Jim DiEugenio on the King Trial and Media Coverage

Transcript, courtesy of David Giglio, of an interview with Jim DiEugenio on the media and the 1999 Martin Luther King assassination trial in Memphis.

(Listen to the interview on YouTube courtesy of Our Hidden History)

OHH:

James DiEugenio is the editor and publisher of kennedysandking.com and he’s the author of The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today. He’s also a noted researcher of the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. People are aware there was a civil trial in 1999 led by the King family in which the jury found that the assassination was a result of a conspiracy.

I’ve been wanting to talk about this case for a long time so I found an article that Jim wrote at the time about the media’s reaction to the trial’s outcome.

It’s sort of a timeless subject to see how the press deals with events that run counter to their narratives, and Jim is always brilliant at dissecting the tropes that the media uses to kind of get around things that run counter to what they want to say. So that’s what we’re going to discuss today but it’s a wider subject and I think we’re going to go a lot of places with it. But thank you Jim for talking today.

JD:

David, the article that you wanted to base this interview around was in Probe Magazine in the January/February issue of 2000.

[see

The Media Buries the Conspiracy Verdict in the King Case

~kennedysandking]

I wrote the article and it’s about the media’s treatment of the conspiracy verdict in the civil trial in Memphis conducted by William Pepper in December of 1999.

OHH:

So William Pepper, who was James Earl Ray’s lawyer, and who was an acquaintance of Dr. King.

JD:

Now, the remarkable thing about the treatment of the verdict is this: the mainstream media did not have any reporter there for anywhere near close to the whole expanse of the trial. I know this for a fact because James Douglass, who was reporting on the trial for Probe Magazine and he filed his report with us a few months earlier. In fact, I think the prior issue. He was there every day.

OHH:

James Douglass, he’s the author of JFK and the Unspeakable.

JD:

Him and a local friend he knew from Memphis were the only people there for the majority of the days of the trial. He said nobody was there. Not one other single person was there every single day and most of the reporters were there for two or three days and then left. So here’s my question: How on earth do you discuss a trial where you didn’t have a reporter there? Well, this is something that was really kind of startling even for the MSM. So we decided to go ahead and round up these views of the trial and prepare an article for them, about them rather, for Probe, which is what we did. The New York Times�"

OHH:

Before you ... Can you just kind of briefly tell what the facts of the trial and just briefly what they found just for people who aren’t familiar with it.

JD:

The trial itself was what is termed the civil trial, which means one private party is suing another private party over what’s called damages. So in this particular case, it was the King family bringing the charges against a man named Loyd Jowers who owned a tavern in Memphis at the time. Now, in 1993 Loyd Jowers had gone on national television with Sam Donaldson on ABC and talked about his part in a conspiracy to kill Martin Luther King. He said that his role was to receive the murder weapon from the guy running the show and then give it to an assassin and then have the assassin give the rifle back to him and then he would go ahead and give it back to his aider and abettor, who had given it to him in the first place.

JD:

Now, as time went on, William Pepper worked more and more on this angle and by around 1996-1997, he was ready to go ahead and reopen the King case as a criminal trial. In other words, the state versus defendant on a murder charge. So he actually did try and get the case reopened upon two sets of new evidence. One was the Jowers presentation, the other one was forensically to try and show that the murder weapon in evidence was not the weapon that was used to kill King.

What happened was what the people in Memphis did not want it to happen. In other words, the power brokers in Memphis did not want this to happen. The judge who the case was assigned to, Judge Joe Brown, actually was in sympathy with Pepper trying to reopen the case.

OHH:

Judge Joe Brown, he later became the famous TV judge but he’s a very interesting character. I think if you have a chance, Len Osanic of Black Op Radio at blackopradio.com has several good interviews of him in his back catalog. If you go to his website you can find those interviews and get your hands on those. They’re really excellent. I suggest people listen to those.

JD:

So he actually was going to go ahead and sanction rifle tests to see if the rifle in evidence was actually the rifle used to kill King. They did a round of tests and they came back inconclusive. There was a scar in the track of the rifle on these tests that was not reported in the first round of tests done by the FBI. It was hard to explain how that got there. So Judge Brown was going to sanction a second round of tests. Did the scar come from a buildup of residue in the rifle in the intervening years? Because if it didn’t, then it’s not the rifle that killed King because that wasn’t there.

So Brown said, “This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to go ahead and have a solution, a chemical solution, which will not damage the rifle barrel at all and we’re going to use that to clean the rifle barrel and then we’re going to retest. If the scar is still there, then I don’t think we have a match.” When Judge Brown said he was going to do that, the city of Memphis rose up in rebellion against him. The local DA’s office, the state attorney general, the major media, theMemphis Commercial Appeal. To make a long story short, what ended up happening was that the same thing that happened to Jim Garrison back in 1967 on the Kennedy case, the same thing that happened to Richard Sprague in 1976 on the JFK case, and the same thing that happened with Gary Webb in the late 1990s on the CIA and crack cocaine.

So what happened was that when Brown was on vacation, there was a kind of unauthorized invasion of his office by a guy named Mike Roberts in cahoots with a Judge named John Colton. Colton was the guy whose court the original case was assigned to way back there in 1969. But during a routine rotation, it had been assigned to Brown in the ’90s. Colton and Roberts went ahead and hijacked the files out of Judge Brown’s chambers while he was on vacation. Judge Brown was very angry about this; he blamed in it on local Republican politics but this was more or less the beginning of the end for Brown’s reinvestigation of the Kennedy case. Excuse me, of the Martin Luther King murder case.

Once he got back, he was removed from the case by the appeals court. The local prosecutor, John Campbell, was overjoyed at this because now the case would not have to be reopened and he wouldn’t have to go ahead and retry the case on a criminal ground. Now, I should add here that when this happened, when the criminal case was finished in Memphis, it more or less coincided with the death of James Earl Ray. He passed away around this same time period. Now, all the great work that Bill Pepper had done on this case ... He wrote that good book, Orders to Kill. He had done all this wonderful research in Memphis, found these new witnesses.

It seemed that it was now essentially going to go down the drain. Because now of course there was no defendant and the case, as far as being a conspiracy, was pretty much wrapped up in Memphis.

So, the people you have to give the credit to for keeping the thing going and getting it into a civil court is the family of Martin Luther King. I don’t think there’s any question about that. They decided to go ahead with the case and they decided to file a civil suit in Memphis against Jowers. This trial took place in the latter part of 1999, I believe in November and December of 1999. I think the verdict came in on December the 8th of 1999.

There’s actually a book that contains the entire transcript of the trial, it’s called The 13th Juror. A literal cascade of information came out at this trial. I mean, it’s really kind of incredible when you go ahead and look at all the great stuff that Pepper was able to introduce into the court record. Just to give you some highlights. There’s a fascinating couple of witnesses by the name of Floyd Newsum and Ed Redditt and a third one Jerry Williams who testified how somebody called off the private body guards that King usually had when he came to that city. They all said they really don’t know how the heck it happened.

But whenever King had come to Memphis, and he had been there before a few weeks earlier of course, for the sanitation workers strike, he had his own private security detail. He also had a surveillance detail that his people would just watch out from across the street to see if anything was coming up. That whole detail was called off on this particular visit.

Now, what Pepper did at the trial is he coupled that evidence with the testimony of a man named Leon Cohen who was a friend of the manager of the Lorraine Motel, Walter Bailey. Cohen testified that Bailey received a call from a member of Dr. King’s group in Atlanta the night before he arrived in Memphis, and the request was to change King’s room. Bailey was not interested in doing that. In fact, he didn’t want to do it, but the guy insisted that they wanted to change the room from an inner courtyard room to an outside balcony room.

Now, I don’t have to tell you how important that is. I think anybody who knows anything about the King case understands how important that is. Because if the room had not been changed, then the assassination could not have taken place. At least not the way that it actually did, from allegedly a rifleman across the street hitting King as he comes out to the balcony of his room.

When you couple the stripping of the security with the changing of the room, things start getting really kind of fishy, don’t they? So, in other words, now what Pepper did is he went ahead and he began to bring witnesses in who questioned the official story of where the fatal shot came from.

See, if you believe the Memphis authorities, the shot came from a place called Bessie’s Boarding House, which is right above Jim’s Grill which was Jowers’ place. It came from a communal bathroom about something like about 210 feet away. First of all, who the heck would ever want to use a communal bathroom if you’re an assassin? Because what that means of course is that anybody could knock on the door or come in and want to use the bathroom or be waiting for you when you ran out. That’s got to be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of.

What Pepper did is he brought in about three witnesses who disagreed with the location of the shot coming from Bessie’s Boarding House. These were Earl Caldwell, a former New York Times reporter was one of them. Solomon Jones who was King’s chauffeur driver and Maynard Stiles who his testimony was really interesting. First of all Caldwell and Jones both said they thought the shot came from below the balcony, these bushes below the balcony. Now, Maynard Stiles received a phone call the next morning saying that the bushes had to all be trimmed and cut down. Get this, the next morning, he gets an order from the parks department saying, we want all the bushes trimmed and cut down.

In other words, the next morning, they weren’t there. In other words, the idea of trying to say that the shot came from the bushes below was now really hard to make stick because there weren’t any bushes.

OHH:

This is a crime scene. They’re uprooting a crime scene...

JD:

Isn’t this really something? The next step in the trial was ... By the way, I think you’re beginning to understand why the media didn’t want to talk about this trial. Was the testimony of a guy named Arthur Hanes. Arthur Hanes was going to be James Earl Ray’s original attorney. He was going to defend him back in 1968. Eventually what happened is that James Earl Ray made a terrible mistake and he got rid of Hanes and replaced him with Percy Foreman which, as Ray later said, was probably “the biggest mistake I ever made in my life.”

But Hanes was prepared to go to trial, which Foreman was not going to do. So Hanes decided to do some investigation, which Foreman also did not do. And he found a witness by the name of Guy Canipe who owned a five & dime store underneath Bessie’s Boarding House. Because the strongest evidence against Ray was that he supposedly dropped a bundle of his belongings as he was running from the scene and this included the rifle. Canipe said to Haynes, “That bundle was on my foyer, my exterior foyer 10 minutes before the shot went off.” Now, you don’t get very much better evidence than that. In other words, somebody was trying to frame James Earl Ray by depositing his items there.

Now, another very interesting witness that they produced was a man named William Hamblin who knew a cab driver named James McGraw. James McGraw was called to Bessie’s Boarding House to pick up a guy named Charlie Stephens. This was around the time of King’s assassination. He is supposed to drive him home because the guy was stone drunk. He said that when he went into the room to try and pick up Charlie Stephens that he looked into the communal bathroom across the way. He said the door was wide open. There was nobody there at that particular time. And he said Charlie Stephens was dead drunk. Of course, Charlie Stephens is a guy who was going to identify Ray as the assassin coming out of that bathroom for the authorities in order to get him sent back from London to the United States. How could he identify him, if the guy was dead drunk?

Now, there was also evidence at the trial produced about the mysterious guy named Raoul. Raoul is the guy who James Earl Ray said that he met up in Canada in 1967. Raoul hired him in Montreal rather, in Montreal, Canada in the summer of 1967. Ray said he hired him to do odd jobs for him like delivering things, picking things up and he would do this all throughout the country from the east coast to the west coast. The whole idea was to try and locate Raoul because Jowers said that the guy who dropped off the rifle to him on the day of the assassination was Raoul, this same guy.

So what happened is that Pepper decided to go ahead and try and find other witnesses who knew of this guy named Raoul and had seen him before, and to see if the witnesses all matched up�"and they ended up doing that. In fact, Pepper went ahead and he found at least three witnesses who identified the very same picture of this guy named Raoul to the point that Pepper actually thought that he found Raoul. Who was living ... It was either New York or Philadelphia in 1997. But he would never answer the door, he would always send his daughter or his wife to answer the door, he would never answer the door to be interviewed.

If that’s not good enough for you, there was also some very interesting evidence introduced about the role of the military intelligence in the stalking and perhaps the shooting of King. Dougl Valentine is a pretty prominent author about CIA operations who wrote a book called The Phoenix Program in 1990. That of course was about the notorious program in Vietnam to snuff out and torture and kill sympathizers of the Viet Cong. When he was doing that book, Doug talked with some veterans who had been redeployed from Indochina to do surveillance on the ‘60s anti-war movement in the United States. He found out that the army’s 111th military intelligence group kept King under 24-hour a day surveillance. Its agents were actually there in Memphis in April of that year when King was killed.

From this information, they reportedly watched and took photos while King’s assassin moved into position, fired and walked away.

OHH:

There are a couple things. There’s the Doug Valentine interview on Porkins Policy Radio which I will put a link to in the comments.

JD:

Now, what’s so interesting about that is that, also produced at the trial was a guy named Carthel Weeden who was a captain of the fire station across the street from the Lorraine Motel, the place where King was gunned down. He testified that he was on duty the morning of the 4th, April 4th and two US army officers approached him and they wanted to look out for the motel. They carried briefcases and indicated they had cameras. So Carthel Weeden showed them the roof at the fire station. He left them at the edge of the northeast corner behind the parapet wall. And from there of course you had a bird’s-eye view of the motel. In other words, the on the scene evidence matches with the information that Doug Valentine had dug up.

So that’s very interesting, and a lot of people would consider it quite powerful. He also got a guy named Jack Terrell who had worked for the CIA during the illegal war against Nicaragua. Who knew a friend of his, a guy named J.D. Hill and J.D. Hill had actually been a member of the army sniper team that was supposed to shoot a so-called unknown target on April 4th. They were supposed to take up positions in Memphis but that mission was suddenly canceled. When he heard what happened to King the next day, he realized what he was going to be there for.

Jim Garrison was probably the first critic of the Warren Commission who understood this matter. And it is probably one of the reasons the MSM decided to smear him beyond recognition. This goes on to the present day. In a recent article in a regional journal called 64 Parishes, a writer named Alecia Long decided to pick up the infernal and eternal anti-Garrison cudgel. The New Orleans Times Picayune has always liked to go after Garrison and so they are now carrying it on their web site.

To anyone who is familiar with the territory, the first reaction is, “Oh my aching back!” The ten-page article is simply a compendium of every MSM caricature of Garrison and his Kennedy case that one can imagine�"except Long does not even mention the ARRB. She only alludes to what they did in about a half a sentence. As we shall see, this was a wise choice on her part.

The preposterous thesis of her essay is that somehow, by his clever use of the media, Garrison was able to advance his case, his cause and his reputation. She uses Garrison’s 30-minute talk on NBC as proof of this. She even opens her article by asking why NBC agreed to give the DA this platform. She does not answer her rhetorical question until several pages later. There, she finally says that in June of 1967, “NBC ran an hour-long special sharply critical of Garrison’s claims and the methods used by his investigators.” This is an understatement. Most objective observers considered the Walter Sheridan production a straight-out hatchet job. But she tries to bolster the program’s credibility by adding, “The special featured several witnesses who claimed to have been offered bribes in exchange for providing testimony damaging to Shaw.”

What she does not note is that these so-called “witnesses” were later exposed, either in court, or by their own confessions, as being bogus. (DiEugenio, pp. 239-43) And more than one witness�"for instance, Fred Leemans and Marlene Mancuso�"testified as to the unethical and threatening tactics used by Sheridan for the program. It was Sheridan who fabricated these phony on-air statements by threatening and intimidating Garrison’s witnesses. Mancuso did not succumb to his bullying, so she was not on the show. Leemans did and went on the program. But both of them signed affidavits revealing the extent to which Sheridan and his cohorts would go to in order to flip Garrison’s witnesses. For example, Leemans was told, “… if I did not change my statement and state that I had been bribed by Jim Garrison’s office, I and my family would be in physical danger.” (DiEugenio, p. 240) Somehow, Long missed those statements, which gravely undermine her thesis because logically, they explain why the Federal Communications Commission decided to grant Garrison the time to counter Sheridan’s handiwork. But even at that, the FCC only gave Garrison a half hour, compared to Sheridan’s full hour, which contradicts the idea of equal time embedded in the now defunct Fairness Doctrine.

She also questions why, when granted the time, Garrison did not answer Sheridan’s charges in more specific terms. As the DA stated throughout his Playboy interview, if he had done that, it would have given Shaw’s lawyers a pretext to move to get his case thrown out of court, since it would prejudice prospective jurors.

With the release of Garrison’s files by the ARRB, the idea that Garrison did not have a factual basis for his case against Shaw is revealed to be utterly false. There is no doubt today that Shaw used the pseudonym of Clay Bertrand. The declassified files contain over ten witnesses who stated this was the case. It is further revealed that the FBI knew this as well. And finally, attorney Dean Andrews knew it�"and lied about it.   As a consequence, Garrison never got to ask Shaw the key question: “Why did you call Andrews and ask him to go to Dallas to defend Oswald?” (DiEugenio, pp. 387-88)

It is also now shown that Shaw lied about his association with the CIA. That association has turned out to be a long service and a lucrative one. Not only did Shaw lie about it at his own trial, the CIA continually lied about it, and Robert Blakey fell for it. In the HSCA volumes, Shaw is referred to as part of a large businessman’s contact program in the Agency. Not true. Shaw was a well-compensated contract agent from at least the fifties. (Joan Mellen, Our Man In Haiti, pp. 54-55) In the sixties, he had a covert security clearance code name that was the same as Howard Hunt’s. (DiEugenio, pp. 383-87) The CIA tried desperately to cover up these facts, even going as far as altering Shaw’s files. (William Davy, Let Justice Be Done, p. 200) The ARRB later discovered the CIA had gone even further and destroyed Shaw’s 201 file.




As the late Yale educated attorney Allard Lowenstein once said regarding the Robert Kennedy assassination: in his experience as a lawyer, people who have nothing to hide don’t hide things. Somehow, Long does not think any of this new material is relevant to any discussion of Jim Garrison today.

In addition to this secrecy about Shaw, which hurt Garrison’s case, Long does not detail any of the other methods of obstruction that the CIA and the FBI used against Garrison. Nor does she elucidate any of the meetings that Shaw’s lawyers had in Washington soliciting this kind of aid, which ended up being bountiful. The declassified files of the ARRB contain literally scores of pages on this subject. This features interference with the serving of Garrison’s subpoenas. And further, the setting up of a special committee within the CIA to survey actions to take against Garrison before, during, and after the trial of Clay Shaw. At the first meeting of this super-secret group, James Angleton’s assistant, Ray Rocca, said that he felt that Garrison would convict Shaw in the Kennedy case. (DiEugenio, pp. 269-74) Perhaps in their quest to stop that from happening, on the eve of the trial, at least three prospective witness for the prosecution were physically attacked before they testified: Richard Case Nagell, Clyde Johnson and Aloysius Habighorst. None of these men ended up testifying. (p. 294)

As mentioned previously, one of the most bizarre statements that the author makes is that Garrison was proficient at using the media and manipulating them for his own benefit. How anyone can make such a statement today is simply inexplicable. As authors like William Davy and myself have shown, the media utterly destroyed Jim Garrison. Before Garrison took on the Kennedy assassination, he had a promising career ahead of him as a Louisiana politician. Many thought he could have been governor or senator from the state. (DiEugenio, pp. 172-74) That career was utterly wrecked by the two-year roasting he took in the press from almost every outlet imaginable: CBS, NBC, NY Times, Life Magazine, Saturday Evening Post, to name just a few. Garrison was eventually defeated in his District Attorney re-election bid due to two sets of phony pinball kickback charges, which he defeated at trial. But the publicity weakened his position and strengthened his opponent Harry Connick, who defeated him in a close election in 1973. (See chapter 19 of Garrison’s book.) To most legal observers, Connick turned out to be a very poor DA compared to Jim Garrison.

After Garrison was retired from the DA’s office, it took him years to recover from the ordeal he went through. At that time, people who visited him in New Orleans said he had a small office that he rented from a larger firm. This is the man who likely would have been residing in the governor’s mansion if not for the JFK case. That media manipulation Long describes did the DA a lot of good, didn’t it?

Long is so utterly biased that she actually credits Judge Herbert Christenberry. This is the judge who threw out Garrison’s attempt to try Shaw on perjury charges after his acquittal. Today, there is little or no doubt that Shaw lied numerous times at his conspiracy trial. For instance, about his employment by the CIA, about his friendship with David Ferrie, about his use of an alias. And according to Garrison assistant Steve Jaffe, this time Garrison was not going to make the same mistake he did at the conspiracy trial. He was going to use every witness he had against Shaw.

Judge Herbert Christenberry should never have presided over this hearing. Moreover, there should have never been a hearing in the first place. As Garrison notes in his book, the idea of a federal judge inserting himself into a state case was quite unusual, since there was a law against it. But that is what happened. Shaw’s lawyers moved to have a state case considered in federal court. (Garrison, p. 253)

Why did they do this?

Because Christenberry’s wife had written a letter to Shaw after his acquittal. This was also after Garrison filed the perjury charges. The letter uses the plural pronoun “we”, so it clearly describes both husband and wife’s sentiments. The Christenberrys congratulated Shaw on the outcome of the trial. They sympathized with him over what the DA had done to the poor man. They continued by saying how much better the proceedings would have been if the case had been allotted to federal court and Judge Christenberry. But unfortunately, Caroline Christenberry could not voice these sentiments during the trial for risk of being labeled prejudiced in advance. (Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p.315)

If there was ever an attempt to solicit a case, this was it. That letter is in the National Archives today. It appears Long has never heard of it.

This article proves the very worst about the JFK case. Everyone hoped that the declassification of the files would aid in the public’s understanding of what that case was really all about, what impact it had on the personages involved and also on American history. That will not happen with people like Long. At the end of her original essay as published in the periodical 64 Parishes, it is revealed that her piece is part of something called the “Democracy and the Informed Citizen Initiative”, which is sponsored by the Federation of State Humanities councils. The Andrew Mellon Foundation was part of the support for that initiative. In other words, the Power Elite Kennedy opposed is still thriving.

But further, as Anthony Thorne discovered, Long made up her mind about this matter without looking at any documents. She said, “I don’t want to dig through CIA and FBI documents for the rest of my life.” She then gave the back of her hand to the myriad books on the JFK case: “I find the basic premise of many these books to be problematic and would then note [sic] take those as seriously as historical studies.”

The books don’t matter. The documents don’t matter. Typical MSM historian on the JFK case.   Which is why her article is worthless. It is the vacuity and speciousness of work like this that helps drive readers to the likes of Alex Jones. Perhaps unbeknownst to her, Long is adding to his minions.

Jim Garrison: The Beat Goes On
Written by James DiEugenio

In response to a recent article which he characterizes as “a compendium of every MSM caricature of Garrison and his Kennedy case that one can imagine”, Jim DiEugenio revisits the New Orleans DA's career and his JFK case, and what the ARRB and subsequent research has revealed about it.

Would Jim Garrison have been forgotten if Oliver Stone had never met the late Ellen Ray? If the reader is unaware of who Ellen Ray was let me inform you of her importance in history. (her obituary)

Ellen Ray was the wife of Bill Schaap. They ran a publishing company called Sheridan Square Press. Sheridan Square did not just release books. They also published magazines like the illustrious Covert Action Information Bulletin and Lies of our Times. If our readers do not know about those two periodicals, it is their loss. The first dealt with the Central Intelligence Agency and its allies; the second was concerned with media analysis. They were well done and important journals.

Ellen Ray had known Jim Garrison a long time�"going all the way back to his original investigation of the John Kennedy murder in the late sixties. She always thought highly of him and his work. So when Garrison thought of writing a book on his inquiry in the eighties, Sheridan Square was one of the houses he thought of releasing it through. But before that, Garrison had had an offer from a much bigger publishing house. That deal did not go through since the proofreader the house assigned to the book was Sylvia Meagher. Now as everyone knows, this site is a sincere admirer of Meagher and her fine book, Accessories After the Fact. But as most insiders also realize, Meagher was one of the early critics who developed a phobia�"some would call it a mania�"about Jim Garrison and his inquiry. (The others would include Josiah Thompson and Paul Hoch.) Even someone like Jerry Policoff, who was a close friend of Meagher, once said that Sylvia should not have been assigned to review Garrison’s book: “My God, she contributed money to Clay Shaw’s defense!”

Well, predictably, Meagher’s analysis contributed to Garrison returning his advance. But that may have been fortunate, because now he turned to Ellen Ray and Sheridan Square Press. They assigned him Zachary Sklar as his editor. Zach was a distinguished journalism professor and contributor to Sheridan’s two publications. It was a fortunate pairing. Originally, Garrison had written his book from a third person point of view. But when he met Zach, the editor convinced him that since the DA was an actual participant in the story he was telling, it would be more effective if he wrote the book as a first person narrative. I think most people today would say that was a good choice.

On the Trail of the Assassins sold about forty thousand copies when it was originally released in hard cover. The thoroughly annotated book revealed many new things about Garrison’s investigation that most outsiders did not know about. It also exhibited Garrison’s firm grasp on the entire evidentiary record of the JFK case and also Kennedy’s place in history. Overall, it was a real contribution to the library of books on the assassination of President Kennedy.

But what happened later was probably even more significant. At a film festival in Havana, Ellen Ray met up with Oliver Stone. She told him words to the effect: “Have I got a book for you!” Stone read Garrison’s book and decided to bring it to the big screen. He did so in December of 1991.

But this was the JFK assassination. And it was Jim Garrison. As the DA noted in his book, there were many media critics of his inquiry. And they struck at him in what can only be called a vicious and personal manner. Some of them hid their relationships with the intelligence community, e.g., James Phelan, Walter Sheridan, and Hugh Aynesworth. Even more buried was the cooperation between these men and Clay Shaw’s lawyers. (See Destiny Betrayed, second edition, chapter 11 for an analysis of this nexus.) That sixties wave of media critics was not going to let Oliver Stone bring back Jim Garrison and the JFK case in any kind of fair or salutary manner. So they decided to do a preemptive strike on Stone’s film.

In what was probably an unprecedented campaign in the history of American cinema, the MSM attacked the film JFK seven months in advance of its release. In fact, Ben Bradlee and the The Washington Post sent George Lardner to Dallas to write a story as the film was being shot in Dealey Plaza.

Lardner’s article began with one of the truly snarky remarks in recent journalistic history. In watching a rehearsal of the Dealey Plaza sequence, Lardner noted that Stone had ordered up five shots in the assassination sequence. The reporter then wrote: “Five shots? Is this the Kennedy assassination or the Charge of the Light Brigade?” Through their acoustical testing, the House Select Committee on Assassinations had concluded that there were four shots fired. But as researcher Donald Thomas revealed at Cyril Wecht’s Duquesne Conference in 2003, those same sound technicians told Chief Counsel Robert Blakey that they detected five shots. Blakey told Thomas that he did not think it was possible to sell that many shots to the committee, so their report only analyzed and accepted four. In other words, this was a political decision, not a scientific one. There is real evidence that there were five shots, but somehow that did not matter to Lardner. After all, it’s the JFK case.

Lardner’s article was the first volley in a seven-month MSM campaign that was intended to make sure that the reception of JFK was jaundiced in advance. Many of the same people who attacked Garrison back in the sixties were brought back to do so again, like Aynesworth and Edward Epstein. The fact that neither of these men was at all credible or objective on the subjects of the Kennedy assassination or Jim Garrison was irrelevant. The goal was to savage the film before it had a fair hearing. That is how radioactive this subject was, even thirty years later.

In spite of this assault, JFK did well at the box office, both at home and abroad. It was nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture. But to show the reader just how nutty the anti-JFK crusade was, consider the following. On the eve of the Oscars, an anonymous author bought an ad in the trade journal Variety. The ad asked that no voters cast their ballot for the film as Best Picture. Researcher Rich Goad did some detective work and found out that the ad was paid for by the late Warren Commission counsel David Belin.

Besides bringing the Kennedy assassination back into the limelight, JFK was the main cause for the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). For at the end of the film, Stone added a subtitle revealing that the files of the House Select Committee were being kept secret until the year 2027. This created a sensation in Washington. Tens of thousands of citizens now called their representatives, sent them letters or faxed them in order to do something about this travesty. It worked. The Board was created. It was a unique agency that was made up of private citizens appointed by the president. That agency had a staff that read and researched documents that were now to be declassified. If an intelligence agency objected, that agency had to show why the document should be kept secret. This reversed the previous Freedom of Information Law, which put the burden of proof on the requester, who had to show why it should be declassified. But even today, twenty years after the ARRB closed its doors, the government is still maintaining secrecy over thousands of documents.

That Board has a decidedly mixed record of achievement. But it did do some good work on the Garrison angle of the JFK case.   In fact, the Board even went to court with then New Orleans DA Harry Connick to salvage a file cabinet full of documents remaining from the Garrison investigation. After being shown up in the press, Connick resisted turning over the materials. But the Justice Department eventually secured the documents. The Garrison family also turned over thousands of pages that the late DA had in his personal effects.

Garrison had always insisted that, for various reasons, he was never able to reveal most of the evidence he had secured from 1967-69. After authors like William Davy, Joan Mellen and myself went through what the ARRB attained, we had to agree. The Garrison files in the Archives today hold an abundance of utterly fascinating material on a wide array of subjects dealing with many aspects of the JFK case. Does the MSM reveal any of this to the public? Nope. One of the most embarrassing aspects of the three-week binge that the media went on last year in anticipation that the JFK files were finally going to be completely declassified was this: No one chronicled what the ARRB had already released. Which was significant. It was about 2 million pages of material that opened up new vistas on subjects like Rose Cheramie, Kennedy and Vietnam, and the medical evidence in the JFK case. Guests like Larry Sabato, Phil Shenon and Gerald Posner did not want to discuss those topics. Nether did their hosts like NBC stooge on JFK, Rachel Maddow.

It is easy to understand why this would occur. As Upton Sinclair once said: It is hard to make journalists understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it. Contrary to popular belief there is no such thing as a liberal media. In the twentieth century, and up until today, the American media has been controlled by an oligarchical class. Some authors call this class the Eastern Establishment. Some call it the Power Elite.   As sociologist Donald Gibson explained in his fine book Battling Wall Street, President Kennedy was not a part of that group. He never joined the Council on Foreign Relations; he did not join any secret societies at Harvard; he didn’t like working intelligence during World War II. He got transferred out to the South Pacific and served with a bunch of Joe Six Pack guys on what were close to suicide missions. As this author demonstrated in the second edition of Destiny Betrayed, both in the Senate and in the White House, Kennedy was opposed to much of what this Power Elite was doing abroad, especially in the Third World. (See Destiny Betrayed, second edition, pp. 21-33) After his death, the progress that he did make in the White House was largely halted, and then reversed. (pp. 367-77) Due in part to the ARRB, we know much more about these changes, especially regarding Indochina.

Apple kicks Infowars app from App Store


Apple kicks Infowars app from App Store Apple has confirmed that it has also removed Alex Jones' InfoWars app from its app store, citing community guidelines.
Last month, several outlets including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Facebook, and YouTube, removed Alex Jones' podcast content and associated accounts. The actions were clearly coordinated and the firms cited community guidelines and violations of rules as reasons for the actions.

At the time, InfoWars fans could still access the content by downloading the Infowars app from the App Store. Apple has now confirmed that it also removed the Infowars app permanently, citing community guidelines violations related to the content accessible in the app.

The Infowars Official app is still available to download from the Play Store for Android for the time being.

Last week, Twitter had also banned Infowars and Alex Jones from its platform. Initially, Twitter had not taken part in the coordinated actions, with CEO Jack Dorsey explaining that the accounts had not violated Twitter's rules. Some more recent tweets were seen to fall foul of the rules and Twitter reacted.

I could continue in a similar vein with excerpts from this book and I could also go on with more questionable aspects of Clay Blair's background. And I could then use this information, and the inferences, to dismiss The Search for JFK. I could even add that Blair's agent on his Kennedy book was Scott Meredith, who was representing Judith Exner at the time. But I won't go that far. I may be wrong, but in my opinion I don't think the book can be classified as a deliberate distortion or hatchet job. Although the authors are in some respects seeking to surface unflattering material, I didn't feel that they were continually relying on questionable sources or witnesses, or consistently distorting or fabricating the record. As I have mentioned, the book can be criticized and questioned�"and dismissed�"on other grounds, but, as far as I can see, not on those two.
Dubious Davis

Such is not the case with John Davis' foray into Kennedy biography. The Kennedys: Dynasty and Disaster 1848-1983, was published in 1984, before Davis became the chief spokesman for the anti-Garrison/Mob-did-it wing of the ramified assassination research community. In its very title, his book is deceptive in a couple of interesting ways. First, from the dates included, it implies that the book will be a multigenerational family saga tracing the clan from Joe Kennedy's parents down to youngest brother Teddy. But of the book's 648 pages of text, about 400 deal with the life and death of John F. Kennedy. And more than half of those deal with his presidency. In no way is the book an in-depth family profile. Secondly, as any school boy knows, the word dynasty denotes a series or succession of at least three or more rulers. So Jack Kennedy's two years and ten months as president constitute the shortest "dynasty" in recorded history. In reality, of course, it was not a dynasty at all and the inclusion of the word is a total misnomer.

But there is a method to the misnoming. For Davis, it is necessary to suggest a kind of "royal family" ambience to the Kennedys and, with it, the accompanying aura of familial and assumed "divine right." One of the author's aims is to establish the clan as part of America's ruling class, with more power and influence than any other. He is clear about this early on, when he writes that Joe Kennedy Sr. was richer than either David or Nelson Rockefeller (p. 133). As any student of wealth and power in America knows, this is a rather amazing statement. In 1960, according to John Blair's definitive study The Control of Oil, the Rockefeller family had controlling interest in three of the top seven oil companies in America, and four of the top eight in the world. They were also in control of Chase Manhattan Bank, one of the biggest in the nation then and the largest today. They also owned the single most expensive piece of real estate in the country, Rockefeller Center in New York City. The list of private corporations controlled by them could go on for a page, but to name just two, how about IBM and Eastern Airlines. I won't enumerate the overseas holdings of the family but, suffice it to say, the Kennedys weren't in the same league in that category. JFK knew this. As Mort Sahl relates, before the 1960 election, he liked to kid Kennedy about being the scion of a multimillionaire. Kennedy cornered him once on this topic and asked him point blank how much he thought his family was worth. Sahl replied, "Probably about three or four hundred million." Kennedy then asked him how much he thought the Rockefellers were worth. Sahl said he had no idea. Kennedy replied sharply, "Try about four billion." JFK let the number sink in and then added, "Now that's money, Mort."

Throughout the book, Davis tries to convey the feeling of a destined royalty assuming power. So, according to Davis, Kennedy was thinking of the Senate when he was first elected to the House. Then, from his first day in the Senate, he was thinking of the Vice-Presidency (p. 147). Epitomizing this idea, Davis relates a personal vignette about the Kennedy family wake after JFK's funeral. Davis, a cousin of Jackie Kennedy, was leaving the hall and paused to shake hands with Rose Kennedy to offer his condolences (p. 450). Mother Kennedy surprised him by saying in a cool, controlled manner: "Oh, thank you Mr. Davis, but don't worry. Everything will be all right. You'll see. Now it's Bobby's turn." Such coolness differs greatly from what is revealed in the recently declassified LBJ tapes in which, after the assassination, Rose could not even speak two sentences to the Johnsons without dissolving into tears. But the portrait is in keeping with the ruthless monarchy that Davis takes great pains to portray.

https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-posthumous-assassination-of-john-f-kennedy

read the full article in the above link .

 The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy
Written by James DiEugenio

A classic and much-discussed essay which explores at length and in depth both the provenance and the evolution of these "JFK scandal stories" over a number of years: how they morphed over time at each appearance into something they were not when they first appeared.

This two part essay appeared originally in Probe back in 1997. No article we ever published ever generated as much discussion and feedback as this one did. If it can be said that any piece ever put us "on the map" so to speak, this one did.

Looking back, one reason it had so much resonance is that no one had ever done anything like it before. That is, explored at length and in depth both the provenance and the evolution of these "JFK scandal stories" over a number of years. By the term evolution I mean how they morphed over time at each appearance into something they were not when they first appeared.

The other point that made this such an attention grabber was the fact that certain personages somehow appeared on the scene directly or on the periphery. People whose presence should have caused alarm bells to go off with intelligent and sophisticated observers: Frank Capell, Robert Loomis, Ovid Demaris, Liz Smith, James Angleton, Timothy Leary etc. As the essay makes clear, these people had agendas in mind when they got into this racket. Others, like Robert Slatzer, as we also show, were just money grubbing hustlers. But the net effect is that by reinforcing each other, they became a business racket, a network creating its own echo chamber.

It was not an easy piece to write. I learned a lot doing it, but I came away with a lot of dirty knowledge about how power in America works. And the lengths the other side will go to in order to snuff out any kind of memory of what America was at one time.

We decided to repost this essay in the wake of the current Mimi Alford episode. This fits in with the essay because the book was published by Random House, home of Bob Loomis who retired last year. The Alford book was likely his parting shot at the JFK researchers, who he despises so much that he launched the now discredited Gerald Posner on them. Also, we cannot help but note how quickly the MSM has fallen head first for the woman without asking any cautionary questions. Like, for example, "Why did you wait nine years to publish?", right on the eve of the 50th anniversary. Which corresponds neatly with her alleged discovery by Robert Dallek back in 2003, at the 40th anniversary. Neither did they ask her how she got to Random House. Another pertinent query: "Why are you and your handlers writing that you were not
named previously when, in fact, Dallek did name you in the trade paperback version of his book?"

Further, no one has called her on her comment that during the Missile Crisis JFK told her that he wished his kids grew up "better red than dead". In other words, he was ready to surrender to the Russians and Cubans and let them take over America instead of insisting the missiles in Cuba be removed. Hard to believe that even the MSM could buy this one sInce it contradicts everything in the newly adduced documentary record. During the Missile Crisis, Kennedy moved a 200,000 man army into South Florida. Two invasion plans of Cuba had been drawn up during Operation Mongoose. Either by invasion or by bombing, the missiles were going to be removed. It was not Kennedy who tried for a deal first. It was the Russians through ABC reporter John Scali. Five hours later, NIkita Khrushchev cabled a long, emotional, rambling letter requesting the outline of an offer to remove the missiles.

But the Missile Crisis has always been perceived by the MSM as being Kennedy's shining moment. (In my opinion it is not. Vietnam is, but they are still in denial on that one.) So they first sent Sy Hersh out to try and smear Kennedy's masterly performance during the episode. That did not work, so now they take a second swing at it. With no one asking why this is bizarre story is at odds with the taped conversations of the crisis. We have little doubt that this book is being passed around the studios by Random House to make a TV movie for the anniversary next year �" perhaps the rightwing Starz Channel will pick it up.

In the classic film "Z", after the generals have killed the liberal candidate for Premier, an excellent scene follows. Seated at a long table, the plotters pass around a dossier. They then agree that the next step is to "Knock the halo of his head." The timely delay in the Alford book's appearance, the push by Random House, and the inclusion of the goofy "better red than dead" exchange, these all demonstrate that the book and this woman are best understood under that shadow. Which we try and illuminate in this essay.
Part I: Judith Exner, Mary Meyer, and Other Daggers

(Click here if your browser is having trouble loading the above.)
Part II: Sy Hersh and the Monroe/JFK Papers: The History of a Thirty-Year Hoax



On September 25, 1997, ABC used its news magazine program 20/20 to take an unusual journalistic step. In the first segment of the program, Peter Jennings took pains to discredit documents that had been about to be used by its own contracted reporter for an upcoming show scheduled for broadcast. The contracted reporter was Seymour Hersh. The documents purported to show a secret deal involving Marilyn Monroe, Sam Giancana, and President John F. Kennedy. They were to be the cornerstone of Hersh's upcoming Little, Brown book, The Dark Side of Camelot. In fact, published reports indicate that it was these documents that caused the publisher to increase Hersh's advance and provoke three networks to compete for a television special to hype the book. It is not surprising to any informed observer that the documents imploded. What is a bit surprising is that Hersh and ABC could have been so naive for so long. And it is ironic that ABC should use 20/20 to expose a phenomenon that it itself fueled twelve years ago.

What happened on September 25th was the most tangible manifestation of three distinct yet overlapping journalistic threads that have been furrowing into our culture since the Church Committee disbanded in 1976. Hersh's book would have been the apotheosis of all three threads converged into one book. In the strictest sense, the convergent movements did not actually begin after Frank Church's investigation ended. But it was at that point that what had been a right-wing, eccentric, easily dismissed undercurrent, picked up a second wind�"so much so that today it is not an eccentric undercurrent at all. It is accepted by a large amount of people. And, most surprisingly, some of its purveyors are even accepted within the confines of the research community.

The three threads are these:

    That the Kennedys ordered Castro's assassination, despite the verdict of the Church Committee on the CIA's assassination plots. As I noted last issue, the committee report could find no evidence indicating that JFK and RFK authorized the plots on Fidel Castro, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, or Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam.
    That the Kennedys were really "bad boys," in some ways as bad as Chicago mobsters or the "gentleman killers" of the CIA. Although neither JFK nor RFK was lionized by the main centers of the media while they were alive, because of their early murders, many books and articles were written afterward that presented them in a sympathetic light, usually as liberal icons. This was tolerated by the media establishment as sentimental sop until the revelations of both Watergate and the Church Committee. This "good guy" image then needed to be altered since both those crises seemed to reveal that the Kennedys were actually different than what came before them (Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers) and what came after (Nixon). Thus began a series of anti-Kennedy biographies.
    That Marilyn Monroe's death was somehow ordained by her "involvement" with the Kennedy "bad boys." Again, this was at first a rather peculiar cottage industry. But around the time of Watergate and the Church Committee it was given a lift, and going back to a 1964 paradigm, it combined elements of the first two movements into a Gothic (some would say grotesque) right-wing propaganda tract which is both humorous and depressing in its slanderous implications, and almost frightening in its political and cultural overtones. Egged on by advocates of Judith Exner (e.g. Liz Smith and Tony Summers), this political and cultural time bomb landed in Sy Hersh's and ABC's lap. When it blew up, all parties went into a damage control mode, pointing their fingers at each other. As we examine the sorry history of all three industries, we shall see that there is plenty of blame (and shame) to be shared. And not just in 1997.

As we saw in Part One of this article, as the Church Committee was preparing to make its report, the Exner and then Mary Meyer stories made headlines in the Washington Post. These elements�"intrigue from the CIA assassination plots, plus the sex angles, combined with the previous hazing of Richard Nixon over Watergate�"spawned a wave of new anti-Kennedy "expose" biographies. Anti-Kennedy tracts were not new. But these new works differed from the earlier ones in that they owed their genesis and their styles to the events of the mid-seventies that had brought major parts of the establishment (specifically, the CIA and the GOP) so much grief. In fact we will deal with some of the earlier ones later. For now, let us examine this new pedigree and show how it fits into the movement outlined above.
Looking for Mr. Kennedy (And Not Finding Him)

The first anti-Kennedy book in this brood, although not quite a perfect fit into the genre, is The Search for JFK, by Joan and Clay Blair Jr. The book appeared in 1976, right after Watergate and the Church Committee hearings. In the book's foreword, the authors are frank about what instigated their work:

During Watergate (which revealed to us the real character of President Richard M. Nixon�"as opposed to the manufactured Madison Avenue image), our thoughts turned to Jack Kennedy....Like other journalists, we were captivated by what was then called the "Kennedy mystique" and the excitement of "the New Frontier." Now we began to wonder. Behind the image, what was Jack really like? Could one, at this early date, cut through the cotton candy and find the real man? (p. 10)

In several ways, this is a revealing passage. First of all, the authors apparently accept the Washington Post version of Watergate�"i.e. that Nixon, and only Nixon, was responsible for that whole range of malfeasance and that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein got to the bottom of it. Second, it seems to me to be a curious leap from the politically misunderstood shenanigans of Watergate to the formative years of John Kennedy's college prep days and early adulthood, which is what this book is about. It takes JFK from his days at the exclusive Choate School in Connecticut to his first term as a congressman i.e. from about 1934 through 1947. I don't understand how comparing the political fallout from Watergate with an examination of Kennedy's youthful years constitutes a politically valid analogy. Third, the Blairs seem a bit behind the curve on Nixon. If they wanted to find out the "truth" about Nixon all they had to do was examine his behavior, and some of the people he employed, in his congressional campaign against Jerry Voorhis, his senatorial campaign against Helen Douglas and, most importantly, his prosecution of Alger Hiss. These all happened before 1951, two decades before Watergate. Nothing in JFK's political career compares with them.

The book's ill-explained origin is not its only problem. In its final form, it seems to be a rush job. I have rarely seen a biography by a veteran writer (which Clay Blair was) so poorly edited, written, and organized. The book is nearly 700 pages long. It could have been cut by a third without losing anything of quality or substance. The book is heavily reliant on interviews which are presented in the main text. Some of them at such length�"two and three pages�"that they give the volume the air of an oral history. To make it worse, after someone has stopped talking, the authors tell us the superfluous fact that his wife walked into the room, making for more excess verbiage (p.60). And on top of this, the Blairs have no gift for syntax or language, let alone glimmering prose. As a result, even for an interested reader, the book is quite tedious.

The Blairs spend much of their time delving into two areas of Kennedy's personal life: his health problems and his relationships with the opposite sex. Concerning the first, they chronicle many, if not all, of the myriad and unfortunate medical problems afflicting young Kennedy. They hone in on two in order to straighten out the official record. Previous to this book, the public did not know that Kennedy's back problem was congenital. The word had been that it came about due to a football injury. Second, the book certifies that Kennedy was a victim of Addison's disease, which attacks the adrenal glands and makes them faulty in hormone secretion. The condition can be critical in fights against certain infections and times of physical stress.

Discovered in the 19th century, modern medication (discovered after 1947) have made the illness about as serious as that of a diabetic on insulin. I exaggerate only slightly when I write that the Blairs treat this episode as if Kennedy was the first discovered victim of AIDS. They attempt to excuse the melodrama by saying that Kennedy and his circle disguised the condition by passing it off as an "adrenal insufficiency." Clearly, Kennedy played word games in his wish to hide a rare and misunderstood disease that he knew his political opponents would distort and exaggerate in order to destroy him, which is just what LBJ and John Connally attempted to do in 1960. The myopic authors save their ire for Kennedy and vent none on Johnson or a potentially rabid political culture on this issue.

The second major area of focus is Kennedy's sex life. The authors excuse this preoccupation with seventies revelations, an apparent reference to Exner, Meyer, and perhaps Monroe (p. 667). Kennedy seems to have been attractive to females. He was appreciative of their overtures. There seems to me to be nothing extraordinary about this. Here we have the handsome, tall, witty, charming son of a millionaire who is eligible and clearly going places. If he did not react positively to all the attention heaped on him, I am sure his critics would begin to suggest a "certain latent homosexual syndrome." But what makes this (lengthy) aspect of the book interesting is that when the Blairs ask some of Kennedy's girlfriends what his "style" was (clearly looking for juicy sex details), as often as not, the answer is surprising. For instance, in an interview with Charlotte McDonnell, she talks about Kennedy in warm and friendly terms adding that there was "No sex or anything" in their year long relationship (p. 81). Another Kennedy girlfriend, the very attractive Angela Greene had this to say:

Q: Was he romantically pushy?

A: I don't think so. I never found him physically aggressive, if that's what you mean. Adorable and sweet. (p. 181)

In another instance, years later, Kennedy was dating the beautiful Bab Beckwith. She invited Kennedy up to her apartment after he had wined and dined her. There was champagne and low music on the radio. But then a news broadcast came on and JFK leaped up, ran to the radio, and turned up the volume to listen to it. Offended, Beckwith threw him out.

Another curious observation that the book establishes is that Kennedy did not smoke and was only a social drinker. So if, as I detailed in the Mary Meyer tale, Kennedy ended up a White House coke-sniffer and acid head, it was a definite break with the past.

The Blairs' book established some paradigms that would be followed in the anti-Kennedy genre. First, and probably foremost, is the influence of Kennedy's father in his career. In fact, Joe Kennedy's hovering presence over all his children is a prime motif of the book. The second theme that will be followed is the aforementioned female associations. The third repeating pattern the Blairs' established is the use of Kennedy's health problems as some kind of character barometer. That because Kennedy and his circle were not forthright about this, it indicates a covert tendency and a penchant for covering things up.

It would be easy to dismiss The Search for JFK as a slanted book, and even easier to argue that the authors had an agenda. Clay Blair was educated at Tulane and Columbia and served in the Navy from 1943-1946. He was a military affairs writer and Pentagon correspondent for Time-Life from 1949 to 1957. He then became an editor for the Saturday Evening Post and worked his way up to the corporate level of that magazine's parent company, Curtis Publications. Almost all of his previous books dealt with some kind of military figure or national security issue e.g. The Atomic Submarine and Admiral Rickover, The Hydrogen Bomb, Nautilus 90 North, Silent Victory: the U.S. Submarine War Against Japan. In his book on Rickover, he got close cooperation from the Atomic Energy Commission and the book was screened by the Navy Department. In 1969 he wrote a book on the Martin Luther King murder called The Strange Case of James Earl Ray. Above the title, the book's cover asks the question "Conspiracy? Yes or No!" Below this, this the book's subtitle gives the answer, describing Ray as "The Man who Murdered Martin Luther King." To be sure there is no ambiguity, on page 146 Blair has Ray shooting King just as the FBI says he did, no surprise since Blair acknowledges help from the Bureau and various other law enforcement agencies in his acknowledgements.

The Ray book is basically an exercise in guilt through character assassination. This practice has been perfected in the Kennedy assassination field through Oswald biographers like Edward Epstein and Priscilla Johnson McMillan. Consider some of Blair's chapter headings: "A Heritage of Violence," "Too Many Strikes Against Him," "The Status Seeker." In fact, Blair actually compares Ray with Oswald (pp. 88-89). In this passage, the author reveals that he also believes that Oswald is the lone assassin of Kennedy. He then tries to imply that Ray had the same motive as his predecessor: a perverse desire for status and recognition. Later, Blair is as categorical about the JFK case as he is about the King case:

In the case of John F. Kennedy the debate still rages. Millions of words have been written�"pro and con. Yet no one has produced a single piece of hard evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was anything more than a psychopath acting entirely on his own. (p. 106)

 James Phelan
Written by James DiEugenio

Because of his writings on the Kennedy assassination in the Post, New York Times, and his book Scandals, Scamps, and Scoundrels, many have harbored suspicions about Phelan's independence as a writer. What makes him even more suspicious is the company he has kept throughout the years, writes Jim DiEugenio.
From the January-February, 1996 issue (Vol. 3 No. 2) of Probe

James Phelan was a nationally known and distributed reporter for over 20 years, from about the mid-50's to the late 70's. He semi-retired in the early 80's and today is fully retired and living in Temecula, California. At the peak years of his career, Phelan wrote for True, Time, Fortune, The Reporter, Saturday Evening Post, and New York Times Magazine. Although Phelan liked to refer to himself as a free-lancer, he was a staff writer for the Saturday Evening Post for about seven years in the 1960's. In the seventies, he was writing almost exclusively for New York Times Magazine.

As anyone with knowledge of the CIA and the media will know, those two publications, as well as the Luce press Phelan contributed to, have been exposed as having ties to the intelligence community. For example, they are prominently mentioned in Carl Bernstein's famous Rolling Stone article entitled "The CIA and the Media." It should also be noted that Saturday Evening Post has had ties to the FBI. For instance, correspondent Harold Martin was used by the Bureau as a friendly conduit for favorable stories to be passed to.

Because of his writings on the Kennedy assassination in the Post, New York Times, and his book Scandals, Scamps, and Scoundrels, many have harbored suspicions about Phelan's independence as a writer. What makes him even more suspicious is the company he has kept throughout the years. For instance, his editor at Random House was the infamous Bob Loomis. According to Jim Marrs, Loomis is formerly CIA, and he edited the recent Norman Mailer and Gerald Posner books depicting Oswald as a lone gunman (Phelan was a source for Posner). Tom Wicker, longtime Warren Commission defender, wrote the introduction for Phelan's 1982 book. While reporting on Garrison over a period of years, Phelan indiscriminately chummed around with people like Hugh Aynesworth, Walter Sheridan, Rick Townley, and David Chandler. Yet if one questions his bona fides, Phelan vehemently denies that he is tied to the FBI, CIA or any government agency. He often intimates possible lawsuits in the face of these suggestions.

With the release of new documents under the JFK Act, Phelan will now have a hard time using these tactics. So far, two full documents and a partial one have been released revealing that Phelan was informing to the FBI and turning over documents to them as a result of his interviews with Garrison in early 1967. The most interesting contact sheet is the one uncovered by Anna Marie Kuhns-Walko and included in CTKA's collection of her work. In this April 3, 1967 memo by R. E. Wick to Cartha DeLoach, Wick writes that he agreed to see Phelan reluctantly: "Although we have stayed away from [Phelan's name crossed out] it was felt we should hear what he had to say and Leinbaugh in my office talked to him." Phelan seems to have tried to pump Garrison for details about his New Orleans investigation and been disappointed when Garrison would not stay on that topic but would return to the faults of the Warren Report.

Phelan has also written much on Howard Hughes. In fact, his first piece for the Post was about Hughes. In 1962, Phelan wrote a story detailing a "loan" from Hughes to Nixon's brother Donald. This story hurt Nixon in his losing race against Pat Brown for governor. But Phelan's most famous work on Hughes was his 1976 "instant book" on the eccentric, invisible billionaire, Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years. To say the least, it is a curious work. It came out within months of Hughes reputed death. Phelan states that two lower level members of Hughes entourage, spilled out the story of the reclusive loner's last years to Phelan in an apartment he rented for them near Long Beach, Phelan's home at the time. Phelan's editor was again, Loomis and it was a top secret project of Random House. Only Loomis and one other person there knew about it. All dealings between New York and California were done either in person or by hand delivery, no mail or phone contact.

The result is a book out of Dickens. It is a picaresque observation of an eccentric slowly slipping into dementia with touches of humor slipped in occasionally. Phelan seems to have bought everything the two assistants told him and relied on it en toto. The book has no footnotes or bibliography. Not even an index. Phelan begins by decrying the "cult of conspiracy" that had grown up around Hughes and, ironically, chides Norman Mailer who in a recent essay had noted Hughes' close ties to the CIA. This was a point that many had commented on at the time. Peter Scott had written that it is difficult to delineate where Hughes' companies ended and the CIA began. Robert Maheu, a friend and source for Phelan, had gone from the Company to Hughes. But, incredibly, in the entire book, after the Foreword, the CIA is mentioned in only two passages. The first is when Maheu's role as Hughes CEO is introduced and then again when the Glomar Explorer episode is sketched in. In an interview he did in Penthouse in 1977 Phelan was asked about Woodward and Bernstein and the possibility that Robert Bennett-Mullen Company executive, Hughes employee, CIA asset throughout the Watergate affair-was "Deep Throat." Phelan discounted this. He said that Bennett "inherited E. Howard Hunt" and Mullen served as a "cover for two CIA agents working abroad." He said he had interviewed Bennett "and found him to be very forthcoming."

As the CIA documents presented in this issue reveal, Phelan didn't do his homework in regard to any of these subjects. In that same interview, Phelan praises the work of Woodward and Bernstein, who were being deliberately led off the trail of the CIA by Agency asset Bennett. In Scandals, Scamps, and Scoundrels, Phelan chalks up Watergate solely to Nixon's obsessive and quirky personality. This was well after the publication of Fred Thompson's book (see page 29) which details the role played by the Mullen Company and Bennett in the Watergate affair.

As with his 1967 caricaturing of Garrison, those interested in what really happened at Watergate and what really transpired between the CIA and Hughes had to settle for personality sketches, vague generalities, and Phelan's own cleverly disguised biases. On the two great traumatic shocks to the system-Watergate and the JFK conspiracy-Phelan has been anything but what Random House billed him as: an investigative reporter.

The newly released CIA files present an interesting biography of "reporter" Sheridan. In 1955 Sheridan was security approved as an investigator for the CIA. A month later this was cancelled because Sheridan accepted a position at the ultra-secret National Security Agency. In 1956 he was security approved once again by the CIA so that he could attend their "Basic Orientation Course". After leaving the NSA, Sheridan went to work for Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department in the "Get Hoffa" squad, where his tactics in nailing Hoffa earned him a rebuke from none other than Chief Justice Earl Warren and paved the way for Hoffa's eventual release. With this background in the intelligence communities Sheridan was now apparently qualified to work for NBC as a reporter, despite having no previous journalism experience. However, documents reveal that Sheridan did not sever contact with the CIA. In early May of 1967 the Counter Intelligence office of the CIA issued a memorandum for the Deputy Director of Plans which stated:

Richard Lansdale, Associate General Counsel, has advised us that NBC plans to do a derogatory TV special on Garrison and his probe of the Kennedy assassination; that NBC regards Garrison as a menace to the country and means to destroy him. The program is to be presented within the next few weeks. Mr. Lansdale learned this information from Mr. Walter Sheridan of NBC.]

As noted previously, during Sheridan's tenure in New Orleans he enlisted the aid of Richard Townley from NBC's affiliate, WDSU-TV. Townley's loose tongue offered further proof that the NBC White Paper was no more than a deliberate attempt to sabotage the investigation and to ruin Jim Garrison. A recently released FBI memo reads:

A local FBI agent reported that Richard Townley, WDSU-TV, New Orleans, remarked to a special agent of the New Orleans office last evening that he had received instructions from NBC, New York, to prepare a one hour TV special on Jim Garrison with the instruction "shoot him down."

After the program aired, Garrison petitioned the FCC who agreed that the program was biased and granted Garrison a 30-minute rebuttal to air on July 15 at 7:30 P.M. --- hardly equal time. Nevertheless, the NBC program aided greatly in the discreditation of the DA's office and potentially contaminated the Shaw jury pool.

In addition to the aforementioned Richard Townley, the local New Orleans news media seemed to have more than its fair share of newscasters willing to flack for the intelligence agencies. Ed Planer, also of WDSU, offered to share information he had relative to the Garrison probe with the FBI. Also reporting to the FBI was Assistant U.S. Attorney Gene Palmisano. In a May 12th memo from the New Orleans office to Director Hoover, Palmisano stated that he had received information that NBC was planning a White Paper concerning Garrison and that this news special would destroy the credibility of Garrison's investigation.

As these repeated and obviously orchestrated attacks on the DA's office continued, Garrison decided to fight back. On July 7 Walter Sheridan was charged with four counts of public bribery and Richard Townley was charged with attempted bribery and intimidation of witnesses. Sheridan's New Orleans attorneys of record were Milton Brener, a former Assistant D.A. under Garrison, now vociferously anti-Garrison, and Edward Baldwin of Baldwin and Quaid. In May of 1967, Baldwin's partner James Quaid wrote a letter to Richard Helms, then Director of the CIA, requesting that the Agency place his name "on their referral list of qualified attorneys in this area." However, Sheridan's Washington representation is much more illuminating.

Herbert Miller was a former head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice who had worked closely with Walter Sheridan. In the aftermath of the assassination Miller was the Department of Justice's point man in Dallas coordinating the Justice, FBI and Texas investigations. After leaving the DOJ, Miller entered private practice in the Washington firm of Miller, McCarthy, Evans, and Cassidy --- the Evans in this case being former FBI Assistant Director Courtney Evans. In 1967 Miller went to work for the CIA representing the Agency's interests in the Hans Tofte case. (Tofte was a long-time CIA covert operative who worked in the Domestic Operations Division with his protégé, Tracy Barnes. In 1966 he was fired by the Agency for apparently hoarding classified material in his apartment.) While he was representing the CIA in the Tofte flap, Miller found time to interject himself into the Garrison investigation. On May 1, 1967, Miller began offering intelligence on the Garrison investigation to the CIA.

Later that week Miller called CIA Associate General Counsel Richard Lansdale to inform him of the expected arrival in Washington of Alvin Beauboeuf. Beauboeuf was one of assassination suspect David Ferrie's close friends, having accompanied him on his mad dash to Texas on the day of the assassination. Miller's source on Beauboeuf was Walter Sheridan. As Lansdale notes in his memo, "[the NBC special] is expected to 'bury' Garrison because everyone is convinced that Garrison is a wild and dangerous man." Miller went on to assure the CIA that "Beauboeuf would be glad to talk with us or help in any way we want." Garrison would note that after Beauboeuf's Washington trip "a change came over Beauboeuf; he refused to cooperate with us further and he made charges against my investigators."

To recap, we have evidence that NBC reporter Sheridan was providing intelligence on the Garrison investigation to a CIA lawyer, a situation that indicates certain sinister possibilities. In fact, recently declassified records show that Sheridan wasn't satisfied with solely presenting his own warped view of Garrison. A May 11th CIA memo reveals that Sheridan wanted to meet with the CIA "under any terms we propose" and that Sheridan desired to make the CIA's view of Garrison "a part of the background in the following NBC show."

While Sheridan's litigation was pending, Miller began doing double duty as a conduit between Shaw's lawyers and the CIA. In May of 1968 Miller wrote to the CIA's Lansdale:

Dear Dick:

Enclosed are the documents I received from Clay Shaw's attorney, Ed Wegmann.

Best Regards,

Herbert J. Miller, Jr.

The following month Miller provided the Agency with at least two more such packages.

Miller was certainly a very busy man during this time frame. While Miller was acting as a CIA courier for Shaw's lawyers and representing Walter Sheridan, he was also performing similar duties for Gordon Novel. While Novel was fighting extradition from Ohio, Miller came to his aid and was successful in getting an Ohio court to quash Garrison's subpoena. Miller also provided the CIA with the transcripts from Novel's civil suit against Garrison and Playboy. After Novel successfully avoided Garrison's extradition he sent a clipping to former CIA Director Allen Dulles. In his own handwritten marginalia to Dulles, Novel took great pride in Miller's victory, noting what a great job "Miller the Killer" did for him. It is interesting to note that the supposedly itinerant Novel now had four lawyers representing him: Miller, Stephen Plotkin, Jerry Weiner, and Elmer Gertz. Gertz, who had also represented Jack Ruby, was one of Novel's lawyers in his civil suit. When answering a list of interrogatories posed to him by Playboy's lawyers Novel stated that payment of legal fees to Weiner and Plotkin were "clandestinely remunerated by a party or parties unknown to me." It was later revealed to a Garrison investigator by a former member of the CIA that Plotkin was receiving his fees from the CIA via a cutout, Stephen Lemman. As for Miller, just a few short years after the Shaw trial ended, he represented President Richard Nixon as his post-resignation attorney.

What brings the Sheridan affair full circle is a friend of Sheridan's, one Carmine S. Bellino. Bellino was a former FBI agent and Kennedy insider who worked with Robert Kennedy on the McClellan Committee in the fifties and was brought on to Sheridan's "Get Hoffa" squad in the sixties. In 1954 Bellino actually shared his office with CIA/Mafia go-between, Robert Maheu. But what is troubling about the Bellino/Sheridan relationship is that Bellino once worked with none other than Guy Banister, performing background checks for the Remington Rand Corporation. In the seventies Bellino became an investigator on the Watergate Committee and did his best to steer the committee away from investigating any CIA involvement in the crime.

In a 1967 memo the CIA outlined several mass media approaches to counter Garrison's charges. One of their recommendations was to make sure that CIA Director Helms assure that various media outlets "receive a coherent picture of Garrison's 'facts' and motives. In anticipation of a trial, it would be prudent to have carefully selected channels of communication lined up in advance." Certainly the evidence above indicates that NBC was one such "channel."

many of you who have researched this case will im sure have seen the NBC program that masqueraded as journalism . but if not please take the time to view it here .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8EfI4XoqxU

the above program is about 55 minutes long , its from 1967 so you will have to excuse the quality . but picture quality or lack there of wont affect your viewing .

when you view the program if you havent done much or any research it may well sway you greatly into believing all that is said and also into believing that garrison was corrupt and trying to frame shaw .

but only when you have sufficiently researched will you be aware of the MANY problems with that program .

in brief they DID NOT give garrison any fair chance to air his side , he was not on the program . they used two convicted criminals torres and canclier , the only thing you can say is that they lied through their teeth . garrison later invited them to repeat their lies to a grand jury , they declined . the program used dean andrews . this is a man who ADMITTED he lied and in fact said why he lied . he was convicted of perjury , but that didnt stop NBC using him . he openly admitted (words to the affect) that he would have to have a severe memory loss . he claimed both memory failure and hallucinations lol , i guess he thought better that than to tell the truth .

walter sheriden appears in the program . this man went to new orleans and spoke to perry russo . sheriden told russo we are going to destroy garrison and his case , and he told russo you can go along with us or we will destroy you to . he was threatened , then bribed . what sheriden didnt know was that garrison had wired russo and recorded the lot . and this man sheriden is on that program which purports to SEEK THE TRUTH . at the line they say GARRISON SAYS HE SEEKS THE TRUTH , SO DO WE . lol well by the time you view the video above and read the article to follow here i feel that most intelligent , open minded and honest people will find that the opposite was NBCs intention .

fred leemans in the program said that garrison and his people said they could help him . he stated that he told them he wanted to open a club etc and that it would cost x amount of dollars , i believe from memory $2500 . leemans said that garirison and his people said they could help him out with that . that is if he went along and REMEMBERED certain things , things that would help in the case against shaw . leemans went on to say that afterwards he back away for any such agreement as he didnt want to see an innocent man in trouble .

jim phelan appears lol lol , that man deserves an article all on his own , and i will post one .

i always say that it doesnt matter where one gets their information as long as the information is accurate and true , and it doesnt matter what or who the source is as long as that source is accurate and true . but if you use a source that is biased , inaccurate , deceptive and or lying well then the information you get from that source will IF USED BY YOU only serve to damage your argument and your credibility .

now lets see if NBC severely damaged their argument and credibility .


"Shoot Him Down": NBC, the CIA and Jim Garrison
Written by William Davy

Author William Davy writes about how NBC and the CIA worked in tandem to discredit JFK assassination investigator Jim Garrison.


With the arrival of the 40th anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination, it was hardly surprising that one of the major television networks attempted to make the case for Lee Oswald's sole guilt. Despite four decades of solid research indicating a conspiracy, the American viewing public was once again treated to a one-sided, unfair and unbalanced presentation. In light of this, it might be instructive to look at how one of the other networks tackled the case for conspiracy some 37 years ago. The mystery of the assassination is still a popular subject among people of all ages. A college student might not know how to ask a girl out, but you can bet they have strong opinions on the JFK assassination based solely on the network specials that run every so often.

On June 19th, 1967 NBC aired an hour long "analysis" of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's investigation titled, The JFK Conspiracy: The Case of Jim Garrison. While unnecessary to rehash Garrison's case here, in summary Garrison's investigation focused on three individuals: A former Eastern Airlines pilot and probable CIA asset, David Ferrie; ex-FBI man and private detective Guy Banister; and Managing Director of the International Trade Mart, Clay Shaw. Garrison believed all three were connected to American intelligence and had, at a minimum, conspired to set up Oswald as a potential patsy in the JFK assassination. Barely three months into his investigation, Garrison's main suspect, the forty-nine year old David Ferrie, died apparently of natural causes. Banister had also passed away in 1964 as a result of a heart attack. On March 1st, 1967 Garrison arrested the surviving member of this trio, the CIA connected Clay Shaw. By mid-March both the Grand Jury and a three-judge panel had ordered Shaw to trial.

Garrison's case was big news and predictably the news media swung into attack mode. None was more vicious or had more resources at their disposal than NBC. For the job as lead investigative reporter, NBC assigned Walter Sheridan. Shortly after Shaw's arrest Sheridan arrived in New Orleans and began questioning witnesses �" perhaps bribing and intimidating would be a better choice of words. Sheridan questioned a former electronics expert and CIA asset Gordon Novel and immediately put him on a $500 a day retainer. (Novel had briefly consulted with Garrison's team). Sheridan then urged Novel to skip town to avoid being indicted and paid him an additional $750 while Novel was in Columbus Ohio. Attorney Dean Andrews, who received the call from a "Clay Bertrand" to represent Oswald, was promised a recording studio if he cooperated with Sheridan. Andrews was overheard bragging, "I can get the equipment here. All I have to do is make a phone call, I'll have open credit, I can pay off on any terms. Look, Bobby Sarnoff promised me those facilities. He'd better pay off, baby." Bobby Sarnoff was, of course, Robert Sarnoff, NBC president and later chairman of the board of its parent company RCA.

Garrison's main witness at the time was Perry Russo, a young insurance agent who had claimed he overheard a conspiratorial conversation between Shaw, Ferrie and Oswald at Ferrie's home. Sheridan "interviewed" Russo and seriously distorted his statements during the broadcast. As the New Orleans States-Item reported, "Russo said Sheridan, WDSU-TV reporter Richard Townley and Saturday Evening Post writer James Phelan repeatedly visited his home in attempts to persuade him to cooperate with NBC and the defense." Russo said he met with the trio with the full knowledge of the district attorney's office and reported everything that happened to Asst. DA Andrew Sciambra. Russo said, "Sheridan offered to set me up in California, protect my job and guarantee that Garrison would never get me extradited back to Louisiana" if he cooperated. He accused Townley of threatening him with public humiliation unless he changed his story and cooperated with the NBC program. The 25-year-old witness said members of the trio told him both, "NBC and the Central Intelligence Agency are out to wreck Garrison's investigation." Of course, Russo's accusations were met with denials, but as we shall see Russo's claims seem to have been accurate.

Another of Garrison's witnesses was Vernon Bundy, a heroin addict and prisoner who had testified at the preliminary hearing that he had seen Shaw and Oswald together at the Lake Pontchartrain seawall. Once Bundy had been exposed in the preliminary hearing, he was now fair game for Walter Sheridan and NBC. In their attempt to discredit Bundy, NBC aired interviews with two fellow convicts, Miguel Torres and John Cancler. Cancler, a convicted burglar and pimp, appeared first and said Bundy had told him he was going to lie to the DA's office to get out of prison. Torres, whose own record of heroin abuse, burglary, pimping, assault, and suspected murder out rivaled Cancler's, was currently serving a nine-year sentence for robbery. He said that Bundy told him he was going to make up a story about Shaw to get the DA to "cut him loose" from prison. After the airing of the NBC special, Garrison invited Messrs. Torres and Cancler to repeat their stories in front of the Grand Jury. Both pleaded the Fifth Amendment and were subsequently convicted of contempt. Another problem with Torres' story is his accusation that Bundy needed the DA to "cut him loose" from prison. In a recently released memorandum from the New Orleans DA's files, former aide William Gurvich wrote of his investigation of Bundy. Gurvich states, "Shortly after my interview with Bundy, I contacted local narcotics officers for background information on him. I also made an extensive inquiry into his criminal history." Of his heroin use Gurvich writes, "[Bundy] uses four or five capsules of heroin daily... This amount is considered sufficient for addiction, but is not an excessive amount as the more heavily addicted use as much as 20-30 capsules daily." Gurvich goes on to write "Bundy claimed he was in Parish Prison at the time because he went there voluntarily when he felt himself reverting back to the use of narcotics and feared the consequences of his addiction. Official records corroborate this." Bundy was on probation for breaking into a cigarette machine, but was not serving time. So much for Bundy needing to be "cut loose." Since NBC offered to relocate Perry Russo to California and provide him with a job if he changed his original testimony one can only imagine what incentives Sheridan offered Cancler and Torres.

Garrison's one time "aide", the aforementioned William Gurvich also assisted Sheridan having left the DA's office several weeks earlier. As Garrison noted shortly after the broadcast Gurvich didn't so much resign as "drift away about six weeks ago" and that since that time he had been in contact with Walter Sheridan. Gurvich also admittedly made off with the DA's master file. The CIA was so smitten with Gurvich that they wanted to make sure he was in touch with Shaw's lawyers. In their enthusiasm to give Shaw's lawyers all the help they could the CIA recommended:

Shaw's attorneys ought to talk to William H. GURVICH. This is an excellent suggestion. It is assumed they have done so, or plan to, but we should try to assure that they do.

One other witness Sheridan used makes for an interesting case study of Sheridan's abuse of power. Fred Leemans, the owner of a Turkish bath house in New Orleans, originally stated that Shaw had frequented his establishment using the name of Clay Bertrand. By the time Sheridan and company got to him, he went on the NBC special claiming he had been offered a $2500 bribe by one of Garrison's men in exchange for his incriminating testimony. After the NBC special had aired, Leemans came forward with the truth. In a sworn statement Leemans admitted that part of the reason he participated in the show was threatening phone calls "relative to the information that I had given Mr. Garrison." Leemans also recalled a visit from a man with a badge who stated that he was a government agent. The man supposedly told Leemans that the government was checking bar owners in the Slidell area for possible income tax violations. The man also warned him "it was not smart" to be involved in the Clay Shaw case "because a lot of people that had been involved got hurt." An anonymous caller told Leemans to change his statement and claim he had been bribed. The caller also suggested that Leemans contact Irvin Dymond, one of Shaw's attorneys. After contacting Dymond, Leemans was introduced to Walter Sheridan. Leemans claimed Dymond offered an attorney and bond in the event he was charged with giving false information to the DA's office. Leemans said his appearance on the show was taped in the office of Aaron Kohn, managing director of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, in the presence of Sheridan and Dymond.