24-10-2013, 02:44 PM
Good post, David. I do think legal scholars pretty much agreed that LBJ was President the moment JFK was dead. We've had many Presidents who died in office.
The amazing thing (and this shows how reckless LBJ was) is that we had no Vice President until January 1965 (when Humphrey was sworn in). And in 1964 Johnson was racing around his ranch at high speed while drinking, with reporters in the car ("Mr. President, you're fun," one of them cooed). If he had gotten killed, Speaker John McCormack would have succeeded him, and no one thought he was capable of handling that.
I think that LBJ and Hoover both heard rumors in the wind that people were plotting against JFK, and they passively did nothing to prevent it. But LBJ and Hoover would never have picked Oswald as the patsy - he created too many headaches for both of them. If they were the masterminds, they would have found some genuine non-political nut, an escapee from a mental asylum, to blame the assassination on.
But as Stanley Karnow wrote, LBJ told the Joint Chiefs at a Christmas Party a month after the assassination, "Just get me elected, and you can have your war." I agree that the lack of AF protection around AF1 during the flight back indicates people within the government knew there was no foreign threat.
The amazing thing (and this shows how reckless LBJ was) is that we had no Vice President until January 1965 (when Humphrey was sworn in). And in 1964 Johnson was racing around his ranch at high speed while drinking, with reporters in the car ("Mr. President, you're fun," one of them cooed). If he had gotten killed, Speaker John McCormack would have succeeded him, and no one thought he was capable of handling that.
I think that LBJ and Hoover both heard rumors in the wind that people were plotting against JFK, and they passively did nothing to prevent it. But LBJ and Hoover would never have picked Oswald as the patsy - he created too many headaches for both of them. If they were the masterminds, they would have found some genuine non-political nut, an escapee from a mental asylum, to blame the assassination on.
But as Stanley Karnow wrote, LBJ told the Joint Chiefs at a Christmas Party a month after the assassination, "Just get me elected, and you can have your war." I agree that the lack of AF protection around AF1 during the flight back indicates people within the government knew there was no foreign threat.