Closing the Casket on JFK's Assassination

I want to thank Michel Gagné for his terrific review of my book, A Heritage of Nonsense: Jim Garrison's Tales of Mystery and Imagination.

One of the major stories in my book was that of Richard Case Nagell:

A third example [tales of grifters and charlatans, the other two being Raymond Broshears and Rose Cherami], the longest chapter in Nonsense, relates the detailed life story of a decorated U.S. Army intelligence officer named Richard Case Nagell who described himself to Garrison as a CIA-KGB double agent and associate of Lee Harvey Oswald who refused to take part in the CIA-sponsored coup d’état, and who owned a trove of incriminating evidence supporting such claims (none of which has ever surfaced).

Conspiracists chronically leave out the details of Nagell’s life story following his unlikely survival from a plane crash that left him with a traumatic brain injury, cognitive neuroses, depression, alcoholism, suicidal ideation, numerous arrests and mental health interventions, and countless attempts to gain attention and money, including by telling gullible researchers whatever they wanted to hear.

Much has been made of Nagell’s September 1963 arrest for discharging a weapon in a New Mexico bank, which he sometimes claimed was to save himself from being “silenced” like Oswald but was more likely a desperate attempt to receive treatment from a veteran’s hospital. Nagell’s stories were convoluted, ever changing, and mired in inaccuracies and clear fabulations, but nonetheless selectively mined by the Garrison gaggle for useful but unproven factoids. In the end, Nagell’s military and intelligence training, paranoid disposition, and cognitive skills and impairments all combined to make him a powerful magnet for the irrationally anxious who want to believe him, but the facts show him to be a broken man who knew very little and needed much help.

Here is Michel's conclusion:

On the whole, A Heritage of Nonsense is a thought-provoking and well-documented read for anyone interested in the JFK assassination and Jim Garrison in particular, as well as the origins and evolution of conspiracy theories. That includes the effects of circular reasoning, or the unwarranted influence of self-interested swindlers in shaping historical memory. 

In short, Nonsense serves as a powerful rebuttal to Garrison’s falsely mythologized legacy as a crusader for justice and to the paranoid fables still being peddled by DiEugenio, Mellen, Douglass, Russell, Stone, and Garrison’s other apostles.

However, since this book was avowedly written as a companion piece to Litwin’s earlier On the Trail of Delusion, readers new to the Garrison drama would be advised to start there, and perhaps also to read Patricia Lambert’s False Witness, before sinking their teeth into this compendium of less well-known Garrisonisms.

Given that the minds of conspiracy-prone fabulists never tire of weaving new yarns into their grand speculative tapestries, this book is likely not going to be Litwin’s final opus. But it does give the reader sufficient reason to close the book on Jim Garrison’s ambitious fantasies, and to go stamp out other malicious wildfires.  

But please read the whole review.

You can purchase my book here.

A Heritage of Nonsense contains nine stories that illustrate Jim Garrison’s malfeasance, his paranoia, and his conspiratorial mindset. There is a commonality that runs through this book: the insidious nature of conspiracy theorists, gullibility that stretches the imagination, and a smattering of mental illness. For the first time ever, you’ll read about the East German Stasi files of Richard Case Nagell, a man who desperately needed psychiatric help; the truth about Rose Cherami who supposedly had foreknowledge of the JFK assassination; a gay rights activist who channeled Lee Harvey Oswald at a séance; a Las Vegas entertainer who became a suspect in Garrison’s investigation because of one phone call; and the search for a lost map of Dealey Plaza. I even solve a longstanding JFK assassination mystery. And a whole lot more.