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Garrison explained why many others failed
to see this enormous conspiracy in his book Heritage Of
Stone that he wrote less than a year after the Clay Shaw
trial (and in which he does not mention even Shaw). Here
he sees Americans, inhabiting the same country but living
in two different realms of consciousness. The first one
is naive and innocent, where everyone is duped by "the glitter
of the official lie." In this world, he explains: "An individual
cannot cope with the unseen forces of the superstate" because
" His perception is limited by his assumption that things
are as they appear to be and by his belief that he is living
in a world in which evil is easily recognized". So, believing
what they see, hear and read corresponds to reality, these
Americans failed to see that " an intricate contrivance
of men for the clandestine production of illusion had become
... a manipulator of America." Or that they were invisible,
noting: "The main reason for the inability of the American
people and the press to recognize the conspiracy to kill
President Kennedy was the fact that its operations all occurred
in another dimension, a dimension which is generally not
known to exist in our nation".
This second dimension is evil as well
as manipulative. In it an "invisible government tat begins
and ends with deception" appropriates power to itself through
assassinations and conceals from the populace "government
force that is as criminal as the Germany of Hitler or the
Russia of Stalin." This elite, supported by the "military-industrial
complex" was the hidden sponsor of the Viet Nam War and
nuclear arms race. To assure its invisibility, this "power
elite" employs technicians capable of inflicting on its
enemies "heart attacks, falls, shootings by 'deranged men'
and dozens of other kinds of misadventures" ( which presumably
explains the sort of problems visited on his surprise witness
at the trial, Charles Spiesel). It engages in "thought control"
over the media and, in the case of those who escape this
"concentration camp of the mind," it stage-manages in the
media "massive discreditation." This accounts for why "Anyone
seeking to inquire into the meaning of the assassination
found himself in an enchanted maze which steadily led him
away from reality."
Garrison, having broken out of this
enchanted maze and penetrated deep into the other dimension,
portrays himself as battling to wrest from the invisible
elite the dark secrets that perpetuate its power. His weapon
in this titanic struggle is the missing evidence that he,
but not others in the naive realm, can see and interpret.
With such an rarefied view of reality,
Garrison did not need to modify his stance when mid way
through his 20 year quest much of the evidence he claimed
had been suppressed emerged. In 1976, occasioned by concern
over the Watergate revelations of government cover-ups,
the House of Representatives' Select Committee on Assassination,
conducted it own investigation. Unlike the Warren Commission's
more limited effort, the Select Committee spent three-year
on its investigation, which delved into some of the deepest
recesses of the CIA, FBI and other government agencies.
It also addressed the issues raised by Garrison and other
critics of the Warren Report (including myself) by appointing
various panels of independent experts to analyze crucial
evidence that had been missing from the Warren Commission's
investigation. Most notably, it cleared up the mystery surrounding
the autopsy results by empanelling nine leading forensic
pathologists, including Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, a well-respected
critic of the Warren Report, to examine the complete set
of the X-rays and color photographs taken of the President's
body at the time of the autopsy as well as the original
Zapruder film of the actual assassination. These experts,
most of whom worked for local authorities, had between them
experience in performing over 100,000 autopsies.
The panel first established the authenticity
of these autopsy photographs by having forensic dentists
compare them with Kennedy's pre-mortem dental records and
other medical X-rays. Satisfied they had not been tampered
with, it then proceeded to resolve discrepancies proceeding
from the original autopsy by re-questioning most of the
medical personnel involved both in the emergency attempt
to prolong the President's life at Parkland Hospital in
Dallas and the autopsy performed at the Naval Hospital in
Bethesda, Maryland. They also re-examined the medical of
Governor John B. Connally of Texas, who had been seated
in front of him, and also wounded in the fussilade.
The panel then examined the autopsy
X-Rays and photographs, which provide the best evidence
of the path of a bullet because as the missile advances
through the body it does progressively more damage. It was
thus able to determine that one shot hit the President in
the back of his shoulder-- two inches lower than where the
Warren Commission's diagram placed it-- and that a second
bullet had entered the rear of the President's head near
the cowlick area and exited from the right front. These
doctors took into account a frame-by-frame analysis of the
Zapruder film that showed the President's head moved backwards
at the time of impact, not forward as might be expected,
but, because of possible neurological reactions to such
a wound, they decided that there was not a relationship
between the direction that the head moves and the direction
from which the bullet struck the head. So, although they
disagreed as to the precise sequence of the shots that hit
President Kennedy and Governor Connally, they unanimously
concluded, as did the Warren Commission, that all the discernible
wounds suffered by President Kennedy had been caused by
shots fired from above and behind him.
Moreover, another panel of firearms
experts, ballistically matched the identifiable fragments
of the bullets found in the car to the rifle found at the
Texas Book Depository. And a third panel, using an exotic
state-of-the-art technique called neutron particle analysis,
in which even the most minute traces of metals found in
a bullet can be analyzed to an accuracy of one-billionth
of a gram by bombarding them with neutrons in a nuclear
reactor, concluded that the composition of all traces from
the bullet and fragments found at the murder scene exactly
matched that of the unfired bullet found in the chamber
of the rifle in the Texas Book Depository, purchased earlier
that year by Lee Harvey Oswald.
It is possible that someone else may
have fired Oswald's rifle that day or fired another rifle
and missed entirely (as the House Select Committee itself
suggested in its final Report), but no mystery remained
about the source of the fatal gun fire. According to this
no-longer missing evidence, President and Governor Connally
were both hit from above and behind with bullets fired the
rifle and lot of ammunition found in the Texas Book Depository.
For over a decade, in court and media
opportunities, Garrison had proclaimed that this same autopsy
evidence, if only it could be examined, would prove definitively
that Kennedy was riddled with bullets in a crossfire from
different rifles and an automatoc pistol located in front,
below and below him. When it proved him wrong, Garrison
diverted to other evidence that was still missing. For in
his mode of inquiry, whatever had been revealed by the government
was ipso facto suspect. What remained missing, on the other
hand, provided him with a blank slate for sketching out
the conspiracy he had envisioned without fear of refutation.
So he deftly switched his focus to the subject of the missing
President's brain, which had been returned by the National
Archives in 1965 to his brother Attorney General Robert
F. Kennedy, and presumably then buried in the President's
grave. He wrote in his new book, appropriately called, On
The Trail Of The Assassins, "the brain, which is still missing
... might show from what the directions the head shots came"
(By pluralizing "direction" and "shot" he slipped back in
those conspirators who had been rendered non-existent by
the examination of the X-rays and autopsy pictures). The
ghoulish idea the President's brain was missing from the
National Archives-- as if that is the proper repository
for Presidential remains-- could again to intensify the
torment over government secrecy.
In addition, he also continued to hammer
away at the fact that Warren Commission documents were still
secreted in the National Archives. He recited their cryptic
titles and anguished over "the order to conceal assassination
evidence for 75 years by the federal government." Actually,
there was no such order. Many investigative files are withheld
by law for 75 year-- a number chosen arbitrarily to exceed
the lifespan of persons likely to be mentioned in government
reports, and thereby protect their privacy-- but in the
case of the Warren Commission material, President Johnson
in 1966 waived this requisite and ordered all documents
opened to the public except those containing the names of
confidential informers, information damaging to innocent
parties and information about agencies operating procedures.
By 1988, some 60,000 pages had been released. And the documents
that still remain classified under these guidelines were
not sinister secrets kept from the Warren Commission but
material that had been voluntarily turned over to it by
the CIA, FBI, State Department and other agencies.
None of his legerdemain, or his rantings
about the demonology of the second dimension, had a deleterious
effect on his political career. After his debacle in the
Shaw trial, where he denounced by the local press as " a
man without principle who would pervert the legal process
to his own ends," and after it had been disclosed that he
had been discharged from the Army for psychiatric reasons,
he still easily won re-election as District Attorney in
1969 with 53 per cent of the vote. Denied a second shot
at Clay Shaw, he abandoned the prosecutorial route, and
quietly dropped the dozen or so collateral indictments against
critical journalist, defecting employees and recalcitrant
witnesses-- including the perjury case against the jivester,
Dean Andrews. So, in the end, no one ever went to prison
because of his conspiracy case. He concentrated instead
on television talk-shows and media interviews.
By the end of his third term as district
attorney in 1973, he found himself in the dock as a defendant,
being tried on federal charges of accepting bribes and conspiring
to protect illegal pinball gambling. Although he won an
acquittal for himself, acting as his own attorney, he lost
his subsequent bid for re-election that year-- no doubt
because he had been himself indicted as a conspirator. Returning
to private life, he wrote a fast-paced assassination thriller,
the Star Spangled Contract, which demonstrated, as might
be expected his talent for fictionizing. Retaining his flamboyant
flair for politics, he successfuly campaigned in 1978 for
a seat on Louisiana's Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. While
on the court, he tried his hand at film acting, playing
a New Orleans judge in "The Big Easy." By 1988, for most
of the world outside Orleans Parish, Garrison had become
a forgotten man. His prosecution of Clay Shaw was seen even
by his former staff members as a tragic mistake that ruined
the life of an innocent man. His repeated media fabrications
--such as transmuting a pebble in a photograph to a missing
bullet President Johnson was hiding-- had destroyed his
credibility even among talk-show hosts. Even assassination
buffs found that his demagogic obsession with missing rather
than existent evidence had made him a menace to any serious
inquiry into the facts surrounding the assassination.
His apocalyptic vision of the secret
elite operating from the second dimension might have faded
into obscurity if was not for Oliver Stone, who, after reading
his "On The Trail Of The Assassin," resonated with its potential.
He explained in the best Hollywood pitch style to Robert
Sam Anson in Esquire: "It reads like a Dashiell Hammett
whodunit. It starts out as a bit of a seedy crime with small
traces, and then the gumshoe district attorney follows the
trail, and the trail widens and widens, and before you know
it, it's no longer a small-town affair. That seemed to me
the kernel of a very powerful movie." So he paid Garrison
$250,000 for the rights to the book-- and hired him as a
guide to the other dimension, which would be revealed in
the movie, JFK. He also cast Garrison the actor as Chief
Justice Earl Warren, so he could have the last laugh on
the Warren Commission.
So one full generation after the trial
of Clay Shaw, Garrison arose from the ashes, phoenix-like,
in Hollywood. He was now reunited with his former star witness
Perry Raymond Russo, who he had twenty-one years earlier
hypnotized into recalling the assassination conspiracy.
This time around, they were both serving as advisors (and
bit actors)to Stone's movie, which also had spliced into
it for an air of pseudo-documentary reality, the Zapruder
film of the bloody event. In his final incarnation, Garrison
achieved in fiction what he failed to do in fact: he obtained
the missing evidence and revealed the existence of the secret
elite that had assassinated Kennedy, pulled a coup' d'etat,
and prolonged American's involvement in the war in Vietnam.
Through the medium of this film, Garrison may yet incorporate
in the popular imagination, at least among those in the
audience confused by Stone's blurring of fact and fiction,
all the claims, and outright delusions, that he had derivered
from non-existent evidence, hypnosis and encounters with
the forces from the second dimension.
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