Photograph by David Mallory.
Joan Mellen discusses LBJ Kick Backs, JFK Assassination Mac Wallace, and Billie Sol Estes on Brent Holland’s Night Fright Show
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Perhaps no president has a more ambiguous reputation than LBJ. A brilliant tactician, he maneuvered colleagues and turned bills into law better than anyone. But he was trailed by a legacy of underhanded dealings, from his “stolen” Senate election in 1948 to kickbacks he artfully concealed from deals engineered with Texas wheeler-dealer Billie Sol Estes and defense contractors like his longtime supporter Brown & Root. On the verge of investigation, Johnson was reprieved when he became president upon JFK’s assassination. Among the remaining mysteries has been LBJ’s relationship to Mac Wallace who, in 1951, shot a Texas man having an affair with LBJ’s loose-cannon sister Josefa, also Wallace’s lover. When arrested, Wallace cooly said “I work for Johnson…I need to get back to Washington.” Charged with murder, he was overnight defended by LBJ’s powerful lawyer John Cofer, and though convicted, amazingly received a suspended sentence. He then got high-security clearance from LBJ friend and defense contractor D.H. Byrd, which the Office of Naval Intelligence tried to revoke for 11 years without success.
Using crucial Life magazine and Naval Intelligence files and the unredacted FBI files on Mac Wallace, never before utilized by others, investigative writer Joan Mellen skillfully connects these two disparate Texas lives and lends stark credence to the dark side of Lyndon Johnson that has largely gone unsubstantiated.
Alan Dale is a full-time professional jazz musician and band leader, a lifetime student of American history whose parents were active as supporters and volunteers in the political campaigns of John and Robert Kennedy. He is the administrator of jfkessentials.com and is a contributing editor to the Assassination Archives and Research Center (aarclibrary.org). To campaign for compliance in enforcing the JFK Records Act, and to ensure the scheduled declassification of JFK assassination related files, he has joined with other interested parties in setting up 2017JFK.ORG.
From the moment he began his investigation in 1965, Jim Garrison has been attacked and discredited in the media and elsewhere, even here a year ago when he was accused by the Louisiana Historical Association at their annual meeting of “outing” Clay Shaw, a falsehood. In the eighteen years that I’ve been working on the Garrison case, none of the charges against Garrison have turned out to be valid.
Jim Garrison would never have subverted a witness, and would never have fed Perry Russo the identification of Clay Shaw under sodium pentothal. He would never have accepted that Clay Shaw was the “Clay Bertrand” who summoned Dean Andrews to Dallas to defend Oswald unless he had massive evidence.
I met Jim Garrison in New Orleans two months after Clay Shaw was acquitted for participating in a conspiracy to murder President Kennedy. It was May 1969. Garrison had invited my husband, Ralph Schoenman, and me to New Orleans because Ralph, who had been living in London, sent him the Paese Sera newspaper articles about a CIA front in Rome to whose board of directors Clay Shaw had been named. Shaw had been recruited in New Orleans by a Hungarian named Ferenc Nagy who himself had been recruited for CIA by Frank Wisner, an early chief of the clandestine services. There’s a CIA document describing Wisner’s recruitment of Nagy.
Professor Joan Mellen – INFILTRATIONS: On the Corruption of Government Investigations
Saturday, September 27, 2014, Bethesda, Maryland.
How CIA and the FBI infiltrated the Garrison, Church Committee and House Select Committee investigations into the murder of President Kennedy, as revealed by documents released under the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act.
“Its is inaccurate and a serious understatement to suggest that Joannides’ being placed with HSCA was the main way CIA corrupted HSCA. This view is false, and an example of what CIA calls a “limited hangout.” Rather, CIA interference began on day one of Robert Blakey’s tenure as HSCA counsel and was a daily intrusion. *It culminated in Scott Breckinridge’s control of HSCA’s final report. Breckinridge worked out of the Office of Legal Counsel of CIA…” Joan Mellen
Dr. Joan Mellen, Ph.D: Is a professor of English and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. She is the author of twenty-two books including several that deal directly or indirectly with the JFK assassination: A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History; Our Man in Haiti: George de Mohrenschildt and the CIA in the Nightmare Republic; The Great Game in Cuba: How the CIA Sabotaged Its Own Plot to Unseat Fidel Castro.
House Select Committee on Assassinations and the CIA
Joan Mellen discusses the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) relations with the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which met from 1976-79 to investigate the murders of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor Mellen argued that the CIA had covert influence over the committee and the writing of their final report.
She spoke at a conference on the 50th anniversary of the release of the Warren Report hosted by the Assassination Archives and Research Center.