In August 1962, the press reported that “the name of Vice President Johnson … figured in testimony before two congressional subcommittees investigating the Billie Sol Estes case. Spokesmen for Johnson immediately denied that he ever sought favors for Estes. The Senate Investigations subcommittee made public an Agriculture Department memorandum that said Johnson discussed the disputed Estes cotton allotments with Undersecretary of Agriculture Charles S. Murphy … LBJ telephones Agriculture Department employee [John E.] Bagwell [author of the memo], ostensibly to obtain a copy of his 4/10/62 memo to Secretary of Agriculture Freeman regarding Estes and LBJ.”61 As noted by author North, “Such a call makes little sense considering the Vice President’s inside contacts with Hoover … More likely, Johnson is either seeking to learn just what Estes has told Bagwell or simply intimidate the official, or both. Note also that the subcommittee had made public copies of the report prior to Johnson’s call.”62
The original connection between Estes and Johnson was through Estes’s anhydrous ammonia fertilizer business, including the related handling of the mobile tanks for the distribution and storage of the material. At first, this business involved chattel mortgages on the mobile tanks; however, the fraud involved the placement of real mortgages on nonexistent tanks, thousands of them, in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and other states throughout the South and West. Closely tied into these operations was the supplier of the anhydrous ammonia, Commercial Solvents Corporation, in which Johnson was invested; it was carrying huge credits in Estes’s deals as he was trying to force out competitors. Other financial backers included Walter E. Heller and Company of Chicago.63 According to author Haley, “Ward Jackson, a high official with Commercial Solvents, attended a business conference with the President, Vice-President and Cabinet Members in Washington in February, 1961, and enjoyed the special services of Clifford Carter and a visit with Vice-President Johnson himself. The fact that he wrote Estes that he had discussed, ‘in general the situation in Texas and in the overall business area,’ with Vice President Johnson served to heighten the Texas suspicion of them all—Johnson, Commercial Solvents and Billie Sol.”64
By 1958—as he took huge losses by selling product substantially less than its cost in order to drive competitors out of business so he could garner monopolistic market control—Estes had gotten behind in his anhydrous ammonia bills from Commercial Solvents, and he owed it over $550,000. He went to New York and sold officers of the firm on a complex deal, by which, in exchange for Commercial Solvents’ deferring the payment of the debt and lending Estes an additional $350,000 (a credit of $125,000 for future purchases of anhydrous ammonia and $225,000 as start-up capital for a new Estes enterprise: the grain-storage business), Estes promised to pay off the debt in installments over a five-year span. The installments would comprise 100 percent of the fees he received for storing grain.65 Billie Sol Estes’s amazing success in his visit with Commercial Solvents, having gone there to meet with their executives “with his hat in his hand,” as a man who owed them over half a million dollars, had witnessed one of his business maxims being validated: He often said, “If you get into anybody’s pocket deeply enough, you’ve got yourself a partner.” The result of his New York trip couldn’t have been better for Billie Sol Estes. As a result of this meeting, Commercial Solvents agreed to completely refinance his existing debt, ship him all the anhydrous ammonia he wanted, and provide financing for another fraudulent business scheme.
Still another scam that he came up with was the matter of fraudulently transferred “cotton allotments.” Estes discovered that the only obstacle to growing more cotton and making more money was a set of pesky USDA rules that imposed strict acreage controls. One of the rules stated that the acreage allotment remained with the land and could not otherwise be sold or applied to other acreage; the only exception to the rule pertained to land taken by the government through eminent domain, in which case the cotton allotment could be transferred to other land bought by the farmer within three years. These transfers had to be approved by the Department of Agriculture, and in Texas they were reviewed by USDA agent Henry Marshall, who noticed that Estes was suddenly involved in hundreds of requests for exceptions to the rule.
Estes had quickly seen all the loopholes in the law—some real, some by virtue of his loose “interpretation” of it—and lost no time in exploiting them, aided by his close association with Lyndon Johnson and all of the bureaucrats he controlled. He had previously bought cotton allotments for land submerged under water, planning to have them transferred to other land he had not yet purchased.66 He also went to farmers across the South who had lost cotton land by eminent domain, much of it the result of the construction of the interstate highway system during that period, soliciting them to purchase land from him. The plan was for a farmer to buy a certain tract of land, then place their cotton allotment on it, and finally lease it back to Estes for $50 per acre. The farmer’s land contract called for four installments to Estes, but it was quietly understood that the farmer would fail to make even the first payment, which would allow Estes to foreclose, taking back the land as well as the newly created cotton allotment with it. The farmer benefited by having been paid in advance for leasing the land back to Estes. The final result was that Estes still owned the land, but it now was an acreage upon which cotton could be grown.67
Regrettably for himself, Henry Marshall evidently did not get the memo liberalizing the rules, as he continued to pressure Estes to comply with the old rules, disapproving his creative use of the new loopholes put in place just for him. Since the new rules relied on local officials to accede to the shortcuts, but didn’t require that they be waived completely, they could be applied on a discretionary basis. The arguably overjealous Henry Marshall—who had not appreciated the threats already made against him—was not about to use discretion to sidestep the rules he had been enforcing and, if anything, resolved only to more vigorously use them to prevent the obvious fraud that Estes was committing. He proceeded to mount a personal campaign against the Estes cotton scam, traveling around West Texas to visit county agricultural committees, explaining the methods used by Estes to circumvent the rules, demonstrating a sample Estes-type contract, and alerting the local office managers to watch for such fraudulent applications.68 The word that Henry Marshall was proving to be a thorn in the sides of Estes and Johnson would quickly spread and cause considerable consternation in both; Ed Clark was also very concerned about how things were shaping up and appealed to Johnson to take firm action immediately to head off worse problems later.
Lyndon Johnson’s Tirade with His Pilots
(and the Resulting Airplane Crash That Took Their Lives)
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.69
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 di
d 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.70 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.”71 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 goddamn 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.
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.”72 As the pilots searched for the runway through the fog, having no radio beams with which to locate it, they flew lower and lower until 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.
In a still-unexplained mystery, it took three days for the accident to be reported. The news on Monday, February 20, 1961, got out that the plane was “overdue” from a trip originating only sixty miles away in Austin the previous Friday. The papers did reassure readers that their beloved vice president was safe. He took time out of his busy schedule to visit the crash site and attend their funerals, appearing “appropriately distressed” according to newspaper accounts at the time.73 While the deaths of the two pilots could arguably be blamed upon themselves (i.e., they ultimately agreed to make the flight and assume the risk of crashing), there were a number of other deaths which would begin occurring a few months later for which blame sharing could not be argued, starting with that of Henry Marshall in June 1961.
The Murderous Mac Wallace
The allegations concerning murders instigated by Lyndon B. Johnson in the pages that follow allow us to get a little closer to an honest evaluation of how the darker elements of his being—in his lifelong quest to become president—led him to direct the murders that others have stated he initiated. Given the weight of the evidence presented, it is not unreasonable to make the charges; it could be argued that continuing to keep them swept under the rug, as they have been for over fifty years, is—and has been—a perverse and outrageous miscarriage of justice for which the country is still burdened.
The man who would eventually become Lyndon Johnson’s hit man, Malcolm “Mac” Wallace, was born in Mount Pleasant, Texas, in October 1921. He joined the marines when he turned eighteen, later serving on the aircraft carrier USS Lexington. Within a year, he fell from a ladder and injured his back, resulting in a medical discharge in September 1940. The following year, Wallace became a student at the University of Texas in Austin and was subsequently elected president of the student union. He became involved in left-wing student groups and, in October 1944, led a student protest in support of Homer P. Rainey, the university president who had been fired because of his socialist leanings; this “movement” failed in its mission to reinstate Rainey. Lyndon Johnson, who read all the Austin newspapers regularly, would have known all about this “rebel with a cause.” Wallace graduated six years later and married Mary Andre DuBose Barton, the daughter of a Methodist preacher. He then went to graduate school at Columbia, where he started working on his doctorate while teaching economics at other universities. At about this time, he met, through his college friend Cliff Carter, Edward Clark, who would later introduce him to Lyndon Johnson. Johnson helped him to get a job as an economist at the United States Department of Agriculture. Although former friends and colleagues considered Mac Wallace as a gifted scholar, he had an explosive temper and had been involved in physical violence.74
The First Murder: John Douglas Kinser
In 1949, two brothers from Austin, Texas, Winston and John (Douglas) Kinser, both veterans of World War II, decided to lease a section of the floodplain along the Colorado River, across from downtown Austin, to make a “chip and putt” golf course. Winston, the older brother, already had a profitable liquor store, but he was trying to help his brother get himself established and settled down. They had used up most of their savings in making improvements to the lot. When they first got started, the land was a dump, nothing but trash among tangled brush, cast-off refrigerators, tires, and other debris. As the two brothers personally cleared the area, Winston designed the par-3 course around the small hills and valleys and trees at the site, and the two of them built the course with very little outside assistance. After the course opened, Winston returned to tending the liquor store he owned downtown and Doug ran the golf course.75
Doug had also been an amateur actor, playing in Austin’s local theaters, and had been a carefree bachelor, enjoying the company of many young ladies around Austin. Unfortunately for him, one of the young ladies with whom he had become involved was Mac Wallace’s wife, Mary Andre, and to complicate matters further, another one was Lyndon Johnson’s sister, Josefa; on increasing occasions, he was enjoying a ménage à trois with both Mary Andre and Josefa at the same time. As if that weren’t enough, even more unfortunate for Kinser was the fact that Mac Wallace, the jealous husband of Mary Andre, was also having a simultaneous affair with Josefa, which at least doubled his level of jealousy toward the unwitting Doug Kinser.76
In her younger years, Josefa had been an intelligent and vivacious girl who enjoyed her social life to its limits. Like her brothers, Lyndon and Sam Houston, she had a long history of fun-loving, uncontrolled wildness. Hers was of a kind that was openly gender-neutral, however. Like her brothers in many ways, she was even more uninhibited, in that she experimented liberally, and openly, on both the hetero and homo dimensions of her sexuality. In 1948, she had been deeply involved in helping with Lyndon’s Senate campaign and later moved to Washington DC, which greatly expanded her horizons and nightlife experiences while further diminishing any residual inhibitions that might have previously constrained her activities. By 1950, at age thirty-eight, she had been married and divorced twice and was then working in Hattie Valdez’s brothel in Austin, Texas. Josefa was a longtime abuser of alcohol and had more recently begun using hard drugs as well. She had a well-earned reputation for being promiscuous. She had become friends and lovers with fellow thespians Doug Kinser and Mary Andre Wallace a
nd particularly enjoyed their experiments with threesomes, which provided her the ultimate erotic pleasure, given her bisexual predilections. Their rendezvous sites even included encounters in Austin’s Zilker Park, which caused complaints from ordinary folks in the park, who, perhaps inadvertently, witnessed some of their public displays of affection, leading the police to increase the park’s police surveillance.77
Josefa was also known for using information about her famous brother as an entrée to expand her social life; she openly disclosed personal information and stories about Lyndon, especially when she was high; the higher she was, the more lurid the stories became. Lyndon was acutely aware of her loose lips and feared that she might have already disclosed some illegal activities about himself to Kinser, specifically certain activities he had engaged in during his race for the Senate. In the early 1950s, well before the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s, this kind of sexual scandal had the potential of ending Lyndon’s political career. Johnson also had a rather myopic, puritanical, and paranoid view of his sister’s amorality; his demands for prudence were, of course, at odds with his own conduct, but he felt he could at least be discreet if not secretive, while concluding that she could not be either. To him, if his sister’s wild behavior became public knowledge, it would put his own political career at risk; he could allow nothing like this to interfere with his obsession to become president of the United States. Johnson must have come to fear that his sister’s wild behavior posed too high a risk for his own personal objectives: He could not risk having his entire career jeopardized by his high-risk, freewheeling sister and her boyfriends and girlfriends. Something had to be done to fix the problem, and fix it quickly.
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