Word: sol
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...that he knows Charles Murphy to be an honest man through and through." Murphy could only be grateful for such testimonials. Throughout nine weeks of hearings by a Senate subcommittee, past and present Agriculture Department underlings had fingered him as the official responsible for decisions that helped make Billie Sol Estes a scandal...
Against charges that he had shown "favoritism" toward Billie Sol, Murphy vowed that he had only met the fellow once in his life. Moreover, the only gift he had ever received from Estes was a couple of crates of cantaloupes. Upon receiving them, Murphy said, he sent Estes a little letter of thanks for the "mighty good cantaloupes"-and politely suggested that there should be no more such shipments, in order "to avoid all possibilities of misunderstanding or difficulty." The Senators were much more interested in possible malfeasance than in melons. They sought the answers to two basic questions...
Witness Jacobs, who was ousted from the department on charges that he had accepted financial favors from Billie Sol, had a confusing way with words. At one point he apologetically confided to the Senators that "my lucidity doesn't quite equal my ambiguity." But one thing came through quite, clearly. Jacobs blamed Murphy for the basic decision that made Billie Sol's extensive land and cotton-allotment shenanigans possible. Also pointing a finger at Murphy was Witness John Bagwell, the Agriculture Department's general counsel...
...after Jacobs testified that Freeman's executive assistant, Thomas R. Hughes, had been in on department discussions of the Estes case as early as January. Hughes denied it at once, but Jacobs had at least raised some question about previous evidence that Freeman knew nothing of the Billie Sol mess until late March...
...Meanwhile, back yonder in Texas, Billie Sol kept getting himself deeper into the soup. He was arrested in Abilene last week after driving his white 1961 Cadillac 1) through a stop sign, 2) the wrong way into a one-way street, 3) without a driver's license. On the way to the station house, he complained to the cop who had pinched him: "I've been blamed for a lot of things I didn't do. A lot of things are not true. I respect the law all the way." That statement has not yet been definitized...