The Official Legend is created and the media takes it from there. The glitter of official lies and the epic splendor of the thought - numbing funeral of J.F.K. confuse the eye and confound the understanding. Hitler always said "the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it." Lee Oswald - a crazed, lonely man who wanted attention and got it by killing a President, was only the first in a long line of patsies. In later years Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, men whose commitment to change and to peace would make them dangerous to men who are committed to war, would follow, also killed by such "lonely, crazed men," who remove our guilt by making murder a meaningless act of a loner. We have all become Hamlets in our country - children of a slain father - leader whose killers still possess the throne. The ghost of John F. Kennedy confronts us with the secret murder at the heart of the American dream. He forces on us the appalling questions: Of what is our Constitution made? What is our citizenship, and more, our lives worth? What is the future of a democracy where a President can be assassinated under conspicuously suspicious circumstances while the machinery of legal action scarcely trembles? How many political murders, disguised as heart attacks, cancer, suicides, airplane and car crashes, drug overdoses will occur before they are exposed for what they are? "Treason doth never prosper," wrote an English poet, "What's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason." The generals who sent Dreyfus to Devils Island were among the most honorable men in France, the men who killed Caesar were among the most honorable men in Rome. And the men who killed Kennedy, no doubt, were honorable men. I believe we have reached a time in our country, similar to what life must've been like under Hitler in the 30's, except we don't realize it because Fascism in our country takes the benign disguise of liberal democracy. There won't be such familiar signs as swastikas. We won't build Dachaus and Auschwitzes. We're not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose - stepping off to work ... "Fascism will come," Huey Long once said. "in the name of anti - fascism" - it will come in the name of your security - they call it "National Security," it will come with the mass media manipulating a clever concentration camp of the mind. The super state will provide you tranquility above the truth, the super state will make you believe you are living in the best of all possible worlds, and in order to do so will rewrite history as it sees fit. George Orwell's Ministry of Truth warned us, "Who controls the past, controls the future." The American people have yet to see the Zapruder film. Why? The American people have yet to see the real photographs and X - rays of the autopsy. Why? There are hundreds of documents that could help prove this conspiracy. Why have they been withheld or burned by the Government? Each time my office or you the people have asked those questions, demanded crucial evidence, the answer from on high has been "national security." What kind of "national security" do we have when we have been robbed of our leaders? Who determines our "national security"? What "national security" permits the removal of fundamental power from the hands of the American people and validates the ascendancy of invisible government in the United States? That kind of "national security," gentlemen of the jury, is when it smells like it, feels like it, and looks like it, you call it what it is - it's Fascism! I submit to you that what took place on November 22, 1963 was a coup d'etat. Its most direct and tragic result was a reversal of President Kennedy's commitment to withdraw from Vietnam. War is the biggest business in America worth $80 billion a year. The President was murdered by a conspiracy planned in advance at the highest levels of the United States government and carried out by fanatical and disciplined Cold Warriors in the Pentagon and CIA's covert operations apparatus - among them Clay Shaw here before you. It was a public execution and it was covered up by like - minded individuals in the Dallas Police Department, the Secret Service, the FBI, and the White House - all the way up to and including J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson, whom I consider accomplices after the fact. Let's ask the two men who have profited the most from the assassination - your former President Lyndon Baines Johnson and your new President, Richard Nixon - to release 51 CIA documents pertaining to Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby, or the secret CIA memo on Oswald's activities in Russia that was "destroyed" while being photocopied. All these documents are yours - the people's property - you pay for it, but because the government considers you children who might be too disturbed to face this reality, because you might lynch those involved, you cannot see these documents for another 75 years. I'm in my 40's, so I'll have shuffled off this mortal coil by then, but I'm already telling my 8 year - old son to keep himself physically fit so that one glorious September morning in 2038 he can walk into the National Archives and find out what the CIA and the FBI knew. They may even push it back then. It may become a generational affair, with questions passed down from father to son, mother to daughter, in the manner of the ancient runic bards. Someday somewhere, someone might find out the damned Truth. Or we might just build ourselves a new Government like the Declaration of Independence says we should do when the old one ain't working - maybe a little farther out West. He approaches the jury. An American naturalist wrote, "a patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government." Well, I'd hate to be in your shoes today. You have a lot to think about. Going back to when we were children, I think most of us in this courtroom thought that justice came into being automatically, that virtue was its own reward, that good would triumph over evil. But as we get older we know that this just isn't true. "The frontier is where a man faces a fact." Individual human beings have to create justice and this is not easy because truth often presents a threat to power and we have to fight power often at great risk to ourselves. People like Julia Ann Mercer, S.M. Holland, Lee Bowers, Jean Hill, and Willie O'Keefe have come forward and taken that risk. I have here some $8000 in these letters sent to my office from all over the country - quarters, dimes, dollar bills from housewives, plumbers, car salesmen, teachers, invalids ... These are the people who cannot afford to send money but do, these are the ones who drive the cabs, who nurse in the hospitals, who see their kids go to Vietnam. Why? Because they care, because they want to know the truth - because they want their country back, because it belongs to us the people as long as the people got the guts to fight for what they believe in! The truth is the most important value we have because if the truth does not endure, if the Government murders truth, if you cannot respect the hearts of these people ...... then this is no longer the country in which we were born in and this is not the country I want to die in ... And this was never more true than for John F. Kennedy whose murder was probably the most terrible moment in the history of our country. You the people, you the jury system, in sitting in judgement on Clay Shaw, represent the hope of humanity against Government power. In discharging your duty, in bringing the first conviction in this house of cards against Clay Shaw, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." Do not forget your dying king who forfeited his life. Show the world this is still a government of the people, for the people, and by the people. Nothing as long as you live will ever be more important. It's up to you.
--Jim Garrison speaking to the jury at the trial of New Orleans business man Clay Shaw-- |
