Just curious if anyone has read the book. I browsed through the Warren Commission Report in my teens and found it boring and implausible. I haven’t yet read Stones book but I am considering getting and reading the book.
LBJ: “Who can we get to do the job?”
Conspirator #2: “We’ve got a guy just back from the USSR. His name is Oswald. Everyone will think he’s a nut, but he can do it. We’ll put another shooter in a second location to make sure.”
Right. Having seen the conspiracy nonsense with the 9/11 “Truther” movement, I’d put this in the same category.
I heard that a couple days after the assasination.
I just did not know what to think, I hope it is false.
The problem with these theories is figuring out who with power to preserve DIDN’T want John Kennedy murdered.
I was five months past my nineteenth birthday and stationed in Keflavik Iceland as an electronics technician on a US Navy communications station when John Kennedy was shot. On a communications base messages from all over the globe are coming through at all times. I didn’t have access to them, my job was to help keep the equipment, which was very unreliable in that era, working. I had nothing to do with the actual communications but I noticed that from the first there were all kinds of rumors about what had actually happened and one of those rumors was that LBJ was behind it. From the first day there were a lot of people who did not believe the official story.
These conspiracy BS theories are just that --- all BS.
One man killed JFK. That was a crazy little Commie loser named Lee Harvey Oswald. Just like a crazy loser named Hinkley almost killed Reagan with the cameras rolling all in full sight. And before that, a couple of other crazies tried to kill Ford out on San Fransisco.
Crazies do crazy things. Sane people can't understand their motives.
There was no conspiracy. Not sexy. No money to be made from that fact. But it is a fact none the less.
Isn't capitalism great?
I can’t see who killed JFK, but I might be able to forward a plausible theory about why it was felt necessary to kill him.
JFK was in terrible health, and one of his worst afflictions was Addison’s disease, which today is closely associated with him. With the severity he had it, a major and unique symptom is the appearance of the skin of the upper chest and face. If you are looking for it, you can even see it on him in the pictures and film of the time. At the time, any physician familiar with Addison’s would have known he had it at 50 feet, just by looking at him.
The only effective treatment they had for years for Addison’s was cortisone, which was very expensive and rare. For this reason he had supplies of it and other essential drugs stored in safe deposit boxes around the US.
But then, in the early 1950s, a pharmaceutical company developed a process to make artificial cortisone cheaply. As a very useful drug, it was soon seen as a “miracle drug” and was widely prescribed for many conditions.
However, the false rumor began in the medical community that taking too much cortisone could make a person mentally imbalanced, even clinically paranoid. This became amplified terribly with the release of the James Mason film Bigger Than Life in 1956. Mason did a “chilling” performance of a mild mannered man driven into a homicidal rage by taking cortisone.
So far, just about anyone could piece together that the president had Addison’s disease and was taking cortisone, which could drive him mad.
But then the Cuban Missile Crisis happened. Suddenly the light dawned that the president could become insane, *and* that he had his hand on “the nuclear trigger”.
JFK was asked by many people to step down for health reasons, but he always adamantly refused. So isn’t it reasonable to assume that *someone* decided that he was too dangerous to live?
I’ve heard that theory for decades. I knew some people connected to Billie Sol Estes and supposedly he was in on the plan too.
Didn’t they recently release some tapes of Jackie O’s and she thought LBJ was involved in her husband’s murder?
Four things
One
I have always thought there is a possibility Jackie Kennedy had her husband whacked. She knew he was a philanderer and was concerned that she’d be put out of the family with none of the family money. What better place, if you are a NE Liberal than a Southern City? She had a whole population of red-neck patsies ready made to blame even if Oswald got a way.
Two
LBJ was scurrilous person but he doesn’t strike me as a politician who’d put a hit out. He would never let a situation get to that point because he’d have the election bought and paid for. If it was Bill Clinton as VP then yeah, LBJ, no I don’t think so.
Three
I do believe that LBJ benefited from a huge sympathy vote in 1964. I think that Goldwater would have done better in the 1964 election against a live JLK rather than a dead, deified one that it was sacrilege to criticize. It took about 45 minutes for the press to deify JFK and to proclaim him as a member of the pantheon that includes Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson.
Four
I am a member of the Lee Harvey Oswald fan club.
I dn’t thinl LBJ physicaly had a had in it but I think he contracted the killing.
I think LBJ did it. JFK had already picked his VP ( I forget who) and he had accepted. Then It was withdrawn and LBJ was selected. Was it because LBJ had Hoover’s file on JFK and his sexcapades? Who know? Who cares? One lousy rat killing another.
LBJ and Ed Clark had painted themselves into a corner to the point that only the power of the presidency was going to keep them both out of prison and JFK was going to drop Lyndon for the 64 election. Read Barr McClellan’s book.
Does he take into account that procedures were significantly tightened up following the assassination, I wonder. /rhetorical
Many years ago I read a book claiming LBJ was behind the assassination - the one with a picture of LBJ with a strange grin on his face. Of all the theories the LBJ theory is the 2nd lamest one I’ve suffered through. The lamest theory belongs to the one claiming the limo driver did it. :-)
It is much worse than that, LBJ killed America.
Conspiracy theories develop because we are not comfortable with the idea that one nobody can cause a dramatic change in history.
Even of the change is negative, we feel better thinking that it was some “group” that caused the change. We’re more comfortable with twisted plots than with one lucky bastard
3rd hand “confessions” like this are a dime a dozen when it comes to the Kennedy assassination conspiracies. Not worth much except to sell some books and make a quick buck.