Who Helped LBJ Become Rich in Radio?

A Whodunit 

If we want to know the truth about who really done it, we have to follow the money. LBJ's wealth was funneled to him through the newest technological tycoons of his era, those men who controlled radio licensing and the cash flow it produced in advertising.

Like every new technology, radio and television infrastructure was built by small, individually owned companies in local areas. In the early days of radio a plethora of such companies existed, owned by local investors and operators. J. Evetts Haley, the somewhat biased historian from the Texas Plains, told us part of the truth about LBJ's radio station in a book he published in paperback in 1964 called A Texan Looks at Lyndon, part of which appears below.

J. Evetts Haley, A Texan Looks at Lyndon

Clearly, Haley had done his research into the personal investments that Texas businessmen had made in connection with their closeness to the power of the Roosevelt family and Lyndon Johnson, and the clues he left gives us a path to pursue in addition to the stated details.

We learned from his clues that Austin's first AM radio station was developed as part of the University of Texas, operating non-commercially and financed by educational budgets that were managed by wealthy businessmen appointed to the board. Austin's station, KUT, was built in 1915 at the urging of a physics professor, S. Leroy Brown, but was seemingly dismantled in 1927 for lack of funds. 

Dr. Brown was closely associated with physics teaching assistant, Ludwig Wilhelm Blau, a 1925 graduate of Evetts Haley's alma mater in Canyon, Texas, near Amarillo, who received his masters degree at UT Austin in 1927. He worked as an instructor at the Austin campus until he was hired in 1929 by Humble Oil's research department in Houston, where he moved to a house just north of Rice University--2027 Colquitt. Brown visited him there in 1932. The technology the physics professors invented for radio was found to be useful for locating oil in the ground. Could Blau have been Haley's unnamed source?

Haley's hero, James Marion ("Silver Dollar" Jim) West, Jr., was a son of the man who built a ranch southeast of Houston on which Humble Oil Company struck oil in 1938 and retained a long-term lease, eventually buying the fee simple title over which it laid a plethora of pipelines. It was this ranch from which NASA's Houston headquarters was carved, after first donating land to Rice Institute. Rice then sold 22 acres for a manned spacecraft center and received government funds in payment. The year Lyndon Johnson died in 1973, the space center was named for him. Much of the remaining land had been purchased by Exxon into which Humble Oil Company had merged. This land was developed by an Exxon-affiliated company called Friendswood Development.

It was telling that even before Johnson became President following Kennedy's assassination, one of J. M. West's sons, Wesley West, used LBJ's attorney, A. W. Moursund, when he sued his brother over their father's estate.

Lyndon's power depended upon his support of Franklin Roosevelt's policies. That support gained him entry into the circle of businessmen who used their insider knowledge and the President's powers of appointment to make money alongside members of the Roosevelt family. They were part of a group who  put the Texas State Network together for FDR's son, Elliott. It was A.P. (Alva Pearl)  Barrett through his Southwest Broadcasting company, who provided the funds for Elliott's radio empire. Barrett was also involved also in another of that decade's newest technologies--the airline industry. 

Monetizing of American Industries 

The monetization of both the radio and airlines industries was then uppermost in the minds of wealthy investment bankers, such as Bobby Lehman and Averell Harriman, who controlled the board of Aviation Corporation (AVCO) even before WWII, and they continued to engage in a war of their own to secure government contracts and concessions--a battle that would continue throughout the war and even later as the British Security Coordination got into the act of protecting Britain's empire.

American Airways, Inc. named Cyrus R. Smith as its president. A. P. Barrett acquired Errett Lobban "E. L." Cord's Cord Corp. stock by means of a labor dispute described in a history of the Cord Corporation, described at a website (safe though not converted to https):

In early 1932, Aviation Corp., (AVCO) the parent company of American Airways, launched a hostile takeover of Cord’s Century Airlines by creating a labor dispute with Century’s pilots. Cord was not amused and spent the next few months secretly purchasing large chunks of Aviation Corp. stock...

The Air Mail Act of 1934 prohibited any air mail contractor from holding an interest in any other aviation enterprise, which prompted the restructuring of Cord’s aero empire. Aviation Corp. (AVCO) was required to divest itself of American Airways, which was reorganized as American Airlines, and the Airplane Development Corp became a subsidiary of the Aviation Manufacturing Company, which was a subsidiary of Aviation Corp.

E.L. Cord was noticeably absent from his automotive and aviation empire during 1934 and 1935 as he and his family fled to Great Britain in March of 1934 following a kidnap scare at their Beverly Hills home. He returned to the county early in 1936 to face charges of stock manipulation which were triggered when he sold back his controlling interest in Checker Cab Co. to Morris Markin, which attracted the interest of the Securities & Exchange Commission [then headed by Joseph P. Kennedy].

Thus Cord was caught in what today is called a pump and dump scheme and replaced with Lucius Manning. After returning from London, Cord sold his stock to Emanuel & Co and Schroder, Rockefeller & Co. The names Victor Emanuel, J. Henry Schroder, and Avery Rockefeller can all be found together in a book in the public domain, which can be freely printed and shared: The Best Kept Secrets by Kristin B. Thompson and Jason A. Wright, which states:

Avery Rockefeller was a director of the J. Henry Schroeder Banking Corporation and the Schroeder Trust Company. He was also a full partner and stockholder in its affiliate, Schroeder, Rockefeller and Company. It is not surprising to learn, therefore, that John Foster Dulles also had been the American representative of the Schroeder trust which was Hitler’s agent in the United States. Gerhardt Westrick had been a Sullivan and Cromwell representative in Germany where he represented such multi-nationals as ITT. And at the beginning of World War II, Dulles became a voting trustee of Farben- controlled American corporations in an attempt to prevent them from being seized as enemy property. 

Instead of this man going down in American history as a tool of international monopoly and a possible traitor in war, he was appointed as a member of a special high-level consulting committee established by the Alien Property Custodian to formulate the basic policies of that office. And then he was chosen by President Eisenhower (CFR member) as Secretary of State. His brother, Allen Dulles (also a CFR member), also a partner of Sullivan and Cromwell, was equally enmeshed in the international cartel web as a negotiator with Farben interests for the Office of Strategic Services in Switzerland. (It was then that Allen Dulles had said, “Only hysteria entertains the idea that Germany, Italy or Japan contemplates war upon us.”) At the end of the war, after using his influence to protect Hitler’s agent, Westrick, 297 he was placed by President Eisenhower at the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. Such is the power of the forces being described. 

Perhaps the best way to judge the extent of hidden cartel power in the United States government is to observe how its German component fared during and after the war. As noted previously, its American holdings were seized by the federal government in February of 1942. Within a few months, all of the original directors and officers were compelled to resign. But whom did the government put in their places? 

Operating control has passed to a group of men who are tied in with a constellation of corporate interests which is rising rapidly in American business under the leadership of an international financier, Victor Emanuel. Emanuel himself sits on the board of directors of General Analine and Film Corporation (CAF) [American I.C.’s new name] There is a liberal sprinkling of his associates among the other directors and officers. 298 

Emanuel’s assumption of leadership over I.C.’s holdings in the United States is significant. Between 1927 and 19B4, he had been in London as an associate of the Schroeder banking interests. This is the same organization that, in conjunction with the Rockefeller group, represented I.C. and became the financial agent of Adolph Hitler. 

As is well known, the Schroeders of London are related to the Schroeders of Germany. Baron Bruno Schroeder is credited with having introduced Hitler to the principal industrialists of the Ruhr. Baron Kurt Schroeder held a high rank in the SS and was known as “The SS banker.” The London banking house, J. Henry Schroeder and Company, was described by Time magazine in July, 1939, as an “economic booster of the Rome-Berlin Axis.” 299 

And what of Victor Emanuel, President of Standard Gas and Electric, who dominated the “new” leadership of the Rockefeller-Farben empire? The answer was provided in one short sentence in a report of the Securities and Exchange Commission dated January 19, 1943. It said: “The Schroeder interests in London and New York have worked with Emanuel in acquiring and maintaining a dominant position in Standard affairs.” 300 (footnotes are at the bottom of pages at linked text)

Sid Richardson, the wealthy Fort Worth oilman, had discovered FDR would take his money but not do his bidding, with one important exception in 1944: Roosevelt appointed Sid Richardson's Republican friend from Texas--Robert Bernerd Anderson, a Republican, whom Truman trusted implicitly. Before Franklin Roosevelt died, he was privy to what Sterling Seagrave and Peggy Seagrave, in their 2005 book, Gold Warriors, called a:

top secret project sometimes called Black Eagle, a strategy first suggested to President Roosevelt by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and his wartime advisors, John J. McCloy (later head of the World Bank), Robert A. Lovett (later secretary of Defense), and Robert B. Anderson (later secretary of the Treasury). Stimson proposed using all recovered Axis war loot (Nazi, Fascist, and Japanese) to finance a global political action fund. Because it would be difficult if not impossible to determine who were the rightful owners of all the looted gold, better to keep its recovery quiet and set up a trust to help friendly governments stay in power after the war. This was informally called the Black Eagle Trust after the German black eagle, referring to Nazi bullion marked with an eagle and swastika, recovered from underground vaults of the Reichsbank.

According to some sources, the Black Eagle Trust could only have been set up with the cooperation of the most powerful banking families in America and Europe, including the Rockefellers, Harrimans, Rothschilds, Oppenheimers, Warburgs, and others. Robert B. Anderson flew back to Tokyo with Lansdale, for discussions with [Gen. Douglas] MacArthur. After some days of meetings, MacArthur and Anderson flew secretly to Manila, where they were taken by Lansdale and Santy [Severino Santa Romana, secret agent of MacArthur’s personal attorney, Courtney Whitney] to some of the sites in the mountains, and to six other sites around Aparri at the northern tip of Luzon. In the intervening weeks, Santy's men, aided by hand-picked teams from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, had successfully opened several of these vaults, where MacArthur and Anderson were able to stroll down row after row of gold bars. Other sites were opened in subsequent months. In all, the recoveries took two years to complete, from late 1945 to early 1947....

 In 1953, to reward him, President Eisenhower nominated Anderson to a Cabinet post as secretary of the Navy. The following year he rose to deputy secretary of Defense. During the second Eisenhower Administration, he became secretary of the Treasury, serving from 1957 to 1961. After that, Anderson resumed private life, but remained intimately involved with the CIA s worldwide network of banks, set up after the war by Paul Helliwell. Eventually, this led to Anderson becoming involved in BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, an Arab Pakistani bank with CIA ties that parlayed money-laundering and the discreet movement of black gold into ownership of the biggest bank in Washington, D.C. The collapse of BCCI in what the Wall Street Journal called "the world's largest bank fraud" also snared Anderson's protege, Clark Clifford, who was indicted for fraud. Clifford and his associate Robert Altman headed First American Bankshares, the BCCI front firm the nation's capital, and were accused of using political patronage to shield BCCI from full investigation.

Anderson's reputation began to crumble when it was revealed by Bernard Nossiter in The Washington Post that he had sought and received $290,000 from a Texas oilman while serving as Eisenhower's secretary of the Treasury. Anderson later pleaded guilty to federal charges of tax evasion and money laundering, and died in disgrace.

Texas reporter Sarah McClendon put Nossiter's revelations in a different light, however. Before the Black Eagle Trust was secretly set up, most Presidents were financially assisted by their closest supporters in assuring they would have funds to fall back on once they retired from office. Even liberal McClendon conceded that fact. But then, she was not privy to the secrets about the looted funds. Stimson and his colleagues kept the secrets among those they believed were most likely to keep the secrets--the Skull and Bones Secret Society at Yale, who had long ago been entrusted with secrets about America's empire in the Philippines. William Howard Taft, Henry L. Stimson, and William Cameron Forbes all served as the American chief executive or Governor-General of the Philippines during the U.S. colonial era. 

Of these, the first two were closely affiliated with Skull and Bones, while Forbes had been a heavy benefactor of Harvard, linked to Yale through Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. Such Ivy League establishments had created huge endowments in the early days of United States' independence with money that came from what was euphemistically called "the Old China Trade," at the time when the most lucrative product sold to China was opium. Skull and Bones was financed by the Russell Trust, linked to the China trade firm Russell & Co.

Robert B. Anderson and Edward G. Lansdale were each privy to the political slush fund scheme to use captured Japanese gold, platinum and diamonds, as well as gold  Hitler had stolen from Poland, Austria, Belgium and France. Their respective jobs were to ensure the stolen funds entrusted to them were used to protect the investments of the country's wealthiest investors and its most elite university endowments. Anderson focused on Canadian mining stocks, while Lansdale, embedded into the CIA, guaranteed the Indo-China opium empire would continue . Kris Millegan has written about Lansdale's role in taking over France's empire in Vietnam in his seminal work on Skull and Bones.

As Cicero warned us: "the sinew of war is unlimited money."  Neither can exist in perpetuity without the other, and their perpetual use predicts their eventual downfall.

Broadcasting in Texas 

While other Texans left FDR's fold, Lyndon Johnson remained true to his New Deal hero all the way up to FDR's death in April 1945, when Harry Truman took his place.

The seller of the radio station which would form the flagship of Elliott Roosevelt's network was Fort Worth attorney Raymond E. Buck, whose father was an appellate judge and close politically to FDR's Vice President John Nance Garner. Buck had acquired the station years earlier on behalf of his clients, A.P. Barrett and C.R. Smith, the same Cyrus Rowlett Smith whom Lyndon Johnson would appoint in 1968 to be Secretary of Commerce.

Prior to 1929, a series of owners included radio evangelist Frank J. Norris, who broadcast under call letters KFQB, and who surreptitiously transferred title to the radio license to Lone Star Broadcasting Company (set up by his henchman, J.M. Gilliam, publisher of The Searchlight). W.P. "Wild Bill" McLean of the firm of McLean, Scott and Sayers acted as special prosecutor against Norris for the murder of D.E. Chipps in July 1926, a prosecution which resulted in an acquittal for Norris.

The McLean firm would, through Wild Bill's son John Evans McLean, represent Marguerite Oswald in her 1948 divorce case against Edwin Ekdahl. While Buck's primary business interests involved him in insurance, he was also vice chairman of the board of Fred Korth's Continental National Bank before his death in 1971. Korth, of course, was the attorney for Edwin Ekdahl, Marguerite's husband in the 1948 divorce.

In 1963 it was also Buck, a longtime friend of Lyndon Johnson's, who, as president of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, sponsored a "non-partisan" breakfast that was the central event of JFK's presidential visit to Fort Worth the morning he was murdered in Dallas. The history behind that morning in Fort Worth, which ended in Kennedy's bloody and horrific assassination in the City of Dallas--Fort Worth's rival--is a story about a quest for power which this author detailed in an article entitled "Tilting at Oil Wells."

Buck's resume mentions also that he was general counsel and director for Southern Air Transport and associate counsel for American Airlines and General Dynamics. Southern Air Transport (in a Florida incarnation) was a CIA proprietary Company which helped launder opium profits from Vietnam. General Dynamics was one of Fort Worth's biggest money makers.

The Associated Press reported in August 1938 (12 years after Buck first acquired the radio license) as follows:

The state of Texas today granted a charter to the Texas State Network, Inc., Fort Worth Broadcasting company Incorporated by Elliott Roosevelt, Harry A. Hutchinson and Raymond E. Buck. The firm, which has 1,000 shares of no par value capital stock ($50,000 paid in), proposes to operate 23 Texas stations tied In with 108 stations of the Mutual Broadcasting company.

The radio advisory commission of Dallas today approved and submitted to the city council a one-year contract that would affiliate station WRR with the new network. The president's son bid last spring for managership of the Dallas station but the commission renewed its contract with Mgr. John Thorwald instead. Roosevelt then advanced the counter proposition. Thorwald said in Dallas the network's key stations would be WRR in Dallas and KFJZ or KTAT of Fort Worth.

Other stations under present plans, would be at Weslaco, Corpus Christi, San Antonio, Austin, Houston, Galveston, Beaumont, Temple, Waco, Amarillo, Corsicana, Tyler, Longview, Paris, Sherman, Abilene, San Angela, Big Spring, Midland, Lubbock. Wichita Falls may be added later. At Fort worth, Roosevelt said he had no announcement to make concerning the new company.

By 1951, Sid Richardson was the majority investor in the network, which continued to purchase other radio stations. That was the year he bought and retired the stock that Elliott Roosevelt had transferred to his ex-wife, Ruth Googins.

 

The history of the northside area J. B. Googins had built can be seen in photos and captions in the "North of the Courthouse: Our Stockyards and Livestock Legacy" section of the Fort Worth: The Way We Were website. According to this history, in 1901 Amon Carter, Sr. had enticed the Swift packing company (Joseph B. Googins) to build a plant in Fort Worth, which had been completed by 1913. Armour Co. also located nearby, and the two became partners in the Fort Worth Stockyards Company, which owned the land the plants were built on. In 1936 Swift acquired that land-owning company under its new umbrella called United Stockyards.
 

Jack White grew up near Googins Building

The Hotel Texas - near Stockyards

The Hotel Texas, where President Kennedy spent his last night before heading for Dallas on November 22, was located just a couple of blocks west of the packing plants which were turned into the Stockyards District after the plants closed in the 1970s.

It is intriguing to note here that, according to Zachary Sklar's documented script for Oliver Stone's movie, JFK, recently-retired Air Force Major General Edward G. Lansdale-- at some point between his retirement from the Air Force on Nov. 1, 1963 and his arrival at his son's home in Arizona following the assassination of JFK--was in that very neighborhood, staying at the Hotel Texas (where President Kennedy would deliver his last speech). 

The hotel's address, 2415 Ellis Ave, intersects with West Exchange Avenue, the street leading into the center of today's Stockyards District. Based on the comments of Fletcher Prouty, General Y below, Stone's researchers came up with an interesting piece of evidence:

JFK: The Book of the Film  by Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar

 

Elliott and Ruth Googins Roosevelt had a daughter named Ruth Chandler Roosevelt, who grew up to marry in 1956 Henry Dickinson Lindsley III. Henry's mother was at that time married to Robert H. Stewart, Jr. of Dallas, the man who hired George H. W. Bush to become a banker when Jimmy Carter refused to let him continued as Director of the CIA in 1977. Lindsley's father had been in the oil business in Midland with Bush. Betty Barwise was a bridesmaid for Ruth Chandler, and her father, Seth Barwise, was partner in the law firm begun by his grandfather, J. H. Barwise, where Fred Korth spent the first dozen or so years of his career. Korth was picked to follow John B. Connally as Secretary of the Navy. Connally had followed Robert B. Anderson in that same position. The senior Barwise was best friends with W. T. Waggoner, who was Robert B. Anderson's long-time employer. J. H. Barwise in 1912 was attorney for Winfield Scott's estate, where he lost to Scott's daughter, represented by William Pinkney McLean, Jr. McLean's son represented Marguerite Oswald in her divorce case against Edwin Ekdahl, who was represented by ... you guessed it... Fred Korth.

Are you getting a picture of who chose these Navy secretaries? 

Keep in mind that in those days the Navy's primary concern was maintaining its supply of oil to fuel its ships, and that the Middle East was then becoming the cheapest source of such oil. Jimmy Carter's background in the Navy had been in the area of nuclear-generated fuel for ships, diametrically opposed to Texans who supplied the Navy's oil before that.

 

 

A TALE OF TWO DANNYS--HOPSICKER AND CASOLARO Part TWO-A

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