Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 03:36:06 CST
From: <U54778@uicvm.uic.edu>
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy.jfk
Subject:    LIFTON ON GARRISON

   Since there were several postings over the holidays that
dealt with discension within the WC critics groups and a
decent amount of time has passed since Garrison's passing, I
thought I would post this tidbit to show that not all critics
are of the same attitude on all subjects.  This does not mean
that I endorse completely Lifton's view on Garrison.  I tend to
lean in that direction but I have not studied this area enough
to feel confident in making a judgement on this.  For those of
you who embrace Lifton and Garrison wholeheartedly, you should
know that there doesn't seem to have been any love lost between
them.
( You should also know that, aside from viewpoints that lack
  a reasonable amount of imagination such as McAdams, who can't
  picture the possibility of a conspiracy in the JFK case,
  there are several focus points in the body of what I will
  call the assassination lore which are very weak in supporting
  facts.  One of the obvious points is if there are persons
  other than LHO in the sixth floor window, how did they get
  away without being seen.  This sounds like it is easily
  answered at first thought but try using all the body of
  testimony showing the TSBD actually quite packed with
  people who knew each other well by sight and you have a
  classic murder mystery canard such as the locked room.
  The other great weakness in the lore is that LHO was a
  superspy and all the other poses were phony.  In particular,
  the embracing of Marxist thought on LHO's part.  I have seen
  casual dismissals of this LHO character trait in several forms
  in several publications.  I would be more impressed if there
  was stronger points of support for this view.  I, myself,
  can imagine a more complex LHO, who could turn to Marxism
  and indulge in some light spy work simultaneously but I
  realize that this not only complicates the story but
  has scant support in the evidence.  If we accept Thornley's
  account of LHO in the Marines, we have to deal with this
  view of LHO when considering what he was capable of doing. )


 (You might also note the date that this intro was written.
  By this date, everyone in the critic community knew that
  Stone was making a movie and was using Garrison as his
  dramatic center.  I would say that Lifton's attack is
  tatamount to an attack on Stone.)

Introduction to Kerry Thornley's novel The Idle Warriors
By David S. Lifton
Author of Best Evidence (Macmillan, 1980)
January 14, 1991

     Kerry Thornley's manuscript, The ldle Warriors, has a special
meaning for me. First, it provides an accurate picture --- through
the vehicle of a novel --- of what it was like to be a Marine in
Oswald's unit, Marine Air Control Squadron One (MACS 1), at the
height of the Cold War in 1959.  Here we have Oswald, as the
fictionalized Johnny Shellburn, portrayed as the kibitzing
wise-cracking fellow that Kerry knew, just months before Oswald
defected to the Soviet Union.
     Oswald's defection was an important event in Thornley's life.
Having decided to be an author, Kerry was looking for a topic. Upon
reading a newspaper account about what Oswald had just done, Kerry
in effect cried "eureka". What a great story, he thought --- and
he had actually known this guy! Thornley knew exactly what his
first book would be about --- a Marine who became sufficiently
disillusioned with his country as a result of peacetime service in
Japan, and decided to defect to Russia.  The Idle Warriors was
born; and the manuscript, complete with its pre-assassination
portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald, was finished well before the events
of November 1963.
     So much for background. The special and more important meaning
Kerry's novel will always have for me is that it constitutes a slap
at District Attorney Jim Garrison, and his inability to take
Kerry's Warren Commission testimony and the book he wrote --- a
writer's first work --- at face value, the honest portrayal of
Oswald by an observer who knew him.  Instead, Garrison
reversed cause and effect. No, he reasoned Kerry hadn't told the
truth. Rather, Kerry had set out to paint a false picture of Oswald
--- all part of a plot.  On February 21, 1968, a few weeks after
calling Thornley before a New Orleans Grand Jury, Garrison charged
him with perjury.  In an eight page press release, Garrison
explained his view of the role Kerry played in a conspiracy to
frame Oswald.
     "It was necessary to have a major witness testify in great
detail to create an early image (of Oswald) as a Marxist so that
there would not be too much public curiosity about the reasons for
Oswald's abrupt departure from the Marine Corps to sail to Russia."
     The result: the beginning of a totally unfair and unjust
prosecution of Kerry Thornley, someone I had gotten to know quite
well back 1965, and who, as far I could tell, had done nothing
wrong but reported the truth about an interesting Marine he had
once known while serving at El Toro Marine Base in Southern
California.  As events unfolded, the media caught on to Garrison
and his so called "investigation", which seemed less and less like
something designed to ferret out truth; and more and more ---
particularly if you were on the receiving end of things, as was
Thornley --- like something out of Kafka.
     Later, I berated myself about Kerry's predicament, because it
was I who had urged Kerry to testify before the New Orleans Grand
Jury.  Looking backwards, I should have known better--but then,
hindsight is always superior.  In the Spring of 1967, I had spent
the better part of a day with Mr. Garrison, alone, in Los Angeles,
and came away quite alarmed at the character and capabilities of
this man who had announced to the world just months before that he
had "solved" the Kennedy assassination. I had taken him to task for
his reasoning in some particular matter, and, somewhat exasperated,
had the temerity to ask what he thought had actually happened, what
the truth really was.  Details of our discussion are less important
than what he said next.  Looking me straight in the eye, Garrison
intoned: "After the fact there is no truth. There is only what the
jury decides."
     Oh really?   Reality is whatever a jury can be persuaded to
believe?
     This corrupt methodology would turn every lawyer into a
salesman, selling his wares to a naive jury. In the hands of a
prosecutor, it is prescription for disaster.  It was the sort of
thinking that led to the false prosecutions by Garrison of people
who the New Orleans jury subsequently acquitted --- defendants who
I believe had no more to do with the assassination than you,
innocent reader, or I, or Thornley.
     To this day, I am astounded that Garrison, with this
philosophy, with those acquittals, with all the damage he did to
the assassination research movement, is a Louisiana judge. To this
day, efforts continue in some quarters to rewrite history, to
transform a man who was regarded by sensible people as a demagogue,
into some kind of folk hero --- someone who found the truth but,
alas, just wasn't able to prove it in court.
     Reconstructing the truth-whether about a crime, or a
historical event --- can indeed be difficult. It all comes down to
the evidence. And on the question of what Lee Harvey Oswald was
like during the time he was in the Marines, Kerry provided just
that: a valid eyewitness account.  History is fortunate that
someone who knew Oswald was intrigued enough to write a book about
him - before November 1963.
     There are three reasons, then, to read Kerry's book. First,
it tells us what it was like in 1959 to be a 19 year old Marine in
peacetime Japan.  Second, it. presents a portrait of Oswald written
before November 1963.  Finally, Kerry's novel provides an insight
to Mr. Garrison and his 1967 pronouncements that he had "solved"
the Kennedy assassination: you read it now; he read it then.
Remember, when reading it, that Mr. Garrison couldn't see it for
what it was, but instead concocted an elaborate conspiracy theory
about the book's author.
     Kerry wrote this novel with the best of intentions -- it was
a writer's first work. Although several years (and thousands of
dollars of legal fees later) the perjury charges against Kerry were
dropped, The Idle Warriors bears witness to the price he paid
simply because he knew Lee Harvey Oswald and decided to write about
him. It was a price extracted because a District Attorney who
became an assassination buff believed the truth was whatever he
could sell to a grand jury; and then got swept away in a paranoid
fantasy, misused the powers of his office, and made Kerry's life
grist for his mill.
     Read it. Pretend you are a juror. You decide.




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