Reclaiming History (305 page)

At the heart of Garrison’s prosecution of Shaw were three operating principles. One, anything that supported his conspiracy theory
du jour
—no matter how far-fetched and lacking in credibility the story was, no matter how the information was gained—is to be believed. Two, everything is fair in love, war, and a criminal prosecution. And three, “propinquity” (i.e., geographic proximity) suggests an incriminating connection. In
False Witness
, author Patricia Lambert writes that “Garrison applied this odd notion to almost any situation. He assumed a person was connected to an intelligence agency because he maintained a residence or an office near it. He imagined individuals were cohorts who rented post office boxes in the same building…Garrison didn’t believe coincidences happened.”
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In two memorandums, dated February 10 and April 7, 1967, written for “The Smith File,” the code name for his investigation of the assassination before it became known to the public, and titled “Time and Propinquity: Factors in Phase I,” Garrison methodically sets forth how the lives and relationships of various people (he believed had some connection to the plot to kill Kennedy or to the plotters) intersected in New Orleans, no matter how tangentially. For instance, he writes in one of the memos that “on August 30, 1961, Layton Martens was arrested for investigation when police found him sitting in [David] Ferrie’s car waiting for Ferrie…By May, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald is living in the 4900 block of Magazine [Street]. One block away toward downtown is the 800 block of Lyons Street. On that block lived two uncles of Layton Martens.” In other words, this would connect Oswald to Martens, and by necessary extension to Ferrie, Oswald’s alleged co-conspirator in the assassination.

Former Garrison aide Tom Bethell, writing that Garrison’s time and propinquity theory was completely unhinged, quotes Garrison, who was thumbing through the New Orleans city directory, as saying, “Sooner or later, because people are lazy, you catch them out on propinquity.”
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So we see that far from the very sensible and level-headed prosecutor Stone depicted for his audience, the real Garrison was anything but.

Garrison’s intemperate and irresponsible pronouncements and charges were also mind-boggling. News of his secret investigation first surfaced on February 17, 1967, in the
New Orleans States-Item
when reporter Rosemary James disclosed that Garrison had spent $8,000 in three months sending members of his staff to Texas, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, running down leads on the assassination.
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On February 24, one week later, Garrison, in a press conference after lunch at the Petroleum Club in New Orleans, and after the expenditure of only the aforementioned $8,000 in investigative travel expenses, announced that “my staff and I solved the case weeks ago. I wouldn’t say this if I didn’t have evidence beyond a shadow of a doubt. We know the key individuals, the cities involved, and how it was done…There were several plots…The only way they are going to get away from us is to kill themselves…It’s a case we will not lose, and anybody that wants to bet against us is invited to, but they will be disappointed.” Garrison said, “There is no doubt that the entire thing [alleged plot to kill Kennedy] was planned in New Orleans.” For good measure, Garrison told the press, “I have no reason to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald killed anybody in Dallas on November 22, 1963.”
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*
Garrison said that “the key to the whole case is through the looking glass. Black is white. White is black. I don’t want to be cryptic, but that’s the way it is.”
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Of course, Garrison was just bluffing. In fact, Perry Russo, Garrison’s star witness and the one around whom he virtually built his entire case, hadn’t even been interviewed by Garrison’s staff yet. That took place the following day, February 25, when they spoke to him for the very first time. Not one scrap of evidence has ever emerged that on February 24, the day Garrison announced that he and his staff had “solved the case,” he had any evidence connecting anyone, in any way, with the assassination.
If there were nothing else at all, this alone, by definition, would be enough to prove beyond all doubt that Garrison had no personal credibility with respect to this case
.

No assassination theory, many originating with the Dealey Plaza Irregulars and bought by Garrison, was too wild or far-out for Garrison’s taste, and all this played particularly well locally. Garrison’s legal sideshow was tailor-made for the Mardi Gras City, where phantasmal mystery, voodoo, and dark intrigue are treasured commodities. It is said that no other people love fantasy more than the people of New Orleans, and their elected DA intended to give them as much as their girths could hold. Before he finally settled in on elements of the CIA working for “war-oriented elements of the American power structure” as being behind the plot to kill Kennedy,
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the fertile-minded Orleans Parish DA saw many other different villains behind the plot and had screwy visions of how it was pulled off.

In her book about Garrison and the Shaw trial,
False Witness
, the best book on the case, Patricia Lambert chronicles, with citations, Garrison’s progression of fantastic and bizarre theories, all of which he shared with the media. Some additional theories of Garrison’s with citations are also herein included.
*

In late February of 1967, Garrison confided to some reporters that the conspirators behind Kennedy’s murder first planned to murder Castro, with Lee Harvey Oswald as the assassin, but when Oswald was denied entry to Cuba, they switched from Castro as the victim to Kennedy.
†
(To the media at large, he was more circumspect, saying only on February 24 that there was more than one plot, and “a change of course did occur. Now that is more than I wanted to say.”) When
Life
magazine’s Richard Billings interviewed Garrison two days after police found pieces of leather and rope, whips, chains, and so on, in Shaw’s home (on March 1, 1967), Garrison told Billings the seized articles held the key to the assassination. In Billings’s contemporaneous notes of the interview he wrote that Garrison had told him, “I’m now convinced it [the assassination] was a sadist plot,” that he had read the Marquis de Sade and knew that sadists escalate from whipping to killing. “Shaw is a phi beta kappa sadist,” Garrison told Billings. “I’ll develop expert testimony that a sadist would have motivation for a presidential assassination.”

But a few days later, Garrison, wanting to be democratic, brought more groups into the assassination. Kennedy’s murder, he said, “was a homosexual thrill killing” committed by four homosexuals—Ferrie, Ruby, Oswald, and Shaw. (Ferrie and Shaw were, indeed, homosexuals, and Ruby’s sexual orientation was never clear. When it was pointed out to Garrison that Oswald was married with two children, Garrison responded that Oswald was “a switch-hitter.”) In addition to these four homosexuals seeking thrills, Garrison said that “masochists” were also involved in the assassination, but he did not identify who they were. “If you placed a masochist in a room along with a button that would blow up the White House,” Garrison said, “he probably would press that button for the thrill of it.”

In May of 1967, Garrison said in an interview that the people involved in the conspiracy to kill Kennedy “were all anti-Castro oriented and had been engaged in anti-Castro training.” Also in May, Ray Marcus, one of his Dealey Plaza Irregulars, showed Garrison enlarged photographs of the trees and shadows of the grassy knoll in which Marcus claimed he saw four killers concealed in the bushes, so Garrison, not wanting to rain on anyone’s parade, added four more assassins to his firing squad,
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but with one proviso, that he add a fifth one whom Marcus had apparently missed. Garrison told CBS the photos showed “three [assassins] behind the stone wall” on the grassy knoll “and two behind [the fence on] the grassy knoll…before they dropped completely out of sight,” but “you can make an identification from their faces.”
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On June 22, he told a Nashville paper that a fourteen-man team of anti-Castro Cubans who had trained, he said, in New Orleans had killed Kennedy.
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In September, he said that “insanely patriotic oil millionaires” were the ones who were behind the assassination, and “the corroborating evidence is in our files.” Also, “elements of the Dallas police force are clearly involved.” In October 1967 he told
Playboy
magazine that his office had developed evidence that, as previously indicated, the president was assassinated by a “precision guerrilla team of at least seven men” who had fired “from three directions.” He also said that “former employees” of the CIA “had conspired to assassinate the president.”
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In early December he explained, on television, how the murder took place. There was a sewer opening in front of the president’s car, and the assassin who killed Kennedy shot him with a .45 caliber bullet from there, and then fled through the sewers, evoking images of the persecuted suspect in
Les Misérables
fleeing through the sewers of Paris to escape the monstrous Ken Starr–like prosecutor.
*
By the day after Christmas, Garrison said at a press conference that there was “an infinitely larger number [of people involved in the conspiracy] than you would dream.” In Dealey Plaza alone there could have been, he said, as many as fifteen people involved in the assassination.
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Garrison eventually added a sixteenth assassin and concluded that the sixteen were firing from several locations in Dealey Plaza.
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With sixteen assassins, surely Oswald had to at least be one of them, right? No, Garrison assured people. “Oswald didn’t shoot at the President,” he declared confidently.
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But if Garrison couldn’t find room for Oswald, along the way he did find room in his conspiracy constellation for the “Minutemen,”
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“the paramilitary right,”
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and elements of “the invisible Nazi substructure.”
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With his New Year’s resolution being to find additional assassins, in January of 1968 he revealed three new ones—the three tramps found in a box car near Dealey Plaza shortly after the assassination—on Johnny Carson’s
Tonight Show
.
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But, he said in February, the assassination “operation” was “100% Central Intelligence Agency.”
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As Rosemary James, the New Orleans reporter who covered the entire Shaw investigation and trial for the now defunct
States-Item
newspaper, said, “Every time press interest in the case would start to wane, Garrison would propound a new theory…He went from a highly intelligent eccentric to a lunatic in one year.”
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But while Garrison, on only one horse, tried to ride off in a great number of different directions, on one point he remained steadfast: “The evidence indicates that Lee Harvey Oswald did not fire a shot.”
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W
illiam Gurvich, Garrison’s chief investigator who resigned in disgust when he saw Garrison had no case against Shaw, said that at one point in the investigation, Garrison’s proposed arrest list for the assassination, in addition to Shaw, included “one of the city’s [New Orleans] leading coffee importers, one of the area’s leading doctors of international reputation, an FBI agent assigned to the local office, two leaders of the local Cuban refugee organization, and the owner of one of the largest local hotels.”
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Newsweek
magazine reported that “some of [Garrison’s] staff became alarmed about his behavior. He would call meetings, then disappear into the men’s room for awhile, emerge with a new theory and send aides to try to prove it.” Garrison found no problems with this reverse methodology. Charles Ward, who later became a judge on the Louisiana State Court of Appeals, was Garrison’s chief assistant in the DA’s office at the time and helped out in the Shaw case. He told the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
in 1983 that “most of the time you marshal the facts, then deduce your theories. But Garrison deduced a theory, then marshaled his facts. And if the facts didn’t fit, he’d say they had been altered by the CIA.”
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As we saw in an earlier section, at one point Garrison’s aides had to literally talk him out of indicting a dead man (Garrison thought he was alive) and the three tramps on the fifth anniversary of the assassination. But on December 10, 1967, no one succeeded in stopping Garrison from filing a criminal complaint against one Edgar Eugene Bradley, alleging Bradley did “willfully and unlawfully conspire
with others
*
to murder John F. Kennedy.” Garrison’s evidence against Bradley? A young man from Van Nuys, California, lived in the home of a woman who was involved in a lawsuit with Bradley, and when she told him that Bradley looked like one of the three tramps arrested in the railroad yards, he wrote a letter to Garrison to this effect, adding for good measure that Bradley had offered him ten thousand dollars to kill Kennedy when the latter was a U.S. senator, but he had turned Bradley down. Several years later it was determined that the man, a member of the Minutemen, was fourteen years old at the time Bradley allegedly made him the offer. When Dallas deputy sheriff Roger Craig (whose credibility, or severe lack thereof, was discussed earlier in this book) told Garrison that he saw Bradley in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, posing as a Secret Service agent, and Garrison’s star witness, Perry Russo, said Ferrie knew Bradley, that’s all Garrison needed to charge Bradley with Kennedy’s murder.

Bradley (a North Hollywood, California, business representative for right-wing radio evangelist Carl McIntire), who
was
in Texas on the day of the assassination (but El Paso, not Dallas), said, “I shot who?” when the press notified him of the murder charges against him. He proceeded to say that Garrison “must be nuts. This man is either being highly paid to do this or he’s off his rocker.”
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On November 8, 1968, there being no evidence presented by Garrison’s office connecting Bradley to the assassination, California governor Ronald Reagan denied Garrison’s extradition request. Edwin Meese, Reagan’s press secretary, said that Garrison’s office had been given the chance to present witnesses to substantiate the allegation but had not done so.
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