It sure didn't keep those who were a threat to Johnson's political future from dying by violent means. Including Henry Marshall and President John F. Kennedy.
In 1961, Henry Marshall was found shot to death on his remote Texas farm. He had been shot five times with a .22 caliber rifle and, since the rifle was lying beside his body, the coroner had no problem coming up with the probable scenario: Suicide. The only problem was the type of rifle - it was a bolt-action, and in non-shooter lay man's terms, this simply meant that Marshall would had to have manually worked the bolt four times (up, back, forward, down, fire - up, back, forward, down, fire, etc.) in order to shoot himself. At the same time he would have had to turn the rifle around at an awkward angle, pointing it into his side, stretching his arm and squeezing off each shot with his thumb. Five times. In addition to the obvious difficulties for a man to have committed suicide in this fashion, were the outcries of Marshall's family, who fervently disagreed with the suicide verdict. There appeared to be no good reason for Marshall, a successful farmer, with money in the bank and a solid record with his employer, the U. S. Department of Agriculture, to have committed suicide. But despite the strange appearance of things, the cause of death was officially listed as suicide by gunshot.
Things started to change a few months later when Secretary of Agriculture, Orville Freeman, released information pertaining to an investigation that Marshall had been participating in at the time of his death.
Billie Sol Estes, now known as the Texas wheeler-dealer and con-man supreme was, in 1961, at the peak of his agricultural career. He had become a multimillionaire and a virtual icon in Pecos, Texas. His success was due, in great part, by his solid connections in government - and one of his primary connections was Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Things started to fall apart when Estes' cotton allotment scheme began to be scrutinized by Agriculture officials. Estes had master minded a bizarre method of having the government transfer other farmer's cotton allotments to his own cotton acreage. In this way all of his land could be used to grow the tightly regulated crop. Such a scheme would have been impossible without help from high officials, either inside the U.S.D.A., or Washington, or both. Henry Marshall, in reviewing the cotton allotment irregularities connected with Billy Sol Estes, evidently uncovered a warm path that led to Vice President Johnson, but also to his own untimely death.
I always thought LBJ was a rotten SOB, but I liked Lady Bird for her indigineous wild flowers she brought back to the State of Texas.