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If adjusted for inflation between then and now, Jim Marrs’ 2010 book The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy would come out nearer a double-trillion, subject to marketplace whims. Marrs had objected to any such title, for that matter. He reckoned that his topic — economic collapse, politically driven — would devalue that figurative trillion dollars to chump change, any day now.
Long acknowledged as the double-dog-defiant journalistic face of the John F. Kennedy assassination of 1963, Marrs had taken his beatings and invited more of the same since his breakthrough book of 1989 — Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. That historical novel had emerged from 26 years of primary-source research to become a mass-market publishing phenomenon, and eventually the basis for Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, “JFK.” Jim Marrs (1943-2017) stoked controversy as an energizing resource: The more raucous the razzes from the naysayers, the more emphatic the backlash, the greater Marrs’ sense of encouragement.
And the greater his revenues as a consequence. Marrs told the truth as he knew it and conventionally easy answers be damned.
Jim proposed to call his new-for-2010 book by the title of Zombie Nation. He telephoned me from his office in Wise County to pilot the idea. Didn’t have caller ID yet on the antiquated landline hookup, but the instrument packed a more recognizably urgent ring when Jim Marrs was doing the dialing.
No sooner had I picked up, than Marrs posed a pressing question: “You know that World War II-era movie, ‘King of the Zombies’?” He paused a beat. I veered the train of thought onto a film-history track. “Well, then,” he continued, “would you say that ‘King of the Zombies’ might be more of a social allegory than an out-and-out horror movie?”
“I might,” I answered, easing into my official American Film Institute Fellowship hat. “You mean the 1941 movie ‘King of the Zombies,’ right? More a comedy than a scare-show or a social-message piece — but sure-enough an anti-Nazi piece. Unusual for its time, too, before Pearl Harbor, when corporate Hollywood was going easy on the Third Reich in the name of fair-play isolationism.”
“Just what I’d thought,” said Marrs. “A society of zombies, numbed to their own enslavement.”
“Something like that,” I answered. Director Jean Yarbrough had fashioned “King of the Zombies” around the notion that Adolf Hitler’s superstitious flunkies were exploring the crackpot idea of resurrecting cadavers as cannon fodder. Zombies, all right.
“Perfect title for my new book!” Jim said. “Zombie Nation!”
“Still on the Nazi kick, eh, Jim?” I said.
“Naw, no Nazis, per se,” Marrs said. “This is as new as tomorrow — the Third Reich has never really gone away, evolving into a newer New World Order of phantom banking, mind-controlling pharmaceuticals with evasive basic medical care, and a bureaucratic dictatorship. A nation of zombies, that’s what. And we’ve gotten that way without having to resurrect a single stiff! Zombie Nation, all right.”
Marrs’ bankable identification with controversy was hardly fleeting. Marrs reentered the bestseller mainstream with 1997’s Alien Agenda: Investigating the Extraterrestrial Presence Among Us, which saw eight printings in less than a year. He did so again in 2000 with Rule by Secrecy, a connecting recent history with ancient mysteries. Marrs and I developed a graphic novel called Oswald’s Confession (2012), a fact-based speculative sequel to Crossfire.
But about that Zombie Nation: Marrs said later in 2010, “The publisher scrapped my perfect title. Said it sounded too much like a Stephen King book — a horror title, y’know. Which it is, of course, of the real-life variety. Anyhow, now it’s The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy.”
The fuller official title proved a mouthful: The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy: How the New World Order, Man-Made Diseases, and Zombie Banks Are Destroying America. The book has remained in print, and never mind the inexorable shrinkage of the trillion-dollar distinction.
“Still managed to keep the word zombie in there, though,” said Marrs.
Conventional Origins of a Unique Career
James Farrell “Jim” Marrs, a Fort Worth native, had become a reporter for the Denton Record-Chronicle while a student at the University of North Texas. In 1968, he joined the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He spent 1969-1970 as a translator of French and German documents for the U.S. Army. Back at the Star-Telegram, Marrs challenged management with an insistence that the 1963 Kennedy assassination must be a continuing story. He left in 1972 to join the public-relations industry, then returned to the Telegram from 1974-1980.
“They blacklisted me at the Telegram,” Marrs told me after our first meeting in 1983 through the Society of Professional Journalists. “Banished me from the very building, even as a visitor, because I kept challenging the ‘Oswald-done-it’ conclusions. Better not let [editor] Jack Tinsley catch you dealing with me, lest you get the same.” I was working as an editor and columnist for the Telegram. Marrs and I became collaborators on the Society’s annual “Texas Gridiron Show,” a political-satire revue.
When Oliver Stone’s “JFK” came to light during 1990-1991, it became imperative that Jim Marrs, as the film’s local-angle source-author, must be interviewed for the Telegram. As the newspaper’s syndicated film critic, I stated the case to Jack Tinsley.
“Why, Jim Marrs is a charlatan,” said Tinsley. “An embarrassment to the profession. I’ve barred him from the newsroom.”
“Well, if we’re going to cover Oliver Stone’s picture, then we can’t neglect the originator of the story,” I said. “And a bestselling, home-grown originator, at that.”
I determined that Marrs had maintained an account with the Star-Telegram Credit Union. No figure of authority could banish an investor. The interview proceeded, and the newsroom-at-large welcomed Marrs as a fondly remembered colleague.
Marrs progressed as publisher of the weekly Springtown Current while serving as an executive of First Bank & Trust of Springtown.
And why the backlash? Political analyst Stephen E. Ambrose disdained conspiracy theorists, but he championed Marrs’ reasoning that motives for the Kennedy murder included attacks on organized crime; failure to support Cuban exiles in connection with the Bay of Pigs invasion; the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty; plans to withdraw from Vietnam, to abolish the oil-depletion allowance, and to drop Lyndon B. Johnson from the 1964 ticket; and civil-rights policies.
Marrs remained a defiant moving target. Publishers Weekly, the trade journal, reviewed Alien Agenda by scoffing at the notion that the moon might be a UFO and taking to task his refusal to dismiss the notorious “alien autopsy” films. But Publishers Weekly also hailed Alien Agenda as “the most entertaining and complete overview of flying saucers ... in years.”
Marrs remained a chronic TV-and-radio presence, a perpetual-motion engine of research, until a heart attack felled him in August of 2017. Such were the relentless ambitions — not to mention the sheer showboating generosity — of one of the more vivid personalities Fort Worth has produced.
