hi this is dark journalist today i have a special report for you on the fiftieth anniversary of the j f k assassination now president kennedy was killed under suspicious circumstances and for reasons that remain obscure to this day the government and the media covered it up but there was one man who put elements of the cia on trial his name was jim garrison and he was the district attorney of new orleans where lee harvey oswald spent the summer in one thousand nine hundred sixty three now garrison story tho celebrated in the blockbuster film j f k may have been lost to us but veteran t v personality john barber poured his time and resources into a fascinating documentary called the garrison tapes the film was hindered from the start by outside influences that didn't want to see the light of day now with director john barber's help we will revisit this landmark effort and show you clips of jim garrison's heroic battle to find the truth in the assassination of president kennedy here we go j f k the last jim garrison documentary were john i want to start off with how it all began how did you meet jim garrison well i met you know strangely not daniel i started out as a stand up comic right and my mentor was red fox and this was long before red sox became the star of sanford and son by the way that's his real name johnson and he was brilliant and i was the first one best ever book him on a parody show when i got my first show but he had a comment that i thought was brilliant and the comment was heroes ain't born there cornered well i was i'm not a hero but i was sort of cornered into my meeting or my first introduction to jim garrison i originated the original am los angeles show in the one nine hundred sixty nine seventy it was the precursor to what became good morning america after i left that's a regis philbin ended up but in any event because i did a lot of topical and political material i read everything that i that i could as a comic so when i ended up auditioning for their show i guess the producers were stunned that i knew some much about the news and i got the job and immediately the show became unbelievably successful i put people on the air that no would be but he would book i mean the government was trying to put mohammad ali in prison i'd booked him for an hour i mean i put terrific people on the air anyway i always believed the warren report i mean why would i doubt what the government would say right stupid the reason i'm not stupid is because i didn't go to school very long but dropped out when i was fifteen and educated on the streets so i had sort of street smarts or street sense garrison arrested the place show off he announced publicly that he had solved the crime i mean we ran the news clip but everybody began to attack him the media began to attack him the s you know after two years he finally got to trial clay shaw was acquitted even though when the jury was polled they felt it was involved with the conspiracy but there wasn't enough evidence to evidence and in the three judge panel discarded that as hearsay so that ignorance is something you never hear of in the united states that in any event the trial is over and i'm in a bookstore one day and i see this book called the heritage of stone and says by jim terrace and i thought oh my is that the same jim garrison said pump it up in the bookstore and started to read it i stood there for an hour i couldn't put the book that i was stunned at what i read i mean that's his account of the trial isn't it yeah that was in three counting the clay shock trial that's all it was but i was staggered by the information the facts right in the had been it was unbelievable to me that he had to sue time live corp and take them to the supreme court to have the supreme court pulled away by generals and admirals i mean it was staggering so i plopped the book and i read it that night the very next morning then you know i went into the office i called information in new orleans the district attorney's office they gave me the number and i called and a female voice didn't answer eight bass baritone answered the phone and said the low and i said he said oh you must be the other one i don't  so i said to my said you know i have this morning show it's highest rated new show in los angeles and we do it live it's ninety minutes long and we open up the phones for for more than eighteen seconds on the raaf the air for a good use of the hosts are using nice people as straight people if somebody had in something interesting to say on my show when they called in they were on for as long as they were interesting in some cases it was a half an hour but in any event i said i want to book you on this show and he said john you'll never get away with it i said mr garrison we have just one of them anywhere doing really good  governor reagan's running for seventy second term he's going to come on this show rather than that the day show you must do it i'll interview you for about forty five minutes and we'll open up the phones because everybody would want to talk to you and he said john you will not get away with that nice mr harrison we'll take that chance ok so we both them for about a week or ten days later that i put up make the hotel reservations and everything the following week i was fired and jim garrison this canceled now let's go to this clip which is garrison describing how the media attacked him ok so you have this popular show and then they remove you as a kind of punishment for booking garrison and you ended up at n b c with a different new show tom brokaw and suggested that i'd be hired by n and i got the job and i was there for five years every monday wednesday and friday i never signed a contract with them because i signed a contract they would have on the material anyway i ended up there i waited three  and a golden mike while i'm there watergate happens and i pick up the phone and i call mr garrison and we chat about watergate and he mentioned some of the names that came up with dallas right so chat with him about that so we became like phone elves but never met so in nineteen seventy nine i create the first reality show which was a show called real people and i remember the show was great thank you very much in any event the executive producer on the other there's a fellow by the name of george slaughter had this contract with n when somebody gets a successful show in television the networks are always running to them to do another show and even those squatter was really not that creatively involved in the first three years of the show and they came to slaughter with an idea to do a live new show that was sort of entertaining and i guess they got the idea from watching  today than it was in one thousand nine hundred seventy seven when the movie came out absolutely anyway they gave him this show called speak up america it's so george it asked me to help him with this challenge and i said hey george i'm not i'm i'm up to my neck twenty hours a day doing real people i can't be helping you with this so i'm going through the paper one day and on page thirteen i come across this story and it said the house says john i feel like a blind man has gotten a small joke free in a very dark room only only i know i got it i said well you must feel vindicated i said you'll be all over the news  because i'm not going to show up and they said why i said because when i said being in the government in my trial they never showed up just a subpoena threat and they never did testify and i said well you know what i'm going to tell you a story i'm coming to new orleans to choose some stories for real people and i'm going to come and i'm going to put you on camera and he said john you know in the ten years since drano i never talk to anyone terrifying stimulating three hours i had ever spent in my whole life here's another clip from the keris and tapes they can remove you and they old so anyway i come back and it's there's so much material it's going to be a two parter ok so in the first part we open up and i have marge of gardeners doing it because waiting for part two now when we did the interview i asked them how many shooters he felt that were and he said it was probably triangulation with three shooters and he said three teams just to one to fire the rifle and one to dismantle and pick up the shells and he said maybe even teams of three in case they needed radio personnel and th our hot many people do you think actively knew that kennedy was going to be the target so he's a former lieutenant colonel in the air force and the he  calculating around it's got to be in a need to know basis of he said about thirty two actively would know so i said wow that's interesting and a lot of them were still around now when he had his trial you know he says in the documentary that the killing of the president was not a federal crime so a lot of the people that he very difficult time anyway part two comes up not here is a point i am people in this business when they hit it big in television they make him and see him on the money and i was making him off a lot of money rental was from a swiss thing but anyway part two is coming up my wife and i are sitting at home with their son watching the story and comes to the story which i had edited and here's marjoe gortner sort of looking at jim slightly off camera and saying how many shooters do you think that we're and he says about thirty two believable and then the phone rings and it's george slaughter and he says what do you think and i started screaming at him yeah we had this horrible fight on the phone and i hung up i immediately called garrison and that's like midnight in new orleans and i'm crying and i garrison i don't know what happened and they reedited at midnight last night and they they didn't tell me what they were doing and he said it's the john i'm used to i said then you not sue them you must sue them the y have deliberately liable jew and that that is slander when it's deliberate and i will back you out back you up and he said john my family loves your show all i want you to do is send me a couple of real people i am so used to this and that's why i haven't talked to anybody for ten years so please don't feel bad i mean i'm telling you daniel he could have alone and b c well it sounds like they definitely had it in for him i'm just surprised they were so blatant about it so then what happened to you as a result of all this  interest industry got really nervous bob may i had a difficult time as you can well imagine in the business but as a sidebar i was going to say in the to go to new orleans to get the key witness kidney a cab driver named perry this work for an insurance company that time who said under oath that he was oswald and clay shaw and david ferrie when they were planning their fascination in new orleans and what walter sheridan was trying to get him out of new orleans to california to go to work for an insurance company at fifty thousand dollars a year well gerritsen was smart because perry came to him and said i'm meeting with these guys from n b c you're going to make this documentary so garrison wired him and here you have walter sheridan from n b c interfering with this murder trial of the president of the united states wow well  charge sheridan with a felony and they never went to court because the federal government stepped in but at the time there was in the united states in broadcasting something called the fairness doctrine  one i viewed reagan on my show he's a republican next week i gotta interview a democrat and if there's a socialist who can get five percent of the vote i've got interview a socialist or if there's a gnat so you're a flyer is there anybody who can get five percent of the popular vote if you put somebody on the air you've got to give them equal time and he has no choice but to give jim garrison at half an hour of late night television to explain his case you can never see that in the america today i mean the frogs that have been perpetrated in this country first of all from the killing of john kennedy to the murder of martin luther king probably by the f b i to the murder of robert kennedy i was personal friends with thomas the go to  led by frank sinatra and frank sinatra and i were the closest of friends since i wrote lap and because i used to write all the special material that was unfortunate last time you ever spoke to me because i was really got rid of the good you ok so this clip is garrison outlining the unusual aspects of the kennedy motorcade as it headed into dealey plaza the newspapers in dalla so the route of the motorcade as it came out main continuing through the extension of my going in the middle of the big pass through the plaza on thursday evening at the eleventh hour the route was changed by the administration of mayor ok the route was changed to turn right on houston and then left on not only going by case in a nutshell how did he describe it to you in the not shall he said the cia murdered him they did that so that they could assassination john kennedy was interviewed at his compound in hyannis port while there cronkite you can google light interview and he says that war is not ours to fight that war is the vietnam we will supply any to them but we will not supply the men to him and he said he was going to withdraw our troops and money for a year in the end of the year there'd be no more americans and vietnam he was killed on friday and on sunday lyndon johnson said it thousand troops that you know now you know the military and the government can't do anything well in two days they had to be preparing that move into vietnam for a long long long time yeah it definitely seems like it so garrisons final analysis was that elements name was revealed to the cops it was revealed to the cops military intelligence so here's jim marrs from the documentary explaining how military intelligence strangely supply the oswald info to the authorities in the late fall of sixty two a little bit in sixty three had lived at six o l's ok but that address never showed up on any of his applications or or employee employment forms for the book deposit colonel jones with fourth army military intelligence got a call from his people in dallas and they said they've got a suspect here and his name is alex j dale and joan said he went to military intelligence files and looked up alex  dale and found a cross reference to lead harvey oswald and he gave his address as six o five l's what does all that mean army intelligence tipped off the dallas police that the man they wanted was hypothetically say that you had the ability to do part two what would be the kind of things that you would cover their going after the media side and how the media kind of whitewashed the entire crime and still to this day protect the secret about it and there's still a wall there well all you have to do you know i used to do in my standup a joke that if you want to make fun of politicians you don't want to write jokes you just said to quote t well let same thing holds true about the media you don't have to denigrate them all you have to do is report what they did in reporting what they did people are go be outraged god that really happened i mean some people are left with their mouths open when they see that section of the document pretty talking about how n b c deliberately tried this and  yeah and then she still has a life i mean it's beyond belief those people should have lost their license and they should have been in prison you know so that's what i would do and you can cover absolutely all of you new york times washington post c b s i mean they were making their documentary supporting the warren report long before the warren report was finished right now here's that it was the fingerprints on the boxes added up to the fingerprints of a large number of policeman one on adenosine and no fingerprints describing where the shots came from and the daughter who was around the time tells a story about well it's saying that shots came from the grassy knoll and then the producers say no no no  commission say where did they say the shots came from from the best buy stores and i said that's right and that's what we want you to say and i remember riding home with him he was so upset i mean he would hit the driving will the steering wheel and say why i mean they to make me look like i'm insane and i know that's where they came from i know that's where the shot came from they didn't intend to publish the report as allen dulles and one of the top people  running the investigation the american people don't really but it turns out some of us do and john you've worked in the media for many years and spent a lot of time with important people in journalism what do you think at this point fifty years after it happened they're still hiding the truth of j f k s assassination and promoting absurd ideas like the magic bullet in lone at their ease i mean what is it about this incident that they will not acknowledge the facts and the evidence and go on record here they like their jobs i guarantee you every one of them i mean look at bill o'reilly for god's sake this is francis you know what he was on inside edition twenty years ago he was always running at service from the zapruder film and he was always decrying the fact that never really investigated the case then they become this mega millionaire mouth that crocks and he puts out this book the killing of kennedy he goes on sixty minutes last week and he says god told him to write this book about the killing of candidate put up a thing on my facebook page that got to at the time it hits he said that on sixty minutes iranian said god directed him to write the killing of kennedy and george but bush said god directed him to invade iraq and then i said in closing that makes three of them who are not boy and god so let's go back to the documentary when you've finished making it you ran into some unusual obstacles i'd say and maybe some outside forces were keeping your film from reaching a wider audience that's exactly right and you know i had was sure that the garrison say was going to make a ton of money because it was going to come out right after fall on the heels of oliver stone's j f k nobody would air it in this country because if i got the money it was going to do two things i was going to set up a scholarship for a law student to do blaine which is where garrison went and so i was going to make a second documentary all the and how it raises the legitimate questions about the assassination absalom the morning edition and the late edition that's all excised he is made head of the book section for their weekend  supplement of pretty fast action and garrison i mean anybody who looks at this case it's stunned that a guy named jack ruby gets into the basement of the dallas police station that jim garrison asked that question and found out the guy who gave jack ruby the orders to kill even harvey oswald and he did was very simple i detective work that any half witted cop could have done and his own the warren commission could have done it the warren commission was not set up to investigate the death of john kennedy they were set up to prevent an investigation into the death of john kennedy price had a block there and had a block of the media side on both yes yes absolutely john kennedy was obviously south of the pond everybody knows that that especially john how do you feel the younger generation is doing with understanding this crime and its implications to history every last two years only one or two ever knew that the federal reserve was a private bank wow and now you know ho at thirty three percent to fight the american civil war he told them to go screw themselves greenbacks and the day he was assassinated they start group printing the greenbacks right but now i just got back to weeks ago from small university college and they can south carolina and everyone whether they are christians  federal government is not only lying to them but is indeed become their enemy and i'll tell you america's in dread both dreadful shape you would think that people would be brining to me  three said please can we show your documentary on showtime or h b o or the history channel or biography already have all turned down humble involved and they all say it's nothing new and i say hold it people have not seen what this man uncovered in his investigation and in a court of law so i never took sides in the telling of any of my stories ever  what i wanted to do was let jim garrison tell his side of the prosecution case for us because for fifty years or by that time it was twenty years thirty years the federal government in the media had had the microphones and the cameras and i thought i'd give him a chance and so that's why i did it and i'll never make back the money that i put into it but i don't care i just want the story to be out the and i'm working on something now ok that if it happens will dwarf anything that's going to be talked about november twenty second this year and you know i was a little this ar comparison and best documentary should be screened in europe and i'll be glad to come back up my own experience and screen to do it q and a and he wrote back it's just too bad we didn't know about you earlier we would have had you but we're all dallas is going to have all these events the week of the twenty second and there's a lady or there's some site that covers everything and the kennedy assassination i can't remember the  upon her site and it's everything about the candid the assassination so i wrote of this great note and suggested she go to my site and look at the documentary and what she mentioned it on what she got in on or side so people could go and see it and they could see it for nothing she wrote me back the nastiest note and i never heard from her again when i must say the yielded well you know there is something weird about a lot of these people who are that for fear that these other people might get more attention but only one person ever investigated the cases a la porson up there and that was scarce and then you'd think they'd you know demand that somehow that documentary be show at these events and i never hear well that is surprising actually but think of it as their loss on that one now these two clips are about the media and certain officials cooperating in the cover up without knowing precisely who they were i think there had to be that there would be at least at the onset if you elements of the media would be cooperative from the were aware and the one with assume because it was too much of an overnight adjustment the f b i was in full cooperation with the c a and b perpetrators of the hours you know i recently came across an interview with larry king where he remembered meeting garrison and also the district attorney of miami in the late sixty's but he distinctly recall that at the end of the meeting garrison you know saying goodbye and leaned down to his car window and said they're going to kill senator robert kennedy you know and then of course it actually the organization does jim garrison finance investigation was not the city you are going to as a nation was a bunch of local businessmen and car dealers and they formed a group called truth  consequences they were the ones that fund garrison so that snoopers couldn't go into the cities records to see where money was going how to help garrison so it was all on the right and then the event larry king had his late radio show and miami and he had one of the heads of truth or consequences a car dealer on the show and jim garrison and they were talking about raising money to investigate the case and guess what people said and then fifty thousand dollars to larry creating to g garrison it's impressive and you know what king did with it i'm almost afraid to ask paid off his horse racing debts and he was charged with charged with never ever hear of the and look at one of the who's the one of the big conservative radio talk shows and i was gordon liddy yeah a guy a guy who wanted to murder anderson to shut him up on behalf of richard nixon wanted to murder him so they would go out and kill him oliver north a traitor to the united states constitution telling arm that the enemy ends up with his own show and ends up on fox yeah i mean it's reprehensible yeah it's absolutely it's like the revolving door between the politicians and the press and the press organizations it's just so tight and that's the way they control the flow of a lot of the information well i heard that somebody asked obama if he was going to give up way that i thought was terrific you put him in there and that's roger craig oh yeah that's a really sad story and he really sickly was in the wrong place at the wrong time and saw something that he shouldn't have  of he was one of the street cops in dallas was told to stand down and not protect the motorcade and you know how you see this so you know it's still a very solvable crime i mean if we had had cell phones at that time that the crime would have been solved that afternoon in spite of what the government was trying to do you know i mean you could google secret service in dallas and you'll see a film of the secret service agent on the right rear of the limousine being pulled off by it's a perrier right as a car turning toward toward the book depository yeah i think it's interesting that you put craig in there because craig is another it's appeared and he tells a story about going to work for garrison doing some work and research war comes out to get in this car and it's car blows up right and then supposedly commits suicide by shooting themselves with a rifle there are so many witnesses to the assassination of j f k that are slowly methodically bumped off that list just unbelievable that somebody researches into it how many of the key crucial people car on the side of the street and i want to get this information and when i came back and cranked up my current former dallas police officer roger craig was hospitalized for two months he later purportedly committed suicide with a rifle i don't want to go into that because the family is and everything else but we've lost the three witnesses the physical reasons it's like dallas that john what is this event you've been hinting about with the thing that i'm planning if it comes out it will dwarf anything that anyone has ever done about the assassination including oliver stone's movie your bike if i can it i'm going to know within the next two or three weeks and if it comes up we will be doing that the first or second week in december and that will be the last look at the assassination tasso that will be excellent because that related all to the part two documentary that you're going to do at the time and decided against no it's not it's a way of getting that documentary screening on a very very broad national international scale with the help of extreme importance in this case and in this country that nobody knows i'm talking to this point except george knapp would host that and myself and this other person would be the only two so if it comes off it'll be here are some final thoughts from garrison on the j f k trial and i realize i was suddenly an object of interest to the agency i guess i might of assumed that earlier but it didn't occur to me i guess part of me still thought i was living in the country i why did you do it well i go back to what redd foxx said heroes are born they're cornered i was i was cornered with this information and what am i going to do about it and i look around at all the other stories and i say to myself they have to hear what this man asked to say and that's the reason i did that i consider myself a jim garrison said he never felt like a hero being da he was just doing his job john i want to thank you and not just for taking the time to do such an excellent interview but also for bringing to light this fantastic story of jim garrison fighting the powers that be to reveal the truth about j f k this has a nation well it's my pleasure daniel thank you for having me thanks for the interest you bet and we will do our best to bring your groundbreaking documentary into the spotlight all that will be wonderful thank you so much thank you for joining me for this powerful report on j f k the last jim garrison documentary with john barber you can find