ustxtxb_obs_1986_11_07_50_00018-00000_000.pdf

Cou r tesy o f t he LBJ Library president-elect summoned him to Washington. Carter had built up a wealth of contacts through canvassing the state for Johnson, names he carried at all times in a little address book stuffed into his coat pocket. Carter’s loyalty to Johnson was unquestioned. “He was a very sharp operator,” said Ralph Yarborough. “Lyndon could trust him to pick up the money and keep his mouth shut.” “Picking up the money” became an important part of Carter’s job, and his contacts began to reach higher and higher. During the Johnson presidency Carter was executive director of the Democratic National Committee and chief fundraiser for the President’s Club, a DNC offshoot. Carter sold $1000 memberships to the Club with a simple and powerful pitch: “Members are assured of a direct relationship with President Johnson.” Carter resigned from the DNC in 1966, after ethical questions were raised about his fundraising techniques. He died in 1971 at the age of 53. Said Edna Moelhman, Carter’s long-time secretary in Bryan, “He just worked himself to death for Lyndon Johnson.” Cliff Carter was as bound up with Johnson’s political fortunes as anyone in the early 1960s. That he knew Billie Sol Estes and knew of his wheelings and dealings is a matter of record. But who besides Billie Sol Estes can say what Carter knew about the death of Henry Marshall? No one has come forward. Nor has anyone been able to document the role of the alleged hitman, Malcolm E. Wallace, a man convicted of a 1951 murder. He is the character who at first seems to fit the bill in the murder saga as told by Billie Sol in 1984. But even Wallace’s check Clifton Carter and the President, 1968. 1 8 NOVEMBER 7, 1986 ered past doesn’t make the story clearer. Perhaps Billie Sol saw in Wallace \(who made-to-order character to fit his plot line. filled with contradictions and erratic turns of events. Before his 30th birthday he had been a star football player, a Marine, the president of the University of Texas student body, and a key organizer for Homer Rainey’s 1946 gubernatorial campaign. He had also distinguished himself academically, having earned a master’s degree and taught college economics, before accepting a research economist’s job with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Although classmates, colleagues, and family members describe Mac Wallace as a gifted intellectual and idealist, it is also known that he was a man of explosive temper and no stranger to physical violence: one week after his 30th birthday, Wallace walked into the clubhouse of an Austin golf course and ordered a pack of cigarettes from the attendant, Douglas Kinser. Kinser had been dating Wallace’s wife, Andre, and to complicate matters, he had dated Wallace, too, had been seeing. Just before Kinser could ring up the sale, Wallace pulled out a .25-caliber pistol and pumped him with five bullets. On February 26, 1952, a Travis County jury convicted Wallace of murder with malice but gave him only a five-year suspended sentence. Not long after the trial, several of the jurors telephoned Doug Kinser’s parents to apologize for voting for a suspended sentence, but said they did so only because threats had been made against their families, according to Al Kinser, a nephew of Kinser’s who along with his father, still runs the Pitch and Putt golf course. Three months after Mac Wallace walked out of the Travis County Courthouse, he went to work for Temco,. Inc., in its electronics and missiles plant in Garland. Except for a short spell, he remained with the company until February of 1961. It was in January of that year, claims Billie Sol Estes, that Wallace, Billie Sol, Cliff Carter and Lyndon Johnson met at Johnson’s house in Washington to discuss killing Henry Marshall. Little is known about Wallace’s whereabouts that month, other than at some point he was arrested in Dallas for public drunkenness; it cannot be confirmed that Wallace was in Washington around the time of the inauguration when the meeting supposedly took place. But Wallace knew Cliff Carter. The two were in Washington together the previous summer, when Johnson was making a run for the 1960 presidential nomination. Wallace was seen at least three times at campaign functions, always accompanied by Cliff Carter, according to Lucianne Goldberg, who worked in the campaign press office. Goldberg recalled that Carter introduced her to Wallace in a hospitality suite at the Mayflower Hotel. “I just knew him and remember him because that was sort of what we were all about remembering everybody you meet, because you never knew where they were going to end up,” said Goldberg, who was 23 and known as Lucy Cummings back then. “We were all on the make, as young people around politicians are.” Goldberg, now a literary agent in New York, told the Observer she noticed Wallace “a couple of times” at Johnson campaign headquarters at the Ambassador Hotel. “I’d be sitting at my desk and there’d be a lot of people milling around and I’d see him with his thumbs hooked into his belt the way those [Texas] guys do.” Goldberg could not recall any conversation she had with Wallace, “other than, `wanna go have a drink,’ that kind of thing, which I never did.” In February of 1961, four months before Henry Marshall’s death, Wallace transferred from Garland to Ling Electronics in Anaheim, California, a subsidiary of Ling-Temco-Vought, where he worked as a manager in the purchasing department. Wallace’s transfer from Texas to California prompted a 1961 background check by the Office of Naval Intelligence. The investigation was to deter