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THIS week's cover story on Billie Sol Estes brings out old-fashioned journalistic instincts-the pursuit of shenanigans, resolving contradictory stories-that all journalists, ourselves included, take professional delight in. We think we have something extra to bring to the story in the accumulation of fascinating detail that a television audience would not be expected to sit still for, and in the deployment of correspondents to many cities, weaving together their separate strands in a way that individual newspapers cannot match...
...Cover) Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman was on the grill. What were his associations with Billie Sol Estes? Freeman shrugged, hopelessly and helplessly. He had, he told newsmen, met Estes once, briefly, when Estes was paying one of many visits to Agriculture Department headquarters in Washington. Said Freeman: "I might recognize him in pictures." Then he mustered up a bit of bitter humor: "I'm sure I'll never forget the name." The newsmen laughed...
...Billie Sol Estes case was no laughing matter-to Freeman or anyone else. It was the case of a welfare-state Ponzi. It was a scandal that had already brought about the resignation or dismissal of four Kennedy Administration officials. It had politicians and bureaucrats of all degrees and of both parties shaking in their boots. It had set off investigations galore. It had called into question the whole administration of the mighty U.S. Department of Agriculture...
Down in Pecos, Texas, Federal Receiver Harry Moore, presiding over the ruins of the Estes empire, refused to let newsmen even peek at the "financial journal" in which Billie Sol had recorded his receipts and expenditures over the years. Until the full record was open to scrutiny, the Estes scandal was the hottest thing around...
Receiver Moore's office in Pecos was jammed with feds poring over Billie Sol's papers. "I have working in this office at the moment," said Moore, "six Senate investigators, five men from the FBI, and four auditors-and twelve more are on the way." In Washington, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations unanimously voted to hold a full-scale investigation of the Estes case, with public hearings to begin as soon as Chairman John McClellan sees fit, probably in June. In addition, a House Government Operations Subcommittee, newly supplied with a special $400,000 appropriation voted...