Investigations: Decline & Fall

INVESTIGATIONS

(See Cover) Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman was on the grill. What were his associations with Billie Sol Estes? Freeman shrugged, hopelessly and helplessly. He had, he told newsmen, met Estes once, briefly, when Estes was paying one of many visits to Agriculture Department headquarters in Washington. Said Freeman: “I might recognize him in pictures.” Then he mustered up a bit of bitter humor: “I’m sure I’ll never forget the name.” The newsmen laughed.

But the Billie Sol Estes case was no laughing matter—to Freeman or anyone else. It was the case of a welfare-state Ponzi. It was a scandal that had already brought about the resignation or dismissal of four Kennedy Administration officials. It had politicians and bureaucrats of all degrees and of both parties shaking in their boots. It had set off investigations galore. It had called into question the whole administration of the mighty U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Last week’s official line from the White House was that the worst was already over, that further investigations would not disclose any more facts that might embarrass the Administration. In fact, the worst might be still to come.

Important documents in the Estes case were carefully hidden from outside gaze.

The hefty Agriculture Department file on Estes was being guarded as if it contained plans for an anti-missile missile.

Down in Pecos, Texas, Federal Receiver Harry Moore, presiding over the ruins of the Estes empire, refused to let newsmen even peek at the “financial journal” in which Billie Sol had recorded his receipts and expenditures over the years. Until the full record was open to scrutiny, the Estes scandal was the hottest thing around.

According to President Kennedy, 76 FBI agents were working on the case.

Receiver Moore’s office in Pecos was jammed with feds poring over Billie Sol’s papers. “I have working in this office at the moment,” said Moore, “six Senate investigators, five men from the FBI, and four auditors—and twelve more are on the way.” In Washington, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations unanimously voted to hold a full-scale investigation of the Estes case, with public hearings to begin as soon as Chairman John McClellan sees fit, probably in June. In addition, a House Government Operations Subcommittee, newly supplied with a special $400,000 appropriation voted by the House, was undertaking its own investigation of Estes’ involvements in federal farm programs. Under way in Texas were federal and state grand jury investigations, plus an inquiry by State Attorney General Will Wilson.

Arkansas’ tough John McClellan promised that the Senate investigation would be “full, thorough and complete.” With him in charge, it probably will be. A veteran of many messy investigations, including 1957-58’s marathon inquiry into the Teamsters Union, McClellan ominously summed up the Estes case as “the darnedest mess I’ve ever seen.” Precocious Deals. The man who made the mess is a bundle of contradictions and paradoxes who makes Dr. Jekyll seem almost wholesome. Billie Sol (pronounced “soul” in West Texas) never smoked or drank. He considered dancing immoral, often delivered sermons as a Church of Christ lay preacher. But he ruthlessly ruined business competitors, practiced fraud and deceit on a massive scale, and even victimized Church of Christ schools that he was supposed to be helping as a fund raiser or financial adviser. He pursued money relentlessly but, despite energy, ingenuity, cunning and a dazzling gift of salesmanship, ended up not only broke but hopelessly in the red—by $12 million according to his own figures, by $20 million according to Texas’ Attorney General Wilson. “The sad part of it,” says a Pecos bank president, “is that he could have been an honest millionaire instead of a broke crook.” Billie Sol grew up in an environment of a sort that is supposed to produce not crooks but plain, solid, honest people—the kind often referred to as the salt of the earth. One of six children, he was raised on a prairie farm near Clyde, Texas.

His sturdy, sunburned parents worked hard and went to Church of Christ services every Sunday. “We’ve never had any trouble in this family.” says his father.

“Why, I’ve never even gotten a parking ticket in my whole life.” The father still refuses to believe that Billie Sol really did anything wrong: “The Constitution says a man ain’t guilty until they prove it, and they ain’t proved anything on Billie yet.” The family was so poor that Billie Sol’s mother sold home-churned butter from door to door to help meet the mortgage and insurance payments. Billie Sol made up his mind early in life that he was going to be rich. While other West Texas farm boys were thinking about shooting crows or catching fish after the chores were done, Billie Sol was precociously thinking up deals. His father fondly remembers an event that took place when Billie was about twelve: “I was plowing behind a team of horses, and he came out there to talk to me. I remember he was barefoot.

He said he’d been thinking about a tractor and said he thought he could get one in a trade for a barn of oats we had. I told him to go ahead and try. He went off and came back with a tractor.” How to Succeed. Billie Sol started out in farming, and he prospered at it. By the time he was 28 he was doing so well as a cotton farmer that the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce named him one of the U.S.’s ten outstanding young men of 1953. Billie Sol traveled to Seattle to receive the award at a Jaycee dinner. While in Seattle he uttered some prophetic lines: To be successful, he said, “you have to walk out on a limb to the far end—for that’s where the fruit is. If it breaks, you learn how far to go next time.” Another top-ten award winner that year was Tennessee’s Frank Clement, then the youngest state Governor in the U.S., later famous in a way for his florid keynote speech (“How long, O how long?”) at the 1956 Democratic Convention. With many similarities of temperament and style, Clement and Estes became fast friends.

Clement made Estes an honorary “colonel” on his staff (“One of your caliber adds distinction to my staff,” he wrote to Estes), and Estes cut Clement, his father and his brother-in-law in on some of his deals.

One Estes venture into which Clement and his kinsmen put some money involved buying up surplus barracks at the Air Force base near Blytheville, Ark., having the buildings chain-sawed into sections, and, after a bit of nailing here and there, selling the segments as one-family dwellings. They were mere shacks, small enough to be transported on a truck. But there was a serious housing shortage around the airbase in those days, and people bought Estes’ wares for lack of anything else.

Today many of the shacks are decrepit and abandoned.

Estes made other friends in Nashville, including the aged president of Nashville Christian Institute, a Negro school sponsored by the Church of Christ and endowed by a Nashville insurance magnate.

Estes persuaded the institute’s trustees to turn $100,000 of the endowment funds over to him in exchange for mortgages on his converted-barracks homes.

Like the Murchisons. From cotton and cheap housing, Estes rapidly branched out into many other businesses—selling fertilizer and farm implements, digging wells, lining irrigation ditches, providing other agricultural services. He even founded a funeral parlor, thereby fulfilling a prophecy in the 1943 Clyde High School yearbook that he would become an undertaker. In the Estes manner, it was a grandiose establishment, far too fancy for Pecos, and it lost money.

Estes was frank about telling people what his ambition was: he wanted to get as rich as the Murchisons, the most famous of Texas’ big-rich clans. He had some theories about how to get Murchison-rich. One of his basic concepts was that he could profit by handing out presents—a car, a suit of clothes, a thousand dollars in cash—since the recipient would be under an obligation to do him future favors. Another notion was that when a debt gets big enough, the creditor acquires an interest in the survival and prosperity of the debtor. “If you get into anybody far enough,” he often said, “you’ve got yourself a partner.”* Estes got far enough into Commercial Solvents, a New York chemical manufacturer, which did become a sort of partner. It was this partnership that enabled Estes to get into big-time wheeling and dealing.

In the mid-1950s, Estes had gone into business as a distributor of anhydrous ammonia, a cheap, efficient nitrogen fertilizer widely used in large-scale farming. Indeed, the stuff has become as necessary as water to the farm economy of West Texas. Estes got way behind in his anhydrous ammonia bills from Commercial Solvents, and by 1958 he owed the firm some $550,000. He went to New York and sold officers of the firm on a complex deal: under the agreement, Commercial

Solvents not only deferred payment of the $550,000 debt but agreed to lend Estes an additional $350,000—a credit of $125,000 for future purchases of anhydrous ammonia, plus $225,000 to enable Estes to get started in the grain-storage business. Estes, now into Commercial Solvents for $900,000, promised to pay off the debt in installments over a five-year span. As part of the overall deal, Estes agreed to assign to Commercial Solvents 100% of the fees he got for storing grain.

And Commercial Solvents in effect agreed to ship him all the anhydrous ammonia he wanted—as long as the grain-storage money kept rolling in.

Picking Up the Pieces. With his entry into grain storage, Estes acquired another partner—the U.S. Government. Grain storage is an appendage of federal price-support programs. A farmer who gets a Government price-support “loan” on a crop of grain deposits the grain in a certified warehouse or silo as collateral. He then has a period of time to decide on one of two alternatives. He can sign the stored grain over to the Government, keep the loan and leave the taxpayers stuck with some more surplus grain. Or, if he finds that he can sell the grain in the open market at a higher price, he can repay the support loan and reclaim his grain. Either way, the Agriculture Department pays the storage operator a fee, so much per bushel, for storing the grain. If the operator can keep his facilities filled to a high percentage of capacity, grain storage can be a highly profitable business.

With Commercial Solvents and the U.S. Government as his partners, Estes envisioned a scandalous cycle: he would keep using the proceeds from ammonia sales to buy or build grain-storage facilities; the federal grain-storage fees would keep flowing to Commercial Solvents; Commercial Solvents would keep shipping him anhydrous ammonia. The more ammonia he sold, the more warehouses he could control, and the more grain he stored, the more ammonia he could get, and so on in an unending spiral.

One of the flaws in this perpetual-motion machine was that other companies also manufactured anhydrous ammonia, and a lot of distributors were selling the stuff to West Texas farmers in competition with Estes. But Estes had an answer to that difficulty: smash the competitors. Estes used a characteristic gesture to illustrate a point in his business philosophy: he would hold out his left hand, doubled into a loose fist, and slap it sharply with the palm of his right hand. “If you shatter an industry,” he would say, “you can pick up all the pieces for yourself.”

The wholesale price of anhydrous ammonia was $90 a ton, and a local distributor had to charge more than $100 a ton to break even. So it stirred up some commotion when Estes, shortly after setting up his deal with Commercial Solvents, started selling the stuff for $60 a ton. In some intense price battles, he slashed his price down to $40 and even $20. One after another, he drove rival dealers out of business, sometimes picking up the pieces for himself by buying up the failed or failing firm’s assets cheap. In a few years, Estes became the biggest anhydrous ammonia dealer in West Texas, and one of the biggest in the U.S. He lost millions of dollars in the process. But for Estes the losses seemed only a temporary inconvenience on the way to a grand and profitable future.

If Estes failed to make money out of his ammonia dealings, so did Commercial Solvents. In 1959-61 some $7,000,000 in grain-storage fees flowed from the U.S. Government to Commercial Solvents by way of Estes’ bank accounts, but anhydrous ammonia flowed to Estes even faster. By the time of his downfall, Estes was into Commercial Solvents for something like $5,700,000. Despite the unprofitability of the joint venture. Texas Attorney General Wilson last week brought an antitrust suit against Estes and Commercial Solvents on the ground that they had conspired to monopolize the West Texas market for anhydrous ammonia. “Commercial Solvents is named in the suit,” said Wilson, “because in our judgment they made possible the whole thing and knew what they were doing.”

Imaginary Tanks. To raise capital to expand his grain-storage domain even faster, Estes dreamed up a scheme for raising money on nonexistent anhydrous ammonia storage tanks. The ammonia is a gas under normal atmospheric conditions; it must be stored in tanks to keep it liquid. Working with Superior Manufacturing Co., a Texas firm that made ammonia tanks. Estes persuaded a lot of West Texas farmers to go through the motions of purchasing tanks from Superior on credit, taking out mortgages on them, and leasing them back to Estes. Estes conveniently made the lease payments equal to the mortgage payments, so the farmer would not have to pay out any money. Estes explained to the farmers that he needed the tanks for his operations, but was short of working capital and simply wanted to use the farmer’s credit to obtain the tanks. In return, he offered the farmer a fee of 10% of the price—in effect, something for nothing.

In this implausible way, Estes collected more than $30 million in mortgages on imaginary tanks. He used the bogus mortgages as collateral to borrow roughly $22 million from commercial finance companies in New York, Chicago and other cities. To get the finance companies to accept the mortgages, Estes and his henchmen had to fake a lot of documents relating to the farmers’ personal finances. One Estes secretary later admitted to typing five phony documents on five typewriters.

Estes’ grain-storage kingdom grew fast —the amount of grain in storage soared from 2.3 million bushels in March 1959 to 54 million in February 1962. But there was an oversupply of grain-storage facilities in West Texas, and Estes could not keep his warehouses full enough to reap really massive profits. After the collapse, amid mounting evidence that Estes had been doing favors for Agriculture Department officials, the department put out these figures as proof of its virtue: early this year Estes’ facilities were 43.4% filled with federal grain as against a Texas statewide average of 48.6%; later on, Estes’ figure rose to 58.3%, but the state average also went up, to 62.9%. Said a White House staffer: “If Estes was spending a lot of money at Agriculture, he sure wasn’t getting much for it.” The Schemer. All the while that Estes’ assets were growing, his liabilities were mounting even faster. In 1960 he ventured on another desperate scheme for making big money. Estes had found cotton-farming profitable. The only obstacle to growing more cotton and making more profits was that the U.S. Government, in exchange for its generous price supports on cotton, imposes strict acreage controls.

Each cotton farmer has an acreage allotment, which cannot be sold or otherwise transferred; it remains attached to the parcel of land.

But the Government makes a special exception for farmers whose land is taken over under the right of eminent domain —to make way for a new highway, perhaps. In such a case, if the displaced farmer buys another farm within three years, he has the right to transfer his old cotton allotment to his new land.

Schemer Estes saw a way to get hold of allotments so he could increase his cotton plantings and profits. He and his agents persuaded numerous farmers in Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia and Alabama, who had been dispossessed by eminent domain, to buy Texas farm land from him, transfer their allotments to the new land, and lease the land-plus-allotments back to him for $50 an acre. Each farmer agreed to pay for the land in four equal installments, with the understanding that if he defaulted on the first installment, the land (with the allotment still attached) would revert to Estes. It was expected that the farmer would default when the first installment came due. When he did, Estes had the land and the allotment; the farmer had the first year’s $50-per-acre lease payments (Estes, as part of the deal, made the lease payments in advance). The net result of this devious and complicated deal was that the farmer had sold his cotton allotment to Estes for $50 an acre.

These deals, by which Estes obtained more than 3,000 acres of cotton allotments in the course of two years, were legal only if the sale of the land was a bona fide sale, and if the default was a bona fide default. Since Estes’ deals with the farmers were set up in the expectation that they would default, the deals were obviously suspect. After long delays, the Agriculture Department finally decided this month that the deals were faked, and fined Estes for growing cotton under the illegally obtained allotments.

Too Garish for Texas. Estes’ rickety empire was doomed to collapse sooner or later under the weight of its accumulating deficits. But while it lasted, his rapidly burning candle at least gave off a bit of dazzle. With his wife and five children, Estes lived in the most lavish house in town. Out in the backyard, he had a swimming pool and Texas-sized barbecue facilities. The Amarillo Daily News called him “probably the biggest wheeler and dealer in all of West Texas.” He conveyed an impression that he wielded a lot of political influence beyond the boundaries of Pecos. and even beyond Texas. He liked to flash a card indicating that he had donated $100,000 to the Democratic Party during the 1960 campaign. He displayed on the walls of his office photos, some fondly signed, of President Kennedy, Vice President Johnson, Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, John McClellan and other Democratic political notables. He boasted of his friendships with politicians, including Texas’ Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough.

But for all his aura of wealth and power, Billie Sol remained a somewhat ridiculous figure; the inner bumpkin kept showing through. One acquaintance recalls him as “the kind of man whose lapels always seem a little too wide.” He sported a diamond stickpin that seemed garish even in Texas. He was constantly bumbling into grotesque situations. Invited to Governor Clement’s second inaugural in 1955, he was the only guest to show up in the ornate regalia of a Tennessee colonel. In 1956 he made a fool of himself by trying to persuade the president of a Pecos bank to help finance a wacky scheme to help Adlai Stevenson win the election. Under the Estes plan, large schools of parakeets, trained to say “I like Adlai” in unison, would fly over U.S. cities. When the banker tried to tell Estes that parakeets could not be trained to say “I like Adlai,” much less say it in unison, Estes got purple-angry, accused the banker of being anti-Stevenson and stomped out.

Estes was widely feared in Pecos because of his seeming wealth and power. But he was not widely liked. When he ran for a place on the local school board last year, he lost to a write-in candidate. That humiliating defeat led to Estes’ downfall. The local paper, the twice-weekly Independent, had opposed him for the school board post. To get revenge, Estes set up a rival paper. Upshot: the Independent investigated and printed the first exposure of Billie Sol’s tank-mortgage fraud. The alarmed finance companies sent in swarms of investigators, and Billie Sol’s empire came crashing down with a thud that reverberated all the way to Washington. On March 29, the FBI arrested Estes on charges of transporting the bogus mortgages across state lines. Estes is now out on bail, but is under both a federal indictment for fraud and a state indictment for theft.

Three Down. Several days after the FBI arrived in Pecos, Texas Attorney General Wilson set off on his own investigation, and his first revelations made the front pages. Employees of Dallas’ Nei-man-Marcus luxury store testified that Estes had bought—or gone through convincing motions of buying—expensive clothing for three officials of the U.S.

Agriculture Department. In September 1961, the testimony ran, Estes went into the men’s wear department of Neiman-Marcus with Assistant Secretary (for Agricultural Stabilization) James T. Ralph and Ralph’s assistant, William E. Morris; Ralph and Morris selected more than $1,000 worth of clothing, which was billed to Estes. In October, Estes came in again, this time with Emery E. Jacobs, deputy administrator of the Commodity Stabilization Service. After Jacobs had selected $1,433.20 worth of clothing, including a $245 suit and a $195 sports coat, Estes went into the fitting room with him.

When they came out, Jacobs proceeded to pay the entire bill himself—with cash.

One by one, Ralph, Morris and Jacobs have all departed from the Agriculture Department since the Neiman-Marcus revelations. Morris proved to have other links with Billie Sol. His wife had been on Billie Sol’s payroll as “Washington columnist” for the paper in Pecos, and in Estes’ files were some very friendly letters that Morris had written to him.

When Morris failed to appear for departmental questioning about his relations with Estes, Secretary Freeman fired him outright.

Jacobs denied that Billie Sol bought any clothing for him. The only gifts he ever accepted from Estes, he said, were two rides in Estes’ private plane, several meals, a box of cigars and a 5-lb. bag of pecans. Yes, Billie Sol did go into Neiman-Marcus with him, Jacobs admitted, but “I had my own money.” Jacobs resigned his post anyway. Maybe he knew it would be hard for people to believe that a $6,500-a-year Government official would be carrying around $1,433.20 in cash to spend for clothing.

Ralph was the last to go and the most vehement in his denials. He actually went to Texas to submit to questioning by Wilson. But while he kept insisting that he never received any clothing, he did admit, under hard questioning, that a salesman had come up with a chalk and tape measure and worked on a suit that Ralph was trying on. Since Ralph persisted in denying that he got any clothing, his case remained hanging until last week, when further investigation showed that he had used an Estes credit card to pay for personal telephone calls. Freeman fired him.

“Good Investment.” Besides the Agriculture men, one other Administration official has lost his job because of ties to Billie Sol: Assistant Secretary of Labor Jerry Holleman, former president of the Texas A.F.L.-C.I.O., who got to know Estes well in the liberal faction of the Texas Democratic Party. Holleman’s name first broke into the Estes scandal when it got out that Holleman had asked Estes and other Texans to ante up for a big dinner party given by Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg last January for Lyndon Johnson. Holleman admitted it, but said that he had not consulted Goldberg in advance. Goldberg offered to produce canceled checks to prove that he had paid the bills himself, and the tremor passed away.

But hardly was it gone when another hunk of Estes debris fell on Holleman: evidence that he had accepted a check for $1,000 from Billie Sol. Holleman admitted that he took the money—and his explanation was a telling commentary on life in official Washington. Holleman said that he needed the $1,000 to help meet his “living expenses.” His $20,000-a-year salary, he said, was inadequate to meet the social demands that his position placed upon him. Holleman said the $1,000 gift was “personal,” and had “no connection with any of Mr. Estes’ interests,” but he resigned anyway. Said he when he got back to Texas: “The only place you eat free in Washington is at an embassy.” On Capitol Hill, one of the men most seriously tarnished by the Estes case is Minnesota’s Republican Congressman H.

Carl Andersen. Early this year, William Morris, one of Estes’ Neiman-Marcus trio, wrote Estes a letter suggesting that Andersen, a member of the House subcommittee on agricultural appropriations, would be a “good Republican contact” in Congress, and that it might be a “good investment” to help him out of a financial pinch. Shortly afterward, Morris took Andersen down to Pecos to talk to Estes.

Then, and again on another occasion in Washington, Estes gave Andersen money —totaling $4,000 or $5,000 or $5,500 according to various versions—for stock in an Andersen-owned coal mine. After this transaction came to light, Andersen insisted that Estes was only making a business investment in the mine. But that seemed unconvincing, since Estes never even bothered to get any stock certificates from Andersen.

Also spattered by the Estes case was Texas’ liberal Democratic Senator Yarborough. He admitted that he had received some $7,500 from Estes as political contributions, including $1,700 to help defray the cost of broadcasts he had made in Texas. These contributions did not seem extraordinary—but what did seem strange was the evidence that Yarborough had used lots of influence to help Estes out of his difficulties with the Agriculture Department.

In Estes’ financial records in Pecos, investigators came across ominous-looking entries totaling $235,000 for something listed as “Washington Project.” But this proved to be a housing venture in the state of Washington rather than payoffs in the District of Columbia. Still not adequately explained are three checks totaling $145,015.14 that Estes drew on a bank account in Pecos last January and then cashed in Austin just before taking off on a trip to Washington, D.C.

Among the most sinister aspects of the Estes case were the bizarre and mysterious deaths of two Texans. Last summer, when Estes was already in trouble about his cotton allotments, Henry M.

Marshall, the Agriculture Department agent in charge of cotton allotments in Texas, was found dead in a lonely pasture. He had been shot in the abdomen five times with his own .22-cal., bolt-action rifle, which lay near by. The local sheriff ruled it a suicide. Apart from the awkwardness of firing the rifle while holding the muzzle against his abdomen, Marshall would have had to pull the bolt back after each shot. Strange, too, was the death of George Krutilek, an accountant who had kept books for the farmers who signed bogus tank mortgages.

A few days after the Estes scandal broke, Krutilek was found dead in his car with the windows up and a rubber hose leading from the exhaust to the interior of the car. But an autopsy revealed no trace of carbon monoxide in his lungs, and local authorities ruled that he had died of a heart attack.

“A Lawyers’ Quarrel.” Secretary Freeman said that the Estes affair had been “ballooned out of all proportion.” There was “no evidence,” he insisted, that Estes had received special favors from the Agriculture Department.

On the contrary, there was evidence aplenty. Items: >-Grain-storage operators are required to post a bond as a prerequisite to getting federal storage. The amount of the bond is based on the capacity of the storage facilities, and other factors, including the operator’s financial status. The better the risk, the lower the bond. Estes’ bond was set at $700,000 back in 1960, and it remained at that level, although both the amount of grain he had in storage and his capital deficit increased enormously. A passing gesture toward upping the bond was made after the New Frontier took over the Agriculture Department, but Estes protested, and the bond remained at $700,000. Freeman explained the department’s generosity to Estes by saying that he had filed a financial statement showing a net worth of $12 million to prove that he was a good risk. But that financial statement was grossly inflated, and could not have passed a reasonably careful scrutiny. Furthermore, a routine check with Internal Revenue would have shown that for 1959, 1960 and 1961 Estes reported no taxable income at all—just a steady stream of losses.

>-Freeman confirmed Estes’ appointment to the National Cotton Advisory Committee in November 1961, two months after the department had already fined him $42,000 for planting cotton under illegally obtained acreage allotments.

Freeman’s explanation: Estes had originally been appointed to the board in July 1961, and in November the department had merely “reconstituted” the old board. Furthermore, said Freeman, the issue of the legality of the allotments was a “lawyers’ quarrel.” Shortly after Freeman offered this explanation, the department belatedly got around to fining Estes $554,162 for additional cotton-allotment violations that had been under investigation since mid-1961.

> The pace of the department’s handling of Estes’ cotton-allotment case was glacial even by bureaucratic standards. On Jan. 6, two weeks before Kennedy’s inauguration, at a time when it appeared that a decision adverse to Estes might be imminent, Senator Yarborough and J. T. Rutherford, the Democratic Congressmen from Estes’ home district, went to the Agriculture Department and interceded for Billie Sol at a meeting with department officials. They succeeded in getting a postponement of the final ruling.

“This was more than favoritism,” charged South Dakota’s Republican Senator Karl E. Mundt last week. “This was complete capitulation to a guy out on the make.” A lower-rung Agriculture Department official named Battle Hales openly charged a few weeks ago that the department had shown “favoritism” toward Estes. Hales also dropped hints that he had been shunted to another job in the department, and denied access to the Estes files, because he knew too much about the case. Hales’s transfer led to one of the unseemliest scenes ever enacted in the somber corridors of the Agriculture Department. Miss Mary Jones, a nervous spinster of 51, who had been Hales’s secretary for eleven years, was upset about the prospect of being transferred to a new boss. After being out sick for two days, she came back and went to Hales’s old office to get her leave record signed. What happened next is obscured by confusion and controversy. But apparently an official ordered her to leave the office.

When she refused, he called in a departmental doctor, who decided that the distraught Miss Jones should be taken away for observation. Result: Miss Jones was dragged off to a mental hospital and held for 13 days until a judge ordered her released to the custody of her sister and her own doctor. Says Miss Jones: “It was all a horrible nightmare.” Irrelevant Defense. Republican leaders charged that Freeman and his department had mishandled everything connected with the Estes case, from the grain-storage bond to Miss Mary Jones. At his press conference last week, President Kennedy came to Freeman’s defense but on rather odd grounds—not that Freeman had been doing a good job but that he played football in college, made Phi Beta Kappa, “had most of his jaw shot off in Bougainville,” and served three terms as Governor of Minnesota. These points are true enough, but irrelevant. All Kennedy said about Freeman as Secretary was that the job had been “challenging.” Having made a weak defense, Kennedy followed up with a weak counterattack.

The substance of his argument: it was his Administration that pounced on Estes by arresting and indicting him, so there was nothing to holler about. But the President was claiming undue credit. Estes was first exposed by the Pecos Independent. Then the finance-company investigators moved in. Only after that did the FBI—which is under Bobby Kennedy’s jurisdiction—put Estes under arrest. Moreover, the revelations about Estes’ involvements with the Administration came out not through federal channels but through the Wilson investigation in Texas.

The Real Villain. On the evidence so far, the Estes case is not yet a Teapot Dome. But it is certainly far more than what the President and his Agriculture Secretary claimed it to be—merely a teapot tempest. The most important villain in the Estes case is the vast tangle of the farm price-support system, with its accompanying systems of production controls and surplus storage. Price-support programs provide scant help for the neediest farmers; the most bountiful benefits flow to prosperous farmers, who could get along with no Government aid at all.

Laxly administered, too vast and complex to be effectively policed, the price-support programs provide a constant invitation to dishonesty.

Billie Sol was largely financed by cotton price supports and grain-storage fees paid for by the taxpayers. If there had been no price-support programs, there would have been no inviting storage business for him to get into, no cotton allotments to obtain by fraud.

In its sheer gaudiness, the Estes mess dramatizes the farm scandal more vividly than ever before. If that dramatization were to result in something really being done about the farm fiasco, who knows but that the U.S. might even owe a vote of thanks to none other than Billie Sol Estes.

* The Murchisons are also great believers in the virtue of borrowing money to make money.

Only half-jokingly, Clint Murchison once laid down a maxim that “a man is worth twice what he owes.”