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The 1968 encounter between Johnny Carson and New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison is all but forgotten now. But it should not be lost amid the post-mortem praise for Carson's 30-year stint on The Tonight Show, if only because of what it tells us about the shy Nebraskan who never wore out his welcome with the viewing public. Their clash was a rare peek into Carson's character beneath the entertainer's mask.
Viewers of the current Tonight, which has devolved (apart from the opening monologue) into an infomercial for actors, actresses and musicians, will probably find it hard to believe that Carson one night devoted more than half of his then 90-minute program to a district attorney from Orleans Parish – especially one who was alleging U.S. government complicity in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Yet that is precisely what did happen on Jan. 31, 1968. In those days, the show was still broadcast live from New York, making it edgier, less predictable and, sometimes, dare it be said, thought-provoking.
Mort Sahl, a political satirist and occasional Tonight guest, paved the way for Garrison's appearance. Sahl had enjoyed enormous success in the early 1960s, yet began eschewing comedy for political lectures after Nov. 22, 1963. By 1967, he was one of Garrison's many "volunteer investigators," assassination buffs who had flocked to New Orleans to put themselves at the disposal of the only law-enforcement officer with the ostensible guts and brains to crack the conspiracy. Still, by 1968, Garrison's case in court amounted only to the pending trial of Clay Shaw, one of New Orleans' most accomplished and civic-minded citizens. The city was sharply but unevenly divided between those who knew Shaw and believed that charging him with conspiring to kill Kennedy was lunatic, and those who believed Garrison must have something, because no rational district attorney would otherwise get involved.
Aspects of Garrison's egregious miscarriage of justice had already been exposed in the Saturday Evening Post, Newsweek and by NBC's own news department. So when Sahl appeared on Tonight in January 1968, Carson could not help but wonder why his friend would put at risk a successful career for a district attorney's controversial crusade. During the segment, Sahl persuaded Carson that, if Tonight was to give Garrison the venue to explain his evidence, everything would become transparent.
If Carson had known at that time that Garrison had been duped by KGB disinformation into believing that Clay Shaw was a CIA employee bent on reviving fascism at home and abroad, the Tonight host would probably not have given Garrison a powerful platform from which to make his case. Garrison's segment, coming a week after Sahl's appearance, promised to be a high-wire act. Carson was just an intelligent layman, after all, while an endless waterfall of names, dates and events rolled off Garrison's tongue. The D.A.'s persona – he looked and acted like the prosecutor ordered from Central Casting – played very well on television. And make no mistake, if Garrison were right, and the assassination was in fact a coup d'etat mounted by the CIA in concert with the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower had warned about, then everything Americans believed about their government was a lie. And it all was going to be revealed, one way or another, on The Tonight Show.