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."
13
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. 14
Gov. Shivers directly confronted LBJ over the
Smithwick murder. "Shivers charged me with murder. Shivers said I was a
murderer!" Johnson later told journalist Ronnie Dugger. 15
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. 16 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.
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." 18 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. 19 LBJ aide George Reedy said that LBJ knew about the
RFK-inspired media campaign against him and was obsessed with it. 20
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. 21
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