Free Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History by Jim Keith Page B

Instead, it was always, “Let’s go visit Brother-in-law tomorrow.”
     
    I had arrived in New Orleans the day after Mardi Gras in 1961. Except for May, June, July, August and part of September of 1963 — I lived there until 13 December 1963. Beginning in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, and continuing up to about the time of the John Kennedy assassination, Slim must have uttered those words between fifteen and twenty-five times. Since these invitations were far apart and infrequent, I never turned Slim down.
     
    Sometimes Brother-in-law would come to the French Quarter and get us. More often, Slim would arrange in advance to borrow his car and then would drive us to Brother-in-law’s house out in the country the next day.
     
    It was difficult to take seriously what Brother-in-law said about his plans to murder the President. Not that Slim didn’t seem honest. On the contrary, he seemed too honest to get himself involved with anyone heavy enough to actually go out and assassinate a President — if Slim would have to lie about it afterwards. To suspect Slim of being a conspirator seemed too paranoid for words.
     
    In April of 1976 I again had occasion to think about paranoia in relation to the John Kennedy assassination. For I attended a lecture in Atlanta by none other than Jim Garrison, for whom by then I felt a lot of sympathy. In light of what I remembered now, it seemed his suspicions of me were only slightly misplaced. I was not a field agent in the assassination; I was among those who helped plan it!
     
    In the question period after his speech Garrison said something I found both significant and touching: “Of course, I have to lean over backwards not to be paranoid, because I have been accused of paranoia in the past.”
     
    One of his diagnosticians had been me; now I was dealing with exactly the same double bind of trying to probe conspiracies without coming on like a paranoid in the eyes of my friends.
     
    Through an emissary I let it be known to Garrison that I wanted to meet with him. His reply: “Not only do I not want to meet with Kerry Thornley, I don’t even want to hear his name. In fact, I don’t even want to think about Kerry Thornley!”
     
    Feeling very much alone, I continued my daily dealings with what were obviously conspiracies — including a correspondence with a man I hoped was a charming crank who was telling me in his letters “why we Fascists assassinated Kennedy.” How I got on Stan Jamison’s mailing list in the first place some years earlier was a mystery to me. Since 1970, though, Greg Hill and I both had been receiving from him everything from advice about how to grow organic sprouts to racist newspapers published by White Christians who were armed and quite dangerous.
     
    In reply to one of my memos about Kirstein that had fallen into his hands indirectly, he wrote me to say that the tragedy in Dallas was plotted by the Secret Order of Thule in such a way as to assure that no cover-up could remain convincing forever. Motive: to make the American public paranoid about their government and mass media. For paranoia, he told me, is a big step in the direction of mental health.
     
    People who become paranoid, Stan Jamison wrote, will not rest until they discover every last shred of truth. Among the devices used to encourage awareness of conspiracy were the many crude Oswald impersonations that occurred just previous to the assassination. Puzzled for more than a decade about exactly that mystery, I had to admit this was the first credible hypothesis to explain it without making the assassins look like idiots. And had they been less than geniuses, there would have been no cover-up at all.
     
    Jamison further informed me that the conspiracy was constructed in concentric circles, like Chinese boxes, with descending levels, so that only “the man at the center” understood afterwards exactly what had happened. Of course, I could not ignore the possibility that man might