...don't underestimate the budget
cuts Kennedy called for in March of
'63 either - close to 52 military
installations in 25 states, 21
overseas bases, you're talking big
money. You know how many helicopters
have been lost in Vietnam? About
three thousand so far. Who makes
them? Bell Helicopter. Who owns
Bell? Bell was near bankruptcy when
the First National Bank of Boston
approached the CIA about developing
the helicopter for Indochina usage.
How 'bout the f-111 fighters? General
Dynamics in Fort Worth. Who owns
that? Find out the defense budget
since the war began. $75 going on a
hundred billion ... $200 billion'll
be spent before it ends. In 1950 it
was $13 billion. No war, no money.
Sometimes I think the organizing
principle of any society is for war.
The authority of the state over it's
people resides in it's war powers.
Even Eisenhower - military hero of
WWII - warned us about it: "beware
the military - industrial complex",
he said. Kennedy wanted to end the
Cold War in his second term. He
wanted to call of the moon race in
favor of cooperation with the Soviets.
He signed a treaty with the Soviets
to ban nuclear testing, he refused
to invade Cuba in '62, and he set
out to withdraw from Vietnam. But
that all ended on November 22, 1963.

FLASHBACK TO the White House, 1963. Lyndon Johnson is with Henry Cabot Lodge. We see them as shadowy figures from a
distance across the wide room, or near a veranda with a porch
and plenty of light. Johnson, his back to us, talks in a
loud, thick Texas drawl (mostly muted) and signs a document.

X
Only four days after J.F.K. was shot,
Lyndon Johnson signed National
Security Memo 273, which essentially
reversed Kennedy's new withdrawal
policy and gave the green light to
the covert operations against North
Vietnam that provoked the Gulf of
Tonkin incident. In that document
lay the Vietnam War.

Could the Mob change the parade route, Bill, or eliminate the protection for the President?

Could the Mob send Oswald to Russia and get him back?

Could the Mob get the FBI, the CIA, and the Dallas Police to make a mess of the investigation? Could the Mob appoint the Warren commission to cover it up? Could the Mob wreck the autopsy?

Could the Mob influence the national media to go to sleep?
And since when has the Mob used anything but .38's for hits, up close? The Mob wouldn't have the guts or the power for something of this magnitude. Assassins need payrolls, orders, times, schedules. This was a military-style ambush from start to finish... a coup d'etat with Lyndon Johnson waiting in the wings.


Oh, now you're saying Lyndon Johnson
was involved? The President of the
United States?


I know this, Bill - Lyndon Johnson
got $1 billion from his Texas friends,
Brown and Root, to dredge Cam Ranh
Bay for the military in Vietnam.
That's just for openers.


First we had your charge that the Cuban exiles killed the President,
then the Mob, then you said the oil
billionaires did it, then you said
the Minutemen and the Ku Klux Klan
collaborated to do it, now your latest
theory seems to be that the CIA and
the FBI and the Pentagon and the
White House all combined in some
elaborate conspiracy to kill John
Kennedy. Let me ask you, is there
anyone besides Lee Harvey Oswald who
you think did not conspire to kill
the President?


But rather than admit to
a conspiracy or investigate further,
the Commission chose to endorse the
theory put forth by an ambitious
junior counsellor, Arlen Specter.
One of the grossest lies ever forced
on the American people, we've come
to know it as the "magic bullet"
theory.


The Official Legend is created and
the media takes it from there. The
glitter of official lies and the
epic splendor of the thought-numbing
funeral of J.F.K. confuse the eye
and confound the understanding.
Hitler always said "the bigger the
lie, the more people will believe
it."

Lee Oswald - a crazed, lonely
man who wanted attention and got it
by killing a President, was only the
first in a long line of patsies. In
later years Bobby Kennedy and Martin
Luther King, men whose commitment to
change and to peace would make them
dangerous to men who are committed
to war, would follow, also killed by
such "lonely, crazed men," who remove
our guilt by making murder a
meaningless act of a loner. We have
all become Hamlets in our country -
children of a slain father - leader
whose killers still possess the
throne.

The ghost of John F. Kennedy
confronts us with the secret murder
at the heart of the American dream.
He forces on us the appalling
questions: Of what is our
Constitution made? What is our
citizenship, and more, our lives
worth? What is the future of a
democracy where a President can be
assassinated under conspicuously
suspicious circumstances while the
machinery of legal action scarcely
trembles? How many political murders,
disguised as heart attacks, cancer,
suicides, airplane and car crashes,
drug overdoses will occur before
they are exposed for what they are?


The men who killed Kennedy, no doubt,
were honorable men. I believe we
have reached a time in our country,
similar to what life must've been
like under Hitler in the 30's, except
we don't realize it because Fascism
in our country takes the benign
disguise of liberal democracy. There
won't be such familiar signs as
swastikas. We won't build Dachaus
and Auschwitzes. We're not going to
wake up one morning and suddenly
find ourselves in gray uniforms goose -
stepping off to work ... "Fascism
will come,"


Huey Long once said. "in the name of anti-fascism" - it will
come in the name of your security -
they call it "National Security," it
will come with the mass media
manipulating a clever concentration
camp of the mind. The super state
will provide you tranquility above
the truth, the super state will make
you believe you are living in the
best of all possible worlds, and in
order to do so will rewrite history
as it sees fit.

George Orwell's Ministry of Truth warned us, "Who
controls the past, controls the
future."


There are hundreds of documents that could help prove
this conspiracy.

Why have they been
withheld or burned by the Government?
Each time my office or you the people
have asked those questions, demanded
crucial evidence, the answer from on
high has been "national security."


What kind of "national security" do
we have when we have been robbed of
our leaders? Who determines our
"national security"? What "national
security" permits the removal of
fundamental power from the hands of
the American people and validates
the ascendancy of invisible government
in the United States? That kind of
"national security," gentlemen of
the jury, is when it smells like it,
feels like it, and looks like it,
you call it what it is - it's Fascism!


I submit to you that what took place
on November 22, 1963 was a coup
d'etat. Its most direct and tragic
result was a reversal of President
Kennedy's commitment to withdraw
from Vietnam. War is the biggest
business in America worth $80 billion
a year. The President was murdered
by a conspiracy planned in advance
at the highest levels of the United
States government and carried out by
fanatical and disciplined Cold
Warriors in the Pentagon and CIA's
covert operations apparatus - among
them Clay Shaw here before you. It
was a public execution and it was
covered up by like - minded
individuals in the Dallas Police
Department, the Secret Service, the
FBI, and the White House - all the
way up to and including J. Edgar
Hoover and Lyndon Johnson, whom I
consider accomplices after the fact.


There is a very simple way to
determine if I am being paranoid
here.

Let's ask the two men who have
profited the most from the
assassination - your former President
Lyndon Baines Johnson and your new
President, Richard Nixon - to release
51 CIA documents pertaining to Lee
Oswald and Jack Ruby, or the secret
CIA memo on Oswald's activities in
Russia that was "destroyed" while
being photocopied. All these
documents are yours - the people's
property - you pay for it, but because
the government considers you children
who might be too disturbed to face
this reality, because you might lynch
those involved, you cannot see these
documents for another 75 years. I'm
in my 40's, so I'll have shuffled
off this mortal coil by then, but
I'm already telling my 8 year - old
son to keep himself physically fit
so that one glorious September morning
in 2038 he can walk into the National
Archives and find out what the CIA
and the FBI knew. They may even
push it back then. It may become a
generational affair, with questions
passed down from father to son, mother
to daughter, in the manner of the
ancient runic bards. Someday
somewhere, someone might find out
the damned Truth. Or we might just
build ourselves a new Government
like the Declaration of Independence
says we should do when the old one
ain't working - maybe a little farther
out West.


** A Congressional Investigation from 1976 - 1979 found a
"probable conspiracy" in the assassination of John F. Kennedy
and recommended the Justice Department investigate further.
As of 1991, the Justice Department has done nothing. The
files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations are
locked away until the year 2029.

The camera moves onto the mottoes chiselled in the walls of
the National Archives in Washington, D.C.:

"STUDY THE PAST"

"PAST IS PROLOGUE"

"ETERNAL VIGILANCE IS THE PRICE OF LIBERTY"

DEDICATED TO THE YOUNG, IN WHOSE SPIRIT THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
MARCHES ON.





** In November, 1969 JIM GARRISON was re-elected to a third
term as District Attorney of Orleans Parish. In June of
1971, he was arrested by Federal Agents on charges of allowing
payoffs on pinball gambling by organized crime. In September
of 1973, after defending himself in Federal Court, he was
quickly found not guilty of charges that appear to have been
framed against him. Less than six weeks later, he was
narrowly defeated for a fourth term as District Attorney.

** In 1978, Garrison was elected Judge of the Louisiana State
Court of Appeal in New Orleans. He was re - elected in 1988.


To this date, he has brought the only public prosecution in
the Kennedy killing.



** SOUTHEAST ASIA: 58,000 American lives, 2 million Asian
lives, $220 billion spent, 10 million Americans air - lifted
there by commercial aircraft, more than 5,000 helicopters
lost, 6.5 million tons of bombs dropped.