James DiEugenio

This substack piece apparently is hitting home. First, it has the most views of any article I have written so far. It also has the highest open rate of any article. Third it has the most shares, that is other substack sites are taking notice of it. Good, the more that gets out about hack Hersh the better.

Oh and BTW, one of the people promoting the whole Liggett mess for Nigel Turner, you know body alteration in Texas, was Billy Sol Estes. I mean what a witness.

I should also add, Hilsman said in a later interview that in 1961, Kennedy told him to be ready for an approach to Red China. Over a decade before it happened. So when you add it all up, again, its probative. Mr. Stoll is full of garbage.

One of the most humiliating experiences this whole community ever had was with Nigel Turner putting this on TV, as I recall PBS. And Barr McClellan proclaiming he knew LBJ killed JFK. And Walt Brown going into the DPD with the alleged Jay Harrison fingerprint match. Neither man cross checked the work. Or revealed that Darby and Hoffmeister were not professionally certified at the time. And neither doing the research to locate Wallace in California on the day of the assassination. I have always though that A Texan Looks at Lyndon was one of the worst influences ever on the JFK case. I mean who can trust a book put out by the John Birch society in order to get people to vote for Goldwater. But they did. And My God, a conman, and a thief like Billy Sol? Who once told a judge up on sentencing "I have a problem, I live in a dream world." That is a lethal combination.

Then there is the approach to the DOJ and Steve Trott: Just remember now, Estes now says he has tapes Then there is Billy Sol’s and Caddy’s relationship with the Justice Department. Caddy tried to get an interview with Stephen Trott, a prosecutor in the Justice Department, after Estes had testified before the grand jury in 1984. (p. 238) According to Caddy, Estes now said that Wallace recruited Jack Ruby, and Ruby then recruited Oswald. During the actual assassination, Wallace was on the grassy knoll. Recall, even though the list kept on growing, Estes and Caddy could produce no real evidence for any of the killings. And Caddy had never seemed to seek out what the exculpatory evidence was. As New York City prosecutor Bob Tanenbaum said to this author, as a DA, this is something you always allow for since you do not want to be blindsided at trial. Taking all this into account, its remarkable what Estes and Caddy wanted in return for a deposition. Estes demanded a pardon for his past crimes, immunity from prosecution, relief from his parole restrictions, and his tax liens removed. (p. 240) Very sensibly, Trott countered that he would agree to immunity if Estes would forward any evidence he had in advance, name his sources, and agree to a polygraph. Trott actually sent three FBI agents to Texas for a preliminary interview. When Estes saw them arrive in the lobby of the hotel, he walked out. (ibid)

To say the least, the list is overstated. For instance, Mellen establishes a solid alibi for Wallace for the dates on and about the murder of Marshall. Marshall was killed on Saturday June 3, 1961. On that Friday, Wallace had filled out and signed a security clearance form at work. On that weekend, his brother had brought both his children, and Wallace’s son Michael, out to see Malcolm. The party arrived Friday evening. That weekend they went to the beach and then Disneyland. (pp. 235-36) There are two other points to be made in this regard. The inquiry into Henry Marshall’s death concluded that he was killed somewhere in the middle of his farm, meaning that the person or persons who killed him knew how to get to him after they came in the gate. There is no evidence that Wallace knew Marshall. (ibid) Finally, when Estes began to broadcast his story, he described the scene where Johnson and his co-conspirators had made the decision to kill Marshall. Unfortunately, Johnson had not moved into that home, called The Elms, at that time. (ibid) Concerning the death of Josefa Johnson, she was married to a man named James Moss at the time of her death in 1961. The evening before, she had been at a Christmas Eve gathering at Johnson’s ranch. The only other guests were John and Nellie Connally. The cause of death was first announced as a heart attack, but was changed to a cerebral hemorrhage, or stroke. (pp. 144-45) Again, Wallace was living in California at the time. And further, are we to assume that he took a quickie course in inducing cerebral hemorrhages and making them look like natural deaths? As per the assassination of John F. Kennedy, again Wallace was in California at the time, working for Ling Electronics. And in 1963, his son Michael had moved in with him. Michael recalls his father being home for dinner and trying to console him about Kennedy’s murder, which occurred in his home state of Texas. (p. 257)

At about this point, Doug Caddy entered the arena and raised the Estes' accusations to nothing less than a Wagnerian Ring Cycle pitch of intensity. Now, according to Estes and Caddy, there were more dead people due to the Estes/Johnson association than Capone had killed in Chicago. Oh, and Estes had tapes too. In 1979, as he was being carted off to prison the second time, Billy Sol Estes began to carve out the foundation for the LBJ/Wallace murder of Henry Marshall construct. Estes told his escort, former Texas Ranger Clint Peoples, that Marshall had not killed himself. The authorities should be looking in another direction. Peoples assumed this to mean Washington DC. When Estes got out of jail, he appeared before a grand jury called on the Marshall murder. Estes would now be represented by attorney Douglas Caddy. Caddy had been trying to get Estes’s story out even while he was in prison—through the auspices of Galveston rightwing millionaire Shearn Moody. (p. 232) Estes now told Peoples that Mac Wallace killed Henry Marshall. Peoples contacted John Paschall, DA of Roberson County, where Marshall had been killed. Peoples convinced Paschall to reopen the Marshall case by calling a grand jury. On March 20, 1984, over 20 years after Marshall’s murder, Estes testified that Johnson had ordered the murder of Henry Marshall at a meeting in Washington with Carter, Estes and Wallace. Caddy then brought these charges to the attention of the Justice Department. But later, in addition to Marshall, Estes and Caddy now listed eight other people who had been killed by Wallace at the behest of LBJ. This included Josefa Johnson, Kinser, and John Kennedy. Like Joe McCarthy and communists in the State Department, the Caddy/Estes number was later raised up to 17. (Ibid, p. 236)

The following is a summary of how this all really started: it was through Billy Sol, then circulated through that pulp book by the John Birchers which sold million of copies, A Texas Looks at Lyndon and which every LBJ did it advocate uses without discrimination. Estes was convicted in both state and federal courts. He exhausted his appeals in 1965. He then went to prison and was paroled in 1971. In 1979, he was convicted of tax fraud and went to prison for four more years. As many authors have noted, including Mellen, Estes always blamed Johnson for his legal problems. He somehow expected LBJ to help save him, though it is difficult to see how that could have happened after the newspaper series was published and then sent to Washington. To put it mildly, Johnson had very little, if any, influence with Bobby Kennedy. Once the publisher sent the article to Washington, Estes was doomed—and LBJ could not save him. Yet, irrationally, Estes seemed to think that he could. He became obsessed with this idea, and as Mellen shows in an interview, Estes became quite embittered toward Johnson. It was a bitterness that never left him. (See pp. 242-43)

Now, where did a lot of this baloney come from? From a witness who very few people think has any credibility at all: a conman and thief Billy Sol Estes Then there was Billy Sol Estes. Estes was a large contributor to Johnson’s Texas campaigns and the 1960 Kennedy/Johnson ticket. To say that Estes was a con man and fraudster does not really describe the nature and scope of the man’s swindles. He first specialized in cotton allotments. He convinced farmers who had their land taken away by eminent domain to purchase land for cotton from him. He would then lease it back. Once, a year later, when the first payment was due, by pre-arrangement, the farmer would default. In other words, Estes had purchased the allotment through lease fees. But since the transaction was not a genuine sale, the deal was illegal. He took the money from this fraud to build another fraud. This was in the anhydrous ammonia business—fertilizer. He sold mortgages on nonexistent fertilizer tanks by convincing farmers to buy them sight unseen. He would then lease them from the buyer for the same amount as the mortgage payment. He used these phony mortgages to get large bank loans. The aim was to corner the anhydrous ammonia business. As many have said, approximately 80% of the fertilizer warehouses were empty. The problem with the schemes was that, in his attempt to corner the fertilizer market, Estes was underselling the product so low that he was losing millions in the process. Not even his cotton allotment scam could bail him out. (Mellen, p. 140) The lending companies grew suspicious. They began to suspect the fertilizer warehouses were non-existent. On top of that, in 1961, even though he said he was worth millions, Estes had paid no income tax in four years. (ibid, p. 141) As with Baker, an unhappy business partner, Harold Orr, was the first to expose Estes. He declared that there was no fertilizer in those warehouses.

On top of Wallace being in California on the day of the JFK murder, there is this. Neither man Harrison employed for fingerprint analysis was currently certified. Which means a lot, like they are not familiar with current techniques through taking classes. An important matter that Garrett discovered was that neither Darby nor Hoffmeister was accredited by the IAI at the time they did their work for Jay Harrison in 1998. One must renew one’s license every five years. This is done by taking education credits, continued work experience, and by passing a test. According to Garrett, who had been in charge of the IAI certification programs, Darby’s certification had expired in 1984, fourteen years before Harrison recruited him. Hoffmeister’s expired in 1996. (p. 261) Why Harrison did not check on this issue in advance is extremely puzzling, especially since Harrison had been a policeman for a number of years, and had to have known what the IAI was, and how its trademark—or lack of—impacted the credibility of the work done by Darby and Hoffmeister. Another problem that Garrett had with the Harrison/Darby file was the same issue that Hoffmeister raised: the quality of the reproductions that Darby had worked with. Garrett actually told Mellen that he would not have proceeded if this is what he had had to base his judgment on. (p. 258) First, the quality of the copy of the unidentified box print from the Warren Commission was simply inferior, to the point that it was unreliable. So Mellen got an actual first generation photograph of this print from the National Archives. And in her book she shows the difference between the two, which is quite considerable. (See the last photo in photo section.) But further, Garrett did not want to utilize the Wallace print from the Kinser case, which Harrison had secured from the Texas authorities. These had been smudged since “the roller used to make the inked print had not been thoroughly cleaned off after its use with the previous subject.” (p. 259) So Mellen attained Wallace’s Navy fingerprints. Using high technology, including a 256 shade gray scale that Darby did not have, Garrett now went to work. He concluded that the unidentified box print was not a match with the Wallace print. First he noted eight points of discrepancy between the two—that is, specific mismatches. And he described these in detail. (p. 259) Beyond that, he brought up problems with all fourteen of the alleged matches that Darby had made. Some of these were due to the poor copies he had to work with. But also part of it was the black and white methodology employed. Garrett indicated where the “plotting” was off due to incorrect alignments. (p. 260) Garrett therefore concluded that there was no doubt that the unidentified Warren Commission box print did not belong to Wallace.

Part 3 of the examiantion [From 1960 on] Wallace spent most of the rest of his life in California working as a control supervisor for Ling. He married a young woman named Virginia Ledgerwood. (p. 169). Later on, ONI lowered his clearance from SECRET to CONFIDENTIAL. This may have been due to a DUI charge Wallace had gotten. It resulted in a demotion at work. Wallace reacted poorly to this. He got depressed and began drinking even more. In 1969 he and Virginia divorced and sold their house. (p. 218) He used the money to take out insurance policies on his three children—he had a third child with Virginia. He decided to return to Texas. Wallace was dealing with severe health problems at this time. On the ride back to Texas, he passed out in a diabetic coma and sustained a concussion. A hitchhiker he picked up saved him from even worse injuries. (p. 219) Because of this, Wallace made out a will in April of 1970. In the last months of his life, he taught part-time at Texas A&M, and worked part-time at his brother’s insurance office. On the evening of January 7, 1971 Wallace died in a single car accident. He had driven off the road and into a concrete bridge abutment. The policeman who wrote out the accident report felt that Wallace was dead at the scene. And, in fact, he was pronounced DOA at the hospital. (p. 221) Jay Harrison questioned whether or not Wallace died that night. But Mellen documents the fact that several of his family members saw the body at the funeral parlor in an open casket. It was Malcolm Wallace. To further this idea, Harrison had also stated that Wallace visited his first wife in 1980. Also not true. This was their son Michael, who resembled his father. (p. 251)

Part 2 of the Examination: But the longer the parade marched on, the odder a certain aspect of this acceptance began to appear. First, no one had done an independent analysis of the print match. After all, Hoffmeister had recanted based upon the quality of the materials he and Darby had to work with. Apparently this did not mean much to the leaping exegetes ready to board the ”LBJ did it” train. Second, no one worked on a real biography of Malcolm Wallace. Was he known as a professional killer? Did he have a close association with the people Estes said he did: like LBJ’s factotum in Texas Cliff Carter, Estes himself, and Johnson? Was he politically committed to everything JFK was against? If not, was there any way to see if he had monetarily profited from all the murders that Estes said he had performed for LBJ? And perhaps the most important evidentiary point of all: Was there any evidence that Wallace was elsewhere on the days that both Marshall and Kennedy were murdered? Incredibly, no one seriously posed these questions for well over a decade. Innocent outsiders who listened to the LBJ cacophony were, understandably, impressed: with all that noise emanating from so many bongo drums, there had to be a real signal in there somewhere; it couldn’t all be much ado about nothing. Could it?

Tom is correct. Part 1 of my review: So you get the whole story In 1998, the late JFK researcher Jay Harrison had a brainstorm. It was simple in concept. He would secure a fingerprint impression left unidentified by the Warren Commission from one of the boxes on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. He would then secure the fingerprints of Malcolm Wallace, the man accused by ex-con Billy Sol Estes of being a hit man for Lyndon Johnson. Estes had accused Wallace of killing John Kennedy. Once Harrison had these two fingerprint samples, he would then enlist a fingerprint analyst to examine them. If it was Wallace’s print on the box, then one could safely assume that he was on the sixth floor either during, or immediately after, the Kennedy assassination. This would indicate that somehow Johnson was involved with the JFK hit; or else why would Wallace be there? As many have noted, it was really Estes who had drawn the crime in this manner, i.e., with Johnson as the prime mover and Malcolm Wallace as the assassin, or chief of the hit team. He had done the first part—LBJ as the prime force behind the JFK hit—in an aside to a man named Clint Peoples, a Texas lawman who had escorted him off to jail. (Joan Mellen, Faustian Bargains, p. 230) The second part—Wallace as assassin—was done years later, when Estes got out of jail and testified before a grand jury. That grand jury had been called to reopen the 1961 murder of another Texas law man, Henry Marshall. Marshall was investigating some of Billy Sol’s crimes in Texas. Right before the case was about to explode, Marshall was murdered by rifle fire. He had been shot multiple times. Incredibly, the local sheriff ruled the death a suicide. In 1984, Estes got out of prison, after his second stay there. He appeared before the Marshall grand jury. He implicated Malcolm Wallace as the killer of Henry Marshall. Wallace had done this at the behest of Vice President Lyndon Johnson. For whom he had also killed President Kennedy. If Harrison’s concept turned out to be true, then it would give new credibility to the accusations of Billy Sol Estes, who many observers had severe doubts about. Estes had promised things like tape recordings and phone records to bolster his case, but he had never produced these exhibits, even when he was asked for them by Stephen Trott of the Justice Department. Harrison enlisted two fingerprint analysts to confirm or deny that the prints matched. One was Nathan Darby; the other was Harold Hoffmeister. Darby went first. After examining the prints he decided they matched at 14 points of identification. Which would be good enough for a criminal legal action. Hoffmeister then said he agreed. But a day later, he recanted. He said that after doing a re-examination, he felt that since both men worked with photocopies, the identification points were not adduced in a reliable manner. (Mellen, Faustian Bargains, p. 256) As we shall see, Hoffmeister’s complaint was a legitimate one. But Harrison felt that he had recanted out of fear, since he had now found out who the print examination involved. So Harrison went ahead. A press conference was called. Darby’s work was submitted to the homicide division of the Dallas Police Department and to the FBI. (ibid) The Bureau ended up disagreeing with Darby, but they did not submit any specific critique of his work. Harrison and his coterie therefore continued along in their mini campaign about Johnson and Wallace killing Kennedy.

Hersh, Jennings, Gus Russo, and the guys who got JFK killed, the Secret Service. Sterling sources.

BTW, the thing about the meeting in Paris with Cubela in November is really something. As Larry Hancock pointed out to me, and so does Talbot in Brothers, is the this is when the rapprochement with Castro is heating up. And Helms was aware of this. In other words, the CIA is plotting to kill Castro at the time that they knew JFK was heading, according to Attwood, towards normalization of relations with Cuba. So in this way Hersh has become now a defense attorney for the CIA. Whew.

BTW, how far out there was Kennedy in his foreign policy? Roger Hilsman, who worked for him in the Far East department, said in his book To Move a Nation, that things changed after he died, for example in Indonesia, for the simple reason that he was the only one supporting those positions. In the case of Indonesia, everyone was surprised when Johnson did not sign the support bill which was on Kennedy's desk at the time of his murder. Because they all knew JFK would have signed it as a matter of routine. Therefore, Hilsman and others now realized that a big change was coming for Sukarno. What an understatement.

BTW, for those not aware of it, this is the second time I went after Hersh since last year. Here is the first time. https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/sy-hersh-falls-on-his-face-again-and-again-and-again As I have concluded, Hersh never got over the fact that his book on Kennedy was roundly flogged even in the MSM. And deservedly so, since it was just a terrible hatchet job in every way. And it was clearly aimed at being so from the start. The dead giveaway was that he ignored the CIA IG Report on the plots to kill Castro. Even though it had been declassified before he wrote his book. When you do something like that, its very clear you have an agenda. So now with Substack, he is allowed to reissue this BS, and people actually pay for it. In my opinion the guy has become a clown show.

That is a really odd rejoinder about Ben. Has Matt Koch made a lot of defenses of Bobby Kennedy Jr.? Did I miss them? And this whole Ira Stoll idea about the Overton Window is typically fruity. But I have to see it when other people post it Kennedy was pushing Medicare and was going to have it passed, he was talking about Universal Healthcare, back in 1962. He submitted an executive order on civil rights within 45 days of being inaugurated. When you add in all those to what he was doing in his foreign policy, I mean get real. Just look what happened after he was killed: in Indonesia, in Vietnam, in the Dominican Republic, in Congo. Concerning the last, as John Newman proved, the CIA was monitoring Lumumba's escape routes so the allies of Belgium could track him as he was running. This was in addition to trying to kill him previously. And when you add in what JFK was doing in the MIddle East with Nasser? Compare that with what Obama did with the secularist leader of Syria, remember Timber Sycamore? Compare that with what Obama and HRC did In Libya: using NATO to bomb Africa? I mean please. Kennedy was pro military? Yeah, that is why he rejected their advice on Laos, Cuba, Berlin and Vietnam. That is why he had profane nicknames for them, which I cannot even repeat on this forum. One of them is two words that both begin with F. Kennedy was the most liberal president since FDR, and no president since has been more liberal than he was. Period.

So this idea that somehow Kennedy was really a conservative and an isolationist type America Firster simply has no foundation in fact. Kennedy had an activist foreign policy, which he himself ran, sometimes through his brother. Since he found out with the Bay of Pigs operation that the people around him could not be trusted. One of the ways he was activist was his encouragement of the decolonization waves that were occurring at the time, particularly in regards to France. He even did this after France titularly gave up its holdings in Africa. Kennedy did not think the commonwealth colonies were free enough. This is a really fascinating subject that you can only find in one book that I know of, namely Philip Muehlenbeck's Betting on the Africans. (Chapter 8) Imagine doing something like that with Pat Buchanan? I mean please.

One last point, after Hammarskjold was killed, and I think that is a certainty today, it was Kennedy who went to the UN twice in order to make a priority of restoring Katanga into Congo. And it was JFK who approved the final UN military operation, Grand Slam, that finally quelled the rebellion. Compare this to what Ike did before and LBJ after. Ike authorized the assassination plots through Dulles to murder Lumumba. Johnson sent Cuban exile pilots to eliminate the last of Lumumba's followers and said this was due to a Red China plot! And now the White House all but abandoned the UN (Jonathan Kwitny, Endless Enemies, p. 79)

When we start relying on writers who work for the likes of Newsmax, and the New York Sun to render us their picture of who Kennedy was and where he was on the political spectrum, we might as well pick up our chips and go home. Comparing Kennedy to the likes of Gerald K. Smith, Lindbergh, and Pat Buchanan? In studying Kennedy's career for years, going on decades, I can safely say that Kennedy was the most liberal president since FDR. And I base this of the study of about 55 books about Kennedy's foreign policy, his ciivl rights program and his economics. The idea that Kennedy was an America First isolationist is so fruity that it is simply preposterous. Kennedy had a wide, sweeping, and visionary view of what America's role should be with Europe, in the Third World, and with the communist world at that time. He was activist in foreign policy and, like Roosevelt, would be willing to butt heads with our allies to be fair to the struggling nations of the Third World e.g. the French/Algeria conflict, advocating for Indonesia vs the Dutch at the New York Agreement. But he saw Berlin as the trip line in Europe, therefore the Berlin Crisis. He was going to preserve the Atlantic Alliance. Which is the likely reason he was willing to go to the brink during the Cuban Missile Crisis, since he though Nikita wanted to trade for West Berlin. I also think that Pat Buchanan would have had problems with the rapprochement policy JFK had with Cuba and the USSR. JFK was an internationalist, one who was willing to work through the UN and his colleague the admirable Dag Hammarskjold. Who Kennedy called the greatest statesman of the 20th century. Because Dag thought the UN could be a forum for the have not nations against the haves. And he used it that way. Do we have to go into civil rights? Kennedy did more for civil rights in three years than FDR, Truman and Ike did in three decades. I mean is anyone here going to say that Ike was an advocate for civil rights? Please, Ike advised Warren to vote against Brown v Board. Bobby Kennedy, at his U of Georgia Law Day speech, spent 25 minutes explaining how the Kennedy administration would support Brown v Board. And President Kennedy signed the first affirmative action order in US history. Kennedy was a Keynesian in economics. His chief economic advisor Walter Heller, used to make fun of Friedman and his ideas. And it was Kennedy who first began to design the War on Poverty, not Johnson. Ever hear of a guy named David Hackett? And JFK hated running deficits. HIs tax cut was done to stave off a coming recession, and its benefits were more aimed toward the middle and working class. (Battling Wall Street, by Donald Gibson, p. 23)And the reason he decided to go with it was because Heller told him it would take longer to counter a recession with capital expenditures. The right has done many things to adulterate history. Like saying we should and could have won in Vietnam. Claiming JFK as one of their own is probably the worst thing of all. But its the way a hack like Ira Stoll gets his ticket punched. That is the way the game is played over there. Those should not be the rules of the game here.

Ben, why even talk to this guy? He has an agenda a mile wide and about an inch deep. Kennedy, America First? What baloney. Here is the first paragraph from Wiki about America First: America First refers to a populist political theory in the United States that emphasizes the fundamental notion of "putting America first", which generally involves disregarding global affairs and focusing solely on domestic policy in the United States. This generally denotes policies of isolationism, American nationalism, and protectionist trade policy.[1] The last person I know to run on this was Pat Buchanan. And Naomi Klein was very unfair to Sachs. She never got his side of what really happened. But how does this relate to what Jeff says about Kennedy in his book? Or interviewing Monika about her excellent book? Anyone who considers Ira Stoll a serious commentator on Kennedy has no credibility. I will soon be doing a two part essay at Substack about Kennedy and his opposition to the Neocons and Ira Stoll types. I am still trying to figure out why Koch is here. What interest has he shown in the actual murder of JFK? None that I can see.

BTW, Hersh also maintains that Oswald shot Kennedy. How many of us know that the story behind why Jennings did that godawful Oswald did it special 2003 special goes back to this.

Since William posted that piece of trash from England about Jackie, making more work for me, I might as well post my most recent demolition of a Kennedy smear. Sy Hersh never got over the pounding he took over his godawful book about JFK, The Dark Side of Camelot. As he has been slowly but surely marginalized by his former employers, the MSM, he has now taken refuge on Substack. One of his preoccupations there is to somehow restore the reputation of his cruddy book on Kennedy. Well, sorry Sy, you are exposed again. I am getting a bit weary of doing this. My Substack is still free. https://substack.com/home/post/p-145676277?source=queue

Nice one Ron. 😃 I mean Leslie.