Lyndon B. Johnson served as Vice President under John Fitzgerald Kennedy before succeeding to the presidency after Kennedy’s assassination. As Vice President he was a close political ally of Albert Thomas, a Texas congressman and staunch anti-communist1; together the two later secured the location of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas, Thomas’s home district2. Kennedy appointed James Webb as Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on Johnson’s specific recommendation3, and Johnson himself had once led the National Space Council during his vice presidency, an agency that George Herbert Walker Bush re-created in 19894.
Kennedy was generally unpopular in the South but more popular in Texas, attributed to Johnson’s influence, Kennedy’s showdown with Nikita Khrushchev over Cuba, and the money the space programme brought to the state5. According to Dark Mission, a September 1963 letter from Johnson aide Jack Valenti announced a Texas campaign swing that would include Dallas6. Johnson had stated the previous spring that Kennedy might visit Dallas, Texas that summer7, and by October 1963 the trip, originally planned as a single day on 1963-11-21, had gained a second day, 1963-11-22, once Johnson became involved in the planning8.
After Kennedy’s speech on 1963-11-21, Congressman Thomas and Johnson accompanied him aboard Air Force One to Dallas, Texas the next morning9. Following Kennedy’s assassination on 1963-11-22, Johnson was taken to an undisclosed location10.
In the weeks that followed, Johnson made a show of arguing to continue Kennedy’s plans for Soviet cooperation in space11. Richard C. Hoagland has said that Johnson held enormous political capital in the period after the assassination, capital he could have used to continue any of Kennedy’s initiatives12. Although constitutionally able to stand for re-election in 1968, Johnson’s unpopularity arising from his handling of the Vietnam War led him to forsake a second elected term and retire from public life13. According to presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Johnson did not watch the Apollo 11 Moon landing on 1969-07-20 and refused to let anyone at his Texas ranch watch it, ordering all the televisions turned off14. In 1968, as President, he had ordered the retirement of the A-12 OXCART when it was replaced by the SR-71 Blackbird, itself a modified version of the A-1215.
Johnson also appears in claims linking the Kennedy assassination to the US space programme. In an account relayed by his son Saint John Hunt, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer E. Howard Hunt said, on a deathbed confession tape, that the operatives who planned and carried out the plot to kill Kennedy, including Hunt himself, were directed by one “top man”: Johnson16. Richard C. Hoagland has speculated that if figures such as Johnson and Thomas were willing to orchestrate Kennedy’s murder to protect the space programme, they must have expected to find extraordinary discoveries over the course of its voyages17. Separately, Luis Elizondo has said he believes several US presidents, including Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bush, and Donald Trump, were briefed in some way on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP)18.