Jack Ruby: Israel's Smoking Gun
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By a strange paradox, most Kennedy researchers who believe that Oswald was “just a patsy” spend an awful lot of time exploring his biography. This is about as useful as investigating Osama bin Laden for solving 9/11. Any serious quest for the real assassins of JFK should start by investigating the man who shot Oswald at pointblank in the stomach at 11:21 a.m. on November 24, 1963 in the Dallas Police station, thereby sealing the possibility that a judicial inquiry would draw attention to the inconsistencies of the charge against him, and perhaps expose the real perpetrators. One would normally expect the Dallas strip-club owner Jack Ruby to be the most investigated character by Kennedy truthers. But that is not the case.
Of course, it is perfectly normal that Chief Justice Earl Warren, when Ruby told him on June 7, 1964, “I have been used for a purpose,” failed to ask him who had used him and for what purpose.[1] But what about independent investigators? Are only readers of the Forward (“News That Matters To American Jews”) worthy of being informed that “Lee Harvey Oswald’s Killer ‘Jack Ruby’ Came From Strong Jewish Background,” and that he told his rabbi Hillel Silverman that he “did it for the Jewish people”? Here is the relevant passage of Steve North’s 2013 article, relating Silverman’s reaction after hearing on the radio that a “Jack Rubenstein” had killed the assassin:
“I was shocked,” said Silverman. “I visited him the next day in jail, and I said, ‘Why, Jack, why?’ He said, ‘I did it for the American people.’” I interrupted Silverman, pointing out that other reports had Ruby saying he did it “to show that Jews had guts.” The rabbi sighed. “Yes, he mentioned that,” Silverman said. “But I don’t like to mention it. I think he said, ‘I did it for the Jewish people.’ But I’ve tried to wipe that statement from my mind.”[2]
Ruby’s defense lawyer William Kunstler also claims in his memoir that Ruby told him: “I did it for the Jews,” repeating on several occasions: “I did this that they wouldn’t implicate Jews.” During Kunstler’s last visit Ruby handed him a note in which he reiterated that his motive was to “protect American Jews from a pogrom that could occur because of anger over the assassination.”[3] There is only one possible interpretation of Ruby’s words: he must have known, and those you tasked him with killing Oswald must have known, that if Oswald was tried, the Jewish hand in JFK’s assassination would likely be made apparent.
Why is this crucial information not in any book on the Kennedy assassination, save in Michael Collins Piper’s (and now mine)? James Douglass, to take the most representative example, insists, without a shred of evidence, that Ruby, besides being a “Chicago mob functionary,” was “CIA-connected”.[4] Not once does Douglass mention Ruby’s Jewish background, and his real name can only be found in a single endnote quoting another author. Could Douglass’s strange omission have the same motive as Ruby’s murder of Oswald, namely to “protect American Jews from a pogrom that could occur because of anger over the assassination”?
Ruby is not the only person connected to Oswald whose confused words implicating “the Jews” are carefully concealed from the public. On March 29, 1977, George DeMohrenschildt, a Russian geologist who had befriended Oswald in Dallas in 1962 at the request of CIA agent J. Walton Moore, was found dead with a bullet through his head. His death was ruled a suicide, but the Sherriff’s report mentions that in his last months he complained that “the Jews” and “the Jewish mafia” were out to get him.[5] His wife confirmed to Jim Marrs, author of Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy (1989), that her husband thought that “the Jewish Mafia and the FBI” were out to get him.[6] Most people mildly interested in the JFK assassination know about DeMohrenschildt’s relationship with Oswald, but how many have ever heard this intriguing—even incriminating—detail?
After DeMohrenschildt moved away from Dallas in June 1963, Oswald was chaperoned by Ruth Paine, who found him a job at the Texas School Book Depository, where he started working on October 16.[7] It is repeated in every book that Ruth Paine looked after Oswald on behalf of the CIA, but no evidence is ever given. On the other hand, I was surprised to read in her testimony to the Warren Commission that in the 1950s, Ruth Paine had been “a leader in the Jewish community at Indianapolis,” working with Jewish immigrants who “spoke Yiddish in conducting their business meetings.”[8] Jack Ruby also made business deals in Yiddish, as we shall see. As a matter of fact, he sneaked into the Dallas Police Station under the pretense of translating for Yiddish reporters (what Yiddish reporters need a translator in the U.S.?).
This piece of information comes from the only useful book written about Ruby: Seth Kantor’s 1978 Who Was Jack Ruby? retitled The Ruby Cover-Up in 1980. Kantor was a reporter working for the Dallas Times Herald in 1963. He knew Ruby and was less than ten feet away from him when he shot Oswald. Kantor’s meticulous investigation is an important contribution to the search for the truth about Kennedy’s assassination. In the rest of this article, I will draw mostly from his book, as well as from Michael Collins Piper’s Final Judgment and a few other sources.
Gangsters for Zion
In its final report, the Warren Commission declared that it could “not establish a significant link between Ruby and organized crime,” because “Ruby has disclaimed that he was associated with organized criminal activities, and law enforcement agencies have confirmed that denial.”[9] But there is plenty of evidence of Ruby’s association with organized crime. Robert Blakey, chief counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations from 1977 to 1979, said: “The most plausible explanation for the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby was that Ruby had stalked him on behalf of organized crime, trying to reach him on at least three occasions in the forty-eight hours before he silenced him forever.”[10] Incriminating “organized crime” in the JFK assassination and the ensuing Oswald assassination was, of course, the most harmless conclusion that the HSCA could come up with, short of ridiculing itself by confirming the Warren Commission’s story of two lone nuts. And so the Washington Post could headline: “MOBSTERS LINKED TO JFK DEATH.”[11]
The missing word, here, is “Jewish”. Most Americans, learning that Jack Ruby was a mobster, must have thought he was Italian, like Hollywood gangsters. They were not told that his real name was Jacob Leon Rubenstein, that he was the son of Jewish Polish immigrants, that he went to the synagogue just before shooting Oswald, and that he later confessed to his rabbi that he “did it for the Jews.”
Jacob Rubenstein belonged to the Jewish mafia, also known as the Yiddish Connection. He had moved from Chicago to Dallas in 1947, on the trail of 15 other Chicago mobsters (3 Italians and 9 Jews) who had settled there to take over the prostitution business. That is when he changed his name from Rubenstein to Ruby. Ruby’s mentor and role model was Mickey Cohen, who operated in Chicago during the Prohibition but was then active in Hollywood. During his trial for shooting Oswald, Ruby’s legal team was fronted by Melvin Belli, a longtime friend and attorney of Cohen (Belli’s defense was that Ruby had suffered temporary insanity due to a bout of “psychomotor epilepsy”).[12] In 1947, Cohen had succeeded Benjamin Siegelbaum, aka Bugsy Siegel (romanticized by Hollywood in 1991) at the head of “Murder Incorporated”. Cohen and Siegelbaum were accountable to Meyer Lansky (born Suchowljansky), the most powerful Jewish mafia boss, who had built part of his fortune with his Havana casinos and brothels, of which he was dispossessed by Castro in 1959. Lansky’s biographer Hank Messick describes him as the head of the National Crime Syndicate. “Thanks largely to Lansky, organized crime has changed from an ugly growth on the body politic capable of being removed by surgery to a cancerous part of our economic and political systems.”[13]
Mickey Cohen claims in his memoirs that, in the 1940s and 1950s, he was “engrossed with Israel”, and boasts about his financial and criminal contributions to the arms smuggling operations of the Haganah. Gary Wean, a detective sergeant for the Los Angeles Police Department, claims in his book There’s a Fish in the Courthouse (1987) that he saw Ruby twice in Hollywood in 1946 and 1947 in the presence of Cohen.[14] He also writes that Cohen had frequent contacts with Menachem Begin,[15] and that he was sharing his girlfriend, stripper Candy Barr, with Menachem Begin as well as Ruby.[16]
Cohen was not the only mobster working for Israel. A pact had been sealed between prominent Zionists and Jewish mafia bosses around 1945, when the Haganah organized a highly effective black market of weapons and explosives from the US to Palestine. The operation was orchestrated by a group of about 40 wealthy American Jews who pledged to help David Ben-Gurion when the latter visited New York in July 1945. Headed by Rudolf Sonneborn, the group acted under the legal cover of a charity, the Sonneborn Institute, whose story is told by Leonard Slater in The Pledge (Simon & Schuster, 1970).[17] The group operated separately from the Jewish Agency in order to shield it from direct involvement in unlawful activities. Among its active members was the future Jerusalem mayor (1965-93) Teddy Kollek, who also played a key role in forging he CIA-Mossad Alliance. Robert Rockaway has documented the contribution of the Jewish underworld to this operation, in his article “Gangsters for Zion: How Jewish mobsters helped Israel gain its independence”. He writes:
In 1945, the Jewish Agency, the pre-state Israeli government headed by David Ben-Gurion, created a vast clandestine arms-purchasing-and-smuggling network throughout the United States. The operation was placed under the aegis of the Haganah, the underground forerunner of the Israel Defense Forces, and involved hundreds of Americans from every walk of life. They included millionaires, rabbinical students, scrap-metal merchants, ex-GIs, college students, longshoremen, industrialists, chemists, engineers, Protestants and Catholics, as well as Jews. One group, who remained anonymous and rarely talked about, were men who were tough, streetwise, unafraid, and had access to ready cash: Jewish gangsters.
Sent by Ben-Gurion to the U.S. to purchase heavy armaments, Haganah operative Yehuda Arazi approached Meyer Lansky and met with members of Murder, Incorporated. Another Haganah emissary, Reuvin Dafni, who would become Israeli consul in Los Angeles and New York, also dealt with Jewish gangsters. “When I interviewed Dafni,” Rockaway writes, “he told me about his meetings with Jewish mobsters. His meetings were arranged by members of the local Jewish community. His first meeting was in Miami with Sam Kay, a leading Miami Jewish gangster.” Dafni also met with Bugsy Siegel.
As Dafni relates, “I told him my story, how the Haganah was raising money to buy weapons with which to fight. When I finished, Siegel asked, ‘You mean to tell me Jews are fighting?’ Yes, I replied. Then Siegel, who was sitting across the table, leaned forward till his nose was almost touching mine. ‘You mean fighting, as in killing?’ Yes, I answered. Siegel leaned back, looked at me for a moment and said, ‘OK, I’m with you.’” “From then on,” recalled Dafni, “Every week I got a phone call to go to the restaurant. And every week I received a suitcase filled with $5 and $10 bills. The payments continued till I left Los Angeles.” Dafni estimates that Siegel gave him a total of $50,000.[18]
Some of those “gangsters for Zion”, writes Rockaway, “did so out of ethnic loyalties,” or “saw themselves as defenders of the Jews, almost biblical-like fighters. It was part of their self-image.”[19]
Such was also the background and self-image of Jack Ruby. His activities in arm smuggling are well documented, although the fact that it was for the benefit of Israel is often blurred. In Coup d’État in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (1975), Allan Weberman refers to the arms-dealing activities of Ruby and other mobsters, but makes no mention of their Jewishness (unless saying that Ruby “was strongly anti-Nazi” counts as an euphemism for being Jewish), and claims that they were in fact arming Castro—while simultaneously participating in CIA plots to kill him.[20]
Ruby knew Lewis McWillie, the manager of the Lansky brothers’ Tropicana nightclub casino in Havana. After the overthrow of Batista by Castro in January 1959, Meyer Lansky relocated to Miami, but Jake Lansky was arrested and confined to a luxury prison, the Trescornia detention camp, together with another mafia figure, Santo Trafficante, Jr. Although not Jewish, Trafficante had sworn allegiance to the Lansky brothers, and controlled substantial portions of Havana’s gambling and prostitution rackets. While in prison, Jake Lansky and Trafficante were often visited by Lewis McWillie, who was negotiating their release by Castro. Ruby told the Warren Commission on June 7, 1964 about visiting Lewis McWillie in 1959 in Havana, and also spoke of knowing McWillie’s bosses, whom, from fear of pronouncing their name, he referred to as “the Fox brothers, the greatest that have been expelled from Cuba.”[21] (McWillie would later acknowledge to the HSCA that, “Jack Ruby could have been out there [Havana] one time with me.”) Ruby added to the Warren Commission that McWillie and one of the brothers later visited him in Dallas.[22]
Seth Kantor quotes from a classified message that was sent from CIA headquarters to National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, on November 28, 1963, confirming that, while Santo Trafficante was living “in relative luxury in a Cuban prison” in 1959, he was visited frequently by “an American gangster-type named Ruby.”[23]
In September 1962, Trafficante is reported to have said to José Alman, a prominent member of the Cuban exile community in Miami, that “President Kennedy would get what was coming to him.” Aleman disagreed and argued that Kennedy would be reelected. “No, José,” said Trafficante. “He is going to be hit.”[24] When Trafficante was asked by Richard Sprague of the HSCA, “did you ever discuss with any individuals plans to assassinate President Kennedy prior to his assassination?” Trafficante refused to answer.[25]
As Kantor shows in great detail, Jack Ruby had repeated contacts with members of the Jewish underworld in 1963. By June 8, “a large group of Chicago racketeers began to show up at Ruby’s Carousel and at two other nearby strip-show clubs, according to a confidential report to Dallas Police Chief Jesse E. Curry written by Lieutenant Robert L. May Jr., who had been head of the vice squad.”[26] Ruby’s underworld contact intensified during the 11 days leading up to President Kennedy’s assassination, “when Ruby abruptly signed a power of attorney, giving up certain rights to control his own money. He also suddenly bought and installed a safe for the first time in his 16 years as a Dallas nightclub operator, to store extra amounts of money.”[27] During this period, “Ruby was getting a series of phone calls at the Carousel from an unidentified man who never would leave a message when Ruby was out.”[28] On November 11, Ruby met in Dallas with Alexander Philip Gruber, who was known for his connections with Mickey Cohen. Gruber, who had not visited Ruby in years, told the FBI that he was in Joplin Missouri at that time, and had simply decided to drop in on Ruby “since Dallas, Texas, was about 100 miles from Joplin” (the distance is 360 miles).[29] In the afternoon of November 22, Ruby phoned Alex Gruber in Los Angeles. “Gruber subsequently told the FBI he didn’t really know why Ruby called.”[30] That is most probably when Ruby received an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Ruby was certainly informed about the precise moment when Oswald would be transferred from the Dallas Police Station to the County Jail. According to former British Intelligence Officer Colonel John Hughes-Wilson, it was Sam Bloom, the Jewish chairman of the “host committee” who had invited Kennedy to Dallas, who suggested to the Police “that they move the alleged assassin [Oswald] from the Dallas police station to the Dallas County Jail in order to give the newsmen a good story and pictures.” And “when the police later searched Ruby’s home, they found a slip of paper with Bloom’s name, address and telephone number on it.”[31]
In an apparent attempt to make it impossible for him to fulfill his contract, Ruby tried to warn the Dallas Police anonymously: Lieutenant Billy Grammer, a dispatcher for the Dallas Police Department, whose statement can be heard here, received an anonymous phone call at 3 a.m. on November 24 from a man who knew Grammer’s name. The caller told Grammer that he knew of the plan to move Oswald from the basement and that unless the plans for Oswald’s transfer were changed, “we are going to kill him.” After Oswald was shot, Grammer, who knew Ruby and had found the voice familiar at the time of the call, identified Ruby as the caller.[32]
Ruby and the Dallas Police
When Ruby shot Oswald on Sunday November 24, this was not the first time he had been allowed into the Dallas Police Station. He knew about every policeman in town, and was nearly as often hanging around in the Police station as the policemen were at his Carousel strip club. “I have always been very close to the police department, I don’t know why,” he told the Warren Commission. Most plausibly, being in friendly terms with the Dallas policemen was his special mob assignment, and certainly the reason why he was chosen for silencing Oswald: few people had as much ease in making their way into the Dallas Police station.
Ruby spent a lot of time there from Friday 22 to Sunday 23, making several attempt to enter room 317 on the third floor where Oswald was interrogated. Early evening on Friday, the day Kennedy was assassinated and Oswald arrested,
shortly after 7 p.m., John Rutledge, a veteran police reporter for The Dallas Morning News, saw Jack Ruby, whom he easily recognized by sight, step from a public elevator onto the third floor. / Ruby was between two men who wore lapel credentials identifying them as out-of-town reporters. The three walked rapidly past a police officer stationed at the elevators to keep out anyone not on official business. Ruby was hunched over, writing something on a piece of paper and then showing it to one of the reporters as they walked toward Room 317, where Oswald was being interrogated by Captain Fritz and others. … A guard was posted at the bureau door to keep reporters from getting in to use the phones, but Ruby had no trouble easing in. He knew the guard. Ruby walked in and shook hands with Eberhardt, who asked him what he was doing. Ruby had note paper in his hand and said he was acting as translator for the foreign press. Eberhardt figured Ruby was talking about the Israeli press or the Yiddish-speaking reporters Eberhardt guessed he heard in the bedlam of the corridor.[33]
Here are the exact words from Detective August M. Eberhardt’s deposition to the Warren Commission (online here):
Mr. EBERHARDT. He came in and said hello to me, shook hands with me. I asked him what he was doing. He told me he was a translator for the newspapers. Of course, I knew that he could speak Yiddish. Had a notebook in his hand…
Mr. GRIFFIN. Do you know if there were Israeli newspaper or Yiddish—
Mr. EBERHARDT. There was a bunch of them running around there talking that unknown tongue. I don’t know what they were saying.
What a shame these Yiddish-speaking reporters were not traced and identified. Victor R. Robertson Jr., a reporter for WFAA radio and TV in Dallas who knew Ruby, also testified seeing him in the Police Station, attempting to enter 317 while Oswald was in there. Despite those testimonies, the Commission denied that Ruby was ever on the third floor Friday evening.
Later that same day, after a short visit to the synagogue, Ruby bought a dozen corned beef sandwiches and “telephoned homicide detective Richard M. Sims and offered to deliver the free food right to the office. Sims thanked him but said the day’s work was about over and they wouldn’t need anything to eat. Ruby found another reason to go anyway and, at about 11:30 p.m., he stepped off the elevator on the third floor again.”[34] At midnight, Ruby made his way to the press conference in the basement police assembly room, when Oswald was put on display. The Warren Report admits Ruby’s presence there, but portrays him as a casual bystander. “Nowhere in its 888-page report to the public did the Commission include Ruby’s admission to the FBI, a month after the crime, that he was carrying a loaded, sub-nosed revolver in his right-hand pocket during the Oswald press session in the assembly room.” Ruby couldn’t approach Oswald close enough to shoot him, as the room was packed with reporters and photographers.[35]
On Saturday 23, Ruby brought sandwiches to reporters in the Police press room; “reliable outside witnesses reported seeing Ruby or talking with him at intervals during Saturday afternoon—witnesses such as Jeremiah A. O’Leary Jr. of The Washington Star and Thayer Waldo, a reporter to The Fort Worth Star-Telegram.” Yet, Kantor notes,
the Warren Commission said it could reach “no firm conclusion as to whether or not Ruby visited the Dallas police department on Saturday” because “no police officer has reported Ruby’s presence on that day” and because “Ruby has not mentioned such a visit.” / In other words, the Warren Commission decided there had been no conspiracy between Dallas police officers and Jack Ruby because none of them reported it at the time.[36]
On Sunday morning, arrangements were made for the transfer of Oswald to the County Jail. A little after 10:30, Kantor hypothesizes, “a call was placed to the unlisted phone in Ruby’s apartment; Ruby was told where to enter the station and that the transfer van was en route.”[37] Ruby first went to the Western Union office in the next block, and arrived just in time to see Oswald being transferred. This narrow timing has been used as evidence that there was no premeditation and therefore no conspiracy. But Kantor theorizes that Ruby’s entrance into the Police station using the public stairway to the basement jail office area “could have triggered the go-ahead signal for Oswald to be brought down”, and he produces plausible evidence that it did.[38] The way Ruby entered the station is still unclear, but the House committee voted in 1979 that “it was less likely that Ruby entered the police station without assistance.”[39]
The Johnson-Ruby connection
Besides Ruby, we know of one person who took steps to make sure that Oswald was silenced forever. Because Ruby could only shoot one bullet to Oswald—he said he had planned to shoot three—, Oswald was still alive when he arrived at Dallas Parkland Hospital. Dr. Charles Crenshaw recalls in his book JFK, Conspiracy of Silence (1992) that, while operating on Oswald with other surgeons, he noticed that an unknown man looking like Oliver Hardy with a pistol hanging from his back pocket had entered the operation room. Minutes later, he was told about an urgent call for him and left the operating room to take it. The call was from the new sworn president Lyndon Johnson who first asked “Dr. Crenshaw, how is the accused assassin?” Crenshaw answered: “Mr. President, he’s holding his own at the moment.” Then Johnson said firmly: “Dr. Crenshaw, I want a deathbed confession from the accused assassin. There’s a man in the operating room who will take the statement. I will expect full cooperation in this matter.” Dr. Crenshaw answered “Yes, sir,” and hung up. Thirty years later, he comments: “As I stood there in a state of disbelief, my mind was racing. First, ‘deathbed confession’ implies that someone is going to die. If Oswald doesn’t die on the table, is ‘Oliver Hardy’ or someone else going to kill him?” Since Dr. Crenshaw had just told Johnson that Oswald was “holding his own,” the expression “deathbed confession” did sound like an implicit order that Oswald should not leave the operating room alive. It really sounded as if Johnson wanted Ruby’s job finished. Moments after Dr. Crenshaw went back to the operating room, Oswald’s heart beat stopped: “Oliver Hardy” disappeared, never to be seen again. “The incident,” wrote Crenshaw, “confounded logic. Why the President of the United States would get personally involved in the investigation of the assassination, or why he would take the inquest out of the hands of the Texas authorities was perplexing.”[40]
There is plenty of evidence of Johnson’s central role in Kennedy’s assassination. And it happens that Jack Ruby directly pointed to him as the mastermind. At the end of a short filmed news conference in the Dallas County Jail in March 1965, Ruby said, “When I mentioned about Adlai Stevenson, if he was Vice-President there would never have been an assassination of our beloved President Kennedy.” Asked to explain what he meant, Ruby continued, “Well the answer is the man in office now.”[41]
How could Ruby know of Johnson’s guilt? Former Nixon operative Roger Stone claims that, in his presence, Nixon recognized Ruby as one of “Johnson’s boys.”[42] I doubt that story; Stone could have made it up to counter another rumor about Ruby’s connection to Nixon, sparked by a forged 1947 FBI memo stating that “one Jack Rubenstein of Chicago […] is performing information functions for the staff of Congressman Richard Nixon.”[43] But there is one more thing linking Ruby to Johnson.
In his testimony to Chief Justice Earl Warren and other Commission members on June 7, 1964, Ruby pleaded to be given a chance to talk directly to Johnson, otherwise “you will see the most tragic thing that will ever happen,” adding that “maybe something can be saved … if our President, Lyndon Johnson, knew the truth from me.”[44] This can be interpreted as a veiled threat addressed to Johnson. Ruby, who by this time had been sentenced to death, may have been trying to remind Johnson that his contract included a presidential pardon (he had shot Oswald out of love for the Kennedys, hadn’t he?). Even more curiously, Ruby hinted that Israel’s reputation could suffer if he spoke: “There will be a certain tragic occurrence happening if you don’t take my testimony and somehow vindicate me so my people don’t suffer because of what I have done.” He feared, he said, that his act would be used “to create some falsehood about some of the Jewish faith.” Ruby also declared to Warren, “I have been used for a purpose,” but no one in the Commission bothered to ask him who had used him and for what purpose.[45] All Ruby got out of his confused testimony was a second pointless Warren Commission interview one month later (July 18, 1964), this time by none other than Arlen “Magic Bullet” Specter (transcript here). His frustration would explain why in March 1965, he finally accused Johnson. Shortly thereafter, he wrote a letter of sixteen pages that he managed to get smuggled out of jail, blaming Johnson for Kennedy’s murder and calling the former “a Nazi of the worst order.”[46] By doing so, he probably hastened his own death, on January 3, 1967.
The case against Johnson
One commenter to my previous Kennedy article argued that the thesis of Israel’s motive is unconvincing because the Israeli Deep State had other options than killing Kennedy in order to go on with its Dimona project. I responded that a murderer’s motive is rarely that he has no other choice than to kill, but that he finds a crucial advantage in the killing. I also remarked that, whoever the assassins were, their purpose was obviously not just to get rid of Kennedy, but to put Johnson in charge. And that had to be done quickly, because the Kennedys were busy destroying Johnson’s reputation and would soon be announcing a change in the vice-presidency. According to Horace Busby, longtime LBJ aide and author of The Thirty-First of March (2005), Johnson had found out that, in early November 1963, Robert Kennedy had sent a team of national reporters to Texas to utterly destroy him. “We’re here to do a job on Lyndon Johnson,” said one the newsmen to an attorney whom he mistakenly believed to be a Johnson enemy. “When we get through with the sonofabitch, Kennedy won’t be able to touch him with a ten-foot pole in 1964”[47] (quoted from this article by Robert Morrow, who wrote more informative articles on Johnson and his “murderous psychopathy”). Richard Nixon, who happened to be in Dallas the day before Kennedy, leaked the rumor to the Dallas Morning News, who reported it on November 22nd under the headline “Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop Johnson.” Instead, Johnson became president that very day (and Nixon knew that Johnson was behind it).[48]
So, since the assassination of Kennedy was a coup to put Johnson in power—what else can it be?—there was no time to waste: it had to be done before the new campaign started and news of a change of vice-presidential ticket was published (Nixon’s prediction was the first and the last). If we now want to know the motive of the coup, we only have to ask: What major change occurred in US policy under Johnson? The change was not visible to the American public then, but they are now well-known, at least to readers of the Jewish and Israeli press. “Lyndon Johnson: Israel Has Had No Better Friend,” headlined Haaretz on May 9, 2018.
“Historians generally regard Johnson as the president most uniformly friendly to Israel,” we are told by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Johnson was the first president to invite an Israeli prime minister, Levi Eshkol, on a state visit. They got along so well — both men were farmers — that Johnson paid Eshkol the rare compliment of inviting him to his ranch.
LBJ soon abandoned pressure on Israel to come clean about the Dimona reactor. He increased arms sales to Israel and in 1968, after Israel’s primary supplier, France, imposed an embargo as a means of cultivating ties in the Arab world, the United States became Israel’s main supplier of weapons, notably launching the talks that would lead to the sale of Phantom fighter jets to Israel.
Johnson wanted to commit more forcefully to Israel’s cause in the lead-up to the 1967 Six-Day War, but he felt constrained from a dramatic show of military might because of the failures of the war in Vietnam then dogging his presidency. Nonetheless, during the war, he ordered warships to within 50 miles of Syria’s coast as a warning to the Soviets not to interfere.
In a speech in the war’s immediate aftermath, Johnson effectively nipped in the bud any speculation that the United States would pressure Israel to unilaterally give up the lands it had captured. He laid down not only the “land for peace” formula that would inform subsequent U.N. Security Council resolutions, but made it clear that any formula had to ensure Jewish access to Jerusalem’s Old City.
It is a good thing that Johnson is being praised by the Israeli press as the US president who “firmly pointed American policy in a pro-Israel direction”, because, on the other hand, his crucial role in the Dallas coup is also getting mainstream attention, as illustrated by the December 2, 2019 issue of the National Enquirer. Anybody who can add one plus one can also make the logical inference.
Watch Laurent Guyénot’s film “Israel and the Assassinations of the Kennedy Brothers” and share it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_kh5tb7PtA
Notes
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