It now looks pretty certain to me that Kennedy’s assassination was the work of a local Texas conspiracy on behalf of, and with the knowledge of, the then Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Most of the extant evidence for this can be seen on the web site ‘The Men on the Sixth Floor'(1) which advertises the book and video of the same name by Mark Collum and Glen Sample.(2)
Theirs is a wonderful, quirky story. In 1971 Mark Collum met Lawrence ‘Loy’ Factor, an American Indian,(3) a WW2 veteran who was in jail for a murder he claimed he didn’t commit. Collum and Factor both had hepatitis and were in an isolation ward together. Factor confessed in vague terms to being part of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Collum told his old school-friend Glen Sample about this and they passed the ‘confession’ to a journalist friend of Sample. But nothing happened and they assumed it was a dead-end. In 1992 the success of Oliver Stone’s JFK encouraged them to track down the then old and ill Factor. He told them a jumbled story at the centre of which was his recruitment by a man called simply ‘Wallace’.
Wallace was ID’d for them by LBJ’s former mistress, Madeleine Brown, who, when they met her, had named Malcolm ‘Mac’ Wallace as the probable killer of JFK in her then unpublished memoir, Texas In The Morning.(4) Using that identification, Collum and Sample were able to research some of Wallace’s career through Texas newspapers. Wallace, who died in a one car crash in 1971, had been convicted of murder in 1951 (5) and was suspected of the murder of others involved in the Billy Sol Estes scandal in Texas in 1960-62. Estes was a con-man who had been bribing Texas politicians, including LBJ, and when his fraudulent scheme began to unravel, the federal investigator on his trail and three potential witnesses were ‘suicided’, apparently by Wallace.(6)
In 1984 Billy Sol Estes had his lawyer contact the Federal Justice Department and offered to talk about the role of LBJ and Wallace in eight murders, one of them JFK’s. Estes sought immunity and when this was not forthcoming, the contact broke down. At some point in the late 1990s – it isn’t clear precisely when – the written exchange between Estes’ lawyer and the Justice Department became public. You can read the exchange, which includes a summary of Estes allegations, on ‘The Men of the Sixth Floor’ site. In 1998 a fingerprint taken from the ‘sniper’s nest’ in the Dallas Book Depository and never identified, was matched with Wallace’s print taken in 1951.
This then is the evidence: a print of Wallace’s at the scene, Estes’ naming of Wallace and Factor’s confession identifying Wallace.
Throughout September and early October of 2003 it looked as though we were going to have more evidence: advance publicity was appearing for a book by a Texan lawyer, Barr McClellan, Blood Money and Power: How LBJ Killed JFK (New York: Hanover House, 2003). McClellan worked for the law firm which handled Johnson’s affairs and obviously knows quite a lot. But his book is a dud; it’s about as bad a book as could be imagined. It is the Mac Wallace tale, the management end of it, the bit linking Wallace to LBJ. McClellan tells us that in charge of the shooting was a lawyer called Ed Clark, an ally of Johnson’s in politics and corruption.(7) There is some interesting material on Texas politics in the 1960s and 70s but the author knows little about the assassination, relies in many places on the Warren Commission’s account, and includes great chunks of made-up dialogue and action, ‘faction’ as he cheerfully calls it. He adds little significant new evidence but provides some biographical details on Wallace. Bizarrely, he calls Wallace a Marxist (as does Estes), apparently based on nothing more than a 1949 FBI file. In one of his ‘faction’ sections McClellan has Wallace, the Marxist, recruiting Oswald, another Marxist. So in his version, if LBJ and Ed Clark were behind the shooting, it was carried out by two Marxists! There is also one little snippet which supports Loy Factor’s strange and frequently implausible tale. Factor said he first met Mac Wallace at the funeral of Texas politician Sam Raeburn; he had gone with his wife to look at the celebrities who would be present. McClellan tells us that Wallace was at Raeburn’s funeral.(8)
LBJ: the man who wasn’t there
I came across ‘The Men on the Sixth Floor’ site a couple of years ago and the evidence seemed immediately compelling, even with Factor’s confused – or confusing – story. Once I accepted the possibility that LBJ was responsible, I was immediately struck by the fact that with the exception of Craig Zirbel’s The Texas Connection (Warner, 1991) which had nothing of substance, Johnson hadn’t been seriously considered since the 1960s. An early Cui bono? candidate – arguably he benefited most – Johnson disappeared from the story as the Garrison inquiry revealed the rich brew of millionaire businessmen, anti-Castro Cubans, White Russians, the FBI and the CIA, who were linked to Oswald. Despite his personal corruption and the war in Vietnam which he vastly expanded, Johnson also came to be seen as a ‘good guy’ because of his ‘Great Society’ legislation on race relations and poverty. When Johnson died in 1971 the news agenda was dominated by the other traumatic events of America in the 1960s and 70s – other assassinations, the Vietnam War, the Weathermen, bombings at home; etc. etc. – and he disappeared from view.
Looking back on it there were two obvious focuses for the assassination research, Ruby and Oswald; and most of the effort went on Oswald. Not only was there was little knowledge of Texas among the research community, the climate of the times pushed the researchers, who were mostly left-liberals, towards the American secret state and away from Texas, crime and mere venal politicians.
As for Collum and Sample, who basically solved the case, the irony is that had they known more about it they would never have taken Factor’s story seriously because of his claim that Lee Harvey Oswald was one of the shooters. Few researchers have taken that idea seriously since 1964 or 5. Of course Factor may have been lying, feeding Collum and Sample a load of baloney along with the nugget of truth about his own involvement.
Case closed?
Hardly closed. Knowing who organised the shooting and why is a big step but there are huge areas which remain a mystery. What was the connection between the shooters and Jack Ruby? What about the medical evidence? What happened at the autopsy? Or, rather, at the two autopsies which apparently took place? And whose was the second body autopsied? (My candidate would be Dallas police officer Tippit who closely resembled JFK.) Why did the FBI work so hard to cover everything up? And, centrally, who was Oswald and what was his role? At which point it gets very complicated for, thanks to John Armstrong’s research, it seems very likely that there were two ‘Oswalds’ and that some kind of elaborate intelligence operation was being run with them.
This was Armstrong’s view in 1997:
‘In the early 1950s an intelligence operation was underway that involved two teenage boys: Lee Oswald from Fort Worth and a Russian-speaking boy who was given the name “Harvey Oswald” from New York. Beginning in 1952, these boys lived parallel but separate lives, often in the same city. The ultimate goal was to switch their identities and send Harvey Oswald into Russia, which is exactly what happened, 7 years later.’
If this seems fantastic, in the 1950s the Americans (and the British) knew very little about the Soviet Union and had almost no agents on the ground. How to get an agent into the Soviet Union must have been high on many agenda in the US intelligence community; defection was one obvious way of doing it; and sending in an intelligence officer under the cover of another’s ID was one way of getting someone useful behind the ‘Iron Curtain’. And that cover would have to be good to fool any Soviet intelligence investigation of it.
Notes
1 < http://home.earthlink.net/~sixthfloor/ >
2 Their book’s first edition appeared in 1995. I haven’t seen the later edition but assume that the evidence which has appeared since their first edition and is on their web site is included in it.
I discussed this evidence in my little book Who Shot JFK? (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2002), chapter 5, and in Fortean Times 176, November 2003.
3 For the politically correct: please note that in the United States the ‘Native Americans’ call themselves Indians – at least the couple I met there did – and the biggest publication covering their affairs is called Indian Country Today.
4 Brown’s veracity has been challenged, notably by David Perry at < www.flash.net/~dperry2/brown.pdf > This may cast doubt on her account of being with LBJ on the night before the assassination when he revealed knowledge of the assassination to come. Nonetheless she identified ‘Wallace’ to Collum and Sample.
5 For first degree murder he got a five year suspended sentence, after being defended by one of LBJ’s lawyers.
6 The unravelling Estes fraud was one of three corruption scandals which were gathering around Johnson in 1963 and which evaporated when he became president. The other big one concerned the activities of LBJ’s assistant Bobby Baker who was part of LBJ’s influence system – booze, broads and money – in Washington. Baker eventually got busted but went to jail and kept his mouth shut.
7 Clark became LBJ’s ambassador to Australia – not the insignificant job it might appear because of the symbolic importance of Australia as an ally of America in the war in Vietnam. When the advance publicity on the book reached the Australian media there were loud guffaws at the idea of their Ed Clark organising the assassination.
8 McClellan does not refer to Factor, or The Men on the Sixth Floor.