Joan Mellen’s Faustian Bargains
(Bloomsbury, NY 2016)
It’s quite refreshing to read Joan
Mellen’s Faustian Bargains – Lyndon Johnson and Mac Wallace in the Robber
Baron Culture of Texas, because it fills in the blanks that LBJ’s official
biographers leave out while at the same time debunking some of the conspiracy
theories that have swirled around LBJ’s alleged role in the assassination of
President Kennedy.
Such debunking has usually been left
to those who attempt to blame the assassination on a deranged lone nut, so
having Mellen, a certified conspiracy theorists do it shows that it’s possible
to take the high road and not fall for every silly conspiracy theory that comes
down the pike without a real basis in fact.
From Craig Zerbel, Robert Morrow and Barr
MacClellen to Roger Stone, we have heard the LBJ did it stories for years, but not until now have we really had a reasonable published response.
LBJ certainly answers the Que Bono?
question, he was in the motorcade a few cars back and ducked as shots were
fired that killed Kennedy, immediately assumed the presidency and took over the
reins of power. But he certainly wasn’t the mastermind behind the Dealy Plaza
operation, the covert military style ambush that took Kennedy’s life and subverted the democratic process that American has yet to fully recover from.
I knew this even before reading
Mellen’s convincing book, since it is now quite clear that what happened at
Dealey Plaza was not so much a plot but a plan, a covert action contingency
plan that was originally developed to be used against Fidel Castro but
redirected to JFK in Dallas. It was very sophisticated plan that not only included a
sniper attack on Kennedy riding in an open car at a key point in a motorcade, but included a psychological warfare twist to blame the murder on pro-Castro Cuban Communists.
That aspect of the plan didn’t
work, which gives us a window into the operation that otherwise
succeeded – JFK did die and Castro was blamed, but it didn’t stick, not
only because it was transparently false, but because LBJ rejected it early on
the evening of the assassination.
Holed up with his closest cronies in
his office in the Executive Office Building (EOB) next door to the White House
LBJ realized that to blame the assassination on Castro and to charge the
accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald with furthering a communist conspiracy would
lead to not only an invasion of Cuba, as that part of the plan called for, but
possibly a full scale nuclear war with the Soviets and the loss of millions of
lives. From the EOB LBJ called Texas officials to call off their plan to charge
Oswald with conspiracy, but he also used the nuke war excuse to convince Earl
Warren and others to be part of the Warren Commission cover-up, and accept
Oswald not as a conspiratorial commie but as a deranged lone nut whose motives we will never
know once he was killed in police custody.
So while LBJ was incapable of
concocting the Dealey Plaza operational plan, especially the psych-war sidebar
to blame the assassination on Castro, a disinformation ploy that continues today,
he exonerated himself by rejecting that part of the deal, and settling on the
lone nut scenario.
Those who continue to blame LBJ
often refer to Billie Sol Estes and Mac Wallace, both notably absent from traditional
LBJ biographies (ie. Caro), and Mellen fills in the blanks admirably.
Even a cursory review of LBJ’s
character reveals the nasty, greedy power hungry maniac he was, Mellen spells
it out loud and clear, though in the end, still exonerating him from being responsible for the JFK hit.
While Billie Sol compiled a list of
a dozen or so murders he blamed on LBJ, usually naming Mac Wallace as the hit
man, Mellen finds that Wallace was actually a scholar with a masters degree
from Columbia, and an ex-Marine, whose Woodrow Wilson Texas high school mates
included Jack Ruby’s pal R. D. Matthews and one Ralph Gleb, who was on the
football team Wallace quarterbacked, and is suspected by former classmates as
being the muscular round faced fellow photographed in Mexico City that was
misidentified by the CIA as Oswald. That is one fact that can and should be
confirmed or refuted.
Wallace is also the convicted
murderer of a professional golfer whose sexcapades with Wallace’ wife and LBJ’s
sister sparked Wallace to murder him in his pro shop with a Nazi officer’s
pistol, a crime for which Wallace, with the help of LBJ’s attorney, got off
with a suspended sentence.
Wallace then got a job with
California defense contractor LTV, getting a security clearance with the help
of LBJ and D. H. Byrd, the owner of the Texas School Book Depository, a
security clearance that the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) unsuccessfully
tried to get revoked for over a decade.
Mellen’s research, as she
acknowledges, were greatly advanced by FBI and ONI records collected by former
Dallas policeman, the late J. Harrison, who submitted Wallace’s fingerprints
and that of a fingerprint taken from one of four boxes that were stacked by the
Sixth Floor TSBD window used by the sniper who shot at JFK. The Texas fingerprint
examiner concluded that the pinky print found on the box matched that of
Wallace, and that supplied the single piece of hard evidence linking Wallace and LBJ to the assassination.
But Mellen discovered that the
original fingerprint expert who made that match was not actually certified as a
court expert and used a smudged print, so she took a more clear copy of Wallace’s
prints and the pinky print found on the TSBD box to another, certified New
Jersey fingerprint expert who determined that the prints in fact did not match.
So Mac Wallace was not the mystery
man in the Sixth Floor TSBD window with a rifle, and neither was Oswald, so the
pinky print belonged to someone else, possibly the real assassin.
Besides that one print, there are 20
other fingerprints that were lifted from those four boxes that have not been
connected to anyone, though some did belong to TSBD employees including Oswald
and Dallas police officers who handled the boxes. But of the 20 unidentified
prints, some of them could belong to the real assassin, and an attempt should
be made to identify them, something that is much easier to do today than it was
in 1963.
3 comments:
I didn't read this book, but it apparently refutes the alleged role of Mac Wallace in the assassination. But it does not appear to prove that LBJ did not have a role as either a planner or "authorizer" of the assassination. Is that a correct assessment?
I think that's accurate. There's no way to disprove LBJ, or the Mob's involvement at this point as there is too much circumstantial evidence for their culpability . Seems to me that if the JFK Assassination was due to high level involvement,Intelligence.Military/Business, not Rogue Intell/Right Wing/Mob, to insure success you would need Hoover and LBJ's foreknowledge and direct participation, to cover up immediately as soon as it happened. Which seems to be what occurred.Nobody in Govt. hated the Kennedy's more than those two, so even if they didn't plan it, they are as guilty as the Gunmen.
If I remember correctly there was a little book published in Europe in the late 50's early 60's that listed members of the CIA.. Jay Harrison the researcher whose work is discredited in this book had such resources.. The names I remember from the booklet was George Bush and Lyndon Johnson. It stuck me as odd that they were CIA members before they were Presidents at the time.. Jay found something the day of the assassination. It was so important that it was his own Faustian Bargain.. He pursued Mac Wallace... In addition, he left us HUGE clues as he worked on the Jesse Curry book while he served in the intel office of the DPD... The connections of Wallace, RD MATHEWS, Ralph GeB and there were others seems overlooked... Jay Harrisons work was STRONG... It was of concern.
Post a Comment