A Monster In The White House February 14, 2008
Posted by papersource in good books!.Tags: assassination, billy sol estes, bobby baker, conspiracy, kennedy, LBJ, lyndon johnson, mac wallace, presidency, president johnson
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I just finished “Blood, Money and Power” by Barr McClellan (the father of former Bush press sec. Scott McClellan). He is a lawyer who spent 14 years as a member of the law firm handling all of the legal, personal and professional business transactions for Lyndon Johnson. It’s a fascinating look at how utterly corrupt LBJ was.
He breaks the attorney-client privilege and goes into great detail on a wide variety of backroom deals and schemes, including threats, blackmail and murder, that took LBJ from a poor hick in rural Texas to congressman, senator, Senate majority leader, vice-president and finally president. Only someone who was deeply on the inside, whom LBJ thought could never reveal what he knows, could tell this story. The detail he provides, the countless names, dates and situations he describes, are a gold mine for anyone interested in how power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
He could have stopped halfway through and it would still be one of the best “tell-all” presidential books. But it’s in the second half of the book that he detonates a nuclear bomb.
He claims that Mac Wallace was one of the three men who assassinated JFK. Wallace was allegedly LBJ’s chief thug. He establishes this through a litany of names, dates, places, conversations — and fingerprint evidence taken from the 6th floor sniper’s nest of the Texas School Book Depository.
Who wants to believe that the vice-president of the United States could possibly order the death of the president? Yet that attitude has caused many to simply reject the idea as impossible and thus refuse to even consider the evidence. It not only is possible, it may very well be true. Once you are willing to entertain the possibility, McClellan’s case becomes at least plausible. And that fingerprint evidence is compelling (the Publisher’s Weekly review at amazon.com is factually wrong and demonstrates bias in its casual dismissal).
McClellan says that the problem with the Kennedy conspiracy books, some of which he compliments, is that they all fall short in three areas: 1) they don’t have the facts he has, particularly those thought by the conspirators to be covered by attorney-client privilege; 2) they are unable to follow the money trail, and 3) they don’t want to believe that LBJ could have done such a monstrous act.
Even if you don’t buy the assassination claim, the book is a fascinating trip through the career of a man who is the #1 contender as the most evil person to ever occupy the White House.
