In this 8 th episode of the series, we continue our analysis of Lyndon Johnson by looking at Johnson’s order to his pilots to fly his plane in bad weather, the likelihood that Johnson would have been removed from the 1964 presidential ticket if JFK had lived, Madeleine Brown’s claim about the alleged party at the Murchison home the night before the assassination, and Barr McClellan’s assertion that Johnson’s attorney, Ed Clark, was a central figure in the assassination.
Over the last seven episodes, we’ve studied the life and times of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the man who would ascend from the Vice Presidency to become the 36th chief executive of the United States when President John F. Kennedy was murdered in broad daylight on November 22, 1963.
I had previously said this would be our final episode of the LBJ series. But, to get all of the information in and provide a meaningful conclusion, we’re going to need a 9th installment on LBJ, which will be out next week.
In this 8th episode of the series, we continue our analysis of Lyndon Johnson by looking at Johnson’s order to his pilots to fly his plane in bad weather, the likelihood that Johnson would have been removed from the 1964 presidential ticket if JFK had lived, Madeleine Brown’s claim about the alleged party at the Murchison home the night before the assassination, and Barr McClellan’s assertion that Johnson’s attorney, Ed Clark, was a central figure in the assassination.
LBJ Gets His Pilots Killed
On February 17, 1961, about a month after being sworn in as Vice President, Lyndon Johnson called for his airplane pilots to pick him up at his ranch in the Texas hill country along the Pedernales river. The pilots had stayed overnight in Austin the previous day. Pilot Harold Teague told Johnson that it would be extremely dangerous to fly because of the weather and because there were no ground control instruments on the landing strip at the Johnson ranch.
According to author James Evetts Haley, Johnson is said to have QUOTE “exploded, venting his profanity upon the pilot, demanding to know, ‘what do you think I’m paying you for?” And telling Teague to QUOTE “get that plane to the ranch!”1 According to Barr McClellan, who we’ll get to later in this episode, Johnson’s urgency was because he had to visit with Billie Sol Estes in person regarding Henry Marshall’s ongoing investigation.2 The timeline would fit, but, I could not find any corroboration for that idea.
Teague, the pilot, called his wife before the flight and told her that he had been ordered to make the flight. When the pilots searched for the runway through the fog, they couldn’t see it, and there was no technology on the ground to help them find it. The two pilots were killed instantly when the plane crashed into a rocky hillside about seven miles from Vice President Johnson’s ranch.3 Johnson told the Rocky Mountain News, QUOTE “I’ve lost the best pilot in the world and two wonderful friends. If they had been thirty feet higher they would’ve missed [the hill].”4
Even with a tragedy that was caused by Johnson’s selfish disregard of aviation safety protocols, Johnson still found a way to blame the incident on the pilots.5
LBJ On the 1964 Ticket?
Between the Billie Sol Estes scandal, the Bobby Baker scandal, the Don Reynolds testimony, and the general acrimony between Johnson and the Kennedys, an important historical question is, ‘if President Kennedy had lived, would Lyndon Johnson have been invited to run on the 1964 Presidential ticket, or would he have been replaced?’
An October 29th, 1963 Newsday article on the Bobby Baker scandal said that the Justice Department started the investigation to embarrass Johnson so that he would not be on the 1964 ticket, according to unnamed sources.6
In a press conference two days later, President Kennedy was asked whether he wanted Johnson on the ticket and whether he expected that Johnson would be on the ticket. Kennedy responded QUOTE “Yes, to both of those questions. That is correct.”7 So, the last time Kennedy publicly spoke on the issue, he said that Johnson would be on the ticket. However, the president’s statement did not accurately reflect what was going on behind the scenes.
You may recall that when Bobby Baker was being investigated by the Senate in the Fall of 1963, it was Attorney General Robert Kennedy who was providing information about Baker to Senator John Williams, who was leading the investigation. RFK even assigned a Justice Department lawyer to supply the committee with information about Johnson and Baker’s financial dealings.8
Burkett Van Kirk was the chief counsel for the Republicans on the Senate Rules Committee during these investigations. Van Kirk told author Seymour Hersh that Bobby Kennedy’s motive in providing this information to the Republicans was QUOTE “To get rid of Johnson. To dump him. I am as sure of that as I am that the sun comes up in the East….There’s no doubt that Reynold’s testimony would have gotten Johnson out of the vice presidency.”9
Colonel Howard Burris, who was Johnson’s military aide, told historian John Newman that Lyndon Johnson knew he was going to be thrown off the ticket.10 Evelyn Lincoln, President Kennedy’s personal secretary said that the president discussed the Bobby Baker investigation with her and told her that Lyndon Johnson would not be his running mate. This conversation was just two days before the president left Washington for his 1963 Texas Trip.11 Similarly, President Kennedy mentioned that he was leaning towards not keeping Johnson on the ticket to North Carolina governor Terry Sanford.12 Hubert Humphrey also said that he heard Bobby Kennedy was plotting Johnson’s ouster from the 1964 ticket.13 On November 22nd, the Dallas Morning News ran an article with the title “Nixon Predicts Kennedy May Drop Johnson.”14
Conversely, Bobby Kennedy said during oral history interviews that there was no plan to drop Johnson. It should be noted, that those statements were made while Johnson was the sitting president and when Bobby had political ambitions of his own.15 So, while it remains a somewhat disputed issue, we can safely say that public statements were to the effect that LBJ would not be dropped, but behind closed doors, those in the know were of the opinion that Johnson would not have remained on the 1964 presidential ticket, if John F. Kennedy had survived Dallas.
Madeleine Brown
We can’t say that we have fully covered the JFK Assassination related allegations against Lyndon Johnson without discussing Johnson’s alleged mistress, Madeleine Brown.
On November 5, 1982, during a meeting of the Dallas Press Club, Brown stood up and announced to the room that she had an extramarital relationship with Lyndon Johnson from 1948 until 1967.16 She claims to have caught Johnson’s eye at a 1948 party associated with his radio station, KTBC, and says that the next time she saw Johnson, their affair began.17
Brown is most known for the claims that she made about Johnson related to the JFK Assassination. Here’s what she said in the documentary series, The Men Who Killed Kennedy:
Lyndon called me from the Texas Hotel and he was still irate. I said, Lyndon, about last night, and he went to cursing (he used foul language all the time) and he said ‘Those Kennedys, they will never embarrass me again. That’s no threat. That’s a promise.” And I’d like the entire world to know how I personally feel, it’s the fact that Lyndon Johnson knew about the assassination and was a part of it.18
…I met Lyndon on New Year’s Eve at the Driskoll Hotel in Austin. And the people in Dallas, I mean, everyone was talking about Lyndon Johnson was the cause of the assassination. And it made my heart very heavy. I just couldn’t believe that he could be a part of something so bad. So, I confronted Lyndon. I said, Lyndon, you’ve got to tell me, were you part of the assassination. And, of course, he had a high tempered fit, hit the wall, and he was very irate and angry. And he said “No, I was not, but the oil people, he called them the fat cats of Texas that I knew and intelligence was the cause of the assassination.”19
So, Madeleine Brown says that she had an affair with Johnson and that he admitted that the assassination was not done by a lone nut, but instead was a plot between Texas fat cats and intelligence. But, Brown is perhaps best known for her story about a party at Clint Murchison’s house on the night before the assassination with an impressive guest list.
‘We had H.L. Hunt, Murchison, Lyndon Johnson made an appearance, we had Hoover, we had Richard Nixon. They were the most influential people there. But, I was under the impression that, since J. Edgar Hoover was there, it was to honor Hoover, rather than anything else.
When Lyndon came in, no one was expecting him. So, when Lyndon arrived at Clint Murchison’s they all went into a conference room. And you could just feel the atmosphere. When Lyndon came out, I was, of course, happy to see him. I did not know that he was going to be there. And he whispered in my ear at that time “those blankety blank Kennedys will never embarrass me again. That’s no threat. That’s a promise.” So, he departed the party and the party rapidly broke up after Lyndon departed.’20
This is a huge claim that Brown is making. She’s saying that the night before the assassination Lyndon Johnson met with Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, along with Texas oil tycoons like Hunt and Murchison, and that during that party there was a private meeting, which appeared to be about the assassination because Johnson came out of the meeting saying that the Kennedy’s would never embarrass him again.
Brown is not alone in asserting that this party with big name VIPs happened the night before the assassination. A woman named May Newman, who worked in another house for Virginia Murchison, Clint Sr.’s second wife, also supports Brown’s claim. Here’s what she had to say:
I remember well the night before the assassination. I worked with a man called Jewel Pfeiffer, a black man, who was Virginia Murchison’s chauffeur. He got a call from her step-son, John, at the big house. They were having a big party for a very special guest that was coming from Washington to go to the party, by the name of Bulldog, which I found out later was J. Edgar Hoover. And he said he was very excited to go to the airport to take this guest to a very special party. And I asked him if he got a good tip and he said, “No” and he was very upset.
He had to go back that night to take J. Edgar Hoover to the airport to go back to Washington. And he still didn’t get a tip.
Further verification of Hoover’s presence in Dallas, came from a friend of May’s who worked at the Murchison family home. Beulah May Holman, she was the cook at John and Lupe’s house. She wanted me to help her that night, which I didn’t. But, she told me she was cooking Quail and I wanted the recipe, so she gave it to me. She said that a very important guest by the name of J. Edgar Hoover was coming and I should go out to help so I could get to meet him. If he was a film star, I probably would have gone, but I didn’t know who he was. No, not at that time.21
So, May Newman claims that two other people told her about the party – and, specifically, the fact that J. Edgar Hoover was attending. There’s the chauffeur, Jewel Pfeiffer, who says he went to pick up Hoover at the airport and then take him back later that night, and that he didn’t get a tip either time. And, then there’s Beulah May Holeman, the cook, who also said Hoover was coming to the party. Wearing my lawyer hat, the first thing that comes to mind is that May Newman did not have personal knowledge of either of these facts. She merely relayed what other people told her. And we have no other corroboration for those two stories. Still, standing alone, the fact that Newman says this, tends to support the existence of an assassination eve party with J. Edgar Hoover.
Brown Counterpoints
However, there are several counterpoints to Madeleine Brown and May Newman’s claims. First, there seems to be confusion about where the party happened. For May Newman’s story to make sense, the party would have been held at John Murchison’s house (one of Clint Sr’s sons and the brother of Clint, Jr.) – not Clint Murchison, Sr’s house. Beulah May Holeman, who told May Newman about the dinner party for Hoover, was a cook for John Murchison and his wife, Lupe, at their house.22 Clint Murchison, Sr.’s closest home to Dallas was in Glad Oaks, Texas – south of Athens, Texas.
Now, let’s look at what we know about the whereabouts of each of these men on the evening of November 21st, 1963. First, Clint Murchison, Sr. was at his home at Glad Oaks the night before the assassination – and there was no party - according to Eula Tilley, who was a cook for Murchison, Sr. at the time.23
Another person who Brown says was at the Murchison party was H.L. Hunt. But, Hunt’s assistant, John Curington says that H.L. Hunt was not present. If Hunt would have attended such a party, Curington says that he would have been Hunt’s driver. And Curington definitively states that there was no such party on the night before the assassination.24
As for Richard Nixon, it is true that he was in Dallas on the night before the assassination. After Nixon lost the 1962 election for California governor, he went to work as a corporate lawyer, and Pepsi, one of his clients, was having its annual bottlers convention in Dallas that week.25 Dallas Morning News entertainment reporters, Tony Zoppi and Don Safron claim that they saw Nixon at the Empire Room at the Statler Hilton Hotel on the Thursday night before the assassination. Nixon was with actress, Joan Crawford. Entertainer, Robert Clary (of Hogan’s Heroes), stopped the show to point Nixon out. The reporters left around 10:45pm. And when they did, Nixon was still there.26
As for Lyndon Johnson, he was in Houston on Thursday night and his flight into Fort Worth landed at 11:07pm. The motorcade arrived at the Hotel Texas at 11:50. There is a photograph of Johnson entering the hotel just after the motorcade’s arrival.27 If the party was at Clint Murchison, Sr.’s home, which is not possible according to the cook, Eula Tilley, Johnson would have had to drive 2 hours, which means that he would have arrived around 2 am in Glad Oaks. If the party was at John and Lupe Murchison’s home on Ash Bluff Lane in Dallas, Johnson would have arrived at 1am at the earliest. However, that would assume that Johnson left immediately after the photo was taken of him at Hotel Texas in Fort Worth.28
Note that Brown said she was already at the party when Johnson arrived and that she was surprised that he was there. Are we to believe that Madeleine Brown was invited to a party at the Murchison home, or Ranch – whichever it was, without Lyndon Johnson? It’s hard for me to understand how she could have been at this rather important party alone without Johnson.
The Murchison Party was first reported by early JFK assassination researcher, Penn Jones, Jr. in his book Forgive My Grief, Volume 3. Jones claims that both Nixon and Hoover were present at Clint Murchison Sr.’s home. He does not mention any other attendees at this party. Jones ends the section on the Murchison party with QUOTE “Admittedly, our information about Hoover’s presence was learned second hand, but it is reliable. We will never tell how we got the information.”29
In Penn Jones’ book, in the same section where he mentions the assassination party, he talks about an article written by Val Imm for the Dallas Times Herald - about a party that happened in 1969 thrown by Clint Murchison Jr.’s wife. Madeleine Brown would later state that Val Imm wrote a story about the Murchison party the night before the assassination. But when Brown asked Imm to find the story, she said it didn’t exist. It could be a coincidence, but Brown mentioning Val Imm’s story seems to be proof that she was at least aware of Penn Jones book, and that she misunderstood the timeline of the Val Imm story.30
Given what we just covered about the original reporting of Penn Jones, combined with the fact that Hunt, Nixon, and Clint Murchison, Sr. all had alibis, and Johnson would not have arrived until 1am to the party at the extreme earliest, it seems clear to me that the most likely scenario is that Madeleine Brown made this party up. Now, we do have the word of May Newman and that is worth something. But, Newman never saw anything with her own eyes. Instead, she spoke to the chauffeur and the chef at John Murchison’s home. The burden of proof for a big claim like this is on the party asserting the claim. And, aside from Newman, and whoever Penn Jones’ anonymous source was, there is no independent corroboration for the Murchison Party.
Separate from the issue of whether the Murchison party actually happened, is the question of whether Brown had a child that was fathered by Lyndon Johnson. Joan Mellen believed that Johnson was the father of Brown’s son, Steven Mark Brown.31 If you look at photos of Steven Brown, there is a resemblance to Johnson. But, that’s no guaranty that he was Johnson’s son. Steven Mark Brown filed a paternity lawsuit against the Johnson estate for $10.5 million in 1987, but the case was dismissed after Brown failed to appear at a court hearing. The next year, Steven Brown died of cancer at age 39.32
The only evidence Brown has that she had a relationship with Lyndon Johnson is a photo of her and Johnson seated at a dinner party, with her back to Johnson.33 While I believe it is possible that Brown had an affair with Johnson, and it’s even possible that Steven Brown was Johnson’s son, the failure to follow through on the litigation to prove this disputed fact is a real red flag.
Claims of Barr McClellan
Having covered Madeleine Brown, we must also address the claims of another Texan who says he had inside information about LBJ killing President Kennedy. Barr McClellan was an attorney at the Clark, Thomas, and Winters law firm from 1966 until 1977. The firm was named for Ed Clark, Lyndon Johnson’s personal attorney – the same one who bailed Mac Wallace out of jail in 1951.34
In 2003, McClellan wrote a book called Blood, Money & Power, in which he shared what he had been told about the JFK Assassination by senior partner, Don Thomas. McClellan was involved in drafting a research memo about whether LBJ’s physician was subject to the attorney-client privilege, which McClellan said was done to make sure that LBJ’s post-presidential psychiatry confessions could not be disclosed.35 The primary first-hand information that McClellan has to share is that Don Thomas told him QUOTE “Clark handled all of that in Dallas.”36 Years later, another partner at the firm, John Coates told McClellan QUOTE “If the truth be told, Clark arranged the assassination of Kennedy.”37
While these statements from partners at a firm that was LBJ’s law firm are disturbing and potentially point to Johnson’s involvement in the assassination, the challenge with McClellan’s book is that much of it is the author speculating about what he believes must have happened – without any evidentiary support. McClellan also relies heavily on the Sixth Floor Mac Wallace fingerprint, which can no longer be said to be credible based on the work of Bob Garrett.
NEXT TIME ON SOLVING JFK: We conclude our series on Lyndon Johnson with part 9. Was Lyndon Johnson just an innocent bystander who benefitted from the actions of a lone nut, or was he an active participant in the plot to kill President Kennedy?
Automated transcript
Machine-generated from the audio and unedited, so names and spellings may be wrong. Tap a timestamp to play from that point.
Speaker 0Over the last seven episodes, we've studied the life and times of Lyndon Baines' Johnson, the man who would ascend from the vice presidency to become the thirty-sixth chief executive of the United States, when President John F. Kennedy was murdered in broad daylight on November twenty-second, I had previously said that this would be our final episode of the LBJ series, but to get all of the information in and provide a meaningful conclusion, we're going to need a ninth installment on Lyndon Johnson, which will be out next week. In this eighth episode of the series, we continue our analysis of Lyndon Johnson by looking at his order to his pilots to fly his plane in bad weather. The likelihood had JFK lived that Johnson would have been removed from the nineteen sixty four presidential ticket. Madeline Brown's claim about the alleged party at the Merchison home the night before the assassination.
Speaker 0And Bar McClellan's assertion that Johnson's attorney Ed Clark was a central figure in planning the assassination.
Speaker 5In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy's motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting The flash, apparently official, doesn't even kind of die and comes to the end of the time.
Speaker 4That was the place this morning resumed yesterday, and then they have formally charged the assassination question. This is Solving JFK. I'm your host, Matt Crumpton.
Speaker 0On February, seventeenth, nineteen sixty-one. About a month after being sworn in as vice president, Lyndon Johnson called for his airplane pilots to pick him up at his ranch in the Texas Hill Country along the Peternale's River. The pilots had stayed overnight in Austin the previous day. Pilot Harold Tieg told Johnson that it would be extremely dangerous to fly because of the weather and because there were no ground control instruments on the landing strip at the Johnson Ranch. According to author James Evans Hayley, Johnson is said to have, quote, exploded, venting his profanity upon the pilot, demanding to know, what do you think I'm paying you for? And telling Tee, good to quote, hit that plane to the ranch. According to Bar McClellan, who will get to later in this episode, Johnson's urgency was because he had to visit with Billy Solstice in person regarding Henry Marshall's ongoing investigation.
Speaker 0The timeline would fit, but I couldn't find any independent corroboration for that idea. Teague, the pilot, called his wife before the flight, and told her that he had been ordered to make the flight. Despite the bad weather, the pilots followed Johnson's orders, but when they searched for the runway through the fog, they couldn't see it, and there was no technology on the ground to help them find it. Johnson's two pilots were killed instantly when the plane crashed into a rocky hillside, about seven miles from the vice president's ranch. Johnson told the Rocky Mountain News, quote, I've lost the best pilot in the world and two wonderful friends. If they'd been thirty feet higher, they would have missed the hill. Even with the tragedy that was caused by Johnson's selfish disregard for aviation safety, Johnson still found a way to blame the incident on the pilots. Between the Billy Soul Estus scandal, the Bobby Baker scandal, the Don Reynolds testimony, and the general acrimony between Johnson and the Kennedy's, an important historical question is, if President Kennedy had lived, would Johnson have been invited to run on the Nineteen sixty-four ticket, or would he have been replaced?
Speaker 0And October, twenty-nine, nineteen sixty-three newsday article on the Bobby Baker scandal said that the justice department started the investigation to embarrass Johnson so that he would not be on the nineteen sixty-four ticket according to unnamed sources. In a press conference two days later, President Kennedy was asked whether he wanted Johnson on the ticket and whether he expected that Johnson would be on the ticket. Kennedy responded, quote, Yes, to both of those questions. That is correct. So the last time President Kennedy spoke about the issue in public, he said that Johnson would be on the ticket. However, the President's public statement did not accurately reflect what was going on behind the scenes. You may recall that when Bobby Baker was being investigated by the Senate in the fall of nineteen sixty three, it was attorney general Robert Kennedy, who was providing information about Baker to Senator John Williams, who was leading the investigation.
Speaker 0RFK was so invested in bringing Johnson down that he assigned a justice department lawyer to supply the committee with information about Johnson and Baker's financial dealings. Burkette Van Kirk was the chief counsel for the Republicans on the Senate Rules Committee during these investigations. Van Kirk told author Seymour Hirsch that Bobby Kennedy's motive in providing this information to the Republicans was, quote, to get rid of Johnson, to dump him. I am as sure of that as I am that the sun comes up in the east. There's no doubt that Reynolds testimony would have gotten Johnson out of the vice president's scene. Colonel Howard Burris, who was Johnson's military aid, told historian John Newman that Lyndon Johnson knew he was going to be thrown off of the ticket. Evelyn Lincoln, president Kennedy's personal secretary, said that the president discussed the Bobby Baker investigation with her and told her that Lyndon Johnson would not be his running mate.
Speaker 0This conversation was just two days before the president left Washington for his nineteen sixty-three Texas trip. Similarly, President Kennedy mentioned that he was leaning towards not keeping Johnson on the ticket to North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford. Schubert Humphrey also said that he heard Bobby Kennedy was plotting Johnson's ouster from the nineteen sixty-four ticket. On November twenty second, the Dallas Morning News ran an article with the title, Nixon predicts Kennedy may drop Johnson. On the other hand, Bobby Kennedy said during his oral history interviews that there was no plan to drop Johnson. It should be noted, however, that those statements were made while Johnson was the sitting president, and when Bobby still had political ambitions of his own. So while it remains a somewhat disputed issue, we can safely say that public statements were to the effect that LBJ would not be dropped.
Speaker 0Behind closed doors, those in the know were of the opinion that Johnson would not have remained on the nineteen sixty four presidential ticket if John F. Kennedy had survived Dallas. We can't say that we've fully covered the JFK assassination related allegations against Lyndon Johnson without discussing Johnson's alleged mistress, Madeline Brown. On November fifth, nineteen eighty two, during a meeting of the Dallas Press Club, Brown stood up and announced to the room that she had an extra marital relationship with Lyndon Johnson from nineteen forty eight until nineteen sixty seven. She claimed to have caught Johnson's eye at a nineteen forty-eight party associated with his radio station KTBC and says that the next time she saw Johnson, their affair began. In addition to her affair with Johnson, Brown is most known for the claim she made about Johnson related to the JFK assassination. Here's Madeline Brown in the documentary series, The Men Who Killed Kennedy.
Speaker 3Early the next morning, only a few hours before the assassination, Madeleine received a phone call from Johnson, who was back in Fort Worth with Kennedy.
Speaker 1Linden called me from the Texas Hotel, and he was still, I write, I said, Linden about last night, and he went to cursing, he used foul language all the time, and he said, those candidates, he repeated, they will never embarrass me again. That's no threat, that's a promise. And I'd like the entire world to know how I personally feel is the fact Lyndon Johnson knew about the assassination and was a part of it. I met Lyndon on New Year's Eve at the disco hotel in Austin and the people in Dallas, I mean everyone was talking about Lyndon Johnson was a cause of the assassination and it made my heart very heavy. I just couldn't believe that he could be a part of something so bad. So I confronted Lyndon. I said, Lyndon, you've got to tell me. were you part of the assassination? And of course he had a high temper fit, hit the wall, and he was very irate and angry. And he said, no, I was not, but he called him, the fat cats of Texas that I knew.
Speaker 1And the intelligence was the cause of the assassination. I am sure Lyndon did not make the plans per se, but he had the key people that he could call to actually do it.
Speaker 0So Madeline Brown says that she had an affair with Johnson and that he admitted that the assassination was not done by a loan nut, but was instead a plot between Texas fat cats and intelligence. In addition to Brown's claim that Johnson told her there was a conspiracy, Madeline Brown is perhaps best known for her story about a party at Clint Merchison's house on the night before the assassination with a very impressive guest list. Here's a clip of Brown talking about the Merchison party from the men who killed Kennedy.
Speaker 1We had H.O. Hunt, Merchison, Lyndon Johnson made an appearance. We had Hoover. We had Richard Nixon. They were the most influential people there. But I was under the impression that since Jagger Hoover was there, that it was to honor Hoover rather than anything else. When Lyndon came in, no one was expecting him. So when Lyndon arrived at Clint merchants, they all went into a conference room. And you could just feel the atmosphere. When Lyndon came out, I was, of course, happy to see him. I did not know that he was going to be there. And he whispered in my ear at that time, the blanked blank Kennedys will never embarrass me again. That's no threat that's a promise. So he departed the party rapidly broke up after Lyndon departing.
Speaker 0This is a huge claim that Brown is making. She's saying that the night before the assassination, Lyndon Johnson met with Richard Nixon and Jay Edgar Hoover, along with Texas oil tycoons like H.L. Hunt and Clint Merchison, and that during that party there was a private meeting which appeared to be about the assassination because Johnson came out of the meeting saying that the Kennedy's would never embarrass him again. Brown is not alone in asserting that there was a party with big name VIPs that happened the night before the assassination. A woman named May Newman, who worked in another house for Virginia, Merchison, Clint senior's second wife, also supports Madeline Brown's claim. Here's what May Newman had to say in the men who killed Kennedy. I remember well.
Speaker 2the night before this assassination. I worked with a man called Jewel Fiverr, Black Man, which was Virginia Margeson's chauffeur. He got a call from her stepson, John, at the big house. They were having a big party for a very special guest that was coming from Washington to go to the party by the name of Bulldog, which I found out later was Jagger Hoover. And he said he was very excited about doing this going on the strip out of the airport to take the special guest to a very special party, big party. And I asked him when he came back, if he got a good tip. And he said, no, one of you is very, very upset. He had to go back that night to take Jager Hoover to the airport to go back to Washington. and he still didn't get a tip.
Speaker 3Further verification of Hoover's presence in Dallas, on the eve of the assassination, came from a friend of May's who worked at the Mercerson family home.
Speaker 2Bill and May Hallman, she was the cook at John and Lippi's house, and she wanted me to go help her that night, which I didn't, but I knew she told me she was cooking coil, and I wanted the recipe, so she gave it to me. She said that it was a very important guest by the name of Jager Hoover. It was coming and I should go out and help us so I can get to meet him. It was a film star probably would have gone, but I didn't know who he was. No, none of that time.
Speaker 0So May Newman claims that two other people told her about the party, and specifically, the fact that Jay Edgar Hoover was attending. There's the chauffeur, Joel Fyfer, who said that he went to pick up Hoover at the airport, and then he took him back later that night, and that he didn't get a tip either time. Then there's Bula May Holman, the cook who also said that Hoover was coming to the party. wearing my lawyer hat, the first thing that comes to mind is that May Newman did not have personal knowledge of either of these purported facts. She merely relayed what other people told her, and we have no other corroboration for those two stories. Still, standing alone, the fact that Newman says this does tend to support the existence of an assassination-eaf party that was attended by Jay Edgar Hoover. On the other hand, there are several counterpoints to Madeline Brown and May Newman's claims.
Speaker 0First, there seems to be confusion about where exactly the party happened. For May Newman's story to make sense, the party must have been held at John Merchesson's house, not Clint Merchesson's senior's house. Bula May Holman, who told May Newman about the dinner party for Hoover, was a cook for John Merchesson and his wife Lupe at their house. Clint Merchison's seniors closest home to Dallas was in Glad Oaks, Texas, just south of Athens, Texas. Let's take a look at what we know when it comes to the whereabouts of each of these men on the evening of November, twenty first, nineteen sixty three. First, Clint Merchison's senior was at his home at Gladowks the night before the assassination, and there was no party. According to Eulitilly, who was a cook for Merchison's senior at the time. Another person who Brown says was at the Merchison Party was H.L. Hunt. But Hunt's assistant, John Kurington, says that he was not present.
Speaker 0If Hunt would have attended such a party, Kurington says that he would have been Hunt's driver. And Kurington definitively states that there was no such party that was attended by H.L. Hunt on the night before the assassination. As for Richard Nixon, it is true that he was in Dallas on the night before the assassination. After Nixon lost the nineteen sixty-two election for California governor, he went to work as a corporate lawyer, and Pepsi, one of his clients, was having its annual Baudler's convention in Dallas that week. Tony Zoppy and Dawn Safron, Dallas Morning News Entertainment reporters, claimed that they saw Nixon at the Empire Room at the Statler Hilton Hotel on the Thursday night before the assassination. Nixon was sitting with actress Joan Crawford, entertainer Robert Clary of Hogan's heroes, stopped the show to point out Richard Nixon's presence. The news reporters left around ten forty five p.m.
Speaker 0and when they did, Nixon was still there. As for Lyndon Johnson, he was in Houston on Thursday night, and his flight into Fort Worth landed at eleven o'clock p.m. The motorcade from the airport arrived at the hotel Texas at eleven fifty. There's a photograph of Johnson entering the hotel just after the motorcade's arrival. If the party was at Clint Merchison Seniors' home, which is not possible, according to the cook, you literally, Lyndon Johnson would have had to drive two hours, which means that he would have arrived around two AM in Gladokes. If the party wasn't John and Lupay merchants' home on Ashbluff Lane in Dallas, Johnson would have arrived around one AM at the earliest. However, that would assume that Johnson left immediately after the photo was taken at the Fort Worth Hotel. One thing that sticks out to me is that Madeline Brown says that she was already at the party when Johnson arrived and that she was surprised to see him there.
Speaker 0Are we to believe that Madeline Brown was invited to a party at the purchase in home or ranch? Whatever it was without Lyndon Johnson? For me, it doesn't make a lot of sense that Johnson's mistress would be invited to an important party alone without Johnson. The Merchison party was first reported by early JFK assassination researcher, Penn Jones Jr. in his book, For Give My Grief Volume Three. Jones claims that both Nixon and Hoover were present at Clint Merchison's senior's home, but Jones doesn't mention any other attendees. In his book, Jones ends the section on the Merchison party with quote. Admittedly, our information about Hoover's presence was learned secondhand, but it is reliable. We will never tell how we got the information. In the same section of Joan's book where he mentions the assassination party, he talks about an article written by Val M of the Dallas Times herald about a party that happened in nineteen sixty nine thrown by Clint Merchison Jr's wife.
Speaker 0Madeline Brown would later state that that same journalist, Val M, wrote a story about the purchase and party the night before the assassination. But when Brown asked M to find the story, she said it didn't exist. It could be a coincidence, but Madeline Brown mentioning Val M's story seems to be proof that she was at least aware of Pin Jones' book, and that she misunderstood the timeline of the Val M story. Given what we just covered about the original reporting of Penn Jones, combined with the fact that Hunt, Nixon, and Clint Merchison's senior all had alibis, and Johnson would not have arrived until one AM to the party at the extreme earliest, it seems clear to me that the most likely scenario is that Madeline Brown made this party up. Now, we do have the word of May Newman, and that's worth something. Newman never saw anything with her own eyes. Instead, she spoke to the chauffeur and the chef at John Merchison's home.
Speaker 0The burden of proof for a big claim like this is on the party that's asserting the claim. Aside from Newman and whoever pen Jones anonymous source was, there's no independent corroboration for the Merchison Party. Separate from the issue of whether the Merchison Party actually happened is the question of whether Brown had a child that was fathered by Lyndon Johnson. Author Joan Mellon believed that Johnson was the father of Brown Sun, Stephen Mark Brown. I've got to be honest, if you look at pictures of Stephen Brown, there is a resemblance to Lyndon Johnson. But that's no guarantee that he was Johnson's son. Stephen Mark Brown filed a paternity lawsuit against the Johnson Estate for ten point five million dollars in nineteen eighty seven. The case was dismissed after Brown failed to appear at a court hearing. The next year Stephen Brown died of cancer at age thirty nine. The only evidence that Madeline Brown had any sort of relationship with Lyndon Johnson is a photo of Brown and Johnson seated at a dinner party with her back to Johnson.
Speaker 0While I believe it's possible that Brown had an affair with Johnson and it's even possible that Stephen Mark Brown was Lyndon Johnson's son The failure to follow through on the litigation to prove this disputed fact is a real red flag. Having covered Madeline Brown, we must also address the claims of another Texan, who says that he had inside information about LBJ killing President Kennedy. Bar McClullin was an attorney at the Clark Thomas and Winters law firm from nineteen sixty-six until nineteen seventy-seven. The firm was named for Ed Clark, Lyndon Johnson's personal attorney. The same one who bailed Mac Wallace out of jail in nineteen fifty-one and would go on to be ambassador to Australia. In two thousand three, McClellan wrote a book called Blood, Money, and Power, in which he shared what he had been told about the JFK assassination by senior partner Don Thomas. As an associate attorney at the law firm, McClellan was involved in drafting a research memo about whether Lyndon Johnson's physician was subject to the attorney client privilege, which McClellan said was done to make sure that LBJ's post-presidential psychiatry confessions could not be disclosed.
Speaker 0The primary first hand information that McClellan has to share is that Don Thomas told him QUOTE. Clark handled all of that in Dallas. Years later, another partner at the firm, John Codes told McClellan QUOTE. If the truth be told, Clark arranged the assassination of Kennedy, While these statements from partners at a firm that was Lyndon Johnson's law firm are disturbing and potentially point to Johnson's involvement in the assassination, the challenge with McClellan's book is that much of it is the author's speculation about what he believes must have happened without any evidentiary support. McClellan also relies heavily on the sixth floor Mac Wallace fingerprint, which we can no longer say is credible based on the work of Bob Garrett. Next time on Solving JFK, we conclude our series on Lyndon Johnson with part nine. Was Lyndon Johnson just an innocent bystander who benefited from the actions of a loan nut or was he an active participant in a plot to kill President Kennedy?
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