Web link:
https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/billie-sol-estes-has-a-deal-for-you/
This 1989 article is typical of how Texas
Monthly, the very essence of the Texas Establishment, treats the topic of
Lyndon Johnson: which is to cover up every single murder this man committed, whether it was Sam Smithwick (1952), Henry Marshal (1961), JFK (1963), various murders around Billie Sol Estes or the 1967 LBJ-Israeli joint mass murder of USS Liberty sailors on June 7, 1968.
By 1984 Billie Sol Estes had already gone into
a courtroom in Texas and admitted that he, Lyndon Johnson, Cliff Carter and
possibly Mac Wallace had orchestrated the murder of Henry Marshall in 1961 so
that Marshall would quit investigating his ties to Lyndon Johnson. In other words,
LBJ was murdering U.S. government officials while he was Vice President!
U.S. Marshall and former Texas Ranger
Clint Peoples totally believe that LBJ murdered Henry Marshall and he was the
one who insisted that Billie Sol Estes go to court before a grand jury and let
them know in Robertson County that Henry Marshall had been murdered and it was
most definitely not a suicide.
The name “Henry Marshall” is not even
mentioned in this article by Texas Monthly, who over the decades has bent over
backward to whitewash the epic criminality of Lyndon Johnson all the way from his
Texas murders to the murder of JFK.
Billie Sol Estes in the early 1960s told
an IRS investigator that he had given over $10 million to Lyndon Johnson in the
form of kickbacks on the dirty government deals that were facilitated by Lyndon
Johnson. That is equal to $90 million in 2021 dollars. When Billie Sol Estes was
arrested for his financial crimes in the early 1960s, his lawyer was an Austinite
named John Cofer, who was a lawyer at the law firm of Ed Clark’s. Ed Clark was
the secret political boss of Texas and one of LBJ’s closest criminal lawyer friends
along with another law partner and tax attorney named Don Thomas who helped LBJ
cover his tracks of his financial crimes, cash kickbacks and political ballot
box stuffing in the 1948 Democratic Senate primary.
This article does mention that LBJ
demanded the Estes hop on a plane and immediately bring him $500,000 and I think
that over the course of the years LBJ probably demanded that over 20 times. That
would be $500,000 in 1960 dollars!
Billie Sol Estes was LBJ’s number one
cash cow and when the Billie Sol Estes scandal broke, LBJ did everything he
could to distance himself from Billie Sol Estes and murder anyone around Estes
who might know about his very crooked connection to LBJ.
Here is a PDF of the extremely rare autobiography
of Billie Sol Estes: A Texas Legend - http://www.narrowbandimaging.com/incoming/Billy%20Sol%20Estes%20A%20Texas%20Legend%20by%20Billie%20Sol%20Estes%20(2005).pdf
in Bill
Adler's article in The Texas Observer (7th November, 1986) : [Web link http://issues.texasobserver.org/pdf/ustxtxb_obs_1986_11_07_issue.pdf
] – article is about the 1961 murder of Henry Marshall which Lyndon Johnson
orchestrated. [Note from Robert Morrow: I think Billie Sol Estes and his
brother were personally involved in the murder of Henry Marshall on the orders
of Lyndon Johnson. Henry Marshall was murdered on June 3, 1961 because he was
investigating the extremely corrupt ties between LBJ and Billie Sol Estes.
Most of
all I highly advise one to read this Phillip Nelson article on the Clint People’s
oral history! https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/02/phillip-f-nelson/clint-peoples-final-interview-last-of-the-secret-files-oral-history/
Billie Sol Estes Has a Deal for You
Free of the law for the first time in three decades, Texas’ most
famous con man still dreams of getting rich.
“I’ve
always been able to make money,” says Billie Sol Estes as he picks over a plate
piled high with lasagna, chicken cacciatore, and spaghetti. “If I put my mind
to it, I could make a million in the next thirty days.” That’s just the sort of
talk that has gotten Billie Sol in trouble for the last thirty years, a third
of which he has spent in prison. In the eyes of the law his talent lies in
being able to make money a little too easily – by a variety of schemes and cons
that have made his name a national synonym for “swindler.” I have already
experienced, in a small way, Billie Sol’s skill at separating people from their
money. When I asked to
meet him, he imposed one condition: I had to take him and his grandkids to
dinner at a restaurant of his choice. And that is how I came to be seated at
the Olive Garden Italian Restaurant in Abilene with Billie Sol, his daughter
Pam, two of his granddaughters, and a nephew named Kerry who is a hairdresser
in Los Angeles.
Billie
Sol is in high spirits, intoxicated with his own freedom. A one-time fertilizer
and farming tycoon, he has been officially off parole since midnight. This is his first full day of
freedom in 27 years, and Estes, whose own daughters describe him as a hopeless
showboater, is in the mood to be noticed.
At
the start of the meal he motions for the waitress, feigning great irritation. A
short, lean brunette with a well-scrubbed West Texas face hurries to the table.
Billie Sol complains that he has no silverware. “Look,” he says in a voice loud
enough to announce his presence to the surrounding tables, “are you trying to
discriminate against me because I’m an ex-convict?” The waitress has served him
before. “No,” she says sternly, “I am not discriminating. But I am putting you
on notice: There will be a pocket check before you leave the restaurant.” The
air fills with the sound of Billie Sol’s high-pitched cackle. Granddaughter
Aimee, who is fifteen, turns to her eleven-year-old cousin, Star Bright, and
whispers, “This is too weird.”
Years
ago one of Billie Sol’s many lawyers described him as an unmade bed, and the
description still fits. At
64 he is a totemic character, massively built and carelessly dressed in an
unironed white cotton shirt and cheap black pants. He has tired blue eyes and
the limp, doughy handshake of an old woman. It is a wet summer night,
and Billie Sol’s black horn-rimmed glasses are splotched with rain. Something
about him makes me want to snatch the glasses from his face and wipe them clean
and dry.
I
resist the temptation to tidy him up and instead ask about his plans.
Immediately Estes assumes an extraordinary trancelike pose. He takes off his
glasses, covers his eyes with his hands, and focuses his energy as though I
have just asked him to reveal the hidden mysteries of the universe. We sit in
silence for a few seconds, and then he says–with his eyes still tightly
shut–“I’m just going to live one day at a time.” I have just experienced Step 6
of Billie Sol Estes’ twelve steps for getting rich: Be original and mysterious.
Don’t tell all of your innermost thoughts and feelings.
What
Billie Sol doesn’t know on this heady night of freedom is that two hundred
miles away in Junction, yet another prosecutor is preparing to ask yet another
grand jury to indict Estes for yet another prosecutor is preparing to ask yet
another grand jury to indict Estes for yet another phony deal. In the sixties, Estes got into
trouble for borrowing money using 33,500 nonexistent fertilizer tanks as
security. In 1979, Billie Sol was convicted of mail fraud and conspiracy to
conceal assets. The convictions meant that he had violated the terms of his
parole, which forbade him to promote his own or other people’s deals, and he
went to prison a second time. Now Estes may be in trouble again. The
latest deal involves stolen blueprints from a company that makes trailers, and
prosecutors are investigating whether Billie Sol is the mastermind behind the
scheme.
But
on this night of Italian feasting, Estes is a happy man. The promoter’s blood
is coursing through his veins, and he’s feeling expansive, almost
philosophical. “Not many people can handle money,” Estes muses. “Me, I’ve never
cared about money. I love putting deals together and watching them run. For
some people, money is death. You might as well give them a loaded forty-five
pistol and point it right at their head.”
Fred the Front
It is hard to reconcile Billie Sol
Estes in the flesh with history’s characterization of him as one of the shrewdest,
boldest swindlers of all time. Even before I met him, I had begun to wonder
whether Billie Sol really was one of the master criminals of our age. A few
weeks earlier a bizarre coincidence had brought me face to face with one of
Billie Sol’s partners from the past.
“Hello,
my name is Fred Michaelis,” said the stranger who stood in front of my desk.
“I’m an old friend of Billie Sol Estes.”
“Did
Billie Sol send you here?” I asked.
“No,
no, no,” he said.
The
stranger described himself as an Austin hobo. I believed him: He looked very
hoboish indeed. A dirty glob of grayish-blond hair was stuck to his head. His
red shirt and blue shorts were wrinkled and clownishly bright, and he smelled
like the garbage dumpsters from which he daily fished his food. Around his neck
were five necklaces – crystals mostly, but Christian crosses here and there as
well. “Sol and I have an extrasensory kind of communication,” he told me,
grinning wide enough to flash a small diamond lodged in one of his front teeth.
“We don’t need words to communicate. We pretty well know what the other is
thinking and feeling at all times.”
Fred
explained that he had been living on the streets for some time and couldn’t
afford to pay for a long-distance telephone call to Estes. He had come to give
me an orange notebook, which he said was a book he had written on Estes’
long-running troubles with the U.S. government. I thumbed through it and
noticed that it was mainly
a collection of newspaper articles strung together with Fred’s commentary.
Fred had met Billie Sol in 1975. “I was
working as a hairdresser in Abilene. Two of his daughters, Pam and
Jan, had their hair done at the salon,” he said. “At the time, the two of them
were interior decorators, and I told them about this idea I had about spiral graphics.”
His
plan to create kaleidoscopic designs on ceilings and walls so people could look
up and enjoy original splatter art. Jan liked his idea and took him home to her
daddy for final approval. “I went to the Estes house for a backyard barbecue,
and something just sparked between Sol and me,” Fred said with great
excitement. “Sol walked over, grinned real big, and said to me, ‘We like your
idea. We’ll promote it. We want fifty percent.’”
The
idea of spiral graphics never made a penny, but Fred didn’t mind. Fred has
always been a man of many careers – he owned a wig shop, joined the Moonies,
piloted airplanes, sold flowers on the streets of Austin, and in 1986 launched
a business called Rent-a-Hobo. He and a few friends walked around town wearing
sandwich-board signs that read: “We move. We hoe. We’re a good hobo to know.”
Fred lived at Billie Sol’s house
overlooking Abilene’s Lytle Lake for four years, serving as his chauffeur and
confidant. “Sol is a bright man,” Fred said, “but when he’s concentrating
on a deal, he can’t do anything else. Like drive. He simply can’t think and
drive at the same time. That’s why he has had his driver’s license revoked so
many times.” The two men would drive around West Texas in Billie Sol’s 1974
Cadillac, trying to out-maneuver the U.S. government. Once, they bugged the
offices of some government witnesses, but Fred’s filing system left a lot to be
desired, and he and Billie Sol often couldn’t find the tapes they had gone to
such trouble to make.
It
was during the late seventies that the federal government came to believe that
Fred was fronting all of Estes’ deals. That’s how the Estes family gave Fred
his nickname: Fred the Front.
As
he talked, I wondered how the government could believe that Fred was a front
for anyone. Fred is what he is – a good-natured hobo, and one of many cold
trails that Internal Revenue Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents
have traveled down in their thirty-year pursuit of the notorious Billie Sol
Estes organization. After Fred left, I picked up the telephone and called
Billie Sol’s eldest daughter, Pam. I told her about Fred’s unexpected visit. “Welcome,” said Pam, “to my
father’s wacky world.”
King of the Wheeler-Dealers
Billie
Sol made his first deal with Santa Claus. When he was seven years old, Billie
Sol wrote his annual Christmas letter to Santa. That particular year all he
asked for was a lamb. His mother made sure Santa delivered, and on Christmas
Eve, Billie Sol was given a newborn lamb named Merry. He bred Merry with a
neighbor’s ram, and the next spring, Merry had two lambs. The following year
she had two more. Billie Sol went to work at three every morning at a dairy
farm for fifty cents a day. With his earnings he bought more lambs, and he cut
school in order to sell his wool at market.
Billie Sol’s father, John, was a rigid
man of few words who worked a farm near Clyde, just a few miles east of
Abilene. Billie Sol always had a vision of himself that was far grander
than merely following in his father’s footsteps, and his mother cultivated that
vision. It was she who made Billie
Sol feel special, drilling him in the teachings of the Church of Christ and
explaining to him that every man is born with a destiny. By age nine,
Billie Sol understood that he needed to make his own way. He asked permission
to pay his brothers and sisters to do his farm chores so that he could manage
his own business affairs. His father agreed to that, and from then on, Billie
Sol Estes, although only a boy, was his own man.
In
1940, when Billie Sol was fifteen, he executed a deal that had all the
components of the many controversial deals that would follow: It was bold in
design, it involved the government, and he overextended himself and others. He
wrote President Roosevelt a letter asking if there was anything the government
could do to help the drought-stricken farmers of Callahan County. He received a
prompt reply from Roosevelt, informing him that the government had surplus
grain for sale. Billie Sol went to his bank and borrowed $3,500 to buy
seventeen train cars of grain. He used some of the grain to feed his livestock
and sold the rest to his neighbors.
By the time he was eighteen, he had
made $38,000 – more than his father had seen in his lifetime – from selling
sheep, hogs, and milk cows. Billie Sol was so well known around Clyde
that the Abilene Reporter-News
did a feature story on him, describing
him as a “glutton for work.” That year he was named the top 4-H club boy
in the nation. “As unassuming sort of chap,” wrote his hometown paper, “Billy
[sic] Sol takes little of the credit for his achievements.” His banker bragged
that Billie Sol was often more than $1,100 overdrawn, but the bank made a
practice of covering his checks because no one there doubted that Billie Sol
Estes was true to his word.
Billie Sol made his first million by
continuing to use whatever commodity he happened to have to buy something else.
Deep inside him he had an unquenchable desire to do bigger and bigger things. He cleared prickly pear cactus
and used the proceeds to buy Army and Air Force barracks, then turned the
barracks into small houses and sold them all over the country to GIs coming
home from the war. In 1949 he traded his house in Clyde for a farm near
Earth, northwest of Amarillo, and started experimenting with irrigation. Then
he began to sell off his irrigated land near Earth for the cheaper, parched
land near Pecos. For every
acre of Earth land he sold, he could buy three or four acres near Pecos. He
made his new land more productive by using portable tanks to pump anhydrous
ammonia fertilizer into the ground. At his peak, he owned more than three
thousand acres around Pecos, and on the land he grew vast amounts of cotton and
grain. He had turned the desert into paradise.
By the mid-fifties Billie Sol Estes was
legitimately rich. Then he came up with the venture that got him in trouble: manufacturing portable
fertilizer tanks and selling them to area farmers. He got potential
customers to give him their financial statements, which he used as security to
borrow money for his new business. He paid the farmers 10 percent of the amount
he could borrow on their statements, and some of them collected as much as
$50,000. But Estes failed
to manufacture as many fertilizer tanks as had been ordered. What he made
instead were small metal tags with serial numbers. When his lenders
asked to check up on what he was doing, he showed them the few hundred portable
tanks he did have on his property, then moved the tanks to another location, switched tags, and made it
appear that he had thousands more tanks. By the time the government
caught up with him in the
early sixties, he had swindled several finance companies out of $24 million. He
had listed 33,500 nonexistent tanks valued at $1,000 each.
Like
every other big-time debtor, Billie Sol has always maintained that if he had
only had more time, he would have eventually manufactured and sold all 33,500
fertilizer tanks and repaid all the loans. Even when he got word that the FBI
and the United States Department of Agriculture were looking into his books, he
wasn’t worried. He thought
he was operating under the veil of political protection. Estes had contributed
large sums of money to then-vice president Lyndon Johnson, who, along with
other Democratic officeholders, had helped him take advantage of government
loopholes involving grain storage and cotton allotments and had secured
lucrative government contracts for him. No matter what happened, Estes was
certain Johnson would save him.
Even now, Billie Sol’s voice becomes
hushed, almost reverent, when he mentions Johnson’s name. “When I first met
Lyndon, he asked me if I was on the team, and I told him that I was,” recalls
Estes. “Then he laid out his rules: I was to do everything I could to help him,
and he would do everything he could to help me. That was it. After that, he
said, ‘Well, let’s not talk about the stuff anymore.’” Estes has told various
people, including an IRS agent who posed as a Chicago investor in 1977, that
Johnson telephoned him in the middle of the night and demanded half a million
dollars in cash. Estes says that when he protested the lateness of the hour,
Johnson shot back, “Goddammit, I didn’t ask you what time it was. Get my
goddamn money to the airport!”
In
the eyes of Estes and his family, Billie Sol was a victim of bad timing and
politics. They believe
that when President Kennedy learned of Estes’ close ties to Johnson, Kennedy
and his entourage saw an opportunity to dump Johnson as vice president. In a
press conference in the fall of 1962, Kennedy announced that 75 FBI agents had
been assigned to the Estes investigation, and he vowed that the FBI, the
Justice Department, and Senate and House committees would find out if any
government officials were involved in the scandal. When all the agencies closed
in on Estes, he kept his silence. In a book that Pam wrote, Billie Sol: King of Texas
Wheeler-Dealers, she says her father told
the family that if he kept his mouth shut and went to jail, Johnson would make
sure he was quickly pardoned.
Others
say Estes has totally exaggerated his relationship with Johnson. One long-time
conservative Democratic politician who still lives in Pecos says, “His problem
is ego. He’s a hopeless name-dropper. Lyndon Johnson might have known him, but
I don’t recall he knew him that well.” San Antonio oilman Morris Jaffe, a heavy contributor to
Johnson’s campaigns who later bought Estes’ bankrupt estate, says that at the
Kennedy-Johnson inauguration in 1961 Johnson hardly knew who Estes was,
although Estes put on quite a show. He arrived at the inauguration Jett
Rink-style, filling up lots of $100-a-plate tables with his Texas friends.
Estes, dressed in tails, bragged to Jaffe that he had flown twelve of his
private planes to Washington for various parties. Jaffe, annoyed at Estes’
showiness, asked, “What did you do? Fly them in formation?”
In
private moments, Estes has spent a lot of time asking his family “what if”
questions. What if he had
told all that he knew about Johnson and other Democrats, and Barry Goldwater
had been elected president in 1964? What if Goldwater had kept the United
States out of Vietnam? Estes has never been a man to underestimate his
individual role in history.
Even
now, he insists that one day he will set the story straight – but not until
he’s ready and the price is right. “Every day I ask God if this is the right
day to break my silence,” he says. “When I feel that it is, I’m going to pick
up the telephone and call Fred Michaelis, and the two of us are going to write
us one hell of a movie script.”
Daddy’s Girl
“What
do you get when you cross an ex-convict with a religious fanatic?” asks Pam,
referring to her father and mother. “A sex therapist.” Pam is also an antique
dealer and a real estate broker. She makes motivational speeches too (“I used
my father’s twelve steps for getting rich for a speech I gave to a bunch of
Mary Kay saleswomen, and boy, did they love it”). She operates out of her two-story office building in
downtown Abilene, where she is constantly getting calls on a pink Princess
telephone – which, she is 100 percent certain, is bugged. Pam and her
daddy are currently in the T-shirt business together. She sells T-shirts in her
antique shop, and Billie Sol sells them on the road. Most weekdays he can be found traveling to truck
stops and barbecue stands all over West Texas in a 1978 faded red station
wagon, peddling T-shirts, Pam’s books, sunglasses, and Spanish-language music
tapes from Mexico. “I have to watch him,” says Pam. “If he tells me he’s
sold two hundred T-shirts, I know it’s more like twenty. Once a con man, always
a con man.” His biggest sellers are T-shirts with messages. Some of his
favorites are “Don’t Just Stand There, Love Me,” “Snuggle Up With Someone From
Texas,” “The Hell With Housework, I’m Going To Bingo.” And the one that best
describes Pam: “I’m Not Fat, I’m Fluffy.”
Bosomy
and buoyant, Pam is every inch her father’s daughter. She has his ferocious
energy, his love of drama, and his gift of persuasion. She has pale skin,
frosted hair, and wears great globs of blue eye shadow and red lipstick. Her
best feature is her mouth, which never seems to lose its roselike shape. I
haven’t been with Pam thirty minutes before I find myself completely immersed
in her world. “How many times a week do you have sex with your husband?” she
suddenly inquires over a chicken-salad lunch. When I hesitate, she moves
swiftly to her point. “If you’re not having intercourse with your husband two
times a week, you can bet he’ll soon be having affair.”
She
should know. In 1982, she tells me, her husband had an affair with his
manicurist. One afternoon a friend drove her to a Motel 6 and pointed out her
husband’s truck parked outside one of the rooms. “Can you imagine,” Pam says,
“anything more tacky than a Motel 6?” She planted herself in the truck and
honked no the horn until a hand emerged from one of the rooms. On this
outstretched wrist was the gold Rolex watch she had given her husband for an
anniversary present. Soon Pam’s husband and the manicurist came out of the
room, and not long after that, her husband filed for divorce. Pam was
devastated, but she exacted her own revenge. She hired a young man to deliver
dead funeral wreaths to the manicurist at her place of employment. After two
weeks the woman quit her job. “And that,” says Pam, sipping her iced tea, “is why I went for my
master’s degree in marriage and family therapy.”
She began her studies by administering
standard personality tests to both her parents. Pam was not surprised to
discover that her father – who
has been through three trials and served ten years and eight months in prison,
and once was accused on the front page of the Abilene paper of raping his
Mexican maid – bears absolutely no psychological signs of being under stress.
“My dad showed up as more a covert personality than an overt one. That’s why
he’s such a good con artist,” says Pam. “What makes a person smooth is his
feminine side, and my dad always has liked women better than men.” Her mother,
however, tested like a prisoner of war – she was totally stressed out.
Pam was three years old when Billie Sol
moved his family from Earth to Pecos. She grew up rich. According to Pam, her
father handed her $100 bills for shopping sprees at Woolworth’s,
and she was driven to the store in a limousine by a chauffeur named Homer who
once worked for Merle Norman, founder of the chain of cosmetic stores. The
Estes family occupied an entire city block. They lived in the largest house in Pecos, a
seven-thousand-square-foot mansion with two tennis courts, palm trees imported
from Florida, and a barbecue pit large enough to accommodate two steers at a
time. In her book, Pam wrote that her daddy always barbecued with a
water hose in one hand; he was too impatient to let the coals burn down, so
every barbecue turned into a fire.
The
family’s main social outlet was the Church of Christ. As a lay preacher, Billie
Sol had two standard sermons, one on zeal and the other on vision. The Estes
family had a large swimming pool, but swimming parties were conducted according to Church of Christ
rules – no mixed swimming was allowed. The girls swam for one hour, and then it
was the boys’ turn.
All five of the Estes children were
indulged so much that they each got to pick the colors for their rooms, and if
they changed their minds, work crews were immediately called to change colors. Pam, now 41, started out with a
yellow room but changed to lilac – lilac walls, closets, carpet, even lilac
furniture. January, now 39 and a pawnshop owner in San Antonio, had a
mint-green and pink room. Dawn, 37 and a dental hygienist in Abilene,
chose a conservative blue and white. No one remembers what color Billie, 34 and now an accountant
for a men’s clothing store in Austin, selected for his room. The
important thing about Billie’s room was its location. As the only son, he had a
room right next to his father’s office. Joy, now 33 and a substitute schoolteacher in Corpus
Christi, chose a color that befitted her baby status – pink – the same color
Pam used when she redecorated her own house in Abilene after her husband
had the affair with the manicurist. Pam’s house has pink couches, pink
curtains, pink patio furniture, and a pink bed spread on her canopy bed. But in
her mind, Pam is always in the Pecos house. “I loved the slate floors and the palm trees,”
she tells me wistfully. “I loved how happy we were there.”
True Confessions–Sort Of
The
way Billie Sol sees it, he has only one overwhelming fault. “My problem,” says
Estes, “is that I’m overanxious to do something for the poor. When I die, I
want them to put one thing on my tombstone: ‘He did all that he could to help
the poor.’”
For
once, he is not conning. His earliest memories are of the Depression, and the
sight of hungry people haunts him. He quickly figured out that there are two
kinds of people in the world – the haves and have-nots – and no matter how much
he acquired, Billie Sol Estes always aligned himself with the have-nots. He
thought of himself as Robin Hood – robbing from rich finance companies and
giving to poor farmers – and he was not susceptible to the rules that governed
other people. When he discovered his own knack for making money, he chalked it
up to luck and mentally converted it to a religious calling. “I think everybody
is raised up to do a job. My job has always been the same – to feed the poor,”
Estes says.
In
the beginning, he gave money away because it made people like him. Pam wrote in
her book that as a boy Estes would wait in the school yard every morning and
give lunch money to any student who couldn’t buy his own lunch. Usually, it was
Billie Sol who paid for his friends’ movie tickets. When his wife, Patsy, first met Billie Sol, he was
fifteen, and although he had money in his pocket, he was obsessed with giving
it away.
Before
he arrived in Pecos, the main beneficiaries of Billie Sol’s generosity were
blacks and Hispanics. He identified with them because he felt as downtrodden as
they were. When Estes was
at his financial peak, he and his wife sent forty black students to college.
Alfredo Gomez, who owned a grocery store in Pecos, said that every time there
was a big rain, Estes would send his limousine to the east side of town, where
the Hispanics and blacks lived, and drive students to the high school, on the
west side. When the funeral home in Pecos refused to handle the bodies of
minorities, Estes opened his own funeral home. Some white children in Pecos
weren’t allowed to play with the Estes children because Billie Sol made a
practice of keeping a preacher’s room in his house, where visiting black Church
of Christ ministers made themselves at home. Estes ran for the school board in the early sixties,
urging integration, and was soundly defeated by a write-in candidate. Pam
remembers her father’s handing a suitcase filled with cash to Dr. Martin Luther
King long before the world knew who King was.
“I
still fight the same fight every day,” Estes says. He usually spends three days
a week in Abilene, visiting friends and family and making food runs to
Thirteenth Street, on the black side of town. Atop his station wagon Estes has
built a large food bin, and in it he carries the salvaged food that he cajoles
from grocery stores, restaurants, and members of his family.
When
he leaves the tidy white part of Abilene, where all the treeless streets are
named for trees, and makes his way to the black part of town, Estes says, he
feels relieved. He usually
attends a black Church of Christ on Sunday, and the poorer the congregation,
the better he likes it. “I just feel more comfortable with poor people,”
he says. “I love picking up a fryer at the store and taking it to a poor
family, and then sitting down and sharing a meal with them. That’s heaven to
me.”
Billie Sol’s Steps
Billie
Sol may be selling T-shirts out of his station wagon today, but he still dreams
of being rich again. Moreover, to hear him tell it, he has plenty of chances to
make money, although he’s leery of doing deals in Texas these days because he
believes the state’s economy is a long way from recovery. “If I had money,” he
says, “I’d put it in the Japanese stock market.” Not a week goes by that some
aspiring wheeler-dealer doesn’t contact Billie Sol, looking for advice. “If
they come by mail, we throw them away,” says Pam. “If they show up in person,
we just hope for the best.”
So
many promoters have begged to be taught his lessons that Estes developed his
twelve-step program for getting rich, derived from Alcoholics Anonymous’ twelve
steps for staying sober. (Estes became an alcoholic while he was in prison. He
had unlimited access to liquor there because Mafia inmates put him in charge of
emptying the fire extinguishers and refilling them with contraband booze. He
found himself routinely sneaking nips.)
Here are Billie Sol’s steps on how to
get rich:
1. Get up early. Plan your
day positively. Do something good for each person you see. A sense of humor is
essential.
2. Have faith in yourself and your business deal. Get a deal that will work and
make money, and then others will join you. You won’t have to find people – they
will find you.
3. Get good legal and accounting advice.
4. Hire the best people available. They will make you money. Delegate to others
what they do better than you.
5. Have zeal and enthusiasm. Start a fire within you. Some will come to join
you, others just to watch you burn.
6. Be original and mysterious. Don’t try to be like everyone else; hold back a
part of yourself. Don’t tell all of your innermost thoughts and feelings.
7. Share yourself. Love your fellowman. Cast your bread upon the waters. You
will multiply by dividing.
8. Be competitive. That’s the American way. Get in the last lick. He who laughs
last does laugh best.
9. Live life to the fullest, a day at a time, and make each day your best.
10. Take risks and borrow to the limit to back your ventures. The best fruit is
at the end of the limb.
11. Learn from your failures. Forgive the past, and at all costs, keep moving.
12. Be willing to listen. Be ready, and when the big play arrives, recognize it
and go for it with all you’ve got.
Like
his life, Billie Sol’s rules are filled with contradictions. How can you share
yourself completely and hold back a part of yourself at the same time? How can
you love your fellowman but also take care to get in the last lick? But it
doesn’t really matter now, because Billie Sol is no longer making big deals,
just big dreams. Thirty years after his last major play, Billie Sol has become
a caricature of himself. He spends most of his time reacting to other people’s
reactions to his celebrity status. Recently on an airplane going to Houston,
the woman seated next to Estes insisted on moving when she found out who he
was. “You would have thought she was sitting next to Bonnie and Clyde,” says
Pam, who was traveling with her father. A few years back, when his name was used in the movie 9
to 5 to describe a crooked deal, his family was surprised — but not too
surprised.
Even
Billie Sol Estes has rare moments of truth, times when his ego and rules for
riches disappear and he reveals himself in spite of himself. No one knows that better than
Sue Goolsby of Abilene, his former mistress, who is still a friend. She says
that her affair with Estes began in the early seventies, when Billie Sol was
fresh from prison the first time. Then, Goolsby was thirty years old, a
dark-haired beauty who had never before seen the world outside of West Texas.
“The first time I met him, he was tan, with black hair,” Goolsby remembers. “He
looked good, he smelled good, and he was famous.” Estes took her to Las Vega
and on shopping sprees at Neiman Marcus. She knew he was a churchgoer and once
asked him if it bothered him that they were committing adultery. “No,” Estes
said. “In the eyes of the Lord, we’re married.” That was when Goolsby began to
understand him as a hopeless but loveable con. “Billie’s problem is that he’s a liar and he just can’t
help it,” she says.
Yet
he may have come closer to leveling with Sue than anyone else. One night,
Billie Sol looked at her and said, “Everyone wants to know what the secret is.
Don’t you want to know my secret?” Yes, Sue said, she wanted to know. “The
secret,” Billie Sol Estes told his lover, “is that there is no secret.”
Still Scamming
In
1987, Billie Sol Estes came to live in his wife’s hometown of Brady, a quiet
ranching community about 85 miles southeast of San Angelo. Patsy had stuck with
Billie Sol through his prison terms – in the eyes of the Church of Christ,
swindling isn’t grounds for divorce – but Billie Sol’s affair with Sue was
another matter. Patsy gave
serious consideration to divorcing Billie Sol but decided to stay with him.
Patsy and Billie Sol settled in with her elderly parents in an old stone house
on College Avenue. Patsy was soon earning bread money by taking in
sewing. (Her busiest time of year is at the end of summer, when she makes
uniforms for many of the town’s cheerleaders and majorettes.)
Billie
Sol and Patsy became regulars at the Sunset Ridge Church of Christ, where the
minister, Ronald J. Morrison, immediately took a liking to them. “Billie Sol
Estes has a heart of gold – I have seen him literally give the shirt off his
back to the needy. Billie
organized a tremendous food bank in our area, and Patsy distributed clothes to
people who needed them,” says Morrison. “As far I know, Billie Sol Estes
has no enemies in Brady, Texas.” It’s true that many in the town believe Estes
is just an endearing old man who has been mistreated by the government. In
restaurants around town, folks don’t call him Mr. Estes or Billie Sol; they
refer to him as Mr. Billie.
The only problem
with living in Brady, from Billie Sol’s point of view, is that the town is
within the five-county jurisdiction of Ron Sutton, a bulldog of a district
attorney who, at 45, already has a formidable reputation to protect. He has
prosecuted both Kerrville’s Slave Ranch trial and the blood-tingling case of
Genene Jones, the nurse convicted of killing babies.
In the fall of
1987, Sutton began hearing rumors about a strange business development in
McCulloch County. The county’s biggest employer was Loadcraft, a company that
made only one product – large trailers used to transport cargo containers. In
September, Loadcraft subcontracted some of its work to a small company by the
name of A-1 Manufacturing. Sutton got wind that David Guzan, the general
manager of Loadcraft, was also a silent partner in A-1 Manufacturing.
Immediately Sutton’s suspicions were aroused. The more the district attorney
checked, the stranger things looked. Guzan and some of the principals at A-1
had formed a new company to compete with Loadcraft in the building of trailers.
Guzan had launched this endeavor without bothering to resign his position at
Loadcraft. Indeed, the design of the new company’s trailers resembled Loadcraft
trailers in every respect but one: The name had been changed to “Loadstar.”
Sutton realized he had a felony on his hands when he learned that Guzan and
three of his Loadstar associates used stolen blueprints of Loadcraft’s trailer
to make a pitch for $5 million in financing from the Corpus Christi Economic
Development Corporation.
Who could put such
a deal together? Who had masterminded a deal that involved stolen company
secrets, quasi government financing, and an insider’s competitive advantages?
The more Sutton looked around, the more he began to hear the name of one man: Billie Sol Estes.
Witnesses told Sutton that Estes had begun hanging around the offices of A-1
Manufacturing in the fall of 1987, right after the company got its contract
with Loadcraft. One former employee told Sutton’s investigators that Estes had
acted like one of the bosses – Billie Sol thanked the man for doing such a fine
job and then asked, “Don’t you think we could build our own trailers right
here?”
Billie Sol’s name
is on none of the company’s documents, which leads Sutton to believe Estes was
following his own Step 4: delegating to others what he ought not do himself.
One day Estes’ parole officer telephoned Sutton to ask if Estes was under
investigation. Sutton explained that he was. Not too many days later, the
parole officer called Sutton and told him that Estes wanted to make a deal.
Billie Sol would cooperate fully with Sutton’s investigation, implying that he
wanted immunity. “Can you imagine,” asked Sutton, slumped in a wooden chair in
his law library, “what people would say if I granted immunity to Billie Sol
Estes? Why, I’d be laughed out of the district attorneys association in two
seconds flat.” In the eyes
of the law, Billie Sol Estes will always be a master criminal.
When I asked Billie Sol what he knew
about the scam in Brady, he looked straight at me and said he didn’t have the
slightest idea what I was talking about. He didn’t seem surprised to learn that
he is once again under investigation. “I suppose I’ll be under investigation
about one thing or another for the rest of my life,” he mused. But what, I
asked, if he had to go back to prison for a third time? “If I do, I guess
that’s part of my destiny.” Suddenly Billie Sol looked exhausted. Right before
my eyes, his face lost all its expression. It was as though he had folded up
some private interior tent and had mentally moved to some other place. Then he
fixed his weary eyes on me and, with a steely voice, said, “Bring on the indictment. Let’s
fight.”
Billie Sol Estes told IRS investigator Walt Perry in 1963 that he
had given $10 million in bribes and kickbacks to Lyndon Johnson
From
Gus Russo’s book Live By the Sword: The
Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK:
QUOTE
Walt Perry, an investigator for the
Internal Revenue Service at the time, says that Bobby Kennedy was attempting to
use Johnson’s legal problems as leverage, should Johnson not agree to leave the
ticket voluntarily. Perry was brought in by Willam Webster (later to become the
FBI director) to assist in the Billie Sol Estes investigation. He befriended
Estes, who, in the course of things, told Perry that he had funneled $10
million in bribes to Johnson. He also related in an anecdote about Bobby
Kennedy. Perry recalls, “Estes told me that in 1963, Bobby Kennedy contacted
him in prison. Bobby made him an offer, saying, ‘If you testify against
Johnson, you’re out [of prison].’ Billie declined the offer, saying, ‘If I
testified against him, I’d be dead within twenty-four hours.’”
UNQUOTE
[Gus Russo, Live By the Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK, p.283]
Gus Russo footnotes on p. 561 of his
book that he interviewed Walt Perry on June 6, 1992.
$10 million in 1960 dollars would
equal $90 million in 2021 dollars: http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
In 1961 U.S. Agricultural official Henry Marshall was investigating
Billie Sol Estes, which really means he was investigating Lyndon Johnson. LBJ, response,
had Henry Marshall murdered on June 3, 1961.
https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmarshallH.htm
Lyndon
Johnson’s crooked business relationship with Billie Sol Estes was critical
I urge you to look into LBJ's
close association with Malcolm Wallace, his alleged hit man. A good book to get
is Billie Sol Estes a Texas Legend. Billie Sol will tell you about
Lyndon's murderous ways: http://www.amazon.com/Billie-Sol-Estes-Texas-Legend/dp/B000ANCGGS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234809493&sr=1-1 Read
the book and you will see how CLOSE Billie Sol was to Cliff Carter, LBJ's
political operative.
Billie
Sol Estes’ 1984 letter to the US Justice Dept. regarding 8 murders of Lyndon
Johnson
Before LBJ Cliff Carter died, he and Billie Sol Estes had a
conversation and Cliff Carter told Estes that as far as he knew, Lyndon Johnson
had murdered 17 people. Estes only mentioned eight of these murders, mainly the
ones he had direct knowledge of, in his 1984 letter to the US Justice
Department.
http://home.earthlink.net/~sixthfloor/estes.htm
LETTER #2 - FROM DOUGLAS CADDY (lawyer for Billie Sol Estes)
August 9, 1984
Mr. Stephen S. Trott
Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division
U.S. Department of Justice
Washington, D. C. 20530
RE: Mr. Billie Sol Estes
Dear Mr. Trott:
My client, Mr. Estes, has authorized me to make this reply to your letter of
May 29, 1984. Mr. Estes was a member of a four-member group, headed by Lyndon
Johnson, which committed criminal acts in Texas in the 1960's. The other two,
besides Mr. Estes and LBJ, were Cliff Carter and Mac Wallace. Mr. Estes is
willing to disclose his knowledge concerning the following criminal offenses:
I. Murders
1. The
killing of Henry Marshall
2. The killing of George Krutilek
3. The killing of Ike Rogers and his secretary
4. The killing of Harold Orr
5. The killing of Coleman Wade
6. The killing of Josefa Johnson
7. The killing of John Kinser
8. The killing of President J. F. Kennedy.
Mr. Estes is willing to testify that LBJ ordered these killings, and that he
transmitted his orders through Cliff Carter to Mac Wallace, who executed the
murders. In the cases of murders nos. 1-7, Mr. Estes' knowledge of the precise
details concerning the way the murders were executed stems from conversations
he had shortly after each event with Cliff Carter and Mac Wallace.
In addition, a short time after Mr. Estes was released from prison in 1971,
he met with Cliff Carter and they reminisced about what had occurred in the
past, including the murders. During their conversation, Carter orally compiled
a list of 17 murders which had been committed, some of which Mr. Estes was
unfamiliar. A living witness was present at that meeting and should be willing
to testify about it. He is Kyle Brown, recently of Houston and now living in
Brady, Texas.
Mr. Estes, states that Mac Wallace, whom he describes as a "stone
killer" with a communist background, recruited Jack Ruby, who in turn
recruited Lee Harvey Oswald. Mr. Estes says that Cliff Carter told him that Mac
Wallace fired a shot from the grassy knoll in Dallas, which hit JFK from the
front during the assassination.
[The letter continues …]
Sincerely yours,
Douglas Caddy
LIFE Magazine, being fed damaging info by
RFK, was on the verge of running a story on 11/29/63 that would have
annihilated Lyndon Johnson’s political career once and for all
Source: James Wagenvoord who in 1963 was the 27 year old assistant
to LIFE Magazine’e managing editor; this issue would have been dated 12/6/63
and mailed out 11/29 and 11/30/63 (Friday/Saturday mailing)
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=14966&st=0
James Wagenvoord to John Simkin (in
November, 2009):
“I've been reading through
you web site and believe that I can add one of the final jigsaw puzzle pieces
that affect the timing of JFK's Dallas trip and the nervousness of LBJ during
the weeks preceding the killing. At the time I was the 27 year old Editorial business
manager and assistant to Life Magazines Executive Editor. Beginning in later summer 1963 the magazine, based
upon information fed from Bobby Kennedy and the Justice Department, had been
developing a major newsbreak piece concerning Johnson and Bobby Baker. On publication
Johnson would have been finished and off the '64 ticket (reason the material was
fed to us) and would probably have been facing prison time. At the time LIFE magazine
was arguably the most important general news source in the US. The top management
of Time Inc. was closely allied with the USA's various intelligence agencies
and we were used after by the Kennedy Justice Department as a conduit to the public.
Life's coverage of the Hoffa prosecution, and involvement in paying off Justice
Department Memphis witnesses was a case in point.
The LBJ/Baker piece was in the final editing stages
and was scheduled to break in the issue of the magazine due out the week of
November 24 (the magazine would have made it to the newsstands on Nov.26th or
27th). It had been prepared in relative secrecy by a small special
editorial team. On Kennedy's death research files and all numbered copies of
the nearly print-ready draft were gathered up by my boss (he had been the top
editor on the team) and shredded. The issue that was to expose LBJ instead
featured the Zapruder film. Based upon our success in syndicating the Zapruder
film I became Chief of Time/LIFE editorial services and remained in that job until
1968.”
Biography of James Wagenvoord: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKwagenvoord.htm
LIFE Magazine was within days of
breaking a major story on Lyndon Johnson that would have been extremely
politically damaging to him. By 11/22/63, the political career of Lyndon
Johnson was hanging by a thin, thin thread and Robert Kennedy, having told the
Washington press corps that it was open season on Johnson, was about to cut it
with scissors:
In
1963 Johnson got drawn into political scandals involving Fred
Korth, Billie
Sol Estes
and Bobby
Baker.
According to James
Wagenvoord, the
editorial business manager and assistant to Life Magazines Executive Editor, the magazine was working on an article that would have revealed
Johnson's corrupt activities. "Beginning in later summer 1963 the
magazine, based upon information fed from Bobby Kennedy and the Justice
Department, had been developing a major newsbreak piece concerning Johnson and
Bobby Baker. On publication Johnson would have been finished and off the 1964
ticket (reason the material was fed to us) and would probably have been facing
prison time. At the time LIFE magazine was arguably the most important general
news source in the US. The top management of Time Inc. was closely allied with the
USA's various intelligence agencies and we were used after by the Kennedy
Justice Department as a conduit to the public."
The
fact that it was Robert
Kennedy who
was giving this information to Life Magazine suggests that John
F. Kennedy
intended to drop Johnson as his vice-president. This is supported by Evelyn
Lincoln, Kennedy's
secretary. In her book, Kennedy
and Johnson
(1968) she claimed that in November, 1963, Kennedy decided that because of the
emerging Bobby
Baker scandal he was going to drop Johnson as his
running mate in the 1964 election. Kennedy told Lincoln that he was going to replace
Johnson with Terry
Sanford.
Don
B. Reynolds
appeared before a secret session of the Senate Rules Committee on 22nd
November, 1963. Reynolds told B.
Everett Jordan and his committee that Johnson had demanded that he provided
kickbacks in return for him agreeing to a life insurance policy arranged by him
in 1957. This included a $585 Magnavox stereo. Reynolds also had to pay for
$1,200 worth of advertising on KTBC, Johnson's television station in Austin.
Reynolds had paperwork for this transaction including a delivery note that
indicated the stereo had been sent to the home of Johnson. Reynolds also told
of seeing a suitcase full of money which Baker described as a "$100,000 payoff
to Johnson for his role in securing the Fort Worth TFX contract".
Researcher John
Simkin on LBJ
and the JFK
assassination
Education
Forum web site: super place to learn about JFK assass.
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=1435
The second problem was far more serious.
The conspirators fully expected Lyndon Johnson to order an invasion of Cuba after J. Edgar Hoover told him on 23rd
November, 1963, that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated as a result of a
conspiracy that involved Cuba and the Soviet Union. This was confirmed at a
meeting that day with John McCone (Director of the CIA).
Johnson
was reluctant to do this. He knew that the announcement of a communist
conspiracy to kill John Kennedy would be followed by a full investigation into
the events surrounding the assassination. If this happened, Johnson was
likely to be forced to resign in disgrace.
HUGE JOHNSON
LIABILITY IN BOBBY BAKER SCANDAL, FALL 1963
In November, 1963, Johnson was embroiled in a serious political scandal. According
to Robert
Winter Barger, Johnson told John McCormick: “… that son of a bitch (Bobby
Baker) is going to ruin me. If that cocksucker talks, I’m gonna land in jail….
I practically raised that mother****** and now he’s going to make me the first President
of the United States to spend the last days of his life behind bars!”
Senator John Williams was known as the "Sherlock Holmes of Capitol Hill
". During a 15 year period his
investigations resulted in over 200 indictments and 125 convictions. In the summer of
1963 he began investigating the activities of Bobby Baker, Fred Black and
Billie Sol Estes. Baker was LBJ’s political secretary. Black was one of LBJ’s political
advisers. Both these men were involved in the business activities of Billie Sol
Estes.
Senator John McClellan, chairman of the Permanent Investigations Committee,
also became involved in this inquiry. Williams and McClellan discovered that in
1962 Baker had established the Serve-U-Corporation with his friend, Fred Black,
and mobsters Ed Levenson and Benny Sigelbaum. The company was to provide
vending machines for companies working on federally granted programs. The machines
were manufactured by a company secretly owned by Sam Giancana and other
mobsters based in Chicago. It was claimed that LBJ was getting a rake-off from
Serve-U-Corporation in return for arranging for vending machines to be placed
in these company’s offices and factories.
Evidence also emerged that Lyndon B. Johnson was also involved in political corruption
concerning the placing of arms contracts. This included the award of a $7
billion contract for a fighter plane, the TFX, to General Dynamics, a company
based in Texas. Fred Korth, the Navy Secretary, and a close friend of LBJ, had
been involved in negotiating this contract.
On 7th October, 1963, Baker was forced to leave his post as LBJ’s [the
Senate’s] secretary. On 1st November, 1963, Korth was forced to resign over the
TFX contract.
Rumours
began to spread that JFK was going to drop LBJ as his running mate in 1964.
Robert Kennedy appeared to confirm this by briefing against LBJ. This
including information that suggested that LBJ would be prosecuted for political
corruption.
DON REYNOLDS’ TESTIMONY REGARDING JOHNSON’S CORRUPTION
At this time the
key witness had yet to testify. His name was Don B. Reynolds. A close friend of Bobby
Baker, Reynolds claimed that for many years he had a business relationship with
LBJ. Reynolds was due to provide evidence before a secret session of the Senate
Rules Committee on 22nd November, 1963. LBJ would not be there to hear what was
said for on that day he was to be visiting Dallas with JFK.
On
returning from Dallas LBJ discovered what Reynolds had told B. Everett Jordan
and his Senate Rules Committee that day. According to Reynolds he had seen a suitcase
full of money which Baker described as a "$100,000 payoff to Johnson for
his role in securing the Fort Worth TFX contract".
LBJ immediately contacted B. Everett Jordan to see if there was any chance of stopping
this information being published. Jordan replied that he would do what he could
but warned Johnson that some members of the committee wanted Reynolds's testimony
to be released to the public.
To Johnson the safe option would be to claim that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman.
J. Edgar Hoover also had good reasons to accept this option. Any thorough
investigation would show Hoover’s close relationship with Clint Murchison, a Texas
multimillionaire who was suspected on being one of those who helped fund the
assassination.
John
McCone, Director of the CIA, also had his problems. An investigation
would show that some senior figures in the organization, including Tracy Barnes, David
Atlee Phillips, Ted Shackley, Desmond FitzGerald, William Harvey and David
Morales were implicated in the assassination.
It did not
take long for Johnson to convince J. Edgar Hoover and John McCone to take part
in the cover-up. The problem for Johnson was to provide a good reason
for this action. He knew that eventually historians would discover what he had
done.
Lyndon
Johnson taped every telephone conversation he had as president. However, he erased
most of these tapes afterwards. He did keep some and these were donated to the
Lyndon Johnson Library on his death. Over the last few years these tapes have
gradually been released.
As historians the most important question to ask is: Why did LBJ decide to keep
these tapes? We have to assume he eventually wanted this information in the public
domain. One tape saved was a telephone call he made to his great friend,
Richard Russell on 29th November, 1963:
“Richard Russell: I know I don't have to tell you of my devotion to you but I
just can't serve on that Commission. I'm highly honoured you'd think about me
in connection with it but I couldn't serve on it with Chief Justice Warren. I
don't like that man. I don't have any confidence in him at all.
Lyndon B. Johnson: It has already been announced and you can serve with anybody
for the good of America and this is a question that has a good many more ramifications
than on the surface and we've got to take this out of the arena where they're
testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this and did that and chuck us into a
war that can kill 40 million Americans in an hour…
LBJ explains
that if he accepts a communist conspiracy he will be under pressure to invade
Cuba. This is likely to lead to a nuclear war that would “kill 40 million Americans
in an hour.” Therefore, the only safe course is to believe that Oswald was a
lone gunman. That there was no communist conspiracy. Therefore, LBJ’s
cover up helps to save the world.
The
right-wing cabal that organized the assassination of JFK did not get the
overthrow of Castro. However, they did get something very important out of the
deal. The continuance of the Cold War. This after all is what the
Military Industrial Complex wanted out of the assassination. In fact, the
existence of a communist government so close to the United States helped to
fuel the paranoia that was the life-blood of American foreign policy.
ED TATRO REPLY TO
MARIANNE MEANS RE: JFK ASSASSINATION
From: Ed Tatro
Sent: Saturday,
September 15, 2001 3:56 PM
To: Marianne
Means
Subject:
"Nothing Like It Since JFK Assassination" article
Dear Marianne
Means:
I have felt pretty
demoralized by the events of this week, but your article of historical inaccuracies
sent my depression into overdrive. I'm sure my response will accomplish nothing
in your mind, but having researched the Kennedy assassination since it
occurred, (when I was an idealistic boy of 16), I feel compelled to respond.
I can't stop you from
denigrating my 38 year effort to determine who really killed JFK by your calling
me an obsessed buff, but it does give me satisfaction to know that you're wrong
in blaming Lee Harvey Oswald for JFK's demise.
Your article
makes reference to LBJ's commandeering of Air Force One after the assassination
and his subsequent conversations aboard the plane back to Washington. Are you aware
that those conversations were taped, but that only a one and a half hours of
edited tape of those conversations exist today? We're talking about the
destruction of some five hours of taped conversations, Marianne.
Do you know who possessed those pristine
tapes? I didn't think so.
Well, I do...and it wasn't Oswald. Did you know that Arlen Specter tried to persuade Ken
O'Donnell to say that O'Donnell told LBJ to take Air Force One back to DC when
it was LBJ who made that decision? Specter wanted O'Donnell to commit perjury
to hide the fact that Johnson had, in fact, lied to everyone.
Do you know why
all this deception was taking place? I didn't think so. Well, I do, and it had
nothing to do with Oswald.
Are you aware that Governor John
Connally's clothes were laundered prior to reaching the FBI's lab preventing
Hoover from determining if the metal on Connally's clothes would match the metal
on Kennedy's clothes, a
crucial factor in verifying or destroying the single bullet theory? Do you know
the people involved in the chain of transfer of those clothes? (The documents
were hidden for 35 years). I didn't think so. Well, I do, and it wasn't
Oswald.
Are you aware that the JFK limo
windshield possessed an entrance hole through it, not a crack? Do you know the
witnesses who saw it? Do you know the name of the professional glass man who was
instructed to remove it? Do you know who told him to do so? I didn't think so. Well, it wasn't Oswald
or Castro or the Russians ...and yes, I know who did it.
Do you know who
suckered JFK to Texas? Do you know who tricked him into going to Dallas? Do you
know who set up that motorcade route? Do you know who owned the buildings in Dealey
Plaza? It wasn't Oswald.
You seem to be bragging
that you talked to Johnson. Do you know about his impending future had JFK not
died? Are
you familiar with his lifelong corruption? Does the name, Bobby Baker, mean
anything to you? Are you remotely aware of the murders related to his affairs?
Do you recall Don Reynolds? Do you know what Reynolds said after November 22,
1963? He didn't accuse Oswald. Are you familiar with Billie Sol Estes at all?
I've been to the man's house. Do you recall Fred Korth and the TFX scandal?
These are the reasons JFK died....and
they have nothing to do with Oswald.
Did you think Johnson would tell you
that his best friends killed JFK? He told his mistress BEFORE it happened that it
was coming. I edited her autobiography. Have you ever talked to her? I didn't
think so.
Have you ever talked
to the autopsy technicians who prepared JFK's body at Bethesda? Do you know that
every damn one of them has said those published photos are fake? My best friend
met them all and videotaped them all. I have met two of them. They aren't
lying. Who controlled the medical evidence which has been tampered with?
It wasn't Oswald.
I could provide
you with much more, but educating you, considering your article, is probably
pointless.
Please don't
respond with Orwellian doublespeak and arrogant journalistic rhetoric. I'm no dummy.
I have been a consultant to Oliver Stone and Nigel Turner, I have two masters'
degrees, and I was invited to testify before President Clinton's Assassination
Records Review Board in 1995, one of only 6 New Englanders to do so.
Lyndon Johnson , through the years,
questioned whether the Russians did it, whether Castro did it, whether the CIA
did it, whether the Mob did it, whether the Vietnamese did it... all in the
name of diversion...and you fell for it. Only to the mother of his illegitimate
child did he tell the truth....and even then, he neglected to include himself
in the mix.
And on a more
personal level, Oswald was never convicted so your article condemns him when he
never had his day in court, a fundamental right for all Americans. Secondly, I am
friendly with his widow and articles like yours sting her children unmercifully
and unfairly. Ironically, his mother was treated very poorly, but she knew who
perpetrated the crime. Do you know the names of those she accused? I didn't
think so.
One last point: When JFK died,
it was LBJ and his cronies who benefited. Thousands of American kids and
millions of Asians were sacrificed for nothing but greed. Keep this in mind
when you write about this week's tragedy. Even if Bin Laden is responsible, find
out who educated his people and who really financed them before jumping
foolishly ahead as before. Who will really gain from all that is apparently about
to take place? It is a fair and sobering and frightening question....and many
of us may die prematurely because of them and their thirst for money and power.
Sincerely,
Edgar F. Tatro
Doug Caddy on phone calls he received in 2003 from
someone seeking to stop the publication of Barr McClellan's book "Blood,
Money & Power: How LBJ killed JFK:
Doug Caddy 3/3/12 posted at Education Forum. Web
link: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=18833&st=0&gopid=247779&
When Barr McClellan's
book, LBJ
Killed JFK,
was about to be released in 2003, both Barr and I independently received about
a half dozen phone calls from someone who was vitally intent in stopping its
publication or limiting its impact. The person who called always remained
unidentified and the phone number from which the call was made was later found
to be non-existent. In one of the phone conversations with me, the person in response to my
bringing up Robert Caro hopefully
covering LBJ's
involvement in JFK
assassination, told me that "We are not worried about Caro. He is on
board." I was disappointed to hear this because I took it to mean
that Caro
may downplay LBJ's
involvement in his forthcoming final volumes on the biography of LBJ.
In 1985 or 1986,
Robert Caro
gave an address at the University of Houston on the subject of urban planning.
I attended his speech accompanied by my father. After the speech I approached Caro, who was
answering questions posed by about half a dozen attendees gathered around him.
I decided to pose my own question to him, asking, "Do you plan to cover the role of Mac Wallace in
your biography of LBJ?"
Caro looked
startled and shaken and grabbed me by the lapels of my business suit, saying
"Who are you? How can I get in touch with you?" I gave him my
business card, which he examined on the spot and pocketed it. However, I never
heard anything more from him.
Also:
Lawyer
Doug Caddy vouches for the credibility of his former client Billie Sol Estes:
In answer to your questions:
1) I give great credibility to the accusations made by Billie Sol Estes in the
relevant 1984 letter to the U.S. Department of Justice. There were
contemporaneous newspaper reports of the untimely deaths of almost all of the
persons listed by him in the letter. In addition, Texan historian J. Evetts
Haley in his 1964 book, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, wrote in great detail about
Estes and the victims.
2) I don’t think my having met Estes, which originally occurred in 1983 when I
was asked to do so by Shearn Moody, Jr., of the Moody Foundation in connection
with a grant request from Estes, influenced my assessment of the accusations
one way or the other. This is because there already existed in the public
record much evidence to support Estes’ accusations.
3) U.S. Marshal Clint Peoples, who had closely followed Estes’ activities for
25 years, told me on several occasions that his research supported Estes’
accusations. His exact words to me: “It is about time that the truth comes
out.” It was Marshal Peoples who arranged for Estes to testify in 1984 before
the Robertson County grand jury. Press reports at the time disclosed that Estes
reiterated his accusations in his grand jury testimony.
4) There was no signed and notarized document of Estes dating before I met him
that recorded his accusations. He had not determined to tell what he knew until
while still in federal prison at Big Spring, Texas, he contacted Shearn Moody,
Jr. in 1983 and indicated he was prepared to relate for the public record what
he knew.
5) Estes has maintained that he has taped recordings of conversations of the
conspirators that support his accusations. I have not heard the recordings and
have no knowledge of their whereabouts,
6) He confided in U.S. Marshal Peoples of what he knew. Peoples is now
deceased. However, the transcript of Estes’ testimony before the Robertson
County grand jury in 1984, if it were unsealed, would clarify much.
7) At the time of JFK assassination, LBJ was facing criminal proceedings stemming
from his involvement in the Billie Sol Estes and the Bobby Baker scandals that
were reaching the explosive stage. LBJ’s involvement in these two scandals
certainly adds credence to what Estes has alleged.
Billie Sol Estes told Doug Caddy that Lyndon Johnson would
transport his personal hitman Malcolm Wallace on military planes so there would
be no record of his travels on commercial airlines
Doug Caddy 6/7/2013:
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=12348&page=2#entry275146
“It is
important to place on the record that Billie Sol Estes maintained in no uncertain
terms that LBJ arranged for "stone killer" Mac Wallace to be transported
by U.S. military planes to the venues where he murdered the designated targets.
Of course the pilot and co-pilot of the military planes had no idea of the
purpose of their passenger's trip. They merely followed orders that came from
on-high in transporting him to and from the venues.
I
discussed this matter with U.S. Marshal Clint Peoples in his office in the
Federal Courthouse in Dallas at one of the meetings we had in 1984 and he said
that this was the same information he had obtained although he did not tell me
who his source was.”
Lyndon Johnson and the JFK Assassination
By Robert Morrow
On the night of New
Year's Eve Dec. 31st, 1963, at the Driskill Hotel, Lyndon Johnson and Madeleine
Brown, one of his longtime mistresses, had an interesting conversation. Madeleine
asked LBJ if he had anything to do with the JFK assassination. Johnson got
angry; he began pacing around and waving his arms. Then LBJ told her: it was
Dallas, TX, oil executives and "renegade" intelligence agents who were
behind the JFK assassination. LBJ later also told his chief of staff Marvin
Watson that the CIA was involved in the murder of John Kennedy.
Lyndon Johnson would often stay at the
Driskill (room #254 today) and LBJ is confirmed by his presidential schedule as
being present at the Driskill Hotel the night of 12/31/63
History is proving that Lyndon Johnson
played a key role in the JFK assassination. An important book is LBJ: The
Mastermind of the JFK Assassination (2011) by Phillip Nelson. Roger Stone, an aide to Richard Nixon, is
writing a book pinning the JFK assassination on LBJ. Stone quotes Nixon as
saying “Both Johnson and I wanted to be president, but the only difference was
I wouldn’t kill for it.”
By 1973 Barry Goldwater privately
telling people that he was convinced that LBJ was behind the JFK assassination.
Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedys hated each
other. So why was LBJ even put on the 1960 Demo ticket in first place? The old
wive's tale is that it was to balance the ticket and win the electoral votes of
Texas. The reality is that JFK was set to pick Sen. Stuart Symington of
Missouri and had already had a deal with Symington to be VP that was
"signed, sealed & delivered" according to Symington's campaign
manager Clark Clifford. Then something strange happened on the night of July
13, 1960, in Los Angeles. According to Evelyn Lincoln, JFK's longtime
secretary, LBJ and Sam Rayburn were using some of Hoover's blackmail
information on John Kennedy to force JFK to put Johnson on the ticket in a hostile
takeover of the vice presidency.
JFK told his friend Hy Raskin,
"They threatened me with problems and I don't need more problems. I'm
going to have enough problems with Nixon."
LBJ & Hoover were very close and
literally neighbors for 19 years in Washington, DC, from 1943-1961. Both men
were also plugged in socially and professionally to Texas oil executives such
as Clint Murchison, Sr, H.L. Hunt and D.H. Byrd.
From that point on, for the next 3 and
1/3 years the Kennedy brothers and LBJ were engaged in a deadly sub rosa war,
even though they were ostensibly a political team. On the day of the '61
inauguration, LBJ protégé Bobby Baker told Don Reynolds that JFK would never
live out his term and that he would die a violent death.
For his part, Robert Kennedy spent the
remainder of JFK's term trying to figure out a way to get rid of the
power-grasping LBJ. The first opportunity to do this was the Billie Sol Estes
scandal of 1961. Estes was a cut out for LBJ doing business and had received
$500,000 from LBJ (which tells us how important Estes was). LBJ and his aide
Cliff Carter manipulated the federal bureaucracy for Estes to ensure that he
got exclusive grain storage contracts and numerous other special and highly
lucrative favors. Estes says that he funneled Johnson over $10 million in
kickbacks.
Henry Marshall was a US agricultural
official who was investigating the corruption of Estes, particularly his abuse
of a cotton allotment program. In January, 1961, LBJ, Cliff Carter, Estes and
LBJ's personal hit man Malcolm Wallace had a meeting about what to do about
Henry Marshall. LBJ said, "It looks like we will just have to get rid of
him."
Side note: the first person I know who
accused Lyndon Johnson of committing a murder was Gov. Allan Shivers who in 1956
personally accused LBJ of having Sam Smithwick murdered in prison in 1952.
Smithwick was threatening to go public with information about the Box 13 ballot
stuffing scandal of 1948 which gave LBJ the margin of victory over Coke Stevenson
in the Democratic primary.
Henry Marshall was murdered on June 3,
1961. He was shot to death 5 times with a bolt action gun and his death was
astoundingly ruled a suicide at the time. The Marshall murder & cover up
shows the depth, breadth and absolute ruthlessness of the LBJ organization. Billie
Sol Estes died recently on May 14, 2013.
Historian Douglas Brinkley has said
that by 1963 JFK and his vice president LBJ had no relationship at all. That is
not correct; in fact a sub rosa war was being waged between the Kennedys and
LBJ. It was an adversarial, death struggle relationship.
In the fall of 1963, the Bobby Baker
scandal exploded into the national media. Bobby Baker, who as the secretary of
the Senate was a virtual son to Lyndon Johnson, was being investigated for a
vending machine kick back scam and numerous shady deals. Baker was known for
providing booze & women to the senators. LBJ denied any relationship with
Baker (who had named two of his kids after LBJ) while at the same time sending
his personal lawyer Abe Fortas to run (control) Baker's defense. JFK’s personal
secretary Evelyn Lincoln told author Anthony Summers that the Kennedys were
going to use the Bobby Baker scandal as the ammunition to get rid of LBJ.
Robert Kennedy had a two-track program
to get rid of LBJ. Phil Brennan was in DC at the time: "Bobby Kennedy
called five of Washington's top reporters into his office and told them it was
now open season on Lyndon Johnson. It's OK, he told them, to go after the story
they were ignoring out of deference to the administration." James
Wagenvoord, who in 1963 was a 27-year old assistant to LIFE Magazine's managing
editor, says that based on information fed from Robert Kennedy and the Justice
Dept., LIFE Magazine had been developing a major newsbreak piece concerning Johnson
and Bobby Baker. This expose was set to run within a week of the JFK
assassination. LBJ aide George Reedy said that LBJ knew about the RFK-inspired
media campaign against him and was obsessed with it.
RFK's other "get rid of LBJ"
program was an investigation by the Senate Rules Committee into LBJ's kickbacks
and other corruptions. Burkett Van Kirk was a counsel for that committee and he
told Seymour Hersh that RFK had sent a lawyer to the committee to feed them
damaging information about LBJ and his corrupt business dealings. The lawyer, Van
Kirk said, "used to come up to the Senate and hang around me like a dark
cloud. It took him about a week or ten days to, one, find out what I didn't
know, and two, give it to me." The goal of the Kennedys was "To get
rid of Johnson. To dump him. I am as sure of that the sun comes up in the
east," said Van Kirk to Hersh.
Literally at the very moment JFK was
being assassinated in Dallas on 11-22-63, Don Reynolds was testifying in a
closed session of the Senate Rules Committee about a suitcase of $100,000 given
to LBJ for his role in securing a TFX fighter jet contract for Fort Worth's
General Dynamics.
Three days before the JFK
assassination, JFK told Evelyn Lincoln that he was going to get a new running
mate for 1964. "I was fascinated by this conversation and wrote it down
verbatim in my diary. Now I asked, "Who is your choice as a running-mate.'
He looked straight ahead, and without hesitating he replied, 'at this time I am
thinking about Gov. Terry Sanford of North Carolina. But it will not be Lyndon.'"
At this point I should add that I
think military intelligence/CIA murdered John Kennedy for Cold War reasons,
particularly over Cuba policy. The fact that the Kennedys were within days of
politically executing & personally destroying Lyndon Johnson could very
well have been the tripwire for the JFK assassination.
The Russians immediately suspected
that Texas oilmen were involved in the JFK assassination. They and Fidel Castro
both feared they were going to be framed for it by US intelligence. By 1965 the
KGB had internally determined that Lyndon Johnson was behind the JFK assassination.
Hoover wrote to LBJ about this in a memo that was not declassified
by the US government until 1996:
"On September 16, 1965, this same source [an FBI spy
in the KGB] reported that the KGB Residency in New York City received
instructions approximately September 16, 1965, from KGB headquarters in Moscow
to develop all possible information concerning President Lyndon B. Johnson's
character, background, personal friends, family, and from which quarters he
derives his support in his position as President of the United States. Our
source added that in the instructions from Moscow, it was indicated that
"now" the KGB was in possession of data purporting to indicate
President Johnson was responsible for the assassination of the late President
John F. Kennedy. KGB headquarters indicated that in view of this information, it
was necessary for the Soviet Government to know the existing personal relationship
between President Johnson and the Kennedy family, particularly between
President Johnson and Robert and "Ted" Kennedy."
Robert Morrow, a
political researcher and political activist, has an expertise in the JFK
assassination. He can be reached at Morrow321@aol.com or 512-306-1510.
Notes:
1)
Brown, Madeleine Duncan. Texas in the Morning: The Love Story of Madeleine
Brown and President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Conservatory Press, 1997. Page
189.
2)
Schlesinger, Arthur. Robert Kennedy and His Times. Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1978. Page 616.
3)
Nelson, Phillip. LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination. Skyhorse
Publishing, 2011.
4)
Dickerson, Nancy. Among Those Present: A Reporter's View of 25 Years in
Washington. Random House, 1976. Page 43.
5)
Hersh, Seymour. The Dark Side of Camelot. Back Bay Books, 1998. Page 126
and 407.
6)
Epstein, Edward Jay. Esquire Magazine. December, 1966.
7)
Estes, Billie Sol. Billie Sol Estes: A Texas Legend. BS Productions,
2004. Page 43.
8)
Dallek, Robert. Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1908-1960.
Oxford Univesity Press USA, 1992. Page 347.
9)
Brinkley, Douglas. Speaking on Hardball with Chris Matthews, 2012.
10)
Brennan, Phil. "Some Relevant Facts about the JFK Assassination,"
NewsMax, 11-19-2003. http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/11/18/152526.shtml
11)
Reedy, George. Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir. Andrews McMeel Publications,
1985.
12)
Wagenvoord, James. Email to John Simkin dated 11-3-09. Web link: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=14966
14)
Lincoln, Evelyn. Kennedy and Johnson. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968.
Page 205.
15)
Hoover, J. Edgar. Memo to Lyndon Johnson with FBI leadership carbon copied.
12-1-66. Web link: http://www.indiana.edu/~oah/nl/98feb/jfk.html#d1
Phil Nelson on LBJ
causing the deaths of his two pilots Harold Teague and Charles Williams on Feb.
17, 1961 - LBJ forced the 2 men to fly in WHITEOUT conditions from Austin to
the LBJ Ranch. They crashed & died.
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=16288&page=3
Only a few
weeks into the new administration, in early February 1961, it became apparent
that the initial meeting between Mac Wallace and Henry Marshall had not been
successful—evidently, Marshall was too honest and incapable of accepting either
bribes or threats—and the situation continued to spiral out of control.
Johnson’s actions at this point can only be described as hysterical. Estes was
insisting on another meeting, and Ed Clark pressed Johnson to fly to Pecos to
meet with him again to come up with a plan to contain the potential calamity if
Marshall was not immediately stopped from his ongoing “persecution” of Billie
Sol.
So, on a day in which
Johnson was apparently having a particularly serious manic/irritability attack,
only one month after the newly minted Kennedy-Johnson administration took
office, he would lose any remaining rationality in a screaming fit that he had
by telephone to his pilots, who had stayed over in Austin and who had the
audacity to attempt to talk Lyndon out of a flight that day—Friday, February
17, 1961—because of “below minimum” weather conditions. In a hysterical blind
rage, on a cold, foggy, and overcast evening in south Texas, after hearing Ed
Clark tell him he had to meet again with Estes, Johnson called for his airplane
to pick him up and expected immediate obedience. He had trained all his other
minions to obey his every command—who were these men to think they did not have
the same duty to pay proper homage to him, the vice president of the United
States? Of all the accounts noted within these pages of Lyndon Johnson’s
narcissism, arrogance, and condescension toward the people who worked for him,
this incident was clearly the most egregious. His reckless disregard for the
safety of the pilots, when their caution impinged on his need to pursue his own
criminal conduct, illustrates his abject arrogance better than any words could
possibly convey.
Pilot Harold Teague was advised by the Austin airport against making the
flight. When Teague complained and tried to refuse to make the flight because
of the extremely dangerous weather conditions and the lack of ground control
instruments at the landing strip, “Johnson is said to have exploded, venting
his profanity upon the pilot, demanding to know ‘what do you think I’m paying
you for?’ and again ordering him to ‘get that plane’ to the ranch.” Yet Lyndon
B. Johnson would not—could not—let some yokel trying to observe standard minimum
visibility aircraft safety rules override him, the vice president of the United
States. Johnson had never seen a rule that couldn’t be bent or broken at his
whim; we can be sure that he told the pilots something like, “To Hell with
those rules, who do you work for, the Austin airport manager or me? Get that
God Damn airplane over here now!” This kind of reaction can be surmised, not
only from everything we know already about the real Lyndon Johnson, but from
the actual results in the official records, as reported through newspaper
accounts of the time, describing the tragic aftermath, which are briefly
summarized in the following paragraph.
Johnson ordered the pilots into the air to pick him up under threat of losing
their jobs. Teague finally agreed and nervously called his wife to tell her
they had been ordered to make the flight, before whispering to her that he
loved her and asked her to remember that. Minutes later, as “Johnson’s Convair
roared into the murky night, flying above the hilly terrain . . . hopelessly
groping down for lights they could not see, had at last flown into a
cedar-covered hill.” As the pilots searched for the runway through the fog,
having no radio beams with which to locate it, they kept flying lower and lower
trying to find the runway until finally they flew too low and the plane crashed
into a rocky hillside near the boss’s ranch. The two pilots were killed
instantly, paying the ultimate cost of disobeying flight rules—not because they
decided to do that but because Lyndon B. Johnson insisted on it—as a result of
extremely high-risk maneuvers. It was not the first, nor would it be the last,
time that men paid with their lives to satisfy the whims of Lyndon B. Johnson;
the irony would be that, had he been on board the aircraft, those same flight
rules would have remained inviolate. This single incident speaks volumes about
the numerous flaws—apparent from his earliest years, based upon his
grandmother’s prescient comments noted earlier—in the character of Lyndon B. Johnson.
___________________________________________
The book is filled with proofs of Johnson's reckless disregard for anyone or
anything that might impede his rise up the political ladder while
simultaneously taking in millions as a result of his collaboration with the likes
of Estes and Bobby Baker and many others. How else might one explain how he
started out virtually broke and wound up with an estate of at least $20
million? On a congressman's then senator's salary, even before becoming vice
president and then president? It certainly wasn't due to Lady Bird's business
acumen.
Here is the grave of LBJ pilot Harold
Teague – I think the plane actually crashed on Feb. 17, 1961 – not so sure
about that. His date of death is listed as Feb. 19, 1961
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/43334255/harold-dexter-teague
Harold Teague is buried in Austin
Memorial Park Cemetary https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2187/austin-memorial-park-cemetery
1-26-2021 email from Mary Patricia
Dougherty to Robert Morrow, on what Lyndon Johnson told his pilots to get them
up in the air in whiteout conditions before they crashed that plane. LBJ was
Vice president, not president in February, 1961
QUOTE
Or as it was
relayed to me by his brother
”This
is your commanding officer in chief or Commander in Chief and I am
ordering you to fly that plane.”
UNQUOTE
1-26-21 interview – Mary Patricia Dougherty
told me that she met one of the brothers of either Harold Teague or Charles
Williams on a plane from Los Angeles to Texas in either 1986 or 1987. She
mentioned that her father had run against LBJ in 1954 and this man immediately told
her of the story of LBJ ordering his brother to fly in whiteout conditions in February
of 1961. The pilot had called his brother to tell him goodbye in case the plane
were to crash.
Lyndon
Johnson is pictured on the cover of A Texan
Looks at Lyndon: A Study in Illegitimate Power as he stands in front of the
wreckage of the plane of the two pilots (Harold Teague & Charles Williams)
who he had ordered to fly in WHITEOUT conditions to come pick him up at the LBJ
Ranch:
Web link: http://www.amazon.com/A-Texan-Looks-at-Lyndon/dp/1568490097/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
LBJ
Plane Crash – News Script
https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc940923/
Script from the WBAP-TV/NBC
station in Fort Worth, Texas, covering a news story about a private plane crash
that killed the pilot and co-pilot near Johnson City, Texas.
U.S. Supreme Court
Estes v. Texas, 381 U.S. 532 (1965)
Estes v. Texas
No. 256
Argued April 1,
1965
Decided June 7,
1965
381 U.S. 532
CERTIORARI TO
THE COURT OF CRIMINAL APPEALS OF TEXAS
Syllabus
Petitioner had
been indicted by a Texas county grand jury for swindling. Massive pretrial publicity
had given the case national notoriety. On the trial date, following a change of
venue, a hearing commenced on petitioner's motion to prevent telecasting, radio
broadcasting, and news photography. The hearing, conducted in the presence of
some trial witnesses and veniremen later released, was carried live on
television and radio, and news photography was permitted. The original jury
panel, petitioner, counsel, and the trial judge were highly publicized during
the two days the pretrial hearing lasted, emphasizing throughout the community
the notorious character that the trial would take. Four of the jurors selected
later at the trial had seen or heard all or part of the broadcasts. The
profusion of cameramen with their equipment in various parts of the crowded
courtroom caused considerable disruption. The trial court denied petitioner's
motion, but granted a continuance of almost a month. During the interim, a
booth was erected in the rear of the courtroom to which television cameramen
and equipment were restricted. Live telecasting was prohibited during most of
the actual trial. The State's opening and closing arguments were carried live
with sound (though, because of mechanical difficulty, there was no picture of
the former), as were the return of the jury's verdict and its receipt by the
judge. The court's order allowed videotapes without sound of the whole proceeding,
and the cameras operated intermittently during the three-day trial, which ended
with petitioner's conviction. Film clips of the trial were shown, largely on
regularly scheduled news programs. Both the trial court and the appellate court
rejected petitioner's claim of denial of due process in violation of the
Fourteenth Amendment by the televising and broadcasting of the trial.
Held: The televising over petitioner's
objections of the courtroom proceedings of petitioner's criminal trial, in
which there was widespread public interest, was inherently invalid as
infringing the fundamental right to a fair trial guaranteed by the Due Process
Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Pp. 381 U.
S. 536-552.
(a) The high
degree of publicity given to the two-day hearing, which could only have
impressed those present and the community
Luciane Goldberg: She saw Mac Wallace with
Cliff Carter at least 3 times in the summer of 1960, including in a Hospitality
suite at the Mayflower Hotel
John Simkin: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=5994
John Simkin: If Billie Sol Estes is telling
the truth, it needs to be shown that Clifton Carter knew Mac Wallace. Evidence
of this appears in Bill Adler's article in
The Texas Observer (7th November, 1986) :
[Web link http://issues.texasobserver.org/pdf/ustxtxb_obs_1986_11_07_issue.pdf
]
Three months after Mac Wallace walked out of the Travis
County Courthouse. he went to work for Temco, Inc., in its electronics and
missiles plant in Garland. Except for a short spell, he remained with the
company until February of 1961. It was in January of that year, claims Billie
Sol Estes, that Wallace, Billie Sol, Cliff Carter and Lyndon Johnson met at Johnson's
house in Washington to discuss killing Henry Marshall. Little is known about
Wallace's whereabouts that month, other than at some point he was arrested in
Dallas for public drunkenness; it cannot be confirmed that Wallace was in
Washington around the time of the inauguration - when the meeting supposedly
took place.
But Wallace knew Cliff Carter. The two were in Washington together the previous
summer, when Johnson was making a run for the 1960 presidential nomination.
Wallace was seen at least three times at campaign functions, always accompanied
by Cliff Carter, according to Lucianne Goldberg, who worked in the campaign
press office. Goldberg recalled that Carter introduced her to Wallace in a hospitality
suite at the Mayflower Hotel. "I just knew him and remember him because that
was sort of what we were all about remembering everybody you meet, because you
never knew where they were going to end up," said Goldberg, who was 23 and
known as Lucy Cummings back then. "We were all on the make, as young people
around politicians are."
Goldberg, now a literary agent in New York, told the Observer she noticed Wallace
"a couple of times" at Johnson campaign headquarters at the Ambassador
Hotel. "I'd be sitting at my desk and there'd be a lot of people milling
around and I'd see him with his thumbs hooked into his belt the way those
(Texas) guys do. " Goldberg could not recall any conversation she had with
Wallace, "other than, 'wanna go have a drink,' that kind of thing, which I
never did."
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