Episode 26: JFK - The Jim Garrison Hit Piece & His Rebuttal

Hypnosis? Jailbirds? Truth serum? Lie detector tests? Psychopathic personalities? Blackmail photos? Bribes? 😬

On June 19, 1967, NBC aired a special titled "The JFK Conspiracy: The Case of Jim Garrison." This is portrayed in Oliver Stone's JFK when Jim Garrison's character says something like, "At least the people watching Laugh In  tonight won't hate me." As hit pieces go, it's a doozy. Garrison in turn received about 25 minutes to go on NBC and offer his rebuttal.

Links:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0247436/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8EfI4XoqxU&t=1s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Clay_Shaw

https://www.jfk-online.com/bundylies.html

https://www.edwardjayepstein.com/diary/garrison.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hqo2c_SxQag

Need more? You can visit the website at: https://consaracytheories.com/ or my own site at: https://saracausey.com/. Don't forget to check out the blog at: https://consaracytheories.com/blog. 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will be talking about what I refer to as NBC hit piece on Jim Garrison and then his subsequent rebuttal. As you can probably imagine, NBCs hit piece goes on for about 60 minutes, whereas Garrison only gets about 25 minutes to respond on television about the pretty damning and awful things that are said about him in that hour long special. If you have not already seen these, I would encourage you to watch them for yourself and formulate your own opinions. Download this episode, bookmark it, come back to it after you've had the chance to watch these items for yourself and to draw your own conclusions. Otherwise, spoilers lie ahead. I'm going to tell you what happens in these documentaries, as well as what I think my own personal opinions. So Let's saddle up and take this ride. A little bit of backstory here. On June 19, 1967 NBC aired a special titled the JFK conspiracy, the case of Jim Garrison. And if you've seen Oliver Stone's film JFK, then you may remember the scene in which garrison and his wife are watching television, and this special comes on and he makes some comment like, at least the people watching laugh in tonight won't hate me. It's only 20 million people that are seeing this smear campaign. No big deal, in my opinion, as hit pieces go. It is a real doozy. I mean, it is. I tried to imagine somebody in 1967 who doesn't know really anything about Jim Garrison. We're looking at this in hindsight, Garrison released several books. He was interviewed several times. Of course, we had Oliver Stone's film JFK, that's largely about Jim Garrison. In the absence of all of that, if it's 1967 and you're watching this report on national television, a major network has taken the time to develop an hour long special about what a piece of shit you are. I don't know how anybody would have watched this show and thought I'm still sympathetic to garrison. I mean, it is really and truly a doozy. They get into hypnosis, interviewing jailbirds, the use of truth serum, lie detector tests, psychopathic personalities, blackmail photos, bribes. It truly makes Jim Garrison and anybody affiliated with him, even just random people in his office, look like hucksters, con artists, crazies. I mean, that's really the conclusion that you come to after watching this documentary or this special, that Garrison had to be a con artist, a huckster, or he was just nuts, one or the other. But the one thing you're not going to come away with is, I think this guy is an honest dude who's really trying to make a difference in terms of being, in my opinion, a propaganda piece to discredit him and his office. It hits the nail on the head pretty damn well. A little bit more backstory before we get into this NBC special. So the NBC special airs on June 19 of 1967 the trial of Clay Shaw is also a sort of backdrop to this on March, 1 of 1967 was when Jim Garrison arrested and charged Clay Shaw as part of a conspiracy to pop pop Kennedy, along with Oswald and David Ferrie. The trial doesn't actually happen until 1969 so we're still in this, what I would consider to be a hit piece. We're ahead of the actual trial of Clay Shaw, but the initial components of Shaw having been arrested and this trial, you know, potentially gaining some momentum in the public eye that has already happened. I would say one central thesis of this NBC special is, even if you're skeptical of the Warren Commission Report, even if you're not convinced that Oswald acted alone, that still doesn't give you a reason to believe Jim Garrison, as theses around the JFK, pop, pop, go. That's not terrible. It's really not. When I was reading the introduction for Jim Mars's book Crossfire, one of the things that really stuck out to me is he says, don't trust this book. Don't trust any one author, any one book in. Anyone witness, you're going to have to do your own research and judge for yourself. And I think that is so spot on. Whether somebody is a fan of Jim Garrison or they're not, the onus is on you to make up your own mind, to do your own reading, your own watching, and decide for yourself what you think I would say that as well about people who expect Oliver Stone's film JFK to be a textbook history lesson that's simply put to film. I know this is going to sound really mean of me, but I kind of can't help it in my mind, if you are expecting any Hollywood movie to have the accuracy of a textbook or some elaborately researched historical tome, then you're the idiot, not the filmmaker. There should be no such presumption that a Hollywood film Hollywood is notorious for taking liberties. There should be no expectation, especially at this point in time, that Hollywood movies, Hollywood television shows, are going to give you the straight scoop. For that matter, I think you have to question what even is textbook accuracy. Anyway, I've been reading Russ Baker's book, family of secrets, which I'll get into in a different episode. That's a whole ball of wax all its own. Really, it may have to be more than one episode, because he gets into some incredibly interesting and disturbing topics in that book, one of which is the control of the Charlie India alpha over the textbook system. He talks about how Allen Dulles was a board member or had some prominent role in the Scholastic Book Company. So even when we go there, it's like the idea of, there's one book or there's one magazine article, there's one journal article, there's one movie that's going to encapsulate the whole truth. I think that's incredibly naive and foolish. In my mind. Does Jim Garrison get everything right point by point in his investigation or in his trial of clay? Shaw, no, I don't think that's the case. I don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think that in some respects, he probably was very, very close to the truth. He probably did interview witnesses that were giving him the straight scoop. Others may have been completely incredulous. Some of his theories may not have rang true. I think I put Jim Garrison, and this is just strictly my personal opinion, and that's all that it is. I'm not trying to sit here and tell you this is historical fact or any such thing. I'm just telling you my personal opinion. I think that Jim Garrison was trying. I put Kennedy himself in that same category too. I think he was trying. I think he was trying to play the hand he was dealt. And this is one of the reasons why I've been passionate out in the media about saying I feel like these criticisms of Kennedy as a person, as well as his presidential legacy, always lead to the same place every flipping time, they lead to the same destination, which is, it doesn't really matter that he was pop popped, because we didn't lose that much on November 22 of 1963 he wasn't anything special. You guys have mythologized him, and you've built him up to be something really incredible, and he just wasn't. So we didn't lose that much. You need to let it go. It All. All roads lead to Rome. In that regard,

for me, I think Jim Garrison was trying to do something. I think he went down a rabbit hole a little bit like Maury Terry in the ultimate evil he got latched on to a story. He got latched on to an idea, and he wanted to try to pursue it and figure out exactly how deep does this rabbit hole go. I don't think that everything Jim Garrison did or said is incorrect. Likewise, I don't think everything that he said or did is correct, either it's in the eye of the beholder, and that's one of the reasons why I would really encourage you to take a look at this information for yourself. But this is part of the thesis of NBC is that even if you doubt the Warren Commission, even if you doubt the stories about Lee Harvey Oswald, it doesn't mean you automatically have to believe Jim Garrison. I think that also lends credibility, seeming credibility, to this hit piece, because it makes all the sense in the world. Think about it. Think about what I just said as the thesis goes. That's not a bad one. Hey, even if you doubt that the Warren Commission report is 100% solid, even if you doubt that Oswald acted alone from the Book Depository window, it doesn't mean that Jim Garrison is right. That makes perfect sense. Sense. So they're giving you this idea and this concession up front, because at the very beginning of this hit piece, the man comes on and says a lot of Americans have doubt about the Warren Commission Report. They're conceding this point early on, it reminds me, in corporate America of when employees have a strike, or they have a walkout, or they threaten to do those things, and so the company will make some early concessions to them. One of the things that we see with strikes and walkouts in corporate America is that even if the company caves to the demand of the employees, they almost always have layoffs afterwards. I mean, you're going to have to pay the piper because we live in crony capitalism. So I think it's rather smart of NBC, the way that they set the stage here. Many Americans don't believe that the Warren Commission Report got it completely correct. But let's talk about Jim Garrison. That's a smart way to go about your propagandizing. Another point that they make is that they have no right to prejudge Jim Garrison's case. This is another concession, I think, because they're creating this mise en scene of the trial hasn't happened yet. A jury of peers hasn't rendered a verdict about Clay Shaw, so we can't really prejudge it now, we're going to 100% prejudge it in this documentary. We're just going to simply tell you, we're going to pay lip service to the idea that we're not prejudging it. That's also a slick propaganda move, if you ask me, two people who also get ragged on pretty good in this documentary are Perry Russo and Vernon Bundy were two of the witnesses that Jim Garrison uses in front of the grand jury to get an indictment for Clay Shaw, and they interview this man named John cansler, who's supposedly aka John the Baptist that is himself a prisoner and states his former occupation as being that of a burglar. So it is a little bit funny and ironic that one of their criticisms of Jim Garrison is that he's relying on jailbirds, and he makes this comment like, well, unfortunately, there weren't a lot of bank presidents that were involved in this conspiracy. Like, we have to use who was there and who has knowledge of it. So it's funny that they rag on Jim Garrison for using jailbirds, but then they do the same thing. So this John the Baptist guy claims that he knew Vernon Bundy, and that Vernon allegedly said to him that he was going to lie in order to gain favor with garrison. You can find a similar type of article on JFK online.com written by Dave rietzes, rightsies writes us. I still don't know how to pronounce this guy's name, sorry. Titled Vernon Bundy Garrison witness, and in this article, he writes several days into clay Shaw's March 1967 preliminary hearing, Vernon William Bundy, a convicted felon and longtime heroin addict residing in Parrish prison, came forward with a story about having witnessed a public meeting between Clay Shaw and Lee Oswald in 1963 Jim Garrison denied that the witness had received any special treatment from the DAs office in exchange for his testimony, Garrison claimed that Bundys background was of no importance. Bundy claimed garrison was in prison voluntarily, having turned himself in for narcotics treatment on March 4, 1967 Bundy stated the exact same thing under oath at Shaw's hearing. Vernon Bundy and Jim Garrison were lying. Vernon Bundy did not turn himself in voluntarily on March 4, 1967 Vernon Bundy was arrested on March 4, 1967 by the New Orleans Police Department and charged with violating parole. Bundy had pleaded guilty to theft charges on March, excuse me, on May 25 1966 his probation is then revoked and he sentenced to a year in prison. I'll continue to read. The question is, Garrison said in a filmed interview with NBC, is he telling the truth or not? There are many attorneys who are brilliant liars, and there are dope addicts who have never learned to lie, and that's the case here. The question is, was he telling the truth? The answer is, obviously, I'll butt in and say that was the interview that was played in this NBC documentary as well. I'll continue to read Jim Garrison was lying in March. Garrison had assigned James kruby. I hope I'm saying that right. I might be mispronouncing that too to administer a polygraph examination to Bundy, and the analysis was that Bundy was lying. The polygraph operator, Edward O'Donnell, was present when kruby reported this to Garrison, and Assistant DA Charles Ward, Ward assured kreby, or kruby that Bundy would not be used as a witness. But Garrison overruled him. I don't care if he is lying or not. Garrison told the men we are going to use him. I'll never forget those words O'Donnell says in the 2000 History Channel documentary false witness in 1971 Jim Garrison was asked under oath by Judge Herbert kristenberry if he had said this, Garrison refused to answer in his famous 1967 Playboy inner. You Garrison denied that either Vernon Bundy or star witness, Perry Raymond Russo had failed a polygraph test. Garrison even denied under oath that Russo had failed such a test, when actually he had failed two end quote. So there you go. Point counterpoint. We have these allegations that Garrison knew these witnesses were bogus, knew they were lying, but used them anyway. In the documentary that was made by John Barbour the JFK pop, pop the garrison tapes in the first part, not in the second part, he talks to Perry Russo, and in that documentary, Russo said that ferry Oswald, Shaw and a few Cubans had talked about murdering Kennedy. Russo says that Shaw had been introduced to him as Clay Bertrand. Russo claims that ferry Shaw, Oswald and banister were all Charlie India alpha, and that allegedly came from David Ferry's own mouth. Supposedly, that's something that David Ferrie had told Carrie Russo directly. They also, in that documentary, in John Barbour's documentary address, NBC hit piece that makes Garrison look like either a liar or a buffoon, because, as Garrison himself says in that Garrison tape interview with John Barbour, this is the playbook. You either get discredited, removed or killed. Well, they clearly are doing a great job of discrediting Jim Garrison in that hit piece. According to this documentary that John Barbour made,

Perry Russo says that Walter Sheridan, who is part of this NBC documentary, tells Perry Russo that he'll go down with Garrison unless he disavows his testimony. But Garrison has him wired for sound and knows what Russo has been offered. So the thesis in that documentary is that the mainstream media wanted to destroy Jim Garrison, and so whatever they had to do, whoever they had to interview, whoever they had to bribe, whoever they had to steamroll to get it done. They were going to do it. Those are their allegations, not mine. I'm just reporting to you what's been said. Another man named Miguel Torres, who has also been in jail for burglary, tells a similar story about Vernon Bundy. According to Torres, Vernon Bundy allegedly tells him that he's going to say whatever he needs to. He's going to testify the way that Garrison wants him to at this Clay Shaw trial, because he doesn't want to have his probation revoked. It's like you can either go along to get along. You can say what we want you to say, and you can be out on probation and be out of jail. Or if you don't go along with us, then your probation is going to be revoked and you'll be in jail. We're also told that Garrison knew Bundy was lying, that Bundy had allegedly undergone a polygraph test and failed it, and other people in Garrison's office told Garrison that Bundy was lying and could not pass a polygraph test, but Garrison wanted to use him anyway. They try to poke holes in what Perry Russo has said about this alleged party where you had like Clay Shaw, David Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald, and they're all talking about, like getting the president. A reporter also tells a disturbing story about Russo being put into some sort of hypnotic state and not telling the same story when he's in the hypnotic state as he told when he was out of the hypnotic state. You know, I did that episode about that documentary Satan wants you and the book Michelle remembers I'm always like, I mean, you can't see me right now, but I'm sort of, I'm holding my arm up as if I'm repelling something away from me. I always keep that kind of stuff at arm's length when we're talking about, well, this happened under hypnosis. It only. The only person who witnessed this was my psychiatrist. There are all kinds of books like that, where people will say they were in a satanic cult, or they witnessed something, they had flashbacks to a former life, whatever the situation may be, whether it's something paranormal or it isn't. I keep that at arm's length, because there's just no way for us to authenticate it. If somebody goes into a hypnotic trance and they say that they remember a life that they had 1000 years ago. Well, there's no way for you and I to know if that's true or not. We would just be expected to take their word for it. Allegedly, Russo is shown a picture of Clay Shaw, and asked, Is this clay Bertrand? And he says, No. Then he also tells the story of Lee Oswald having a beard like they took some composite sketches, and according to this reporter, they had to draw like, 15 or 20 different styles of beard on this Oswald composite before Russo said, Yes, that's it. That's the guy. We also. Turn again, allegedly, supposedly, according to this reporter on this NBC documentary, that Russo didn't remember this party and the cast of characters at the party until he was put into a hypnotic trance, and then again, allegedly, the psychiatrist begins to ask him a series of leading questions. Now, see, for me, this is another reason why I keep those kinds of stories at arm's length. It's not only that you and I were not there. We can't verify what happened, but it's like you don't know what the psychologist or the psychiatrist or the hypnotist leading this session was saying to the person while they were in this altered state of consciousness, and if you're leading the witness, so to speak, then you're tainting the pool. It's not really a valid memory at that point, Garrison's rebuttal to the BBC is that they were engaged in the use of things like hypnotism and truth serum because they wanted to be absolutely sure that their witnesses were telling the truth for something this big. If you are going to accuse a person of witnessing a plot against the president or being involved in the murder of the President of the United States, you had better be damn sure that your witnesses are telling the truth. That's Garrison's rebuttal in his interview with the BBC that we are watching in this NBC documentary. NBC interviews this expert, I believe they say he's both a lawyer and a psychiatrist, which seems to be an intriguing line of work there. And he says that using drugs like sodium pentathol and putting a subject into like an altered hypnotic state is not always the most reliable thing to do, because the patient may not be able to distinguish fact from fantasy when they're in that state and then they're using those drugs again. You know what I would say as a thesis goes, that's not a bad one. That's not the most terrible argument in the world. If you pump somebody full of a drug, even though it's supposed to be a truth serum and then put them in an altered state of consciousness. How trustworthy is the testimony that's coming out of them? A point to ponder for sure. This doctor also says that he feels, based on the transcripts between the psychiatrist and Russo, that the psychiatrist is asking leading questions and he's not doing enough to flush out. Is Russo having legitimate memories, or is this just a fantasy in his mind? This reporter, who's being interviewed also tells a story that when members of Garrison's office are confronted about this weird hypnotic state that happened, and the things that Russo said, supposedly, again, really want to highlight these words, like allegedly, and supposedly, one of the members of Garrison's office burns his notes. This is another thing that we see in the JFK pop, pop, you know, the autopsy notes that just mysteriously get burned were told that they were burned because they had the President's blood on them, and they didn't need to become an object of morbid curiosity. But it's like, why on earth would you burn autopsy notes for one of the most important autopsies in American history? That is super suspicious. So if this is true, and I'm not saying it is, but if it's true, that somebody in Garrison's office started burning notes as it related to Perry Russo and his hypnotized state. That's freaking weird. We're also told that Russo submitted to a polygraph test and his answers were found to be deceptive, and then his reaction we're not told what his reaction was. We're just told that the polygraph administrator said that whenever Russo was told about the results of the polygraph test, whatever he did in reaction was considered to be the signs of a psychopathic personality. There's another witness they talked to, or somebody that knew, not a witness to the party, I don't think, but somebody that supposedly knew Russo. This starts to get complicated after a while, as does everything related to the JFK, pop, pop, this man named lefty Peterson that claims the party would have taken place in September. He tells the story of like a two lane football game. So of course, in this NBC documentary, as well, they should, they're trying to figure out exactly when this would have been based on the location and the football schedule, when would this actually have taken place? Supposedly, they interview Ruth Payne, who comes up frequently in these discussions about Oswald. And I intend to talk about a documentary that was made called the pop pop and Mrs. Payne, which is pretty darn interesting. I mean, I'm not going to get into that here, but suffice it to say, they go and talk to Ruth Payne. They also talked to this woman, Jesse Garner who I think was like a landlady of Oswald's at some point. And the question is, did Oswald look like a beatnik at this point in time? In order for him to. Look like the picture that Russo identified with this weird, scraggly beatnik beard. Would that have even been possible? Of course, Ruth Payne says, Yes, I do remember that day. I remember September 20.

I can't even remember what I had for breakfast last week, but she suddenly has a lot of clarity. So instead of saying something like, I don't ever remember Oswald having a beatnik beard, ever, let alone on some specific date? No she can allegedly remember this specific date and inform us that Oswald was a neat dresser and he did not have a beatnik beard. So now, because of Garner and Payne, we have two witnesses who say that there's no way that Oswald was living with David ferry on this the 20th of September, as well as he did not have this shaggy beatnik beard. So when they ask this lefty guy about going to David Ferry's apartment, and the roommate answers the door, he says that the roommate is two or three inches taller than he is, meaning lefty easily. They ask lefty, how tall are you? And he says, five nine. And then the NBC Narrator comes back on and says, Lee Harvey Oswald was also exactly five nine. And we hear this story that the roommate was had like, he had, like, dirty blonde hair and this shaggy beard, and was just dirty in general. Quote, like a Beatnik. So Ruth Payne comes back on, and she's like, No, Lee was always neat. I'm not aware that he ever had a beard. I think Marina would have told me if he ever did. I think that Perry Russo must have seen somebody else and not Lee Oswald. Now this opens up a whole other can of worms, especially within JFK, pop, pop research, because there are people who believe there had to have been more than one Oswald. This is something else that we see in the film executive action. I mean, it's portrayed very clearly that a decoy Oswald gets hired in order to go around to make scenes to be memorable, to smart off at the car dealership, to shoot another man's target at the Boomstick range, to make loud comments, to get arrested out in the street over the fair play for Cuba literature. I mean, it's possible that there was more than one Oswald. It just depends on what flavor of conspiracy theory that you believe in, if you believe all of this was coordinated for months in advance, maybe even longer than that, and there needed to be more than one Oswald to show up at these different places and create a smoke screen. Maybe there was maybe Perry Brust did see somebody who was dirty blonde with a shaggy beard and a generally unkempt appearance that told him that he was Lee Harvey Oswald. That's possible, and maybe it wasn't the actual Lee Harvey Oswald. Another witness is interviewed to say that there was a man named James Llewellyn who, from time to time, was over at David Ferris place. Might could have been considered his roommate here and there that would have more closely matched the description. That would have had the dirty blonde hair and a shaggy beard. In fact, they show a picture of this man with kind of a shaggy looking beard, and then they put it side by side with the composite of Oswald with a kind of a scraggly looking beard drawn on it. And it's like, yeah, it could have just been mistaken identity. Maybe it was this James Llewellyn guy, and it didn't have anything to do with Oswald at all. They interview lefty again because Clay Shaw has a striking appearance. I remember when I saw Oliver Stone's film JFK for the first time and I saw the weird hairdo that they gave Tommy Lee Jones. I was like, that cannot be real. And then I looked at pictures of the real Clay Shaw, and I was like, well, I'll be damned. Of course, it was even worse with David ferry, because you see Joe Pesci in this terrible wig with the shoe polish eyebrows, and you're like, No, no, seriously, guys, that cannot be Oh shit, it was. So they go back to lefty, and they're like, was there anybody older there? Could there have been a man like 40s or 50s at this party, and lefty says no. He's then asked, was there anybody named clay there? No. You ever heard of anybody named Bertrand? No. Have you seen pictures of Clay Shaw, yes. Was that Clay Shaw, there that night, at that party? No. We also see an interview with Clay Shaw himself, where he's asked if he was ever clay Bertrand. He says, No, do. Were you ever involved with David ferry, no. Were you ever involved with Lee Harvey Oswald, no. Then we cut back to the thesis that garrison is going to prove that Clay Shaw was clay Bertrand. We then get into the story that is depicted in Oliver Stone's film about how this man, Clay Bertrand, had supposedly called the attorney Dean Andrews, who's played really, really well by John Candy in the film. This is another example where you think something is hyperbolic, and then you see an interview with the real Dean. And you're like, holy smokes. He really didn't wear sunglasses all the time. He really did have that weird Daddy O kind of language. It's crazy. So Dean says that somebody named clay Bertrand had called him about providing a defense for Lee Harvey Oswald, but he denies that Clay Shaw was the man named Bertrand that called him. Says that he just closed his eyes and listened to clay Shaw's voice and knew that it wasn't the same man. NBC further says that there's a man named Clem Bertrand who does exist. It's not Clay Shaw. It's a separate man, and that he's a homosexual man who lives in Louisiana, and he's using this alias Clem Bertrand, to help protect his safety and his identity. And now we see Walter Sheridan, who was mentioned in that John Barbour documentary I talked about earlier. We see Walter Sheridan pop up and say, Oh, Perry Russo regrets that he ever got involved in this, but he's scared that if he were to back out, if he tried to recant his testimony, that Garrison would indict him for perjury. He wishes he had never gotten involved in any of this. Garrison is interviewed as saying that Oswald was not pro Castro the whole fair play for Cuba thing was just an act. It was just a ruse. There was some kind of plot, some kind of machinery that existed in 1963 and at some point it gets turned against President Kennedy. This is another theory we hear from time to time within the JFK, pop, pop research community, that initially there was a plot against Castro, and at some point the target of this plot becomes Kennedy, rather than Castro. We then go into a somewhat elaborate and weird story about a phone book listing like supposedly Clay Shaw and Oswald both had this same phone number in their possession that belonged to Jack Ruby. Now, when you see a photograph of this passage from Oswald's notebook or address book, whatever it was, it does appear to me to to not be a PO. Now, everybody's handwriting is different. I used to have excellent penmanship over the years as I've had to just type more and actually hand write less. My handwriting is fairly terrible. It's not as bad as a doctor's handwriting, but it's it's fairly not good. And I used to be able to do calligraphy. I beautiful penmanship, but I do not anymore. So I acknowledge everybody's penmanship is different to me, as someone who speaks some Russian, this very clearly looks to be two letter D's, D, D. Now you wouldn't know that, if you don't read Cyrillic, you would automatically know that, but it does, to me, appear to be more like D, d1, 9106, as opposed to P, o1, 9106, according to Garrison, it is a PO according to the people that are interviewed by NBC for this documentary, they say that it is a Russian DD, I'm inclined to agree with it. To me, it looks like two Cyrillic DS, the analogous listing that's in one of clay Shaw's address books is for a man named Lee Odom with a PO Box, 19106 so I think that's where garrison is trying to get the PO to come from, because Shaw has PO Box 19106

in Oswald's notes this DD, 19106

I think that's where he's trying to get the PO to come from. And who knows, maybe it was a code for this exact thing. I'm not saying that that's not the case. What I am saying is that to me, it looks like DD as opposed to PO. A man who has named Odom from somewhere in Texas had allegedly called Garrison's office to say that he had had some business dealings with Shaw and that he was in no way connected to the Charlie India alpha, like he had rented a post office box. It was just for business purposes, and everything was completely innocent. They also trot out a cryptologist to say, like, I don't, I don't believe that this is some kind of hidden code. And one of the things that I think is so funny about this is the reporter that's talking to this cryptologist, who seems to me like he's a bit nervous. The reporter says, Well, if you have the answer already in mind, then you can always work backwards and invent a code to fit the answer, and the guy just kind of chuckles nervously. And I thought, yeah, and that's exactly the same thing that happened with the Warren Commission. You already have the answer that you want Lee Harvey Oswald to be a lone pop, pop or nut bag. So now we just have to go back and make sure all of the evidence fits that thesis, and yet that's exactly. Exactly what they're accusing Jim Garrison of doing with this diary entry. I want to swing over for a minute because I feel like this is important. Edward J Epstein has an entry on his website. Jim Garrison 1000 pound Canary. And I want to read from this post now, of course, I'll drop a link to this so you can check it out for yourself. HARRIS found something of possible interest in the boxes now see okay, so Epstein is talking about how he had dinner with Jim Garrison, and he had made the papers of Clay Shaw like personal paraphernalia, letters, photos, address books, etc, available to Epstein and his research associate, Jones Harris. So that's that's what they're talking about here. Harris found something of possible interest in the boxes, a five digit number in Shaw's address book that almost matched an entry in Lee Harvey Oswald's book. Oswald's phone book contained the number 19106, preceded by the Cyrillic letters. DD. Shaw's book contained the same number in an entry. Lee Odom. PO Box, 19106, Dallas Tex Harris immediately told Garrison, who then announced to the press that he had linked Shaw to Oswald. He stated, without equivocation, that Shaw and Oswald's address books had the identical entry in them. Po, 19106, which was untrue, that this number was non existent, which he had not yet determined, and that the number was a code which, when deciphered, produced the unlisted telephone number of Oswald's killer, Jack Ruby, and no other number on Earth, which was also false. When asked by a reporter for The Times Picayune, how po 19106, became Ruby's number, which had been wh, one, dash, 5601, Garrison without missing a beat, explained that one simply transposed its third and last digit so it became po 16901, and then arbitrarily subtracted 1300 since this nonsensical hocus pocus still did not produce the WH portion of the number. Garrison added that the code was subjective. It turned out that the Post Office Box, 191 06 in Dallas not only existed but had been assigned to precisely the person listed in Shaw's book, Floyd Odom. It could not possibly have been the number in Oswald's address book, because, as the Dallas Police confirmed that post office box number did not exist in Dallas before it was assigned to Odom in 1965 end quote, I think this is an area of rightful criticism. It seems to be a massive overreach to try to put two things together that don't even necessarily have to go together, and then, in turn, it makes the entirety of what Jim Garrison was trying to do look foolish. We hear another damning story from this John the Baptist burglar guy, that allegedly two members of Jim Garrison's staff had tried to coerce him into doing a burglary, into breaking into clay Shaw's house and planting some kind of evidence. And he asked them, are you setting me up so that as soon as I get in the window here, I'm going to get my head blown off? And they say, No, they want him to plant something. What is this about? I'm not going to take the job unless you tell me what it is I'm doing. Well, it has to do with the murder of JFK. And at that point, he says, I'm out. I don't want anything to do with it. They go back to Dean Andrews again, and I'm laughing, because it was just one of the craziest interviews on national television ever. There's some story about, allegedly, Jim Garrison talking to Dean Andrews about some operation around Lake Pontchartrain, and that Dean Andrews pulls out two fake names. Just gives him two fake names, because he's not really sure what garrison is doing. Doesn't know if garrison is legit. And supposedly, Jim Garrison says something about one of the fake names being held on a weapons charge. And at that point, Dean Andrews knows that it's phony baloney, because he made the name up. He makes this weird comment about he's got the right ta, ta with the wrong Ho, ho, like, what does that even mean? There are three different people who are interviewed who claim that garrison and or Garrison's office threaten them like you can either play nicely and testify the way that we want you to or you cannot play nicely, and then we won't play nicely with you. Either. We can make things really rough for you. There's a man who even claims that black male photos were taken of him, and it was like, if you don't go along with us and do what we want you to do, then these black male photos can be splashed all over town like they're going out of style. They interview a man named Fred who says that he ran a bath house on Canal Street, and supposedly a man who identified himself as Robert E Lee with the district attorney's office contacts this guy Fred like, hey, was Clay Shaw ever in there? Did he ever use. Name clay Bertrand. Did he ever bring a young man with him? Could that man have been Lee? And Fred says that he got the clear impression that they wanted him to say certain things and that they could make life better for him if he said certain things. Fred also says that he had his eye on a property to lease out to become like a nightclub or a private club, but he was going to need $2,500 to make it happen, and it was hinted at that if he said the right things in this interview, that he wouldn't have any problems being able to raise the money and get the lease. So he says that he goes back to Slidell, where he was living, and he starts to have a guilty conscience that it's really not right for him to damage somebody's freedom, to damage somebody's reputation irreparably, just so he can get what he wants. So he says that he gets back home and starts to have a really guilty conscience about it all. Fred said that he had never known Clay Shaw to go by the name clay Bertrand, and had no idea about this man named Lee, that if Shaw came with other people, it wasn't anybody named Lee. It wasn't a young, scruffy guy with a beatnik beard named Lee, and he there's this joke a little bit with the reporter from NBC, like, yeah, I let you know that I needed some money, but you told me pretty clearly you weren't going to pay me anything for this interview, ha, ha, and that's essentially where NBC piece ends. There's a little bit at the end of the reporter saying we can't prove that whatever garrison is going to say about the murder of JFK, we can't prove that it didn't happen that way, or that Garrison can't prove it. What we're trying to do in this NBC documentary is to just say that what he's basing his trial of Clay Shaw on is information from these unreliable witnesses that haven't passed a polygraph test, and we're just trying to make sure on our side of things that justice is done. Garrison claims that he wants justice to be done. Well, that's what we're trying to do in this documentary. So now we fast forward in time just a little bit on July 15 of 1967 NBC allows a little bit of air time for Jim Garrison to go on the air to give his rebuttal of this very damning piece that they did. So they get a full hour. And even though garrison is supposed to have a half hour, which is literally half the time, it really amounts to about 25 minutes that he's able to stand up and speak for himself. I really don't think that such a thing would happen in mainstream media anymore. I can't imagine that somebody who was the victim of a smear campaign hit piece would be allowed to come on on national television to defend themselves. I just think things like that wouldn't even occur in today's world.

Garrison opens up his rebuttal by talking about little kids are told fairy tales, and they're comforting and they're nice, but then when you become an adult, you're gonna have to dispense with fairy tales because they're not true. Just because a fairy tale has an official seal of approval around it doesn't make it automatically true. It's still a false fairy tale. Likewise, a fairy tale doesn't become true just because mainstream media tells you over and over again that it's true, something I noticed throughout his rebuttal is this use of the term honorable men automatically makes me think back to Antony's eulogy of Caesar. I've written this on my blog before. I really think that in mgms 1953 adaptation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, which stars Marlon Brando as Antony, this is done masterfully by Brando in the film The eulogy of Caesar, and the way, I mean, you can just tell the way that he's turning the crowd against the murderers of Caesar. You can watch it happening. It's a masterclass in acting, and it's a master class in oratory. It's made even more spectacular by the fact that Brando was not a Shakespearean actor by trade. He wasn't someone like Olivier, or, in modern times, Kenneth Branagh. He was not classically Shakespearean trained, but yet he does that role so incredibly well. We see the same thing with Garrison honorable men. These are all honorable men. Well, we know that really what he's saying is not so much as he says, the American people should not be protected from the truth. We shouldn't live in a country where a handful of nobles get to decide what the public is allowed to know and what the public is supposedly too fragile to know. I agree with that 100% and I think it's appreciative comment for whatever Jim Garrison may have gotten wrong, for whatever methodologies he may have used that were wrong, he's absolutely right on that point. We shouldn't live in a world where overlords decide what the American public is allowed to know, and yet we do. Yeah, we by by now. I mean, if he could fast forward in time to see 2024 he would probably be stunned at how much worse it's gotten in that regard. He also talks about the idea of a group of elites, people in the media, people in the federal government, having like a totalitarian regime of we will do your thinking for you. This is also incredibly prescient, because we see that even more now. Maybe it was always present, but we see it more clearly now. It's just become a bit unmistakable. I think unless a person is an amoeba, I think it's unmistakable. As Garrison says, his assertion is that Kennedy was murdered by forces that wanted a change in foreign policy. He also points out that under Kennedy, the cold war had started to thaw. He brings up the Cuban Missile Crisis, the detente with the Soviet Union, that there needed to be some way for America to live with some kind of peace, even if it's just a tenuous peace, some kind of peace with the Soviet Union and with Cuba, the idea that, while you had war hawks that really took an invasion of Cuba as just being a fait accompli. It needed to happen. It was going to happen. Kennedy didn't view it that way, and he needed to be gotten out of the way, as Garrison says in his rebuttal. At some point the efforts that were focused on removing Fidel Castro from power shifted over to moving John F Kennedy from power. He brings up his thesis that Kennedy was not only shot from the back, but also shot from the front, perhaps from the grassy knoll area that Lee Harvey Oswald had the paraffin test, and it was found that he could not have fired an R, i, f, l, e that day, because there wasn't the presence of the nitrates on his cheeks, as you would have if you had fired that manlicker Carcano that day, Oswald's fingerprints were not on the manlicarcano, and then it would be pretty much impossible for him to have wiped his prints off and then gone down multiple flights of stairs and gone into the break room and been drinking a soft drink, perfectly calm and composed within like a 92nd window of time. He also talks about Oswald's access to information about the u2 spy plane programs, Oswald's ability to speak Russian, which is odd at a time, especially with Cold War tensions. Why would some relatively uneducated guy suddenly know how to speak Russian? He alleges that Oswald was an intelligence agent or was involved with intelligence agencies within the US. Oswald is questioned for 12 hours, but there are no notes or recordings taken, and one of the excuses given is that the interrogation room was too small for a stenographer to come in. He talks about Oswald being questioned by an agent in August of 1963 but the notes are burned. Then he also gets into JFK autopsy notes which are burned someone else who had questioned Lee Harvey Oswald burned his notes, as well as Garrison says there seemed to be a lot of accidental fires and accidental burning of notes that take place around this case. There was a further message about Oswald from the Charlie India alpha that was damaged in the process of a thermofax, supposedly it too burned up just in the process of trying to get the communique to go through. He says that in more than five years, they've never had a case reversed for improper conduct. Nobody has ever walked. There have been no technicalities. They haven't ever been proven to have done anything wrong within his office and within his administration as district attorney, Garrison asserts that the mainstream media just doesn't want the trial to happen, period. If the mainstream media, the powers that be, really felt that he was a crackpot and that the trial was going to amount to one giant puddle of nothing, then they wouldn't be pulling out all the stops to try to make sure the trial didn't happen, period. And I think that's a valid point. If they really felt that Jim Garrison was a kook, if they felt like the evidence that he had, whether we're talking about Clay Shaw specifically, or we're talking about the JFK pop, pop in general, if they really felt like the evidence that he had was so stupid and idiotic that nobody would believe it, then why do a smear campaign? Garrison feels that one motive is also to prejudice potential jurors in advance, to make them go into the trial thinking that Jim Garrison is a crackpot and Clay Shaw is totally innocent, so that instead of going in with an open mind and hearing the facts and judging for themselves, they will already walk in with a bias. Jim Garrison tells about a Newsweek article that accused his office of bribery, but he was later exonerated for that. The media doesn't go back and. Say that he was exonerated for it, and then it based the article on false evidence. It just leaves everything as it was. He points out that, as we just talked about in that NBC hit piece, they said that they had identified the real clay Bertrand. Now they weren't going to mention his name on the air because it was an alias, and this man was a homosexual at a time when it was not safe to be out, especially in the Deep South, they were going to protect his identity, but they had found him. He did exist, and Garrison says that was just a total fabrication. And then whenever it was time for them to print a retraction, it was like it went out coast to coast in all of these major news media outlets that NBC had located the quote, real clay Bertrand, and it was not clay. Shaw, well, that gets disseminated everywhere, but then whenever they needed to do a retraction because it was false, they had not identified a real clay Bertrand and the man they were trying to pin the name on hotly denied ever having used the name clay Bertrand, coast to co silence. He revisits the accusation of that John the Baptist burglar guy who supposedly a couple of members of Jim Garrison's Office wanted him to break into clay Shaw's home and plant evidence. Well, they put him on the stand about that, and he takes the Fifth Amendment. They asked him, was your testimony in NBC true about members of Jim Garrison's office wanting you to plant evidence inside clay Shaw's house, and he takes the Fifth Amendment, as Garrison points out, they want to make it sound like this, burglar is still so moral, so much more moral than Jim Garrison in his office that he's not even willing To participate in something so nefarious. But then, when he's asked to testify about it, to really put his money where his mouth is, so to speak, he pleads the fifth. As Garrison says, It's not the government's job to either incite fear and inflame fear or to calm fear. They're not supposed to have thought control over people, and as he admits in this rebuttal, I don't want to calm down about the pop pop of JFK. Well, I'll be honest with you, I don't either. That's one of the reasons why I'm on this podcast, why I have this little personal side endeavor. I don't want to calm down about it either. I don't think that we have the truth. And I think as we get farther and farther out from the event itself, the man's life, as well as the man's murder in broad daylight, we always run the risk of future generations forgetting or feeling that it's just insignificant. Bill Hicks would talk about that in his stand up routines. Let it go, Bill, it's already been like 30 years. Man, you can't do anything about it. You're not going to bring him back. You might as well just let it go.

I'm with Jim Garrison on that. I don't want to calm down about it either. I think the ramifications of what actually happened that day are just too important for John and Jane Q Public to ignore it. Garrison says, if you can murder a president over foreign policy disagreements, and then the moment his heart stops beating, you start a conspiracy to cover it all up, then we've ceased to be a democracy. I mean, is that a completely wrong conjecture? You'll have to decide for yourself what you think about it. I think that America's alleged position as a democracy is pretty thin anyway. I mean, we were founded as a republic, and the idea of your vote really counts. I mean, does it? Though, does it? I'm thinking of Doug in the black Jeopardy skit on SNL. They've already decided who's going to win before they even hold the election. I mean, that was in a comedy skit. But don't we all kind of know that deep down, Garrison says that no da's office in America would behave the way that he's accused of behaving, and that they're going out of their way to make Garrison seem like he's an enemy of the people. He's a troublemaker. This has already been solved. We've already had the investigation. You already have the Warren Commission Report. Now sit down, shut up and don't fan the flames. We definitely see that happening over and over again in modern society. My God, look at all the gas lighting that has occurred about the economy and the job market churning and burning, doing great, robust economy, resilient consumer, fantastic job market. Think about how many times we were told there were two legitimate, open jobs for every one unemployed person. And I was on my blogs, and I was on my daytime, business oriented broadcast, telling people bullshit. Some of those jobs are ghost jobs. They're posted for optics, and the same day that a company has 58 requisitions posted, it can go out of business, or it can conduct a layoff. Some of the people that put up help wanted signs in the window for those Triple P loans, they just never bothered to take the help wanted. Had signed down, but they didn't hire one damn person. It's easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they have been fooled. If somebody is determined to believe that somehow the economy is robust and there they want to buy into that gas lighting and nonsense, there's not a damn thing I can do to help them. And so I would say it is with this situation I get what garrison is saying here. It's already been looked into. Sit down, shut up, little peon and accept the official narrative. Anybody else who's trying to question it is just a troublemaker. He shows a picture of a diagram that was used in the Warren Commission report of Governor Connally, and it shows the trajectory of this bullet going through his shoulder, his upper part of his chest, I guess, his wrist, and then it goes down into his thigh. And as Garrison points out in that same diagram, they don't put a silhouette of Kennedy behind him, because if they did, it would be patently obvious that, based on their trajectory they have drawn, there's no way that Kennedy could have been behind him and could have been struck by the same bullet. It's just not possible, when you look at the angle that they have for this magical bullet to go through Connolly's body that many times, at that many points, JFK would have had to have been, I don't know, maybe 15 feet tall for that to have worked out. I mean, it would fall apart immediately if you saw the two silhouettes put together. Garrison uses the analogy of all the mathematical impossibilities that are at play here, such as it would be like if someone told you it's mathematically impossible for an elephant to hang off a cliff with his tail tied to a daisy, and then you had somebody come in and split hairs and say, well, but the elephant wasn't full grown. It was a lightweight elephant, and its tail was tied to an abnormally strong strain of Daisy. I have to admit, you do see that a lot in various research about the Pop Pop, especially the apologists, the people that want to say the Warren Commission got it right, and Oswald did act alone. He was just a loner. He was a loser. He wanted to be known for doing something really avant garde and dangerous, and so that's why he Pop Pop, the president. I always go back to, okay, well, if that's the case, then, why didn't he say so? Why wasn't he proud? Why didn't he do like a John Wilkes Booth and take a bow and yell something out? Instead, he yelled out, I'm just a patsy. Why wouldn't he take credit for it, if that were the case? He ends his rebuttal on something of a hopeful note, that he believes that Americans still want to know the truth, that we're not just going to be controlled by a handful of men in Washington, DC and New York, that the American public will demand the truth. So there you have it. You have the initial NBC piece that's pretty damning, pretty awful. And then Tim Garrison gets a little 25 minute rebuttal. I will say, in fairness, because I want to, I want to, I want to try to be fair here. I don't want to try to be a worshiper of anybody. It seems to me that Garrison spends most of his time during this rebuttal talking about general inconsistencies with the official story of the pop pop, which I think, Gosh, anybody with common sense should be able to listen to that information and say, Yes, I get it. I don't. I'm going to try to be careful here, because I don't want to be downright insulting. It's just that it's hard for me to get my mind around people that are totally and completely convinced of the magic bullet theory. I think that's one of the things for me that I just cannot and there are many inconsistencies and weird things that happen in the Kennedy Pop Pop. We see this also with the death of Dag Hammarskjöld. Everybody else is burned up, but Dag Hammarskjöld is not burned and he has the ace of spades playing card tucked in his collar. This is weird. That's not a natural death. That's crazy. So we have some of the same elements here. I mean, a bullet doesn't zigzag around a car like a bumblebee. It says that doesn't even make any sense. You're expecting me to believe that. So I have a real struggle with people that say, Yes, it was Oswald. It was him by himself from the sixth floor of the School Book Depository, and there was a magic bullet. End of story. That's it all the other witnesses are wrong. Anybody says they saw anything on the grassy knoll? They're a crackpot, a kook, a liar, etc. I can't get there on that one, okay, but in fairness here, I think it's important to point out that Garrison spends most of his time in this rebuttal talking about the general anomalies and the general problems with the official narrative of what happened when Kennedy was murdered, as opposed to going in. And point by point and trying to refute the negative things that NBC said about him. I really wish that there had been a rebuttal where he did go through point by point and give his side of the story. Does Garrison get everything right in his investigations and in his theories? No, I don't think he does. Because I don't think any one person, any one author, any one documentary, any one book, gets everything right. I think that's too lofty of a task. As I said earlier in this particular episode. I think garrison was trying my I don't know, personal theory, personal idea, personal inclination, whatever you'd want to call it, I think that he could see these inconsistencies. He could see that the people were being lied to. And when he found an opening to go after Clay Shaw, he took it, and he may have gotten too rabid and too intense in trying to pursue this fairy Oswald Shaw connection in New Orleans. I genuinely believe that he was onto something legitimate. I just think he may have gone about his execution of these things in the wrong way. Does that discredit everything that he did, all of his contributions to JFK, pop, pop research? No, I don't think it does. I don't think it negates everything. I think we just have to make sure that we don't get into any kind of worship anywhere, whether it's of JFK himself or it's of any particular researcher, any movie, any book. I was reading a review of Oliver Stone's JFK and the author seemed to me to be very smug and said something like, Gen X believes what they see in the movies. And as an X or myself, I was like, fuck you guy. Don't put that on a whole generation. His attitude was because younger generations weren't there. They don't remember Kennedy from any firsthand experience. They're just gonna believe whatever somebody tells them in a movie.

I disagree. I'm on this broadcast telling you all the time, read these books for yourself. Watch the documentary for yourself. Get this information for yourself, and please make up your own mind, as I said in an interview when I was asked about Oliver Stone's movie JFK, specifically, Hollywood takes liberties, and we all know that, or at least we should. You shouldn't expect textbook accuracy out of a Hollywood movie. If it inspires people to read, to ask questions, then I think it's done a great service, and I stand by that the movie is not perfect. Jim Garrison and his investigation were not perfect. If it inspires people to ask questions, then I think it's done a great service. I don't give Jim Garrison a complete pass card on everything, and I don't give him a 100% endorsement if he inspires you to ask some questions, to contemplate what you believe about this issue and its ramifications, right? It's not just the murder of a president in broad daylight. It's about what actually happened that day, and how does it impact, how does it inform the way that we're living our lives today? If any of these things inspire you to start asking questions and doing really good research on that topic, God bless these things. If that be the case, stay a little bit crazy, and I will see you in the next episode.

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