John Barbour and Daniel Liszt examine the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination, asserting CIA involvement where Lee Harvey Oswald fired no shots. They detail Jim Garrison's New Orleans investigation into Clay Shaw, NBC's alleged re-editing of his testimony, and the kidnapping of witness Terry Roseau to suppress evidence. The discussion highlights the House Select Committee's four-shot conclusion, the missing Mauser rifle, and military intelligence tipping off Dallas police regarding Oswald. Ultimately, the segment argues that media suppression of the "Garrison Tapes" conceals a broader conspiracy linking the killing to Vietnam War troop deployments. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
Time
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The Garrison Tapes Documentary00:01:57
Hi, this is Dark Journalist.
Today I have a special report for you on the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination.
Now, President Kennedy was killed under suspicious circumstances, and for reasons that remain obscure to this day, the government and the media covered it up.
But there was one man who put elements of the CIA on trial.
His name was Jim Garrison, and he was the district attorney of New Orleans, where Lee Harvey Oswald spent the summer in 1963.
Now, Garrison's story, though celebrated in the blockbuster film JFK, May have been lost to us, but veteran TV personality John Barber poured his time and resources into a fascinating documentary called The Garrison Tapes.
The film was hindered from the start by outside influences that didn't want it to see the light of day.
Now, with director John Barber's help, we will revisit this landmark effort and show you clips of Jim Garrison's heroic battle to find the truth in the assassination of President Kennedy.
Here we go JFK, the lost Jim Garrison documentary.
John Kennedy was killed by a major force.
The simplest way to describe it is a central intelligence agency.
Lee Harvey Oswald killed no one at all.
So the point is, it wasn't a question of being alone or with anybody.
He had nothing to do with the assassination.
To answer it more fully, one of the functions of the Warren Commission was to conceal the fact that Lee Oswald was not involved.
To conceal the fact that he was not involved in any way and to make it appear as if he were involved.
Concealing Lee Harvey Oswald's Role00:10:22
Now, John, I want to start off with how it all began.
How did you meet Jim Garrison?
Well, I met, you know, strangely enough, Daniel, I started out as a stand up comic.
Right.
And my mentor was Red Fox, and this was long before Red Fox.
Became the star of Sanford and Son.
By the way, that's his real name, John Sanford.
But he was brilliant.
And I was the first one to ever book him on a variety show when I got my first variety show.
But he had a comment that I thought was brilliant.
And the comment was heroes ain't born, they're cornered.
Well, I was sort of, I'm not a hero, but I was sort of cornered into my meeting or my first introduction to Jim Garrison.
I originated the original AM Los Angeles show in 1969 70.
It was the precursor to what became Good Morning America.
And after I left, that's where Regis Philbin ended up.
But in any event, because I did a lot of topical and political material, I read everything that I could as a comic.
So, when I ended up auditioning for this show, I guess the producers were stunned that I knew so much about the news, and I got the job.
And immediately, the show became unbelievably successful.
I put people on the air that nobody would book.
I mean, the government was trying to put Muhammad Ali in prison.
I'd book them for an hour.
I mean, I put terrific people on the air.
Anyway, I always believed the Warren Report.
I mean, why would I doubt what the government would say?
Right.
But I'm not stupid.
The reason I'm not stupid is because I didn't go to school very long.
I was a dropout when I was 15 and educated on the streets.
So I had sort of street smarts or street sense.
And when Garrison arrested Clay Shaw, he announced publicly that he had solved the crime.
I mean, we ran the news clip.
But everybody began to attack him.
The media began to attack him, the federal government began to attack them and said he was.
Power hungry, and he was a maniac.
The government released his psychiatric files from when he was in the military, they did everything to destroy him.
Wow!
After a year of this, Daniel, I said to myself and a few of my friends, You know, if Garrison has nothing, why doesn't the government just get out of his way and let him go in there and fall on his face?
Right, and any of them, as you know, after two years, he finally got clay shaw.
To trial, Clay Shaw was acquitted, even though when the jury was polled, they felt he was involved with the conspiracy, but there wasn't enough evidence to convict him.
And in the subsequent documentary I made, you find that Diamond, a trialer named Diamond, who was Clay Shaw's attorney, tried to introduce the Warren report as evidence, and in a three judge panel, discarded that.
As hearsay.
That is something you never hear of in the United States.
But in any event, the trial's over, and I'm in a bookstore one day, and I see this book called Heritage of Stone.
And it says by Jim Garrison.
I thought, oh my, is that the same Jim Garrison?
So I picked it up in the bookstore and started to read it.
I stood there for an hour.
I couldn't put the book down.
I was stunned at what I read.
That's his account of the trial, isn't it?
Yeah, that was his recounting of the Clay Shaw trial.
That's all it was.
But I was staggered by the information and the facts in the book.
I mean, it was unbelievable to me that he had to sue Time Life Corporation and take them to the Supreme Court to have the Supreme Court rule in favor of Garrison's being able to subpoena the Zapruder film for the trial.
And also, a doctor.
Zinc was not allowed to help participate in the autopsy because he was pulled away by generals and admirals.
I mean, it was staggering.
So I bought the book and I read it that night.
The very next morning, Daniel, I went into the office.
I called information in New Orleans and I said, Could I please have the district attorney's office?
They gave me the number and I called, and a female voice didn't answer.
A deep bass baritone answered the phone and said hello.
And I said, Hello, can I speak to Mr. Garrison, please?
And the voice said, Speaking.
And I said, Mr. Garrison, my name's John Barber.
I'm calling from Los Angeles.
And I just read Heritage of Stone.
And Daniel, right away, he said, Oh, you must be the other one.
I only sold two copies.
That's great.
So I said to him, I said, You know, I have this morning show.
It's the highest rated news show in Los Angeles.
And we do it live.
It's 90 minutes long, and we open up the phones for people to call in.
And unlike the shows that you see now that are call in shows, whether they're radio call in shows or whether they're television call in shows, all of these shows today, nobody gets to speak for more than 18 seconds, and then they're off the air.
Right.
Because usually the hosts are using these people as straight people.
If somebody had something interesting to say on my show when they called in, They were on for as long as they were interesting.
In some cases, it was a half an hour.
But in any event, I said, I want to book you on the show.
And he said, John, you'll never get away with it.
I said, Mr. Garrison, we have just won an Emmy.
We're doing really good.
Governor Reagan's running for a second term.
He's going to come on this show rather than the Today show.
You must do it.
I'll interview you for about 45 minutes and we'll open up the phones because everybody would want to talk to you.
And he said, John, You will not get away with it.
I said, Mr. Harrison, we'll take that chance.
Okay, so we booked them for about a week or 10 days later.
I'm going to make the hotel reservations and everything.
The following week, I was fired.
And Jim Garrison was canceled.
Now, let's go to this clip, which is Garrison describing how the media attacked him.
I was burned so many times that I stopped giving interviews.
In other words, if the words ended up in print, they were twisted in an indescribable fashion.
If they were for TV, repeatedly the editing.
Resulted in an absurdity.
So I reached the point where I concluded it would be almost useless to try and communicate my position, and I was tired of being harassed.
Okay, so you have this popular show, and then they remove you as a kind of punishment for booking Garrison, and you ended up at NBC with a different news show.
Tom Brokaw suggested that I be hired by NBC.
I auditioned at NBC and I got the job, and I was there for five years.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I never signed a contract with them because if I signed a contract, they would have owned the material.
Anyway, I end up there.
I win three Ebbies and a golden mic while I'm there.
Watergate happens, and I pick up the phone and I call Mr. Garrison.
And we chat about Watergate, and he mentioned some of the names that came up with Dallas.
Right.
So there's a crossover there between the personnel in the JFK assassination and the Watergate cast of characters.
That's right.
And then with the business of Vietnam, since he had been in the military, I thought, well, I'm going to chat with Jim about this.
So we became like phone pals, but never met.
So in 1979, I create the first reality show, which was a show called Real People.
Oh, yeah.
I remember the show.
It was great.
Thank you very much.
In any event, The executive producer owner of the show, a fellow by the name of George Slaughter, had this contract with NBC to do a show called City versus Country.
It was city humor and city music versus country music, country humor.
Anyway, he knew that ABC had turned down my first pilot, and Slaughter said, Do your show here.
Within a year, a show that started out near the bottom.
It was a monumental hit.
In some areas of the country, it got a 50 share.
And anyway, in any event, when somebody gets a successful show in television, the networks are always running to them to do another show.
And even though Schlaughter was really not that creatively involved in the first three years of the show, they came to Schlaughter with an idea to do a live news show.
That was sort of entertaining.
And I guess they got the idea from watching Patty Szajewski's Network with Peter Finch.
From Flop to Monumental Hit00:12:16
I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it.
Oh, yeah.
That's a great movie.
Yeah.
Oh, it was the only movie in the history of Hollywood that you go to to listen to.
It has the most brilliant dialogue ever written.
And to this day, Daniel, that movie becomes more important.
I mean, if you Google Ned Beatty's speech about money, It is more important today than it was in 1977 when the movie came out.
Absolutely.
Anyway, they gave him this show called Speak Up America.
So, George had asked me to help him with the show.
And I said, Hey, George, I'm not writing this.
I'm up to my neck 20 hours a day doing real people.
I can't be helping you with this.
So, I'm going through the paper one day, and on page 13, I come across this little story.
And it said The House Select Committee on Assassination has concluded four shots have been fired in Bealey Plaza because a fella named Mack had discovered a Dicta belt.
Worn by a motorcycle officer that had been accidentally left open when the shots were fired, and they recorded more than four shots.
So they had no choice but to conclude that there had been assassination, that Lee Harvey Oswald could have never fired those shots in that time.
So immediately I called Jim.
I'm thrilled.
And he gets on the phone and I said, Jim, Mr. Garrison, I never called him Jim.
Mr. Garrison, do you feel vindicated?
Daniel, he says, John, I feel like a blind man who's gotten a small trophy in a very dark room.
Only I know I got it.
I said, Well, you must feel vindicated.
I said, You'll be all over the news.
I mean, Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley and Reynolds and all these people will be calling you.
And he said, John, you're the only phone call I've gotten about this.
Unbelievable.
And I said, You're kidding.
I said, you gave a lot of stuff to the House Select Committee.
And he said, yes, indeed, I did.
He said, they even wanted to subpoena me to testify.
And I said, don't send a subpoena because I'm not going to show up.
And they said, why?
I said, because when I subpoenaed the government in my trial, they never showed up.
They just tore up the subpoena.
That's right.
And they never did testify.
And I said, well, you know what?
I'm going to tell you a story.
I'm coming to New Orleans to shoot some stories for real people.
And I'm going to come and I'm going to put you on camera.
And he said, John, you know, in the 10 years since the trial, I've never talked to anyone.
I said, I know.
He said, but I'll be happy to talk to you.
Wow.
So I went to New Orleans.
I put him on camera for over three hours.
And I must tell you, Daniel, it was the most terrifying, stimulating three hours.
I had ever spent in my whole life.
Here's another clip from the Garrison tapes.
If they can't remove you, and they do assassinate in the United States, and they've been doing it for years, and I'm sure they still do because there's no reason for them to change their policies now.
They've been continually successful.
If they can't kill you, they concentrate on discreditation.
So, what was your first face to face meeting with Garrison like?
I almost never met.
Anyone brighter than Jim Garrison, anyone more well read than Jim Garrison, and I've never met anyone with a more caustic, Mark Twainish sense of humor.
I've met three totally brilliant people in my life.
One was a scientist named Buckminster Fuller, the other was Jim, and the third is my son, who's got like a 5,000 year old soul.
Anyway, I come back, and there's so much material, it's going to be a two parter.
Okay.
So, In the first part, we open up, and I have Marjorie Gartner doing it.
We open up with this close up of Garrison leaning forward in his very sincere, deep voice saying, Lee Harvey Oswald had nothing to do with the assassination.
As a matter of fact, he wasn't even on the sixth floor.
And I mean, audiences were totally spellbound because they'd never heard in prime time this kind of comment about the Warren report.
So everybody was waiting.
For part two.
Now, when we did the interview, I asked him how many shooters he felt there were.
And he said it was probably triangulation with three shooters.
And he said three teams of two, one to fire the rifle and one to dismantle and pick up the shells.
And he said maybe even teams of three in case they needed radio personnel.
And then I asked him, How many people do you think actively knew?
That Kennedy was going to be the target.
So he's a former lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, and he was calculating around it's got to be on a need to know basis.
He said about 32 actively would know.
So I said, wow, that's interesting.
And a lot of them were still around.
Now, when he had his trial, you know.
He says in the documentary that the killing of a president was not a federal crime.
So, a lot of the people that he wanted to subpoena, and he gave me dozens of names people who even arrested at Dealey Plaza, the three tramps, identified the three tramps and the people he wanted, especially a guy named Fred Crispin, who he felt might have been one of the shooters.
But, yeah, Crispin in another state, and nobody would.
Nobody would extradite him for the trial.
So he had a very, very, very difficult time.
Anyway, part two comes up.
Now, here's the point.
People in this business, when they hit it big in television, they make an obscene amount of money.
And I was making an awful lot of money at the time.
And the show was number one, and justifiably so.
Anyway, I had bought this small bungalow in Toluca Lake, which was about a block and a half from Bob Hope's house.
Right next to a golf course, a little tiny house.
So I had it torn down.
I hired an architect to build this really huge sort of Swiss kind of chalet made out of cedar, red brick, and skylights.
So that's where I was putting my money for my family.
And I moved into a little rental house while this was being built.
Anyway, part two is coming up.
My wife and I are sitting at home with our son watching the story.
And here comes the story, which I had edited.
And here is Marjo Gordner sort of looking at Jim slightly off camera and saying, How many shooters do you think there were?
And up comes Garrison's face.
And he says, About 32.
Unbelievable.
And then the phone rings.
And it's George Slaughter.
And he says, What do you think?
And I started screaming at him.
What did you do?
And he said, Jim Garrison is not.
I says, No, you're the nut.
You've deliberately libeled that man.
He could own you and he could own NBC.
And we had this horrible fight on the phone, and I hung up.
I immediately called Garrison, and it's like midnight in New Orleans, and I'm crying.
And I said, Mr. Garrison, Mr. Garrison, I don't know what happened.
They re edited at midnight last night, and they didn't tell me what they were doing.
And he said, John, I'm used to it.
I said, then you must sue them.
You must sue them.
They have deliberately libeled you.
And that is slander when it's deliberate, and I will back you up.
And he said, John, my family loves your show.
All I want you to do is send me a couple of Real People t shirts.
I am so used to this, and that's why I haven't talked to anybody for 10 years.
So please don't feel bad.
I mean, I'm telling you, Daniel, he could have owned NBC.
Well, it sounds like they definitely had it in for them.
I'm just surprised they were so blatant about it.
So, then what happened to you as a result of all this?
Schlatter badmouthed me.
The industry got really nervous about me.
So, I had a difficult time, as you can well imagine, in the business.
But as a sidebar, I was going to say in the documentary, you will see.
The crimes committed by NBC.
NBC hired an FBI informant by the name of Walter Sheridan to go to New Orleans to get the key witness, a kidnapped cab driver named Perry, he worked for an insurance company at that time, who said under oath that he was with Oswald and Clay Shaw and David Ferry when they were planning the assassination.
In New Orleans.
That's Terry Roseau.
Walter Sheridan was trying to get him out of New Orleans to California to go to work for an insurance company at $50,000 a year.
Well, Garrison was smart because Terry came to him and said, I'm meeting with these guys from NBC who are going to make this documentary.
So Garrison wired him.
And here you have Walter Sheridan from NBC interfering.
With this murder trial of the President of the United States.
Wow.
Well, Garrison charged Sheridan with a felony.
And it never went to court because the federal government stepped in.
But at the time, there was in the United States, in broadcasting, something called the Fairness Doctrine.
When I interviewed Reagan on my show, he's a Republican.
Next week, I've got to interview a Democrat.
And if there's a socialist who can get five.
Percent of the vote, I got to interview a socialist.
Or if there's a Nazi or a flat earther or anybody who can get five percent of the popular vote, if you put somebody on the air, you've got to give them equal time.
NBC had no choice but to give Jim Garrison a half an hour of late night television to explain his case.
You can never see that in America today.
I mean, the frauds that have been perpetrated in this country, first of all, from the killing of John Kennedy to the murder of Martin Luther King, probably by the FBI, to the murder of Robert Kennedy.
The Warren Commission Fraud00:15:29
I was personal friends with Thomas Noguchi, who was a coroner who performed the autopsy on Robert Kennedy.
And you can see that autopsy report if you Google it.
He said that the gun that killed Robert Kennedy was more than two inches from the back of his skull because of the extensive powder burns.
Sirhan wasn't closer than six feet with his arm extended.
Right, so the evidence doesn't match there.
Sarah Ham did not fire the fatal shot.
So, city council in LA was trying to get rid of Thomas Noguchi.
So, I became the co chair of the committee to retain Noguchi as an independent coroner.
The opposition was led by Frank Sinatra.
And Frank Sinatra and I were the closest of friends since I wrote Laughing because I used to write all this special material.
That was unfortunately the last time he ever spoke to me because I was fighting.
To keep Noguchi and they eventually got rid of Noguchi.
Okay, so this clip is Garrison outlining the unusual aspects of the Kennedy motorcade as it headed into Dealey Plaza.
The newspapers in Dallas showed the route of the motorcade as it came out of Maine, continuing through the extension of Maine, going in the middle of that big pasture they call Dealey Plaza.
On Thursday evening at the 11th hour, the route was changed by the administration.
of Mayor Earl Cabell, the route was changed to turn right on Houston and then left on Elm, not only going by the ambush nest where the waiting rifles were, but also going by the building in which they had pre-located the Patsy.
And the indications are three teams at the minimum, with two teams shooting from the Grassy Knoll, that's four men, and at least one team in the back, although not on the sixth floor at that window.
They could not have been going any faster as they passed through the depository, as they passed through the target zone of 11 or 12 miles an hour, which is virtually stationary if you have rifles and professionals waiting for you.
So, what was Garrison's conclusion, like when he talked to you about the whole case in a nutshell?
How did he describe it to you?
In a nutshell, he said the CIA murdered a.
And they did that so that they could proceed with their war in Vietnam because John Kennedy, we had 12,000 what we called advisors there at the time.
And in October, which was a month before the assassination, John Kennedy was interviewed at his compound in Hyannisport by Walter Cronkite.
You can Google that interview, and he says that war.
It's not ours to fight.
That war is the Vietnamese to fight.
We will supply aid to them, but we will not supply the men to them.
And he said he was going to withdraw a thousand troops a month for a year.
At the end of the year, there'd be no more Americans in Vietnam.
He was killed on Friday, and on Sunday, Lyndon Johnson sent 50,000 troops to Vietnam.
Now, you know the military and the government.
Can't do anything well in two days.
They had to be preparing that move into Vietnam for a long, long, long time.
Yeah, it definitely seems like it.
So, Garrison's final analysis was that elements of the CIA were involved in the assassination.
And military intelligence hit him in.
Okay.
And indeed they did.
As a matter of fact, Jim Mars in the documentary talks about how Oswald's name was revealed to the cops.
It was revealed to the cops by military intelligence.
So, here's Jim Mars from the documentary explaining how military intelligence strangely supplied the Oswald info to the authorities.
Oswald in the late fall of 62 and a little bit in 63 had lived at 602 Elspeth, okay?
But that address never showed up on any of his applications or employee employment forms for the book depository.
Colonel Jones with 4th Army Military Intelligence got a call from his people in Dallas and they said they've got a suspect here and his name is Alex J. Heidel.
And Jones said he went to military intelligence files and looked up Alex J. Heidel and found it cross-referenced to Lee Harvey Oswald.
And it gave his address as 605 Elspeth.
And what does all that mean?
Army intelligence tipped off the Dallas police that the man they wanted was Lee Harvey Oswald.
Let's just hypothetically say that you had the ability to do part two.
What would be the kind of things that you would cover there going after the media side and how the media kind of whitewashed the entire crime and still to this day protects the secret about it?
And there's still a wall there.
Well, all you have to do, you know, I used to do.
In my stand up, a joke that if you want to make fun of politicians, is you don't have to write jokes, you just have to quote them.
You should get a big hand.
Well, the same thing holds true about the media.
You don't have to denigrate them, all you have to do is report what they did.
Yeah.
And reporting what they did, people are going to be outraged.
God, that really happened?
I mean, some people are left with their mouths open when they see that section of the documentary.
Talking about how NBC deliberately tried to sandbag Garrison's case.
Yeah.
And then she still has a license.
I mean, it's beyond belief those people should have lost their license and they should have been in prison.
Yeah.
So that's what I would do.
And you can cover absolutely all of them New York Times, Washington Post, CBS.
I mean, they were making their documentary supporting the Warren Report long before the Warren Report was even finished.
Right.
Now here's Garrison describing how there was no solid evidence against Oswald.
And the paraffin test would show whether or not you fired a rifle.
The results were available before the end of the day.
They showed that Oswald had not fired a rifle.
But the way that that was handled was it was announced to the world that the paraffin test showed that he had fired a rifle.
Chief, we understand you have the results of the paraffin test which were made to determine whether Oswald had fired a weapon.
Can you tell us what those tests were?
I understand that it was positive.
Fingerprints on the boxes added up to the fingerprints of a large number of policemen, one unidentified man, and no fingerprints of Lee Oswald.
And there's that great story that is told by a daughter of, I think her aunt's name was Willis.
He's a World War II veteran who was at Dealey Plaza, who was describing where the shots came from.
And the daughter, who was around 10 at the time, tells a story about this.
Willis saying the shots came from the grassy knoll.
And then the producers say, no, no, no, cut, cut, cut, cut.
Yeah, that's a great story in the documentary.
Let's go to that now.
Took them down to Dealey Plaza, and they said, okay, Mr. Nix, where did the shots come from?
Where did you hear the shots come from?
From a fence between the book depository and the railroad track.
Cut, cut, cut.
Now, Mr. Nix, where did you hear the shots come from?
They came from a fence.
Cut, cut, cut.
They finally pulled him aside, this man did, and pulled him aside and said, Now, Mr. Nix, what did the Warren Commission say?
Where did they say these shots came from?
From the book depository.
And they said, That's right, and that's what we want you to say.
And I remember riding home with him.
He was so upset.
I mean, he would hit the driving wheel, the steering wheel, and say, Why?
I mean, they try and make me look like I'm insane.
And I know that's where they came from.
That's where the shots came from.
They didn't intend to publish the report.
As Alan Dulles said, one of the top people running the investigation, the American people don't read.
But as it turned out, some of us do.
John, you've worked in the media for many years and spent a lot of time with important people in journalism.
Why do you think at this point, 50 years after it happened, they're still hiding the truth of JFK's assassination and promoting absurd ideas like the magic bullet and lone nuts?
Theories.
I mean, what is it about this incident that they will not acknowledge the facts and the evidence and go on record?
Fear.
They like their jobs.
I guarantee you, every one of them.
I mean, look at Bill O'Reilly, for God's sake.
Oh, boy.
This is expensive.
You know, when he was on Inside Edition 20 years ago, he was always running excerpts from the Zapruder film and he was always decrying the fact that he never really investigated the case.
Then he becomes this mega millionaire mouth.
At Fox, and he puts out this book, The Killing of Kennedy.
He goes on 60 Minutes last week and he says, God told them to write this book about the killing of Kennedy.
I put up a thing on my Facebook page that got just a ton of hits.
I said that on 60 Minutes, Irani said God directed him to write The Killing of Kennedy, and George Bush said God directed him to invade Iraq.
And then I said, in closing, that.
Makes three of them who are nuts.
That's O'Reilly, Bush, and God.
So let's go back to the documentary.
When you'd finished making it, you ran into some unusual obstacles, I'd say, and maybe some outside forces were keeping your film from reaching a wider audience.
That's exactly right.
And you know, I was sure that the Garrison tapes was going to make a ton of money because it was going to come out right after following the heels of Oliver Stone's JFK.
Nobody would air it in this country because if I got the money, I was going to do two things.
I was going to set up a scholarship for law students at Tulane, which is where Garrison went.
Oh, yeah.
And secondly, I was going to make a second documentary.
Oh, the material I have that Garrison gave me, the stories I have.
There was a guy named John Leonard who was a book critic at the New York Times.
He wrote this ravery for you about Garrison's book.
And how it raises legitimate questions about the assassination.
That's in the morning edition.
In the late edition, that's all excised.
He is made head of the book section for their weekend supplement.
That's pretty fast action.
And Garrison, I mean, anybody who looks at this case is stunned that a guy named Jack Ruby gets into the basement of the Dallas police station and, while surrounded by cops, shoots Oswald in the stomach and kills him, okay?
Oh, yeah.
Any half-witted policeman.
Is going to say, somebody gave that guy orders to do that.
Jim Garrison asked that question and found out the guy who gave Jack Ruby the orders to kill Lee Harvey Oswald.
And he did it with very simple CSI detective work that any half witted cop could have done on his own.
The Warren Commission could have done it.
The Warren Commission was not set up.
To investigate the death of John Kennedy, they were set up to prevent an investigation into the death of John Kennedy.
Right, so you had a block there and you had a block at the media side on both sides.
Yes, absolutely.
And you know, all this somehow is bubbling to the surface.
This America's downfall began on November 22, 1963.
Well, many researchers would agree there.
Let's go to Garrison discussing the Sabruder film, which he got by subpoenaing Time Life.
It's a horrific film, but crucial to understanding what happened.
All any intelligent person, even a child, has to do is look at the Sabruder film.
After the shot hits him in the head, the critical shot, John Kennedy goes backwards towards the back of the car.
So he's almost blown out of the back of the car.
John Kennedy was obviously shot from the front.
Everybody knows it, and especially the government.
John, how do you feel the younger generation is doing with understanding this crime and its implications to history?
Every once in a while, I get to speak at colleges and universities and show the documentary.
Great.
And I always do a question and answer.
Now, these are college kids, they're A students.
In the thousands of students I've talked to in the last two years, only one or two.
Ever knew that the Federal Reserve was a private bank?
Wow.
And now you know how staggering that is.
Well, John Kennedy in 1962 signed an executive order.
I believe the number was 11111 or 11110, calling for the United States Treasury, as mandated by the Constitution, to print our own money.
They were silver certificates.
That's right.
The day John Kennedy was shot, they stopped printing the silver certificates.
Strangely enough, the only other president in the history of the United States to have done that to the Federal Reserve or the National Bank was Abraham Lincoln.
Oh, during the Civil War, yeah.
The Rothschild Central Bank offered to lend him money at 33% to fight the American Civil War.
Stopping Silver Certificates Printing00:16:24
He told them to go screw themselves, he would print the greenbacks.
And the day he was assassinated, they stopped printing the greenbacks.
Right.
But now, I just got back two weeks ago from Small University College in Aiken, South Carolina.
And everyone, whether they're Christians or Jews or atheists or Democrats or Republicans or libertarians, everyone has this gnawing distrust.
Of the federal government.
They now begin to feel that somehow the federal government is not only lying to them, but has indeed become their enemy.
And I'll tell you, America's in dreadful, dreadful shape.
You would think that people would be running to me since it's the 50th anniversary, saying, Please, can we show your documentary on Showtime or HBO or the History Channel or Biography?
They have all turned it down.
Unbelievable.
And they all say it's nothing new.
And I say, hold it.
People have not seen what this man uncovered in his investigation and in a court of law.
So I never took sides in the telling of any of my stories, ever.
But what I wanted to do was let Jim Garrison tell his side of the prosecution case.
Right.
Because for 50 years, or by that time it was like 20 years, 30 years, the federal government and the media.
Had had the microphones and the cameras, and I thought I'd give Jim a chance.
And so that's why I did it.
And I'll never make back the money that I put into it, but I don't care.
I just want the story to be out there.
Now I'm working on something now.
Okay.
That, if it happens, will dwarf anything that's going to be talked about November 22nd this year.
And you know, I was a little disheartened.
I just saw.
A friend of mine named Joe Mellon, who wrote the best book about Jim Garrison, is speaking at some kind of seminar put on by Sarah Weck at Duquesne University.
They got Oliver Stone there.
They got Dr. McClellan from Parkland Hospital.
And I never heard from them.
And so I wrote Ben Weck, who is, I guess, Cyril Weck's son, and said, All of these are interesting and informative voices, but the best voice is not there.
And that voice is Jim Carrison.
And this documentary should be screened at your event.
I'll be glad to come back at my own expense and screen it and do a QA.
And he wrote back, It's just too bad we didn't know about you earlier.
We would have had you, but we're all booked.
You know, that's just shocking to me.
Yeah, well, they didn't seek you out, and, you know, that's the thing.
So to just say, well, it's too bad we didn't know earlier.
Yeah, well, the same thing that Dallas is going to have all these events the week of the 22nd, and there's a lady, oh, there's some site that covers everything about the Kennedy assassination.
I can't remember the lady.
That's Mary Farrell?
Say that again?
It's the Mary Farrell Foundation.
No, I wish it was.
She was just a terrific researcher.
Gosh, I wish I could remember the name.
I can't remember the name.
That's all right.
But anyway, about five years ago, I stumbled upon her site, and it's everything about the Kennedy assassination.
So I wrote her this great note and suggested she go to my site and look at the documentary, and would she mention it?
Would she put it on her site so people could go and see it, and they could see it for nothing?
She wrote me back the nastiest note, and I never heard from her again.
What did the note say?
Well, you know, there is something weird about a lot of these people who are involved in the assassination.
They become egomaniacal and possessive about their own little category of knowledge that they have about the case.
Yeah.
And they're jealous of everybody else who's involved with it for fear that these other people might get more attention.
But only one person ever investigated the case as a law enforcement officer, and that was Garrison, and you'd think they'd.
You know, demand that somehow that documentary be shown at these events.
And I never hear from them.
Well, that is surprising, actually, but think of it as their loss on that one.
Now, these two clips are about the media and certain officials cooperating in the cover up.
Without knowing precisely who they were, I think there had to be assurance that there would be, at least at the outset, a few elements of the media that would be cooperative from the beginning, because they had to start off.
With a certain momentum from the beginning before reality started to interfere with the building of the illusion.
A larger part of the government bureaucracy, meaning key individuals here and there, were aware than one would assume because there was too much of an overnight adjustment.
The FBI was in full cooperation with the CIA and the perpetrators of the assassination within hours.
You know, I recently came across.
An interview with Larry King where he remembered meeting Garrison and also the district attorney of Miami in the late 60s.
But he distinctly recalled that at the end of the meeting, Garrison, you know, saying goodbye, leaned down to his car window and said, They are going to kill Senator Robert Kennedy, you know.
And then, of course, it actually happened.
And King said he felt that Garrison should have been given more credit overall, which I found surprising.
Let me tell you a story about Larry King.
Okay.
The organization to help Jim Garrison finance investigation was not the city.
The organization was a bunch of local businessmen and car dealers, and they formed a group called Truth or Consequences.
They were the ones that funded Garrison so that snoopers couldn't go into the city's records to see where money was going to help Garrison.
So it was all in the QT.
Right.
In any event, Larry King had his radio show in Miami, and he had one of the heads of Truth or Consequences, a car dealer, on the show, and Jim Garrison.
And they were talking about raising money to investigate the case.
And guess what?
People sent in $50,000 to Larry King to give to Jim Garrison.
Oh, that's impressive.
And you know what King did with it?
I'm almost afraid to ask.
Paid off his horse racing debts.
Oh, okay.
And he was charged with grand theft and convicted of grand theft and ends up on CNN with a show.
That's incredible.
Wow.
Okay.
So these are the kinds of stories that people never, ever hear about.
And look at one of the.
Who's the.
One of the big conservative radio talk show hosts now is Gordon Liddy.
Yeah.
A guy who wanted to murder Jack Anderson to shut him up on behalf of Richard Nixon wanted to murder him, said he would go out and kill him.
Oliver North, a traitor to the United States Constitution, selling arms to the enemy, ends up with his own show and ends up on Fox.
Yeah.
I mean, it's reprehensible.
Yeah.
It's absolutely reprehensible.
It's like that revolving door between the politicians and the press and the press organizations is just so tight, and that's the way they control the flow of a lot of the information.
Well, I heard that somebody asked Obama if he was going to give up his medical plan and sign on to Obamacare like everybody else, and Obama never answered him, so I guarantee you that guy will never be invited to the public job again.
Have you, you know, there's somebody interesting in your documentary, by the way, that I thought was terrific.
Put him in there, and that's Roger Craig.
Oh, yeah, that's a really sad story.
He basically was in the wrong place at the wrong time and saw something that he shouldn't have.
Well, he was one of the street cops in Dallas, he was told to stand down and not protect the motorcade.
And you know how easy this is, I'll tell you, it's still a very solvable crime.
I mean, if we had had cell phones at that time, the crime would have been solved that afternoon in spite of what the government was.
Trying to do.
But I mean, you could Google Secret Service in Dallas and you'll see a film of the Secret Service agent on the right rear of the limousine being pulled off by his superior as a car turning toward the book depository.
Yeah, I think it's interesting that you put Craig in there because Craig is another important figure in the JFK assassination story that is completely ignored.
Yeah, he.
He found one of the rifles.
It was a Mauser.
It wasn't that old.
A man with a cock on him.
It was a Mauser, and the Mauser disappeared.
He tells a story about going to work for Garrison, doing some work and research for him.
Comes out to get in his car, and his car blows up.
Right.
And then supposedly commits suicide by shooting himself with a rifle.
There were so many witnesses to the assassination of JFK that were slowly, methodically bumped off.
And that list is unbelievable if somebody researches into it.
So many of the key, crucial people.
Penn Jones wrote mostly about those people in a series of books called Pardon My Grief.
He did some outstanding work in that regard.
Here's another clip from the Garrison tapes.
I was digging up some information actually for Jim Garrison and Penn Jones Jr. of Midlothian.
I was digging up some information that they wanted, you know, in Dallas.
And I parked my car.
On the side of the street, and I wanted to get this information.
And when I came back and cranked up my car, it blew up.
Former Dallas police officer Roger Craig was hospitalized for two months.
He later purportedly committed suicide with a rifle.
I don't like to go into that because of your families and everything else, but we lost a few witnesses by physical reasons, just like Dallas did.
John, what is this event you've been hinting about?
With the thing that I'm planning, if it comes off, it will dwarf anything that anyone has ever done about the assassination, including Oliver Stone's movie.
If I can pull it off.
And I'm going to know within the next two or three weeks, and if it comes about, we will be doing it the first or second week in December, and it will be the last look at the assassination.
Fantastic.
That would be excellent.
Does that relate at all to the part two?
Documentary that you were going to do at the time and decided against?
No, it's not.
It's a way of getting the documentary screened on a very, very broad national and international scale.
The help is extremely important in this case and in this country that nobody knows I'm talking to at this point except George Knapp would host it.
And myself and this other person would be the only two dead.
So if it comes off, it'll be huge.
Here are some final thoughts from Garrison on the JFK trial.
And I realized I was suddenly an object of interest to the agency.
I guess I might have assumed that earlier, but it didn't occur to me.
I guess part of me still thought I was living in the country I was born in.
So the conclusion I would give you was they did everything they could to tear the office apart, to tear the trial apart.
And they did tear the trial apart, but the time came when I was no longer district attorney.
Whatever their explicit objectives were, they accomplished them, but I would have to reply.
On the other hand, the agency, when it was all over, they knew they'd been danced with.
Now, John, we've been discussing how Garrison took these immense chances to bring this truth to light, but you had a very successful career in television and you risked all that in order to get the documentary done.
Why did you do it?
Well, I go back to what Red Fox said heroes aren't born, they're cornered.
I was cornered with this information.
Yeah.
And what am I going to do about it?
And I look around at all the other stories I see and I say to myself, they have to hear what this man has to say.
And that's the reason I did it, you know.
I consider myself a storyteller, you know.
I'm really, truthfully, I'm very apolitical.
I remember one of Jack Parr's great lines when he hosted The Tonight Show.
He said, I never vote because it only encourages him.
Well.
Now here's Garrison describing the immense emotional toll that the trial took on his life.
I wish I could say in heroic words that yes, I would do it again.
But actually, what the investigation cost me.
magnificent office which took years to build up and a tremendous amount of emotional involvement not unrelated to my personal concern about what happened to John Kennedy and what was obviously happening to America.
I'd say that I don't know if I would do it again because of the emotional price I paid.
Jim Garrison said he never felt like a hero.
Being DA, he was just doing his job.
John, I want to thank you, and not just for taking the time to do such an excellent interview, but also for bringing to light this fantastic story of Jim Garrison fighting the powers that be to reveal the truth about JFK's assassination.
Well, it's my pleasure, Daniel.
Thank you for having me.
Thanks for the interest.
You bet, and we will do our best to bring your groundbreaking documentary into the spotlight.
Oh, that'll be wonderful.
Thank you so much.
Exposing Powers That Be00:00:14
Thank you for joining me for this powerful report on JFK, the Lost Jim Garrison documentary with John Barber.
You can find more special reports and interviews at youtube.com forward slash dark journalist.