The Death of John Barbour
John Barbour passed away on May 9, 2026, in Las Vegas, where he had moved after leaving Los Angeles many years ago. John was one of the few entertainment figures—like Oliver Stone and Jesse Ventura—who took an anti-Warren Commission stand on the John Kennedy assassination. And he did so at a cost to his career.
But before we get to that, let us outline the rather copious career he did have in the entertainment field. John was born in Toronto and left home at an early age. He reportedly did not have an ideal family life, so he decided to leave.
He began in the entertainment field as a comedian. In 1965, he released an album called It’s Tough to Be White. He then did another comedy album, I Met a Man I didn’t Like. He made comedy appearances on The Dean Martin Show and The Tonight Show. In Las Vegas, he was an opener for Robert Goulet and Bobby Darin. He wrote TV scripts for Gomer Pyle USMC, My Mother the Car, and wrote sketches for Laugh-In. He was also a writer for Speak Up, America. He then originated and hosted the hit series Real People, which ran for four years and is usually credited as being the first reality TV show. Later on, in 1982, John wrote a film about TV comedian Ernie Kovacs. This highly praised documentary was titled Ernie Kovacs: Television’s Original Genius.
But to show how expansive John’s career in entertainment was, he had a parallel career to writing for TV and being a stand-up comedian. He also became a daytime talk show host on KNXT TV in Los Angeles. He then moved to Chicago as co-host of AM Chicago on the ABC-run WLS-TV. While hosting in LA, he won five local Emmys. He won three more of them doing movie reviews for KNBC as their critic at large. He then transferred from doing live TV film reviews to writing reviews for Los Angeles Magazine for ten years.
John had a strong interest in the John Kennedy assassination. And particularly in the investigation that was done by New Orleans DA Jim Garrison from the sixties. In 1980, he went down to New Orleans to interview Garrison. This was when John was at the height of his career, hosting Real People. When he tried to get some of the interview shown on TV, he discovered that producer George Schlatter had re-edited the footage to make Garrison say that instead of 20-30 people being involved in the overall plot, that there were that many in Dealey Plaza. Barbour was outraged. He tried to get Garrison to sue NBC. Garrison declined, but it was this anger that cost him his position with Real People.
In 1992, John had taken ownership of the Garrison interview. He decided to time a release of the footage with Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK. This was called The JFK Assassination: The Garrison Tapes. It is one of the fairest treatments of the DA one will find in the canon of JFK assassination films. The interview subjects that Barbour attained for this film were remarkable. In addition to Garrison, there was Bill Alford, a lawyer from the DA’s staff, defense attorney Irvin Dymond, investigators Lou Ivon and Steve Jaffe, Mark Lane, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, Dr. Robert McClelland, Fletcher Prouty, Jim Marrs and more. Beyond that, John got a big-time Hollywood producer to back and promote the film, Fred Weintraub. After playing at a theater in Century City, it then got a very wide release on video cassette. But according to John, he did not have a very good deal on this. This film can be seen on YouTube.
In 2014, John released a film that was made up of interviews he did at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, with some critics of the Warren Report who had done further work on investigating the crime. These were Jim Marrs, Joan Mellen and Dick Russell. This release was called The Last Word on the Assassination. This is available on DVD.
In 2017, he made another documentary on the JFK case. This was called The American Media and the 2nd Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In this film, John went after the hallowed cows of the MSM like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather for their slavish adherence to the Warren Report. And it again supported the Jim Garrison investigation. This film was streamed on platforms like Roku and Apple.
Then, to top things off, he wrote a long autobiography in 2019 called Your Mother’s Not A Virgin.
I know of no one who has made three documentaries on the JFK case. But John did, and he talked about the Kennedy assassination and defended Jim Garrison on various podcasts he did from his home in Las Vegas. To have lost Cyril Wecht two years ago, then Bob Tanenbaum in January and now John Barbour in May, these are all grievous subtractions to the critical side of the JFK equation. The best we can do is shoulder on in the face of adversity and do our best to honor their memories.
