You might remember Jim Garrison. If you don’t, you should take time to watch this episode of “America’s Untold Stories” with Mark Groubert and Eric Hunley, which does a great job of detailing Garrison and his efforts to expose the conspiracy behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy:
Garrison was a genuine American hero, a World War II hero who rose to become a long-time District Attorney and state judge in New Orleans.
Starting in 1965, likely after having a meeting with New York City journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, who was in the midst of her own investigation, Garrison conducted a formal investigation into the New Orleans-centered piece of the JFK conspiracy, and almost immediately began turning over rocks that led to the involvement of the CIA, the FBI and other federal intel agencies that constitute the core of what we now refer to as the Deep State. He soon discovered that Lee Harvey Oswald himself had been an operative for Naval Intelligence while stationed in Japan during his time in the Marine Corps, and had also been an asset for the CIA.
It would take forever to go into all the details of the investigation here - which is why you should watch the episode linked above and let Groubert and Hunley do it for you in an hour - but Garrison soon found himself in a situation in which witness after witness began to disappear and/or die mysterious deaths as he inched closer and closer to being able to expose the powers in Washington, DC who were guiding New Orleans figures like Guy Bannister, Clay Shaw and David Ferrie.
Garrison also found himself the subject of a national smear campaign mounted by the Deep State and its assets in the major media outlets of day, including all three broadcast TV networks, Life and Time Magazines, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Operation Mockingbird was fully entrenched by then, obviously.
Late in the investigation, comedian Mort Sahl, who actually left his work for a time serve on Garrison’s team, convinced Johnny Carson to have Garrison as a guest on the “Tonight Show.” The interview with Garrison created so much national controversy that it almost got Carson fired, and NBC mounted an effort to obtain all copies of the episode and destroy them. Fortunately, a handful of copies of the interview or portions of it survived. This is very similar to the treatment of current “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon, who created a backlash and was almost fired when he had Donald Trump on his show in 2015.
The more things change with the Deep State, the more they remain the same.