Phil Nelson on LBJ causing the deaths of his two pilots Harold Teague and Charles Williams on Feb. 17, 1961 – LBJ forced the 2 men to fly in WHITEOUT conditions from Austin to the LBJ Ranch. They crashed & died.
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=16288&page=3
Only a few weeks into the new administration, in early February 1961, it became apparent that the initial meeting between Mac Wallace and Henry Marshall had not been successful—evidently, Marshall was too honest and incapable of accepting either bribes or threats—and the situation continued to spiral out of control. Johnson’s actions at this point can only be described as hysterical. Estes was insisting on another meeting, and Ed Clark pressed Johnson to fly to Pecos to meet with him again to come up with a plan to contain the potential calamity if Marshall was not immediately stopped from his ongoing “persecution” of Billie Sol.
So, on a day in which Johnson was apparently having a particularly serious manic/irritability attack, only one month after the newly minted Kennedy-Johnson administration took office, he would lose any remaining rationality in a screaming fit that he had by telephone to his pilots, who had stayed over in Austin and who had the audacity to attempt to talk Lyndon out of a flight that day—Friday, February 17, 1961—because of “below minimum” weather conditions. In a hysterical blind rage, on a cold, foggy, and overcast evening in south Texas, after hearing Ed Clark tell him he had to meet again with Estes, Johnson called for his airplane to pick him up and expected immediate obedience. He had trained all his other minions to obey his every command—who were these men to think they did not have the same duty to pay proper homage to him, the vice president of the United States? Of all the accounts noted within these pages of Lyndon Johnson’s narcissism, arrogance, and condescension toward the people who worked for him, this incident was clearly the most egregious. His reckless disregard for the safety of the pilots, when their caution impinged on his need to pursue his own criminal conduct, illustrates his abject arrogance better than any words could possibly convey.
Pilot Harold Teague was advised by the Austin airport against making the flight. When Teague complained and tried to refuse to make the flight because of the extremely dangerous weather conditions and the lack of ground control instruments at the landing strip, “Johnson is said to have exploded, venting his profanity upon the pilot, demanding to know ‘what do you think I’m paying you for?’ and again ordering him to ‘get that plane’ to the ranch.” Yet Lyndon B. Johnson would not—could not—let some yokel trying to observe standard minimum visibility aircraft safety rules override him, the vice president of the United States. Johnson had never seen a rule that couldn’t be bent or broken at his whim; we can be sure that he told the pilots something like, “To Hell with those rules, who do you work for, the Austin airport manager or me? Get that God Damn airplane over here now!” This kind of reaction can be surmised, not only from everything we know already about the real Lyndon Johnson, but from the actual results in the official records, as reported through newspaper accounts of the time, describing the tragic aftermath, which are briefly summarized in the following paragraph.
Johnson ordered the pilots into the air to pick him up under threat of losing their jobs. Teague finally agreed and nervously called his wife to tell her they had been ordered to make the flight, before whispering to her that he loved her and asked her to remember that. Minutes later, as “Johnson’s Convair roared into the murky night, flying above the hilly terrain . . . hopelessly groping down for lights they could not see, had at last flown into a cedar-covered hill.” As the pilots searched for the runway through the fog, having no radio beams with which to locate it, they kept flying lower and lower trying to find the runway until finally they flew too low and the plane crashed into a rocky hillside near the boss’s ranch. The two pilots were killed instantly, paying the ultimate cost of disobeying flight rules—not because they decided to do that but because Lyndon B. Johnson insisted on it—as a result of extremely high-risk maneuvers. It was not the first, nor would it be the last, time that men paid with their lives to satisfy the whims of Lyndon B. Johnson; the irony would be that, had he been on board the aircraft, those same flight rules would have remained inviolate. This single incident speaks volumes about the numerous flaws—apparent from his earliest years, based upon his grandmother’s prescient comments noted earlier—in the character of Lyndon B. Johnson.
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The book is filled with proofs of Johnson’s reckless disregard for anyone or anything that might impede his rise up the political ladder while simultaneously taking in millions as a result of his collaboration with the likes of Estes and Bobby Baker and many others. How else might one explain how he started out virtually broke and wound up with an estate of at least $20 million? On a congressman’s then senator’s salary, even before becoming vice president and then president? It certainly wasn’t due to Lady Bird’s business acumen.