50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: NBC's 1967 `Case Of Jim Garrison' Special Revisited

On June 19, 1967 NBC broadcast a 60-minute special on New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's investigation of the JFK assassination, entitled "The JFK Conspiracy: The Case of Jim Garrison," but "only allowed Garrison to be interviewed for less than two minutes," according to The Kennedy Conspiracy by Paris Flammonde. On July 13, 1967, however, Garrison was finally allowed by NBC to speak to tv viewers for a half-hour and he said the following:


"...Many things that some of the major news agencies have been telling you are untrue...Although you are citizens of the United States, information concerning the cause of the death of your President [JFK] has been withheld from you...President Kennedy was not killed by a lone assassin...There has been, and continues to be, a concerted effort to keep you from learning these facts...

"...The conclusion of the Warren Report, that President Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin, is a fairy tale.

"...This country was not built on the idea that a handful of nobles, whether located in our federal agencies, in Washington, D.C., or in the ews agencies in New York, should decide what was good for the people to know, and what they should not know. This is a totalitarian concept, which presumes that the leaders of our federal government, and the men in control of the powerful press media, constitute a special elite..."

As long ago as May 16, 19067, Garrison told a New Orleans newspaper reporter the following:

"The point is that Clay Shaw and Lee Oswald have the same post-office box number in their address book and this is, in coded form, the unpublished phone number of Jack Ruby in 1963...

"We have had evidence for some time that in Dallas, Texas, Jack Ruby was working for the CIA at the same time Lee Oswald was working for the CIA here (in New Orleans).

"This means that the CIA well knew that these two men knew each other. We also have evidence that Lee Oswald was not the only man in Dealey Plaza who was an employee of the CIA and now we have found the phone number of the CIA in front of Lee Oswald's address book..."

In an October 1967 Playboy magazine itnerview, Garrison also observed that "there are also 51 CIA documents classified toop secret in the National Archives pertaining to Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby" and "in practice, any documents the CIA wanted classified wasa shunted into the Archives without any examination by the sleeping beauties on the [Warren] Commission..."

(Downtown 4/95)