Phil Nelson

Phil Nelson's interest in the darker character traits of Lyndon B. Johnson began well before John F. Kennedy's assassination. Nelson was a high school student in a small country town in Indiana, who was just becoming aware of Johnson's connections to scandals in Texas and Washington, DC.  He had become intrigued by articles about Johnson's enigmatic past, which had appeared sporadically in newspapers and magazines in 1961-62. The first of those articles - in February, 1961, about the mysterious crash of an airplane on LBJ's ranch that killed the two pilots - was a story that had been suppressed for four days before it was reported in the news.  Subsequent articles on that incident merely added to his perception of the negative aura of Johnson's character traits since the reports seemed to leave more questions than answers.

Nelson was eighteen years old when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.  Through the initial shock and immediate aftermath, he wanted to believe the government's case against Lee Harvey Oswald, the "malcontent/lone nut," because the alternatives were too frightening to ponder.  Yet he knew that there were many puzzling questions about the new President Lyndon Johnson's past which had been previously reported, with more coming during the 1964 election cycle, including stories of corruption in a widely-read Life Magazine article dated August 21, 1964 titled How LBJ's Family Amassed Its Fortune, and more extensively reported in the book A Texan Looks at Lyndon. (1964)

But it wasn't until Nelson retired from his corporate officer insurance career in 2003 – after seeing the three new episodes in November of that year the History Channel series, The Men Who Killed Kennedy - that he became actively involved in conducting his own research into that "cold case."  The last of this trio, The Guilty Men, was the most stunning video he had ever seen, and it made him realize that researchers appearing in that video - led by the iconoclastic Edgar F. Tatro, having tracked the case since the mid-1960s – were finally revealing truths about Lyndon B. Johnson as none had ever done before.  That video led Nelson to begin conducting more research into Johnson's rise in politics and the increasingly bold and brazen criminal actions that defined his career.

Following a few more years of research, the idea for a book grew during the 2006-2007 period and for the next three years, as a new avocation permitted by his retirement, he began compiling the notes he had made while reading the dozens of books and research papers already written on Johnson.  That culminated in the publication of LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination in 2010, a revised and shortened edition published in 2011 by Skyhorse Publishing and then a "sequel," LBJ: From Mastermind to The Colossus published in 2014, which traced Johnson's obsession to "Americanize" the Vietnam civil war and his numerous other criminal acts throughout that tumultuous period.

The third book, Remember the Liberty! – Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas, was published in 2017, the fiftieth anniversary of the June 8, 1967 Israeli attack, by TrineDay Publishing.  It is a story of treason on the high seas, the direct result of disgraceful presidential treasons of the highest order: Lyndon Johnson plotted to have his own ship sunk, and all 294 men on board to go down with it, all for what he perceived would be his ticket to another landslide election the following year – a delusion that nearly triggered a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

The fourth book, Who REALLY Killed Martin Luther King?  The Case Against Lyndon B. Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover, is a reexamination of the original government case against James Earl Ray.  It shows that the entire case was based on the early magazine articles and book written by the famed "checkbook journalist" and novelist William Bradford Huie.  Nelson's book conclusively establishes that Huie was commissioned by the FBI, brazenly in advance of Dr. King's assassination, to write those articles and book, based upon made-up "facts" cunningly shaped to "frame" James Earl Ray, the "stalker" who never was. 

Within his website/blog, LBJ The Master of Deceit Nelson has continued documenting numerous other treasons and murders of other men whom Johnson believed had crossed him, or feared they would expose his true nature, arguably including the murders of Robert F. Kennedy, Thomas Merton, Adlai Stevenson, and Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt.