Jim Garrison on "The Steve Allen Show" in 1971: Just think where we'd be now if "our free press" would always give such mavericks a respectful hearing, instead of jeering them (as the CIA requires)
We didn't have to end up where we are today—and wouldn't have thus ended up, if "our free press" had served us as the Framers meant it to
Here—some four years after the CIA first weaponized the phrase “conspiracy theory,” for use against those questioning the Warren Report—was a remarkable appearance by Jim Garrison on “The Steve Allen Show,” to talk about his new book A Heritage of Stone, about JFK’s assassination, and its relation to the war in Vietnam. Garrison was joined in that rare moment by Mort Sahl, the great comedian, who had served for several years as part of Garrison’s investigative team (and who paid dearly for it).
This was not the only time that Garrison appeared before a national TV audience, but it was the first (and only) time he had a sympathetic host. On January 31, 1968, he had appeared on “The Tonight Show,” with an uneasy Johnny Carson. Mort Sahl, in a prior appearance, had challenged Carson to have Garrison come on, and Carson had no choice but to agree; but he gave Garrison a cool reception, and rather a hard time, though Garrison knew far too much about the matter, and was too skilled at public argument, for Carson to prevail: Garrison handily won over Carson’s studio audience, just as he’d won over countless juries as New Orleans’ Attorney General. (It’s highly probable that Carson had been influenced beforehand by the CIA, via NBC, which, the year before, had aired a hatchet-job on Garrison by NBC News.)
By contrast, Steve Allen was respectful toward both Garrison and Sahl, since (as he said in introducing them) he’d already been persuaded, by his reading, that the Warren Report has very little credibility. (The two books that he mentions, without naming them, were, more than likely, Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment and Sylvia Meagher’s Accessories After the Fact.) Thus he knew enough to let his two guests say their piece, while having on, to counter them, Bob Dornan, the right-wing TV actor who would graduate to Congress two years later, continuing his demagogic service to the Pentagon and CIA. His comfy residence inside the latter’s pocket is apparent in his lavish condemnations of the “madness” he discerned in Garrison’s “conspiracy theory”; though, in fairness to the CIA, it must be noted too that Dornan’s oratorical hysterics and maniacal illogic were excesses all his own. At carrying the CIA’s anti-“conspiracist” message, Dornan did a better job in 1994, when, in the House, he ranted thus:
I remember when terrorism specialist Steve Emerson totally
demolished, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Time magazine's outrageous
story on the now infamous phony October Surprise conspiracy theory.
Emerson proved that Time had been shamelessly used by agent
provocateurs and con artists. Yet, incredibly, Time stuck by its story.
When a major news magazine refuses to admit its most obvious and
blatant errors, something is drastically wrong. But it is a perfect
example of how difficult it is to get satisfaction from the media.
Now that that “infamous phony conspiracy theory” has, at long last, (quietly) been deemed true by the New York Times, so has Dornan’s function as a propagandist been reconfirmed.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CREC-1994-10-08/html/CREC-1994-10-08-pt1-PgE207.htm
This fascinating segment on Steve Allen’s show is an invaluable glimpse of an explosive truth—indeed, the most explosive truth—when it had not yet been blacked out completely by the media. JFK’s assassination, and the likely state conspiracy behind it, would now and then flash into public view through 1979 (when the House Select Committee on Assassinations found, reluctantly, that the murder did result from some conspiracy). Thereafter, that explosive truth (along with those concerning King’s and Bobby Kennedy’s assassinations) went into full eclipse until December, 1991, when Oliver Stone’s JFK forced it into public view again, and with unprecedented cogency. It tells us something more about the CIA’s vast propaganda apparatus that the film was savaged as “conspiracy theory” both by Rep. Dornan (who called Stone “a Bolshevik enemy”) and such leftist luminaries as Alexander Cockburn and Noam Chomsky.
And as this segment on the Allen show provides a clear glimpse of the darkening terrain in 1971, it also hints at where we might be now, if it weren’t just Steve Allen who would host the likes of Garrison and Sahl, and not to trash them, but to let them speak so that a national audience could hear them. It’s pertinent to note that “The Steve Allen Show” was not on any network at that point, but a syndicated program (and that it ended shortly after Garrison’s appearance there). It’s also relevant to stress that Allen’s studio audience was overwhelmingly receptive to Garrison and Sahl’s “conspiracy theory,” which, as Sahl reported, was, according to Lou Harris, credible to over 90% of the American people. Thus “our free press” and We the People were in separate orbits even way back then—so we must wonder where we’d be today if “our free press” were really ours, and really free, back when we badly needed it to blow away that biggest of Big Lies, so that its authors couldn’t then proceed to put across the many others that, by now, have made this world a living hell, where we must fight to speak the simplest truths out loud.
Garrison on “The Tonight Show,” January 31, 1968:
Garrison’s reply to NBC’s “White Paper” attacking his investigation into JFK’s assassination:
Garrison was a great man and a patriot-- one of the true heroic figures of the last 100 years and one of the first to have his reputation so unfairly destroyed by the CIA propaganda machine. Here is a great quote from a Playboy Interview he did in 1967:
"I was with the artillery supporting the division that took Dachau; I arrived there the day after it was taken, when bulldozers were making pyramids of human bodies outside the camp. What I saw there has haunted me ever since. Because the law is my profession, I've always wondered about the judges throughout Germany who sentenced men to jail for picking pockets at a time when their own government was jerking gold from the teeth of men murdered in gas chambers. I'm concerned about all of this because it isn't a German phenomenon; it's a human phenomenon. It can happen here, because there has been no change and there has been no progress and there has been no increase of understanding on the part of men for their fellow man.
What worries me deeply, and I have seen it exemplified in this case, is that we in America are in great danger of slowly evolving into a proto-fascist state. It will be a different kind of fascist state from the one of the Germans evolved; theirs grew out of depression and promised bread and work, while ours, curiously enough, seems to be emerging from prosperity. But in the final analysis, it's based on power and on the inability to put human goals and human conscience above the dictates of the state. Its origins can be traced in the tremendous war machine we've built since 1945, the "military-industrial complex" that Eisenhower vainly warned us about, which now dominates every aspect of our life. The power of the states and Congress has gradually been abandoned to the Executive Department, because of war conditions; and we've seen the creation of an arrogant, swollen bureaucratic complex totally unfettered by the checks and balances of the Constitution.
In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can't spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can't look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won't be there. We won't build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line. We're not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose-stepping off to work. But this isn't the test. The test is: What happens to the individual who dissents? In Nazi Germany, he was physically destroyed; here, the process is more subtle, but the end results can be the same.
I've learned enough about the machinations of the CIA in the past year to know that this is no longer the dreamworld America I once believed in. The imperatives of the population explosion, which almost inevitably will lessen our belief in the sanctity of the individual human life, combined with the awesome power of the CIA and the defense establishment, seem destined to seal the fate of the America I knew as a child and bring us into a new Orwellian world where the citizen exists for the state and where raw power justifies any and every immoral act. I've always had a kind of knee-jerk trust in my Government's basic integrity, whatever political blunders it may make. But I've come to realize that in Washington, deceiving and manipulating the public are viewed by some as the natural prerogatives of office. Huey Long once said, "Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism." I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
"The clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line." -- I always thought this observation was bloody brilliant...and this was 1967!
I have my issues with Steve Bannon. He says and does many things I agree with. And he says and does some things I don't agree with, and don't trust him on. That said, when people finally hear a side of a debate they've never heard before, been told horrible things about and avoided they can change their minds. This video is from a debate held in Canada in front of a VERY liberal audience, an audience that was outwardly hostile to Steve Bannon and supportive of David Frum throughout it. An audience that groaned at Bannon, mockingly laughed at him, applauded all of the liberal talking points they shared with Frum and the moderator, who is an "elite" liberal, not a populist. The audience was surveyed at the beginning and the end of the debate about which side of the issue they were on. The shift was dramatic and unexpected.
The future is Populist or Liberal?
From pre-debate: Populist 28% - Liberal 72%
To post-debate: Populist 57% - Liberal 43%
Steve Bannon vs David Frum - The Rise of Populism - Munk Debate Nov 2, 2018
https://youtu.be/qA50BE7d1X8
Because when people hear a side they have never heard before, from the mouth of the person who holds those ideas instead of through a filter that applies a bias, they become more open-minded to an idea they thought they knew their position on before. And this debate is an example of why we are so censored. The powers, government and industry, know the power of free speech reaching ears that haven't heard censored ideas before. And they fear a population that does hear them. For good reason. They know their ideas are losers in free and fair debates. Even in front of liberal, progressive, "elite" audiences.