What the mainstream media hid about LBJ

The Story The Mainstream Media Never Reported

By Mick Gregory

We will never be told the truth about JFK’s assassination. In fact, the FBI has film they will not release. But the truth is coming out in pieces. There are enough pieces to complete most of the puzzle and make out the subject.

This is what we know now:

A decade after LBJ’s death, a friend of Estes, a federal marshal, talked Estes into coming forward with what he knew about Henry Marshall’s death. Then on August 9, 1984, following Billie Sol Estes’ grand jury testimonyregarding Mac Wallace’s murder of Henry Marshall, Estes’ attorney, Douglas Caddy sent a letter to Stephen S. Trott, Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division, of the US Department of Justice. The letter
reads:

Lyndon’s scandalous wheeling and dealing from his Senate days were catching up with him even faster than the Billie Sol Estes affair, and it would bring the whole Democratic party down with it if the key players weren’t thrown overboard. Estes and to a lesser degree Johnson were the primary benefactors of their doings, while everyone on Capitol Hill knew Bobby Baker, and every lawyer, lobbyist, and lawmaker wanted a piece of the action — and Bobby was LBJ’s boy. The dealings had been too many to keep quiet with a quick “Texas suicide.” LBJ wasn’t just looking at the end of his political career; he was looking at hard time.

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 1960s. The other two,
besides Mr. Estes and LBJ, were [White House aide] Cliff Carter and Mac
Wallace. Mr. Estes is willing to disclose his knowledge concerning the
following criminal offenses:

1. 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 spoke of a list of 17 murders which had been committed, some of which Mr. Estes was unfamiliar with. 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. . .

It continues for several more pages, detailing many other crimes Estes had knowledge of, including illegal cotton allotments and payoffs.

Estes’ testimony was conditional on certain demands, including immunity from prosecution, a full pardon, and absolution of past income tax debts. Talks between the Justice Department and Billie Sol Estes broke off later in the year.

On June 19, 1992, US Marshall Clint Peoples told a friend of his that he had documentary evidence on one of the shooters in Dealey Plaza. On June 23rd, Peoples, a former Texas Ranger and a onetime friend of Henry Marshall, was killed in a mysterious one-car automobile accident in Texas.

Investigator Harrison Livingstone spoke to Kyle Brown, named as a witness in the letter, at length in 1993, and Brown backed up everything Livingstone had heard. Kyle Brown, to this day, is one of Billie Sol Estes’ closest friends.

On March 12, 1998, a 1951 fingerprint of Malcolm “Mac” Wallace was positively matched with a copy of a fingerprint labeled “Unknown,” a fresh print lifted on November 22, 1963, from a carton by the southeast sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. This carton was labeled “Box A,” and also contained several fingerprints identified as
those of Lee Harvey Oswald. The identification was made by A. Nathan Darby, a Certified Latent Print Examiner with several decades experience.

Mr. Darby is a member of the International Association of Identifiers, and was chosen to help design the Eastman Kodak Miracode System of transmitting fingerprints between law enforcement agencies. Mr. Darby signed a sworn, notarized affidavit stating that he was able to affirm a 14-point match between the “Unknown” fingerprint and the “blind” print
card submitted to him, which was the 1951 print of Mac Wallace’s. US law requires a 12-point match for legal identification; Darby’s match is more conclusive than the legal minimum. As cardboard does not retain fingerprints for long, it is certain that Malcolm E. Wallace left his fingerprint on “Box A” on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book
Depository early on November 22, 1963.

The FBI currently has custody of the Mac Wallace fingerprint, Nathan Darby’s sworn affidavit, and several hundred pages of corroborative evidence developed by Texas research group which is currently remaining anonymous. Brown has received permission from the group to release the name of one eyewitness to some of the covert business dealings between Lyndon B. Johnson and members of the assassination plot. This is Barr
McClellan of Houston, Texas, onetime attorney for the law firm led by Ed Clark, which had represented Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s.

Biographer Robert A. Caro, author of two volumes to date in the
groundbreaking series *The Years of Lyndon Johnson* writes:

“Because Lyndon Johnson would have been only sixty-seven years old, when,
in 1975, I began my research on his life, most of his contemporaries were
still alive. This made it possible to find out what he was like while he
was growing up from the best possible sources: those who grew up with
him. And it also makes it possible to clear away . . . the misinformation
that has surrounded the early life of Lyndon Johnson.

“The extent of this misinformation, the reason it exists, and the
importance of clearing it away, so that the character of our thirty-sixth
President will become clear, became evident to me while researching his
years at college. The articles and biographies which have dealt with
these years have in general portrayed Johnson as a popular, even
charismatic, campus figure. The oral histories of his classmates
collected by the Lyndon Johnson library portray him in the same light. In
the early stages of my research, I had no reason to think there was
anything more to the story. Indeed, when one of the first of his
classmates whom I interviewed, Henry Kyle, told me a very different
story, I believed that because Kyle had been defeated by Johnson in a
number of campus encounters, I was hearing only a prejudiced account by
an embittered man, and did not even bother typing up my notes of the
interview.

“Then, however, I began to interview other classmates. . . . When I found
them, I was told the old anecdotes that had become part of the Lyndon
Johnson myth. But over and over again, the man or woman I was
interviewing would tell me that these anecdotes were not the whole story.
When I asked for the rest of it, they wouldn’t tell it. A man named
Vernon Whiteside could have told me, they said, but, they said, they had
heard that Vernon Whiteside was dead.

“One day, however, I phoned Horace Richards, a Johnson classmate who
lived in Corpus Christi, to arrange to drive down from Austin to see him.
Richards said that there was indeed a great deal more to the story of
Lyndon Johnson at college than had been told, but that he wouldn’t tell
me unless Vernon Whiteside would too. But Whiteside was dead, I said.
“Hell, no,” Richards said. “He’s not dead. He was here visiting me just
last week.

“. . . I traced Mr. Whiteside to a mobile home court in Highland Beach,
Florida . . . flew there to see him, and from him heard for the first
time many of the character-revealing episodes of Lyndon Johnson’s years
at San Marcos at which the other classmates had hinted. And when I
returned to these classmates, they confirmed Whiteside’s account;
Richards himself added many details. And now they told additional
stories, not at all like the ones they had told before . . . [a]nd the
portrait of Lyndon Johnson at San Marcos that finally emerged was very
different from the one previously sketched.

“The experience was repeated again and again during the seven years spent
on this book. Of the hundreds of persons interviewed, scores had never
been interviewed before, and the information these persons have provided
— in some cases even though they were quite worried about providing it
— has helped form a portrait of Lyndon Johnson substantially different
from all previous portraits” (Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path
to Power, 769-70).

This passage demonstrates the power that Lyndon Baines Johnson wielded
over people; even people who hadn’t seen him in fifty years; even people
who knew nothing of him but his childhood and teen years — people who
knew no secrets of state, no political ammunition, little more than
gossip; people who continued to fear him and “his people” even after
Lyndon Baines Johnson, in fact, was dead.

Caro continues:

“Prior to his entrance into campus politics at San Marcos, ‘no one,’ as
another student recalled, ‘cared about campus politics.’ Elections — for
class offices or the Student Council — were casual affairs. But Johnson
saw in those elections an opportunity to obtain a measure of control,
small but pivotal, over the fate of some of his fellow students. At this
‘poor boys’ school,’ a diploma was for many students the only hope of
escape from a life of poverty and brutal physical toil on their families’
impoverished ranches and farms, and in the Depression, campus jobs, with
their tiny cash stipends, represented the only means by which these young
men could stay in school and obtain their diplomas. Johnson saw a method
by which the victors in campus politics could obtain authority to
dispense those jobs. And to obtain this power that no one else had
focused on, he did what no one else on the sleepy campus had done:
created, out of a small social club, a disciplined and secret political
organization. And when, because of his personal unpopularity, the club
could not, despite his organizing, win elections, he taught
unsophisticated farm boys how to steal elections (and how to win them by
other methods: ‘blackmailing’ a popular rival woman candidate out of a
race over a meaningless indiscretion, for example; ‘things we would never
have dreamt of if it hadn’t been for Lyndon’). College Hill’s pattern was
repeated on Capitol Hill in 1933 and 1934. The ‘Little Congress’ of
congressional aides was a social organization. But Lyndon Johnson saw in
its presidency a means of entree to men of power. Again there were
repeated complaints, this time from fellow Little Congress members, that
he had ‘stolen’ elections (‘Everyone said it: “In that last election that
damn Lyndon Johnson stole some votes again”‘). When, in 1933 and 1934,
Johnson was accused of ‘stuffing’ a ballot box, he was not yet
represented by Abe Fortas, and his accusers succeeded in accomplishing
what Fortas prevented Johnson’s 1948 accusers from accomplishing: opening
the ballot box. When the Little Congress box was opened, it was found
that the accusations against Johnson were true. Again, as at college,
what he had done was unprecedented: no one had ever stuffed a Little
Congress ballot box before. (And, perhaps no one would ever stuff one
again, for after his departure the organization quickly reverted to its
easygoing social role; ‘My God, who would cheat to win the presidency of
something like the Little Congress?’) In his first campaign for the
Senate, he stole thousands of votes, and when they proved insufficient
(‘He [‘Pappy’ O’Daniel] stole more votes than we did, that’s all’), his
reaction was to try to steal still more, and his failure in this attempt
was due only to [an] irredeemable tactical error, not to any change in
the pattern . . . At each previous stage of his career, then, Johnson’s
election tactics had made clear not only a hunger for power but a
willingness to take (within the context of American politics, of course;
the coups and assassinations that characterize other countries’ politics
were not and never would be included in his calculations) whatever
political steps would be necessary to satisfy that hunger. Over and over
again, he had stretched the rules of the game to their breaking point,
and then had broken them, pushing deeper into the ethical and legal
no-man’s-land beyond them than others were willing to go. Now, in 1948 .
. . he was operating beyond the loosest boundaries of prevailing custom
and political morality. What had been demonstrated before was now
underlined in the strongest terms: in the context of the politics that
was his life, Lyndon Johnson would do whatever was necessary to win. Even
in terms of the most elastic political morality — the political morality
of 1940s Texas — his methods were amoral” (Robert A. Caro, *The Years of
Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent,* 397-98).

Lyndon Johnson could not have acted without the assistance of his best
friend, the most powerful law enforcement agent in the world, J. Edgar
Hoover, Director of the FBI. An operation such as this could not be run
without enormous cash reserves, businesses in which to launder funds and
transmit orders, to set up trusts for beneficiaries at a later date; the
kind of money that H. L. Hunt had; the kind of money that Clint Murchison
had. In 1963, oilman H. L. Hunt was literally one of the richest men in
world, estimated to be worth five billion dollars.

H. L. Hunt had the kind of money that could buy trucks, jeeps, guns, and
explosives for the Minutemen and the John Birch Society; could fund a
radio station making daily broadcasts interpreting the day’s news in
light of the terrible “Communist threat” in the inner corridors of
Washington; could build munitions plants and helicopter factories just in
case a war should suddenly erupt; could keep active men with valuable
connections such as Sergio Arcacha Smith and Jack Ruby on the payroll.

Hunt and his sons had a private intelligence agency up and running to
combat the Communist threat, having hired intelligence agents away from
their government positions to charge for their loyalties by the hour.
Their man in charge was Paul Rothermel, an ex-FBI agent presiding over a
host of ex-FBI agents, and ex-CIA assets could also be counted on to keep
their mouths shut. Hunt’s top aide for many years, John Curington,
eventually left the organization, fed up playing cops and robbers without
a badge.

He told Harrison Livingstone that not only was Lamar Hunt chatting with
Ruby on November 21st, but shortly after Oswald’s arrest, H. L. himself
requested that Curington personally take a stroll over to DPD
headquarters to see how tight security was around the suspect. He added
that Curington should make a point to check out the elevators they were
using to transport the prisoner. Curington strode into the building, rang
for the elevator, and when the doors opened he found himself face to face
with Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald’s police escort introduced the two men
(Livingstone, *Killing the Truth,* 502). His employer was pleased to
learn that security around the prisoner was rather lax.

Curington saw Marina Oswald depart from a private meeting with H. L. Hunt
one evening in December 1963. “Hunt asked me to lock everything up and
prevent anyone from coming upstairs on the elevator. As I waited, an
elevator came down and Marina Oswald came out of it, left the building,
and got into a waiting car. I’m absolutely sure it was her” (Livingstone,
501). Marina first denied the story, but has conceded that she met with
many people she didn’t know after the assassination.

Eventually, the Hunt “security” agency became so intricate that the
billionaire’s billionaire son, Nelson Bunker Hunt, would feel the need to
institute his own counterintelligence program to weed out intruders and
turncoats; it would cost him. Paul Rothermel, the former G-man, went
public with incredible charges against the younger Hunt, whom, Rothermel
charged, asked him to help start a private army to be called the American
Volunteer Group (AVG), drawn from the ranks of General Edwin A. Walker’s
John Bircher brigade. Hunt’s goal was a top-secret paramilitary based in
southern California that could be called upon to act when Communists and
liberals got too pushy. Like father, like son; just before November 22,
1963, H. L. Hunt told a gathering of compatriots that the only way to get
Communists like the Kennedy brothers out of office is to “shoot ’em out.”

When Rothermel refused to participate, he found himself spied upon and
his phone tapped. Nelson Bunker Hunt would eventually plead guilty “to a
misdemeanor stemming from a massive wiretapping conspiracy in which he’d
hired a Houston detective agency to eavesdrop upon his own security
force, a force composed largely of former FBI agents” (Jim Hougan,
*Spooks,* 74-75). Hunt denied the AVG charge, however, journalist Peter
Noyes confirmed that the AVG was up and running for at least a brief
period of time. His sources were a number of active California Minutemen,
a group which had been tapped by the Hunts for recruits, but who found
the Hunts a bit extreme even for their taste (Hougan, 75).

H. L. Hunt once wrote a novel called Alpaca, about a utopian democracy
that based citizenship rights on property ownership and educational
qualifications. (Hunt dropped out of school in the sixth grade.)
Elections in this best of all possible worlds were determined by the
amount of taxes one paid; the more you pay, the more votes you get.

A source requesting anonymity told Harry Livingstone, “H. L. had every
lawyer in Dallas doing something for him. He’d give them all a little
piece of the pie, and nobody could find a lawyer big enough to stand up
to him.” Madeleine Brown – Lyndon B. Johnson’s longtime mistress and
mother of his illegitimate son Steven, as well as a personal friend of
the Hunts for a number of years — said, “If they didn’t play his game,
they went in and took it. They pulled no punches. The had no morals. They
had no rules. It was strictly power. They were absolutely ruthless”
(Livingstone, 496-7). Madeleine has come to regret merely standing by and
watching.

John Curington told Livingstone that H. L. Hunt had a personal line to
Lyndon Johnson through their mutual friend Boothe Mooney (Livingstone,
500).

If Hunt and LBJ were birds of a feather, Johnson also flocked around his
close friend J. Edgar Hoover’s generous benefactors, the family of oil
baron Clint Murchison. Murchison is now well known to have hosted the FBI
director for any number of paid vacations both to his home and private
race track as well as other glamorous jaunts, often hobnobbing with the
gangsters the FBI would presumably be prosecuting were they not devoting
all their manpower to fighting the Red Menace. Hoover had been arguably
the most powerful man in Washington for some decades, and it was common
knowledge that JFK was going to put him out to pasture following the 1964
election, just as Kennedy was going to do to Lyndon.

Within 24 hours of the assassination, Lyndon Johnson called Captain Will
Fritz, chief of the Homicide Bureau of the DPD, and personally informed
him he had his man in custody and the investigation was over. Johnson
aide Cliff Carter phoned the same message to Texas DA Waggoner Carr, who
was none too pleased to receive it. When Lee Harvey Oswald lay dying in
Parkland Hospital on November 24, 1963, Dr. Charles Crenshaw was
astonished to pick up a phone call and find himself talking to the
President of the United States, who said he wanted a confession from
Oswald; he didn’t get it. Johnson created the Warren Commission, which
answered only to him, thereby preempting the numerous proposed
investigations in Texas and on Capitol Hill. Then Johnson locked up as
much of the evidence as he could, all with the help of J. Edgar Hoover,
who buried or destroyed any evidence that threatened to upset the apple
cart; the Hunts and Murchisons and their enormous cash and influence, and
certain rogue elements of the intelligence community who resented Kennedy
for both his foreign policy and his attempts to curb the CIA’s massive
and wholly unconstitutional power.

The intelligence community has long hidden in the shadows of the
assassination, between the more obvious suspects as well as the “false
sponsors” they intentionally drew into the operation to shield themselves
— Castro, the anti-Castro Cubans, the Mob. That was their most important
contribution; though they routinely interfaced with the Texans and
undoubtedly played a role in the events of Dealey Plaza, their most
valuable asset was the one which was needed most: the unfathomed
capability of certain of their ranks to confuse and deceive. More than
getaway planes and unmarked cars, the plotters needed smoke and mirrors
to blind and mislead, to confuse and disorient. They had planned for such
a need; they had masters of propaganda at key points, allies in the
press, and for their greatest trick, a certain “Harvey” rabbit to produce
from a hat and then make disappear on cue.

It may be pure conjecture, but given Hunt’s organizational ties and
unholy alliances, his personal spies and private law, one wonders if it
doesn’t strain credulity to the breaking point to think there wasn’t
someone else we know to have been in Dallas who couldn’t have somehow
stumbled into this snakepit; someone who Hunt’s chief staff assistant
John Curington admitted he “had run across . . . before the
assassination” (Dick Russell, “The Man Who Knew Too Much,* 317). It was
John Curington who turned over a previously unknown slip of paper to the
FBI, a brief note the handwriting of which has been authenticated by
numerous independent handwriting analysts. The only part of the note
disputed is the signature, which appears to be misspelled. But the
purported author was not immune to misspelling his own name, even on a
very deliberately executed, typewritten document (CE 908, 18 H 97); see
Reitzes, “Alik and Marina.”