The Fort Worth Star Telegram recently reported what many in the conspiracy community will consider to be tragic news:
Jim Marrs, the author whose book Crossfire: The Plot to Kill Kennedy helped inspire the Oliver Stone movie JFK, died of a heart attack Wednesday at his home outside in Wise County. Marrs, 73, who worked as a Star-Telegram reporter between 1968 to 1980, didn’t just write about John F. Kennedy. He also authored books about everything from UFOs to population control.
Marrs also taught courses on the JFK assassination and UFO’s at the University of Texas at Arlington before retiring in 2007. In a 2003 Star-Telegram article, Marrs said lawyers, teachers, even an official with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had taken his classes.
“They, like myself, have a natural and, I think healthy, questioning attitude about all this,” Marrs said. “What I tell people is, don't come here expecting me to have all the answers.”
... Among his books were Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, which reached the New York Times Paperback Non-Fiction Best Seller List. Other titles include: Alien Agenda (1997); Rule by Secrecy (2000); The Terror Conspiracy Revisited (2007); The Rise of the Fourth Reich (2008); The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy (2010); Our Occulted History (2013); Population Control (2015); and his last book, The Illuminati (2017).
On a personal note, your humble blogger read (and enjoyed) Crossfire, Rule by Secrecy, and Rise of the Fourth Reich, none of which achieved the academic rigor or journalistic integrity of the best of the genre (as exemplified, for instance, by Carroll Quiggley or Carl Oglesby), many of which were prone to flights of somewhat ludicrous fancy, but ALL of which contained intriguing ideas, dug up surprising facts, and made connections worthy of further study.
Those three are also very well written and highly entertaining, and I was able to use Rule by Secrecy as a sort of gateway book via which I was able to re-ignite my father's passion for studying alternative theories of history and politics... something for which I will always remember Marrs with fondness.
I was less fond, however, of his late-life cash-grab work that aimed to portray President Obama -- a mainstream, conservative Democrat whose fetish for decorum and bipartisanship hobbled his entire first term -- as some kind of Far Left "Communist" ideologue in the Castro/Chavez mold.
But... those books didn't sell very well, and it was a bandwagon Marrs didn't spend much time on, so I can forgive and forget. Thinking about it now, I would love to hear Marrs' take on Trump. Unfortunately, that's a book we'll never get to read.
