On the Trail of Delusion, by Fred Litwin - Everything You Wanted to Know about Jim Garrison and His Take on the Assassination of JFK

Everybody knows that Jim Garrison, the DA in New Orleans from the early 60s to the early 70s, claimed that the Warren Report was inaccurate and set out to prove his theory.  But what he did during his investigation is mind-boggling.  Fred Litwin has done an amazing job of giving us a detailed account of the time Garrison spent trying to discredit the Warren Report.  Here are just a few of the highlights:

1.  He claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, and several others were part of a homosexual ring that were responsible for the assassination.

2.  He linked co-conspirators based, in part, on how close they lived to each other.

3.  He ultimately said it wasn't the Oswald-Ruby group but, rather, anti-Castro Cubans who were unhappy with how the Bay of Pigs incident was handled.

4.  He blamed LBJ, claiming that he benefited the most from the assassination.

5.  He said the Dallas police were involved.

6.  He targeted certain individuals whose lives were ruined by the attention they got.  (One of them, Clay Shaw, was found innocent in 54 minutes.  And it only took that long because the jurors had to queue up for the bathroom!)

7.  He said that the dismissal of any further prosecution against Clay Shaw by the Supreme Court was due to a conspiracy consisting of top-level military authorities and our intelligence agencies.

8.  Garrison came out with his first book in 1970, called A Heritage of Stone.  He wrote several others.

9.  He was interviewed by Playboy, which led to one of the biggest circulations Playboy has ever had.

10.The bulk of the book concerns the JFK assassination.  But the last part explores some quirky side notes, including an explanation of how Oliver Stone, in his 1991 movie, JFK, made Garrison out to be a hero.  Kevin Costner played the title role.

There were parts of the book that dragged for me a little.  But the original documents and quoted passages are outstanding.  In college I took a history course that only looked at original documents.  And I still remember (many decades later!) how that positively affected my enjoyment of the class and the impact it had on me.  That was a really neat part of the book.

Let me wrap up by saying this:  If you are looking for a comprehensive tome on Jim Garrison and all of the efforts he made to tell us what really happened re JFK's assassination, complete with a whole slew of original documents and actual conversations, then I strongly recommend you pick up a copy of On the Trail of Delusion, by Fred Litwin.  It's all you will need to understand Jim Garrison and his many machinations.