Albert Thomas (April
12, 1898 - February 15, 1966) is not exactly a household name, but he carved
out a place in political trivia as the man who winked at Lyndon Johnson aboard
Air Force 1 just after he had taken the oath of office. We believe that Thomas
was an accessory to the murder of President John F Kennedy.
Thomas
represented Texas’ 8th Congressional district from 1937 to 1966, a
district in the metro Houston area. He had become a powerful Congressman
assuming the position of Chairman of the House Appropriation Committee’s
sub-committee on defense appropriations, a role which enabled him to steer the
Manned Spacecraft Center to Houston.
Thomas was a man
whom Kennedy needed to court because his support was required to advance his
program of space exploration, an important plank in his presidential campaign. Thus when the subject of traveling to Houston
came up, word was put out that Thomas was singing his swan song due to the ravages
of cancer. His supporters organized a party to honor him, and it was a homage
which the president could not afford to miss on both political and public
relations grounds.
The men who were
guiding the president to Texas needed this hook to guarantee that he would be
in Dallas when they wanted him. The men were Lyndon Johnson and John Connally both
of whom handled the details of positioning Kennedy exactly where they wanted
him in Texas for the CIA kill teams. Connally played hardball with the president’s advisors who
endured his insulting and arrogant manner of manhandling them, threatening at
one point that he would not participate in the visit if his demands for the
selection of Friday’s luncheon site were not met.
When Johnson was
on Air Force 1 taking the oath of office after participating in the murder of
his boss, Thomas was there to give him a wink after the proceedings concluded.
The unspoken message was that they had succeeded in their coup and that Johnson
was advancing according to plan.
This gesture was
unknown for years until David Lifton published it in his book Best Evidence. Lifton accidentally
received the photo from the Lyndon Johnson Library which unwittingly released the
image taken by Cecil Stoughton. In a subsequent interview with Lifton,
Stoughton expressed shock that he had the photo as Stoughton thought it had been
buried in government files.
The Johnson
library subsequently “lost” the negative which has not been seen since. The “loss”
of the negative was damage control because the wink indeed revealed a story of
two collaborators in the murder. The Library would have no other reason to “lose”
the negative.
As for Thomas’
illness, he was indeed ill but managed to server more than 2 more years before
dying. He played the pity card for all it was worth in seducing Kennedy to
Texas just as Johnson maneuvered it through Connally.
In all fairness,
we should note that one Kennedy advisor testified before the Warren Commission
that Kennedy was fond of the Congressman, so may have been happy to attend the
testimonial dinner in the Congressman’s honor. Our suspicion is that the admiration
was not mutual.
Reference
Inside the ARRB (volume 5), Douglas Horne, 2009
Copyright 2013 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.
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