LBJ: Kennedy White House killed U.S. ally

LBJ: Kennedy White House killed U.S. ally Tapes support new book showing who really assassinated JFK

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: September 23, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern

Newly released tapes of President Lyndon Johnson's telephone conversations corroborate the central premise of an explosive new book that promises to completely reshape the debate over who killed President John F. Kennedy.

President Johnson believed what Richard Nixon always suspected, writes Fox News White House correspondent James Rosen in the Weekly Standard.

The surreptitious recordings, released from the Johnson library in Austin, Texas, Feb. 28, offer this bombshell missed by the press, Rosen writes: The Kennedy White House did not merely tolerate or encourage the murder of its ally, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, but organized and executed it.

Rosen's findings provide further evidence of the stunning, but convincing conclusion of co-authors Brad O'Leary and L.E. Seymour in the upcoming WND Books release "Triangle of Death."

Although the book has not yet been released to bookstores, it has already shot up to 568 on the Amazon chart just from initial pre-sales.

"Triangle" authors present compelling evidence that President Kennedy was killed Nov. 22, 1963, as the result of a massive conspiracy between the CIA-installed government of South Vietnam, the French global heroin syndicate and the New Orleans Mafia.

The book is based on recently declassified federal documents, material supplied by the KGB, information from the Bonano crime family, documents obtained from a French court and the only interview done with a French witness previously only debriefed by the FBI and CIA.

In his Weekly Standard story, Rosen writes Johnson left little doubt of his beliefs about who killed Diem in a Feb. 1, 1966, call to Sen. Eugene McCarthy in which he complained about the Kennedy administration and its left-wing allies in the Senate, who had supported Kennedy's entrance into the war but not Johnson's continuance of it.

"They started on me with Diem, you remember," Johnson told McCarthy, recalling the words of the coup's proponents. "'He was corrupt and he ought to be killed.' So we killed him. We all got together and got a goddamn bunch of thugs and assassinated him. Now, we've really had no political stability [in South Vietnam] since then."

Rosen notes minutes later, in a call to Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, until recently America's ambassador to South Vietnam, Johnson expounded on his recollection, and the general echoed it.

"They started out and said, 'We got to kill Diem, because he's no damn good. Let's, let's knock him off.' And we did," Johnson told Taylor.

"That's exactly where it started!" Johnson replied with obvious anger. "And I just pled with them at the time, 'Please, don't do it.' But that's where it started. And they knocked him off."

"Triangle of Death – which includes details of a first-time-ever crime scene re-creation at Dealey Plaza – shows how Kennedy planned and developed the coup d'état that resulted in the political murders of the Catholic president, Diem, and his two brothers just 22 days before his death. The U.S. State Department suppressed this information for more than 30 years.

Evidence includes federal documents that only recently have been declassified or released – exclusively to the authors.

But more important than any of that, the authors say, this book reveals an official CIA document "that may well be the most shocking piece of evidence ever to arise from the enigma surrounding Kennedy's murder."

The document affirms that an international assassin had been captured by U.S. authorities in Dallas less than 48 hours after Kennedy was shot, and that instead of arresting him, those same U.S. authorities secretly flew the assassin out of the country to freedom.

The authors also reveal a Mafia chieftain, who employed Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald's uncle, confessed to federal officers he had been directly involved in Kennedy's murder.

In addition, O'Leary and Seymour recount how the United States and the Soviet Union both went on high military alert immediately after Kennedy's death, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

Mafia Godfather Joe Bonano saw Jack Ruby gun down Oswald and knew immediately that it was a mob hit. Bonano offered to testify before the Warren Commission but never was called.

In 1963, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev ordered the KGB to find President Kennedy's killer. The FBI never asked for the KGB's report.

Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey secretly identified who they believed ordered JFK's assassination.

Robert Kennedy's biographer finally admitted RFK, the president's brother and then-attorney general, prevented testimony of certain witnesses to the Warren Commission.

Kennedy's brain – a crucial piece of forensic evidence – was stolen by a U.S. Navy admiral, on Robert Kennedy's orders.

Robert Kennedy didn't want his brother's death investigated because the investigation might uncover the fact that he, along with the president and the rest of the Kennedy White House, had drawn up operational plans to assassinate Fidel Castro after the Bay of Pigs invasion. Two chapters of this book have already been used to make two different television specials – one on PBS and the other on the History Channel.

Co-author O'Leary, involved in politics for more than 25 years, publishes the O'Leary Report, one of the most influential publications in American politics. His clients have included more than 60 political and public figures, including Sen. John Tower and Texas Gov. John Connolly, who rode in Kennedy's car when he was shot. O'Leary also hosted his own radio show on NBC for seven years and was a contributing columnist for USA Today Weekend magazine. He currently is president of Associated Television News in Los Angeles.

O'Leary is available for media interviews through Shirley and Banister and Associates at (703) 739-5920.

His co-author, Seymour, is a free-lance writer and author of 15 novels, including "The Stickmen" and "Operator 'B'."

O'Leary and Seymour note investigative bodies of the U.S. government have made numerous claims, including that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin; that only two shots hit their target, that the bullets fired that day all came from the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository; and that Kennedy was killed because he was preparing to pull all U.S. troops out of Vietnam.

The authors insist all of these claims are false and are designed to placate the American public and distract them from the facts of the case.

They acknowledge most readers will find it difficult to accept that Kennedy authorized the overthrow of the Catholic government of South Vietnam and the assassination of Diem, South Vietnam's democratically elected, constitutional president.

After all, Kennedy had generously pledged American troops, military equipment and tax dollars to protect South Vietnam from the threat of communism.

But the authors of "Triangle of Death" provide evidence Kennedy personally asked a high-ranking U.S. military officer to assassinate Diem, who was a political disaster-in-the-making for the president.

The events were set into motion when a Buddhist leader named Quang Duc calmly sat down in a Saigon street June 11, 1963, soaked himself with gasoline, lit a match and burned himself to death.

The news swept through the world, and when the full extent of Diem's brutality toward the Buddhists became apparent, America immediately began to ask itself the obvious questions, O'Leary and Seymour write: "Why is the U.S. supporting a foreign government that engages in religious persecution? Why is President Kennedy sending U.S. military personnel to help the government of a man who puts his own people into concentration camps?"

The authors point out: "Until then, America believed the increasing number of U.S. men and women being sent to South Vietnam – close to 15,000 by June 1963 – and the $1.2-million-per-day aid package were to help the South Vietnamese fight the deadly Vietcong. But literally overnight, the U.S. was internationally perceived as a bunch of buffoons who were propping up a tyrant."

With the next U.S. presidential election just over a year away, they write, "Kennedy was infuriated; moreover, he and his political consultants were scared."

People "already believed that Kennedy had stolen the election, based on suspicious vote-counting in Illinois; a Catholic U.S. president supporting a Catholic fanatic who was intent on persecuting another religious group would provide them with all the ammunition they needed in November of '64."

The authors contend they have irrefutable evidence the Kennedy White House supported a coup d'etat against the government of South Vietnam and the assassination of President Diem.

"More than anything else," they write, "this was the rich ground in which a counter-conspiracy was planted, the conspiracy that led to President Kennedy's own assassination."

The New York Times

September 11, 2003

ECONOMIC SCENE

The Internet Book Race

By VIRGINIA POSTREL

IKE every author I know, I'm obsessed with the Amazon ranking of my new book. Several times a day, I check the number on the book's Amazon.com page to see how its sales compare with sales of every other book. Best-seller lists rank just the top 10 or 20 books. Amazon ranks more than two million — every book it sells.

Authors love the rankings at Amazon and its competitor, BarnesandNoble.com (also known as BN.com), because they give us real-time information on how well a book is selling. Aside from satisfying anxious curiosity, the rankings provide immediate feedback on the effect of reviews and media appearances.

But the rankings aren't just important to authors. With some clever tweaking, they let economists answer some basic questions about online competition.

"Does the Internet make things very competitive?" asks Austan Goolsbee, an economist at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. "Or does the Internet make the sellers of things able to gather information and charge different prices" to different customers, depending on their willingness to pay?

To put it a different way, does every product become a commodity online, driving all prices down so far that they just cover costs? Or can online retailers find ways to make significant sustainable profits? In theory, things could go either way.

Testing the question empirically means doing more than checking the prices listed on Web sites. Just because an online retailer offers a product at a particular price doesn't mean anyone's buying. Researchers need to know how much is actually selling at those prices. And that information is hard to come by.

Enter the Amazon and BN.com ratings. By measuring sales for exactly the same goods at competing sites, the book rankings provide the missing information.

In an article in the June issue of Quantitative Marketing and Economics, Professor Goolsbee and Judith Chevalier, an economist at the Yale School of Management, figured out how to turn the book rankings into sales figures. They then recorded prices and sales for more than 18,000 titles at three points in 2001, when Amazon tested various pricing strategies and BN.com responded. With that information, they examine how price changes at one site affect sales by both that retailer and its competitor. (The paper can be downloaded from http://gsbadg. uchicago.edu/vitae.htm.)

Unfortunately for curious authors, the specific calculation used to translate rankings into sales is obsolete, because online book sales have grown substantially since 2001. All the economists can say is that sales approximately double every time the rank is cut in half.

"A book at rank 2,000 sells a bit less than half the books as a book at 1,000," Professor Goolsbee says.

That means it's relatively easy to climb the low ranks. A book selling two copies a day at the time of the study was ranked at 14,468. The economists bought six copies in a 10-minute period and drove the rank to 2,854.

It's much harder, however, for top-selling books to move up, since already-high sales must double for a book to go from No. 8 to No. 4, double again to go to No. 2, and double once again to reach the top slot.

Not surprisingly, the researchers found that higher prices mean fewer sales. But the effects are notably different at the two sites. Both sites lose customers when prices rise, but Barnes & Noble loses a lot more.

A 1 percent price increase at BN.com pushes sales down 4 percent, making price rises a bad idea. By contrast, the same increase at Amazon reduces sales by only 0.5 percent — a net revenue gain.

That's not exactly what economists expected. "We economists decided in about 1998 that the whole world was wrong about the Internet, and the Internet is not about companies making money," Professor Chevalier says.

Instead, the Internet would unleash "incredibly vigorous competition to a point that the law of one price is going to hold," she said. "You're not going to see a penny of difference in prices across different sites because everybody can check."

The Internet has indeed spurred competition. But it hasn't led to uniformly low prices. In the book business, at least, Amazon has demonstrated that it's possible to build a large base of customers who won't bolt to the competition if you raise prices a little bit. (For the record, I own 100 shares of Amazon stock, which I purchased about two years ago and have no immediate plans to sell.)

Barnes & Noble, by contrast, caters to discount hunters with little loyalty to its particular service. (Customers at smaller sites are, if anything, even more price-sensitive.)

In fact, BN.com picks up just about all the customers Amazon loses when it raises prices. By contrast, Amazon gets only a small number of the customers BN.com loses. They either go to an even cheaper retailer or perhaps don't buy at all.

"Raising prices by 1 percent at BN.com reduces sales about 4 percent but increases sales at Amazon.com by only about 0.2 percent," the economists write. "Many of the lost customers from BN.com evidently do not just go buy the book from Amazon.com."

For traditional independent bookstores, this is all bad news. "It just looks like it's a very competitive retail business," Professor Goolsbee says, "and it doesn't bode that well for the bookstores," since most of them have a lot less pricing clout than Barnes & Noble.

"Except for Amazon, the online bookselling business is extremely competitive," he says. "If they mess up the pricing they're just going to die."

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