President Johnson was initially opposed to establishing a Presidential Commission and was highly in favor of the Texas State Inquiry into the assassination, which he made clear in a phone call to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on November 25, 1963, the same day that Katzenbach wrote his memo to the White House promoting a Commission.
Johnson told Hoover, “Some lawyer in Justice is lobbying with the Post because that’s where the suggestion came from for this Presidential Commission, which we think would be very bad.”
Johnson promoted having the FBI work in conjunction with the Texas State Inquiry, stating, “The State Attorney General is young and able and prudent . . . . He’s going to have associated with him the most outstanding jurists in the country . . . . They can expect Waggoner Carr, the Attorney General of Texas, to make an announcement this morning to have a state inquiry, and you can offer them your full cooperation and vice versa.”
After telling J. Edgar Hoover to have the FBI fully cooperate with the Texas State Inquiry, President Johnson further disparaged “this Commission thing,” stating, “Sometimes a Commission that’s not trained hurts more than it helps.”
In a phone conversation with newspaper columnist Joseph Alsop just ten minutes after speaking to Hoover, Johnson again promoted having the FBI work with the Texas State Inquiry, stating, “They’re going to have FBI from outside Texas, but this is under Texas law . . . . We don’t send in a bunch of carpet-baggers . . . . If we have another Commission, hell, you’re gonna have people running over each other.” (Assassinating the President was not a “federal” crime in 1963, which is why Johnson stated that the investigation was “under Texas law.”)
Later in the conversation, Alsop told President Johnson, “I now see exactly how right you are and how wrong I was about this idea of a blue ribbon commission,” and Johnson replied, “Katzenbach suggested that and that provoked it.”
CIA Director John McCone met with President Johnson the next day, Tuesday, November 26, and a CIA Memorandum for the Record disclosed, “The President noted with some considerable contempt the fact that certain people in the Department of Justice had suggested to him on Saturday that an independent investigation of the President’s assassination should be conducted by a high level group of attorneys and jurists.”
The memorandum continued, “President Johnson rejected this idea, and then he heard that the identical plan was to be advanced in a lead editorial in the Washington Post. The President felt this was a deliberate plant and he was exceedingly critical. He personally intervened.”
CIA officer Nicholas Katzenbach, using his “official cover” as Deputy Attorney General, obviously went into action on Saturday, November 23, suggesting the idea of a Presidential Commission to Johnson and then lobbying the Post. He then harped on the idea with J. Edgar Hoover on Sunday, November 24, and pressed the issue further by writing his memo to the White House on Monday, November 25.
Katzenbach’s 3-day push for a Presidential Commission was clearly not yielding results, nor was the phony story about Oswald visiting the Soviet and Cuban Embassies in Mexico. President Johnson was apparently not moved when, on Sunday, November 24, McCone informed him of the CIA’s “plans against Cuba,” which included assassinating Fidel Castro, and then advised him to get “an early briefing on the Soviet long-range striking capability” and Soviet “air defense posture.”
It all sounded so ominous, but President Johnson had absolutely no desire for a Presidential Commission and displayed his “considerable contempt” for the idea when he met with CIA Director and KGB officer John McCone on Tuesday, November 26.
The next day, Wednesday, November 27, McCone sent his cable to National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy in which he pointed out every detail of Alvarado’s story about Oswald receiving a payoff in the Cuban Embassy with absolutely no disparaging remarks about Alvarado. McCone clearly made it sound like Alvarado’s story was an amazing development that changed everything.
On the following day, Thursday, November 28, President Johnson was apparently very much in favor of a Presidential Commission, which he made clear in a phone call to Senator James Eastland. Johnson told Eastland, “My thought is this . . . if we could have two Congressmen and two Senators . . . and maybe a Justice of the Supreme Court to take the FBI report and review it and write a report . . . and do anything they felt needed to be done . . . . This is a very explosive thing, and it could be a very dangerous thing for the country . . . . What would you think about . . . getting somebody from the Court and somebody from the House and somebody from the Senate and have a real high-level judiciary study of all the facts?”
In a call to Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield on Friday, November 29, 1963, President Johnson stated, “Secretary of State is here with me now and he’s quite concerned about it. We have given a good deal of thought, at least I have, to the suggestion of Katzenbach over at Justice to having a high-level Commission . . . to having someone from each side, House and Senate, and let them review the investigation that has been made by the Court of Inquiry and the thorough one by the FBI and let them staff it.”
Johnson then put Secretary of State Dean Rusk on the phone with Senator Mansfield, and Rusk told Mansfield of the “possible implications . . . that if the rumors were to leak out as fact, and if there were anything in this that had not been fully substantiated, it would cause a tremendous storm.”
Rusk also said, “Trying to get . . . the absolute truth . . . is very much in my mind. This has already been commented on and picked up all around the world, and if we’re not careful here, we could really blow up quite a storm.”
But the CIA documented that the “alleged plots” to kill President Kennedy “are seen everywhere as racist and rightist,” and the Soviet Union went so far as to repeatedly implicate Goldwater in a plot to kill President Kennedy. The only thing that could possibly cause Johnson to worry that people are testifying “Khrushchev did this” and “Castro did that” is disinformation from CIA Director John McCone and the phony story about Oswald going to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico.
McCone’s blatant disinformation is readily apparent in Johnson’s phone call to Senator Richard Russell on November 29. Johnson told Russell that Secretary of State Dean Rusk is “deeply concerned” about the claim that “they’re spreading throughout the communist world” that “Khrushchev has killed Kennedy.”
McCone and his KGB minions easily hoodwinked the entire United States government hierarchy into thinking that the United States risked a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union unless Lee Harvey Oswald is pegged as President Kennedy’s lone assassin.
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