Lbj: The Mastermind of JFK's Assassination [Hardcover]

A very well written and informative book. The author claims that LBJ planned the assassination of JFK years in advance of Dallas. I dunno. The author freely admits on several occasions that the book is pure conjecture. To suggest that LBJ planned the whole thing - I don't buy it.
I believe that LBJ had a hand in the assassination but to suggest he planned it from start to finish takes some believing. My view is that the conspirators - the military, the industrial complex etc., etc., etc. roped LBJ into the assassination early on since they believed that LBJ's co-operation and help would be essential in the smooth running of the assassination and events after the assassination. Perhaps LBJ was given certain tasks to carry out in Dallas e.g. the motorcade seating arrangements and the actual lay out of the motorcade, the motorcade route, events concerning the arrest and subsequent murder of Oswald by Ruby etc., etc. I found the book
repetitive.The same events are covered several times - in detail and then in broader terms.The graphics in the book come up extremely well. The Altgens 6 photo in particular is clear and precise and shows that LBJ is absent from the photo (there are other high resolution copies of the Altgens 6 photo available to view on the internet - if you're someone who takes the time to research these things seriously and properly). Usually in books such as this the photographs are of poor quality. This book is the exception.The murder of Officer Tippit is mentioned. The author postulates that the killing of Officer Tippit is unrelated to the JFK assassination. This may well be true. World-renowned and highly respected JFK researcher Anthony Summers posits the same argument in his best seller and highly readable book The Kennedy Conspiracy.The author of LBJ Mastermind Of JFK's Assassination Phillip F. Nelson is, as ever, in good company.

To conclude I suppose if anyone had the most to gain and the least to lose as regards JFK's murder, it was LBJ. LBJ may have been capable of assassinating JFK. He may indeed have planned it, but as the book states most of the "evidence" is - at this stage - no more than conjecture.

A good read nevertheless and well worth the 5***** I have given it for the book's overall content. There's a lot of good expert research in this 5***** book!!

And who knows................?

Maybe LBJ did plan the assassination of JFK from sordid start to tragic finish and all foul and despicable points in between.

Only time can tell.........

To all my loyal reviews' readers, please feel free to add your comments again. If you have kept a copy of your original post, just paste again.

101 Things to Do Before You Die

Get a Life

This is the book we've waited 50 years for. It justifies everything we-who-were-in-USA-then all said instantly & for the first week after JFK's assassination, but then suddenly no one was allowed to mention. Revealing new stuff about LBJ's Texas past, too, and clear explanations of his pre-presidential scandals. Book repeats itself, but as it's in tidy mini-chapters you can easily use the index to just read the area you're interested in or just skim any repeats as you peruse this very readable volume. Excellent!

Many if not all the stories in this book have been published elsewhere before but that alone does not make them true. Nelson made this book interesting because he weaved the stories together in a form that is captivating. He keeps them short and pacy. He implicates Johnson in the stories by constantly weaving his own opinion and inferences into them, e.g. "Meanwhile, as Johnson was manipulating and sabotaging the president he had sworn to support, John Kennedy thought that he had neutralized Johnson by putting him into the vice presidency".

Nelson shows that LBJ was one man who had the motives to have JFK killed. He shows (by his own inferences and conclusions) that LBJ was a nasty, wicked, and ambitious man who was extremely close to the FBI director, J Edgar Hooover. From that angle, Nelson also pointed out all the (old) stories about the dirt that Hoover had on Kennedy and how Hoover helped Johnson in many ways, from compelling Kennedy to name him his vice presidential candidate to suppressing evidence concerning the assasination.

What is, and has always been, controversial, was the belief that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman. Nelson rethreads all the dubious evidence and investigation procedures to show that Oswald was one small cog in the assasination masterminded by LBJ. Nelson criticizes the Warren Commission for discarding or ignoring vital evidence, eg the secretary who saw Oswald in the same building Oswald was stopped by a police officer shortly after the killing. Why this was so critical was not explained. We might infer that Oswald was not the gunman. That leads to the crux of the flaw in this book. Oswald might not be the real killer, he might have been one of several killers, there might have been a conspiracy by various people to kill Kennedy, but Nelson has not shown any evidence that LBJ was the mastermind behind it. He merely shows that LBJ had the reasons, the meanness, and the closeness to do it, and therefore, because no evidence connected him to the assasination, he must have been the mastermind. So, although the book was interesting to read, the title is misleading and the assumptions in the book are a little suspect. It may be interesting for readers with the curiosity, time, and energy, to read and compare the first edition of this book which was published in 2010 and completely withdrawn from sale in the first part of 2011. The second edition was published by a different publisher, "professionally redone", according to Nelson.