have Johnson, who was much more in line with their vision of world domination.
Installed as the new president.
So LBJ is willing to go into Vietnam.
Kennedy is already pulling out.
LBJ wants an arm race with the Russians, and Kennedy was turning to reducing tensions, say the nuclear test ban treaty and so on.
So coming into the end of the 63 period, as I understand it, it was an open secret that LBJ would be dropped from the ticket.
So in political circles, they knew this was going to happen.
Even your old boss Nixon said Johnson would be dropped in 64.
And he said that right before the assassination, right?
Yeah, I mean, essentially, he had a press conference in which he predicted that Johnson would be drunk from the ticket and that he had now become a negative.
You can go on YouTube and see clips, television clips of that performance.
Okay, so we have Johnson and some forces in the military and intelligence.
What other groups would be involved in planning the assassination?
The mob, who's been paying Lyndon Johnson $50,000 a month.
Through Carlos Marcelo to protect their illegal gambling operations in Houston and Dallas and San Antonio, he has a long standing relationship with Lyndon Johnson, he has bankrolled his career for a long time.
They, of course, are upset because they gave Jack Kennedy and his father a cool million.
And in return, Robert Kennedy is seeking to deport two of the top mobsters of the day, Carlos Marcelo and Sinto Traficante.
So the mob is serious and they want revenge.
Their motives are clear.
And then, of course, there's big Texas oil.
Kennedy is talking about repealing the oil depletion allowance.
That is a disaster for the Dallas money crowd.
And therefore, everybody involved in the assassination has their own motives.
But again, the reason Lyndon Johnson is the indispensable man is because in Texas in 1953, Murder is a state crime, not a federal crime.
And therefore, the investigation into John Kennedy's murder will be conducted by the Dallas District Attorney and the Dallas Police Department.
Both tightly controlled by Lyndon Johnson and his cronies.
Dallas was the perfect place for the crime.
Interesting.
Wow.
Well, when you mentioned the mafia aspect and the figures who were supporting Johnson, is there a particular mafia figure that comes to mind for you on that?
Well, Carlos Marcelo runs the mob in both Louisiana and Texas.
He is a longtime supporter of Johnson's, passing his contributions through a middleman named Jack Halfin, who would later go to prison and admit.
That he was a bad man for Marcelo and delivered bribes to Johnson.
We also know that Chuck Giancana, the brother of Sam Giancana, says in his memoirs that Sam told him that he had both Nixon and Kennedy and Johnson, quote unquote, covered.
I mean, he'd bribed all three of them and wasn't worried about the outcome of the election because the way Sam Momo Giancana, the boss of the Chicago mob, saw it, no matter who won, Sam won.
Right.
He also was obviously sharing Judith Campbell Exner, who was a girlfriend of Giancarna's, was also a mistress of Kennedy.
So the mob boss was sharing a Gumara with the President of the United States.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's a little close for comfort, for sure.
So, what do you think happened in Dealey Plaza, and how did they come to use Oswald as a patsy in the assassination?
Well, Oswald is, as far as the plot is concerned, I'm convinced that there are multiple shooters.
But Johnson, because he was a control freak, has to have his own man in the turkey shoot.
That's why he designates Malcolm Wallace.
Malcolm Wallace is Lyndon Johnson's personal killer.
He is killed on eight other occasions at least, although, in all honesty, Johnson aide Cliff Carter would tell Billy Sal Estes that Wallace has killed 17 men for Johnson.
Mostly these killings have to do with covering up corruption or covering up vote stealing.
When people start running their mouths, Johnson has to have them put away.
For example, John Kinzer, a man who was involved in a sexual relationship with Johnson's sister, started trying to blackmail Johnson regarding things he learned having to do with voter theft in Johnson's first Senate election.
So Johnson ordered him off.
While I was shot Kinzer in broad daylight, Is outside of Austin.
He was immediately apprehended and told the officer, You can't arrest me.
I work for Senator Johnson.
Uh huh.
So Wallace is really the shooter, Johnson's shooter, and his fingerprints are found on the cardboard boxes on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.
Now let's go to this clip of fingerprint expert Nathan Darby from the Men Who Killed Kennedy documentary describing his surprise at how the FBI. Handled the fingerprint evidence.
I don't know why they couldn't say that the thing didn't match.
It did match.
There's no question about it.
My experience, I've just had too much experience.
I know what I'm talking about.
I'm positive.
There's no question about it.
My dying decoration, if I have to drop dead right now, they match.
Well, that's pretty convincing.
Darby was an expert with 35 years' experience, so he ought to know.
There are also witnesses who describe someone who looked like Wallace, right?
Less than six witnesses tell the FBI or the Warren Commission they all describe a man who looks like Wallace, heavy set.
Brown jacket, white shirt, canned pants, glasses.
Three of them say glasses.
Does that sound like Lee Harvey Oswald?
No, it doesn't.
Exactly.
I think Oswald is exactly where he says he is, downstairs in the cafeteria eating lunch.
He's a patsy.
They've set him up.
It takes a while for it to dawn on him.
Now, other shooters?
Yes, I think so.
I suspect that there is a shooter on the grassy knoll.
I think Kennedy is shot from the front and the back.
I do think there's an entrance wound in the front.
I think the final headshot comes from the front.
I do think he's also shot from the rear.
There may have been another shooter in the Dow Tech building.
It is conceivable that there is another shooter in the sewer grate.
That would be Johnny Roselli, the mob fixer.
The man who I believe is the shooter from Degrassi Knoll is Bernard Barker.
Isn't that amazing?
He also is a Watergate burglar.
Isn't that coincidental?
And guess what?
He was there at the Bay of Pigs.
So, there's a common thread that runs all between all of these events.
Three of the Watergate burglars, at least three, perhaps four, were there in Dallas on that day.
Coincidental?
I think not.
Well, one of these burglars, E. Howard Hunt, came forward, it was kind of a deathbed confession, saying that LBJ was involved in setting up the assassination through Cord Meyer and the CIA.
He basically said that he didn't take part in it, but he was a bench warmer on it.
Did that revelation come as a surprise to you, or how did you feel about that?
I do think that he is a.
Hunt is a second stringer.
He admits, oh, importantly, that he was on the ground that day in Dallas.
And he attributes, he says Johnson was in fact running the show, which is consistent with my belief.
Jack Ruby himself being pulled down the hallway in the Dallas police station before his brutal murder.
Reporter yells out, Jack, Jack, how could this happen?
Gerald Ford and Ruby00:08:38
Ruby said this never would have happened if Adlai Stevenson was vice president.
Reporter, Jack, Jack, what do you mean?
Ruby, look at the top.
The man at the top.
Whereupon two Dallas policemen hustle Ruby off the scene into a back room.
Yeah.
He's talking about Lyndon Johnson.
Yeah, I have seen that news clip, and that is fascinating, actually.
But you bring up something very interesting in your book saying that Nixon knew Ruby, and you talk about when he first found out that Ruby was behind killing Oswald.
Yeah, I think that Nixon flies back to New York.
He goes to his apartment and hears.
In the route that Kennedy has been shot, he learns when he gets to his apartment house that Kennedy is dead.
He immediately calls J. Edgar Hoover, who he knows from his eight years as vice president, and he asks Edgar, was it one of those nuts, meaning a right winger?
Hoover says, no, Dick, it was a communist.
Really, it's been 26 minutes, and he already knows it's a communist.
And I think Nixon kind of buys it until the next day when he and millions of other Americans are watching television, he sees Ruby.
Now he recognizes Ruby's face.
And he looks like he's seen a ghost.
He says to his traveling age, Nick Ruby, I know him.
Huh.
Fast forward, Nixon says to me, The hell of it is, I knew this ruby fella.
Lyndon Johnson brought him to me in '47.
We put him on the payroll as a courtesy to Johnson.
He was one of Lyndon's boys.
Now, this is important because some have misconstrued.
What I believe this means is not that.
Jack Ruby worked directly for Lyndon Johnson as one of his cronies.
What it means is that Johnson was carrying water for Marcelo.
Johnson was getting a job for Ruby at the behest of his crony Marcelo.
Marcelo is the Johnson Ruby connection.
But those who wish to dispute this cannot dispute the document, which has been found in House archives.
It indicates that, yes, indeed, Jacob Rubenstein of Chicago, that's Jack Ruby, was hired as a confidential informant for the House Un American Activities Committee at the direct quest of Congressman Richard M. Nixon.
That's pretty remarkable, considering that we generally know of Jack Ruby.
They generally say about him in the media, oh, he was a distraught nightclub owner, you know, just some nobody who freaked out and did the crime.
So to find any connection of him with Nixon and LBJ is pretty phenomenal, I think.
Well, it's amazing that the Warren Commission, Ken, with a straight face, said he had no known connections with organized crime.
I mean, he runs guns for Carlos Marcelo.
He works briefly in Marcelo's casino.
She is running guns to Cuba for Marcelo.
He is a button man.
He is mobbed up to his nose.
And the Warren Commission makes that background of Ruby disappear, like they make their own connections to Oswald disappear.
Oswald, an intelligence asset.
Oswald, trained and working for the CIA.
Oswald, a paid informant to the FBI.
50 years later, these things are indisputable.
There's myriad evidence of those facts.
But the CIA at the time and the FBI, working at the direction of Alan Dulles and the others that Johnson appointed to the Warren Commission, are committed to burying the truth.
Right.
Well, can you go into what Nixon told you?
And I know he alluded to a few things with LBJ, and it wasn't always easy to get him to talk about something so sensitive.
But what did he tell you about the assassination in LBJ?
He was shocked.
On the other hand, he can be heard in the Watergate tapes saying the Warren Commission is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated.
Right.
He also said, and I quote, that's the difference between Lyndon and me.
We both wanted to be president, but I wasn't willing to kill for it.
Uh huh.
How did you feel when you heard that?
You know, it proved what I had put together in terms of my own research.
This book took me 15 years to write.
Not because it was 15 years of contiguous writing, but because I had to pick it up and put it down based on whichever political project I was working on.
I'm a veteran of eight national Republican presidential campaigns.
But as I think you'll see in my upcoming book on Nixon, I think I'm a very objective observer in terms of writing a warts and all tale of what really happened in the 1960s.
For example, Richard Nixon was definitely connected to organized crime.
So was Lyndon Johnson.
So was John F. Kennedy.
So was Stuart Humphrey.
Now, you make some very interesting observations about Ford and some of the things that Ford did while he was a member of the Warren Commission before he became president.
Can you get into what you see Ford's role as being?
Absolutely.
Gerald Ford is a very close associate of J. Edgar Hoover.
More importantly, Gerald Ford has been caught.
Partying with a call girl in the Sheraton Carlton Hotel, where lobbyist Fred Black has films and still photographs of Gerald Ford in flagrante delicto, as they say.
Now, in truth, Hoover really doesn't need to blackmail Ford because Hoover has directed early funding to Ford's first campaign for Congress, and Ford is already known in the Congress as a man who.
Supports bigger and bigger budgets and more and more power for both the FBI and the CIA.
In any event, LBJ appoints Ford to the Warren Commission.
And then, if you look at the memoirs of both William J. Sullivan and Deke DeLoach, Carthage Deke DeLoach, number two and three men at the FBI, Hoover makes it clear to Johnson, the party makes it clear to Ford that he needs him to alter the autopsy records.
To change the description of the wound in Kennedy's upper back, moving it from the upper back to the neck.
This is meant to accommodate the government's so called single bullet theory, which, as you know, is built around the premise that there's only one shooter and therefore no conspiracy.
Right.
Anyway, we now know, because documents have become declassified in 1988, that Gerald Ford, in his own handwriting, altered the records.
To accommodate the government's cover up.
When the New York Times asks Ford, then a former president, why he did this, it's interesting.
Ford is quoted as saying, the country needed clarity.
Not the country needed truth, the country needed clarity.
I believe, you see, that this act by Ford is what, in the end, is the reason that Nixon chooses Ford to succeed him as vice president and ultimately president.
Nixon is well aware of the autopsy revision, and he picks the one man he's got the goods on, Jerry Ford.
That's why in my upcoming book, Nixon's Secret, I detail how General Alexander Haig would tell a man in 1988 that the reason Nixon got the pardon was, quote, he had Jerry Ford by the balls, close quote, and said, let me just look at this if Dick Nixon's going down, they're all going down with me.
Ford.
That prick helms the whole shebang.
Yeah, that's fascinating.
So, Nixon had the goods on him and he was able to turn things around and blackmail Ford into giving him a pardon.
Bobby Kennedy's Panic00:05:43
But if we jump back to 1968 and we have Johnson who suddenly declares he's not going to run for a second term, and we also have the death of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, how do you think that these three things are related?
I know a couple things that I find curious.
One, Dr. King is murdered very shortly after being caught on an FBI wiretap telling an associate that he intends to endorse and help Senator Robert Kennedy become president.
Kennedy was, of course, the arch enemy of Lyndon Johnson.
We also know that Robert Kennedy, who was clearly very stunned by his brother's murder, and who was, for a very long period, although certain that his brother had died as the result of a conspiracy,
and thought that organized crime at a minimum had been involved, also very clearly thought the CIA had complicity and would ask the agency directly, Did one of your guys kill my brother?
So, I think Bobby is beginning to put the pieces together, but he also knows, and many people ask him, why didn't he do anything about it?
Because he had no power.
Because Lyndon Johnson's president controlled the Justice Department and the FBI, and both of them would deny it.
Bobby Kennedy knew the only way he could investigate and avenge his brother's death was to become president and seize the federal machinery himself.
And therefore, for many years, he gave mumbling but not very strenuous support to the Warren Commission.
And then on the eve of the California primary for president in 1968, he tells a student audience that if elected, he would reopen the records and investigation into the Kennedy assassination.
Right.
He has now just signed his own death warrant.
Okay.
He will be dead approximately 48 hours later.
So I think that the same people who were involved in the murder of JFK are involved in the.
Murder of RFK.
If anything, the murder case itself and the investigation are botched worse than the murder in Dallas.
The Los Angeles Police Department seem unaware that there are two gunmen.
They find additional bullets in the woodwork three days after the assassination that weren't in their initial investigation.
They ignore numerous witnesses who say they saw a man and a woman in a polka dot dress.
Running out the front of the hotel and the woman yelling, We got him.
Right.
There's no follow up on that.
So, and it appears that Sirhan Sirhan, the accused assassin, is under some kind of mind control.
Right.
His actions are erratic.
His writings are erratic.
And there is, and I'm not an expert on the Robert Kennedy assassination, although I expect to become one.
Right.
Because I'm thinking about, because I do think these are interrelated crimes, but.
I think you should research it because if you do a job on that like you did on the LBJ book, it'll be terrific.
Well, it's something I'm looking at.
I think I'm going to write the definitive biography of George H.W. Bush because I don't think the full story of his drug dealing while he was at the CIA, of his epic corruption, very little of this has been reported.
His plans.
To set Reagan up in Iran Contra in order to become president upon Reagan's resignation has not been duly covered.
And then his four essentially secret attempts to become vice president of the United States, twice under Nixon, twice under Ford, all of which are thwarted one after another.
So I think it's a very compelling story.
The Bush family made its initial money by selling armaments to the Nazis.
And from that point, their ethics went downhill.
Right, exactly.
Well, we know he became director of CIA in 76 as well.
And his friend was George de Mornchild, who was the babysitter of Oswald there when he came back from Russia to Texas.
And that's a very unusual and I would say hard to describe or, you know, hard to explain association.
Yeah, we do know a couple things.
We know that DeMorn Shield writes to Bush while Bush is CIA director in a state of panic, essentially saying that he is being hounded because he knows too much, that he may have run his mouth in some inappropriate places about Oswald and what happened in Dallas, and he begs Bush to call off the dogs.
Bush writes back and essentially says, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Good luck to you.
The Warnshield would ultimately be called to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, but before he could get there, he put a shotgun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.
When they found his personal address book, among the unlisted numbers he had was the one for his close friend George Poppy Bush in Houston.
That's pretty amazing.
That really is amazing.
McClellan and the Jury00:10:09
If we go back to LBJ for a moment and talk about what happened to him when he got out of office, he started to psychologically deteriorate.
Can you go into that a little bit?
Yeah, I really rely more on any other author on Barr McClellan in this regard.
Barr McClellan was a partner at the Texas based law firm that represented Johnson and ultimately his estate.
McClellan worked directly for Ed Clark, who was Johnson's.
Right hand man, Mr. Cleanup, he was like the Harvey Keitel of the Johnson operation.
If you ever saw that particular movie, Pulp Fiction.
So, in this particular case, we are told that Johnson is wallowing in guilt.
He knows that he has murdered Kennedy.
He is drinking heavily.
He is smoking, despite the fact that the doctors have told him in view of his 1955 heart attack.
And his weakened heart that smoking is deadly.
He continues to smoke and drink.
One source even says that he begins smoking marijuana, the very symbol of the counterculture that drove him from office in an effort to assuage his guilt.
And he dies a broken man.
He really made a bad bargain in the sense that Lyndon Johnson had spent his entire political career fighting integration.
He voted against every.
Civil rights or anti lynching or voting rights piece of legislation from 1937 to 1957.
Right.
Some people would be shocked at what he voted for.
He wasn't just voting for, he was leading the charge.
In 1957, he decides to pass a civil rights bill to burnish his acceptability to the northern liberals in the party, but he also drops in a poison pill amendment that says that anyone brought to trial for violating the new law will be tried before a State, not a federal jury, meaning an all white jury in the South.
It moots the bill.
The bill becomes symbolic.
Johnson knows no white jury anywhere in the South will convict a white man of a transgression against a black man.
Right.
Now, Johnson becomes president.
He wants to pursue the war.
He doesn't want the liberals asking too many questions about exactly what happened to Jack Kennedy, so he does a complete reversal.
Now, suddenly, out of nowhere, he embraces civil rights and he attempts to rewrite his history.
Saying that he was always been a New Dealer and he was a liberal.
I see.
So it's a very opportunist kind of get on the bandwagon move.
You know, that's the thing about Lyndon Johnson.
Even when he does the right thing, he does it for the wrong reasons.
He doesn't do it as a moral or ethical question.
He does it for political gain.
Therefore, he's shocked when the left wing of his party won't buy the escalating war in Vietnam.
Let me be very clear.
Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson have vast stock holdings in defense contractors like Halliburton, Brown and Root, which later are combined, and Bell Helicopter.
Johnson personally makes $325 million, it is estimated, on the war in Vietnam.
An enormous $175 million dredging of Camron Bay is given to Brown and Rue.
There's only one minor problem Camron Bay doesn't need dredging.
So Johnson profiteers off the war, he makes a fortune off of it.
And he is stunned when his advocacy of civil rights buys him no inoculation from the left on the war.
And he is ultimately driven from power, leaving Washington a broken and very bitter man.
That's a pretty accelerated descent there from taking power in this coup and avoiding prison to then to become the person who basically is behind the unpopular war and yet wanting to be known as the Great Society president.
It's interesting.
It's falling short.
So there's an interview that Johnson gives after he leaves office in 1969 to Walter Cronkite.
Which shortly afterwards his aides will pull the plug on and it's never broadcast.
Yeah, Johnson's manipulation of the Warren Commission is very clever.
As I have spoken to book signings around the country about my book, people have asked me, how could you think that the Warren Commission, these really august, respected Americans, congressmen, senators, judges, why would they cover up for Johnson?
Well, they're not covering up for Johnson.
Johnson tells all of them, as he would tell Cronkite, the Russians killed Kennedy.
It was the Russians and the Cubans.
If the American people find this out, they will demand retribution, and we're talking about World War.
Millions will die, and therefore, Justice Warren, you must help me cover up what happened for your country.
The fiction that is woven by Hoover about Lee Harvey Oswald is pushed by the Warren Commission members who believe they're doing it for patriotic reasons because the truth would lead.
To the Russians and the Cubans.
In fact, we know there is not, to this day, not a shred of evidence that the Soviets or the Cubans killed Kennedy, but it is a fiction that Johnson uses cleverly to justify the cover up of what really happened by the Warren Commission.
Right.
So this is the cover story for the cover story.
In essence, it's the cover story to get the Commission to do his bidding and to bury the truth.
So, Earl Warren and the others, they think they are acting in the country's interests.
Kind of reminds me of Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men.
You can't handle the truth.
Right.
You know, you mentioned Barr McClellan earlier.
Can you just briefly go into the Billy Celestes affair?
And Celestes was a Johnson business partner who went to prison for many years, but when he got out, he gave a deposition in the 1980s that listed all of the murders LBJ was involved in, including JFK's.
Billy Salestis and the Billy Salestis scandal was one of the biggest stories of the 1960s.
1960s.
Sol Estes was a flamboyant Texas Wheeler dealer and financial genius, and he was a partner of Lyndon Johnson's in a number of financial escapades.
The most celebrated one is where Johnson used his influence to deliver multi million dollar agricultural contracts to Sol Estes for the rental of storage facilities, grain storage facilities, and fertilizer tanks that never really existed.
And of course, Johnson would rake off millions off the top.
Johnson is under investigation for his involvement with Estes, and that is the case that he fears going to jail for just before the Kennedy assassination.
Obviously, the investigation into Johnson stops the instant Lyndon Johnson becomes president.
Estes would then go on to plead guilty and serve time.
After he emerged from prison and therefore had nothing whatsoever to gain, after he'd played his full sentence, he would go to the U.S. Justice Department.
And he testified before a grand jury that Lyndon Johnson had ordered the murder of at least eight men, including John F. Kennedy.
That is memorialized in a letter from SD's lawyer, Douglas Caddy, to the Justice Department.
Now, Robert Caro is considered by many the greatest biographer of Lyndon Johnson.
And Robert Caro has written four really extraordinarily detailed volumes.
Yet, if you look in the index of those volumes, for some odd reason, you will never find the name Billy Salestis.
That is unbelievable.
Now, there was the other dual scandal, as I mentioned earlier, at the time of Kennedy's death, was the Bobby Baker scandal.
Johnson was under heat by both the Senate Rules Committee, which Bobby Kennedy had lent some lawyers and investigators to, and the Justice Department on two different corruption investigations.
The Sal Estes matter back in Texas and the Bobby Baker matter in Washington, D.C.
And lo and behold, Carroll gives enormous coverage to the Baker matter, but there's no mention of Estes.
Why?
Because if he mentioned Estes, he would have to, as a historian, report that Estes accused Johnson of the murder of John F. Kennedy.
And because he's an establishment quote unquote historian, And because he wants his ass kissed on the Upper East Side of Manhattan among the beautiful people, he leaves this important wrinkle of history out of his narrative.
So to me, it's sinning by omission, it's falsity by omission.
Tarot and his researcher wife should be ashamed that they don't address this question.
It's clear why they don't.
Actually, this fall, I'm going to go to New York with a video camera.
I figured out which apartment house the The great man lives in, and I intend to confront him as to why he has never reported the affidavit in which Estes accuses his close friend Lyndon Johnson of the murder of JFK.
That's a fantastic idea.
They should set up a debate between the two of you.
I'd love to see that.
Well, he'd have to be willing, and I don't think that's going to happen.
Confronting Mr Carr00:04:48
So, in essence, Celestes said that Johnson aide Cliff Carter gave him this list of people that LBJ had arranged to be eliminated.
And one of them was a guy from Texas named Henry Marshall.
Yes, Henry Marshall was a federal agriculture agent who was investigating Johnson's dealings with Billy Salestis.
And he was, first, they tried to bribe him.
Johnson went to him with an offer of money and he declined.
Then Johnson went to him with an offer of a big promotion in the agricultural department, which would move him to Washington, D.C., and again he declined.
It seems that Johnson had found an honest man.
So, Glendon Johnson, while meeting with Salvestris, and Cliff Carter gave the order to Carter, and Malcolm Wallace gave the order to Malcolm Wallace to, quote, take care of him.
And then shortly thereafter, Henry Wallace would be found shot eight times.
With a rifle, which is a hard thing to do to shoot yourself in the head with a rifle and then pull the bolt for another shot.
The local coroner, a Johnson man, he said it was suicide.
They quickly buried Henry Marshall without an autopsy over the objections of his wife.
When Clint Peoples, who was a very celebrated Texas Ranger, investigated the case, he took a picture of Malcolm Wallace and began asking around.
He went to a gas station and indeed he found an attendant who said that.
A man meeting that description had stopped at the gas station on the day that Henry Marshall was murdered and asked for directions to the Marshall Ranch.
He looked at the picture, and it was none other than Malcolm Wallace.
So, this is Malcolm Wallace acting as Johnson's hitman to protect him, and this is a role he cultivated in the future as well.
Right.
Wallace kills Henry Marshall to cover Johnson's involvement with the flim flamer Billy Salestis, and then Malcolm Wallace shows up in Dealey Plaza.
Leaving a fingerprint on the boxes in the sniper's nest and being identified by at least six witnesses who saw a man meeting that description.
The most interesting of those is a man named Richard Carr.
I think this is worth dwelling on for just a second.
Mr. Carr is mining his own business in Dealey Plaza.
He's gone down to see the president.
Minutes before the shooting, he sees a man with hormone spectacles, brown jacket.
White shirt, tan pants, balding, punchy, and middle aged in the window of the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building.
Minutes later, after the shooting, he sees the same man bolt from the side door of the building and jump into a late model Oldsmobile being driven away by a dark complected man.
Mr. Carr, because he's a fine citizen, decides that he needs to report this to the Dallas police, and he does.
They call in the FBI, and together he is questioned.
That very night, a gunman goes to his house and tries to kill him.
Unfortunately for them, Mr. Carr is packing and he scares away the intruder.
Now, between 1963 and 1978, there are no less than five attempts on Mr. Carr's life.
He is assaulted twice in Texas but survives.
He moves to a rural place in Montana trying to hide.
There he finds dynamite strapped to the ignition of his car.
He ultimately moves back to Texas, but he is subpoenaed.
By the district attorney Jim Garrison in his investigation.
And when Mr. Carr travels to New Orleans, two men try to shoot him in the street there.
Unfortunately for them, Mr. Carr is packing.
He shoots one of the two assailants, killing him, and the other one runs.
What was it that Mr. Carr saw that made it so vital that he'd be murdered?
He saw Lyndon Johnson's hitman before and immediately after the assassination.
Wow, extraordinary.
But whatever happened to Wallace?
Wallace would ultimately die mysteriously when someone filled the ignition on his truck so that exhaust fumes would fill the cab while he was driving.
He ultimately drove off the road and hit a pylon and was killed.
It's unclear whether he was killed by the monoxide poisoning or whether he was killed by the impact, but he was definitely dead.
Well, we know two things about Wallace for sure.
Moyers and Banned Tapes00:11:22
One is that he was.
He shot Douglas Kinzer and was tried for it and found guilty, but they gave him a suspended sentence.
The only suspended sentence, by the way, in the history of Texas jurisprudence.
How is that true?
We could find by using a Texas lawyer no other evidence ever of anyone being convicted of first degree murder and getting a suspended sentence.
In fact, we learned that in 90 some odd percent of the cases, those convicted were executed.
Huh.
By the way, Malcolm Wallace's lawyer at his trial was John Kopher, the personal attorney for Lyndon Johnson.
His bail money was put up by two other Johnson cronies.
Johnson himself took a hotel room not far from the courthouse and monitored the trial.
So Johnson bailed him out, made sure, even though he was caught, you know, sort of cold blooded, red handed, that he didn't get sort of found guilty for murder and executed.
Well, not only that, but immediately upon his being executed, Given a suspended sentence, he would immediately be hired by H.D. Byrd, a close friend and financial supporter of Lyndon Johnson's, to work for a defense contractor that was owned by Byrd.
Byrd, interestingly, also has one other large asset.
He owns the Texas School Book Depository building.
Yeah.
Now, this is extraordinary.
D.H. Byrd owns the Texas School Book Depository, and he just happens to be close friends with LBJ.
After the murder of JFK, D.H. Byrd is so happy that he has the window casing from the window moved to his living room as a trophy.
That is fascinating.
And the other thing about Byrd is that he started the Civil Air Patrol.
He has a strange connection.
He is very well connected to military intelligence, and obviously he's an oil man.
D.H. Byrd became known as Dry Hole Byrd because he was such an aggressive oil speculator.
He was an extreme right winger.
And he indeed had started the Civil Air Patrol, where he had two well known members.
One of them was Lee Harvey Oswald, and the other one was David Ferry, who was an associate of Carlos Marcelo and also a sometimes pilot for the CIA.
Oh, yeah.
And he was the guy who Garrison had charged or was about to charge, and he turned up dead before that investigation.
So certainly he had some connection to the assassination.
Correct.
There was a special and.
It was by Nigel Turner.
You mentioned this a few times, called The Men Who Killed Kennedy, The Guilty Men.
And this was actually banned.
Can you go into that just a bit?
Yeah, and this can be found online, and it is well worth it for your listeners because it's a multi part series on Men Who Killed Kennedy.
Yeah, it's great.
But this program aired in the UK, and it makes a very compelling case that Lyndon Johnson met at the home of.
Clint Murchison Jr., a Texas oil man, the dean of the oil men, as it were, Ed Clark, Representative H.L. Hunt, and others, very late at night, actually early in the morning of November 22, 1963, to go over the final plans for Kennedy's murder.
Many writers and authors, researchers have tried to debunk that.
It was alleged initially by Madeline Duncan Brown, a mistress of Johnson's who bore him a son.
That this meeting took place.
She also said that Richard Nixon was there.
What I have learned by checking Nixon's scheduling records was that I think there is confusion between a reception held in the early evening at Murchison's and a late night meeting that is well after 1 a.m.
Nixon is indeed at Murchison's for a reception.
Murchison is one of the few people to come up with money for Nixon's disastrous 1962 race for governor of California.
And therefore, when he's in town, he cannot turn Murchison down.
He is also Nixon, this is seen at his hotel by a reporter at 10 o'clock that evening in the hotel rooftop restaurant.
Okay.
So he did not attend this meeting, although I believe the meeting took place.
Who was there?
Well, I think you're looking at Murchison, representative for H.L. Hunt, who was then the richest man in the world, another Texas oil man, D.H. Byrd, John Currington, John Connolly.
Essentially, all of the key people going over the big event to make sure it pulled off without a hitch.
Now, LBJ and Hoover.
In the television show you refer to, both the chauffeur and a maid for Murchison are interviewed on camera and they confirm the late night meeting.
And the chauffeur says that he drove J. Edgar Hoover, who was there for both the reception and the meeting, to a remote airstrip and a federal airplane at 3 o'clock in the morning.
Again, this isn't Roger Stone saying this.
This is the chauffeur on a videotape.
I'm sure he's long dead.
Right.
So, in a certain odd sense, the Nigel Turner series is like the video version of The Man Who Killed Kennedy, the case against LBJ.
I highly recommend it because many of the facts that I bring out in my book are expanded upon and proved in this series.
Now, how did it get banned?
When the executive Bill Moyers with Public Broadcasting learned about this, he moved very aggressively to rally a number of powerful Johnson supporters, including Lady Bird Johnson, LBJ's widow, to object to the airing.
That's what I love about these open minded liberals.
They fear information.
My attitude is let's see it and let people make their own decisions.
Yeah.
I don't believe in censorship.
I don't care whether your views are extreme left, extreme right, or undefinable.
Let the people decide the content.
I had the same argument with CNN regarding my book.
I was booked for two different programs on CNN to talk about Johnson's role in the killing of Kennedy.
And when Tom Johnson, a former Lyndon Johnson aide who became an executive of CNN, learned about it, he would spike both interviews.
What are you afraid of, Tom?
Let me make my case.
Let me make my case.
Let the viewers decide whether I'm right or wrong.
It was the same kind of thing.
So, Moyers, Jack Valente, another former famous Johnson aide, George Reedy, Liz Carpenter, they all wrote an open letter and they railed against this irresponsible film, which was therefore never shown in the United States.
Thanks to the magic of YouTube, everybody listening to this can go watch it and you will come away with the clear idea that Lyndon Baines Johnson played a crucial role in the murder of John Kennedy.
Oh, yeah.
I have a copy of it before it got banned, basically, and it is explosive.
I agree with you 100%.
But Moyers was formerly, and this isn't talked about very much, the special assistant to LBJ.
Yeah, it's very interesting.
Bill Moyers was a Presbyterian minister, he was kind of a straight laced Texan, was really brought in as a beard for Lyndon Johnson.
Johnson impregnated three different women at the same time in the White House secretarial pool.
He was known to be having relations with as many as five or eight women at a time.
And he was.
Moyers was kind of brought in as the beard.
Interestingly enough, it is Bill Moyers, aide to Vice President Johnson, who gives the Secret Service the order to remove the bubble top from Kennedy's limousine on the day of the murder.
Now, the bubble top, which is made of plastic, is not bulletproof, but it is not transparent.
It's opaque.
It's black, which means that a shooter in a high building could not get a bead on Kennedy's head.
Because he couldn't see it.
Therefore, it is Bill Moyers who says to the FBI agent, Get that goddamn bubble top off.
Who's he paraphrasing?
Who's the minister?
Who's the Reverend Moyers paraphrasing when he takes the Lord's name in vain?
That sounds like LBJ, yeah.
It's boss Lyndon Johnson.
Moyers has never been confronted about that.
I may get a video camera and try to track him down, too.
We also know very recently.
An extraordinary thing.
Lucy and Lindeberg Johnson, his two daughters, gave an interview with Katie Couric in which they extolled their daddy's great role on civil rights.
They forgot all those anti lynching bills he killed.
And they said that if he were alive today, he'd be a champion of gay marriage.
Well, in truth, Lyndon Johnson ordered Moyers to use the FBI to hunt down and expose gay Republicans working in the campaigns of his opponents.
Barry Goldwater.
Right.
So the idea that Johnson had some affinity or cared about the civil rights of gay people is nonsense.
He sought to destroy gay people through his illegal use of the FBI for political reasons.
Well, it's interesting that you mentioned Valente, who was on that petition to try to get the documentary banned.
And of course, they did get it banned.
But he became the president of the Motion Picture Association.
But his history, which you go over, In the book is pretty fascinating with LBJ.
Well, in essence, Valenti is an aide to Johnson, and Johnson's very favorite mistress is a woman named Mary Margaret Wiley.
Johnson fathers a daughter with Mary Margaret.
His daughter is now a major executive with one of the Hollywood studios.
She's most definitely the daughter of Lyndon Johnson and Mary Margaret Wiley Valenti.
There's actually a White House tape in which Valenti is.
Talking to the president, and Johnson says, Well, Jack, what are you going to do this weekend?
And Jack says, Well, Mr. President, I think I'll go home and see my daughter.
And Johnson says, Your daughter.
So, I think Jack was a beard for LBJ.
And I do not think Jack was gay, although we do know that Johnson ordered Moyers to tell the FBI to do a full investigation into Valenti to see if he was gay.
The Billion Dollar Theft00:05:36
Fascinating.
So, while he may have been bisexual, I have no information on that.
He was most definitely not exclusively gay.
Well, it's just very interesting that these kind of Johnson associates years later sort of got together and were like, Don't let that Men Who Killed Kennedy, The Guilty Men episode out.
I found that interesting that they collaborated.
And there hasn't been a lot of follow up on that, so I'm glad you mentioned it.
Well, I mean, I do think that this recent civil rights conference at the LBJ Library and the effort by his two daughters to go out and try to get people to forget the Vietnam War in which 50,000 Americans died and Lyndon and Ladybird made millions, they'd like us to forget that and focus on.
Civil rights record.
I don't want to pat myself on the back, but I tried very hard to use the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination to draw new public attention to the real history.
And I thank all those media outlets like Fox and Glenn Beck and Larry King and dozens of others, print and electronic, who gave publicity to the book, who were open to the possibility.
Of an alternative history.
You don't have to believe everything I say.
All I ask is you read it and decide for yourself.
Well, they had the guts to put you on, and that's important.
The book is a bestseller, from what I understand, so congratulations on that.
It became a number 15 New York Times bestseller to my amazement and surprise, and it continues to sell briskly.
Now, the paperback version will be out shortly.
It has two new chapters.
That has additional information, including Johnson's attack that Johnson authorized on the USS Liberty, in which 36 American servicemen were killed.
This was a false flag attack that Johnson hoped would spark a war, if we could blame it on the Egyptians in the Middle East.
And I also detail, incredibly, the theft of $1 billion of gold by Lyndon Johnson, which would be worth about $6 billion today.
So, there's a lot of great information in the new chapters, and the paperback will be out shortly.
That's fantastic.
How did you, now just to kind of wrap everything up, after spending so much time studying this, and you'd been really deep in Washington politics, but what's the feeling that you came away with on LBJ and his presidency when it was all over?
It's largely a failed presidency.
He gave us unsustainable debt and big government.
Uh huh.
They gave us the disastrous interventionist foreign policy.
It's really tragic.
I mean, there's karma in the murder of John Kennedy.
Johnson achieves his greatest desire, power, and money, yet he dies bitter and broken.
So it's a cautionary tale.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you actually feel that maybe he had almost psychopathic qualities.
Oh, he was an amoral psychopath.
This is a man who blew up a dog with a stick of dynamite in the town square as a child, who, for amusement and show off for his friends, beat a mule to death with an axe.
This is a man who foddered multiple children.
He had an unending appetite for alcohol and cigarettes, but what he really enjoyed was humiliating, embarrassing, and ridiculing people.
He was a sadist.
He enjoyed making people unhappy.
This is why he would conduct White House staff meetings while sitting on the toilet.
Right.
It wasn't about his coarseness or the fact that he was crude, although he was certainly coarse and crude.
But it was the sadist in him.
This is a sick individual, someone who could order a murder the way you and I would order a ham sandwich, someone who is epically, biblically corrupt, somebody who would steal a hot stove.
So it is very hard to find any redeeming qualities.
John F. Kennedy would describe him as, quote, a fucking liar, close quote.
This is not someone who I think has the balance.
He wasn't a moral psychopath.
And I think that an important aspect to my book is a psychological profile of him.
Nice.
And do you think JFK underestimated him and putting him on the ticket, what he was capable of?
It was both the best and the worst decision.
In retrospect, had he not put him on the ticket, Kennedy would have lost and he would have been a footnote in history.
Yes, but weighing the consequences of putting him on the ticket, I really wonder.
I wonder.
Roger, thank you for an excellent book, The Man Who Killed Kennedy, and the outstanding interview today.
Great.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you for being with us.
All right.
Terrific.
Many thanks.
Thank you for joining me for this powerful report on LBJ and the JFK assassination with Roger Stone.
You can find more special reports and interviews at www.darkjournalist.com.