Category Archives: Reviews

Kirkus Reviews Book Review of Joan Mellen’s “Blood in the Water”

KIRKUS REVIEW 

Historical research leads to some unsettling assertions about a violent incident shrouded in secrecy for over 50 years.

Original review at Kirkus Review

The attack on the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967, during the Six-Day War, left 34 dead and 174 wounded, along with myriad unresolved questions even after Israel admitted responsibility, claiming it had acted in error. This book represents a massive undertaking, whereby Mellen (English Emerita/Temple Univ.; Faustian Bargains, 2016, etc.) systematically and persuasively dismantles the narratives espoused for decades by reviewing official documents, evaluating publications, and conducting personal interviews. Disturbingly, the author’s solid research indicates that the United States and Israel collaborated in planning, executing, and covering up this operation in order to implicate Egypt, bomb Cairo, and precipitate Gamal Abdel Nasser’s downfall. The author astutely points out that it wouldn’t be the first time the American government resorted to such tactics, citing the Maine in 1898 and the Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin during the Vietnam War. She also contextualizes the Liberty incident amid “the hothouse of 1967,” signaling the Cold War’s paranoia and brinkmanship together with the Vietnam War escalation and oil supply concerns. To Mellen’s credit, her clear writing style and organizational abilities allow even readers unfamiliar with the events of the time to become engrossed in technical details, political intrigue, the military chain of command, and personal stories. Against all odds, through many sailors’ concerted effort, the Liberty managed to stay afloat despite a torpedo hit and send an SOS signal. The author darkly claims: “The survival of the ship was unanticipated by those in highest authority.”

Continue reading →

Praise for “Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty”

“Finally, the definitive reconstruction of the greatest moral and political scandal in American history, which demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that the US government at its highest level conspired with Israel in 1967 to destroy a surveillance naval vessel, USS Liberty, and murder its own sailors to gain a pretext for launching an aggressive attack on Egypt. With this exposé, based on exhaustive research and extensive interviews, Joan Mellen has done an immense patriotic service. An extraordinary book that should be not only read but acted upon.”

—Richard Falk, Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law, Emeritus, Princeton University

 

“With predictable moral courage and impressive literary deftness, Joan Mellen has now written a very important book which punctures the long-standing official explanations of what exactly happened when Israel attacked the intelligence ship U.S.S. Liberty during the frenzy of the Six Day War.  Like the JFK assassination, the truth about this incident has been deliberately buried for decades in misleading documents.  All along, Israel has proven to be an amazing success and a truly desperate enterprise.  Both aspects of its history come through in this inspired book.”

—Burton Hersh, Ted Kennedy’s primary biographer (“Edward Kennedy:  An Intimate Biography”) and the author of “Bobby and J. Edgar”, often cited as the “breakthrough book” about the JFK and RFK assassinations.  Hersh is also the author of The Old Boys:  The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA, currently mandatory reading for incoming CIA officers.

Pre order at Amazon

Review of “Blood in the Water”, by Eileen Fleming, Arab Daily News

“Blood in the Water” by Joan Mellen Ends the USS LIBERTY Cover-Up

“Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty” details the USA-Israeli collusion of the attack on the USS LIBERTY during the Six-Day War and is the definitive work to end the over fifty-year long cover-up.

By Eileen Fleming

In the Synopsis of “Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty”, author Joan Mellen explains:

In 2014 I was completing a book exposing dark truths about President Lyndon Johnson that had been suppressed by Johnson’s official biographers whose goal in recent years was to provide cover for an official whose actions not infrequently bordered on the criminal. One day I received an email from a fellow researcher who offered a challenging question: will you be including Johnson’s role in the attack on the USS Liberty? I had never heard of the USS Liberty. When I learned of the ambush of this unarmed USS Intelligence ship, and of Johnson’s role in planning it and then covering it up, I was at once committed to a course that resulted in a new book, “Blood in the Water,” whose subtitle is “How the US and Israel Conspired in the Ambush of the USS Liberty” devoted entirely to the events surrounding the LIBERTY. My goal was to discover who had planned the attack and what was their motive.

Temple University Professor Mellen has published 24 books and researched voraciously regarding the USS Liberty. However “none of the books or articles” she read could answer WHY Israel would attack an American ship and a few hours later admit that they had been behind the attack, but that it was an “accident.”

Mellen asserts that the virtually unarmed USS Liberty was brutally attacked with the intent to send that spy “ship and everyone on it to the bottom of the sea, because the perpetrators were determined to unseat the premier of Egypt, Gamal Abel Nasser by blaming him for the attack. Nasser was highly influential among powers in the Middle East as a neutral, a thorn in the side of the U.S. and Israel. The motive was to so discredit Nasser that he would fall easily from power, leaving his adversaries to maintain political control over the region.”

Continue reading →

“Faustian Bargains” Review: American History Magazine

american-history-magazine-reviewIn the 20th book of a diverse oeuvre of biographies, cinema, and literature, Joan Mellen documents Lyndon B. Johnson’s career in cronyism, mainly in his home state but also on the international stage. The title reflects LBJ’s penchant for obscuring his personal and financial affairs and his membership in a cadre of pols and business types given to enriching themselves at voters’ expense. The subtitle might well have mentioned Billie Sol Estes, who, after serving his king, tried unsuccessfully to drag him into disgrace.

Citing recently released FBI files, interviews, books, newspaper and magazine articles, and diaries, Mellen traces Johnson’s lifelong dance with power and infamy. Analyzing the 1948 campaign, she shows how Johnson, ever the clever puppeteer, had marionettes falsify records and destroy ballots at arm’s length from their boss to defeat Coke Stevenson by 87 votes in a Democratic primary runoff that assured Johnson of a U.S. Senate seat. “Johnson was not elected to the United States Senate, and so should not have served there,” Mellen writes.

In the Senate, as he had in the House, Johnson toadied to his betters, engineering profitable arrangements that Mellen illuminates using sources well-known but in this context previously untapped–Estes, influence peddler Bobby Baker, and federal contractors willing to kick back dough to a frenemy they mostly feared. Mellen establishes Johnson’s corruption by showing that he directly awarded government work that was worth millions to cronies.

As LBJ was amassing paydays and political clout, men and women in his circle were dying under mysterious circumstances. The fallen included Johnson’s loose-lipped younger sister Josefa, who expired at 49 only hours after leaving a Christmas party at her brother’s home in 1961. As Lyndon Johnson rose, so did Mac Wallace, one of Josefa’s beaus. LBJ counted Wallace among his elves in the 1948 campaign. Wallace later worked for the U.S. Agriculture Department and a military contractor favored by Johnson. A 1952 murder conviction seemed no bar to advancement.

Wondering whether Johnson pondered which, if any, of many dangerous secrets Wallace knew, and whether LBJ did anything about that, Mellen plunges into Wallace’s self-destructive story: college corner, weapons merchant, holder of a controversial security clearance, convicted but unpunished murderer, chronic drunk, dead in a one-vehicle accident for which all official reports disappeared.

Faustian Bargains stands apart from the latter-day run of LBJ books by distinguishing fact from opinion and primary from hearsay evidence, conscientiously not vaulting to conclusions and satisfying the author–and this reader–that Lyndon Johnson was a killer more than metaphorically.

–Richard Culyer is a writer in Hartsville, South Carolina

Review of “A Farewell to Justice” by Dr. Stuart Jeanne Bramhall, Veterans Today

From Veterans TodayPicture 10

New Evidence in JFK Assassination

Newly Unclassified Documents Prove High Level CIA Involvement

by Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall

A Farewell to Justice is an exhaustive review of the only arrest and trial stemming from the 1963 murder of President John F Kennedy. The late New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison describes the 1967 grand jury investigation and prosecution of long time CIA officer Clay Shaw in his 1988 bestseller On the Trail of the Assassins. In 1992, the public outcry prompted by JFK, Oliver Stone’s screen version, led Congress to pass the JFK Records Collection Act. A Farewell to Justice uses classified documents released under this Act to update Garrison’s original case against Shaw and other CIA co-conspirators.

A revised version of the 2005 edition, the new 647 page A Farewell to Justice is a virtual encyclopedia of the JFK assassination. The book leaves no doubt that high level CIA officials authorized the murder and provides a complete list of the cast of characters who played roles in the assassination and/or cover up.

Continue reading →