To me, the bigger question is what would have happened if JFK did not pick Johnson as Vice President. JFK likely would not have been in a parade in Dallas, Johnson's home town, without Johnson in the parade, to get assassinated and have Johnson take over, who to me was the most corrupt Democrat during the last 50 years (in my opinion, both Reagan and W. Bush were more corrupt than Johnson). This conspiracy theory carries the most weight to me, from Wikipedia, because Johnson had the most to gain by JFK's death:
"In 2003, researcher Barr McClellan published the book, Blood, Money & Power: How L.B.J. Killed J.F.K.. McClellan claims that Lyndon Johnson, motivated by the fear of being dropped from the Kennedy ticket in 1964 and the need to cover up various scandals, masterminded Kennedy's assassination with the help of his friend attorney Edward Clark. The book suggests that a smudged partial fingerprint from the sniper's nest likely belonged to Johnson's associate Malcolm "Mac" Wallace, and that Mac Wallace was therefore the assassin. The book further claims that the killing of Kennedy was paid for by oil magnates including Clint Murchison and H. L. Hunt.
Madeleine D. Brown, a former mistress of Johnson, has also implicated him in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Brown alleged in 1997 that Johnson along with H. L. Hunt had begun planning Kennedy's demise as early as 1960. Brown claimed that by its fruition in 1963 the conspiracy involved dozens of persons including the leadership of FBI and the Mafia as well as well-known politicians and journalists.
Johnson was also accused of complicity in the assassination by former CIA agent and Watergate figure E. Howard Hunt.
Billie Sol Estes (born 1924) was a scandal-ridden financier best known for his close association with Lyndon Johnson and for having accused Johnson of a variety of crimes, including the assassination of John. F. Kennedy.
In 1984, Estes' lawyer, Douglas Caddy, wrote to the Department of Justice claiming that Estes, Lyndon B. Johnson, Malcolm "Mac" Wallace, and Cliff Carter had been involved in the murders of Henry Marshall, George Krutilek, Harold Orr, Ike Rogers and his secretary, Coleman Wade, the president's sister Josefa Johnson, John Kinser and John F. Kennedy. Caddy added, "Mr. Estes is willing to testify that LBJ ordered these killings, and that he transmitted his orders through Cliff Carter to Mac Wallace, who executed the murders."
Kennedy had a few troops in Vietnam- Johnson gave in to the military contractors for a huge useless buildup and a huge profit for them, and Johnson's "war on poverty" created thousands living on welfare for generations in government subsidized housing, while many go on crime sprees. Maybe McGovern or a Kennedy could have beat Nixon, and we would still have a gold standard for our inflatodollars, instead of the minimum wage peaking in 1967.
What if Ted Kennedy did not drive drunk and crash, so his girlfriend died? Maybe he would have made it beyond Senator.
I think things would be very different if both Kennedys were not killed. It seems to me JFK was killed for Johnson to take over, and RFK disagreed with Johnson about the Vietnam War.
Another interesting factoid about JFK, from Wikipedia, which may have changed U.S. history in the 2000s:
"In 1963, the Kennedy administration backed a coup against the government of Iraq headed by General Abdel Karim Kassem, who five years earlier had deposed the Western-allied Iraqi monarchy. The CIA helped the new Baath Party government led by Abdul Salam Arif in ridding the country of suspected leftists and Communists. In a Baathist bloodbath, the government used lists of suspected Communists and other leftists provided by the CIA, to systematically murder untold numbers of Iraq's educated elite — killings in which Saddam Hussein himself is said to have participated. The victims included hundreds of doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military and political figures. According to an op-ed in the New York Times, the U.S. sent arms to the new regime, weapons later used against the same Kurdish insurgents the U.S. supported against Kassem and then abandoned. American and UK oil and other interests, including Mobil, Bechtel and British Petroleum, were conducting business in Iraq."
I liked the director's cut of this movie (not the theater version), about what might happen if we could go back in time and "fix" history, with unintended consequences:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/butterf ... entReviews
- By wat0n
- By Potemkin