The accepted story is that Johnson, not knowing why Kennedy was shot or who pulled the trigger, wanted the President’s widow at his side to show the nation/world/conspirators/whoever that what had happened was not a coup and that the government would continue through constitutional succession.
If that sounds melodramatic, remember that this was during the Cold War, only a year after the Cuban missile crisis and just three weeks after the president of South Vietnam had been assasinated.
Johnson was certainly at the hospital. His limo followed the President’s there after the shooting.
"At about 12:30 p.m. Nov. 22, 1963, Vice President Johnson was riding through Dallas in a Lincoln convertible just behind President Kennedy’s limousine. Following a loud noise, Secret Service Agent Rufus Youngblood pushed the vice president to the floor of the car while the driver sped away from the noise to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. "
Johnson was at Parkland, arriving a few minutes after the Presidential limo did. His bodyguards quickly hustled him into an isolated and controllable room (No. 13 in Minor Medicine) close to the ER suites where Kennedy and Govenor Connelly were being attended to. Once it was established that the doctors had declared the President dead at 1pm, the decision was quickly taken to move the Johnsons back to Love Field and Air Force One and they left the hospital at about 1.26pm. Basically everybody else in the party had the decision of either trying to follow LBJ or staying with the body and the widow.
There are no photos of LBJ inside Parkland - indeed there are really no photos or footage from inside until Malcolm Kilduff’s press conference officially announcing the death and the coffin being moved.
However, there are quite a few of him being escorted to the car as he left and of him in the car as it leaves Parkland.
The situation in the main cabin (the coffin was in an aft galley) as the oath was taken was sufficiently crowded that the only person taking photos was the White House’s official photographer Cecil Stoughton. His involvement was not accidental, since those involved realised the importance of having photos of the swearing in that could be transmitted round the world as rapidly as possible. Indeed one of the reasons for delaying the takeoff was to allow the negatives to be got off the plane and developed as quickly as possible.
Of all the photos he took, the famous one more or less selected itself. One important aspect of the choice of angle was to avoid including the bloodstains on Mrs. Kennedy’s clothes.
There’s a detailed account of Stoughton and what he took in Dallas in Pictures of the Pain (Yeoman Press, 1994) by Richard Trask. It reproduces the other shots he took of the ceremony.
A few days ago, I heard a radio interview intended to refute the LBJ-in-Dallas story. The fellow said LBJ was in Houston at a party function. Hundreds of people saw him there, “pressing the flesh,” as Johnson called gladhanding. An emergency trip to Dallas after the shooting would not have taken long. My web search skills are not so hot, and I was not able to find a cite. So, here I am, making an against-the-current assertion without a cite. I heard the story, but I can’t prove it to you. :o
Not to get into the Pit here, but this is an absolute crock, and I’m ready to call the person his claims this an absolute liar. Johnson was in the motorcade, riding with Ralph Yarborough.
The official airline distance from Houston Hobby Airport to Dallas Love Field is 239 miles. The crusing speed of an early model Boeing 707 was 550 miles per hour. Assuming minimal time for climb to and descent from cruising, the flight itself would have taken about 45-50 minutes. Your “source” doesn’t say where Johnson was in Houston, but if he was notified of the shooting at 12:35 (about the earliest possible) and took 15 minutes to get back to the airport and on a plane, and five minutes to taxi and take off, the minimum time he would have needed to get to Love Field would have been just over one hour. That’s cutting it a little close, even for conspiracy theorists.
Indeed. Even if one were to ignore the testimony from the likes of the Johnsons, Yarborough, their bodyguards and the several thousand people who lined the route, he clearly appears in numerous photographs of the motorcade. I can’t think of any of him in the immediate aftermath of the shooting - peoples’ attention was focussed elsewhere and, as already noted, his bodyguard had forced him to the floor of the car. However, there’s at least one clear photo of him as the limo turns into the Plaza.
Johnson can even just be made out in the famous Altgen shot of the motorcade taken as the shooting starts. In good reproductions (unlike this one), both Yarborough and Lady Bird are clearly seen in the car framed between the motorcyclists. LBJ is just to the left of his wife, though the photo is not quite good enough for you to be sure it’s him. But it is.
Maybe, maybe not:
Hm.
Hm… what? The fact that two websites have the same photo is proof of a conspiracy, or something?
Earl: Hughes is identified as an “old friend of the Johnsons” in Merriman’s account. I wasn’t aware of any counterevidence.
Compare the two pictures. Different guy to Lady Birds right.
This is a good example of what’s wrong with so many JFK conspiracy theories.
Plus, Krokodil’s picture appears to have an extra… what is that, an air conditioner? Mainframe computer?
Obviously, Krokodil has retouched the bow-tie guy’s picture, to make him look more like Krokodil and less like Boris Karloff. Inserting himself, Zelig style, into history.
As for the preposterous conspiracy theory about Johnson being in Houston — don’t you guys get it? Part of being a good conspirator is to cook up and circulate the goofiest possible conspiracy theories, like this one, the better to discredit all conspiracy theories.
Your right. Krokodil’s picture appears to be an altered version of Bryan Ekers’.
Hmmm… Does anybody know who either of those guys in the pictures is supposed to be?
Here’s another look at the same picture.
Curiouser and curiouser. Here it’s clearly the Boris Karloff lookalike, looking even less like Krokodil. In Krokodil’s version, the bow-tie guy is young with a beard, but here he’s old and beardless. Both bow-tie guys are wearing the same clothes and leaning at the same angle to get a look at LBJ. It’s as though there were two of them jostling for position at the back of the cabin, and between one shot and the next, Krokodil shoved Boris out of the way and took his place. And how did that extra equipment he’s leaning on get in the plane when it wasn’t there before?
For the record, the guy in the bow-tie is the (beardless) Texan congressman Albert Thomas.
It’s clear from Stoughton’s 35mm roll taken before, during and after the ceremony and the couple of Hasselblad images he also took (all reproduced in Trask, p46-8) that there was indeed a certain amount of jostling in the cabin in the run-up to the oath. Needless to say, there’s neither a bearded guy, nor that panel, to be seen in any of them.
