The Lies of Texas
Alma Mater Coniurationis (Mother of Conspiracy)
Cause the players tried to take the field/The marching band refused to yield/Do you recall what was revealed/The day the music died? —Don McClean, American Pie
“What Starts Here Changes the World.” —University of Texas motto since 2004
The University of Texas at Austin is in the heart of Texas. Its alma mater is “The Eyes of Texas.” Its mascot is the Texas Longhorn, an official symbol of the state. Its catch phrase is “Hook ’em Horns.” The UT Longhorns are among the biggest brands in college athletics. UT boasts having the LBJ Presidential Library, and the LBJ School of Public Affairs on its campus. Those facts and more are well known to Texans. Very few, however, know that the University of Texas most likely aided and abetted the conspirators who assassinated JFK, and still does.1 That fact puts UT in the heart of the deep state.
I graduated from UT, then worked on staff there for a decade. As an alumnus of the University of Texas Longhorn Band, I supported the proposal, in 2021, to create a separate marching band for members who, in good conscience, must separate themselves from the evils of the university’s history. Their protest is over the racist history of “The Eyes of Texas.”2 My protest goes much further. Mine is a wider, darker perspective. As I showed in my book, UT’s evil goes well beyond its alma mater controversy.
One of the men with whom the truth may lie, concerning the JFK assassination’s links to the University of Texas, was one of UT’s most ardent supporters who happened to own the building that has become synonymous with the assassination. His ties to UT are well known. His numerous ties to the assassination are lesser known.3
Wealthy Dallas oil man and UT patron David Harold Byrd was the owner of the Texas School Book Depository building from the 1930s to the 1970s. I explored D.H. Byrd in some detail, including his likely role regarding the conspirators’ use of his property in 1963.
Dry Hole Byrd—his nickname from his early, bad luck in oil exploration—had close relationships with powerful Texas politicians such as Lyndon Johnson, Sam Rayburn, John Connally, and other Texas governors. He was a cousin to Admiral Richard Byrd and his brother, the powerful Senator Harry Byrd. That story, its twists and turns, and its background are too much to cover here, except for a few, brief highlights. Suffice it to say, the full story is significant.
In May 1964, Byrd had the “Oswald window” removed and kept it as part of his estate. In 1972, after Byrd sold the building, an arsonist set it on fire. It was saved, but the buyer defaulted on his payments and the property reverted to the Byrd family. In 1975, Byrd sold it again.
D. Harold Byrd, as he is known on campus, donated large sums of money to the University of Texas and its Longhorn Marching Band. Among the things this money helped purchase was “Big Bertha,” the largest bass drum in the world, and the construction of the Music Building East, in which a lounge is named the “Byrd Room” in his honor. Each year three band members receive the “Harold Byrd Awards” for leadership.4
I was in the Longhorn Band from 1977-1980. As an art major, I was assigned the task of designing the image on Big Bertha’s drum head in 1979 (pictured below), and hand-painting it with the help of fellow art major David Turner. We knew Byrd’s money had paid for Big Bertha. All of us in the band were taught Byrd’s public importance to the university. That’s why Byrd was on my radar when I came across him in darker contexts. It’s a small world here in conspiracy land. But, I had to learn his hidden significance on my own.
It was that public knowledge which eventually led me to UT’s conspiratorial connections. Byrd probably knew George de Mohrenschildt, David Atlee Phillips and George Bush through the Dallas Petroleum Club. As co-founder of the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), Byrd probably knew David Ferrie and he definitely knew the very top Air Force brass. CAP Captain David Ferrie was CAP cadet Lee Harvey Oswald’s trainer.5
...Temco, Inc. was an aircraft company founded by D.H. Byrd and which later merged with his friend James Ling’s electronics company (1960), and aircraft manufacturer Chance Vought Corporation (1961) to form Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV). Byrd became a director of LTV and bought, along with Ling, 132,000 shares of LTV in November 1963. Byrd then left the country to go on a two month safari in central Africa. He returned in January to find his good friend Lyndon Johnson president of the United States, his building famous, and a large defense contract awarded to LTV to build fighter planes.6
D.H. Byrd also knew fellow philanthropist Barbara J. Burris, the wife of Air Force intelligence Colonel Howard L. Burris, Vice President Johnson’s military aid. Colonel Burris “was the end point of a treasonous secret back-channel of information to Johnson concerning combat intelligence; Edward G. Lansdale...,‘Intellfirst’ [codename for Colonel Delk Simpson] and Burris were friends with [Walt] Rostow’s longtime friend, General Charles P. Cabell (Lansdale and Cabell were very close); and Rostow was Lansdale’s sponsor and ‘patron’ in the White House.”7
Many of us who were college students in the late ‘70s, myself and Praise From a Future Generation author John Kelin included, saw Richard Sprague, Henry B. Gonzalez, and Mark Lane at our respective campuses during their college tour in 1976-77 at which they showed the Zapruder film and Rush to Judgment. They packed auditoriums. It is a major part of our individual awakenings as researchers. …
My historiography and criminal investigations of the JFK assassination, began in earnest in 1988. ...I was further motivated by a civic duty to report a suspicious automobile, which I spotted in 1989 on the campus of The University of Texas at Austin, fitting the description of a getaway car seen by several JFK assassination witnesses leaving Dealey Plaza in my hometown of Dallas. My police chief, Jesse Curry, went on TV the week of the assassination and asked all citizens to report anything suspicious. So I did, albeit 30 years later at Jerry Rose’s Third Decade Conference in Providence Rhode Island.8
Infamous CIA Director and Warren Commissioner Allen Dulles, a long-suspected JFK conspirator, had held various positions in the State Department early in his career. His uncle, Robert Lansing, had been President Woodrow Wilson’s troublesome Secretary of State. Some of UT’s and Texas’ most esteemed leaders had served in Wilson’s cabinet with Lansing: Colonel Edward M. House, David Franklyn Houston, Albert Sidney Burleson, and Thomas Watt Gregory. House, a kingmaker in Texas politics, was the man principally responsible for Wilson’s nomination and election.9
House’s father, Thomas William House, Sr., was a wealthy Houston businessman, cotton magnate, and mayor. T.W. House was also a racist, white supremacist who used his ships to run Union blockades in order to supply arms and vital supplies to the Confederate army from Cuba and Great Britain.
After President Lincoln died at Petersen House, Mary Todd Lincoln, upon departing, was heard to cry “Oh, that dreadful house!” Which could have been “Oh, that dreadful House!” Mrs. Lincoln had made an appointment on April 3, 1865, on White House stationary, of a new and inexperienced guard to the President’s elite, longtime security detail, a stranger named John F. Parker, a member of the Metropolitan Police. Parker is infamous for abandoning his post outside the Presidential theater box, allowing John Wilkes Booth to enter. Mrs. Lincoln later blamed Parker for her husband’s death and told him she would always think he was responsible.
Lincoln assassination expert Walter F. Graf,10 told me, “One thing is for sure. There had to be something very unusual to bring Mary Todd to assert this authority in such a timely fashion. Unusual authority.” Mr. Graf explained that, “Thos W. House was the Mayor of Houston 1862, father of Edward Mandel House, The king of Cotton. Mary Todd was into cotton. Once on a shipment of $7,000,000 until Grant caught on. How did she get into appointment of details?”
An important question, considering Edward M. House gave us President Wilson’s Secretary of State Robert Lansing, who in turn gave us his nephew Allen Dulles. “Through events that preceded and followed D-Day, Dulles became something of an expert in the secrets, successes and failures of high level assassination conspiracies.”11
UT was also the alma mater of Lansing’s friend, William F. Buckley, Sr., whose famous namesake son was, among many other things, hired by future Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt to work with him at the CIA’s infamous Mexico City station. Yale professor James Burnham, the CIA’s covert-action chief, introduced Buckley, Jr. to Hunt.12
Former UT President Harry Huntt Ransom, another of Lyndon Johnson’s friends, rose quickly through the UT ranks from assistant dean of the graduate school in 1951 to Chancellor of The University of Texas System by 1961. Like his university, Ransom was no stranger to clandestine activities. While Chancellor, he was elected chairman of the Advisory Panel on ROTC, Department of the Air Force, which advised the Secretary of the Air Force on ROTC programs. John Stockwell, who became the highest-ranking CIA whistle-blower, was an ROTC graduate of UT in the late 1950s. Stockwell told reporter Earl Golz in 1991, that CIA associations did exist at UT within the ROTC program, the Spanish and Portuguese Department, the Institute of Latin American Studies, and with Harry Ransom.13
Ransom recruited John W.F. Dulles and Walt Whitman Rostow to the faculty. “Jack” Dulles was the eldest son of former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and the nephew of Allen Dulles. Rostow was former Kennedy State Department counsel and President Johnson’s national security advisor. Rostow was close, socially and professionally to Allen Dulles, McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security advisor, Richard Bissell, director of CIA covert operations, and Air Force General Charles P. Cabell, deputy director of the CIA. Kennedy forced Dulles, Cabell, and Bissell out of the CIA after the Bay of Pigs invasion as part of his bold, but failed, attempt to reform the rogue agency.14
My understanding of UT’s conspiratorial ties was becoming clear when Earl Golz,15 who had covered the assassination for the Dallas Morning News, and was one of my mentors on the crime, quoted my findings in a 30th anniversary article for the Austin American-Statesman.
We now begin to see a very powerful group involved with UT, the CIA and JFK, all known to each other; all with shared backgrounds and futures; shared past and future interests; anti-Kennedy people who very likely shared their grievances with each other; and all of whom have past or future, professional or personal ties to Texas, its university system, and its most notorious crime: Johnson, Dulles, Cabell, Helms, Lansdale, Burris, Rostow, Ransom, Byrd, de Mohrenschildt, and “Intellfirst.” As we shall see, their ominous and dark interrelationships become even more apparent.16
Journalist Ronnie Dugger, who knew much about UT’s deep politics, wrote about UT as an example of the decline of educational institutions beholden to wealth and power. He observed, “Administrators are not facilitators of the university if they are acting as agents of this corrupted regency. Acting for power, subverting the community of learning away from the work of independent knowledge, the administerium cuts its own lifeline to the people and loses its legitimacy as the people’s agents.”17
Changing a tradition like the alma mater has been met with resistance by UT administrators and their monied interests. Removing “The Eyes of Texas” from its vaunted pedestal has proven too painful for a powerful few, despite the song’s inspiration from Confederate Brigadier General John Gregg of Texas, and its debut in a racist campus minstrel show on May 12, 1903,18 — even after the removal from campus of Confederate statues and building namesakes.
To those of us who know the bigger picture of Texas’ unresolved crimes, however, their pain over the official school song is only the beginning. Given UT’s unacknowledged ties to the murder of President Kennedy, there is a terrible reckoning still to come. The lies of Texas are upon you. Do not think you can escape them. You cannot get away.
ENDNOTES:
Tommy Wan, “It’s time to revisit the Eyes of Texas,” The Daily Texan, Feb. 7, 2023. Accessed Feb. 13, 2023. https://thedailytexan.com/2023/02/07/its-time-to-revisit-the-eyes-of-texas/
Megan Menchaca, “UT official delays 'The Eyes of Texas' vote, citing 'misleading' student government tweet,” Austin American-Statesman, Feb. 16, 2023. Acessed Feb. 17, 2023.https://www.statesman.com/story/news/education/2023/02/16/the-eyes-of-texas-ut-student-vote-on-alma-mater/69905555007/
Richard Bartholomew, The Deep State in the Heart of Texas: The Texas Connections to the Kennedy Assassination. San Antonio, Tx: Say Something Real Press, 2018, p. 226
Ibid, pp. 223-224.
Ibid, p. 218.
Ibid, pp. 218-219.
Ibid, 202-203, Barbara J. Burris was the daughter of former Texas Governor Beauford H. Jester, another close Byrd friend. A CIA troopship used for the Bay of Pigs invasion was named “Barbara J.” (pp. 170-17)
Ibid, p. 185.
Bartholomew, The Deep State in the Heart of Texas, op cit, p. 115.
Ibid, p. 194, 235.
Ibid, pp. 146, 148; Linda Minor, “Excerpt from Manuscript by Richard Bartholomew: Possible Discovery of an Automobile Used In the JFK Conspiracy,” Quixotic Joust, Oct. 4, 2011. Accessed Feb. 16, 2023. (Note: some hyperlinks have expired, but much annotation remains.) https://quixoticjoust.blogspot.com/2011/10/excerpt-from-manuscript-by-richard.html
Bartholomew, The Deep State in the Heart of Texas, op cit, pp. 149-150.
Earl Golz obituary, Cook-Walden/Forest Oaks Funeral Home and Memorial Park, Austin, Texas, 2014. Accessed Feb. 4, 2023. https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/austin-tx/earl-golz-5801570
Bartholomew, op cit, p. 172; Codename “Intellfirst” was later identified as Air Force Colonel Delk Simpson.
Ronnie Dugger, Our Invaded Universities: Form, Reform and New Starts, New York, NY, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1974, p. 341.
Joe Levin, “The Damning History Behind UT’s ‘The Eyes of Texas’ Song,” Texas Monthly, June 17, 2020. Accessed Feb. 16, 2023. https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/ut-austin-eyes-of-texas-song-racist/