The October 1967 issue of Playboy Magazine contained the longest interview in their history - 20,000 words from Jim Garrison. About 5 million copies were printed and Playboy organized a press tour for Garrison. You can read the whole interview here.
Here is Playboy's press release for their interview:
Warren Commission critic Sylvia Meagher did not much like the Garrison interview and she wrote Playboy a 3-page letter. For the first time ever, here is her letter:
As you can see above, Meagher wrote that "without intending levity on matters as grave as these, I have to admit that Garrison's theory of men on the grassy knoll whose sole function was to catch the cartridges as they were ejected from the assassins' rifles' strikes me as comical."
Garrison had more information to tell Playboy, but he didn't want it in print. And so he confided in Eric Norden, the Playboy interviewer, and he wrote several memos to the editors of Playboy.
Edward Jay Epstein has written about these memos, but they are not available anywhere. I found them in the Papers of Elmer Gertz, the lawyer for Gordon Novel, who sued Garrison for libel because of the Playboy interviews.
Here is the first memo of secret information:
This is one insane memo. None of this stuff panned out - it's no wonder that Garrison didn't disclose this publicly. For instance, the Reverend Clyde Johnson {it wasn't Alvin} was a complete fraud (I have the full story on him in my book); the Shaw-Ruby connection was never mentioned in court; Raymond Cummings never had any credibility and Garrison quickly forgot about him; the "New York accountant of good reputation" turned out to be a total crank, etc.
You can see that the Clinton story still wasn't fleshed out, and that Garrison knew about
the Permindex/CMC story (more about this to come).
Tomorrow, another secret Playboy memo. Stay tuned.