75. See Robert Caro, Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of the War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 196173 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

76. David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 389.

77. Johnson had had a near-fatal heart attack in 1955. Once out of office, Johnson had another serious heart attack in 1972 and finally succumbed to heart disease at the age of sixty-four in January 1973.

78. Randall B. Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (New York: Free Press, 2006), 422. Having succeeded Kennedy with only fourteen months remaining in the term, Johnson was constitutionally eligible to run for two full terms. Had he not been essentially forced out by anti-Vietnam war sentiment in 1968, LBJ might have served over nine years as president, more than anyone except his political hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

79. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 102021.

80. "Sale 43, Lot 240: John F. Kennedy's Personal Secretary Lists Suspects in His Murder," Alexander Autographs,

http://auctions.alexautographs.com/asp/fullCatalogue.asp?salelot=43+++++++240+&refno=+++68450

[accessed June 3, 2011]. Lincoln's other suspects were (in order) the "KKK, [Southern] Dixiecrats, [Teamsters boss Jimmy] Hoffa, [the] John Birch Society, [Richard] Nixon [who had been in Dallas on a well-publicized trip the previous day, perhaps raising suspicions in Mrs. Lincoln's mind], [the late South Vietnam Premier] Diem [presumably, Lincoln meant loyalists to Diem upset about his recent assassination], Rightist[s], [the] CIA in Cuban fiasco [presumably, she meant the Bay of Pigs], [unnamed] Dictators, [and] Communists."

81. David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (New York: Free Press, 2007), 252.

82. "Godfrey T. McHugh Oral History Interview, May 19, 1978," John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum website,

http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKOH-GTM-02.aspx

[accessed April 23, 2013].

83. Craig I. Zirbel, The Texas Connection (New York: Warner Books, 1991), 226.

84. Zirbel says that Hunt assisted LBJ during the 1960 Democratic primaries by printing and circulating "over 200,000 copies of a speech lambasting Kennedy as a Catholic." Zirbel also believes that Oswald wrote a letter to Hunt or Hunt's son on November 8, 1963, that read, "Dear Mr. Hunt, I would like information concerding [sic] my position. I am asking only for information. I am asking that we discuss the matter fully before any steps are taken by me or anyone else. Thank you, Lee Harvey Oswald." Handwriting experts are divided over the authenticity of the letter. In the 1990s, Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin published a book claiming that the Hunt letter was a clever KGB forgery. Mitrokhin was a KGB agent who worked in the agency's foreign intelligence archives; he defected to Great Britain in 1992 and turned over a treasure trove of notes and secret documents. See The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 2000). The Hunts were staunch right-wingers. One of Hunt's sons helped pay for the highly critical advertisement headlined "Welcome Mr. Kennedy" that appeared in the Dallas Morning News on 11/22. Hunt Sr. hosted a right-wing radio show called Life Line and founded a conservative organization called the Facts Forum. Another wealthy Texan sometimes linked to Hunt and the Kennedy assassination is D. H. Byrd. David Harold Byrd was an oil baron who purchased the Texas School Book Depository in the 1930s. He was affiliated with the so-called Suite 8F Group-a coterie of conservative businessmen who took their name from the Houston hotel room where they would often meet. Lyndon Johnson and John Connally were supposedly affiliated with this group. Byrd also founded an aviation company called Temco that employed Mac Wallace, a man who was charged with killing the owner of a golf course in Austin (John Kinser) who was allegedly sleeping with Johnson's sister. Wallace also knew Lyndon Johnson, and it has been alleged that LBJ interceded to get Wallace off the hook following the murder. Wallace has also been linked to a palm print found on the sixth floor of the Depository. If Wallace worked for Byrd, it is not unreasonable to think that he might have been in the Book Depository at some point for one reason or another-assuming the palm print was actually his, which is hotly disputed. In 2001 author Vincent Bugliosi interviewed Nathan Darby, a Texas print examiner who identified a print found on the sixth floor of the Depository as Wallace's. Darby told Bugliosi that he'd been given "two fingerprints, one from a card, the other a latent [print]" and that it was "all blind." "I didn't know and wasn't told who they belonged to," said Darby. Bugliosi told Darby that the "latent" print found in the Depository was a palm print, not a fingerprint. Darby replied, "Of course, you can't compare a palm print with a fingerprint." Bugliosi, Reclaiming History, 92223. Gary Mack of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza goes further: "There was no 'Wallace print' found anywhere in the Depository. One partial print [on the sixth floor at the time of the assassination] was unidentified and a study decades later using photocopies, not actual prints, concluded the partial belonged to Wallace. But another examiner found far more points of dissimilarity which, to print experts, immediately rules out a match." E-mail from Gary Mack, August 30, 2011.

85. Robert Dallek, Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 142. Other Kennedy loyalists doubted Lincoln's story, including close aide Ted Sorensen. For example, in a personal interview with me, Sorensen said he was unaware of any such plan. However, Jackie Kennedy, in tape-recorded conversations with historian and Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger in the spring of 1964, insisted that both JFK and RFK were completely opposed to LBJ as Kennedy's potential successor, and they planned to back someone else to stop Johnson in 1968. No doubt Johnson, who had superb political antennae, was aware of their hostility to his ambitions. See Jacqueline Kennedy, Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy (New York: Hyperion, 2011), 27778.

86. Kennedy, Historic Conversations, 278.

87. In the latest installment of his award-winning series on LBJ, historian Robert Caro reveals that the editors of LIFE magazine were meeting to decide the fate of a muckraking piece on Johnson's questionable business dealings in Texas when news of Kennedy's death came over the wires. See Robert Caro, The Passage of Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 3089.

88. See Blaine, Kennedy Detail, 176, 322, and his "U.S. Secret Service Employee's Monthly Activity Report," November 1963, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland. The report shows that Blaine worked 109 overtime hours the month Kennedy was killed.

89. "Report of the United States Secret Service on the Assassination of President Kennedy," C. Douglas Dillon Papers, Box 43, Folder "The President's Committee on the Warren Report," John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts.

90. For example, Secret Service agents produced 30,820 "protection hours" in August 1964 compared to 21,446 the previous August. "Comparative Analysis: August-Protection Hours, U.S. Secret Service," C. Douglas Dillon Papers, Box 43, Folder "The President's Committee on the Warren Report," John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts. The Treasury Department spent time reviewing security procedures during overseas presidential trips and "the advance detection of people who might [pose a threat] to the president or the vice president." At a press conference held on September 29, 1964, Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon announced the completion of a "great many" security improvements. "There has been a great deal more advance preparations of visits to different cities," he said, "buildings have been surveyed, routes have been surveyed; we have used in this process the help of other government enforcement agencies, largely Treasury agencies but also the FBI ..." See "President's Committee on Warren Report Holds First Meeting," September 29, 1964, C. Douglas Dillon Papers, Box 42, Folder "The President's Committee on the Warren Report," John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts.

91. While no one knows for sure how Lee Oswald learned of the motorcade route, one of his fellow boarders at the Roberts house told the press-forty years after the assassination-that Oswald saw the route on an evening news show a few days before the president's visit. Unless Oswald was part of a well-informed, high-level assassination plot, one assumes he first realized via the local news or from co-workers that Kennedy would be passing right next to his place of employment.

92. "SAIC Behn-White House Detail, Statement on Releasing the Exact Route of Presidential Motorcades," and "Statement on General Procedure When Surveying Individual Buildings along Motorcade Route," December 12, 1963, C. Douglas Dillon Papers, Box 42, Folder "The President's Committee on the Warren Report," John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts. Today, it is accepted practice for the Secret Service to insist that all windows in buildings surrounding a presidential appearance be either closed or covered by agents or police.

93. Gerald S. Blaine to James J. Rowley, "Final Survey Report," December 4, 1963, JFK countercoup website,

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-tampa-survey-report.html

[accessed January 8, 2013]. Blaine explained to me why he finally decided after fifty years to donate this document and others to the National Archives: "[It's] because some of the conspiracy theories indicated that we had a problem in Tampa by an alleged three-man hit team [and that] the president knew about it. This was totally false. The report states that there were no unusual incidents. Tampa went very smoothly and both threat subjects were isolated. One, a young man with psychiatric problems [Wayne Gainey], was placed under the custody of his parents and a local agent had the home under surveillance. The second threat case individual [John Warrington] was in the Tampa jail for making a death threat to the mayor." E-mail from Gerald Blaine, January 9, 2013. During a 1978 interview with the HSCA, one of Blaine's colleagues, Agent Robert Jamison, was presented with documents from November 18, 1963, that showed that the Secret Service was worried about "a mobile, unidentified rifleman shooting from a window of a tall building with a high powered rifle fitted with a scope." Jamison did not recall the incident. Blaine thinks that the memos might have been in reference to Joseph Milteer, a right-wing southern segregationist who told a police informant that JFK could be shot "from an office building with a high-powered rifle ... He knows he's a marked man." See HSCA interview with Robert J. Jamison, February 28, 1978, HSCA# 180-10074-10394,

http://www.jfklancer.com/greer/d-114.pdf

[accessed January 10, 2013], and Summers, Kennedy Conspiracy, 3089.

94. Blaine, Kennedy Detail, 14249.

95. It is also true that Kennedy took risks from time to time that further complicated his security arrangements. For example, in March 1963 during a visit to Chicago, JFK ordered his limousine to stop at a busy downtown intersection so that he could shake hands with well-wishers. A mob scene ensued, as motorists on a nearby highway halted their vehicles and ran across the median to get a better look at the president. See Stephan Benzkofer, "Why Kennedy Came to Town," Chicago Tribune, March 17, 2013,

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-per-flash-kennedy-ohare-0317-20130317,0,670202.story

[accessed March 18, 2013].

96. Vince Palamara, author of Survivor's Guilt: The Secret Service and the Failure to Protect the President, does not believe that JFK ever ordered his bodyguards to stand down. "Don't believe the 47-year-old lies told by those seeking to profit from the man they failed to protect," Palamara writes on his blog. See "Vince Palamara's JFK Secret Service President Kennedy Blog: The Real Truth About the Kennedy Detail,"

http://vincepalamara.blogspot.com/

[accessed June 14, 2011].

97. E-mail from Gerald Blaine, January 9, 2013.

98. A few months after the assassination, Warren Leslie published a book called Dallas Public and Private: Aspects of an American City that blamed Kennedy's death on Dallas's right-wing political climate. Leslie's critics complained about his unflattering portrayal of Dallas and pointed out that hundreds of thousands of the city's residents had turned out to welcome the Kennedys. See Dennis Hevesi, "Warren Leslie Dies at 84; Wrote Book That Rankled Dallas," New York Times, July 23, 2011,

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/us/24leslie.html

[accessed July 25, 2011]. A lot of people shared Leslie's unfavorable opinion of Dallas. The Dallas Cowboys, playing in Cleveland on November 24, were roundly booed by the crowd, and the team members were even warned by Coach Tom Landry not to be conspicuous in public or identify themselves as belonging to the team. See Marc Sessler, "Cowboys Fielded Boos, Anger After JFK's Assassination in Dallas," NFL.com, November 23, 2011,

http://www.nfl.com/news/story/09000d5d824651e6/article/cowboys-fielded-boos-anger-after-jfks-assassination-in-dallas?module=HP11_content_stream

[accessed November 30, 2011].

99. Stevenson visited Dallas on October 24, 1963.

100. Blaine, Kennedy Detail, 14849, 162; Donald Janson, "Johnson Caught in Booing Crowd as He Heads for Rally in Dallas," New York Times, November 5, 1960; Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power (New York: Touchstone, 1993), 634.

101. "United States Secret Service Lecture Outline on Protection of the President for Guidance of Special Agents Appearing Before Police Schools," C. Douglas Dillon Papers, Box 42, Folder "The President's Committee on the Warren Report," John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts.

102. Robert C. Doty, "Attempt to Kill De Gaulle Fails," New York Times, August 23, 1962.

103. Marc Ambinder, "Inside the Secret Service," Atlantic Magazine, March 2011,

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/12/inside-the-secret-service/8390/4/

[accessed June 2, 2011]; "Kessler: Secret Service: LBJ Out of Control, Often Drunk," YouTube,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G41XRl40RL0