Crossfire

by Jim Marrs

  Watching the energetic Johnson was a close friend of the Johnson family, congressman Sam Rayburn, already a power on Capitol Hill. In August 1935, thanks to some help from Rayburn, president Franklin Roosevelt named Johnson as Texas director of the National Youth Administration, a New Deal program for employing youngsters.

  Capitalizing on his authority to award loans and jobs, Johnson created a formidable political base in south Texas. He also used his new position to ingratiate himself with President Roosevelt, whom Johnson referred to as “my political daddy.” By now his career designs were set firmly in politics.

  In early 1937, with the sudden death of Austin congressman James P. Buchanan, Johnson saw an opportunity to advance. At the same time Johnson was looking for financial and political support to make a bid for Buchanan’s seat, Austin attorney Alvin Wirtz and his client Herman Brown were looking for help in Washington.

  Brown’s construction company, Brown & Root, had already spent millions building the Marshall Ford Dam in south Texas. But the project had not been officially authorized by Congress; rather it had begun as a government grant obtained by Buchanan. With his death, the entire $10 million project was in limbo.

  Backed by Wirtz, Brown, and their well-heeled business associates, the indefatigable Johnson raced through nearly 8,000 square miles of Texas hill country pledging total support of Roosevelt and his New Deal, a theme that sat well with impoverished farmers and laborers.

  The senatorial election, climaxing with a raging blizzard and sudden surgery for LBJ to repair a ruptured appendix, was a victory, with Johnson outpolling five opponents by 3,000 votes.

  Back in Washington, the twenty-nine-year-old Johnson managed to get authorization for the dam project as well as a contract for Brown & Root to build a huge Navy base at Corpus Christi.

  Herman Brown and his friends were so pleased with Johnson’s performance that in 1940 the young congressman was offered a share in very lucrative oil properties with no money down. Johnson was told he could pay for his share out of yearly profits. It was tantamount to a gift. Brown was shocked when Johnson, who had been complaining of lack of money, turned him down, saying the offer “would kill me politically.” Since both a House and a Senate seat would come from Texas’s reliable oil and gas constituency, Brown realized even at that time that Johnson’s true political goal was the presidency.

  As a congressman, Johnson continued to perform for his oil and business mentors back in Texas. In 1941, Brown & Root obtained a lucrative Navy contract to build four sub chasers, although as George Brown later recalled, “We didn’t know the stern from the aft—I mean the bow—of the boat.”

  Just two days after Pearl Harbor, Johnson—who had been commissioned as a lieutenant commander in the Navy Reserve some months previously—was called to active duty, becoming the first congressman to leave for military service. After serving less than a year, Johnson arrived back in Washington after Roosevelt called on all congressmen serving in the armed forces to return home.

  His wartime service had won Johnson at least one solid ally. After a period of cool relations due to Johnson’s blatant ambitiousness, he again was accepted by powerful House Speaker Sam Rayburn. Rayburn taught Johnson his political philosophy, which he repeated often: “To get along, you have to go along.”

  J. Evetts Haley, a biographer critical of Johnson, wrote, “Lyndon became Rayburn’s protégé; their relationship a fusion of experience and political sagacity with youthful ardor and enthusiasm, with no appreciable enhancement of the ideals and ethics of either.”

  Johnson entered a race for the Senate in 1948. It was a close race between Johnson, still identified with Roosevelt and the New Deal, and conservative Texas governor Coke Stevenson, who managed to defeat Johnson in the Democratic primary. However, Stevenson didn’t have a clear majority, so a run-off election was called for August 28.

  Due to slow communications and manual voting procedures, the election outcome was in doubt for several days. Finally on September 2, Johnson went on the radio with a “victory speech,” which shocked the confident Stevenson forces. Veteran Texas newsman Clyde Wantland wrote:

  Their fears were validated the following day . . . when a source friendly to Stevenson reported from Jim Wells County that Precinct 13 had been recanvassed and a “correction” made favoring Johnson with 202 more votes. Johnson’s radio broadcast on Thursday thus became a reality on Saturday.

  This revision earned Johnson the sobriquet of “Landslide Lyndon” and began one of the longest legal feuds in Texas history.

  Johnson’s opponents claimed the eighty-seven-vote “correction.” This eighty-seven-vote edge in the 1948 election came only after frantic phone calls between Johnson and George Parr, a powerful south Texas political boss known as the “Duke of Duval County.”

  The controversy continued into 1977, when Luis Salas, the local election judge, admitted to the Dallas Morning News that he had certified fictitious ballots for Johnson on orders from Parr, who committed suicide in 1975. Salas told news reporters, “Johnson did not win that election; it was stolen for him.” But more troubling than this case of common political fraud was the series of deaths and federal government interference with investigations into Johnson’s activities.

  One of these deaths was Bill Mason, a south Texas newsman investigating the Duval incident, who was murdered by Sam Smithwick, a Parr associate who in turn was found hanged in his prison cell after saying he was willing to talk.

  As far back as 1941, the IRS had initiated investigations of Johnson’s finances, but had been blocked by orders from Johnson’s mentor, President Roosevelt. In 1954, the Austin district IRS collector, Frank L. Scofield, was removed from office accused of forcing political contributions from his employees. Scofield was acquitted of these charges, but in his absence, all of the IRS files relating to Johnson and Brown & Root were placed in a Quonset hut in south Austin that mysteriously caught fire, destroying the evidence.

  In the late 1940s and early 1950s, both Johnson and his protégé John Connally had offices in Fort Worth. Johnson operated out of the Hotel Texas, the site of Kennedy’s breakfast speech the morning of November 22, 1963. Connally’s offices were in the historic Flatiron Building, which later became the Press Club of Fort Worth.

  It was in Fort Worth that both Johnson and Connally came into contact with gamblers, who in turn were later connected to Jack Ruby as well as anti-Kennedy Texas oilmen.

  W. C. Kirkwood was known as a “gentleman gambler” because he never allowed anyone in his high-stakes poker games who was on a salary. He did not want to be the cause of someone’s children going hungry. Kirkwood conducted his big-time gambling at a luxurious, sprawling Spanish-style complex known as the Four Deuces—the street address was 2222 on Fort Worth’s Jacksboro Highway, once notorious for its taverns and prostitution. It was here, under the protective eye of off-duty policemen, that such men as H. L. Hunt and Clint Murchinson joined Sam Rayburn and his protégé Johnson for hours of Kirkwood-provided hospitality.

  Retired Fort Worth policeman Paul Bewley recalled for this author that while providing security for Johnson’s Hotel Texas office suite, the one man who had unquestioned access to Johnson was W. C. Kirkwood.

  Assassination researchers noted that Kirkwood’s son, Pat Kirkwood, hosted Kennedy’s Secret Service guards in his Cellar club the night before his trip to Dallas—and that both the Kirkwoods and Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby shared a common close friend in gambler Lewis J. McWillie. McWillie—who at one time operated his own gambling establishment in Dallas, the Top of the Hill Club—had tried to open a casino in Cuba in 1959 and had participated in gunrunning schemes.

  There may have even been some connection between Ruby and Texas governor John Connally only days before the assassination. Diane Bishop was nineteen years old and working at the message and reservation desk in the Sheraton Hotel in Houston on Wednesday night, November 20, 1963. Connally had taken a room there in preparation for meeting Kennedy the next
day but the staff was under orders not to make his presence public. That night, Bishop, who said she wasn’t even aware that Connally was governor, received a call from a man who had to speak up due to background noise “like an airport or public place.” The man sounded like the message was urgent and asked to speak with Connally. As per orders, Bishop said no one with that name was registered there but the man asked to leave a message. The caller told her, “Tell Connally, if I don’t see you tonight in Houston, I’ll see you in Dallas. This is Jack Ruby.”

  Bishop thought no more of the call but filed the message away. She was shocked on November 24 to hear that Oswald had been shot by a Jack Ruby. On Monday, November 25, she went to work intending to retrieve the phone message but found the hotel “swarming” with federal agents. Although Bishop was questioned regarding the phone call, her written note, the only proof of the incident, was missing.

  Yet, despite links between Jack Ruby’s friend McWillie, the Kirkwoods, Texas oilmen, Lyndon Johnson, and John Connally, apparently neither the Warren Commission nor the House Select Committee on Assassinations felt the need to fully investigate these associations.

  In 1951, Johnson was elected Democratic whip in the Senate. Two years later, at only forty-four years of age, Johnson became the Senate’s majority leader.

  Johnson used his powerful position to best advantage, according to biographer Robert Caro, who told the Atlantic Monthly:

  For years, men came into Lyndon Johnson’s office and handed him envelopes stuffed with cash. They didn’t stop coming even when the office in which he sat was the office of the vice president of the United States. Fifty thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills in sealed envelopes was what one lobbyist for one oil company testified he brought to Johnson’s office during his term as vice president.

  There is evidence that Johnson also profited from cash contributions from the mob. Jack Halfen—a former associate of Bonnie and Clyde, Frank Costello, Vito Genovese, and Carlos Marcello—was the mob’s gambling coordinator in Houston. On trial for income tax evasion in 1954, Halfen revealed how Houston gambling netted almost $15 million a year with 40 percent going to Marcello, 35 percent to Halfen, and 25 percent to Texas police officials and politicians.

  In talks with federal officials while serving a prison term, Halfen told how Johnson had received more than $500,000 in contributions over a ten-year period while in the Senate. He said Johnson in turn had helped the crime syndicate by killing anti-racketeering legislation, watering down bills that could not be defeated, and slowing congressional probes into organized crime.

  Halfen substantiated his close ties to Johnson with photographs of himself and Johnson on a private hunting trip and a letter from Johnson to the Texas Board of Paroles written on Halfen’s behalf.

  According to published reports, Johnson also received large-scale payoffs from Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa. A former senatorial aide, Jack Sullivan, testified that he witnessed the transfer of a suitcase full of money from a Teamster lobbyist through a Maryland senator to Johnson’s chief aide, Cliff Carter.

  Also recall that one of Johnson’s “trusted friends,” Bobby Baker, had long and documented mob connections. Baker once wrote, “A New Orleans businessman rumored to be well connected with the Mafia had once sought me out to inquire whether President Lyndon Johnson might be willing to pardon Hoffa in exchange for one million dollars.”

  The Johnson administration’s anticrime record is dismal. Racket-busting came to a virtual halt. During the first four years following the assassination, Justice Department organized-crime section field time had dropped by 48 percent, time before grand juries by 72 percent, and the number of district court briefs filed by that section by 83 percent.

  There also was a discernible lack of prosecution follow-up to corruption charges against Lyndon B. Johnson, such as the controversial awarding of a $7 billion contract for the TFX prototype fighter-bomber plane to Texas-based General Dynamics. LBJ’s close friend Fred Korth became secretary of the Navy when John Connally resigned to become Texas governor and was negotiating this TFX contract.

  On October 7, 1963, Baker was forced to leave his post as LBJ’s man in the Senate. This was soon followed by the resignation of Korth.

  Yet another example of Johnson’s willingness to circumvent the law for his career’s sake came in 1960, when he decided to run for president despite continually denying this decision. At Johnson’s urging, Democratic Party legislators in Texas rushed through a law that superseded an old statute forbidding a candidate from seeking two offices at the same time.

  Thus, Texas voters witnessed the bizarre spectacle of Johnson running for vice president on Kennedy’s liberal national ticket while also running for Texas senator on the state’s conservative Democratic ticket.

  One can easily imagine Johnson’s anger and hurt when the Democratic Party in 1960 handed its presidential nomination not to this longtime standard bearer, but instead to John F. Kennedy, a relative newcomer. Johnson complained to friends, “Jack was out kissing babies while I was passing bills.”

  Knowing how Kennedy’s top supporters detested him, Johnson must have seen Kennedy’s nomination as a major roadblock in his drive for the presidency. He was therefore pleasantly surprised when Kennedy offered him the vice president’s position on the ballot. This offer, coming as it did after an often-bitter contest between the two men, has been the subject of much debate. It now seems clear that Kennedy never really believed that Johnson would swap his Senate power for the empty honor of being vice president. He made the offer due to pressure from J. Edgar Hoover and as a conciliatory move, fully expecting Johnson to turn it down. But Johnson saw it as an opportunity to get one step closer to the presidency and promptly accepted. Reminded by friends that the office of vice president carried little importance, Johnson said, “Power is where power goes.”

  The Kennedy forces were shocked. How could Kennedy pick Johnson, who stood for almost everything they hated? It has been speculated that Kennedy accepted Johnson because it seemed necessary to have Johnson’s help in swinging the 1960 election in southern and western states.

  This proved prophetic. It was only through Johnson’s tireless efforts that six crucial southern states—including Texas—were kept in the Democratic column.

  In Texas this was accomplished very simply. According to biographer Haley, both Johnson and Rayburn warned the state’s oilmen that if they voted for Nixon and the Democrats won, the oilmen could kiss the oil depletion allowance goodbye. So oil money helped swing the state for Kennedy-Johnson, despite a national Democratic Party platform that called for repealing the allowance—mute testimony to their belief in Johnson’s power and hypocrisy. As vice president, Johnson was a changed man. Gone were his power and enthusiasm. There was almost constant friction between this old-style political powerbroker and the new breed of Kennedy men. Johnson’s brother, Sam Houston Johnson, wrote about the treatment of his brother as vice president:

  They made his stay in the vice presidency the most miserable three years of his life. He wasn’t the number two man in the administration; he was the lowest man on the totem pole. . . . I know him well enough to know he felt humiliated time and time again, that he was openly snubbed by second-echelon White House staffers who snickered at him behind his back and called him “Uncle Corn Pone.”

  By the fall of 1963, rumors were rife that Johnson would be dumped from the 1964 Democratic national ticket. In fact, the day of Kennedy’s assassination, the Dallas Morning News carried the headline: NIXON PREDICTS JFK MAY DROP JOHNSON. Consequently, Johnson made several trips abroad, most probably to escape the daily humiliations in the White House.

  James Wagenvoord, editorial business manager and assistant to the executive editor of Life magazine, has revealed that his magazine was compiling information on Johnson’s corrupt practices. “Beginning in later summer 1963 the magazine, based upon information fed from Bobby Kennedy and the Justice Department, had been developing a major news break pie
ce concerning Johnson and Bobby Baker,” said Wagenvoord. “On publication Johnson would have been finished and off the 1964 ticket (the 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 by the Kennedy Justice Department as a conduit to the public.” Immediately following the assassination, the exposé on Johnson was shredded and never saw publication.

  Soon, yet another investigation into Johnson’s dealings got under way. This time it involved a big-time Texas wheeler-dealer named Billie Sol Estes. Henry Marshall, a Department of Agriculture official, was looking into Estes’s habit of acquiring millions in federal cotton allotment payments on land that was under water or actually owned by the government. Marshall was particularly interested in Estes’s connections with his longtime friend Lyndon Johnson. However, before any official action could be taken, Marshall was found dead in a remote section of his farm near Franklin, Texas. He had been shot five times in the abdomen. Nearby lay a bolt-action single-shot .22-caliber rifle.

  Five days later, without the benefit of an autopsy, a local peace justice ruled Marshall’s death a suicide. Others knew better. Veteran Texas Ranger Clint Peoples once told this author, “If Henry Marshall committed suicide, I can ride a jackass to the moon.”

  In 1985 Estes, after being granted immunity from prosecution, told Texas media that Johnson had ordered Marshall’s death to prevent his connections with Estes from being exposed. Later that year, a Texas district judge changed the official verdict of Marshall’s death from suicide to homicide. At least three other men connected with the Estes case died in unusual circumstances.