Working with thousands of previously unreleased documents and drawing on more than one thousand interviews, with many witnesses speaking out for the first time, Joan Mellen revisits the investigation of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, the only public official to have indicted, in 1969, a suspect in President John F. Kennedy's murder.Garrison began by exposing the contradictions in the Warren Report, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was an unstable pro-Castro Marxist who acted alone in killing Kennedy. A Farewell to Justice reveals that Oswald, no Marxist, was in fact working with both the FBI and the CIA, as well as with U.S. Customs, and that the attempts to sabotage Garrison's investigation reached the highest levels of the U.S. government. Garrison interviewed various individuals involved in the assassination, ranging from Clay Shaw and CIA contract employee David Ferrie to a Marine cohort of Oswald named Kerry Thornley, who at the very least was a Defense Intelligence Agency asset. Garrison's suspects included CIA-sponsored soldiers of fortune enlisted in assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, an anti-Castro Cuban asset, and a young runner for the conspirators, interviewed here for the first time by the author.Building upon Garrison's effort, Mellen uncovers decisive new evidence and clearly establishes the intelligence agencies' roles in both a president's assassination and its cover-up, set in motion well before the actual events of November 22, 1963.

"In her account of Orleans Parish District Attorney Jim Garrison's investigation of and obsession with the JFK assassination, Mellen brings an astonishing amount of information to light, but even those very familiar with the topic will have trouble sorting out the tangles, turns and treachery. Garrison's complexities-an overdriven libido, a willful blind spot regarding the unsavory character of many of his investigators and a desperate relentlessness about the Kennedy investigation that likely led to his death at 70-are objectively portrayed. What is less clear, unfortunately, is the nitty gritty about his investigation. Rather than providing an outline of the events preceding and following Kennedy's assassination as uncovered by Garrison, Mellon slices up her book into topical chapters and confuses an already bewildering case by shifting timelines, authorial voices and locations with seemingly little cause. Even given a straightforward, chronological narrative of Garrison's investigation, the novice reader would have difficulty following the many threads of Garrison's inquiries: witnesses had multiple identities; research uncovered misinformation, disinformation and plain old lies; and some alleged CIA cover-ups may have been a product of Garrison's paranoia. Readers are likely to come away with a qualified admiration of Garrison and a muzzy understanding of how and why Kennedy was killed." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's crusade to try a suspect in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was immortalized in the Oliver Stone film, JFK. Revisiting the trial, Mellen (English and creative writing, Temple U.), who was incidentally involved in the investigation and met Garrison in 1969, reconstructs his investigation, supplementing it with new information from recently declassified documents and interviews with a number of the actors, including suspected plotters Clay Shaw and David Ferrie. She argues that Garrison was correct in his assertions about CIA involvement in the assassination and seeks to show how both CIA and FBI officers (including Watergate's "Deep Throat," Mark Felt) conspired to torpedo Garrison's efforts to get to the bottom of the assassination. Distributed in the US by Books International.
Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's crusade to try a suspect in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was immortalized in the Oliver Stone film, JFK. Revisiting the trial, Mellen (English and creative writing, Temple U.), who was incidentally involved in the investigation and met Garrison in 1969, reconstructs his investigation, supplementing it with new information from recently declassified documents and interviews with a number of the actors, including suspected plotters Clay Shaw and David Ferrie. She argues that Garrison was correct in his assertions about CIA involvement in the assassination and seeks to show how both CIA and FBI officers (including Watergate's "Deep Throat," Mark Felt) conspired to torpedo Garrison's efforts to get to the bottom of the assassination. Distributed in the US by Books International. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Working with thousands of previously unreleased documents and drawing on more than one thousand interviews, with many witnesses speaking out for the first time, Joan Mellen revisits the investigation of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, the only public official to have indicted, in 1969, a suspect in President John F. Kennedy's murder.

Based on recently declassified U.S. government documents; demonstrates how the FBI and CIA attempted to destroy a key investigation; establishes that Lee Harvey Oswald was set up as a scapegoat

Breaking their silence, witnessees expose a cover-up in JFK's assassination