By “building upon Garrison’s effort” (as the author’s web page says), this book is an
attempt to resuscitate the evidentiary equivalent of a corpse.
Review by Patricia Lambert
Joan Mellen reviewed unfavorably my 1999 book, False Witness, and in the book being reviewed here she is critical of my work.
Despite the promise implicit in its subtitle, A Farewell to Justice does not try to explain what happened in Dallas when President Kennedy was shot in 1963 but rather to justify what happened in New Orleans years later, when District Attorney Jim Garrison put a businessman named Clay Shaw on trial for conspiracy to murder the president.
Garrison was legally discredited if not humiliated, twice: in 1969, when a jury deliberated only
54 minutes before setting Shaw free, and again in 1971, when a federal court concluded that
Garrison’s prosecution of Shaw was based on shockingly insubstantial, even concocted,
evidence.
By “building upon Garrison’s effort” (as the author’s web page says), this book is an
attempt to resuscitate the evidentiary equivalent of a corpse.
The author embraces questionable witnesses and unlikely stories with little to recommend them except that they fit with her (and Garrison’s) belief that the CIA killed John F. Kennedy.
One such witness is Jack Martin, an important figure in Mellen’s story and, at least in the
beginning, in Garrison’s. An occasional private investigator, Jack was a former mental patient
and alcoholic whose conspiracy stories first surfaced in 1963 when they were investigated and
found to be binge-induced fantasies. Even Garrison once called Jack “a liar.” Mellen transforms
this courthouse hanger-on (known for his intrinsic unreliability) into a savvy CIA operative who
“never left the agency,”
an all-knowing insider and sinister conspirator, by giving him a new
identity—that of a Washington, D.C., man working for the CIA.
The author embraces questionable witnesses and unlikely stories with little to recommend them except that they fit with her (and Garrison’s) belief that the CIA killed John F. Kennedy. |
She engineers this literary version of body snatching largely by incorrectly reporting the results of
a 1967 inquiry, conducted by the CIA, into the possibility that a former agency employee named
Joseph James Martin and a John J. Martin (one of Jack’s aliases) might be the same individual.
The investigation found that the two men were not the same. Yet Mellen, with no explanation,
concludes the opposite—that they were the same and, while oddly insisting that Jack’s real name
was John J. Martin, she proceeds to reconstruct Jack’s life using Joseph’s biography. This,
despite the fact that the two were born in different states, two years apart, and that Joseph died in
1975 while Jack was very much alive. Moreover, Jack’s real name was not Jack, John J., or
Joseph. It was Edward Stewart Suggs, as his FBI files show.
Consider too this allegation regarding David Ferrie, a pilot posthumously named by Garrison as
one of Clay Shaw’s two co-conspirators (the other being Lee Harvey Oswald). The week of the
assassination, supposedly needing money to rent a plane, Ferrie supposedly signed a $400 loan
document and Clay Shaw supposedly co-signed it.
In one of those stunning extrapolations that
mark this work, Mellen declares:
“The document proved not only that Ferrie and Shaw knew each other, but that
they participated together in preparations for the assassination, reflecting their
mutual foreknowledge of the crime.”
What does Mellen have to prove this document existed? Not the document, not even an author’s
interview with the alleged lender. What she has is a single witness who claims he spoke to the
lender and saw the contract thirty-five years earlier.
Moreover, the reader is supposed to believe
that the same CIA which sponsored the assassination couldn’t scrape together $400 in cash so
Ferrie and Shaw would not leave behind a paper trail.
. . . the reader is supposed to believe that the same CIA which sponsored the assassination couldn’t scrape together $400 in cash so Ferrie and Shaw would not leave behind a paper trail. |
Beckham was schooled only through the third grade and spent time in mental institutions on at
least three occasions. (Mellen claims the latter was a CIA setup, but Beckham’s deposition
suggests otherwise.)
In 1992 he had changed his name some eight times, according to writer Gus
Russo, who tracked him down at his home in Louisville, Kentucky, and recently recalled the
encounter.
Beckham basically acknowledged to me being what most people would call a
flimflam artist—I remember he pointed to his office walls. They were filled with
bogus diplomas from every major university; he was selling them and cheap
trinkets, like whoopee cushions, for a living. . . He told me he not only recorded
but wrote three Number One hits, which he named—“From a Jack to a King” was
one. When I told him that I was a former professional musician and recited the
names of the real composers, he laughed and said, “Well, I can’t fool you.” . . .
For anyone to use him as a source for anything is staggering.
In Mellen’s view, it was the president’s assassination that set Beckham on the “wandering life of
a con man.” But Beckham was conning people before then: In 1962 he was “wearing a Roman
collar” and “soliciting money” as a Catholic priest (for “Cuban revolutionary forces,” according
to him).
In the book’s dramatic finale, Mellen describes “a government document,” given to her by
Beckham, on “United States Army Air Defense Command” letterhead allegedly recounting the
training Beckham received in 1963 at Camp Peary, “the CIA training installation. . .also known
as The Farm.” There, Mellen says, he was “taught how to be an assassin.”
Then she states the
following:
This revelatory and never-before-seen document reveals how military intelligence,
the Army, and the CIA, working in concert, had set up a scapegoat [in case
Oswald was unavailable]….His being groomed at the CIA for that role places the
murder of the president at the highest levels of intelligence. Beckham’s
experience demonstrates that Oswald certainly did not plan the assassination of
President Kennedy, nor did he operate at any time “alone” just as Jim Garrison
had claimed all along.
Those grandiose conclusions are based on an unauthenticated document, absurd on its face,
provided by a man with a long history of using phony documents.
Beckham, who later in life, Mellen writes, “studied to be a Rabbi,” is a crucial witness in this
book. The final chapter is devoted mostly to him and closes with his endorsement of Garrison:
“He got it where it started and no one else came close. . . I wish I could have told him.”
That the
author thinks Thomas Beckham, with his spy stories and “government document,” advances her
cause, is revealing of her but tells the reader nothing whatever about the Kennedy assassination.
A Farewell to Justice is not an easy read. The book’s epic-size cast sometimes renders the narrative incoherent. New characters appear at a dizzying rate, vast numbers of whom are said to be CIA connected—CIA operatives, CIA media assets, CIA agents, CIA employees. Affixing the CIA label to as many lapels as possible (regardless of how flimsy the evidence), appears to be a central goal of this book, the assumption being that no such association could possibly be innocent or, God forbid, patriotically inspired.
New characters appear at a dizzying rate, vast numbers of whom are said to be CIA connected—CIA operatives, CIA media assets, CIA agents, CIA employees. Affixing the CIA label to as many lapels as possible (regardless of how flimsy the evidence), appears to be a central goal of this book. . . |
Clay Shaw’s alleged intelligence career supposedly began during World War II when he served
in the SOS, which Mellen identifies as the “Special Operations Section,” “an Army
counterintelligence group.” She provides no evidence for this and for good reason—she is
grossly mistaken. Shaw served in the United States Army’s Services of Supply in the European
Campaign under Brig. Gen. Charles O. Thrasher, who ran its huge daily operations. Shaw was
Thrasher’s “right hand man.” The job of that SOS was to keep allied forces equipped with
everything from “toothpaste to tanks” as they fought their way to Germany. Shaw, who began as
Thrasher’s aide-de-camp and became his deputy chief of staff, later said that supplying three
armies as they spread out across Europe honed his “organizational skills.”
A definition of SOS
chosen because it fits an agenda is worse than meaningless, it is fiction.
For facts, readers might want to look elsewhere.
November 16, 2005
Unless otherwise indicated, these documents are found in the JFK Collection at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.
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