Newly opened files reveal that Jim Garrison -the New Orleans prosecutor, Oliver Stone hero and J.F.K. conspiracy hunter- himself conspired to frame an innocent man.
BY GERALD POSNER
The New York Times Magazine, August 6, 1995
EVEN AFTER 2,000 BOOKS AND A MAJOR HOLLYWOOD FILM, conspiracy
theorists are still divided over Jim Garrison's 1969 prosecution of the New Orleans
businessman Clay Shaw, the only trial that ever resulted from the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy. While Shaw's acquittal prompted most historians to conclude
that Garrison had abused his powers, supporters of the District Attorney speculated that
the original case files might prove otherwise. Now, on the eve of the public release of
some of those files, it is finally possible to settle whether the case against Shaw was a
fraud.
The problem confronting Garrison when he began his investigation was separating facts from
rumors. The assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had lived in New Orleans only months before the
assassination. But Garrison persisted in following leads even when they were quickly
discredited: that an eccentric homosexual, David Ferrie, taught Oswald how to shoot and
had visited Texas on the evening of the assassination; and that Oswald, together with some
flamboyant homosexuals, had visited a local attorney, Dean Andrews, who claimed his legal
bill was paid by a man known only as "Clay Bertrand." Using these assertions,
Garrison soon said the plot to kill the President was "a homosexual
thrill-killing." (He claimed that Oswald was a "switch-hitter" and that
Jack Ruby was gay.)
What Garrison actually discovered should have raised red flags. The source of the Ferrie
story was a private investigator, Jack Martin, an alcoholic who had been in prisons and
mental institutions. Within a week of the assassination, he confessed to the F.B.I. that
he had concocted the account while drunk. Andrews, who had given widely different
descriptions of the alleged Clay Bertrand, also recanted his yarn after the F.B.I. failed
to find anyone in New Orleans who ever heard the name Bertrand. But in 1966, when Martin
and Andrews revived their early tales, Garrison overlooked the inconsistencies, a pattern
he repeated throughout the case.
In early 1967, Ferrie, still a suspect, died. Since the case was at a halt, some of
Garrison's staff advised that the investigation be dropped. Although Ferrie died of
natural causes, Garrison speculated the cause was murder or suicide, and was confident he
was on the right track. The only suspect left, though, was the mysterious Bertrand.
Garrison had shocked his staff months earlier by telling them he thought Clay Shaw, a
prominent businessman and a member of the city's social elite, was Clay Bertrand. The fact
that Garrison knew Shaw was a homosexual fit his theory. He was untroubled that Shaw, at 6
feet 4 inches tall and with shocking white hair, fit none of Andrews's descriptions.
Instead, he told his staff, the name Clay Bertrand was the key, since homosexuals
"always change their last names, but never their first names." A week after
Ferrie's death, Shaw was arrested and charged with being part of a conspiracy to
assassinate Kennedy.
During the height of the Shaw investigation, there were five five-drawer file cabinets of
documents. Today, only one cabinet remains. '"That's all that was here when we took
over from Garrison on April 1, 1974," says Harry Connick Sr., the current Distract
Attorney. He invited me to examine the files before he was scheduled to send them to the
Assassination Records Review Board, a Presidentially appointed group. Louis Iron,
Garrison's chief investigator, confirmed to me that the staff pruned the investigatory
files before Connick took charge; they feared an abuse of process suit by Shaw, and
possible Federal prosecution against Garrison. Even so, these remaining records confirm
that the Shaw prosecution was a travesty.
THE DAY AFTER SHAW'S ARREST, FOUR OF GARRISON'S INVESTIGATORS grilled Dean Andrews, the
local attorney. In the files, there are 10 pages of handwritten notes about that
interrogation. Andrews did not equivocate when asked if Clay Shaw was Clay Bertrand --
"No." Although that answer destroyed the crux of the charge against Shaw,
Garrison ignored it. Similar was the handling of a man named Vernon Bundy, in jail for a
parole violation. He testified that while he was shooting heroin along the lake one day in
1963, he saw Shaw meet Oswald. At the trial, Bundy identified Shaw from his slightly stiff
walk -- "the twisting of his foot had frightened me that day on the sea wall when I
was about to cook my drugs." The defense did not shake his basic story.
Looking through the files now, I discovered a March 16, 1967, transcript of an interview
between Bundy and three Garrison investigators. In that talk, only two weeks after Shaw's
arrest, Bundy described the "Oswald" character as a "real junkie," and
said his name was "Pete." Not once in a 12-page typewritten statement did Bundy
mention any unusual walk or gait. By the time of his testimony, he had dropped any
inconsistencies, and his memory had "improved" favorably for the prosecution.
The most telling abuse shown by the files probably concerns four witnesses from Clinton,
La, who were used to holster a sighting of Oswald, Ferric and Shaw. The witnesses gave
almost uniform trial testimony, saying that during a Congress of Racial Equality
voter-registration drive in the late summer of 1963, a black Cadillac, driven by Shaw,
stopped in town. Ferrie and Oswald were passengers. This testimony seemed strong. Yet, the
fries confirm suspicions that the witnesses initially gave dramatically conflicting
statements to investigators. Some had failed to identify Oswald, Shaw or Ferrie. Others
had described the Cadillac as an "old and beat-up Nash or a Kaiser," or instead
of three men in the car, they originally said four, or two, or a woman with a baby. Some
swore the Oswald look-alike was in a voter-registration line, while a few thought he
applied for a job at a mental institution, and another claimed to have cut his hair.
Several placed the sightings in October, when Oswald was in Dallas, and two thought Jack
Ruby drove the car.
Moreover, the files reveal new information that Garrison's investigators had tried in vain
to find support for the alleged sighting. They had combed the Clinton area; more than 100
local residents failed to recall a dark car or strangers in the small town. At a separate
meeting of 60 CORE volunteers, investigators explained the story and projected pictures of
Oswald, Shaw and Ferric. No one remembered the incident.
But in an era when defense attorneys were not entitled to exculpatory material or
contradictory witness statements, it was up to the prosecutor not to proceed with
unreliable evidence. Garrison exercised no such restraint. In a March 24, 1967, memo from
Lynn Loisel, a prosecution investigator, to Garrison, a potential witness was adamant that
Clay Shaw was not Clay Bertrand. That document was hidden not just from defense lawyers
but from the rest of the investigative staff. At the top is written: "Do Not
DISTRIBUTE! Not clear. Re-interview needed when facts are straightened out."
The excesses shown by the newly opened Garrison files do not stop at prosecutory
persecution. They also disclose a previously unknown aspect -- that Garrison secretly
taped the conversations of journalists who were critical of him. Jack Martin, the private
investigator who had first spun the tale about Ferric and Oswald, recorded most of the
conversations. On the tapes and in their transcripts in the files, Martin and others
assured people they spoke to that their telephones were not tapped. The surveillance might
have been legal under Louisiana law (the consent of one party to the conversation is
necessary), but misrepresentations like those from Martin cloud the issue. Other
surveillances in the files raise the issue as to whether Garrison's investigators broke
the law. When Ferrie's godson was arrested on a narcotics charge, prosecutors offered to
drop it if he taped conversations with journalists. Several of Garrison's investigators
also unsuccessfully tried to record a meeting, in a car, between two NBC reporters and an
unidentified third person. There is no evidence of consent to the recording, nor a court
order authorizing the surveillance.
Rumors that Garrison bugged the apartments of some potential witnesses are also confirmed
in the files. Journalists like James Phelan, at The Saturday Evening Post, and George
Lardner, at The Washington Post, were routinely recorded when they visited the apartments.
THE NEWLY OPENED FILES PROVIDE YET ANOTHER INSIGHT INTO Garrison's personality and
motivation. His view of who was in the conspiracy evolved radically, from a small group of
homosexuals to members of the "military-industrial complex." A thick folder
labeled with his name contained documents and handwritten notes to himself. It included a
map of the United States titled "Massive Retaliation Complex, which names potential
witnesses or suspects in cities and cross-links them to defense contractors. In a separate
memo, Garrison listed people tangentially connected to Oswald (for example, the librarian
from whom Oswald checked out books) and wrote their supposed connections to the
military-industrial complex.
But theories about the military-industrial complex did not impress the Shaw jury. They
took only 45 minutes to return a not-guilty verdict. That meant little to Garrison, who
viewed the jury's decision as an over- sight in an otherwise solid case. He later charged
Shaw with perjury, an action that an appeals court enjoined him from continuing when it
concluded he had acted in bad faith.
When I finished reviewing Garrison's files, I again met with District Attorney Connick. I
asked whether Oliver Stone, Whose movie "J.F.K." portrayed Garrison as a lone
hero, had ever asked to see Garrison's files. "Heavens no. They did not even ask
about them. I don't think they were probing anymore. I had the impression that Oliver
Stone knew what he was going to do, had his mind made up and wasn't going to be bothered
by the facts. For history, that's a shame."
Did Stone ever ask for your opinion? "Yes, he did," Connick says. "I said I
thought it was one of the grossest, most extreme miscarriages of justice in the annals of
American judicial history. And Stone said, 'Well, we are going to do the movie anyway,' as
if I was suggesting he shouldn't do it. I said: 'Well, do whatever you want to do. I have
nothing to say about that. You were asking and I was telling you that it was just a
miscarriage of justice. An innocent man was plucked out of somebody's mind and made a
defendant in a criminal case.' "
Copyright 1995, Gerald Posner