James DiEugenio - Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case

DESTINY
BETRAYED

DESTINY
BETRAYED

JFK, CUBA, AND THE GARRISON CASE

James DiEugenio

With a preface by Lisa Pease and
a foreword by William Davy

Copyright 1992, 2012 by James DiEugenio

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-62087-056-3

Printed in the United States of America

To my mother, Flo (19241991)
With sorrow and regret that you werent
here to see this book published.
Rest in peace, forever.

Contents

Not all conspiracies are theories. As grown-ups, we need to learn to decouple those terms, which have been irresponsibly glued together since 1963.

I grew up with conspiracies. I watched Congress investigate Watergate and Iran Contra. I saw high-level government officials repeatedly tell us Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, only to learn that that information was false. I was a juror on a conspiracy trial. Conspiracies happen.

So why do some conspiracies get investigated while others get covered up? This volume will help you answer that question.

I first encountered Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba and the Garrison Case in an independent bookstore, on a shelf labeled simplyand appropriatelyIntelligence. Within the first few pages, I knew I had discovered something special. I had read a handful of books on the assassination of President Kennedy by that point, but this was the first book I read that put the events squarely in their historical context. I experienced a light bulb moment, seeing the convergence of factors that led to Kennedys death.

The book also explained why the erudite Jim Garrison I met in Garrisons own wonderful book, On the Trail of the Assassins , did not match the image of him that the press was presenting. The picture of a crazed district attorney hell-bent on prosecuting an innocent man never rang true to me. Here was a district attorney who, in my opinion, had done the right and honorable thing, something that had not been done to that point: treated the assassination like the prosecutable crime it was. He called in witnesses. He arrested Clay Shaw, a prominent citizen, on charges of conspiracy to kill the President because of strong evidence. He took his case to trial. And yet, Shaw was found not guilty. What happened?

In this volume, James DiEugenio connects the dots to explain why Garrisons case fell apart, who undermined it, and how those players connect to the circle of people who had been manipulating Oswald long before the Kennedy assassination took place.

If you want to understand how a lie can be perpetrated for almost fifty years, read this book. DiEugenio deconstructs, through declassified government records, personal interviews, and careful analysis, how high-ranking members of the CIAthrough their allies on the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, with the help of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and the FBIs and CIAs assets in the mainstream mediaderailed not just Garrisons investigation but every serious attempt to investigate John F. Kennedys assassination.

Greatly expanded and rewritten from the original edition, this book shows us how our past has been deliberately rewritten to hide the important truth of who killed President Kennedy and why.

This is not conspiracy theory. This is the factual history of how the investigations into the assassination of President Kennedy were deliberately and provably subverted. DiEugenio exposes the mechanisms that enabled the conspiracy and cover-up to take place.

But this book is not just about our past. If we dont learn not only what happened, but how the cover-up was effected, then not only did they get away with it, but the same operational template can be run again.

If you never punish a criminal, will the criminal voluntarily stop committing future crimes? Of course not. The same is true when the criminal is a government official. Its long past time we started demanding that people be held accountable for high-level crimes and cover-ups. Accountability matters.

And why are we, the people, so gullible? It has often been said that people prefer to believe a conspiracy killed Kennedy because such a consequential act demands a consequential reason. But consider the reverse. Why would anyone in their right mind prefer to believe that members of their own government had Kennedy killed and then covered it up? Who would choose to believe that? Isnt that why the lies persist? We want to believe our government would never do such a thing, even when the facts scream otherwise.

But the truth doesnt have to be scary. A cover-up is like a magic trick. Once you understand how it was accomplished, you can never be fooled by it again. Thats why this book is so important. It dissects the magic trick. You may feel youre losing your innocence, but youll only be losing your navet.

Jim Garrison stepped up, did the right thing, and was pilloried for it. It will take many more people with the courage to do what Garrison did, to risk ridicule and defamation, in order to rescue our future. But with each new recruit, the truth becomes more obvious and less of a struggle to defend. Thats where you come in.

It is too late to hold some of these people accountable in their lifetimes. But its not too late to hold them accountable in the eyes of history. Who controls the past controls the future, wrote George Orwell in his prescient book 1984. By restoring to us the real history of these events, this book offers us the power to choose a different future. Lets accept the gift and do something useful with it.

Lisa Pease, coeditor of The Assassinations

Like millions of others in 1992, I too was caught up in the buzz created by Oliver Stones 1991 film, JFK. Primarily based on New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrisons 1988 book about his investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy, On the Trail of the Assassins, Stones film generated controversy, legislation and a lot of ink.

Unlike a lot of the movie-going public though, I had already studied the JFK assassination and the Garrison case for more than ten years and so had a little easier time separating the wheat from the chaffand there was a lot to digest. In the wake of the film, a spate of books, magazines, newspaper columns, and TV specials flooded the market.

One day at the newsstand, I picked up a copy of Cineaste magazine that was devoted to the topic of JFK, the film (Vol. XIX No.1, 1992). That issue featured many interesting articles by the likes of Christopher Sharrett, George Michael Evica, andGarrisons editor and Stonesco-writer, Zachary Sklar. But what caught my eye was an ad on page 22 announcing the release of a new book on the Garrison investigation called, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case . I have to admit, I greeted it with skepticism. Other than Paris Flammondes book, The Kennedy Conspiracy, and Garrisons own volumes, little of note had been written about Garrison, and one had to be wary of the mountain of disinformation and shabby scholarship surrounding the case. I was somewhat relieved to find out that the book was being brought out by Garrisons publisher, Sheridan Square Press, and had been endorsed by both Stone and Sklar. Yet I still had a nagging feeling as I had never heard of the authorJames DiEugenio. Somewhat reluctantly I mailed my check off.