{"id":721,"date":"2018-12-31T13:38:43","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T13:38:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=721"},"modified":"2018-12-31T13:38:43","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T13:38:43","slug":"lone-star-book-reviews-22","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=721","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly
at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
\n

P<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

<\/a><\/span>OLITICAL BIOGRAPHY<\/p>\n

Joan Mellen<\/span><\/p>\n

Faustian Bargains: Lyndon Johnson and Mac Wallace in the Robber Baron Culture of Texas<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Bloomsbury USA<\/p>\n

Hardcover (ebook), 978-1-62040-806-3, 384 pages, $28.00<\/p>\n

September 13, 2016<\/p>\n

A \u201cFaustian bargain\u201d is a deal with the Devil.<\/span> You give your soul to Beelzebub in return for a chance to satisfy your greed for power, love, or knowledge.<\/p>\n

In Joan Mellen\u2019s controversial new book, Lyndon Baines Johnson, America\u2019s thirty-sixth president, sometimes comes across as virtually the Devil himself \u2014 a \u201cpowerful and profoundly amoral public figure\u201d\u2014who ruthlessly strikes backroom deals with several Fausts while advancing his own personal and political agendas.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a chronicle of the dark side of Lyndon Johnson and of the collateral damage wrought by his actions,\u201d Mellen writes. Noting that other books have focused on LBJ, she expresses concern over a \u201csurprising absence\u201d of information about two Texans who could be found within \u201cthe hidden nooks and crannies of Lyndon Johnson\u2019s life in the shadows.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Estes\u2019s and Wallace\u2019s long-time connections to Lyndon Johnson are complex and not quickly summarized. But Joan Mellen\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 1965, Johnson also dispatched troops to Santo Domingo, under the pretext that there was a \u2018Communist pattern in the hemisphere\u2019 that could be \u2018traced back\u2019 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<\/span> as a pretext for retaliatory bombing. It was a false-flag operation, in which the United States fired on its own ship.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Actually, North Vietnamese PT boats shot at the Maddox in international waters during daylight and suffered casualties. That was the first \u201cincident.\u201d In the second \u201cincident,\u201d another destroyer, the USS C. Turner Joy,<\/span> fired in total darkness at false, weather-related radar echoes later identified as \u201cTonkin spooks\u201d \u2014 common in the Tonkin Gulf yet unfamiliar to many American naval personnel. The U.S. did not fire on its own ships.)<\/p>\n

Mellen\u2019s book acknowledges LBJ\u2019s \u201cunrelenting efforts to help the poor,\u201d his passage of the Civil Rights Act, and appointing Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lone Star Book Reviews of Texas books appear weekly at LoneStarLiterary.com P 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 \u201cFaustian bargain\u201d is a deal with the Devil. You give your soul to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}