A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK's Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History

Description

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 Kennedy. A Farewell to Justice reveals that Oswald, no Marxist, 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 at the very least was a Defense Intelligence Agency 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, interviewed here for the first time by the author. 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.

Joan Mellen is a professor of English and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia and the author of seventeen books. She lives in Pennington, New Jersey.

-For seven years Joan Mellen, with determination and breathtaking courage, investigated and tested the original inquiry of District Attorney Jim Garrison into the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Single-handedly, she has taken that investigation far beyond where Garrison was able to go and has emerged from this terrifying underworld with astounding revelations. In A Farewell to Justice she brings to light the hidden witnesses and documentary record that establish the lead role of the CIA in the assassination and reveal that the setting up of alternative patsies accompanied the preparations for the shooting itself. The writing is taut and dramatic, the book indispensable.---Dick Gregory, coauthor of Murder in Memphis: The FBI and the Assassination of Martin Luther King--Dick Gregory