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.)
