Word: garrisoned
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...because his career has been so bizarre, it's not likely that anyone will ever herald Garrison as a champion of New South politics. Garrison became the district attorney in New Orleans in 1962, winning a surprise victory over an entrenched, conservative incumbent. He spent his first term cleaning up prostitution and gambling in the French Quarter and getting in fights with criminal court judges, and he was reelected to a second term in 1965 by a wide margin...
Some time in the first year of his second term--no one is sure exactly when--Garrison became convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald had not assassinated President Kennedy on his own. Garrison decided that Oswald was just the pawn of an elaborate conspiracy run by the Pentagon and the CIA, based largely in New Orleans...
...middle of 1967 the New Orleans newspapers figured out that Garrison was spending almost all his time investigating the assassination, and he became a national figure overnight, the golden boy of the conspiracy buffs. A few months later, Garrison indicted Clay Shaw, a quiet, wealthy New Orleans businessman, in connection with the conspiracy, and once that happened his troubles began...
...clear from the beginning that Shaw was innocent. Garrison's star witnesses were a heroin addict who claimed he saw Shaw and Oswald together once when he was shooting up at the lakefront; a businessman who remembered the details of conversations with Shaw after Garrison's staff hypnotized him; and an accountant who fingerprinted his children every morning to make sure the CIA hadn't stolen them during the night and substituted lookalikes to spy on him. The national and local press gave the trial heavy coverage. Garrison lost and came out looking like a fool...
...months later, Garrison ran for reelection again and won by a landslide, beating a bland liberal named Harry Connick. The two New Orleans dailies had blasted Garrison almost daily on their editorial pages, and few major political groups had endorsed him. Garrison hardly campaigned at all; he spent almost all his money on three enormously effective 15-minute T.V. spots the night before the election. He was an awesome figure on T.V. He wore a black suit and sat in a black chair in a room with black walls, so that his face seemed to hover in mid-screen...