Final_Judgment

[388] Final Judgment 485
One other book on the Garrison investigation of Clay Shaw is Edward
Jay Epstein's Counterplot. It's an all-out attack on Garrison—a slender
volume that I wouldn't mention if it otherwise weren't for the fact that it
was Epstein who wrote the book.
This is significant, as I have noted in Final Judgment, in that Epstein
was a close associate of CIA man James Angleton and it was also Epstein
who also wrote the one book Legend (a biography of Lee Harvey Oswald)
that most closely reflects Angleton's own JFK cover story: that ultimately
the Soviet KGB was behind the assassination of President Kennedy, whether
by accident or by design. Epstein suggests that Oswald had been co-opted by
the KGB and that he committed the crime acting alone–with or without the
orders of his KGB superiors. That book received wide play in the
Establishment media.
Interestingly, Epstein also wrote the book Inquest that was hailed by the
media as an important critique of the Warren Commission Report. However,
I've always felt that this volume was an Establishment "cover story"
suggesting that while there were problems with the way the Warren
Commission conducted its investigation, there was nothing to worry about
in the end. In any case, none of Epstein's books are of any real value.
Jim Garrison himself wrote his own account of his investigation.
Entitled On the Trail of the Assassins, it's an interesting and well-written
book. I would suggest, however, that the book is somewhat of a
disappointment in that it is more a free-flowing personal memoir on the
case, rather than a detailed account of the investigation that many would
have found far more enlightening.
The most recent study focusing on the Garrison investigation is James
DiEugenio's Destiny Betrayed. This is an important book in that it
examines much of the evidence in the Garrison investigation (more so even
than Garrison's own book) and essentially proves that Garrison was right
when he targeted Clay Shaw for involvement in the JFK assassination
conspiracy. We don't know precisely what role Shaw played in the
conspiracy, but DiEugenio demonstrates beyond question that he was mixed
up somewhere in the middle of it.
There are some problems with the book. I find DiEugenio's hero
worship of JFK a little overwhelming. One would think that JFK was
almost a God. Because DiEugenio seems to betray a somewhat naive pro-
Kennedy bias, coming from a liberal perspective, DiEugenio falls into the
trap of perceiving and portraying Clay Shaw as being "right wing." As I
told DiEugenio in correspondence, his book fails in that he does not pursue
Shaw's Permindex Connection to its ultimate Israeli Connection.
There might be an explanation for this. The book was published under
the auspices of the Sheridan Square Press (which, incidentally, also
published Garrison's book) which is affiliated with the Institute for Media
Analysis. This institute, as we already noted in Appendix Three, receives
money from the Stern Family Fund.
This foundation is the creation of the Stern family of New Orleans who
were not only Clay Shaw's close friends, but also leading backers of the