Larry Hancock
Texas: JFK Lancer Productions and Publications, 2006; $35.00, h/back, ISBN 0-9774657-1-3,
Faced with the vast pile of data which now constitutes the JFK assassination literature, an author – a serious author, at any rate; and Hancock is serious – has to chose a path s/he is going to follow through it, a hypothesis. In the first section of this book Hancock follows the anti-Castro Cuban thread, which has pretty much become the consensus view among JFK researchers; and he starts with the apparent advance knowledge of the plot of John Martino, a minor criminal and anti-Castro activist. He presents a selection of the known and reliable evidence to suggest that the anti-Castro Cubans – with organised crime and/or CIA links – planned to kill JFK, and leave a dead Oswald framed as a pro-Castro, communist assassin, triggering another US invasion of Cuba and scuppering JFK’s plans to do a deal with Castro. This is terribly plausible, a good hypothesis, and Hancock handles the immensely detailed material very well; but the basic problem remains: the trails all peter out as we arrive at Dealey Plaza.
In the next section he shows how LBJ, the incoming president, organised the cover-up, heading-off attempts to get a real investigation. This ground is not nearly so well ploughed and this section is very useful indeed. (5)But this raises what Hancock calls ‘a very uncomfortable question…..Is there any possible way in which the vice-President of the United States could somehow have become influenced by a conspiracy?’ (p 308; emphases added). He thinks there is and tells the Bobby Baker story, pointing out that LBJ’s closest aide Baker and a lobbyist friend of them both, Fred Black, were in business with organised crime figures; and this might have been revealed by an enquiry (Baker was already being investigated in Congress). Hence, perhaps, LBJ’s role in organising the cover-up. More tentatively he offers the outline of the Billy Sol Estes – Malcolm ‘Mac’ Wallace story. He does not take seriously the claim that the murder was organised by LBJ’s lawyer/fixer, Ed Clark, using ‘Mac’ Wallace, as suggested in Barr McClellan’s Blood, Money and Power (6) but he does mention Sample and Collum’s The Men on the Sixth Floor (7) which first uncovered Wallace, in a section headed ‘Other commentary on the Johnson speculation’. Is the Estes-LBJ-Sample-Collum material ‘commentary’? No: it’s another hypothesis. By referring to this LBJ material Hancock tells us that he thinks there is something going on here but he isn’t quite sure how seriously it should be taken.
Hancock thinks Oswald’s pro- and anti-Castro Cuban activities, not to mention his previous roles with various federal agencies, entail that his ‘legend’ was created precisely to make him the patsy in the murder conspiracy; that this means we have to have the anti-Castro Cubans and/or the CIA and organised crime in the picture; and if this is the case, how does that fit with the Clark-Wallace-LBJ thesis? But this is not necessary: the ‘legend’ may have been under construction for other reasons.
Hancock can’t believe that the murder was a purely Texas event but I don’t see the problem. Johnson’s crime gang had already killed people in covering-up the Estes scandal; Mac Wallace had been convicted in Texas of first degree murder in 1951 and received a suspended sentence; why would they not think they could kill the president in Texas and cover that up, too? It was just a crude bushwhack in broad daylight. We’ve seen it a hundred times in the cowboy movies. The fact that Oswald – or the Oswalds, if we take John Armstrong’s two Oswalds thesis seriously – was/were apparently being ‘dangled’, to use Hancock’s term, as tough guy ex-Marine, talking of killing Castro, and as a pro-Castro sympathiser, does not entail that this be part of the assassination conspiracy. (8)The use of Oswald as the patsy may have just have been opportunism by the local LBJ people. (Dallas was quite a small town in the 1960s.)
Hancock discusses all the stories which apparently show advance knowledge of the assassination – gossip on the racist right, in the mob and among the anti-Castro Cubans. Sample and Collum tell us in The Men on the Sixth Floor that an oil man they met in Houston told them that half of Texas knew that LBJ had Kennedy killed. Is this plausible? I have no way of knowing. We know so little about Texas politics and organised crime in the period. For example, it is still not possible to say for certain how significant a figure Jack Ruby was in organised crime. There is little information on the relationship between the mob, law enforcement and local politicians in Texas. There are just accounts which suggest power in Texas was wielded with payoffs and murder – the Billy Sol Estes case being the most conspicuous example.
This is a big book, over 500 pages of text, and it contains far more than I have mentioned. There are 100 pages of appendices in which Hancock discusses aspects of the case, all fascinating stuff for the buff. In a sense this is less a conventional account of the murder than discussion of a number of hypotheses. But the big news, to me, is that the LBJ-dunnit thesis, the ‘Mac’ Wallace and Billy Sol Estes story, is creeping into what we might call mainstream JFK research.
Notes
- John Armstrong does a more detailed version of the same material in his book Harvey and Lee reviewed in Lobster 47.
- New York: Hanover House, 2003. This is a very bad book, with some interesting bits and pieces on the political system in Texas in the 1960s interspersed with ‘faction’ about the assassination. What it boils down to is this: McClellan worked in the Clark law firm, with LBJ as one of its biggest clients, and was told by another lawyer in the firm that Clark organised the murder.
- See <http://home.earthlink.net/~sixthfloor/>
- Comparing the calm, rational, mild Oswald who did the radio interview and made the distinction between being a Marxist and being a fan of the Soviet Union, with the reports of the gung-ho would-be assassin of Castro – is this really the same person? Armstrong’s ‘two Oswalds’ thesis makes a kind of immediate sense when you consider the wildly contrasting behaviour and beliefs attributed to ‘Oswald’.