Richard Nixon thought Lyndon Johnson killed John F. Kennedy, according to legendary political operative Roger Stone.
“Richard Nixon told me in 1982 that he immediately knew who Jack Ruby was when he saw him shoot Oswald,” Stone told The Daily Caller in an extensive interview.
Stone’s new book The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ is currently tearing up the Amazon bestseller list and even earned praise from Ron Paul.
Among other revelations, Stone told TheDC that Nixon hired Jack Ruby as a House committee informant at Johnson’s request years prior to the Kennedy assassination, which occurred 50 years ago today.
“Nixon said, ‘The damn thing is, I knew this Jack Ruby. Murray [Chotiner] brought him to me in 1947, said he was one of “Johnson’s boys” and that LBJ wanted us to hire him as an informant to the Committee. We did,'” according to Stone.
“I think Nixon immediately recognized that LBJ was using one his operatives to do ‘clean up’ work on the murder of John Kennedy. Nixon would also say to me ‘Both Johnson and I wanted to be president, but the only difference was I wouldn’t kill for it.’ At other times when I pressed the old man hard on who really killed JFK, Nixon would just shiver and say ‘Texas!’,” Stone said.
“Richard Nixon, Henry Cabot Lodge and Barry Goldwater were convinced that Lyndon Johnson murdered JFK. I mean absolutely convinced.”
But why would Johnson take such a massive risk? Johnson had been Senate Majority Leader and was Vice President of the United States at the time of Kennedy’s execution.
“Lyndon Johnson was on the verge of political execution at the hands of the Kennedys who despised Johnson for using blackmail and intimidation with a hostile takeover of the vice presidency at the 1960 Democratic convention…All the insiders in DC knew that the Kennedys and LBJ were enemies. Robert Kennedy was within days of destroying LBJ with a two-track program. One was a RFK-fed LIFE magazine expose into LBJ’s epic corruption and ties to his protégé’s Bobby Baker’s scandals. The other was a Senate Rules Committee investigation, also fed by Robert Kennedy, into LBJ’s corruption and kickbacks,” Stone said. “Desperate” does not even begin to describe LBJ’s situation. LBJ was on the verge of not just national humiliation and being dropped from the 1964 Demo ticket, he was looking at the slammer.”
And the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald was a Soviet sympathizer operating either out of ideology or in tandem with left-wing foreign elements?
“One of the great canards that the government and the media have pushed over the decades is that Oswald was a leftist. In fact, Oswald was a U.S. intelligence operative and an FBI informer,” Stone said. “There is an 85 year old anti-Castro Cuban alive today named Antonio Veciana down in Miami. He met 25-35 times with his CIA handler, a man named David Atlee Phillips from Texas. In late August, 1963 Veciana saw his CIA handler with Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas. Machiavellians in U.S. intelligence recognized that Oswald’s fake public persona of being a “pro-Castro Marxist” made him an ideal person to frame for the JFK assassination.”
And what of Johnson’s own doubts about the veracity of the Warren Commission Report, expressed in a 1969 interview with Walter Cronkite? Why would he openly claim that he suspected “international connections” if he had an incentive to put the story to rest?
“Behind the scenes in 1963 and 1964, LBJ told many people that Fidel Castro murdered JFK. He implied to another person it was blowback from the Diem assassination. Later Lyndon Johnson said that it was blowback because the USA was running “Murder, Inc.” in the Caribbean,” Stone explained.
“One of LBJ’s greatest manipulations was to tell people behind the scenes that Castro or the Russians did it and if we don’t cover it up and blame it on one dead man, then we are going to have WWIII and 40 million people are going to die. He tried that number on Earl Warren and even laughed later about Warren crying. Any real investigation of a ‘conspiracy’ would have led directly to the feet of LBJ,” Stone said.
Stone’s book is a must-read not only for its insight into the death of an iconic president, but for its unfiltered and extremely entertaining depiction of a political world that Stone for decades has been privy to.