Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History
READER REVIEW
Saint Joan, October 27, 2005
Reviewer: Eddie Kasica (New York City) – Originally posted on Amazon.com
The United States of America has never truly had its equivalent of Zola’s “J’Accuse!” Until now. While the Dreyfus Affair is a joke compared to the far-reaching PERMANENT effects of the National Security State execution of President John F. Kennedy(don’t think they’re permanent? — pick up the damn newspaper), quite a few books on the crime have been labeled Zolaesque: “Rush to Judgement”, Weisberg’s “Whitewash”, Sylvia Meagher’s “Accessories After the Fact”(a worthy forerunner of “Farewell to Justice” — Meagher and Mellen are sisters of heart, toughness and understanding), Anthony Summers’s “Conspiracy” and, of course, Gerald Posner’s “Case Closed”(just kidding). But they weren’t. Not even close, because they couldn’t be. The cover-up of the crime continued well into the 1990s and — like the film or not — it was Stone’s “JFK” which caused the break in the dam. The wave of the past 10 years, beginning with the publication and media-embrace of the malignant “Case Closed”, has been intensely anti-conspiracy. As all of U.S. society has seemingly moved toward the worship of power for power’s sake, leading to the establishment of the Bush Reich, anti-conspiracy ideology has become its own form of totalitarianism. In the power-saturated universe of Millennial America, seething with plots, anti-plot pronouncements have become as necessary as squeals in a slaughterhouse. But, there has been a counterwave. And it’s now tidal. More fresh evidence regarding 11/22/63 has become available these past years than was available to the Warren Commission, Jim Garrison or the House Assassinations Committee when they were conducting their investigations or cover-ups. We have had to be patient, and now it’s pay-off time. Christopher Lawford on the family, Gareth Porter on JFK and Vietnam, Bradley Ayers and Richard Whalen on Kennedy and Cuba, Gerald McKnight on the Warren Commission, and David Talbot’s coming book on Bobby and the murder(`though the Mellen book may have made that release somewhat compromised).
“Farewell to Justice” is the book we have all been waiting for, since the day the music died. Joan Mellen has always been one of the world’s best film critics, a magnificent biographer(Kay Boyle, Marilyn Monroe & Bobby Knight!), and a great writing teacher. Now she has broken the case. There’s no guessing here. No theoretical chapters on the validity of the Zapruder Film, the DalTex Building vs. a sewer drain opening, no jacket holes or bullet fragments. Just the moment-by-moment narrative of what happened to Jack Kennedy 42 years ago. And, best of all, why. The names are all here: the initiators, the designers, the middle-managers, and the mechanics. Mellen is also overwhelming in her recapturing what was really happening in the early 1960s United States. Not only those who care not about history relive it. As Americans, all of us relive Dallas every day of our lives. Everywhere we look, we can see the ghost of John F. Kennedy – and the shadows of the men and women who killed him. There is only one way to finally let him rest in peace: a cleaning-out from power of all those directly and indirectly responsible for his murder, and all those who have knowingly benefited from it. Germany could only put the ghosts of the Third Reich to rest through a complete de-nazification. The United States must do the same.
There is also sadness in this book too, for those of us who see the Kennedys as true heroes. (And they are.) Mellen has solved many, many mysteries in the book. One of the most startling is her clinching the case as to whether or not Robert Kennedy knew of plots to murder Fidel Castro. As Mellen demonstrates, his involvement went way beyond mere knowledge. By answering this question, she also answers the questions as to why the Kennedy Family has been so forceful in impairing post-Warren investigations of the crime.
Mellen’s passion, brilliance, understanding, writing talent and just-plain-sleuthing-genius has resulted in a book which will change history. The corporate media will no doubt try to burn her at the stake. They will fail. Because there is no answer to this book. Except justice and revenge.
A Farewell to Justice
From the new evidence in the National Archives’ JFK Assassination Records Collection and interviews with over one thousand people, author Joan Mellen in her comprehensive new book A FAREWELL TO JUSTICE demonstrates how the cover-up began in Louisiana months before President Kennedy was shot in Dallas.
Biographer Joan Mellen met New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in 1969. His relentless search for the truth about what happened to President Kennedy made a deep impression upon her. In 1997, Mellen started to work on the story of Garrison’s life.
Her biography turned into the story of Garrison’s investigation and then into a new investigation of the assassination itself.
Working with thousands of previously unreleased documents and drawing on more than one thousand interviews, with many witnesses speaking out for the first time, Joan Mellen revisits the investigation of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, the only public official to have indicted, in 1969, a suspect in President John F. Kennedy’s murder.
Garrison began by exposing the contradictions in the Warren Report, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was an unstable pro-Castro Marxist who acted alone in killing President Kennedy. A FAREWELL TO JUSTICE reveals that Oswald was no Marxist and was in fact working with both the FBI and the CIA, as well as with U.S. Customs, and that the attempts to sabotage Garrison’s investigation reached the highest levels of the U.S. government.
Garrison interviewed various individuals involved in the assassination, ranging from Clay Shaw and CIA contract employee David Ferrie to a Marine cohort of Oswald named Kerry Thornley, who was also a Defense Intelligence asset. Garrison’s suspects included CIA-sponsored soldiers of fortune enlisted in assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, an anti-Castro Cuban asset, and a young runner for the conspirators, who speaks openly here for the first time.
Building upon Garrison’s effort, Mellen uncovers decisive new evidence and clearly establishes the intelligence agencies’ roles in both a president’s assassination and its cover-up, set in motion well before the actual events of November 22, 1963.
This book will become a landmark. As Mellen explains in the Preface, on the 40th Anniversary of President Kennedy’s death in 2003, a Gallup Poll verified that twice as many people believed that the CIA was responsible for the assassination as believed that Oswald, a man without a motive, acted alone.