Lyndon Johnson and Mac Wallace - Joan Mellen

[Peter Lemkin]

Mellen needs to get the Darby file from IAI, and name her source. Her claims as to the contents of the files are unverifiable, without the identity of the source and/or the contents of the file; and, as we have seen, the IAI refuses to release, at least upon my written request, information from the Darby file. Mellen has been cautious in the past to document and footnote her published work, (and indeed complains about other author's failure to do so in this very article); why has she not done so here, at the very centerpiece of her work?

She needs to put up the proof. If she won't, we should consign her new work to the same place she consigns Stone, McClellan, Bowden, Nelson, Sardie, Pegues, Darby, and J Harrison.

PS: Feel free to copy this to a forum that Mellen reads.

Joan visits NO forums on JFK and related. I believe she will give the information and footnotes you decry as missing in her book - this was just a public lecture, albeit to a JFK-assassination interested audience. Her book is in the hands of the publisher and is awaiting printing and distribution soon. I myself wonder if some intelligence agency might not have slipped that note in the Darby file after he did the work for J. I don't know, and don't think it would be easy to know. While Mellen's research seems intensive, from what I've been privately told, she did possibly get one thing very wrong about Hofmeister. Dawn knew Darby personally and I know takes great offense at some of Joan's positions on this matter. I'm trying to be neutral about personalities and look for the truth. Joan seems [in her lecture] to not consider the possibility of someone setting LBJ up rather than he [LBJ] being someone behind the assassination, per se.