JFK

Part 2 of 2

TLDR: LBJ blackmailed his way onto the Kennedy ticket, which he would never do simply to earn a demotion from Senate Majority Leader to VP, understood at the time as a powerless position, unless he was planning to have Kennedy killed.

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Jim Garrison said, “Psychotic oil-rich millionaires ordered and paid for the assassination of JFK.” ¹ And who did they order and pay? Lyndon Baines “The Bull” Johnson. And rather than relying on his own assassins, he got the pros at the CIA to take care of the operational details so that he could have the plausible distance he would need. The CIA was amenable for reasons Allen Dulles wished to keep to himself, but are clear to history.

Those statements are impossible to prove or disprove, or else it wouldn’t be the JFK assassination. The older generation of JFK researchers, those who were closer to the event, tended to emphasize LBJ. For that reason, and because LBJ was considered a liberal politician, the LBJ angle accumulated a thick coating of shit, and that is why my generation tends to emphasize the CIA. It’s time to work towards the synthesis. To do so, I went back to first-generation JFK researchers like Barr McClellan, who worked in Ed Clark’s law firm in Austin, and then after the assassination understood his own experience in a different context, leading him to write a book, Blood, Money, and Power: How LBJ Killed JFK, published in 2003 by the admirable independent, Skyhorse. He called Johnson’s Texas patronage regime “the dictatorship of padrones.”²

He started at the firm in the fifties, after the 1948 Box 13 election, but he said, “Over time as a partner in Clark’s firm, I discovered that meeting someone associated with Johnson’s election fraud of 1948 was an everyday occurrence. Many were in the corridors and well-appointed tables of the petroleum clubs in Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio.”³

It is natural to shrink from the idea that Johnson himself was the motive force behind the assassination because it paints a too-simple picture of a vice president killing the president; it’s too Shakespearean. But in this case, the vice president and president were enemies and represented competing powers. Johnson was also on a killing spree at the time. He had his own shooter, Mac Wallace, for the small jobs. That doesn’t mean he would leave the most important murder in his career to an amateur. Wallace was there in Dallas on November 22—they found his fingerprint in the book depository. His job was to plant the Mannlicher-Carcano and the shells.

The pros he enlisted into his conspiracy worked for Allen Dulles. Allen Dulles had everything to gain, but the primary means, motivation, and will [ck?] all lay with LBJ, who, as a Texan first, rode Texan capital to power. Ultimately, where did the money come from? Black Giant oil—even the “non-oil businesses” that paid up never would have existed without the Black Giant beneath Rusk County, and related entities.

In every other oil field in the world, that fell outside of domestic borders, all of the control and all of the profits went straight to the seven sisters. (Shell had contracts in Texas, but they weren’t just stealing the oil, as they were in Indonesia and elsewhere. Shell played heavily in the Texas oil industry, refining and buying and shipping and selling, but they did so to the benefit of racist, alcoholic white men who considered themselves to be “cowboys,” and therefore were named “Cowboys” by Charles Oglesby. Structurally, it wouldn’t have occurred to them to expropriate the slave-owning settler-colonial ownership class in Texas. This created a class of men that accumulated huge power in the 20^th century called by historian Bryan Burrough, “The Big Rich.”

The political representative of this group of cowboys in the 1950s was a manic depressive megalomaniac named Lyndon B Johnson. These rich men, with time on their hands, were known to gather at The Dallas Petroleum Club, “located downtown in the elegant Baker Hotel,”⁴ or in suite 8F at the Lamar Hotel in Houston, Texas. This group included H.L. Hunt, Clint, Murchison, and Sid Richardson, but also representatives of “non-oil businesses” like Brown & Root, the firm whose financial fortunes were always fundamentally enmeshed with the political ambitions of Lyndon B. Johnson. They were all “extreme right-wing anti-Communists of the John Birch Society genre willing to fund likeminded groups.”⁵ This was Lyndon B. Johnson’s political base of power, and it was a strong one.

But there is a big difference between being a part of a class of influential people, and actively soliciting bids on a $50,000 contract to kill the president. (A witness who appeared before the House Assassinations Committee in 1977, Willem Oltmans, testified that H.L. Hunt—the man who had won the Black Giant in a poker game with Daddy Joiner—put out a $50,000 contract to kill JFK, and that this bounty was administered by “oilman” Georges de Morenschildt, who promised it to Oswald as well as some unidentified Cubans.⁶)

In 1962, congress passed The Kennedy Act that removed distinctions between foreign profits and profits made in America, making more foreign revenue taxable. It’s estimated that this cost oil companies in particular 15% of their foreign investments.

In 1963, Kennedy proposed removing the oil depletion allowance, which had been on the books since 1926, and allowed oil companies to keep up to 27.5% of their revenue tax free. The original justification of this allowance was to encourage new oil exploration. Its repeal would have cost the Texas oilmen in particular $300 million in profits annually. After Kennedy was assassinated, abandoned the discussion of removing the allowance.⁷

But even that would be an oversimplification, given the particular web of corruption and conspiracy that Kennedy drove into on Dealey Plaza. Instead we must allow our gaze to stray to the office of H. L. Hunt (not to be confused with E. Howard Hunt, the CIA operative). But even more important than Hunt himself are his relationships with the oilmen above and below him in the strict hierarchy in which these men lived their lives: Lyndon B Johnson and Georges de Morenschildt.

The most powerful man in Duval County, George Parr, was the one who delivered the stuffed ballot box that got Lyndon into the senate in 1948By 1952, Smithwick was still in prison and pissed about it, and so he decided that he was ready to talk to the media 1948 Box 13 voter fraud that George Parr had executed for Lyndon. He said he could produce the missing ballot box that had been kept out of court proceedings.⁸ Lyndon’s lawyer, Ed Clark, had a man at the state Board of Prisons, Hubert Hardison “Pete” Coffield, and Coffield was able to mobilize a group of both prisoners and guards known as the “Death Rangers” to kill strangle Smithwick in his cell. The Governor of Texas, Allen Shivers, was convinced that Johnson was behind the “prison suicide,” and said so publicly.⁹

Throughout his twelve years in the senate, “the two basic policies Johnson pursued were reactionary, getting a better deal for Big Oil and preventing any progress for Blacks.”¹⁰ He became majority leader in 1953, under Eisenhower, with whom he worked closely, despite the party divide. Sam Rayburn gradually went from being his mentor to being his closest friend and ally. During his time in the Senate, he was much less shy about being associated with the oil industry—he no longer turned down their largesse, as he had in the forties. On their behalf, he completely destroyed the career and life of a well respected bureaucrat at the Federal Power Commission, Leland Olds, by attacking him for socialist leanings in what would become a template for Joe McCarthy.¹¹

For his oil friends, his top legislative priority was deregulating the natural gas market. As noted earlier, gas has been regulated as part of the utility compact with power companies since the first moment of its commodification. That means that the price was regulated by the Natural Gas Act. He wanted producers to be able to set prices, as they did for their oil. ¹² In 1955, one of his first moves as majority leader was to pass such a bill. The oil companies flagrantly bribed senators and the act was passed, but the process was so visibly corrupt that Eisenhower was forced to veto it.¹³

Of course defending the oil depletion allowance was another top priority for the men Johnson represented. In 1960, Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin, proposed to cut the allowance rather than eliminate it. A Yale and Harvard graduate roughly in the Kennedy mold, Proxmire dared to challenge the old boy’s network. LBJ struck back by blocking his appointment to the Senate Finance Committee. Rather than taking his punishment quietly, Proxmire attacked Johnson publicly and justifiably. It hurt Lyndon, both personally because he was a narcissist who couldn’t handle criticism, and politically—but to protect the oil depletion allowance, it was worth the hit.¹⁴

The NAACP had asked for anti-lynching legislation, obviously for very good reason. Johnson had voted against such legislation in the House and continued to oppose it in the Senate. Texas, particularly his part of it, is the Deep South. Johnson wanted his voters to believe that he was incredibly progressive but also a staunch defender of white supremacy. They believed it, but he could never win a national election, because nobody else did. He knew this. He never believed he would win a national presidential election, and that did nothing to stop him from pursuing his dream to become President.

Robert Gene “Bobby” Baker was a senate pageboy from Pickens, South Carolina. One day, Johnson called him and said, “I hear you know where the bodies are buried in this town.”¹⁵ Indeed he did, and became Johnson’s secretary, and then top aide. In that capacity, he set up a series of extortion rackets and mob-affiliated investment schemes, allowing Johnson to use his growing political influence to make himself richer and richer. Baker also turned the Congressional Hotel, across the street from the Capitol Building, into an informal bordello with women available for “quickies” and “nooners.” He became the guy on Capitol Hill who knew every senator’s intimate desires and how to fulfill them. He provided this intimate information to his boss. Lyndon began referring to Bobby as “my son.”

Baker set up a few side hustles for himself and his boss. He started a snack-food vending machine company that would have a monopoly on all government facilities. He bought a beach motel in Ocean Springs, Maryland,¹⁶ which could be useful if he had been trading women for influence, or if he was doing sexual blackmail.

Much of the kickbacks and cash deliveries of this era were laundered by Ed Clark through the Brazos Tenth-Street Corporation. Brazos and Tenth Street was the intersection where LBJ’s radio-cum-television station was headquartered. The Corporation’s trustee was Don Thomas, who had written the fraudulent ballots in Box 13, back in 1948. The money came in from “Senate Parties” all over Texas, which oilmen would attend with bags of cash. Brazos Tenth-Street split the money 20-20-40, with 40% going to campaign expenses, and 20% each going into Clark’s and Johnson’s pockets. Johnson was protected by his attorney-client relationship with Clark, and by Thomas’s nominal control of the entity. The corporation would invest excess cash in land, which would subsequently be sold to the government for offices, highways, and other infrastructure. Johnson’s net worth quickly exceeded twenty million dollars, the equivalent of a quarter of a billion dollars today, and that can’t have counted all the assets.¹⁷

Dwight Eisenhower relied on Lyndon Johnson more than anybody else, and by 1958, the Master of the Senate was the de facto president and the most powerful man in America.¹⁸

Meanwhile, he would focus his energies on installing as many of his own Texan agents into key jobs at regulatory agencies, and then work to exploit the opportunities they could open up. He did this first with his own radio station, Austin, which he bought at distressed sales since it couldn’t get a license to expand its frequency. With Johnson in the Senate, first it got those licenses and then it got a complete monopoly over Austin TV broadcasting. One of his guys at the FCC was Robert T. Bartley, who was Sam Rayburn’s cousin.¹⁹ Any businessman who needed a legislative or regulatory favor was glad to buy extremely over-priced commercial airtime from one of Johnson’s stations. He claimed that Lady Bird, for that was his wife’s name, was exclusive owner of his media empire.

Then he did it with the Department of Agriculture, working with Billy Sol Estes, who sold irrigation pumps and ammonia (perhaps there’s some spiritual connection to Fritz Haber) to farmers around Pecos, Texas. He offered farmers tanks of ammonia with complicated finance schemes that ended up keeping those farmers in his debt. He became a big donor to Lyndon, both in the 1948 campaign and after. What he needed in return was cotton allotments (cotton production being federally regulated). Estes needed his farmers to grow cotton to buy more fertilizer, and so he had a limitless need for these cotton allotments. Johnson focused on getting his guys into the DoA to provide those in exchange for cash payments. The whole Ponzi fell apart in 1961.²⁰

One of his guys at DoA was an “economist” named Malcolm “Mac” Wallace, from Mount Pleasant, Texas, and married to Mary André DuBose Wallace neé Barton.²¹ At thirty years old in 1951, Mac Wallace had moved to Washington from Austin to work at the DoE as an economist, leaving Mary Anne at home in Austin.²² She began fucking Josefa Johnson, along with a man, the owner of a local “chip and putt” golf course, John “Doug” Kinzer. The three of them formed a polycule and had lots of sex, all the time. Also, it just so happened that Mac Wallace had occasional sex with Josefa Johnson as well, which gave him more reason to be jealous of Doug. So both women were fucking with both men and each other, while Mac and Doug were set against each other.

Lyndon’s Austin-based right hand, Ed Clark, told Lyndon about it, and Lyndon became panicked that the scandal would ruin his career. To make it worse, Doug Kinzer even got Josefa to ask Lyndon for a loan for the golf course, which Lyndon interpreted as blackmail. The threesome was known to fuck in a public park, Zilker Park, and it seemed inevitable that the public would become aware of this, and that it would destroy Lyndon’s pathologically precious career. Lyndon said to his mistress, Madeline Brown, “Hell, I’ve got friends in Austin who owe me favors. I’m going to call in my markers for [this]. Madeline, I can’t have this bullshit embarrassing my family.”²³

In October 1951, Mac Wallace took a vacation leave from his job in Washington, and drove to Dallas, where he got a gun from an FBI agent friend of his. Then he drove to Austin and spent a couple days calling his wife, Mary Anne, “a homosexual and a whore.” Then, on October 22^nd, he drove to Kinzer’s golf course office, in his distinctive car with Virginia plates, and shot him point blank multiple times. He didn’t make much of an attempt to run or hide, and was arrested soon after.

Mac Wallace was brought to trial in Austin. The District Attorney, Bob Long, produced both overwhelming physical evidence and eyewitness testimony, but kept the story of the sexual liaison—and Josefa’s name—out of the trial and out of the press. Mac Wallace was represented by the star criminal defense lawyer from Ed Clark’s firm, John Cofer. McClellan describes Mac Wallace not as an angry and jealous husband, but a calculating agent of Johnson.

In jury selection, Cofer asked each juror how much they knew about suspended sentence laws. During the trial, two well dressed men with shotguns visited the house of every member of the jury. After two hours of deliberation, the jury found Wallace guilty of “murder with malice aforethought,” but the sentence of five years in prison was to be suspended, which meant that Wallace owed no prison time whatsoever. One of the jurors, D. L. Johnson, later admitted to the Dallas Times Herald that he had forced the jurors to recommend the suspended sentence by threatening to cause a hung jury. He somehow had been given the impression that it really was just a recommendation and the judge would over-rule it to impose a real sentence, but Cofer knew that Texas law bound the judge, who was compromised anyway, to enact the recommendation. Wallace quit his job at the Department of Agriculture, and became Lyndon Johnson’s personal hitman, with Lyndon’s political influence granting him, with a “license to kill.”²⁴ He went back to Texas to work for a defense contractor, Luscombe Aircraft Corporation in Fort Worth, where he worked directly for that company’s executive D.H. Byrd, who owned the Texas School Book Depository building.²⁵ During this time, he was granted a top security clearance. When Luscombe went into bankruptcy, the clearance was not revoked. Despite multiple DWI charges, five years to the day after the murder conviction was entered, the suspended sentence was set aside. He divorced and then re-married Mary André, with whom he had a daughter that he raped on a regular basis.²⁶

Ten years after the trial, in 1961 while Lyndon was VP, Josefa Johnson had a Christmas party in Washington, and one of the attendees was Mac Wallace. Josefa died in her sleep that night of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 49. “In deference to the wishes of her brother” no autopsy was performed, no investigation made.

At that time, 1961, for reasons unclear, Johnson applied to get Mac Wallace a Naval security clearance. This resulted in a Naval Intelligence investigation of the Doug Kinzer case. Those investigators alerted Texas Ranger Clint Peoples, who began further investigations. Naval Intelligence recommended against the security clearance, but they were mysteriously over-ruled and the clearance was granted.²⁷

The inner circle of beneficiaries of these schemes included Jimmy Hoffa, Hoffa’s lobbyist Irving Davidson, and oilman Clint Murchison.²⁸ Only a small proportion of these payouts and bribes came to light, one involved a Gulf Oil lobbyist who testified that he passed Johnson aides $50,000 for the Senator’s personal use. When asked how much money Gulf had given Johnson and his campaign (the line between the two was nonexistent), Johnson’s lawyer, Ed Clark, responded “I knew of about two hundred thousand. And Gulf was only one oil company—and there were non-oil businesses in Texas, too.”²⁹ John Connally, Sid Richardson’s lawyer, and Ed Clark spoke openly to Robert Caro about taking envelopes stuffed with cash to Washington for Johnson.³⁰

These men, Clint Murchison in particular, felt that when Johnson joined the Kennedy ticket, he had betrayed them. During the campaign, Johnson had promised his oilmen that they would not push for the elimination of the oil depletion allowance, but he was marginalized from the administration, for very good reason.

The vice presidency becomes a much more desirable position when murder is on the table. Otherwise, it could be what Kennedy had hoped: a way to marginalize and contain Johnson’s influence.

He would have been up for re-election as a Senator in 1960. Two years before that, he and Clark decided they didn’t want to do another all-or-nothing run for senator. They decided that what he needed to do was simultaneously run for Senator and for President. That was illegal in Texas, but Clark easily took care of that at the state level. ³¹

But he announced his candidacy for president weirdly late, five days before the 1960 convention. He had done the same thing in 1956, both of which could have been products of his manic depressive cycles, but it reflected his strategy of not putting himself in a position where he’d have to campaign. He stayed in Washington throughout election season until he traveled to the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.

He knew he couldn’t win an open election for president, and his biographer Doris Kerns Goodwin knew it as well, writing “it was unlikely that Johnson could have moved from majority leader to election as president on his own.” His strategy in 1960 was to hope that Jack Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey were going to beat each other up so badly in the primary that the convention would be deadlocked and he could win the nomination in the smoky back rooms. But this didn’t really seem to be a viable path to power, and perhaps Johnson had other plans.

Immediately after JFK became the democratic candidate to run against Dick Nixon in 1960, Johnson demanded a meeting with the Kennedy brothers, and at that meeting, demanded to be named vice president. JFK had no interest or desire in doing so; he had already decided on Senator Stuart Symington, and he sent his aid, Clark Clifford, to “Find out if Stuart will accept and let me know right away.” Stuart, in turn, sent Clifford back with the message, “You can tell Jack I will accept his offer.³²

That very night, Kennedy got a phone call from either Johnson or Rayburn and was given “an offer he could not refuse.”³³ Kennedy’s personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, believed that Hoover had provided evidence of one of JFK’s many affairs, and Johnson—perhaps via Rayburn—to blackmailed his way onto the Democratic ticket as JFK’s vice-president.³⁴ Who knows what was in the blackmail package. Perhaps it was JFK’s affair with Inga Arvad, a gossip columnist who had been seen cozying up to Adolf Hitler at the 1936 summer Olympics.³⁵

The next morning, Kennedy told Clifford to withdraw his offer to Symington, because, as Clifford remembers it, “’during the night I have been persuaded that I cannot win without Lyndon on the ticket…. Tell Stuart that I am sorry.’ Kennedy added that no one in his whole family liked Lyndon Johnson; there had been a ‘family ruckus’ about his selection, [but] he saw no alternative, no matter how painful the choice.”³⁶ JFK spelled it out in the clearest possible terms to his aid Hyman Raskin, who had assisted in the choice of Stuart Symington: “You know we had never considered Lyndon, but I was left with no choice. He and Sam Rayburn made it damn clear to me that Lyndon had to be the candidate. Those bastards were trying to frame me. They threatened me with problems and I don’t need more problems.”³⁷ JFK rationalized it to himself as just a clever way of getting Johnson out of the senate. Johnson told everyone that Johnson was the first and only name that had ever been on Kennedy’s list of potential VP picks. The choice of Johnson as VP lost JFK the support of the labor movement and much of the left, and was not a politically smart choice.

In Robert Caro’s biography, when he gets to this part in the fourth volume, the chapter opens with Johnson magically receiving a call in the morning of July 14^th from JFK, offering him the veep spot. There is no discussion of why Kennedy might have chose Johnson instead of someone more politically aligned with his agenda. The truth is there between the lines, however, in his discussion of the convention hotel-room visit between the two acronymic politicians in the morning (the blackmail package had been delivered the night before): “Whatever had been said between Kennedy and Johnson, it had been said in terms vague enough so that their purport could be denied. The talk had taken about half an hour, and by the time Kennedy left, there was a reporter, Marvin Miles of the Los Angeles Times, outside the door. ‘We talked mostly about what happened last night,’ Kenny told him.” Caro didn’t mention anything about what had happened the night before.

Instead, the question was why he would accept the position. Lyndon had won both his elections, as Vice President and as Senator from Texas. when being a VP was a clear demotion in power from his current position as Senate Majority Leader. His decision to become VP when he could have remained as the Senate Majority Leader confused many observers. But as Connally told him, “You’ll still have the Speaker,” referring to the fact that Sam Rayburn was his creature.³⁸

It is true that Johnson didn’t want to risk his senate seat by getting picked to be a VP and then losing in the general election. There was a Texas law against running for two offices at once, but Ed Clark had gotten that law rewritten so that Johnson could run simultaneously for VP and Senator in 1960. So he wasn’t really risking anything by accepting the VP spot.

So Caro does, in this roundabout way, consider why Johnson wanted to be VP. He has two answers. The first is that while he was in the Senate, he was irrevocably tied to the deep, racist south, as the Senator from Texas, and the majority of Americans were not racist, not in that way, and so he needed to disassociate himself from the South, and the VP is a national position. Possibly.

More to the point, “Sometime in early 1960, he had had his staff look up the answer to a question: How many Vice Presidents of the United States had succeeded to the presidency? The answer was ten.” Then, he had his staff look up a second figure: How many Presidents of the United States had died in office? The answer was seven. Since thirty-three men had been President, that was seven out of thirty three: the chances of a Vice President succeeding to the presidency due to a President’s death were about one out of five.”³⁹ Caro, and the class he represents, will have us believe that Johnson, to whom defeat was unacceptable, accepted these odds without doing anything untoward to increase his chances.

At this time, Johnson was violently depressed. “He is one of the greatest sad-looking people in the world,” observed Bobby Kennedy.⁴⁰ At the Democratic Convention, he flew into rages that “embarrassed” Sam Ryburn.

JFK didn’t understand what was going on. “Why Mr. Johnson, the masterminded Majority Leader, would ever dream up a scheme like this is beyond me” he told Evylin Lincoln.⁴¹

When Jack and Lyndon were about to be inaugurated in January 1961, the Department of Agriculture was actively investigating Billy Sol Estes’ cotton allotments. The USDA inspector responsible was named Henry Marshall.⁴² This was making Lyndon nervous, in ways that are both pathological and understandable, since he was directly implicated in the blatantly illegal scheme. He invited Estes and their mutual associate Clifton Carter to his house in Washington, where they talked in his backyard in the snow to avoid wiretaps. Carter briefed Lyndon, who grew furious with Billy for the visible paper trail he’d left in his wake. Lyndon was paranoid that Estes would squeal. Estes and Carter recommended that Agent Marshall would have to be “taken care of for good.” Estes was told to go talk to Mac Wallace.⁴³

Within two weeks, on February 19, 1961, Estes demanded another meeting, in his own turf in Pecos. Johnson was back on his ranch in Texas, he demanded his airplane come pick him up to fly to Pecos. The day was heavily overcast and not safe for flying. The pilots were in Austin, with their families, and refused to fly due to the unsafe conditions. Lyndon flew into one of his rages and threatened their jobs, and so they tried to fly to his ranch to pick him up. They flew into a rocky hillside near their boss’s ranch, killing both pilots instantly.⁴⁴ After cleaning up the resulting mess, Johnson took a military plane to Abilene to meet with Estes.

The USDA investigation continued for another four months, until, on June 3, 1961, Mac Wallace drove up to investigator Henry Marshall’s ranch near Bryan. He’d stopped at a filling station to ask directions. First he pistol-whipped Marshall, knocking him unconscious. Mac figured he had time to stage a suicide, so he rigged a plastic liner from the exhaust of Marshall’s truck to Marshall’s face to kill him with carbon monoxide. But it was taking too long, and he’d thought he heard a truck driving nearby, so he shot his victim five times in the side of his lower torso with a bolt-action .22-guage rifle. Three of the shots were fatal.⁴⁵

The next day, the coroner ruled the death a suicide. There was no investigation, but just to cover his tracks, the next day Mac Wallace, a deeply clumsy man, went back to the filling station where he’d asked for directions to Marshall’s ranch, and told the attendant that he “had not really needed to go to the Marshall ranch, and had not gone there.” Alibi so guaranteed, Mac returned to his home in California and his top-security-clearance defense contractor. Over twenty years later, a grand jury investigated Marshall’s death and concluded that Johnson, Carter, and Mac Wallace were co-conspirators in murder.

The USDA continued investigating Estes, and Robert Kennedy quietly began investigating the Marshall murder. The loss of the lead investigator slowed it down, but in December, the USDA’s general counsel recommended to the undersecretary of agriculture, Charles S Murphy, to cancel Estes cotton allotments. Murphy canceled Billy Sol’s allotments but on the same day named him to the Cotton Advisory Council, and subsequently provided a mechanism to suspend the investigation indefinitely. Billy Sol would have been saved if not for a dentist from his home town of Pecos, Dr. John Dunn. Dunn was so upset at the corrupt system around him that he bought a local newspaper, and published records and stories about the illegal allotments as well as illegal loans, including one made by Lyndon to Billy Sol. On Thursday March 29, 1962, Billy Sol Estes was charged with fraud and the scandal broke nationally.

Around this time back in Washington, Bobby Baker was setting up a brothel for Senators in his Carousel Motel, six miles north of Ocean City, working with the beautiful German Ellen Rometsch. “On October 8, 1962, a friend purchased a condo in Washington for Baker’s lady friends.” ⁴⁶ Johnson began bringing Rometsch into the White House for Kennedy. According to Hoover’s FBI, Rometsch had ties to the Soviets. Bobby stepped in to clean up his brother’s mess, Rometsch was quietly deported back to East Germany.

There was also, of course, the TFX scandal.

Kennedy was pissed, about all of this, and about the fact that he was forced to associate himself with the man enmeshed in all this sordid activity. He saw every reason to try to dump Johnson off of his ticket for the 1964 election. For Johnson, remaining in power was the only way to remain out of jail, and killing was the only way to contain the situation. The FBI questioned Billie Sol’s chief accountant, George Krutilek, and two days later his body was “found in the dry sand hills near Clint, Texas, a hose attached to the exhaust pipe of his pickup.” The coroner again ruled it suicide. Another Billy Sol associate, Harold Orr, “committed suicide” in Amarillo, Texas, and a fourth, Coleman Wade, turned up dead in Chicago.⁴⁷ Much later, Estes would testify that Wallace had killed these men to protect Johnson.⁴⁸

The murders couldn’t stop the investigation, and two days later, fines totalling more than a half-million dollars were levied against Estes. Assistant Secretary of Labor Jerry Holleman resigned for accepting a loan from Estes. And in Texas, an already-famous Texas Ranger, Clint Peoples, was investigating the murders, even connecting them back to the Kinser murder in 1951. Peoples brought in the Houston medical examiner, who clarified that it is impossible to shoot yourself five times with a bolt-action rifle.

Bobby Kennedy was a silent driver of all these investigatory actions. He was Lyndon’s chief rival for power in the administration, and Bobby and Jack both wanted Johnson off the ticket in 1964. Bobby needed to protect his brother by preventing the scandal from blowing up and implicating the whole administration, but he wanted the material to blackmail Johnson off the ticket before the next election, the same way he had blackmailed his way onto the ticket the first time. So the investigation had to be tightly controlled. Nonetheless, the Senate Permanent Investigations Committee, led by John McClellan of Arkansas, subpoenaed Estes and set a date for hearings.

In October, Lyndon summoned Ed Clark to his ranch in Texas to discuss what to do about Estes. At that meeting, Johnson gave Clark the Secret Service policy manual for the protection of the president.⁴⁹

Estes was ready to talk. He’d been ready to talk, but he kept getting denied immunity, so he shut up for the time being. His company was in bankruptcy, and had been purchased by Morris Jaffe, a San Antonio attorney aligned with Johnson. His attorney, Cofer, refused to put him on the stand. Estes tried to fire Cofer, had no luck. Someone shot at his house in Pecos, and he moved his family to Abilene.⁵⁰

In 1963, Bobby Baker sold his Carousel Motel to his Serv-U Corporation, the vending machine company. He then bought a house next door to Johnson in the Spring Valley area, where the two lived near Chief Justice Fred Black.

On April 23 1963, Johnson met in Dallas with Dallas Times Herald and KRCD executives (his station was KTBC) and told them that Kennedy would visit Dallas in November. He also addressed their dislike and criticism of Kennedy, saying “At least wait until November before you shoot him down.”⁵¹ The next day, the banner headline on page one of the Dallas Times Herald was that Kennedy was coming to town.⁵² The Suite 8F group met at the Lamar Hotel that day.⁵³

That October, litigation related to Bobby Baker’s illegal activities was filed, and the story could not be kept out of the press. He was forced to resign, and then was convicted and imprisoned. Johnson disavowed any involvement with the man he’d previously referred to as his son.

An insurance named Don B. Reynolds testified that LBJ had demanded kickbacks on his own life insurance policy, and the policies that Reynolds sold to others—these kickbacks included a new stereo system for his wife.

That was on November 22, 1963. The hearing was interrupted by the news.

Lyndon’s narcissism demanded not only that he become president, but that he became a great president, the greatest president of the greatest society, and society, all of us, humans, benefitted from the Civil Rights Act, the Environmental Protection Act, and so on. But those were just concessions; JFK certainly wanted to pass Civil Rights, and had he lived perhaps the bill itself would have been better. As it was, these regulatory acts built an easily corruptible system that failed at their stated intentions, their problems (contradictions) lingering and metastasizing rather than being addressed. Perhaps LBJ was truly a liberal politician, but that would require, for some, a painful reconsideration of what it means to be liberal, because he was so extravagantly corrupt. He would never support any policy that would hurt his friends, same as Allen Dulles—and the two had friends in common. Within the limits of discourse set by the cold war—that is, without a socialist alternative—if you said that there were multiple shooters in Dealey Plaza, you were against the Great Society. This only worked to the great advantage of hardline anticommunist Cold Warriors like Allen Dulles. That may seem like an absurdity, but liberal politics is more than capable of such things. It’s clear that despite his philandering, JFK was the better man, and perhaps he would have done better things, at a moment when the CIA was young and vulnerable. And that’s why he had to die.

1

In Joachim Joesten, How Kennedy was Killed: The Full Appalling Story. Tandem Books, 1968. https://archive.org/stream/HOWKENNEDYWASKILLEDByJoachimJoesten1968VeryReadablePDF/HOW%20KENNEDY%20WAS%20KILLED%20by%20Joachim%20Joesten%20%281968%29%20Very%20readable%20PDF_djvu.txt

2 McClellan ctrl+f dictatorship of padrones.

3 McClellan 114

4 Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard 524

5 Nelson, LBJ, chapter 3.

6 Wendell Rawls., Jr, “Witness Ties Oswald to Oilmen and Cubans,” The New York Times, April 2, 1977. https://www.nytimes.com/1977/04/02/archives/long-island-opinion-witness-ties-oswald-to-oilmen-and-cubans.html

7 https://www.universalroyaltyco.com/john-f-kennedy-texas-oil/ ; https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKoildepletion.htm

8 McClellan 103.

9 McClellan 105.

10 McClellan top of Chapter 9

11 This episode is better told in Nelson

12 McClellan ch 9 but I’d like to look deeper here

13 McClellan ch 9

14 McClellan ch 9 ctrl+f Proxmire

15 Nelson

16 McClellan Ch 8, ctrl+f nooners

17 McClellan, much repeated in Nelson.

18Via McClellan: Caro, Master of the Senate, p 840; cf. Dallek, Rising, p. 468.

19 McClellan chapter 9, ctrl

20 McClellan ch 8 ctrl+f “Billy Sol Estes” full name

21 Nelson cites

Haley, pp. 106-109; McClellan, pp. 104–115; Brown, M. p. 79

McClellan, Barr. Blood, Money & Power—How LBJ Killed JFK. New York: Hannover House, 2003.

Brown, Madeleine. Texas in the Morning: The Love Story of Madeleine Brown and President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Baltimore: The Conservatory Press, 1997.

22 Now I’m reading Haley, 107.

23 Madeline Brown p 79

24 Nelson

25 Nelson cites McClellan

26 McClellan 114

27 Nelson chapter 4

28 Nelson, LBJ Chapter 1 cites Peter Dale Scott citation

29 Caro, Master of the Senate, p. 406. Quoted in Nelson.

30 Caro, Master of the Senate, p 407

31 Caro, The Passage of Power, top of chapter 3.

32 Nelson cites Clifford, p. 317-318.

33 Sy Hersh, The Dark Side p. 125. CK

34 Summers, Official and Confidential, pp. 271–273. CK

35 Summers, Official and Confidential, pp. 271–273.

36 Clifford. p. 318. CK

37 Sy Hersh, The Dark Side, p 126

38 Caro, The Passage of Power, chapter 4, ctrl+f “You’re totally at his command”

39 Ibid., Caro, The Passage of Power ctrl+f the quote

40 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 225–226.

41 Lincoln, p. 72.

42 McClellan top of ch 10

43 All McClellan, which acts as a primary source on these points, in my estimation.

44 Nelson quotes Haley, P. 249. That’s

James Evetts Haley, A Texan Looks at Lyndon—A Study in Illegitimate Power. Canyon, Texas: Palo Duro Press, 1964.

45 McClellan’s note is: The scene of the murder is recreated from facts reported from the crime scene investigation. The account is standard for an attorney’s argument to a jury. The Houston medical examiner’s report dated May 22, 1962, was filed August 17, 1962. The Texas Department of Safety reported its conclusions on July 18, 1962, and included a report from Ranger Peoples dated June 7, 1962. Peoples also testified in Marshall v. Health Department, Travis Courthouse, No. 377, 991, 52nd District, to change the death certificate from suicide to homicide. The crime is also discussed at length in Mysteries and Peoples.

46 McClellan, ctrl+f Rometsch

47 McClellen, ctrl+f “Harold Orr” or “Coleman Wade”

McClellan notes: . Appendix

48 TK

49 McClellan chapter 10

50 McClellan:The Estes story is related in his daughter’s book. Pam Estes, Billie Sol: King of Texas Wheeler-Dealers (Noble Craft, 1983) [Estes]. She tells about her father’s accomplishments but omits details of the trials and convictions except to set out Cofer’s actions representing her father. Doug Caddy later represented Estes with the Department of Justice inquiry. Two Department of Justice attorneys were scheduled to meet Estes; however, state immunity was declined at the last minute, and Estes refused to participate.

51 McClellan cites North, 260.

Mark North, Act of Treason ctrl+f 4/23/63

He cites

Blakey, Plot to Kill the President, p. 357.

52 Blakey, Plot to Kill the President, 357. The April 24, 1963 Dallas Times Herald should be found to see if it contains the “shoot him down” quote. Blakey doesn’t have notes.

53 Nielson cites Clark diaries, 1948–1959, Clark Collection, Boxes 99–100, Files 1329–1340.