President Johnson: “Fidel Castro Got Kennedy First”

[Lance Payette]

LP--

LBJ and former CIA director James Woolsey would disagree with you. But what do they know?

Each to his own.

Caveat emptor, and draw your own conclusions.

I don't think LBJ and Woolsey knew any more than anyone else - Woolsey considerably less than most LNers and CTers. Your original piece connects "LBJ, with access to top secret information" to his statement about Castro. It doesn't say "access to top secret information that Castro had orchestrated the assassination" because there wasn't any. LBJ, of course, knew that good old Cui bono? pointed at him, so his Castro statement was somewhat self-serving.

[John Corbett]

I don't think LBJ and Woolsey knew any more than anyone else - Woolsey considerably less than most LNers and CTers. Your original piece connects "LBJ, with access to top secret information" to his statement about Castro. It doesn't say "access to top secret information that Castro had orchestrated the assassination" because there wasn't any. LBJ, of course, knew that good old Cui bono? pointed at him, so his Castro statement was somewhat self-serving.

LBJ's confusion is understandable given that he was getting most of his information from the clueless Mr. Hoover.

[Veronica Jayne Wheeler]

Well, the source for this quote is a book printed in 1991 by Georgie Ann Geyer. So who knows?

Wow!

Just. No.

This postulated theory is so whacked out, I refuse to touch it.

You go ahead and take a deep dive down that rabbit hole that leads to exactly nowhere if you like.

Might keep you out of other people's hair for awhile though with your non sequitor "research"

Dig deeper!

[Steve M. Galbraith]

Max Holland's book "The Assassination Tapes" has transcripts of a number of calls that LBJ made on the assassination. He was receiving all sorts of odd information from various sources about what happened. And not just from Hoover. The columnist Drew Pearson first told him about the Mafia plots, specifically the Roselli allegations.

He later told Ramsey Clark this:



LBJ was repeating something he heard about Castro capturing the Mafia assassins and then retaliating against JFK by using Oswald. The rest of the book has numerous accounts of LBJ promoting this type of stuff.

[Lance Payette]

New York Times article from 1976, when Howard K. Smith reported what LBJ had said in 1968. My guess is that LBJ actually knew no more than yours truly, possibly considerably less.

Lyndon B. Johnson privately linked Premier Fidel Castro of Cuba to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Howard K. Smith, the ABC News commentator, said last night, quoting from what he called a “confidential” convexsation with President Johnson in his tenure in the White House.

“Mr. Johnson often dealt in blarney; and what he told me may have been that,” Mr. Smith said, in reporting the conversation.

“I'll tell you something [about Kennedy's murder) that will rock you,” Mr. Smith quoted the late President as saying. “Then he said, Kennedy was trying to get to Castro, but Castro got to him first,” Mr. Smith continued.

“I was rocked all right, begged for details,” Mr. Smith added. “He refused, saying it will all come out one day."

Mr. Smith, who based his report on “thorough notes,” written an hour after the conversation, said he was making the conversation public because the issue of the assassination had been “revived, responsibly, by Senators.”

As “evidence that belief in Cuban assassination plots was alive in Washington,” during Mr. Johnson's first months in office, Mr. Smith said that Mr. Johnson's airplane had once been diverted from Miami to an obscure rural airport because of a rumor that “a Cuban kamikaze pilot had been ordered to ram his plane.”

Those dang Cuban kamikaze pilots, they're the worst.