Max Lerner: Garrison and Shaw

I posted an important Max Lerner opinion piece yesterday on Garrison's early thinking on the JFK conspiracy. Garrison told Lerner, just like he told Hugh Aynesworth, James Phelan, Merriman Smith, and Lawrence Schiller, that homosexuals were behind the conspiracy. Here is another excellent Lerner opinion piece.

Springfield Daily News, February 24, 1969

I find this article to be particularly persuasive. Lerner mentions Edward Jay Epstein's book, Counterplot. It's an excellent book, and I heartily recommend it. You can read Epstein's three major books on the JFK assassination, with added commentary, in one large compilation.

A few important tidbits:

"But I do know, from a long conversation with him after the Shaw case broke, how obsessed he has been with destroying the Warren Commission's report on Kennedy's death, and with exposing the malignant counter-conspiracy (as he sees it) to keep the truth about the killing from the American people. The trial is his means to that end. He sees himself very much as Darrow saw himself in the Scopes anti-evolution trial, and like Scopes, Shaw is as much symbol as defendant."

I also like Lerner's conclusion:

"I have one major quarrel with Epstein. My own emphasis would not be on Garrison as demagogue, but on Garrison as an obsessed man, caught in the cocoon he has spun, believing it, and beyond any hope of ever getting free of it."