Last night I was up till midnight again reading Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate. What a great book! Oh, I’m sorry. I think I’ve said that before.<\/p>\n
Before going to bed I googled Billie Sol Estes<\/a> and came up with a JFK assassination website which had lots of interesting information in it. I sent the site’s author an email inquiring about a mysterious news story I’d read in the late 1980’s about\u00a0a man\u00a0who had just claimed on his death bed that\u00a0Lyndon Johnson\u00a0had ordered another man’s murder. (Not JFK but someone else who was in a position to blackmail the President about his personal corruption)<\/p>\n Having just read Caro’s book the story seemed considerably more credible but my newspaper never followed the accusation up. This was in the days before the Internet\u00a0or Google so\u00a0the story\u00a0just receded from view. Then\u00a0last night after finding\u00a0the site\u00a0(one of many such JFK sites) I sent an inquiry about\u00a0that mysterious old news story\u00a0(along with a link to my web\u00a0page about the\u00a0Boyd Scandal) to the website’s author.<\/p>\n He wrote back this morning and said he would post my question on his site. He also invited me to send him a biography which he also offered to post for people who might have information about my research.<\/p>\n Here’s the email I just sent him.<\/p>\n Thank you John, After I sent you the email I realized that I probably saw the news story shortly after reading Robert Caro\u2019s first book in 1984 or 85. The news story must have come out between 1985 and 1990. Caro\u2019s book so impressed me with LBJ\u2019s mania to be President and his ties to Brown and Root that it enhanced the credibility of the death bed confession I\u2019m trying to locate. It was such a potent accusation \u2013 US Senator\/President orders the murder of a political threat \u2013 that I could never understand why it was never followed up by our newspaper. I am a JFK conspiracy skeptic but I am open to serious research about the interesting little dust bunnies that history tried to sweep under the rug after JFK was murdered. Coincidentally, conspiracy enthusiast, Jim Fetzer, is a neighbor of mine but I\u2019m non-plussed by his theory that Paul Wellstone\u2019s charter plane was brought down by an electromagnetic pulse. In my opinion<\/a> Fetzer\u2019s work mostly serves to discredit other assassination researchers. I\u2019m a local eccentric in Duluth, Minnesota. I\u2019m an ex-liberal Republican (I\u2019m still a liberal) who has failed to establish much of a political presence in our very Democratic oriented part of Blue State, Minnesota. I\u2019m best known in town for my winter snow sculptures. I was a history teacher and served on the Duluth school board for eight years. I run for office promiscuously. I just ran a Quixotic race for Congress. It was my 12th campaign but my 5,508 votes were about 150,000 votes short of a victory. I was a columnist for our local tabloid the Reader Weekly and my columns and other miscellaneous stuff can be found with a little poking around on my Internet closet: www.snowbizz.com. I also blog every so often at www.lincolndemocrat.org Six months ago an interesting lead from another JFK website<\/a> wetted my appetite to dig deeper into the 1973 Boyd Scandal<\/a> which is closely tied to HHH. The new lead involved yet another long-forgotten Minnesota scandal from a decade earlier, 1963-64, that threatened my Father\u2019s pension. My father was particularly chagrined about this at the time because he had been a fraud investigator for the Kansas State Insurance Commission prior to moving us to Minnesota. This time period coincided with LBJ prot\u00e9g\u00e9 HHH\u2019s, move from the Senate to the Vice Presidency when money would have been at a premium for the 64 presidential campaign. This earlier scandal involved a failed Minnesota insurance company (like the kind my Dad used to investigate) which managed Minnesota\u2018s state pensions. One of the company\u2019s leaders threatened to expose the state\u2019s Democratic party to charges of corruption (he never did) while another executive who was sent to prison later claimed to have information about the Kennedy Assassination. I don\u2019t know where my research is headed but it is an interesting little cul de sac. Feel free to use this email as my biography. Harry Welty <\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last night I was up till midnight again reading Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate. What a great book! Oh, I’m sorry. I think…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,49,30,51],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=950"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19982,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950\/revisions\/19982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}