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OLITICAL BIOGRAPHY

Joan Mellen

Faustian Bargains: Lyndon Johnson and Mac Wallace in the Robber Baron Culture of Texas

Bloomsbury USA

Hardcover (ebook), 978-1-62040-806-3, 384 pages, $28.00

September 13, 2016

A “Faustian bargain” is a deal with the Devil. You give your soul to Beelzebub in return for a chance to satisfy your greed for power, love, or knowledge.

In Joan Mellen’s controversial new book, Lyndon Baines Johnson, America’s thirty-sixth president, sometimes comes across as virtually the Devil himself — a “powerful and profoundly amoral public figure”—who ruthlessly strikes backroom deals with several Fausts while advancing his own personal and political agendas.

“This is a chronicle of the dark side of Lyndon Johnson and of the collateral damage wrought by his actions,” Mellen writes. Noting that other books have focused on LBJ, she expresses concern over a “surprising absence” of information about two Texans who could be found within “the hidden nooks and crannies of Lyndon Johnson’s life in the shadows.”

They were businessman and financier Billie Sol Estes, who went to prison several times for fraud, and, more notably, Malcolm Everett (Mac) Wallace, a federal agriculture economist who had killed a man who was having an affair with LBJ’s sister, Josefa. Though convicted of murder, Wallace received a suspended sentence and later, despite Office of Naval Intelligence objections, obtained a secret security clearance to work for a defense contractor who was an LBJ friend.

Estes’s and Wallace’s long-time connections to Lyndon Johnson are complex and not quickly summarized. But Joan Mellen’s well-written book is rich with intrigues involving them as she reveals information gathered by the FBI, the Office of Naval Intelligence, magazine, plus other sources and her own research.

She does present inaccurate information as fact, however, in at least one instance, which might undermine reader confidence. She contends that while LBJ was accelerating the war in Vietnam:

“In 1965, Johnson also dispatched troops to Santo Domingo, under the pretext that there was a ‘Communist pattern in the hemisphere’ that could be ‘traced back’ to Vietnam. Pretexts were now his stock in trade. The most notorious was the Gulf of Tonkin episode, in particular the second incident of August 4, 1964, when the United States falsely accused the North Vietnamese of firing in international waters on the USS Maddox as a pretext for retaliatory bombing. It was a false-flag operation, in which the United States fired on its own ship.”

(Actually, North Vietnamese PT boats shot at the Maddox in international waters during daylight and suffered casualties. That was the first “incident.” In the second “incident,” another destroyer, the USS C. Turner Joy, fired in total darkness at false, weather-related radar echoes later identified as “Tonkin spooks” — common in the Tonkin Gulf yet unfamiliar to many American naval personnel. The U.S. did not fire on its own ships.)

Mellen’s book acknowledges LBJ’s “unrelenting efforts to help the poor,” his passage of the Civil Rights Act, and appointing Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court.  Her most startling chapter, however, lays out a case that LBJ nearly started World War III while helping Israel win its 1967 war with Egypt and other Arab nations.

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