Ghosts of Dallas

19: Flooding the Zone

On January 25, 1967, two men squared off to debate an issue that had become an increasingly hot one, in the fractured and paranoid atmosphere of late 1960s America. Who killed President Kennedy? Had there or had there not been a conspiracy behind his murder? The two participants in this long-ago debate are now dead. But the tactics that one of them used that day to drown out the truth, and to flood the zone with demagoguery and lies, live on today, in the dangerous conspiratorial style of Donald J. Trump …

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18: The Trial of Clay Shaw (Part 6)

On February 27, 1969, the defence in the matter of the State of Louisiana versus Clay L. Shaw called its final witness to the stand. The witness was Clay Shaw himself. Under questioning from his own attorney, Shaw didn’t say anything all that startling or unexpected. What was surprising was happened next …

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17: The Trial of Clay Shaw (Part 5)

On January 21, 1969, at the criminal district court building in NO, proceedings finally got underway in the case of the State of Louisiana versus Clay L. Shaw. For almost two years now, Garrison had been loudly telling the world that he’d solved the Kennedy case. He had repeatedly promised that the proof would be delivered, when the time came. Well, the time had finally come. Garrison’s chance to put up or shut up had officially arrived. And if he didn’t put up, he really was going to look like one of history’s all-time greatest frauds and tools …

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16: The Trial of Clay Shaw (Part 4)

In April 1967, researchers working for the New Orleans DA Jim Garrison found a suspicious entry in the address book of Clay Shaw, the man Garrison had charged with having conspired to murder President John F. Kennedy. The entry was for a man named Lee Odom; the address Shaw had scrawled down for this Odom character was PO Box 19106, Dallas, Texas. According to Jim Garrison, the late Lee Harvey Oswald had once scrawled the same PO Box number in his notebook. Also according to Garrison, Post Office Box 19106 did not really exist in Dallas, and never had. It was “a non-existent or fictional number.” This meant that the number had to be some kind of code. And Garrison publicly claimed to have cracked the code. He announced that the number in the notebooks was an encrypted version of Jack Ruby’s unlisted telephone number: WH1-5601. The telephone code was the smoking gun. Not only did it link Clay Shaw with Lee Harvey Oswald. It also linked both men with Jack Ruby …

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15: The Trial of Clay Shaw (Part 3)

How do you make a case when you have no real case to make? It’s a question that all conspiracy theorists face. Jim Garrison faced it in March 1967, when he opted to stage a public pre-trial hearing in the Clay Shaw case. Garrison would now have to produce some evidence, fast, to show why he believed that Shaw had conspired in the murder of President Kennedy. So how did Garrison make his case? By injecting witnesses with truth serum and hypnotizing them. By offering bribes and issuing threats of violence. By springing convicts from prison in exchange for lurid anti-Shaw testimony. “He’s an unmitigated liar and a psychopathic paranoid,” said one of Garrison’s former aides, after quitting from his investigation in disgust. And the Jolly Green Giant was just getting warmed up …

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14: The Trial of Clay Shaw (Part 2)

On March 1, 1967, the New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison arrested a local civic leader named Clay Shaw, and charged him with having conspired to murder President John F. Kennedy. To Garrison, it didn’t matter that there was no serious evidence to support that extremely serious charge. He set about simply manufacturing a case out of thin air, using a series of increasingly desperate measures, including coercion of witnesses, bribery, extortion, forgery, and threats of physical violence. When Garrison arrested Clay Shaw, he crossed the Rubicon. There was no turning back. He had nowhere to go except deeper and deeper into the almost incredible clusterf**k that he had set in motion. And unfortunately, the man who was going to pay for Garrison’s act of madness wasn’t Garrison himself. It was Clay Shaw, the man who suddenly found himself starring in a Kafka novel, accused of committing a crime that he’d had absolutely nothing to do with …

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13: The Trial of Clay Shaw (Part 1)

To this day, the late New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw remains the only person ever to have been criminally prosecuted in connection with the murder of JFK. His trial began in New Orleans in January, 1969. On March 1st, a jury found him Not Guilty in just 54 minutes, but Shaw's life and reputation were destroyed by his very public prosecution. How was it that an entirely innocent man came to be prosecuted for conspiring to murder the President of the United States? The answer has nothing to do with Shaw, and everything to do with the warped mind of the man who prosecuted him: the New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. Garrison was drunk on conspiracy theory; when the early conspiratorial books about the case came out, he fell disastrously under the spell. And before he tried to pin Kennedy's murder on Clay Shaw, he tried to pin it on another innocent man: the eccentric, wig-wearing David W. Ferrie ... 

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12: The Odio Incident (Part 2)

Sylvia Odio's claim that she encountered Lee Harvey Oswald in late September of 1963 was compelling - so compelling that we have almost no choice but to believe it, unless we can find rock-solid evidence proving that Oswald couldn't have been at her apartment when she claimed he was. The Warren Commission believed that there was rock-solid evidence to that effect. It concluded that the man at Odio's apartment couldn't possibly have been Oswald. But how rock-solid, really, were the Warren Commission's reasons for believing that? And if we find that those reasons were not as impressive as the Commission thought - if we find that the real Oswald could indeed have been present at Sylvia Odio's apartment that night - then what the hell did his presence there mean? And who were the two men in his company? Clearly, they were not who they claimed to be. So who were they? Was it possible that they were agents of the Castro regime? And if they were, did Oswald know that? The more you look at the Odio incident, the more you see why it has been called "the strongest human evidence of conspiracy." 

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11: The Odio Incident (Part 1)

One night in late September of 1963, two months before the Kennedy assassination, three mysterious men paid a visit to the Dallas apartment of Sylvia Odio, a Cuban-American woman who was active in anti-Castro politics. One of these men was introduced to her as Leon Oswald - and when Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested after the assassination, Sylvia Odio instantly recognized him as the man who had come to her apartment. But why had the "Oswald" who visited Sylvia Odio portrayed himself as a bitter enemy of the Castro regime, when the real Oswald was a big-time fan of Castro's? Who were the two men he was with? And why had this "Oswald" told one of those men that it would be an excellent idea to shoot President Kennedy?

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10: The Magic of Reality

Within a few years of its appearance in 1964, the Warren Report had become a joke, a punchline. And the funniest thing about it, according to the critics, was the Single-Bullet Theory: the idea that a single bullet fired by Oswald had gone through both President Kennedy and Governor John Connally. The conspiracy theorists had a name for this bullet. They called it the Magic Bullet, because they believed that no bullet in the real world could possibly have behaved the way the Warren Commission said this bullet had behaved. If the conspiracy theorists were right to believe that, then the whole Warren Report was a fiction. If on the other hand the Warren Commission was right about the single bullet, that would tell us something important about conspiracy theory. It would tell us that the conspiratorial worldview is too limited and one-dimensional, and that it fails to grasp how rich and surprising the world can sometimes be. If a single bullet did go through both Kennedy and Connally, then reality itself is more magical than conspiracy theorists are capable of imagining …

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