Mort Corrupt Series: Lyndon Baines Johnson - LBJ - Forgotten History

Often the debate comes up who was the best and who was the worst president of the United States. Many people have their opinions and there were many methods by which to gauge those responses. However, when it came to subterfuge, lying, intimidation, hypocrisy, bigotry, fraud and possibly murder, few can touch President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Who was Lyndon Baines Johnson? Why is he both reviled and also revered depending upon who you talk to? Hello, I'm Colin Heaton, a veteran of the United States Army and Marine Corps, former history professor, book author, and welcome to this episode of Forgotten History. Lyndon Baines Johnson was born August 27, 1908 in Gillespie County, Texas. He was the first of five children of Sam Ely Johnson Jr., a farmer, businessman, and state legislator, and his wife, Rebecca Baines Johnson. On November 17, 1934, he married Claudia Alta Lady Bird Taylor, whose wealthy family ensured Johnson's political success. In 1937, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat. Johnson reported for active duty in December of 1941 and served in the U.S. Navy as a lieutenant commander until all members of Congress in the military were recalled to Washington in the summer of 1942. Lieutenant Commander Johnson, U.S. Naval Reserve, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, temporarily served in the Navy, and he received the nation's third-highest combat decoration while on a 1942 fact-finding mission aboard the B-26 medium bomber, the Heckling Hare, to take photographs. According to acclaimed historian Barrett Tillman, the mission of 9 June 1942 was codenamed Tow 9, and it involved 11 Martin B-26 marauders, fast twin-engine bombers of the 22nd Bomb Group from Port Moresby, New Guinea. Their target was Ley Aerodrome, an important Japanese installation on New Guinea's northern coast. Diversionary attacks by B-25 Mitchells and B-17 Flying Fortresses were to cover the 22nd's approach. However, the citation for his Silver Star and rationale for his getting the award are in great controversy, because he was never even in active combat. Johnson's biographer, Robert Caro, in his book, stated that Johnson wore the Silver Star pin on the lapels of his suit jackets for the rest of his life. Caro's book, Means of Ascent, takes umbrage at Johnson's receiving the medal for spending a few minutes under fire, but even that description overstates the case. The fact is, LBJ never got within sight of Japanese forces. His combat experience was a myth. Again, Tillman provides the following. Once back home, LBJ lost no time stomping the campaign trail. Caro notes that Johnson had the Silver Star presented to him repeatedly, each occasion as if it was for the first time. Claiming the nickname Raider Johnson, LBJ also told audiences that he saw 14 Zeros shot down in flames. That never happened. The declaration remains a sore point with many of the 22nd Bomb Group veterans. The Hare's crew chief, retired Master Sergeant Woodrow W. Harrison, said, as to the strangeness of LBJ's Silver Star, no other crew member aboard 1488 received one. Equally adamant was the Hare's usual gunner, Robert Marshall, who said, We didn't know LBJ was awarded the Silver Star until the book came out. We didn't like it. If he got it, so should everyone else on the mission. In 1948, Johnson was elected to the U.S. Senate in the Democratic primary, where he won the primary by just 87 votes in a very questionable election. His ability to work with Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower and unite fellow Democrats behind important legislation did make him a powerful force. But Johnson had problems closer to home. He had a sister, Josepha Johnson, who hated him and their entire family. Well, this is how the story goes from his biographers and independent investigators. Josepha, who was divorced twice, became a prostitute and drug addict, which risked to destroy the family's name and their creditability in federal and state politics and in Texas. She also had affairs with LBJ's associates, Jim Kinzer and Mac Wallace, who was also known as Johnson's hitman. Kinzer wanted LBJ to loan him money via his sister, and LBJ considered it a shakedown, a blackmail attempt, as Josepha had apparently told Kinzer about her brother's illegal activities. On October 22, 1951, Wallace shot Kinzer, which only helped Johnson in keeping Kinzer quiet. Wallace was arrested and charged with murder, but was released on bail after Edward Clark arranged for two of Johnson's financial supporters, M.E. Ruby and Bill Carroll, to post the bond for Wallace. Johnson's personal attorney, John Cofer, also agreed to represent Wallace. Wallace was found guilty of first-degree murder, and the jury that voted 11 to 1 for the death penalty was overruled. Judge Charles O. Betts, a friend of LBJ, overruled the jury and announced a sentence of five years imprisonment. Then, he suspended the sentence and Wallace was immediately freed. At that time, the jurors in Texas had to agree to the sentence, because under Texas law, juries decided the punishment, not the judge, and they had to agree to the judge's decision. And they did. According to Bill Adler of the Texas Observer, several of the jurors telephoned John Kinzer's parents to apologize for agreeing to a suspended sentence, but said that they did so only because threats had been made against their families. Another point of interest was the connection of LBJ to one Billy Sol Estes. Estes apparently cut a lucrative deal with LBJ. Over the next couple of years, Estes ran a vast scam using federal agricultural subsidies. According to Estes himself, he obtained 21 million dollars a year for growing and storing non-existent crops of cotton. This would have been a major problem for Johnson politically, and his sister knew about it. In 1960, Henry Marshall, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was investigating Johnson and Estes regarding their illegal business defrauding the government. Marshall was offered a promotion to Washington D.C. to drop the investigation, but he refused. According to Estes, on January 17, 1961, Lyndon Johnson told Wallace, quote, get rid of him, end quote, meaning Marshall. And Marshall was murdered to keep him quiet and protect Johnson and Estes. According to Estes' testimony, Wallace followed Marshall to a remote area of his farm and beat him nearly unconscious. Then, while trying to asphyxiate him with exhaust from Marshall's pickup truck, Wallace thought he heard someone approaching the scene and hastily grabbed a rifle. Wallace then fired five shots into Marshall, killing him and fled the scene. Through LBJ's connections with the local law enforcement, the murder was amazingly ruled a suicide. No pictures were taken of the crime scene, no blood samples were taken of the stains on the truck, which was washed and waxed the following day, and no fingerprints were taken from the rifle or the pickup. Also, in 1960, John F. Kennedy brought Johnson on as his readyman to secure southern conservative votes. Johnson had to make sure that his background was very clean. In addition, after Robert Kennedy became Attorney General, he also started an investigation. He began talking to witnesses. Johnson's sister had to go. The official story is that Joseph had died of a cerebral hemorrhage on December 25, 1961, and was found in her bed. Despite state law, no autopsy was conducted, so how could they know the cause of death? 23 years later, the lawyer, Douglas Caddy, wrote to Stephen S. Trott at the U.S. Department of Justice. In the letter, Caddy claimed that Billy Sol Estes, Lyndon B. Johnson, Mack Wallace, and Cliff Carter had been involved in the murders of several people, including Josephine Johnson and John Kinzer. Kennedy won his unquestionable close election against Vice President Richard M. Nixon due to reported widespread fraud and vote-buying by his father, former Prohibition bootlegger and U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain Joseph Kennedy Sr., who recruited his mafia friends through mob boss Sam Giancana in major cities like Chicago to bundle ballots and coerce voters. But LBJ had more problems, as the new Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, was already investigating Johnson and his associates for a multitude of crimes, and they had Democrat support in Congress from members who hated Johnson. These investigations went away after JFK was killed. On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was shot and killed while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. Johnson was then sworn in as president later that day aboard Air Force One. It has always been assumed, and at least one member of the Warren Commission believed, that LBJ was behind the hit because he hated Kennedy and because of the investigations into his criminal activities. Defeating Republican candidate Barry Goldwater by more than 15 million votes in the 1964 presidential election, Johnson introduced a slate of new reforms that he said would build a great society for all Americans. Johnson was looking to run for re-election, and he needed to have secure black votes not yet convinced by his getting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed through the House of Representatives. Approved with bipartisan support by a vote of 290 to 130, all Republicans and only a few Democrats voted for the bill. This was later revised in 1968 to aid Native Americans. But the bill had to pass the Senate, and Johnson needed Republican support because his fellow Democrats were not on board. The bill then moved to the U.S. Senate, where Southern and Border State Democrats staged a 75-day filibuster against it. This was one of the longest filibusters in U.S. history, as Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a former Ku Klux Klan member, spoke for over 14 consecutive hours arguing against civil rights for blacks. The Republican majority passed it in the Senate. The law prohibited racial segregation and discrimination in places of public accommodation, discrimination by race or sex in employment and union membership, and new guarantees of equal voting rights. The Department of Justice could bring lawsuits against local school boards to end discrimination, leading to desegregation. The constitutionality of the law was immediately challenged by Democrats, but it was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1964. Johnson decided to begin working on his Great Society program to ensure that black Americans would have a good reason to vote for Democrats in the future. His plan was to have American taxpayer money dispersed primarily among the black community in particular, but also poor whites, who were all generally impoverished and less educated. However, the expansion of government and a strategy focused on handouts that discouraged self-improvement caused more harm than good, and it did not help the poor. Five decades later, after President Johnson initiated the War on Poverty, America remained at around the same percentage of people still living in poverty as it did back then. In 1964, the poverty rate was approximately 19 percent. Today, it's around 15 percent, said Project 21 spokesman Darren Green in 2014. Statistics such as these demonstrate the War on Poverty was a continually mismanaged disaster. That isn't to say there haven't been people helped by it. All things considered, however, it's been a tragedy. Green then added, the disastrous effects of the government's management of anti-poverty initiatives are recognizable across racial lines, but the destruction is particularly evident in the black community. It effectively subsidized the dissolution of the black family by rendering the black man's role as a husband and father irrelevant, invisible, and more specifically, disposable. The result has been several generations of black born into broken homes and broken communities, experiencing social, moral, and economic chaos. It fosters an inescapable dependency that primarily and oftentimes solely relies on government to sustain livelihoods. Federal programs directly resulting from the War on Poverty include Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, food stamps, and enhanced social security benefits. At the time, President Johnson boasted, the richest nation on earth can afford to win it. The result was complete failure, creating generational poverty with trillions of dollars spent over the last 60 years on a failed application of socialism which still reverberates today. Next, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed, but again the voting rights bill was passed in the U.S. Senate by a 77 to 19 vote, with Democrats voting no in their majority. On May 26, 1965, after debating the bill for more than a month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the bill by a vote of 333 to 85. No Democrats on July 9th. Despite Johnson's ego and disinterest in people in general, he did manage to do some other things that did help Americans, but they were all for political optics. Johnson signed the Social Security Amendments Act of 1965 into law, creating Medicare and Medicaid. Johnson followed JFK's position of supporting NASA and made the Apollo program a national priority. In 1967, he nominated black civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court, which was a good decision but not altruistic by any means. On October 22, 1968, Johnson passed the Gun Control Act, which satisfied the anti-gun lobby. The race riots in 1966 and deaths of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King Jr. prompted the action. However, insiders who knew him stated that Johnson's reasons for getting the law passed was to restrict access to guns by minorities, mostly blacks, due to the riots by creating war regulations and stringent purchasing and registration requirements. However, Lyndon Johnson's hypocrisy knew no bounds. When he stated publicly that he would not send American boys to do what South Median boys should be doing for themselves, rang hollow. Here's why. Johnson's family, along with Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara, were heavily invested in the military industry. Johnson and his wife were investors in Bell Aircraft that made the UH-1 Iroquois Huey helicopter, among others. McNamara owned massive stock in Ford Motor Company, making military vehicles, and many others on Capitol Hill were big investors in the war industry. Johnson's great break came when he created the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and the resolution was passed in Congress on August 7. Johnson had just brought the United States officially into a war that would last until 1975. Investment portfolios exploded as the war industry went full throttle to supply the military. Johnson, McNamara, and others made a lot of money. He and his wife also owned several radio and TV stations, as well as Lady Bird Manufacturing Company, and they produced ammunition, which they sold to arms globally, dealers, salesmen, and then it was reported they even sold it to the North Vietnamese to kill our men. That is probably true, but it came through third parties. According to some detractors, this is one of the many reasons why he wanted the war to continue, and has been assumed that he got kickbacks from all the other large manufacturers who made so much money from the war. Johnson had also invested in several companies, such as Day & Zimmerman, who had the construction contracts to build air bases, such as the U.S. Air Force Base in Karat, Thailand, among others used during the war. When Johnson died on January 22, 1973, he was worth an amazing 100 million dollars in 1973 money, almost 900 million dollars in 2023 value. In later years, more investigations continued. On August 9, 1984, Estes' lawyer, Douglas Caddy, wrote to Stephen S. Trott at the U.S. Department of Justice. In his letter to Trott, he stated, Mr. Estes is willing to testify that LBJ ordered these killings, and that he transmitted his orders through Cliff Carter to Mack Wallace, who executed the murders. 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 Cliff Carter and Mack Wallace. Mr. Estes is willing to disclose his knowledge concerning the following criminal offenses. 1. The killing of Henry Marshall. 2. The killing of George Kudleck. 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 Josepha Johnson. 7. The killing of John Kinzer. 8. The killing of President J. F. Kennedy. In the cases of murders numbers 1 through 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 Mack 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 the 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 Mack Wallace, whom he describes as a stone killer with a communist background, recruited Jack Ruby, who in turn recruited Lee Harvey Oswald. Strangely, Wallace himself was killed in a suspicious automobile accident in 1971. Resuming quote, Mr. Estes says that the Mafia did not participate in the Kennedy assassination but that its participation was discussed prior to the event but rejected by LBJ, who believed if the Mafia were involved he would never be out under its blackmail. On June 19, 1992, former Texas Ranger and U.S. Marshal Clint Peoples told a friend that he had documented evidence that LBJ's associate, Mack Wallace, was one of the shooters in Dealey Plaza during the Kennedy assassination. More information was coming. He apparently had information on the 18 material witnesses to the JFK shooting who had all died within three years of the event. The London Times calculated the likelihood of all 18 witnesses of their respective ages dying of any cause within three years of JFK's assassination as 1 in 100 trillion. This testimony regarding Wallace would have been an S.D. Seale testimony given before a Robertson County Grand Jury in 1984, which Peoples had. On June 23, 1992, Peoples was killed in a mysterious one-car automobile accident in Texas. U.S. Air Force General Curtis E. LeMay stated that Johnson never did anything to benefit anyone in society, laws or otherwise, unless it benefited himself politically. He also stated during my personal interview with him in 1986 that the only reason Johnson pushed to get welfare passed was to secure the black vote for Democrats forever. On another note, Madeline Duncan Brown, Johnson's alleged long-time mistress of 20 years and who died in 2002, claimed that her son Stephen was born out of that relationship, and she also implicated Johnson in the conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. Both claims were never proven as witnesses were dead. Regarding Mack Wallace and LBJ's connection to the JFK assassination, on March 12, 1998, Wallace's fingerprint, as was recorded in 1951 when he was arrested, was positively matched with a copy of a fingerprint labeled unknown that investigators lifted on November 22, 1963, from a shipping carton located near the southeast side of the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository building. That was where Oswald was supposed to have shot Kennedy. The carton, labeled Box A, also contained several fingerprints identified as those of Lee Harvey Oswald. So, we leave it up to you. Who was the worst president? Well, you have several to choose from. Thank you for watching Forgotten History. Please click like, subscribe, and share. Send us comments and show ideas, and we will get back to you as soon as possible. Until next time.