Final_Judgment

320 They Dare Not Speak Out [259]
barrage. This is all the more remarkable in that it was the very newspapers
of New Orleans who were Garrison's fiercest at-home critics.
Garrison clearly was on the right track. He was looking in the right
places. It was Garrison who linked Clay Shaw to the JFK assassination
conspiracy and it was Shaw who sat on the board of Permindex, the
shadowy Israeli Mossad-linked entity that played so central a role in the
murder of the American president. How much Shaw knew about the
impending murder of the president will never be known, but there is no
question that Shaw was tied to the core of the conspiracy.
THE FEDS VERSUS GARRISON
No wonder then that the full force of the federal government came down
on Garrison's head. He was hit with a wholly-concocted indictment on
bribery charges but subsequently—and rightly—was acquitted. The key
witness against him, a former friend named Pershing Gervais, admitted in a
press interview (with journalist Rosemary James, herself a Garrison critic)
that the charges against Garrison were a Justice Department concoction.
Gervais said, "They wanted to silence Jim Garrison. That was their primary
objective . . ." It was, according to Gervais, "a total, complete political
frame-up, absolutely." He said "the entire thing" was a whole lie. 706
Despite the vindication, the Internal Revenue Service jumped into the
picture and brought a tax evasion indictment against Garrison for not paying
taxes on the alleged bribes that he had been acquitted of having accepted.
This, of course, seems incredible, but it is absolutely true. Garrison beat
that charge, but his Establishment critics continue to allege (in a last
desperate effort to pummel Garrison) that the jurors in that case—as in the
previous case—may have been bribed to bring in a not guilty verdict.
THE MEDIA TRASHES THE KENNEDY IMAGE
What's more, thanks to the media, the image of John F. Kennedy
likewise has been repeatedly savaged in the years following the
assassination. It virtually became a form of ritual defamation.
Kennedy's reputed sex life became the subject matter not of just the
tabloids, but of the Establishment press itself. Kennedy, we were told, was
not all that he was cracked up to be. His affair with Marilyn Monroe became
the subject of conversation at every dinner table. (The strange role of Meyer
Lansky's man in Hollywood, Mickey Cohen, in the Kennedy-Monroe
liaison—which we examined in Chapter 13—however, was not a staple of
the continuing coverage.)
The antics of John Kennedy's brother Edward did little to help things.
The media eagerly pounced on the Massachusetts senator's every mistake
and—as the 30th anniversary of the JFK assassination approached in 1993—
began hyping several malicious books attacking Ted Kennedy with what many
people might accurately assume was the purpose of preventing the youngest
Kennedy brother from ever reaching the White House.