Jim Garrison: The Beat Goes On

[James DiEugenio]

It never ends, especially down there in the New Orleans area.  But take a look at who put up the foundation money for this one.

Then look at what the author says about declassified documents of the ARRB.  Not needed for historical research.

LOL.  John Newman is up a tree.

https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/jim-garrison-the-beat-goes-on

[Ron Bulman]

Essential reading for trying to understand where research (from Garrison himself to many others) has come from to what is known today.  And how this information has been and still is repressed. 

[James DiEugenio]

Its incredible I think that the MSM is so intent of staying with this Hugh Aynesworth inspired meme that they do not want to deal with all the new info on the New Orleans angle.  

In fact that is what the writer actually says.

I really think that memo from the ARRB about Shaw's file being destroyed says it all.

After that, this writer comes along like Lt. Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun, "Nothing to see here!"

[Joe Bauer]

I always wish Jim Di's essays would be presented in their full content straight away on pertinent threads versus a link.

For many reasons readers too often avoid opening up extra content links imo.

I've done so, saying to myself I don't have the time or I just want to get through the thread without any extra effort to learn more about it's main OP theme.

However, I more often than not do go right to Jim Di's linked essays.

Because when I do I almost always find them full of valuable and well documented background information that invariably enables me to see much more of the total picture regards the original thread's premises and findings, especially those which are of a highly debatable point of view in their integrity, validity and self-proclaimed promotion as the truth.

Jim's essay here on this thread just blows away the original poster's premise that Clay Shaw was greatly and unfairly persecuted by Jim Garrison through the charges of conspiracy toward Shaw and the trial that followed and especially when the truth is that Jim Garrison was the one being persecuted to unprecedented degrees that make anything Shaw went through look like a cake walk in comparison

I went to see Oliver Stone's film "JFK" when it first came out in 1991.

There was a long ticket buying line down the block which I hadn't seen in many years in our relatively small town. The audience was a mix of people my age at the time ( 39 ) and older and younger to the twenties but no teenagers or younger age children I recall.

The audience was rapt from the very beginning of the film to the closing credits.

The film was very powerful and effecting. The kind of film that you thought about long after seeing it. 

I always felt that Stone's film JFK was like a mass therapy session that millions of American's who lived through and were traumatized by JFK's brutal slaughter finally had where they were directly presented with the true brutality, shock, emotional loss and truth unsureness they had experienced with this murder of their President but had never dealt with in a commonly shared, outside of family way.

Stone's film is still powerful. I have seen this a dozen times over the years and it still holds and in some ways even haunts me.

[Paul Brancato]

Agree - Jim’s essays are always worth reading and to the point. So may times Over the years I’ve remarked to friends how telling it was that negative press on JFK movie started months before it’s release.

i asked Mort Sahl, who I’ve gone to see twice in the last few months, what he thought of Jim Garrison, and his answer was short and definitive - he was a great American who solved the case. 

[James DiEugenio]

Thanks Paul and Joe,  here is my favorite part of the essay:

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.

 

My other favorite part if the ARRB memo saying the CIA destroyed Clay Shaw's 201 file.

Geez, wonder why?

 

 

[Ron Bulman]

I'd forgotten about Nagell having the grenade tossed at him from a speeding car in New York during this time and concluding he shouldn't testify for Garrison after all.

Ditto on the HSCA sound technicians telling Blakey they had determined there were five shots.  But Blakey decided he couldn't "sell" over four and that's what they went with.  I really don't remember hearing about four shots in the news at the time.  I.E. it being a revelation that meant there was a conspiracy.  Was I just not paying attention in 79-80 or was it smoothed over/ignored by the mass media?   

[Paul Brancato]

1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:

Thanks Paul and Joe,  here is my favorite part of the essay:

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.

 

My other favorite part if the ARRB memo saying the CIA destroyed Clay Shaw's 201 file.

Geez, wonder why?

 

 

Jim - you mention Steve Jaffe in your essay. He hasn’t posted here in a while. I asked him for more detail on Garrison sending him to France to interview an SDECE member and he said I would have to wait for his book to come out. Any idea about such a book?

i gather the Garrison papers you reference are not available. Can you share anything?

[James DiEugenio]

Ron, yes the HSCA said there were four shots and that did make the news for maybe a day or two.

Steve is working on his book right now as far as I know.

Those Garrison papers are available at the NARA.  I had a friend back then who used to send me those documents since he lived in the area.

Man, the stuff that was in Garrison's files was really something. Wallace MIlam once asked me to show him some of the material so I brought the docs to a conference.  He said, "Garrison had stuff like this?"   I tried to write about some of it in Probe, but there was material that I just could not get to.  To give you one example:

Garrison was the first guy who said Vietnam was part of the reason JFK was killed.  I never understood why or how he said that back then.  It turned out that a professor from Ohio University sent him a 25 page handwritten letter showing him why this was so.  In going through his files, you see that many people saw this as a chance to go ahead and give him the information they had.  Since he was the first guy to really investigate the case.  So not only did Nagell want to talk to him, so did DInkin.  So did Bolden.  And so for the first time, you had these leads that the WC buried, that were now coming forth and getting a hearing.

Garrison's investigation of the Clinton/Jackson incident was really something to behold.  Just amazing the stuff he turned up there.  No wonder Hoover wanted it buried.  

Or how about this one: Garrison had a job application Oswald filled out naming Ruby as a reference.

[Paul Brancato]

Did Dinkin in fact talk with Garrison?

[James DiEugenio]

I don't know for a fact.  But Garrison did have a file on that matter.

This is one of the things that is really frustrating in this field.

See, what we have of the Garrison inquiry is, at best, maybe 60 per cent of what was there.  As I have pointed out, Garrison's files were dissipated in three ways:

1. Saboteurs in his midst who walked off with them like Boxley.  (Which was made easier by Garrison putting Tom Bethell in charge of the files.  I can just see him dropping down a carton and Boxley putting it in his car.)

2. Garrison's friend Steve Bordelon had some of them in his garage and these were stolen.

3. Connick incinerated what was left behind.

 

So the considerable amount of fascinating stuff that is there stands out even more since there is so much that is not there.

[James DiEugenio]

Paul, I note you say you have talked to Mort Sahl a coupe of times recently.

I assume this is his one man show up in northern California where you happen to live?

Did you have a cup of coffee with him after? 

[Paul Brancato]

Jim - yes, in Mill Valley where he speaks for an hour once a week health permitting. He’s 91 and very unsteady on his feet. It might be possible to sit with him, but he has a handler or friend that controls access after his show, and he is hard of hearing so conversation is difficult. I think my meeting lasted about 2 minutes. When he talks he rambles, touches on many things, occasionally JFK. He takes questions after he talks. I asked him if he had ever met DeGaulle, figuring he might go from there. His answer was interesting. He said he met him once, and that JFK didn’t like DeGaulle because he was in some ways like him. 

[Andrew Prutsok]

Great article. If you don’t mind a suggestion from an aging editor, I would abandon the justified text at Kennedysandking in favor of ragged right. Justification causes type to break oddly, creating those big spaces between words which emerge not infrequently in this piece. Makes reading more difficult, particularly on a small screen like a phone, where about 70 percent of online content is consumed. 

Edited September 15, 2018 by Andrew Prutsok

[James DiEugenio]

Thanks Andrew, will forward to web master.