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)

Guest Post by Mark Crispin Miller

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:

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