Traces of LBJ’s Personal Involvement in Martin Luther King Jr.’s Assassination – LewRockwell
Posted by M. C. on August 29, 2019
Johnson and Hoover-The perfect storm.
Washington keeps trying to come up with a worse pairing and we arte the worse for it.
A Primer, condensed and recompiled from Who REALLY Killed Martin Luther King Jr.?
People who have not intensely studied President Lyndon B. Johnson (i.e. the great majority, if not nearly the entirety, of the population) fail to perceive how his psychological-psychiatric disorders could lead him to commit brazen criminal acts.
J. Edgar Hoover (and doubtlessly many other political leaders the world over) similarly suffered from the same disorders as his neighbor and friend, LBJ. I have written at length about this point, but for our purposes here, these brief reedited excerpts from my books, as referenced within, augmented by additional information obtained since their publication.
The thirty-sixth president was cruel, mendacious, narcissistic—concerned only about the pseudo-legend he worked an entire lifetime to create, resulting in the false legacy that has persisted today. This is not merely my personal opinion:
- A psychologist, D. Jablow Hershman, in her book Power Beyond Reason: The Mental Collapse of Lyndon Johnson, wrote that “the United States was being led by a man who already was or rapidly was becoming psychotic. LBJ’s grandiosity, megalomania and paranoia reached dimensions that could no longer pass for normalcy. Signs of grandiosity and paranoia were present before LBJ became President, but assuming responsibility for the war in Vietnam appears to have been more stress than he could bear as 1966 wore on.” Furthermore, Hershman concluded, “LBJ’s manic furies and incapacitating depressions, his pathological ego, megalomania and paranoia were products of his manic depression. Unfortunate though they were for him and the people with whom he came in contact, their effects became tragic when he took over the conduct of the Vietnam War . . . The effect on Johnson was catastrophic. His illness worsened past the point of psychotic collapse. The consequences were fatal, if not for him, certainly for those who died in Vietnam in his needless war—LBJ’s war—for he would not accept guidance from the advisors who might have imparted some degree of sanity to his decisions.”[1]
- A number of aides who worked for Johnson – including Bill Moyers and Richard Goodwin – knew all about Johnson’s psychotic episodes but feared challenging him because, after all, “who would believe us?” For much of his time in the Oval Office, the country was being run by a man experiencing periodic psychotic or depressive mental states, unbeknownst to most citizens.[2]
- These were among the disorders that other psychiatrists would later affirm Lyndon Johnson had shared with J. Edgar Hoover. They were far more than neighbors and friends; they were “birds of a feather” in many other ways, as well. One of those, Dr. Harold Lief, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania stated: “There is no doubt that Hoover had a personality disorder, a narcissistic disorder with mixed obsessive features. I picked up some paranoid elements, undue suspiciousness and some sadism. A combination of narcissism and paranoia produces what is known as an Authoritarian Personality. Hoover would have made a perfect high-level Nazi.” [3]
Exactly one year before Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, his Riverside Church “Beyond Vietnam” speech on April 4, 1967, marked the culmination of his long-simmering revulsion at Johnson’s Vietnam policies and represented his final break with the President. Rumors soon began surfacing about King possibly making a run for the presidency in 1968 and had even included a proposed vice-presidential candidate, the famed pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, who had also become a strong antiwar proponent.
By the end of 1967 and in early 1968, the talk began to turn to Robert F. Kennedy’s expected run for the presidency. In the period leading up to his March decision to enter the presidential race, RFK had been trying to contact Dr. King to tell him of his decision to run for the presidency and seek his support, and J. Edgar Hoover had warned President Johnson of that, according to Dr. William F. Pepper.[4]
Though not stated by Dr. Pepper, rumors also abounded that Kennedy might have been considering asking King to become his nominee for the vice presidency of the United States if he won the nomination at the Chicago convention. The very idea of that possibility must have kept Johnson up at night before he made his stunning announcement on March 31, 1968 that he would not run for reelection. Dr. Pepper – having devoted over forty years into investigating, researching, and documenting the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. – eventually came to the conclusion that Johnson’s decision to withdraw from the 1968 presidential election was indeed related to the plot to murder King.[5]
Within four days of Johnson’s announcement —April 4, 1968 — that part of it would no longer be a worry, and two months after that, by June 6, 1968, President Johnson would be able to sleep well again, no longer worried about Robert Kennedy’s presidential aspirations.
Secrets Between Friends—Required Elements of Covert Ops
Essential to understanding the dynamics that played out in the months before Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination is the fact that covert operations require close and trusting personal relationships between the highest-level sponsors as well as other key lower level operatives. In this case, as in the other 1960s political murders by those who were behind the successful coup d’état of 1963, it was the major players back in Washington and their personal relationships to the key local operators who would be orchestrating all the moves in the streets and alleys of Memphis, Tennessee.
First, there was the long-term closeness of President Lyndon B. Johnson to Tennessee Governor Buford Ellington, both of whom were also united by their respective ties to the Dixie Mafia.[6]…
The “federal authorities” to which Emison referred, with whom the governor talked “many” times, would have undoubtedly included the man he was closest to, Lyndon B. Johnson, and his highest-level aides. Others would have included J. Edgar Hoover and his highest-level associate, Clyde Tolson—along with the FBI liaison to the White House, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, acting as the chief of operations of the entire project to “neutralize” Martin Luther King Jr. that had started at least a decade earlier when they put him under constant surveillance.
Coming Next in Part 2: One week before his murder, after three years of plotting . . . “The Culmination of Months of Planning: Dr. King Takes the Bait“
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