The Journey 46. Phillip Nelson: LBJ, Master of Deceit

Phillip Nelson discusses his book, “Remember the Liberty: Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas,” with publisher Kris Millegan. LBJ ordered an attack on an American ship, the USS Liberty, to help himself politically in 1967. Everyone was afraid of Johnson. He was ruthless and cunning and vindictive. The blood of many is on his hands.

K: To think that somebody would use the blood of our own citizens to help themselves get elected.

P: Captain McGonagle [USS Liberty commander] told Lieutenant George Golden that it was the president [Johnson] and Robert McNamara [secretary of defense] – he had straight information through Fort Meade, NSA – that “when they sent us up from over in Africa, we were there to have this [the attack on the Liberty] happen.”

K: So how do these crew members who are still alive, how do they deal with it?

P: A lot of them are still shell-shocked. One of the survivors wrote in an Amazon review that “’Remember the Liberty’ by Mr. Nelson provides the most plausible explanation for why the attack occurred and why our government to this day refuses to conduct an official investigation into the attack. … That has to be because President Johnson was directly involved, not just in withholding military support from the Sixth Fleet during the attack, and conducting the brutal cover-up afterwards, but in the planning and execution of the attack well before the actual attack occurred.”

K: The story is getting out there but it doesn’t seem to resonate very far.

P: You may have heard of Tom Cahill. He was subjected to extreme torture through the FBI and COINTELPRO back in the late sixties, basically because Johnson didn’t like the fact that this guy was protesting the war down in his hometown more or less of San Antonio. It was an atrocious example of what would happen to people if they dared cross LBJ and J. Edgar Hoover. A lot of people didn’t think LBJ was smart enough or cunning enough or whatever. He was more than that.

This is the point made by this Tom Cahill: If Johnson would do something as God-awful as attack his own ship and intentionally try to sink it with 294 men onboard – if he could rationalize doing that, then he could rationalize anything. And John F. Kennedy was the one person who stood in his way. And there were many, many others who crossed him. In addition to John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, I believe he was responsible for numerous other murders. Just with the USS Liberty, he’s responsible for the 34 men who died and the 174 who were injured. And you could argue that the Americanization of what was a civil war in a fourth-world country [Vietnam], the millions of people who died there, plus the 58,000-plus Americans, would not have happened were it not for what he did. It was his mania that drove that through.

I haven’t convicted of him these that I’m going to mention now but I’ve made a pretty strong case [in my blogs] that Lyndon Johnson was also behind the murder of Adlai Stevenson, Thomas Merton, and even the Australian prime minister, Harold Holt. So anybody who denies that Johnson had anything to do with the murder of John F. Kennedy because he was not smart enough or not connected enough, he was all that and more.

K: Presidents had much more power then. Same for the secret societies. In 1969 my father told me that “they” are playing out a “lose scenario” in Vietnam, an example of cynical blood politics that the powers-that-be were using to herd us into the position that they wanted. Phil, how do people find you?

P: My blog is titled LBJthemasterofdeceitdotcom. You can check out my books. And you’ll see the archive of [my blog articles that were] posted each month.

K: Basically, there have always been two JFK assassination communities. In one of them, you can say some stuff. In the other one, you can’t say that LBJ was involved.

P: I was forewarned that just the title of my book, that one single word “mastermind” [“LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination”] was going to get me in a lot of trouble. I decided to go ahead with it anyway because it would trigger a lot of people who were just like me, who had experienced living through the sixties. It all goes back to this idiotic war that Lyndon Johnson decided that he wanted to exploit.

We found out from the testimony of the late Gore Vidal that a lot of people in the know in Washington DC suspected that Johnson had been involved in Kennedy’s assassination, but they were afraid to say it, even senators and congressmen, who had a duty I think to respond to that. Everybody was afraid of Lyndon Johnson. It’s difficult for me to comprehend why some people still cling to this idea that, “Well, this is the guy who brought us so much great progressive legislation.” They don’t realize that he had stalled that legislation for 27 years. He only supported it when he saw that it was inevitable and he would get the credit.

K: My crew the for JFK assassination are J. Edgar Hoover and LBJ. They’re some of the base of it, and they’re so blackmailable, you’ve got them in your pocket. And then you’ve got Allen Dulles. And then you’ve got George H. W. Bush and Nelson Rockefeller, with Averill Harriman and David Rockefeller off in the side. There was a Trent Parker and he got a phone conversation with those five.