Max Collins - Ask Not

Anyway, Mac Wallace served on the USS Lexington, an aircraft carrier, but he took a tumble off a ladder in 1940 and, wouldn’t you know it, injured his damn back again. Got himself a medical discharge, and... you, too? No kidding, Mr. Heller. Section Eight, huh? Guadalcanal? That’d do it. Still, I bet you jumped right smack in the swing of things, back on the home front.

So did Mac Wallace. He enrolled at the University of Texas, over in Austin, and was active in student groups, some of a type that a less charitable man than myself might term pinko. But he wasn’t no oddball or nothin’, no. He was elected student body president, and kept pullin’ down top marks. When the university’s president was fired because of his socialist ways, Mac headed up a student protest, led eight thousand kids in a march. The movement failed, but it got in all the papers. He was for sure a young man worth watching.

Here’s a picture of him — you can have that, Mr. Heller, I had that made for you. That’s him about 1945 — handsome devil, look at that curly dark hair, those moody dark eyes, regular Tyrone Power type, but kind of studious-looking too, don’t you think, in those wire-rim glasses. Later on he preferred black-rimmed jobs. I got an older picture of him, which you can also have. But I’m gettin’ ahead of myself.

Brainy as he was, it still took him something like seven years to get his degree, partly ’cause he switched majors a bunch of times, finally settling on economics. Plus, he was working his way through, taking various jobs, at least till the G.I. Bill kicked in, in ’44. I should mention he was chosen to belong to the Friar Society, sort of the Texas version of Yale’s Skull and Bones, if you’ve heard of that. Figured you had. Anyway, that put this fast-rising young man on a path to the highest reaches of business and government in the Lone Star State.

The Friars’ is probably how he met up with Edward Clark, LBJ’s man, his top legal counsel and financial adviser. Later on, Clark would introduce Mac to Lyndon, but I’m gettin’ ahead of myself again.

Where was I? Oh, after graduation Mac married a good-lookin’ gal named Mary Andre DuBose Barton. Her daddy was a Methodist preacher, but they had some powerful relatives up and down the family tree. Unfortunately for Mac, his young wife was a wild one. You know how preacher’s daughters can be. In divorce proceedings against her, years later, Mac said she was a sexual pervert. He told me himself that she was a whore and a homosexual. And frankly there’s evidence to back him up.

What kind of evidence? Well, Mary Andre Wallace was picked up on several occasions by police at notorious make-out spots, public parks primarily, with other women. Stripped down to their undergarments. Apparently Mary Andre liked both boys and girls, and Mac didn’t like that at all. I won’t bore you with all the ins and outs... that didn’t come out right, did it?... but he up and hauled the little woman off to New York, where he did a couple of semesters at Columbia, going for a doctorate. Top marks again. He was doing some teaching, too. They had a kid, and then the gal got pregnant again, and she would get real wild during the pregnancies, boy howdy. Her own mama called the police on her for having sex with both men and women in Zilker Park.

Anyway, Mary Andre claimed Mac got violent with her, hitting and raping her and so on, and she filed a divorce petition, and Mac didn’t bother fighting it. But he must have carried the torch, ’cause he remarried her some time later. My apologies for this mixed-up chronology, but Mac Wallace led a pretty mixed-up life after college. Not that he wasn’t doing respectable work. Taught at two or three colleges, winding up back in Austin, where his wife took their young son.

Finally Mac got tired of Mary Andre’s catting around, and took a big step toward respectability and the kind of career he had seemed headed for, before his ill-fated marital union. His connections with President Johnson, of course he was Senator Johnson then, led to a job in Washington, D.C., with the Department of Agriculture. Once again, seemed like Mac was going places.

There’s another interesting LBJ tie-in, by the way — while he was separated from his wife, Mac dated Lyndon’s sister, Josefa. This may indicate that Mac was his own worst enemy, since Josefa was herself a wild child who caused LBJ considerable embarrassment — divorced twice, a heavy drinker who liked to dally with both men and women, even worked in a brothel for a time.

This is where a feller named Doug Kinser comes into the story. We’re going to set Mac Wallace aside, just temporarily, and take a look at Doug, an Austin boy who grew up loving the game of golf. He realized a dream when his brother went in with him to open up a little pitch-and-putt nine-hole golf course by the downtown lake in Austin.

Now, golf wasn’t Doug’s only enthusiasm. He also loved theater. He even went to New York to give acting a whirl, which is where he met up with Mac and his wife Mary Andre. All three were involved in some amateur theater there, when Mac was studyin’ at Columbia. But by 1950, Mac was in D.C. working for the Department of Agriculture, while back home in Austin, Mary Andre was gettin’ involved in local productions with Doug. Josefa Johnson was part of that thespian group, also. Kind of funny how some people get those two words confused — thespian and lesbian?

Well, those words got confused a lot when Doug was pursuing his other enthusiasm — having sexual affairs with willing ladies. He particularly liked what the French call ménage a twat. That means a threesome, but I can tell by your silly grin that you knew that already.

So now if you been keeping score, we got Mac Wallace havin’ an affair with LBJ’s wild-gal sister, Josefa — well, Mr. Heller, I call it “an affair” because Mac was still married to Mary Andre at the time. She dropped her divorce petition, though they weren’t living together, at least not steady. Hell, any way you look at it, it was a mess. Particularly considering that Mary Andre and Josefa were both having affairs with our friend Doug, sometimes two at a time, sometimes all at once.

Now here’s an item that may or may not be significant. As a law-enforcement officer, I will caution you that it is not even close to evidence. But it sure as hell is suggestive.

Some time during or in between pillow talk with Josefa, Doug asked her to try to get her brother Lyndon to loan him some money to pay off some outstanding debts that were threatening his new pitch-and-putt enterprise. Apparently she went to Lyndon, got turned down, and went back again a couple times, after Doug pressed the issue. It’s possible Lyndon might have viewed this as attempted blackmail. Possible.

Now, Mac was living in D.C. at the time, or anyway in Arlington, and late October 1951, he drove down in his shiny new blue station wagon to Dallas, where he borrowed a little .25 from an old college roommate of his, who happened to be in the FBI. That always makes me smile. He spent a couple of days talking to Mary Andre, and asking her to be a better wife, a more normal wife, and just what the hell had she been up to lately? Who’d been doing what to whom, he wanted to know, and that kind of thing. By all reports, he was calm and cool and collected. No talk of him slapping her around this trip. Anyway, he wound up in Austin a few days later, and drove to Butler Park, where the pitch-and-putt golf course was.

It was a lazy afternoon, sunny, kind of breezy, grass turnin’ yellow with winter on the way. Golfers were fooling around nearby on a putting green, but that didn’t faze ol’ Mac. He walked right in the pro shop and confronted Doug, who was at the cash register, and a few words were exchanged. Then Mac shot Doug point-blank five times and killed him very damn dead. Well, yeah, Mr. Heller, I guess that does sound like “overkill,” but remember, it was a little gun, so Mac was probably just makin’ sure.