by Joan Mellen
Jim Garrison bravely pointed to the Central Intelligence Agency as bearing responsibility for the murder of President Kennedy. As subject as Garrison was to press ridicule and harassment, he would be offered far more limited a hearing today than he enjoyed in the late 1960s. By 2008, the Director of CIA, Leon Panetta, would remark, while [Barack] Obama was in office, CIA “would not be hung out to dry.”
The context was Panetta’s reply to a United Nations report complaining about CIA’s drone program, charging that the United States had “become the world’s number one user of targeted killings.” Obama himself declared, “The C.I.A. gets what it needs.” If John F. Kennedy was determined to bring CIA to heel, Obama would be a President who had deferred his foreign policy to the intelligence services.
Because the murder of President Kennedy was never solved, its perpetrators never brought to justice, the presidency itself was weakened. “Does the president of the United States have any power whatsoever to change the game plan that was put in place by the military industrial complex after World War Two?” filmmaker Lyle Sardie asked former president Jimmy Carter on KABC radio, Los Angeles.
“No,” Carter said.
Where in earlier years the Agency had concealed its domestic presence, after the 9/11 attacks, the Agency expanded. It placed agents “with nearly all of the FBI’s fifty-six terrorism task forces in U.S. cities.” By 2010, the Agency employed, by the Washington Post’s estimate, 854,000 people. “CIA presided over 1,271 separate government organizations and 1,931 private companies.”
Openly now, CIA demanded “operational flexibility in dealing with suspected terrorists.” So Cofer Black, in 2002 the head of the “Counter Terrorism Center,” insisted. As arrogant as Allen Dulles in his heyday, Black told Congress, “This is all you need to know.” In CIA’s wars of duration, there need be no victories. Troops would simply move on to another venue. Constant war, columnist and lawyer Glenn Greenwald wrote on salon.com, “has been the normal state of affairs.” “We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth,” Barack Obama said in his acceptance speech for his richly undeserved Nobel Peace Prize, “we will not eradicate violent conflicts in our lifetime.”
In retrospect, it appears that the meaning of the Kennedy assassination was to lay the groundwork for this new America in which presidents did what they were told by the intelligence services and their military arm, both serving a corporate oligarchy, just as President Eisenhower had warned. A Farewell to Justice opened with Jim Garrison’s incredulity as he attempted to bring to justice those responsible for the murder of a president he admired. “I guess part of me still thought I was living in the country I was born in,” Garrison said more than once.
Those of us born before the Kennedy assassination can only echo Jim Garrison. If John F. Kennedy stood up to CIA and attempted to rein it in, no president since has had the temerity to do so. If Kennedy fought hard, as A Farewell to Justice reveals, to stop CIA from making policy, he represented a losing cause. Where once CIA officers like James Angleton felt compelled to deny that CIA ran assassination programs, in the millennium, with the endorsement of George W. Bush, Richard Cheney and Barack Obama, CIA pursued political assassinations openly. Under Obama, CIA accomplished its assassinations with the use of drones.
If at first the Agency hesitated, and refused to acknowledge its drone program, before long it was broadcasting its victories. Following the Agency’s lead, Barack Obama targeted for assassination an American citizen who had never committed a crime. CIA drones killed Anwar al-Awlaki first, and then his son, aged sixteen, and a cousin. Shamelessly Obama applauded this assassination that he had sanctioned. Only a lone dissident like Dennis Kucinich, headed for political oblivion, dared notice that “the assassination policies vitiate the presumption of innocence . . . the government then becomes the investigator, policeman, prosecutor, judge, jury, [and] executioner, all in one.”
Accompanying CIA’s extraordinary rise to power has been an erosion of civil liberties and individual rights. Presidents began overtly to undermine the constitutional rights of citizens, beginning with violating the rule of law.
Habeas Corpus was reduced to being a luxury rather than a right. The expectation that only probable cause could result in the surveillance of individuals had become a distant memory.
The Bush and Obama presidencies gave us a Patriot Act, and a renewed Patriot Act. Bush offered a Military Commissions Act, which eroded “protection from arbitrary arrest” and permitted the introduction of evidence extracted under torture. In 2007, the New York Times noted that those in Congress who voted for this law “betrayed the Constitution and the democracy they were sworn to defend.”
Obama laid the groundwork for the military to be used at home against American citizens with his National Defense Authorization Act, permitting the arbitrary detention of U.S. citizens. After 9/11, George W. Bush gave the Agency a billion dollar infusion, while instructing the military “to help the CIA in any way it could.” Obama followed suit.
The examples of the millennial presidents making inroads on freedom of speech, freedom of the press and on the rule of law are many. Barack Obama instructed his Justice Department not to investigate CIA’s use of torture during interrogations in Iraq at Abu Ghraib prison, at Guantanamo and at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Questioned, he argued that he didn’t want to “get bogged down in the issue at the expense of my own agenda.” No such alternative agenda emerged. In keeping with his diminished powers, his actions (if not his rhetoric) were those of a man who believed in nothing.
Since the Kennedy assassination, the press has been silenced— with rare exceptions like a 2011 Los Angeles Times editorial titled, “CIA has a lot to answer for.” The paper reported that Obama’s prosecutor, John Durham, had decided “not to recommend further investigation of as many as 100 CIA interrogations of detainees for the last decade.” This default, the editorial concluded, was “a loss to the nation.”
It was a loss that didn’t emerge out of nowhere, but, I believe, had been prepared for by CIA’s assistance in the murder of Lumumba in the Congo, of Diem in South Vietnam, and finally by the horrendous killing in Dallas that opened the door to the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy.
No criticism of the intelligence services is likely to appear these days on cable television, and even the newspapers have not operated free of CIA influence. During the Kennedy administration, newspapers exhibited a certain independence, exemplified by Arthur Krock’s passionate New York Times column in which he referred to CIA as a “malignancy on the body politic.”
“Should there ever be an attempted coup in America,” Krock warned, famously, “it will come from the C.I.A. and not from the Pentagon.” Krock’s column was published in 1963, a month before the Kennedy assassination.
That the Times has not been operating free of Agency interests is suggested by a document dating from 1975. Apparently CIA has long enjoyed the capacity to hack into the New York Times computers. “The NYT computer can be monitored,” reads a document signed by Theodore C. Poling and issuing from the Counter Intelligence’s Research & Analysis branch.
There seems to be a connection between the Agency’s ubiquity and the New York Times of the millennium, which treats as a taboo any objective discussion of the Kennedy assassination. The Times has preferred to reside behind the discredited conclusion of the Warren Commission that Lee Oswald was a sociopathic assassin who acted alone.
The incursions on the Constitution did not happen overnight. Obama continued the program of extraordinary rendition and torture begun under Bill Clinton. But while Lyndon Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act, offensive as he found doing so, Obama has been especially recalcitrant about the release of information to the public. When the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in favor of the ACLU, decreeing that the remaining photographs of CIA-led torture at Abu Ghraib be released, Obama promised to “take every legal and administrative remedy available to
me” to ensure that the photographs be consigned to oblivion. He overruled the court and prevailed.
“Is this what America does?” the New York Times asked.
Georgetown law professor David Cole wrote in The New York Review of Books that the government was now exercising the power to “kill the people it was elected to represent. . . can we really claim that we live in a democracy ruled by law?” Torture awaited such people as Pfc. Bradley Manning, who had turned government files over to WikiLeaks in the service of openness of government. Law professors pleaded that Manning’s treatment be “consistent with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” They were ignored. Edward Snowden came next.
So Obama proved himself to have enjoyed “a unique partnership with the CIA,” as he made no effort to continue what John F. Kennedy attempted, to preserve the separation of powers and the integrity of the presidency. The New York Times could not help but notice “one of the most significant shifts in C.I.A. history,” in which the Agency placed itself openly “at the vanguard of America’s farflung wars.”
The Washington Post quoted an anonymous CIA veteran: ‘You’ve taken an agency that was chugging along and turned it into one hell of a killing machine . . . CIA now functions as a military force beyond the accountability that the United States has historically demanded of its armed forces.” John F. Kennedy turns out to have been an inconvenient patriot who paid with his life to defend an America very different from the one that burgeoned in the wake of his untimely death. No one could have called Kennedy the “Covert Commander-in-Chief,” as the Washington Post dubbed Obama.
This then seems to be the meaning of the Kennedy assassination, something Jim Garrison foresaw: the creation of a society with no arena of the culture immune to CIA incursions. The Agency professionals of Kennedy’s time were even themselves aware of what was coming. “A secret organization is a risk in any society,” David Atlee Phillips said. Phillips was among the wiliest of CIA operators. French foreign agent Philippe de Vosjoli wrote in his memoir, Lamia, that “intelligence services are tools for the defense of democracy, not weapons to kill it.” This ideal, this sentiment, seems archaic, an anachronism.
John Quirk remarked to the author that “the United States would have done a hell of a lot better without the CIA,” if only because “our values are a lot better.” Instead the Kennedy assassination marked, as Jim Garrison saw, the resurgence of an agency that, as one former CIA officer and whistleblower said, had become “a state within a state . . . susceptible to no correction from outside.”
Only outliers have dared in these times to speak out. One was former Congressman Ron Paul, who has demanded that CIA be abolished; Paul pointed to “the harm they have done since they were established.” CIA became the “American Gestapo” feared by President Truman and Ambassador David K. E. Bruce at the time of the birth of the Agency, a threat to the Republic.
With courage to spare, Jim Garrison asked that we view the Kennedy assassination in a larger context. Despite the title that originated with him, he was not quite ready to bid farewell to the possibility of justice. We owe it to him and to the martyred president to do no less.
Joan Mellen
Pennington, New Jersey
July 2013
NOTES
FREQUENTLY CITED ABBREVIATIONS:
AARC Assassinations Archives and Research Center
ARRB Assassination Records and Review Board
CAP Civil Air Patrol
DRE Revolutionary Student Directorate
FOIA Freedom of Information Act
JMWAVE CIA office in Miami
MCC Metropolitan Crime Commission
NARA National Archives and Records Administration
NOAC New Orleans Athletic Club
NODA New Orleans District Attorney’s office
NOPL New Orleans Public Library
HSCA House Select Committee on Assassinations
OAS Organisation Armée Secrète
ONI Office of Naval Intelligence
SAC Special Agent In Charge
SSCIA Senate Select Committee On Intelligence Activities (Church Committee)
WC Warren Commission
CHAPTER 1
p. 1: trip to Shreveport: Interviews with John Volz, May 21, 1998; May 12, 2000. Macdonald: “A Critique of The Warren Report,” Esquire (March 1965), p. 59ff.
p. 1: Herbert J. Miller Jr. in Dallas. See “Texas To Hold Inquiry Court,” Times- Picayune, November 26, 1963, Section 1, p. 14; Miller destroys the idea: Tapes of Herbert J. Miller Jr. 543 FOUR 24, reels 1–23; ARRB (Assassination Records and Review Board). August 7, 1997; see also Miller interview, August 7, 1997. NARA.
p. 2: “I would hope that none of these records are circulated”: The Freedom of Information Act and Political Assassinations, ed. David R. Wrone. Volume I. The Legal Proceedings of Harold Weisberg v. General Services Administration, together with the January 22 and 27 Warren Commission Transcripts. (University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, Wisconsin: Foundation Press, Inc, 1978). p. 236.
p. 2: “one man could not have fired”: Boggs confided the same point to Edward Jay Epstein. Conversation with Edward Jay Epstein, April 17, 2001.
p. 2: no notes, no transcription: “Back Up Material For On the Trail of the Assassins,” June 27, 1989. AARC.
p. 2: It was Hale Boggs: Interview with Phyllis Kritikos, January 11, 2000. Kritikos was Garrison’s second wife.
p. 2: “messianic”: David W. Ferrie, “Suicide Note A.” NODA. NARA.
p. 3: “my jurisdiction”: Interview with Jim Garrison in Beyond JFK. Documentary film by Danny Schecter and Barbara Kopple.
p. 3: “not my affair”: “Insert A” of draft of a letter regarding charges
p. 3: “rather eccentric”: Carl D. Lynch to Mrs. Alfred Garrison, October 25, 1964. Appendix to A Short History of the Garrison Family of North Carolina and Their Descendants. Courtesy of Lyon Garrison.
p. 3: the Robinson boys: Fragment of a history of the Robinson Family, pp. 32-33. The Garrison Family Papers. NARA.
p. 3: “rather eccentric”: Carl D. Lynch to Mrs. Alfred Garrison, October 25, 1964. Appendix to A Short History of the Garrison Family of North Carolina and Their Descendants. Courtesy of Lyon Garrison.
p. 3: the Robinson boys: Fragment of a history of the Robinson Family, pp. 32-33. The Garrison Family Papers. NARA.
p. 3: stark naked: Pearl Rank Heiden to Mrs. Ethel Thompson, March 8, 1967. Courtesy of Lyon Garrison.
p. 3: he could read. Interview with Mrs. Liz Garrison, January 11, 1998.
p. 3: “Oh, you mean Jimmy”: Interview with Elizabeth Garrison, January 11, 1998.
p. 4: unable to afford a bicycle: Interview with Dr. Bernard Jacobs, April 14, 2000.
p. 4: “too much blue”: Interview with the late Walter Gemeinhardt, May 31, 2000.
p. 4: ate lunch by himself: Interview with John Clemmer, June 1, 2000.
p. 4: parking violations: Interview with Alvin Gottschall, March 6, 1998.
p. 4: the Big Bands and Peggie Baker: Interviews with Peggie Baker and Wilma Baker, May 26, 1996.
p. 4: “Roger The Dodger”: See, “A Piper Cub Over Germany,” in New Orleans: An Oral History of New Orleanians During World War II comp. Brian Altobello (1990), pp. 134–136. (The Williams Research Center, 410 Charters Street, New Orleans, Louisiana, 70130.) See also: Memorandum. January 16, 1984. To: Stadiem. From: Garrison. Re: Characteristics of the Grasshopper (with regard to the Initial Combat Scene). Courtesy of Lyon Garrison. On Dachau: see “Foreword— A Heritage of Stone,” in Crime, Law and Corrections, ed. Ralph Slovenko (Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas, 1966), pp. xx, xxi.
p. 4: “has haunted me”: Playboy. Vol. 14, No. 10 (October 1967), p. 178.
p. 4: “afraid of people”: Interview with Judge James C. Gulotta, January 9, 1998.
p. 4: never mentioned that he had been at Dachau: Interviews with Warren Garfunkel, June 14, 2000, and Rene Lehmann, June 16, 2000.
p. 4: he was bored with
the law: Interview with Jay Teasdel, January 16, 2000.
p. 4: stealing a book: Interview with Jack Benjamin, May 31, 2000.
p. 5: Nazi ticket: Interview with Wilmer Thomas, March 7, 2001.
p. 5: mockery of the Louisiana political system: Interview with Wilmer Thomas, July 24, 2000.
p. 5: “Hotsy, totsy”: Interview with Rosemary Pillow, April 23, 2000.
p. 6: “decidedly promising”: A. L. Fierst to Jim Garrison. July 23, 1952. The Garrison Family Papers. NARA.
p. 6: blue denim trousers: The Taming of the Shrew, original script by Jim Garrison. Courtesy of Don Howell.
p. 6: dinner at Antoine’s: Interview with H. Jackson Grayson Jr. January 16, 2000.
p. 6: “I’ll get her to the head of the line.” Interview with Mickey Parlour Bremermann, July 30, 1999.
p. 6: “I want to be district attorney”: Interview with Numa Bertel, October 9, 2000.
p. 6: “just close the door”: Interview with the late Herman Kohlman, May 19, 1998.
p. 6: “one man’s dramatic involvement”: Jot pad for notes and questions. Notes re: Jury Trials. The Garrison Family Papers. NARA.
p. 6: Marc Antony’s arrest: interview with Joyce Wood, June 10, 2000.
p. 7: Marc Antony a Kohn informant: Investigative Report— Confidential. October 14, 1957. MCC (Metropolitan Crime Commission).
p. 7: little black book: Interview with Barbara Barry Ward, July 11, 2001.
p. 7: post additional signs: Milton Brener, The Garrison Case: A Study in the Abuse of Power (New York: Clarkson N. Potter 1969), p. 3.
p. 7: “posters don’t vote”: Interview with Robert Haik, January 9, 2000.
p. 7: frequent the racetrack: Interview with G. Harrison Scott, June 9, 2000. Interview with Warren Garfunkel, June 2, 2000.
p. 7: in his seat: Interview with Garfunkel.
p. 7: disturbing the peace: “Picketers Arrested in N.O.,” Times- Picayune, August 29, 1961, section 1, p. 12; “Bucaro Defers Trial of Three,” Times-Picayune, August 30, 1961, section 1, p. 8; “Picketing Case Suspect Freed,” Times-Picayune, September 1, 1961, section 3, p. 8; “Two Get 90-Day Jail Sentences,” Times-Picayune, September 9, 1961, section 1, p. 7.