Lyndon Johnson Fingered in Book on JFK Assassination

According to a recent Gallup Poll, 61 percent of Americans do not believe the lone gunman theory that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating President John Fitzgerald Kennedy 50 years ago on Nov. 22, 1963.

The theories of who was behind the murder are many – the Mob, a right-wing cabal, Soviets, Cubans, the CIA and J. Edgar Hoover, to name a few of the more prominent theories.

Fred T. Newcomb and Perry Adams believed Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson was behind the plot against Kennedy and said so in their book Murder from Within: Lyndon Johnson’s Plot Against President Kennedy. Not only did Johnson orchestrate the murder, according to the scenario they paint, but it was Kennedy’s Secret Service driver who fired the shots that killed the 35th U.S. president on that Friday in Dallas.

“The research community acknowledges everything but the driver being the shooter,” said the late Fred Newcomb’s son, Tyler Newcomb in a telephone call from his Cape Cod, Mass., home. “A lot of people do like the agent as the shooter, but they’re not researchers, so a lot of the reaction has been mixed from the research community.”

Tyler remembers the very moment that the Kennedy murder began to claim his father’s attention. He was a teenager in the summer of 1966 when he and his father, were sitting at the breakfast table, his dad engrossed in a story in the LA Times. It was a review of Edward Jay Epstein’s book (which actually began as his Master’s thesis) Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth, a critique of the Warren Commission report that fingered Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman in the JFK murder.

“He said, ‘Someone else might have shot Kennedy’,” Tyler said. “He was just blown away by this new book. That was the start of the whole thing.”

“The whole thing” for Fred Newcomb was a journey to unravel the truth about the murder of JFK.

President and Mrs. Kennedy arrive at Love Field in Dallas, TX, on Nov. 22, 1963. Photo courtesy Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

“Then we had to read every book on the subject, and he got into researching it,” Tyler said. “Eventually he hooked up with a publisher of a muckraking newspaper called Probe. That was Perry Adams. He wrote a lot of articles for that. They gathered so much stuff together that they decided to write a book and give it to Congress and the FBI in the hopes of spurring a new investigation. That was the whole idea. He never sold one book.”

In 1974, as the Nixon Watergate scandal was unfolding, Newcomb and Adams had 100 copies of their book printed, Murder from Within: Lyndon Johnson’s Plot Against President Kennedy, and gave copies to key politicians, the FBI and media, hoping to spur a new investigation, which, of course, never happened. When that did not garner the attention they thought it should, they decided to seek a publisher.

“He had several publishers that were interested and then backed away for fear of libel and lawsuits because so many of the people named were still alive,” Tyler said.

The years passed, and Tyler said his father was “haunted” by the murder of the president and by the details he had uncovered.

Meanwhile, someone in Canada was selling photocopies of the original 1974 manuscript.

“Sen. Russell Long’s copy ended up on e-Bay, where it went for about $1,000,” Tyler said.

By this time, all the players named in the book were dead, and Fred Newcomb was nearing the end of his life.

“It was time to get it respectably printed,” Tyler said. “My sister (Valerie Woods) and I raised the money and we went to a self-publishing house, AuthorHouse, and managed to get it out three months before he passed away (on March 30, 2012), which was the whole object of the thing. We did that to honor his work and give him a smile before he went away.”

President Johnson shakes Mrs. Kennedy hand at President Kennedy’s funeral service in Washington, DC. Photo courtesy Abbie Rowe. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

Tyler said his father had a copy of the Abraham Zapruder film years before Geraldo Rivera on “Good Night America” first showed it to the public on March 6, 1975. Tyler is a jazz trumpet/flugelhorn player who used to be on the road with a band and is now director of the jazz ensemble at the Cape Cod Conservatory of Music. He recalls as a young traveling musician that he would gather bar and wait staff at the end of a gig and show them the Zapruder film and explain the assassination theory his father had reached.

“If it happened this way, no wonder no one will believe it. It’s just diabolical, brutal,” he said of the theory that it was Johnson’s only way to become president, adding, “No other plot works.”

Newcomb and Adams were not the only researchers to conclude that Johnson was behind the plot to assassinate JFK. A book released earlier this year by Wisconsin native Joseph McBride, who previously wrote critically acclaimed books on film history and just revealed with release of this book that he has been secretly researching the Kennedy assassination for the past 31 years, reaches the same conclusion (the book is Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit).

“If you can pollute a river of information at the source, then everyone downstream reacts to false information for eternity,” Tyler Newcomb said. “That’s how this was designed, and it came from the people who did it.”

Murder from Within is available in hardcover, paperback and in a Kindle version.