08-04-2018, 04:57 AM
A point that gets lost in the discussions around the March-April 1968
period: Why Johnson abdicated: from my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE KILLERS
OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT:
My journey back to my original understanding of the Kennedy assassination coverup began in earnest in the early 1970s. Studying the Vietnam War as it unfolded and with the help of the revealing Pentagon Papers made me fully aware of how pervasive the level of deceitfulness involved in the assassination was in our governmental system. But it was the Watergate scandal that served as the decisive catalyst for my reexamination of postwar American history. This demonstrable conspiracy -- one of those rare political conspiracies everyone accepted as such -- and the many other crimes surrounding the Nixon presidency gave me a fresh awareness of the role of what Peter Dale Scott has since described as "deep politics" in American history. Scott, who has written perceptively on Watergate as well as the Kennedy assassination, is one of the writers who has drawn connections between those two events, which the mainstream media have regarded as distinct, even though some of the same high-level and lower-level players were involved. Scott writes in Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, "In each case an incumbent President was removed from office, after a build-up of suspicion and resentment inside his administration because of his announced plans and/or negotiations for disengagement from Vietnam."
In fact, as I was beginning to recognize at the time of Nixon's resignation in 1974, three presidents in a row -- Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon -- had been removed from office. It was becoming hard not to notice how the political system had changed with the Coup of '63 and the coverup that followed. The calamitous turn in the Vietnam War when the Vietcong mounted the Tet Offensive in January 1968 led to President Johnson's forced withdrawal from that year's presidential race at the behest of his senior advisers, "The Wise Men." That group was largely drawn from the leadership of the eastern establishment and including Clark Clifford, Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Henry Cabot Lodge, Douglas Dillon, and George Ball. Their decisive meeting with Johnson came on March 25, six days before he stunned the nation by announcing at the end of a televised speech about Vietnam, "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President."
Henry Brandon, the chief American correspondent of the Sunday Times of London, reports in his autobiography, Special Relationships: A Foreign Correspondent's Memoirs from Roosevelt to Reagan (1988), about a conversation he had with President Johnson in 1968, after that decision was made: "LBJ, aware by then of his public repudiation, seemed to drag a burden of anguish in his wake when he spoke his own epitaph during a flight to visit President Truman in Independence, Missouri, aboard Air Force One: The only difference between Kennedy's assassination and mine is that mine was a live one, which makes it all a little more torturing.'" (Johnson visited Truman in Independence on May 3 and October 11 of that year.) Former Secretary of State Acheson summed up the March decision by the Wise Men by saying that "we can no longer do the job we set out to do [in Vietnam] in the time we have left, and we must begin to take steps to disengage." Carl Oglesby in The Yankee and Cowboy War interprets what he calls Johnson's forced "abdication" as a Yankee power play by the Wise Men to "break off [from the Cowboys] a war believed to be unwinnable except through an internal police state, both sides fighting for control of the levers of military and state-police power through control of the presidency. Johnson's Ides of March was a less bloody Dallas, but it was a Dallas just the same: it came of a concerted effort of conspirators to install a new national policy by clandestine means. Its main difference from Dallas is that it finally did not succeed."
period: Why Johnson abdicated: from my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE KILLERS
OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT:
My journey back to my original understanding of the Kennedy assassination coverup began in earnest in the early 1970s. Studying the Vietnam War as it unfolded and with the help of the revealing Pentagon Papers made me fully aware of how pervasive the level of deceitfulness involved in the assassination was in our governmental system. But it was the Watergate scandal that served as the decisive catalyst for my reexamination of postwar American history. This demonstrable conspiracy -- one of those rare political conspiracies everyone accepted as such -- and the many other crimes surrounding the Nixon presidency gave me a fresh awareness of the role of what Peter Dale Scott has since described as "deep politics" in American history. Scott, who has written perceptively on Watergate as well as the Kennedy assassination, is one of the writers who has drawn connections between those two events, which the mainstream media have regarded as distinct, even though some of the same high-level and lower-level players were involved. Scott writes in Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, "In each case an incumbent President was removed from office, after a build-up of suspicion and resentment inside his administration because of his announced plans and/or negotiations for disengagement from Vietnam."
In fact, as I was beginning to recognize at the time of Nixon's resignation in 1974, three presidents in a row -- Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon -- had been removed from office. It was becoming hard not to notice how the political system had changed with the Coup of '63 and the coverup that followed. The calamitous turn in the Vietnam War when the Vietcong mounted the Tet Offensive in January 1968 led to President Johnson's forced withdrawal from that year's presidential race at the behest of his senior advisers, "The Wise Men." That group was largely drawn from the leadership of the eastern establishment and including Clark Clifford, Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Henry Cabot Lodge, Douglas Dillon, and George Ball. Their decisive meeting with Johnson came on March 25, six days before he stunned the nation by announcing at the end of a televised speech about Vietnam, "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President."
Henry Brandon, the chief American correspondent of the Sunday Times of London, reports in his autobiography, Special Relationships: A Foreign Correspondent's Memoirs from Roosevelt to Reagan (1988), about a conversation he had with President Johnson in 1968, after that decision was made: "LBJ, aware by then of his public repudiation, seemed to drag a burden of anguish in his wake when he spoke his own epitaph during a flight to visit President Truman in Independence, Missouri, aboard Air Force One: The only difference between Kennedy's assassination and mine is that mine was a live one, which makes it all a little more torturing.'" (Johnson visited Truman in Independence on May 3 and October 11 of that year.) Former Secretary of State Acheson summed up the March decision by the Wise Men by saying that "we can no longer do the job we set out to do [in Vietnam] in the time we have left, and we must begin to take steps to disengage." Carl Oglesby in The Yankee and Cowboy War interprets what he calls Johnson's forced "abdication" as a Yankee power play by the Wise Men to "break off [from the Cowboys] a war believed to be unwinnable except through an internal police state, both sides fighting for control of the levers of military and state-police power through control of the presidency. Johnson's Ides of March was a less bloody Dallas, but it was a Dallas just the same: it came of a concerted effort of conspirators to install a new national policy by clandestine means. Its main difference from Dallas is that it finally did not succeed."