Investigations: Setting Up the Fall Guy

Testifying in the Billie Sol Estes investigation, former Agriculture Department Official Emery (“Red”) Jacobs spoke a classic bit of bureaucratese. “The state to which the situation has been definitized,” he said, “is uncertain.”

Well, maybe, and maybe not. One thing that had been “definitized” was that Under Secretary Charles S. Murphy, 53, the No. 2 man in the department, is in for a hard time before the subcommittee when he appears, probably this week. To many it appears that he is being set up as the fall guy.

Witness Jacobs, who was ousted from the department on charges that he had accepted financial favors from Billie Sol, had a confusing way with words. At one point he apologetically confided to the Senators that “my lucidity doesn’t quite equal my ambiguity.” But one thing came through quite, clearly. Jacobs blamed Murphy for the basic decision that made Billie Sol’s extensive land and cotton-allotment shenanigans possible. Also pointing a finger at Murphy was Witness John Bagwell, the Agriculture Department’s general counsel.

“Anybody Else?” To Subcommittee Chairman John McClellan, such testimony seemed persuasive. Some high Agriculture Department official, he said, must have made the decision that helped Estes.

“Who is that person?” he asked in his rhetorical rumble. “Who? Either the Secretary or Murphy. Anybody else?” But McClellan had already publicly absolved Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman: “I want to commend the Secretary, for as soon as he got the full facts on this he said, ‘This won’t do!’ and he canceled those cotton allotments.” That, in McClellan’s mind, seemed to leave Murphy, a Government careerist who helped draft the New Deal’s second Agricultural Adjustment Act in 1938 and who served as special counsel to Harry Truman, as the chief culprit.

McClellan appeared only slightly less certain after Jacobs testified that Freeman’s executive assistant, Thomas R. Hughes, had been in on department discussions of the Estes case as early as January. Hughes denied it at once, but Jacobs had at least raised some question about previous evidence that Freeman knew nothing of the Billie Sol mess until late March.

“All the Way.” Meanwhile, back yonder in Texas, Billie Sol kept getting himself deeper into the soup. He was arrested in Abilene last week after driving his white 1961 Cadillac 1) through a stop sign, 2) the wrong way into a one-way street, 3) without a driver’s license. On the way to the station house, he complained to the cop who had pinched him: “I’ve been blamed for a lot of things I didn’t do. A lot of things are not true. I respect the law all the way.” That statement has not yet been definitized.