In a new look at LBJ, Joan Mellen debunks the Mac Wallace myth

In her new book about Lyndon Johnson, Faustian Bargains, Joan Mellen does something all too rare in the world of JFK research. She checked an oft-asserted "fact," and found it isn't a fact at all, but a fiction.

But first, the book. Faustian Bargains is intended less as a biography of LBJ than a portrait of the "robber baron culture" of Texas" and correc…