Garrison was a foot note. No one really believed him, or at least not for long, he was a bully who made a decision and then sought evidence to back it up and ignored all that didn't, went after and attacked innocent people, and ran a horrifically inept and incompetent case for personal glory based on personal idiocy. He went after Shaw, a Kennedy supporter and an upstanding citizen who helped his community, because Shaw was a homosexual, and Garrison actually said that he must have been in on it because he was gay, and because the homosexuals were part of the vast conspiracy. His star witness, whom his entire case was based on, was a liar, who failed a lie detector and was forced to admit after failing that he was lying, and Garrison put him on the stand anyway. And so Shaw was found not guilty after like 5 minutes of deliberation, because Garrison was full of it.
Real Conspiracy believers, who pride themselves on their research, don't even believe Garrison, and believe he damages their case for conspiracy because his ideas were so wrong and out there.
Shaw was quickly forgotten by everyone, until Oliver Stone (that prick; there's not political flame war to come from hating a director, so I freely call him that because he is one) dug him up to make "JFK". And then he was unleashed on a whole new generation, and conspiracy theories were unleashed on a whole new generation, and Stone got everything wrong about both Shaw and the JFK assassination and case when he presented them except for the fact that these people existed. But he warped the minds of a generation of people who believe his film presented everything accurately, which has done about a century more of damage which cannot be repaired. And worst of all, these innocent people who did nothing, who were attacked by Shaw decades before in his bullying or who Stone personally had a grudge against because of his ideas, have their names drug through the mud and their popular conception as one that they were evil years after they'd passed away. I hate Oliver Stone. The man is a jerk.
I'm not actually defending the Garrison case here, my argument was that his case represented the genesis, at least in so far as the public was concerned, of the idea of CIA complicity. That even if no one really believed him at the time, the case, and Garrison's presence as a slight media figure, introduced that idea to the public imagination. Later, after the idea had been absorbed but dissociated with Garrison Of course, this is a chicken egg situation, because one could argue that Garrison moved towards arguing for CIA complicity as the conspiracy theorists other then him moved towards that erroneous conclusion. I apologize if I am misreading you here, but once again I am not suggesting that Garrison actually had a case against Shaw; I am merely hypothesizing that he may have represented the point at which certain strands of conspiracy thinking entered the
public imagination, and that therefore, without him, you wouldn't have many people accusing the CIA of having been involved. The question is, to what extent had that idea of government complicity entered into the public imagination before Stone's film, and why that was the case. Again, it may just be that the overall trend towards distrust in the era in question was ultimately responsible for those beliefs.
I'm not actually confident about that hypothesis, and I could very well be wrong and overestimating the impact of someone bringing up conspiracy theories on the news for example. My idea about Garrison has
nothing to do with whether or not he actually had a case. The idea of CIA complicity, could just as well have stemmed from the same kneejerk suspicion of authority that developed in the same time period, problem is, with a divergence after Kennedy's death, that kind of suspicion is hard to avoid. Granted, Watergate doesn't have to happen. But even then, the same kind of thought process had been developing for a long time. And Garrison's investigation itself could more be symptomatic of a cultural shift than the cause of anything.
I still, for the life of me, can't understand why the existence of these theories seems to offend you so much. Is it because you feel that the denial of historical truth in this case leads towards more dangerous varieties, or at least makes those kinds of varieties of historical revisionism more acceptable than they otherwise would be? Is it because people being confident that they know some truth, when they are wrong, is simply annoying to the point of offensiveness and frustration? Is it because you believe that these theories distract from Kennedy's actual legacy? That is, do you feel that obsession with the circumstances of November 22nd 1963 takes away from our understanding of the Kennedy Presidency? You seem genuinely mad about this, and I do not know why. I hope in asking you this I am not coming across as a jerk, that's not my intent, and I apologize if that's how it comes across.