Blood, Money & Power: How L.B.J. Killed J.F.K.

McClellan brings an insider's account to legal maneuvers around the LBJ sphere and, like many other books, paints a convincing picture that LBJ and his lawyer buddies operated as a criminal organization leveraging political power. Tying to the JFK assassination the author points to what he sees as evidence of pay offs for the crime while I think he undercuts his arguments with dramatized "faction" about a conspiracy. At least for me, the most convincing parts revolve around
Malcolm Everett "Mac" Wallace. Wallace is a known killer with alleged participation in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. The author describe the murder by Wallace On October 22, 1951 in Austin, of John Douglas Kinser, a 33-year-old sophomore show more student at the University of Texas. (Sources say that both Kinser and Wallace had been having simultaneous affairs with Josefa Johnson, sister of LBJ, and her life as a free spirit is touched on here.)

In 1984, a decade after the death of LBJ, Billie Sol Estes told a grand jury investigating the 1961 shooting death of Henry Marshall, an official with the Department of Agriculture, that Wallace was his murderer. Estes, a long-time conman in the LBJ sphere who served two prison terms for his crimes, said that Marshall possessed information linking Estes's fraudulent schemes to a heavily-funded political slush fund run by Lyndon B. Johnson. According to Estes, he and Johnson discussed the need to stop Marshall from making their illegal ties public. The author uses the case to paint LBJ as an indicted co-conspirator to murder and thus making involvement in the presidential assassination more realistic.

McClellan reiterates many of Estes's claims stating that Johnson, Wallace, Estes, and law partner Cliff Carter were responsible for the death of Marshall. According to McClellan, Wallace fired one shot at Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, then ran to escape. He states that fingerprints and an eyewitness placed Wallace in that location and that Wallace could be seen as a "shadowy figure" in photos of the building. (Books like Faustian Bargains: Lyndon Johnson and Mac Wallace in the Robber Baron Culture of Texas state that the fingerprint claim has been discredited. This author claims Wallace partially altered his fingerprints with sandpaper and that some experts do see a match to Wallace.) show less