A Bone-Chilling NEW Revelation: The Name and Background of Another Victim of Lyndon Johnson: Milt Paul Good, One of RFK’s Secret Special Investigators

A Story Never Before Published

Evidence to be presented: That LBJ Ordered the Murder of RFK’s Special Agent Milt Paul Good — one which Mac Wallace Evidently Filled on July 3, 1960 — Just One Week Before the Start of the Democratic National Convention

---

As the DNC’s Convention was gaveled to order in Los Angeles on July 11, 1960, a secret, furious and deadly battle had just been disengaged in southwest Texas in the aftermath of Mr. Good’s murder.

Robert F. Kennedy, in his mission to destroy the political life of his nemesis, Lyndon B. Johnson, had, some weeks earlier, sent twelve volunteer special agents of the Texas Rangers on a mission in southwest Texas to investigate LBJ’s criminal activities with Billie Sol Estes, as well as to gather facts about the stolen 1948 election.

The murder of Milt Good, to be summarily described below, will be detailed in a future book (tentatively titled “Good & Evil”). The author, Chad Mills, is the Great-Grand-Nephew of Milt Good; Chad’s Great-Uncle, Harold Elder, had personally told him the painful truth of his own uncle’s murder, a secret he would carry with him for more than fifty years. Mr. Mills believes he was the only person his bachelor great-uncle ever told about those hidden secrets. Chad believes the reason his great-uncle Harold revealed these details to him was to ensure that the story would survive and be added to the historical record, where it belonged, but it could never publicly surface as long as he was alive, the single person left of those few men who had personally investigated it.

---

It should be acknowledged here that RFK resigned that position late in 1959, but by the time he left it, he had accumulated considerable residual power, and much more freedom to conduct secret, sub-rosa investigations, now for the family’s interests, not the government’s.

Not only would he retain what he had experienced—the knowledge, personal connections and gravitas he earned there, as well as the inherent power vested in him as JFK’s brother—but, in cutting his ties to it, he became freed of the constraints and limitations of power imposed by government regulations — rules designed with the intention of curbing abuse by the hungriest of the grubby politicians [LBJ, for example, comes to mind]. [2]

In fact, it could be said that when Robert Kennedy walked away from his senate job in November, 1959, it was to begin working full time advancing his brother Jack’s political campaign. Because, within six months, he developed and executed—from a higher, ever more powerful political level—a plan co-created with the Texas Rangers, to enlist 12 volunteers to be assigned the task of doing an intensive investigation of Senator/Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson’s crimes.

Not many people alive, then or now, could manage to do that from any platform, especially one without an official federal government authority’s backing.

---

“Good & Evil” — A Book-Manuscript Summary

This is a story about Milt Good’s life, and sudden violent death, much of it derived from his 1935 autobiography, “12 Years In A Texas Prison.” It’s about him going from Rodeo World Champion in 1921 to convicted murderer two years later, after becoming involved with a neighbor-rancher named Tom Ross, in the fatal 1923 shooting of two Texas Cattle Association detectives.   Milt managed to escape from prison twice (1925 & ’26).

And it is about his creation of the Huntsville Prison’s unique rodeo program upon recapture and how he decided to reform himself by being more cooperative with the warden and other officials.  

Milt Good was the unsung hero who provided key information to Hamer, leading to the famous bullet-riddled scene into which the lover-robber team was ambushed near Sailes, Bienville Parish, Louisiana on May 23, 1934. According to the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) website:

“Hamer trailed Bonnie and Clyde for 102 days. Finally, Hamer and other officers, including former Ranger B. M. Gault, caught up with the dangerous duo in Louisiana’s Bienville Parish. The officers had hoped to take the outlaws alive, but when the pair reached for their weapons, Hamer and the others opened fire. The career of Bonnie and Clyde was over.”

Chad’s story will also examine how Milt’s last attempt to redeem all the bad he had done by volunteering for assignment by Robert Kennedy to continue that effort to covertly stop LBJ in 1960. It was a mission that would eventually cost him his life just one week before the Democratic National Convention.  

Finally, and of equal importance, it is a story about Harold Elder (Milt’s nephew and Chad’s great-uncle), who, prodded to do so by Robert F. Kennedy, was able to take down an arm of Vice President Johnson’s political machine (Billie Sol Estes) and avenge the murder of his great-grand uncle Milton Paul Good in the end.

---

Though the news of Milt Good’s death was reported locally, it was always stated that Mr. Good died “accidentally” when his car purportedly slipped into reverse and backed into him as he was closing a cattle gate. Owing to that lie, his death was immediately framed to be “accidental”, thus the story itself died within a week or so.

But a few people on the scene, who were investigating the death of “one of their own,” knew that Milt had been murdered. Whether RFK knew, on July 11th, the opening day of the convention, that it was another one of Johnson’s doings or not, cannot be known now; but, based upon Chad’s emerging story, it is highly likely that he did know sufficient details to connect the dots already at that point, even though he had also been stymied by the “accidental” cause of death, undoubtedly what LBJ’s man-on-the-scene would immediately assign.

But certainly Robert Kennedy knew it when he contacted Harold Elder, persuading him to move to Pecos and become a bank teller in 1961 to gather data on LBJ’s bagman Billie Sol Estes—for the very purpose of helping to avenge Milt Good’s death and further expose Lyndon Johnson’s insidious criminality. Harold would continue working there, eventually as president of the bank.

As might be expected in the LBJ-netherworld’s “standard operating procedures,” everyone with any knowledge about it whatsoever were all threatened and sworn to secrecy, precisely as so many other witnesses were treated throughout LBJ’s reign of terror: They were forcefully warned about never revealing the truth about Milt’s murder, else their own lives and those of their families would be put into jeopardy.[3]

And none of them ever talked about it again, save Chad’s great-uncle, Mr. Elder.

---

There was actually no break—between Robert Kennedy’s 1960 efforts, and the second major one in 1963—as those efforts continued in 1961-62, as noted in these excerpts from my LBJ: The Mastermind book (pp. 307-309):

In addition to being very frustrated by Johnson’s ineptitude, John Kennedy was afraid that the Baker and Estes scandals would blow up during the 1964 campaign, jeopardizing his own reelection chances. He had discussed this with Bobby on many occasions, and despite RFK’s repeated and expected denials, the decision to replace Johnson had been made; it was only necessary to be able to justify it, to him or anyone else. Bobby had been procuring information on Johnson’s Mafia ties, specifically with his own nemesis, Carlos Marcello.

Jack Halfen had been serving his second year of a ten-year sentence in 1961 when Bobby Kennedy sent one of his investigators to interview him after Halfen had hinted that he might be willing to reveal incriminating information about Johnson. It would take thirty-seven years—until 1998—for the FBI records relating to all of this to be released; when they were, thirty-seven of the forty names on Halfen’s list were blacked out, leaving only three close friends of Johnson: Tom Clark (father of Ramsey and a former U.S. Attorney General and Supreme Court Justice), U.S. Congressman Albert Thomas (who would be caught winking at Johnson immediately after he was sworn in on Air Force One), and a former Texas deputy sheriff named Jake Colca.

In due course, it became well known that John F. Kennedy followed all news of Johnson’s legal entanglements, and he would specifically take much interest in the investigation of the Billie Sol Estes and Bobby Baker cases, with all of their connections to Johnson. This was confirmed in the early days of the administration, in a newspaper that Johnson had always read closely. The Dallas Morning News carried a headline in 1961 titled, “JFK Takes Interest in Henry Marshall Death.” Over three decades later, according to author Gus Russo’s sources: “In 1998, a high government official, on condition of anonymity, confirmed that Robert Kennedy had in fact instructed his Justice Department to initiate a ‘criminal investigation of Lyndon Johnson.’” By the time of the trip to Texas, Bobby Kennedy had information documenting Johnson’s long criminal history on many fronts: Bobby Baker, Billie Sol Estes, and Jack Halfen, the legendary go-between who connected Lyndon Johnson directly to Carlos Marcello.

[Citations may be found within the book to the following sources: Gus Russo (Live by the Sword); John H. Davis (Mafia Kingfish) and Robert Dallek, (Flawed Giant)].

---

RFK’s Second Attempt: His 1963 effort to “Dump Johnson”

As I wrote in LBJ: From Mastermind to The Colossus:

Another witness to Bobby’s plotting to “get rid” of LBJ from the 1964 ticket was journalist Phil Brennan, who in the 1960s and 1970s authored a column for the National Review magazine using the pseudonym “Cato.” Brennan wrote a lengthy article on November 18, 2003 which explains the point in detail; I have summarized it below:

For forty years, he held back the story of his personal involvement in the fight between Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Finally the linked article was published, titled “Some Relevant Facts About the JFK Assassination;” within it he described the background leading up to his sudden involvement in the brush-up between the two. He stated that the Washington press corps had buried the stories about the feud between the vending machine entrepreneur Ralph Hill and Bobby Baker, as they fought over the kick-back price Baker wanted to charge for his private handling of government contracts. Then, suddenly, word came that Brennan should tell Senator John Williams about the details, because he wanted to investigate the story. That led to Senator Williams asking Brennan to introduce him to Ralph Hill, which led to a full scale Senate investigation, including all the ties to Lyndon B. Johnson. A few days later, the Attorney General Robert Kennedy, called five of Washington’s top reporters into his office and told them:

“… it was now open season on Lyndon Johnson. It’s OK, he told them, to go after the story they were ignoring out of deference to the administration.”

All of the maneuvering by the Kennedys behind the scenes to “dump Lyndon” finally became widely known, through leaks by the many people involved, and thus became fodder for the Washington rumor mill. The sources for the “rumors” circulating throughout Washington by day increased geometrically at night, starting at Capitol Hill. They were repeated over cocktails and again at dinners in Georgetown.

The “dump Lyndon” talk had sprouted during the early spring, bloomed in the summer and, by the fall of 1963, had flowered into the ubiquitous talk of the town. By the time of JFK’s assassination, as documented by Mark North, “there was a thick investigative file on Robert Kennedy’s desk detailing the Marcello-Halfen-Johnson connection that Kennedy was debating whether to pursue.” [4]

As demonstrated below, in what Horace Busby—one of LBJ’s highest level aides—had to say about the long and vicious RFK-LBJ feud, it is safe to assume that everything he wrote in his autobiography about what occurred in 1963 was the culmination, and extension of, precisely the same techniques Robert Kennedy had personally used three years earlier, now extended further, and wider.

The sum and substance of the excerpt, below, as Horace Busby portrayed it, was that Lyndon Johnson was aware, by Nov. 4, 1963, while he was out of the country, in Luxembourg, that the Kennedys had sent another SWAT team to Texas: This time it consisted of forty national reporters who were given the task of utterly destroying Lyndon Johnson. The following paragraphs are excerpted as Mr. Busby originally wrote them, with a little more emphasis added within each step: [5]

          “A mirthless smile played across the vice president’s lips, and he seem almost apologetic. “You may not believe what’s happening, but you may as well know.” Then he began relating what he had been learning from Walter Jenkins.

          “On Monday, as the vice president arrived in Luxembourg, teams of newsmen from major national publications began arriving almost simultaneously in Austin and Johnson City, as well as the major metropolitan centers of Texas. None of the reporters were known figures of the Washington press corps, but upward of forty correspondents thus far had been identified in different parts of the state. At first, when the newsmen began making their presence known, it was assumed that they were arriving to do advance stories on President Kennedy’s visit. One of the senior figures, however, quickly revealed the true purpose. Talking with an attorney whom he mistakenly believed to be a Johnson enemy, the newsman said: “We’re here to do a job on Lyndon Johnson. When we get through with the sonofabitch, Kennedy won’t be able to touch him with a ten-foot pole in 1964.”

          “It appeared to be a dragnet operation. The investigative teams were spreading out over the state, talking with attorneys, bankers, businessmen, and known political enemies of the vice president. Four or five publications were represented, but many questions from the different teams were almost identical. Evidently, someone had compiled and distributed a master dossier on the vice president’s twenty-six-year career in rough-and-tumble Texas politics; some questions, for example, involved campaign charges dating back to before World War II.

“Whoever’s behind it,” the vice president conceded, “has done one hell of a thorough job.”

That “Whoever,” who was behind it, as LBJ surely knew, was his nemesis, Robert F. Kennedy, and that “master dossier on the vice president’s” criminal past was not put together quickly; Johnson also had to remember that RFK had been working on it for three years already, and it started back in June, 1960, as LBJ would doubtlessly remember.

Lest anyone miss the most salient points that Mr. Busby was warning us about, the various “teams” reporting back to the RFK’s Justice Department who were swarming about Texas in 1963 reveals a candid and highly insightful prism: one which implicitly belies the notion that the Kennedys ever had any actual plan to keep Johnson aboard in 1964.

That Horace Busby put this story into his memoirs speaks volumes about his courage and integrity, despite having served so long as another one of Johnson’s enabler/sycophants (But, compared to others, like Moyers and Valenti for example, Busby was a saint, for this glimmer of truth alone).

Considering the fact that Pulitzer Prize winning biographer/ historian Robert Caro (among many others) apparently missed still another page [two in this case] is tantamount to absolute proof that he selectively ignored the strongest argument contradicting his weakly presented, less insidious, alternative fabricated story—which completely contradicted Busby’s thoroughly compelling, first-hand, intrinsically truthful, account.

Moreover, given that Caro made no reference to this issue in his tome subtitled “The Passage of Power,” or any other of his four books on LBJ, it demonstrates that he failed once more to “turn the page, turn all the pages” as he likes to put it; it was a lesson he proudly claims to have learned early in his career from a very old-school supervising editor (See HERE for numerous other points of which Caro stopped short of that promise).

Why Mr. Caro would make such curious claims, knowing that there are many cases where he demonstrably did NOT “turn the page” (or, if he did, he then ignored it) is troubling when one considers how his books have been lauded for his exhaustive research. The missing pieces may turn up in his final volume — of which he has stated “the tone will change.”

It will take considerable amounts of tonal change to correct the record. For that reason, the longer it takes to publish it, the greater are the chances of it not appearing until sometime after Mr. Caro passes.

---

So Why is Chad’s Story Important?

Were it not for Chad’s stepping up, no one would have ever heard the name Milt Good in any discussion about LBJ’s many victims — the actual people killed/vanished on the orders of the man who would become the 36th POTUS.

Milt Good should have had a hero’s salute on July 11, 1960 at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, along with the other eleven members of RFK’s investigative team. And they probably would have, had he (and others’?) not been killed in order to stop the investigation they had accepted.

Were it not for the murder of Milt Good one week before the DNC convention (possibly others as well), Robert Kennedy might have succeeded in his mission to dump Lyndon Johnson “forever” (as in criminal indictments) to keep his name off the ballot later that year, not only the nomination for President, but the Vice Presidency as well.

That would have precluded Lyndon Johnson from ever becoming president, and that alone would have left the nation, and the world, in a clearly better place. Instead, the nation as we knew it then was forever corrupted thanks largely to LBJ’s infective wickedness and inherent criminality.

By the time Johnson left the Oval Office in January, 1969, he had created a bureaucratic structure that would protect his numerous cover-ups for many decades into the future, and it has grown like topsy ever since.[6]

The rest is history, but one deeply affected by the curse inflicted on the world by Lyndon B. Johnson: “Bull” for short.

---

     

---

ENDNOTES:

[1] Senator John L. McClellan was Chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for eighteen years (1955-1973), and became famous for conducting more congressional investigations than any other member. He had emerged as a national figure during the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, leading a Democratic walkout of the Republican-controlled subcommittee because of objections to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunting conduct. In 1955, Senator McClellan assumed chairmanship of that committee and hired Robert F. Kennedy as chief counsel. Probes into the activities of teamsters Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa, the so-called “Valachi hearings,” and investigations surrounding the affairs of Texas financier Billie Sol Estes, all catapulted McClellan into the public eye.

[2] Among other such mundane governmental-limiting examples is that of “curating official records” — the need to report and document meetings and correspondence about practically everything, in considerable, usually boring, detail. But anyone having an expectation that the writers of these documents might be politically neutral and unbiased is preposterous, especially anything emanating from Washington D.C. in the 1960s.

Indeed, the likelihood of Johnson’s corruption being baked into the bureaucracy so deeply–for the original purpose of covering up his numerous acts of treasons, high crimes and more than a few misdemeanors—is nearly absolute. That assertion is proven to anyone who ever ventured into, say, the FBI files related to Martin Luther King’s assassination—the very premise that Hoover’s FBI might ever investigate itself (which was abundantly obvious from the beginning) is absurd on its face: could anyone expect to find any “smoking guns” in there?

[3] According to Billie Sol Estes’ attorney (Douglas Caddy), in 1984 Billie Sol Estes informed him that he knew of at least 17 murders ordered by Lyndon Johnson, only about half of which he would, or could, attach names, and did.

Caddy also made this astonishing statement about how LBJ got Mac Wallace in place for these jobs, such that he didn’t have to risk being caught with a gun on commercial airliners: “At that time Billie Sol Estes outlined to me the proposed contents of his book, which dealt, among other topics, with murders commissioned by LBJ. He indicated that LBJ over the years employed Malcolm Wallace as a stone cold killer to murder certain individuals who posed a threat to LBJ’s political ambitions. Billie Sol Estes told me that Johnson arranged at times for Malcolm Wallace to use a U.S. military plane to transport him to the location where the victim would be found. The pilots of the plane had no idea of the purpose of the trip, only that they were to provide transportation. Once Malcolm Wallace completed his assignment, he would reboard the military plane for the return trip.” (See LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination for more details — pp. 245-250).

[4] Mark North, Act of Treason, p. 371

[5] Horace Busby, The Thirty-First of March, pp. 129-130

[6] For a very clear example (one of uncountable many) see the subsection titled “More Traces of the Continuing Cover-Up” in my book Who REALLY Killed Martin Luther King Jr.? (pp. 402-404). The last paragraph there sums it up thusly:

As noted previously, this phenomenon has been repeated time and again, as new evidence or witnesses appear, or events occur: the fact the reactions produce the same results is proof enough of the existence of a sub-rosa network within the “Deep State” assigned to keep state secrets secret. The cost of moving that floor [of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis] a foot higher and relocating the bathtub was undoubtedly one of its most minor expenditures.