Into the Maze

The Senate Investigations Subcommittee, chaired by Arkansas' implacable old John McClellan, began its long-awaited probe into the affairs of Billie Sol Estes--and, to be sure, Billie Sol's name got mentioned a few times. But top billing in the first days' hearings was bestowed on the bureaucratic maze of the Agriculture Department.

First witness was the subcommittee's assistant counsel, Paul Kamerick, 47. "It has become increasingly apparent," said Kamerick, with masterful understatement, "that this subcommittee may wish to consider recommending a major reorganization of the Department of Agriculture. It appears that over the century of its existence, programs have been added piecemeal to the department, and they have been administered piecemeal. A system that permits inefficiency encourages dishonesty, and some of the facts we have developed are hard to explain merely on the basis of inefficiency." Kamerick went on to deplore Agriculture's weak, sometimes nonexistent communications among its Washington, state and county offices--and even within Agriculture headquarters itself.

In Washington, he said, "there are eleven internal audit groups, including one attached to the office of the Secretary.

Each of these groups reports to the head of its own agency. These audit groups have no authority and little interest in anything that transpires outside their own narrow assignments." Two separate investigations of Estes went on simultaneously for weeks without either group's knowing that the other was tilling the same field.

Said Kamerick: "A group equipped and manned to audit, investigate and monitor all of the varied activities of this important department could save the Government many millions of dollars each year and at the same time improve the service of the department." In rounding up material relevant to the Estes case, said Kamerick, subcommittee investigators found papers in no fewer than 16 Agriculture Department offices. Said he wearily: "I must say at this point that we are not sure yet that we have all the documents in the Department of Agriculture pertinent to Billie Sol Estes." In his specific comments on the Estes case, Kamerick singled out Under Secretary Charles Murphy as the official who overruled a decision to cancel Billie Sol's 1961 cotton allotments--which had been obtained from farmers through land trans actions carried out in evident violation of a legal requirement of good faith. It was Murphy who also backed Estes' reappointment to the Cotton Advisory Committee despite adverse reports from Agriculture's office of personnel. North Carolinian Murphy, 52, helped draft the second Agricultural Adjustment Act in 1938, later served as White House special counsel under Harry Truman; after spending the Eisen hower years in private law practice, Murphy joined Agriculture in 1961.

Next day, Secretary Orville Freeman took the stand. Even while insisting that Murphy had meant well, Freeman admitted that "it was a mistake." He said he assumed "full responsibility" for this and other transgressions within the Department of Agriculture. But he complained that the department's operating weaknesses should be blamed in part on "lack of real concern for the administration of farm programs on the part of those in the previous Administration who sought to minimize or eliminate such programs." In other words, it was the Republicans' fault.

Back in Pecos, Billie Sol's lawyers startled everybody by marching into court and demanding that their client be tried immediately on charges that he stole $162,144 through a fraudulent fertilizer tank deal. Picking the jury was another matter; Estes' lawyers interrogated 44 veniremen before Judge J. H. Starley dismissed the panel, then huddled over a road map with counsel. Finally the judge ordered a recess until July 23, said the trial would resume in Tyler, a city in East Texas. Why Tyler? It is 519 miles from Pecos, where everyone knows Billie Sol--and its courthouse is air-conditioned.

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