The Presidents Johnson Connection

Of all the extraordinary coincidences at play linking the assassinations of Presidents Kennedy and Lincoln, one of the most intriguing --and least able to be dismissed as "mere" coincidence is that of their Vice-Presidents, Andrew Johnson (AJ) and Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ).

Even the obvious links are startling, that is that is both men had the same surname and were born exactly a century apart, 1808 and 1908.

Admittedly Johnson is not an uncommon name in an English-speaking community with a proportionately large Anglo-Celtic population (in Australia for example there are 17,172, entries for Johnson in the white pages against 30,226 for Jones, 62,822 Smith -- and, incidentally 7,319 for Kennedy, and only 470 for Lincoln). But that "Johnson" should come up in the context of a most uncommon position, Vice-President, is rare and that it should recur in the further context of a Vice-President who assumes the presidency following the assassination of the incumbent, makes it a rare occurrence indeed: Let's face it, unique.

On a broader view of the two men we see how their lives followed similar patterns, including volatile presidencies with one impeached and the other, LBJ, threatened with impeachment, rare charges indeed to be laid against a president, at least until the 1990s.

But to any student of the assassinations what is most intriguing of all is the fact that both men were said to have been in some way involved in the deaths of their predecessors. More on this later but first a broad look at the two men and their lives of coincidence.

THE TWO JOHNSONS

The names Andrew Johnson and Lyndon Johnson each contain thirteen letters. Both Johnsons had been the only two Vice-Presidents from the South in the 100 years between the assassinations. Both were the fathers of two daughters.

Education was an important influence in the early adult years of both men, but, ironically for opposite reasons: one was self-taught, the other the teacher. ( just for the curious: LBJ received a Bachelor of Science degree from Southwest Texas State Teachers college in San Marcos and then taught for a year in Houston before going to Washington in 1931).

They entered their presidencies in their mid-fifties and each was opposed for re-election by a man whose name started with G: Grant in the case of Andrew and Goldwater in the case of LBJ.

In office, the major tasks confronting the Johnsons were dealing with the problems of a nation divided (on a geographical basis) by war, the American Civil War and in LBJ's case, another North-South conflict: Vietnam and the freedom of slaves and civil rights for blacks. Both were born into poor white Southern families, Andrew in a wooden shack in Raleigh, North Carolina and LBJ in a small farmhouse in Texas. AJ's father was a janitor, LBJ's father also worked for a time as a janitor. As a Southern Democrat AJ defended slavery throughout the 1840s and fifties, just as LBJ, was a consistent opponent of civil rights legislation throughout the 1940s and much of the fifties before having a change of heart.

When the Southern States began to leave the Union to form the Confederacy, AJ argued that secession was illegal. By then a US Senator from Tennessee he fought to keep his state in the Union. In the ensuing civil war he was the only Southern Senator to remain loyal to the United States. In recognition of this loyalty the Republicans chose the Democrat Johnson to run as Vice-President with their man Lincoln in the 1864 presidential campaign.

Soon after stepping into the presidency, AJ ran into trouble with a powerful Northern group in Congress known as the Radical Republicans who pushed through a sweeping civil rights Bill for the Southern Blacks. President Johnson vetoed the measure on the grounds of states' right and his belief whites should rule by right. Congress overrode the veto and passed a series of Acts establishing suffrage for the freed slaves and guaranteeing them civil rights. The Bill also established military rule in the Southern States and harsh conditions on their re-admission to the Union. Johnson vetoed all these measures but each time Congress over-rode him.

The struggle reached a climax in 1868 when the President was tried on impeachment charges. The Senate found Johnson not guilty, However, Johnson's power had been broken and he spent the remainder of his term in impotent frustration. AJ died of a stroke in 1875.

With Kennedy gone, Lyndon Johnson was left to deal with the growing campaign for civil rights among the Blacks the likes of which the nation had not seen since Andrew Johnson's presidency. Acting as though he wanted to make up for his Southern namesake's entrenched white supremacist stance, in 1957 LBJ then a Senator helped engineer the first national civil rights legislation since the Civil War. As President, Johnson began a rapid escalation of the war in Vietnam. While AJ had been against the use of military force in the conquered Southern States, LBJ saw its use as a solution against North Vietnam.

Just as the 1866 Congressional elections had shown the dwindling support for AJ, the New Hampshire presidential primary of 1968, revealed the dwindling support for LBJ and his war policies. After stepping down from the presidency in January 1969, like his predecessor, frustrated that he had been unable to complete many of his goals, Johnson returned to his ranch in Texas where he died in January the following year.

History regards the two men as among the most colourful of American presidents. But each suffered under the handicap of dealing with a nation divided by war and being overshadowed from the outset by the comparisons with the two most impressive presidents in American history.

THE INQUIRIES

A military commission of inquiry into Lincoln's assassination was appointed by President Andrew Johnson, as President Lyndon Johnson was to appoint the Warren Commission of inquiry on 29 November, 1963. In the situation in which President Lyndon Johnson found himself, we have a fine example of the lessons of history, not to say those of coincidence -- being ignored. The Lincoln commission, while a trial, found itself having to inquire into the circumstances surrounding the death of the president. Yet when it came to the Warren Commission. The circumstances were considered to be unique even though it too was dealing with. The assassination of an American president, by a lone gunman. Writing just a few years after Kennedy's death, Edward Jay Epstein, says in his book, Inquest (Hutchinson, London, 1966, p. xvi), the Warren Commission operated under virtually unprecedented circumstances. Epstein's book began as a thesis: How does a government organisation function in an extraordinary situation in which there are no rules or precedents to guide it? In the book's introduction, Richard H., Rovere, goes further, saying that Johnson could find little "guidance in American history" for the Warren Commission (p. x). It was a view shared by many, even though it too was dealing with the assassination of an American president.

ASSASSINATION LINKS

On the day of Lincoln's assassination (April 14, 1865, Good Friday) his murderer John Wilkes Booth left a note for Andrew Johnson at the Kirkwood House hotel where the vice president was staying. Theodore Roscoe describes the incident thus: " ... At the desk he (Booth) inquires for Mr. Atzerodt. (George Atzerdodt, a fellow conspirator who was also staying there). Out. Booth shrugs and steps into the bar. A quick glass and he is back in the lobby. And here he makes perhaps the strangest move in all that complex day-long gambit. Time: about 3:30 p.m. Action: Booth asks the desk clerk if Vice President Johnson is in. Told Johnson is out, he requests a blank card. On this card he scribbles "Don't wish to disturb you Are you at home?" signs his name and asks the clerk to deliver this item to Mr. Johnson. To this day no two historians can agree on the meaning or import of that card. (Roscoe, The Web of Conspiracy, Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, p101) Roscoe does not say so, but "At-home was" of course, a genteel Victorian phrase (which Booth may well have adopted from his English-born parents if it was not in common usage in the US) to mean are you receiving visitors? Such a note would normally have been handed in at the door to a flunkey of the person a caller wished to see, or even sent by the inquirer's own servant. The reason for the euphemism "at home' was largely to avoid giving offence if the card's recipient was physically at home but did not for some reason or other wish to see visitors. In that sense then, he/she was not at home. Honour was satisfied, decorum maintained, etiquette observed. The recipient did not have to pretend to be indisposed (ie ill). However Booth apparently did not, as courtesy would have demanded, wait for a reply. Instead, according to Roscoe, he went on to scribble a note to Atzerdodt, which he may or may not have carried to the conspirators room, accounts differ, slipped it under his door, then "satisfied, the author of these mysteries left the Kirkwood. (Roscoe p. 101).

Roscoe points out that, "Most historians believe the leaving of the card was an evil trick to implicate the Vice President in the conspiracy." (Roscoe p.182). However, in 1867 detectives investigating Johnson's past discovered that when he was governor of Tennessee he had met Booth in Nashville. (Hamilton G. Howard, Civil War Echoes-Character Sketches and State Secrets (Washington, D.C., 1907, p. 84, quoted in Roscoe p.182). Roscoe says ambiguously the meeting took place "on a local level hardly recommended for a public official." Eh? This suggests there was something unsavoury about the supposed meeting. What are we talking about here: a bar-room, a brothel? Are we to take the implications of that meeting to be that Booth had something on Johnson? Further, are we talking of a solitary meeting or one of a series? In other words was their relationship deeper than was commonly supposed, sufficient for Booth the actor to make a casual call on the Vice-President on the day of the assassination and to know that he would not be giving offence by not waiting for a reply to his request for a further meeting? Johnson never, it appears, offered an explanation for the assassination day call. Indeed so far as any claims, innuendoes or outright accusations Johnson was involved in Lincoln's assassination, he never felt the need to deny, justify or speak on the matter.

Adding further to the mystery hanging over Andrew Johnson is his behaviour that night and into the following morning of the assassination. Johnson had unexpectedly retired early, then only briefly attended the house across from Ford's Theatre where Lincoln lay dying before heading back to the Kirkwood. Roscoe says it appears the Vice-President subsequently left the hotel some time before dawn and "went somewhere in the night and rain-- nobody knows whether accompanied or alone--and did not turn up again until daylight." (Roscoe, p. 182) About 8 a.m. Senator William M. Stewart of Nevada called at the Kirkwood to see Johnson and found him in a drunken stupor, his clothing in disarray, his hair matted with mud. He looked as though he had fallen headlong in a gutter. A doctor and a barber were hustled into the suite to ready him for the office he was soon to inherit. (Senator William M. Stewart, Reminiscences (New York: Neale Publishing Co.,
1908), pp.194,195, quoted in Roscoe p. 182). Roscoe draws the incidents in this period together -- the card from Booth, his unexpected early retirement, his brief and by some accounts reluctant and disinterested visit to the dying Lincoln, his strange disappearance followed by his turning up drunk back at the hotel to conclude dark suspicions hang over Andrew Johnson in relation to the assassination. He is, of course, reflecting the widespread feelings of the time and in later years.

( Like AJ, LBJ was criticised for what many saw as his callous attitude towards the president immediately following the murder. Johnson flew back to Washington in the plane that carried Kennedy's body and his grieving wife, Jackie and is reported to have dismissed what many regarded as an insensitive gesture with the words, "one plane is just like another," It had been anticipated by officials that Air Force One would be designated a flying hearse for Kennedy and Johnson would return to Washington on Air Force Two on which he had been travelling. Of this episode Charles Roberts, a former White House correspondent who travelled on the flight and witnessed Johnson being sworn in on board, says, "the argument that Johnson should have limped home aboard a back-up plane leaving Jackie and the dead President behind is a conspicuous example of frivolous, biased nit-picking," (Roberts, The Truth About the Assassination, Grosset & Dunlap, N. York, 1967, p. 115

During the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, it was said openly in Congress that Johnson had stood to benefit by Lincoln's death and that he might very well in some way have been connected with it. (The Man who Killed Lincoln by Philip Van Doren Stern (the Literary Guild of America, New York 1939 pp401-406). The treason accusation was hurled at Johnson from the Senate floor. Congressman Benjamin Loan of Missouri: "An assassin's bullet wielded and directed by Rebel hand made Andrew Johnson President· · · · The price that he was to pay for his promotion was treachery to the Republicans and fidelity to the party of treason and rebellion!" Loan promised the truth of his charge would be provided. (It never was)
Congressman J. M. Ashley of Ohio denounced, "the man who came into the Presidency through the door of assassination." He called attention to a "dark suspicion which crept over the minds of men as to his (Johnson's) complicity in the assassination plot." The nation demands, roared Ashley, that "the incubus which has blotted our country's history with the foulest blot should be removed·" (Roscoe p. 26)

Roscoe says: "Impeached, he won a hairline acquittal. But he was never fully acquitted in the public mind. For behind the impeachment charges lurked another charge - one that should have been (and probably could have been) satisfactorily answered, but never was: that Johnson was involved in the assassination conspiracy... Loyal men who knew Andrew Johnson denounced his accusers as slanderers and said he was the victim of a monstrous cabal. But the charges left a blot."

Stern offers another angle on the Johnson involvement scenario. He says that in 1907, a Finis (finis) L. Bates published a book in which he flatly accused Johnson of complicity in the crime. Bates said that in 1872, in Texas, he had met a man by the name of John St Helen who told him, that he was really John Wilkes Booth and that Johnson had helped him to escape. (Stern. p. 401). Stern says the case made by Bates is a very flimsy one, but he is intrigued by an entry Booth made in his diary on Friday, April 21 while he was on the run... " I have a greater desire (not to flee) and almost a mind to return to Washington and in a measure clear my name, which I feel I can do." Stern asks: "How could this self-confessed assassin "clear his name: unless he knew something that would implicate people who were so important that the sensational nature of his disclosure would dwarf even the enormity of his own crime?"

That Booth had other unknown and secret accomplices has long been suspected, (David Herold who was captured with Booth) said quite unequivocally, that Booth had told him thirty-five men in Washington were involved in the plot. Stern says it may very well be that Booth himself did not know exactly who these men were, or what self-interest they had in wishing to see Lincoln killed. (Stern pp 404-405)

Author Emmanuel Hertz wrote that a few years before the death of Robert Lincoln, the president's son, a Mr Young went to visit him at his home in Manchester, Vermont. He found Lincoln in a room, surrounded by a number of large boxes and with many papers scattered about the floor, and with the ashes of many burnt papers visible in the fireplace. Young asked Lincoln what he was doing, and Lincoln replied that he was destroying some of the private papers and letters to his father. Young remonstrated with Lincoln saying no one had any right to destroy such papers, Lincoln least of all. Lincoln replied that he did not intend to continue his destruction but the papers he was destroying contained the documentary evidence of the treason of a member of Lincoln's Cabinet and he thought it was best for all that such evidence be destroyed... Young called in a Dr Nicholas Butler who persuaded Lincoln to desist in his act of destruction. The material saved was deposited in the Library of Congress and sealed until 1947. (preface to The Hidden Lincoln by Emanuel Hertz, Viking Press, New York, 1938, quoted in The Man who Killed Lincoln, Stern, p 406 et al). The inference here is clearly that the a loyal member of the Cabinet was Johnson. Stern expected that come 1947 "we shall find out who it was that sat on the cabinet table betraying the President and the people he served. Perhaps we shall even be able to trace some connection to the men who shared with John Wilkes Booth the responsibility for the murder of Abraham Lincoln." I asked the Library of Congress the following questions in relation to the above: Were such papers made public in 1947? Did they contain any material that showed a traitor in the Lincoln cabinet, in particular Andrew Johnson? Is there evidence that Robert Lincoln destroyed incriminating documents referring to a traitor? At the time of writing I had not received a reply. However, Roscoe claims that the papers were made public in 1947, but failed to reveal anything of a dramatic nature, adding that if Mr Young's story was as stated then Robert Lincoln must have consigned the incriminating evidence to the flames. (p 533)

LBJ AND CONSPIRACY

We move forward 100 years to the conspiracies linking LBJ with Kennedy's assassination. Johnson's involvement is hinted at in a number of texts and by inference one reason being the assassination took place in Johnson's own state Texas, and initially he appeared willing to allow that State's judiciary conduct the inquiry into it.

In their book LBJ and the JFK Conspiracy (Condor, Westport, Connecticut, 1978) Hugh McDonald and Robin Moore, say although there is no proof that Lyndon Johnson instigated the plan to murder John Kennedy, there is evidence suggesting strongly that he played a major role in the cover-up (pp x-xi)
They give these reasons for the charge;

1. He called the then Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev immediately upon his return to Washington from Dallas.
2. He created the Warren Commission, whose make-up was totally devoid of any serious, investigative expertise.
3. He controlled the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, both of which withheld critical information from the Warren Commission.

They present what they call circumstantial evidence of a meeting in Moscow where Kennedy's death warrant is authorized by the Council and Central Committee of the Communist Party and the KGB was instructed to develop and carry out the assassination plan. Johnson's role in the assassination plan was to assist in the cover-up.

McDonald and Moore say a secret meeting between Johnson and the KGB took place in Helsinki in September, 1963 at which the KGB pointed out that Kennedy's brother Robert, then Attorney-General, was going to prosecute Johnson's friend Bobby Baker and that the president intended dropping Johnson as his running mate at the next presidential elections. (chapter 26)
(Baker was secretary for the Majority. The Majority leader traditionally makes the appointment and in this case it was Johnson in that position who had appointed Baker in 1955. Johnson, when he became Vice-president, asked Baker to stay on in the role. Baker was reputedly involved in a call girl racket, providing them for Senators and Congressmen. Also, in a clear conflict of interests, he had amassed a fortune in deals involving government contracts. If Baker went down in disgrace, Johnson feared he would take him with him. The possibility of impeachment disappeared, however when, on April 1, 1964, the House Baker hearing was permanently discontinued).

The authors also say President Johnson ordered that damaging evidence about the spying activities of George De Mohrenschildt be withheld from the Warren Commission. De Mohrenschildlt, who claimed to be the son of a nobleman in Czarist Russia, had made friends with Oswald following his return from the Soviet Union. A few days after a shot had been fired at the right-wing ex-Army general Edwin A. Walker, De Mohrenschildt, joked with Oswald about why he had missed the target. When news of the president's shooting came through, De Mohrenschildt speculated aloud that Oswald may have done it.

Covering up or suppressing of incriminating evidence, is a theme of other writers who see Johnson as having played some scurrilous role in the assassination. For example, Gary Shaw and Larry R Harris, say in their 1976 book appropriately named Cover-up, it is highly unlikely LBJ himself could have orchestrated the assassination or that he took part in its promoting and/or planning. But he was involved willfully or otherwise in the ensuing cover-up. Their conclusion: Kennedy was killed by the United States military and industrial complex with its intelligence apparatus.

Other charges of a cover-up are made in Assassination of JFK by Coincidence or Conspiracy, produced by the Committee to Investigate Assassinations, under the direction of Bernard Fensterwald Sr and compiled by Michael Ewing, Zebra Books, New York, 1973. The book charges that Johnson had hidden in the National Archives crucial documetanry evidence on the JFK murder, marked not to be declassified until 2039. (p13 )

Paradoxically Johnson himself spoke of a conspiracy behind the assassination and became obsessed with fear in the ensuing years that he too was a target All this while at the same time publicly supporting the Warren Commission's finding that Oswald acted alone. According to a secret and internal FBI memo date April 4, 1967, a top Johnson aide had said the president "was now convinced" the CIA had somehow been involved in the Kennedy assassination. (p 124) And in an interview with Walker Cronkite of CBS News, released in 1975, six years after it was taped, Johnson spoke of the motivation of Oswald and "others that could have been involved".

The idea that their vice-president could be involved directly or indirectly in an assassination plot of their leader is widely rejected by Americans as much today as it was in Kennedy's and Lincoln's time. The view would appear to have a strong validity for a number of reasons. Supposedly the actions of a democratic government are much too overt to allow a conspiracy to flourish in hiding. Also there are the vetting procedures -- the utter public scrutiny under which candidates for high office in democracies are subjected to, so that any faults, quirks of character, predisposed criminal traits, etc. are soon revealed.

But the assumption of guilt even to a small degree hangs over those who were subject to the spotlight of suspicion: Andrew Johnson, even though he was acquitted at an impeachment hearing - for the suspicion that he was involved in some way with Lincoln's death, LBJ for his handling of the Vietnam war. who was fortunate to escape impeachment -- and whose role in the Kennedy assassination remains at best ambiguous. As he begins to ponder his life post-presidency Clinton can take little comfort from the stories of the two men whose presidencies were so marred, for history has not treated them kindly.

The Presidents Johnson Connection

Of all the extraordinary coincidences at play linking the assassinations of Presidents Kennedy and Lincoln, one of the most intriguing --and least able to be dismissed as "mere" coincidence is that of their Vice-Presidents, Andrew Johnson (AJ) and Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ).

Even the obvious links are startling, that is that is both men had the same surname and were born exactly a century apart, 1808 and 1908.

Admittedly Johnson is not an uncommon name in an English-speaking community with a proportionately large Anglo-Celtic population (in Australia for example there are 17,172, entries for Johnson in the white pages against 30,226 for Jones, 62,822 Smith -- and, incidentally 7,319 for Kennedy, and only 470 for Lincoln). But that "Johnson" should come up in the context of a most uncommon position, Vice-President, is rare and that it should recur in the further context of a Vice-President who assumes the presidency following the assassination of the incumbent, makes it a rare occurrence indeed: Let's face it, unique.

On a broader view of the two men we see how their lives followed similar patterns, including volatile presidencies with one impeached and the other, LBJ, threatened with impeachment, rare charges indeed to be laid against a president, at least until the 1990s.

But to any student of the assassinations what is most intriguing of all is the fact that both men were said to have been in some way involved in the deaths of their predecessors. More on this later but first a broad look at the two men and their lives of coincidence.

THE TWO JOHNSONS

The names Andrew Johnson and Lyndon Johnson each contain thirteen letters. Both Johnsons had been the only two Vice-Presidents from the South in the 100 years between the assassinations. Both were the fathers of two daughters.

Education was an important influence in the early adult years of both men, but, ironically for opposite reasons: one was self-taught, the other the teacher. ( just for the curious: LBJ received a Bachelor of Science degree from Southwest Texas State Teachers college in San Marcos and then taught for a year in Houston before going to Washington in 1931).

They entered their presidencies in their mid-fifties and each was opposed for re-election by a man whose name started with G: Grant in the case of Andrew and Goldwater in the case of LBJ.

In office, the major tasks confronting the Johnsons were dealing with the problems of a nation divided (on a geographical basis) by war, the American Civil War and in LBJ's case, another North-South conflict: Vietnam and the freedom of slaves and civil rights for blacks. Both were born into poor white Southern families, Andrew in a wooden shack in Raleigh, North Carolina and LBJ in a small farmhouse in Texas. AJ's father was a janitor, LBJ's father also worked for a time as a janitor. As a Southern Democrat AJ defended slavery throughout the 1840s and fifties, just as LBJ, was a consistent opponent of civil rights legislation throughout the 1940s and much of the fifties before having a change of heart.

When the Southern States began to leave the Union to form the Confederacy, AJ argued that secession was illegal. By then a US Senator from Tennessee he fought to keep his state in the Union. In the ensuing civil war he was the only Southern Senator to remain loyal to the United States. In recognition of this loyalty the Republicans chose the Democrat Johnson to run as Vice-President with their man Lincoln in the 1864 presidential campaign.

Soon after stepping into the presidency, AJ ran into trouble with a powerful Northern group in Congress known as the Radical Republicans who pushed through a sweeping civil rights Bill for the Southern Blacks. President Johnson vetoed the measure on the grounds of states' right and his belief whites should rule by right. Congress overrode the veto and passed a series of Acts establishing suffrage for the freed slaves and guaranteeing them civil rights. The Bill also established military rule in the Southern States and harsh conditions on their re-admission to the Union. Johnson vetoed all these measures but each time Congress over-rode him.

The struggle reached a climax in 1868 when the President was tried on impeachment charges. The Senate found Johnson not guilty, However, Johnson's power had been broken and he spent the remainder of his term in impotent frustration. AJ died of a stroke in 1875.

With Kennedy gone, Lyndon Johnson was left to deal with the growing campaign for civil rights among the Blacks the likes of which the nation had not seen since Andrew Johnson's presidency. Acting as though he wanted to make up for his Southern namesake's entrenched white supremacist stance, in 1957 LBJ then a Senator helped engineer the first national civil rights legislation since the Civil War. As President, Johnson began a rapid escalation of the war in Vietnam. While AJ had been against the use of military force in the conquered Southern States, LBJ saw its use as a solution against North Vietnam.

Just as the 1866 Congressional elections had shown the dwindling support for AJ, the New Hampshire presidential primary of 1968, revealed the dwindling support for LBJ and his war policies. After stepping down from the presidency in January 1969, like his predecessor, frustrated that he had been unable to complete many of his goals, Johnson returned to his ranch in Texas where he died in January the following year.

History regards the two men as among the most colourful of American presidents. But each suffered under the handicap of dealing with a nation divided by war and being overshadowed from the outset by the comparisons with the two most impressive presidents in American history.

THE INQUIRIES

A military commission of inquiry into Lincoln's assassination was appointed by President Andrew Johnson, as President Lyndon Johnson was to appoint the Warren Commission of inquiry on 29 November, 1963. In the situation in which President Lyndon Johnson found himself, we have a fine example of the lessons of history, not to say those of coincidence -- being ignored. The Lincoln commission, while a trial, found itself having to inquire into the circumstances surrounding the death of the president. Yet when it came to the Warren Commission. The circumstances were considered to be unique even though it too was dealing with. The assassination of an American president, by a lone gunman. Writing just a few years after Kennedy's death, Edward Jay Epstein, says in his book, Inquest (Hutchinson, London, 1966, p. xvi), the Warren Commission operated under virtually unprecedented circumstances. Epstein's book began as a thesis: How does a government organisation function in an extraordinary situation in which there are no rules or precedents to guide it? In the book's introduction, Richard H., Rovere, goes further, saying that Johnson could find little "guidance in American history" for the Warren Commission (p. x). It was a view shared by many, even though it too was dealing with the assassination of an American president.

ASSASSINATION LINKS

On the day of Lincoln's assassination (April 14, 1865, Good Friday) his murderer John Wilkes Booth left a note for Andrew Johnson at the Kirkwood House hotel where the vice president was staying. Theodore Roscoe describes the incident thus: " ... At the desk he (Booth) inquires for Mr. Atzerodt. (George Atzerdodt, a fellow conspirator who was also staying there). Out. Booth shrugs and steps into the bar. A quick glass and he is back in the lobby. And here he makes perhaps the strangest move in all that complex day-long gambit. Time: about 3:30 p.m. Action: Booth asks the desk clerk if Vice President Johnson is in. Told Johnson is out, he requests a blank card. On this card he scribbles "Don't wish to disturb you Are you at home?" signs his name and asks the clerk to deliver this item to Mr. Johnson. To this day no two historians can agree on the meaning or import of that card. (Roscoe, The Web of Conspiracy, Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, p101) Roscoe does not say so, but "At-home was" of course, a genteel Victorian phrase (which Booth may well have adopted from his English-born parents if it was not in common usage in the US) to mean are you receiving visitors? Such a note would normally have been handed in at the door to a flunkey of the person a caller wished to see, or even sent by the inquirer's own servant. The reason for the euphemism "at home' was largely to avoid giving offence if the card's recipient was physically at home but did not for some reason or other wish to see visitors. In that sense then, he/she was not at home. Honour was satisfied, decorum maintained, etiquette observed. The recipient did not have to pretend to be indisposed (ie ill). However Booth apparently did not, as courtesy would have demanded, wait for a reply. Instead, according to Roscoe, he went on to scribble a note to Atzerdodt, which he may or may not have carried to the conspirators room, accounts differ, slipped it under his door, then "satisfied, the author of these mysteries left the Kirkwood. (Roscoe p. 101).

Roscoe points out that, "Most historians believe the leaving of the card was an evil trick to implicate the Vice President in the conspiracy." (Roscoe p.182). However, in 1867 detectives investigating Johnson's past discovered that when he was governor of Tennessee he had met Booth in Nashville. (Hamilton G. Howard, Civil War Echoes-Character Sketches and State Secrets (Washington, D.C., 1907, p. 84, quoted in Roscoe p.182). Roscoe says ambiguously the meeting took place "on a local level hardly recommended for a public official." Eh? This suggests there was something unsavoury about the supposed meeting. What are we talking about here: a bar-room, a brothel? Are we to take the implications of that meeting to be that Booth had something on Johnson? Further, are we talking of a solitary meeting or one of a series? In other words was their relationship deeper than was commonly supposed, sufficient for Booth the actor to make a casual call on the Vice-President on the day of the assassination and to know that he would not be giving offence by not waiting for a reply to his request for a further meeting? Johnson never, it appears, offered an explanation for the assassination day call. Indeed so far as any claims, innuendoes or outright accusations Johnson was involved in Lincoln's assassination, he never felt the need to deny, justify or speak on the matter.

Adding further to the mystery hanging over Andrew Johnson is his behaviour that night and into the following morning of the assassination. Johnson had unexpectedly retired early, then only briefly attended the house across from Ford's Theatre where Lincoln lay dying before heading back to the Kirkwood. Roscoe says it appears the Vice-President subsequently left the hotel some time before dawn and "went somewhere in the night and rain-- nobody knows whether accompanied or alone--and did not turn up again until daylight." (Roscoe, p. 182) About 8 a.m. Senator William M. Stewart of Nevada called at the Kirkwood to see Johnson and found him in a drunken stupor, his clothing in disarray, his hair matted with mud. He looked as though he had fallen headlong in a gutter. A doctor and a barber were hustled into the suite to ready him for the office he was soon to inherit. (Senator William M. Stewart, Reminiscences (New York: Neale Publishing Co.,
1908), pp.194,195, quoted in Roscoe p. 182). Roscoe draws the incidents in this period together -- the card from Booth, his unexpected early retirement, his brief and by some accounts reluctant and disinterested visit to the dying Lincoln, his strange disappearance followed by his turning up drunk back at the hotel to conclude dark suspicions hang over Andrew Johnson in relation to the assassination. He is, of course, reflecting the widespread feelings of the time and in later years.

( Like AJ, LBJ was criticised for what many saw as his callous attitude towards the president immediately following the murder. Johnson flew back to Washington in the plane that carried Kennedy's body and his grieving wife, Jackie and is reported to have dismissed what many regarded as an insensitive gesture with the words, "one plane is just like another," It had been anticipated by officials that Air Force One would be designated a flying hearse for Kennedy and Johnson would return to Washington on Air Force Two on which he had been travelling. Of this episode Charles Roberts, a former White House correspondent who travelled on the flight and witnessed Johnson being sworn in on board, says, "the argument that Johnson should have limped home aboard a back-up plane leaving Jackie and the dead President behind is a conspicuous example of frivolous, biased nit-picking," (Roberts, The Truth About the Assassination, Grosset & Dunlap, N. York, 1967, p. 115

During the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, it was said openly in Congress that Johnson had stood to benefit by Lincoln's death and that he might very well in some way have been connected with it. (The Man who Killed Lincoln by Philip Van Doren Stern (the Literary Guild of America, New York 1939 pp401-406). The treason accusation was hurled at Johnson from the Senate floor. Congressman Benjamin Loan of Missouri: "An assassin's bullet wielded and directed by Rebel hand made Andrew Johnson President· · · · The price that he was to pay for his promotion was treachery to the Republicans and fidelity to the party of treason and rebellion!" Loan promised the truth of his charge would be provided. (It never was)
Congressman J. M. Ashley of Ohio denounced, "the man who came into the Presidency through the door of assassination." He called attention to a "dark suspicion which crept over the minds of men as to his (Johnson's) complicity in the assassination plot." The nation demands, roared Ashley, that "the incubus which has blotted our country's history with the foulest blot should be removed·" (Roscoe p. 26)

Roscoe says: "Impeached, he won a hairline acquittal. But he was never fully acquitted in the public mind. For behind the impeachment charges lurked another charge - one that should have been (and probably could have been) satisfactorily answered, but never was: that Johnson was involved in the assassination conspiracy... Loyal men who knew Andrew Johnson denounced his accusers as slanderers and said he was the victim of a monstrous cabal. But the charges left a blot."

Stern offers another angle on the Johnson involvement scenario. He says that in 1907, a Finis (finis) L. Bates published a book in which he flatly accused Johnson of complicity in the crime. Bates said that in 1872, in Texas, he had met a man by the name of John St Helen who told him, that he was really John Wilkes Booth and that Johnson had helped him to escape. (Stern. p. 401). Stern says the case made by Bates is a very flimsy one, but he is intrigued by an entry Booth made in his diary on Friday, April 21 while he was on the run... " I have a greater desire (not to flee) and almost a mind to return to Washington and in a measure clear my name, which I feel I can do." Stern asks: "How could this self-confessed assassin "clear his name: unless he knew something that would implicate people who were so important that the sensational nature of his disclosure would dwarf even the enormity of his own crime?"

That Booth had other unknown and secret accomplices has long been suspected, (David Herold who was captured with Booth) said quite unequivocally, that Booth had told him thirty-five men in Washington were involved in the plot. Stern says it may very well be that Booth himself did not know exactly who these men were, or what self-interest they had in wishing to see Lincoln killed. (Stern pp 404-405)

Author Emmanuel Hertz wrote that a few years before the death of Robert Lincoln, the president's son, a Mr Young went to visit him at his home in Manchester, Vermont. He found Lincoln in a room, surrounded by a number of large boxes and with many papers scattered about the floor, and with the ashes of many burnt papers visible in the fireplace. Young asked Lincoln what he was doing, and Lincoln replied that he was destroying some of the private papers and letters to his father. Young remonstrated with Lincoln saying no one had any right to destroy such papers, Lincoln least of all. Lincoln replied that he did not intend to continue his destruction but the papers he was destroying contained the documentary evidence of the treason of a member of Lincoln's Cabinet and he thought it was best for all that such evidence be destroyed... Young called in a Dr Nicholas Butler who persuaded Lincoln to desist in his act of destruction. The material saved was deposited in the Library of Congress and sealed until 1947. (preface to The Hidden Lincoln by Emanuel Hertz, Viking Press, New York, 1938, quoted in The Man who Killed Lincoln, Stern, p 406 et al). The inference here is clearly that the a loyal member of the Cabinet was Johnson. Stern expected that come 1947 "we shall find out who it was that sat on the cabinet table betraying the President and the people he served. Perhaps we shall even be able to trace some connection to the men who shared with John Wilkes Booth the responsibility for the murder of Abraham Lincoln." I asked the Library of Congress the following questions in relation to the above: Were such papers made public in 1947? Did they contain any material that showed a traitor in the Lincoln cabinet, in particular Andrew Johnson? Is there evidence that Robert Lincoln destroyed incriminating documents referring to a traitor? At the time of writing I had not received a reply. However, Roscoe claims that the papers were made public in 1947, but failed to reveal anything of a dramatic nature, adding that if Mr Young's story was as stated then Robert Lincoln must have consigned the incriminating evidence to the flames. (p 533)

LBJ AND CONSPIRACY

We move forward 100 years to the conspiracies linking LBJ with Kennedy's assassination. Johnson's involvement is hinted at in a number of texts and by inference one reason being the assassination took place in Johnson's own state Texas, and initially he appeared willing to allow that State's judiciary conduct the inquiry into it.

In their book LBJ and the JFK Conspiracy (Condor, Westport, Connecticut, 1978) Hugh McDonald and Robin Moore, say although there is no proof that Lyndon Johnson instigated the plan to murder John Kennedy, there is evidence suggesting strongly that he played a major role in the cover-up (pp x-xi)
They give these reasons for the charge;

1. He called the then Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev immediately upon his return to Washington from Dallas.
2. He created the Warren Commission, whose make-up was totally devoid of any serious, investigative expertise.
3. He controlled the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, both of which withheld critical information from the Warren Commission.

They present what they call circumstantial evidence of a meeting in Moscow where Kennedy's death warrant is authorized by the Council and Central Committee of the Communist Party and the KGB was instructed to develop and carry out the assassination plan. Johnson's role in the assassination plan was to assist in the cover-up.

McDonald and Moore say a secret meeting between Johnson and the KGB took place in Helsinki in September, 1963 at which the KGB pointed out that Kennedy's brother Robert, then Attorney-General, was going to prosecute Johnson's friend Bobby Baker and that the president intended dropping Johnson as his running mate at the next presidential elections. (chapter 26)
(Baker was secretary for the Majority. The Majority leader traditionally makes the appointment and in this case it was Johnson in that position who had appointed Baker in 1955. Johnson, when he became Vice-president, asked Baker to stay on in the role. Baker was reputedly involved in a call girl racket, providing them for Senators and Congressmen. Also, in a clear conflict of interests, he had amassed a fortune in deals involving government contracts. If Baker went down in disgrace, Johnson feared he would take him with him. The possibility of impeachment disappeared, however when, on April 1, 1964, the House Baker hearing was permanently discontinued).

The authors also say President Johnson ordered that damaging evidence about the spying activities of George De Mohrenschildt be withheld from the Warren Commission. De Mohrenschildlt, who claimed to be the son of a nobleman in Czarist Russia, had made friends with Oswald following his return from the Soviet Union. A few days after a shot had been fired at the right-wing ex-Army general Edwin A. Walker, De Mohrenschildt, joked with Oswald about why he had missed the target. When news of the president's shooting came through, De Mohrenschildt speculated aloud that Oswald may have done it.

Covering up or suppressing of incriminating evidence, is a theme of other writers who see Johnson as having played some scurrilous role in the assassination. For example, Gary Shaw and Larry R Harris, say in their 1976 book appropriately named Cover-up, it is highly unlikely LBJ himself could have orchestrated the assassination or that he took part in its promoting and/or planning. But he was involved willfully or otherwise in the ensuing cover-up. Their conclusion: Kennedy was killed by the United States military and industrial complex with its intelligence apparatus.

Other charges of a cover-up are made in Assassination of JFK by Coincidence or Conspiracy, produced by the Committee to Investigate Assassinations, under the direction of Bernard Fensterwald Sr and compiled by Michael Ewing, Zebra Books, New York, 1973. The book charges that Johnson had hidden in the National Archives crucial documetanry evidence on the JFK murder, marked not to be declassified until 2039. (p13 )

Paradoxically Johnson himself spoke of a conspiracy behind the assassination and became obsessed with fear in the ensuing years that he too was a target All this while at the same time publicly supporting the Warren Commission's finding that Oswald acted alone. According to a secret and internal FBI memo date April 4, 1967, a top Johnson aide had said the president "was now convinced" the CIA had somehow been involved in the Kennedy assassination. (p 124) And in an interview with Walker Cronkite of CBS News, released in 1975, six years after it was taped, Johnson spoke of the motivation of Oswald and "others that could have been involved".

The idea that their vice-president could be involved directly or indirectly in an assassination plot of their leader is widely rejected by Americans as much today as it was in Kennedy's and Lincoln's time. The view would appear to have a strong validity for a number of reasons. Supposedly the actions of a democratic government are much too overt to allow a conspiracy to flourish in hiding. Also there are the vetting procedures -- the utter public scrutiny under which candidates for high office in democracies are subjected to, so that any faults, quirks of character, predisposed criminal traits, etc. are soon revealed.

But the assumption of guilt even to a small degree hangs over those who were subject to the spotlight of suspicion: Andrew Johnson, even though he was acquitted at an impeachment hearing - for the suspicion that he was involved in some way with Lincoln's death, LBJ for his handling of the Vietnam war. who was fortunate to escape impeachment -- and whose role in the Kennedy assassination remains at best ambiguous. As he begins to ponder his life post-presidency Clinton can take little comfort from the stories of the two men whose presidencies were so marred, for history has not treated them kindly.

Well there you have it. More proof that we live in a truely wierd world.

I'm Average Joe