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Garrison's unconventional methodology
was not limited to concocting encoded phone numbers. It
also accounted for the conspiracy charge at the center of
his case against Clay Shaw. This allegation was that Clay
Shaw, under the alias "Clay Bertrand," met with David Ferrie
and Lee Harvey Oswald in Ferrie's apartment on a single
occasion in September 1963 and, in the presence of a fourth
man, Perry Raymond Russo, plotted the assassination of President
Kennedy in Dallas. Ferrie and Oswald were now dead, and
Shaw unequivocally denied that he had attended such a meeting
(or, for that matter, knew Oswald or Ferrie), so Garrison's
only possible witness to this putative event was Russo,
a 25-year old insurance man from Baton Rouge who in 1963
had been in the pornography film business with Ferrie. But
Garrison had not even known of Russo's story when he had
announced on February 24, 1967 that he had "positively solved
the assassination." Just as he inventively fashioned what
appeared to be innocent phone numbers into a conspiratorial
nexus, he developed Russo's bland story on a local television
program that same night, in which he said he had been acquainted
with Ferrie but he had no reason to believe he was involved
in a plot to kill Kennedy, into one in which he said he
witnessed the plot unfold. After seeing Russo on TV, Garrison
wasted no time. The next day he dispatched Assistant D.A.
Andrew "Moo Moo" Sciambra, a former pugilist, to Baton Rouge
to interview him. Russo's story, according to the lengthy
written report Sciambra submitted, mainly concerned Ferrie's
sexual activities, including his efforts to develop an homosexual
aphrodisiac and to acquire Cuban pornographic films (which
Russo sold for him), but it contained nothing about a conspiracy
that would validate Garrison's press claims. Russo did not
recall any meeting in which Ferrie, Oswald, Shaw or anyone
else discussed assassinating President Kennedy and, when
shown a set of photographs of Shaw by Sciambra, Russo flatly
stated that he had only seen Shaw on only two occasions
from afar: one time at a political rally for Kennedy and
the other time in a car at a gasoline station. Although
such testimony, which precluded the possibility that Russo
witnessed Shaw in a conspiratorial meeting in Ferrie's apartment,
might seem exculpatory, Garrison realized that Russo might
be induced by exotic techniques to fill in his story. On
February 27, he had Russo drugged with sodium pentathol
and re-interrogated. While in this semi-conscious state,
Moo Moo Sciambra introduced the subject of "Clay Bertrand"
by asking Russo "if he could remember any of the details
about Clay Bertrand being up in Ferrie's apartment". Under
such prompting, Russo gradually began to expand his story
Next, Garrison had him hypnotized by a Doctor Esmond Fatter,
who told Russo to imagine a television screen in his mind.
"You are in Ferrie's apartment... There will be Bertrand,
Ferrie and Oswald... They are talking about assassinating
someone". By the Garrison had finished such "verifying tests,"
as he called them, Russo would be his sole witness to the
assassination plot.
Such hypnotically-induced testimony
eventually would be exposed in court, since, as Garrison
realized, the defense had a right to examine all the accuser's
statements, but he artfully managed to stretch out the interim
between charge and the trial for over 22 months while he
engaged in a wide range of diversionary actions. At one
point, for example, he had a religious fund-raiser in California
named Edgar Eugene Bradley arrested in Los Angeles on the
charge of conspiring to kill the President, even though.
As his bewildered staff confirmed, he had not a scintilla
of evidence against this person other than an inflammatory
anti-Kennedy letter that, it turned out, had been written
by a different person with a similar name (He later claimed
he was provoked into making this erroneous arrest by "disinformation'
foisted on by the sponsors of the assassination). With similar
cavalierness, he issued arrest warrants for three journalists,
whom he had himself previously sought publicity from, accusing
Walter Sheridan of NBC of "public bribery", David Chandler
of Life Magazine of "perjury" and Richard Townley of WSDU-TV
in New Orleans of "intimidation of a witness". He also used
this pre-trial period, in which he had become the focus
of national attention, to appear on such television programs
as Johnny Carson show, where, when asked by Carson to reveal
the new evidence he claimed he had, he reached magician-like
into his black case and pulled out some old news photographs
he had obtained from the Dallas Times Herald, taken soon
after the assassination at the Texas Book Depository, that
showed nothing more than a group of bystanders, at least
two of whom worked in the building, being questioned by
policemen. "Here are the pictures of five of them being
arrested and they've never been shown before," he said,
holding up the blurry prints. "Several of these men arrested
have been connected by our office to the Central Intelligence
Agency," even though he was referring to bystanders whose
identity he had not yet determined-- no less their organizational
affiliations, and then extrapolated "An element of the Central
Intelligence Agency of our country killed John Kennedy".
By this time, the had considerably proliferated the "forces
behind the conspiracy." When he began his investigation
in December 1966, he told Senator Long that only a few insignificant
men were involved-- referring to Ferrie and a few of his
bizarre associates. After Ferrie's death, the conspiracy
began to expand. He told me in early 1967, after he had
arrested Shaw, the group included perverts--both Ferrie
and Shaw were homosexual-- and anti-Castro Cubans. Then,
as he went from interview to interview, the conspiracy escalated
to include Minutemen, oil millionaires, Dallas policemen,
munitions exporters, reactionaries, White Russians, elements
of "the invisible Nazi substructure" and CIA agents.
When the trial finally began on January
21, 1969, Shaw's defense lawyer Irvin Dymond made short
work of the credibility of Garrison's only witness to the
conspiracy at issue. Moo Moo Sciambra's memorandum describing
Russo's pre-hypnosis story showed that Russo originally
had excluded Shaw from any meeting in Ferrie's apartment
he witnessed. Moreover, during his cross-examination, Russo
himself admitted that he had told Lieutenant Edward O'Donnell,
a veteran officer of the New Orleans police department,
that Shaw probably had not been the man he had seen in Ferrie's
apartment-- after Shaw had been arrested. Moreover, the
shadowy figure of Clay Bertrand, whom Russo claimed was
the alias Shaw used when he met him, was now acknowledged
by Dean Andrews, the jive-talking lawyer who had first introduced
the name "Clay Bertrand" into the investigation back in
1964, to be nothing more than a name he made up "out of
thin air" to shield the identity of a friend of his. So
how could Russo assert that this was the name Clay Shaw
was using in 1963-- unless the name had been fed to him
by the prosecution?
Despite the apparent collapse of his
case, Garrison had his assistants darken the courtroom and
screen, ten times no less, the celebrated amateur film of
the assassination made by Abraham Zapruder in Dallas, so
the jurors saw, over and over again, the gruesome scene
of Kennedy's head being shattered by a bullet. They also
called a parade of ear witnesses, all of whom heard shots--or
their echoes -- emanating from different directions. He
also presented as his surprise witness an impeccably-dressed
New Yorker named Charles I. Spiesel. Spiesel testified matter-of-factly
that on a trip to New Orleans he had also found himself
at a party where the assassination was being plotted by
most of the same characters at the Russo party. Under cross-examination,
however, Spiesel admitted that he himself had been the victim
of a vast conspiracy for some sixteen years in which the
conspirators, who included police, his own psychiatrist
and some 50 hypnotists, followed him around New York, tapped
his phones, caused him to make errors in his business, prevented
him from having normal sexual relations, kept him under
their hypnotic control and were so proficient at assuming
the identity of his relatives that he had fingerprinted
his own daughter repeatedly to assure she was not an alien
impostor. While such excursions may have held interest to
the assassination buffs attending the event, it had no direct
bearing on the case being tried.
Garrison himself rarely appeared at
the trial -- not even for the testimony or cross-examination
of the man he had accused of conspiring to kill the President.
When he finally made his closing statement, he mentioned
the defendant's name only once in a disjointed 25 minute
speech. Instead, borrowing from Kennedy's celebrated rhetoric,
he told the jury "ask not what your country can do for you
but what you can do for your country". Even though it was
past midnight, it took the jury less than an hour to unanimously
reach its verdict: Shaw was not guilty. Two years to the
day had elapsed since Shaw's arrest and he was nearly bankrupt
from the cost of his legal defense. Although Shaw left court
on March 1, 1969 an acquitted man, he was not yet free of
Garrison who, despite the hoary principle of double jeopardy,
re-arrested Shaw and attempted to re-try him for perjury.
Eventually, a Federal court intervened and quashed the re-indictment.
(Shaw, wearied by more than four years of prosecution, died
in 1973).
So ended the evidence part of Garrison's
process, which the New York Times called, "one of the most
disgraceful chapters in the history of American jurisprudence."
Even assassination buffs were dismayed by the dearth of
evidence it produced. The local press, which Garrison had
tried so hard to win over, now condemned him; with the States-Item
calling for his resignation, on the grounds that "his persecution
of Clay L. Shaw was a pervasion of the legal process such
as has not often been seen".
Such condemnations missed both the point
and power of Garrison's appeal. His process, which did not
end for another 20 years (when it was encapsulated in a
movie), was not about forensic evidence-- Shaw served merely
as a convenient means to an end-- it was about something
far more tormenting to his public, the conspicuous absence
of evidence. He was concerned not with what existed, and
could be verified and tested through accepted procedures,
but what was agonizingly missing from the investigation,
which he reeled off like a litany: the X-ray and photographs
of President Kennedy' body (that had not been available
even to the Warren Commission), four frames of the Zapruder
films (that had not been published in the Warren Report),
Classified documents in the national archives (which were
unavailable to the public for 75 years, the President's
brain (that had vanished from government custody), bullets
that had not been found at the scene of the assassination,
missing (or dead) witnesses. The very fact such evidence
were missing from the public record revealed for him of
the systematic suppression of the truth about the assassination
and the power of forces behind this cover up. Why should
something be kept from the public, he asked, if it has no
sinister implications-- playing on the concern, and repugnance
over government secrecy in a democracy. Once he had focussed
attention of his audience on missing evidence, it took him
only a single rhetorically step to draw the most sinister
connection between it and the succession to power. For example,
he asked on the cover of Ramparts magazine in 1968: "Who
controls the CIA? Who controls the FBI? Who controls the
archives where this evidence is locked up for so long that
it is unlikely that there is anybody in this room who will
be alive when it is released? This is really your property
and the property of the people of this country. Who has
the arrogance and brass to prevent the people from seeing
that evidence? Who indeed? The one man who has profited
the most from the assassination-- your friendly President,
Lyndon Johnson."
Garrison, to be sure, was not the first crusader to
attack the dragon of missing evidence. Exploiting the public's
fear and fascination with secrecy had, as Edward Shils argued
in his book Torment of Secrecy, deep roots in a society
suspicious of aristocratic privilege. In the 1950s, Senator
Joe McCarthy, who also portrayed himself in the center of
an apocalyptical struggle to wrest secrets from hidden elites,
deduced much of his evidence that a Communist conspiracy
was infiltrating the American government and media from
missing documents. For example, in one of his more celebrated
appearances before the Tydings Senate Sub-Committee, he
charged that the FBI had sealed away classified documents
that revealed there were eighty-one card-carrying Communists
employed by the State Department. When President Harry S.
Truman then waived his executive privilege and made these
files available to the Tydings Committee, McCarthy, finding
they did support his allegation, claimed that they had been
"raped and rifled" before they had been shown to the Committee,
and he now demanded the release of the "real files". The
advantage he found in basing his charges on missing evidence
was that they could not be refuted because the very absence
of substantiation was further proof of the conspiracy's
power to expunge information.
Garrison, however, proved far more imaginative
than earlier self-styled populist in using this mode of
inquiry to project on television and magazine interviews
a vision of a grand conspiracy. Consider, for example, how
he magically extrapolated from what might have been a stray
pebble, President Johnson's participation in the conspiracy.
On a television show in Texas, he held up two newspaper
photographs taken about ten minutes after the assassination.
In the first one, an unidentified man in a dark suit is
looking towards the curb on the street near where President
Kennedy was shot. Although it is not apparent to the naked
eye, Garrison announced he could discern in this photograph,
partially concealed in the matted grass by the curb, a pebble-like
object (which his staff later concluded from the blow up
might indeed by a pebble). He then identified this object
as a .45 caliber bullet, the one "which killed John Kennedy,
which had markings on it that would show [that] the automatic
gun that it came [was a] handgun." He then deduced from
this "bullet" that the assassin must have been in a sewer
in front of the President, not in the Book Depository behind
the President as the Warren Commission concluded. Even more
amazing, from the second photograph he presented, which
showed only the man walking away from the curb, Garrison
deduced in Sherlock-Holmes style, first, that the man from
his appearance-- a dark suit -- had to be a "federal agent",
second, from the man's closed fist, that he "got the bullet
clutched in his hand, the bullet that killed John Kennedy."
He never explained how he could know that a bullet was in
a closed hand, or its caliber, but since this .45 caliber
bullet (or pebble) had been conspicuously missing from the
inventory of the Warren Commission's evidence, he announced
that "the bullet which killed John Kennedy, which fell in
the grass with pieces of the President's head , was in the
hands of the federal government ten minutes after the President
was dead." And, Eureka: "This meant that the Federal Government
knowingly participated in framing Lee Oswald" and that "Lyndon
Johnson had to know this."
The putative gunman in the sewer was
not the only member of the conspiracy that Garrison had
derived from missing evidence in his long media campaign.
In a 26-page long Playboy interview, he had posited a team
of 14 additional assassins, firing from four different locations--
two of whom were probably assigned to pick up all the cartridge
cases (explaining why they were never found). Since four
frames of the famous Zapruder film had not been published
in the Warren Commission, he further deduced that these
missing frames revealed the tell-tale marks of stray bullets
on a road sign (that was also missing). When Life, which
owned the Zapruder film, published the missing frames and
they showed no traces of a bullet-stressed sign, he suggested
that had been air-brushed out. Since a spectator at the
scene, who fainted 20 minutes before the motorcade arrived,
had not been identified in the Warren Report, he claimed
he was part of a paramilitary diversionary action that simulated
an epileptic fit (Subsequently, this alleged paramilitary
diversionist turned out to be Jerry Boyd Belknap, an employee
of the nearby Dallas Morning News who had been taking medication
for a head injury he suffered in a car accident). Because
the X-ray and autopsy photographs of the President's body,
which were the best evidence of the path of the bullets,
were locked away in the National Archives, and not even
the Warren Commission had examined them, he reasoned that
they showed the President was shot from the front in a cross-fire,
not from the back as the Warren Commission concluded. "Front
was changed into back when the Zapruder film and autopsy
X-rays were kept out of sight," he added in his book. Since
all tangible evidence of this imputed "cross fire" -- the
automatic rifles and .45 caliber pistol used by the assassins,
the cartridge cases ejected at the four sniper nests, the
stray bullets, the communications equipment to coordinate
the gunfire, the entry wounds in the President's neck --
had vanished, he concluded that the conspiracy possessed
the "hidden machinery" necessary 'to remove all stain and
make it appear to have been something less. " This capacity
brought him back to the CIA which he asserted had "incinerated"
evidence, saying the Warren Commission's failed to obtain
"a secret CIA memo on Oswald's activities in Russia" because
it had been "destroyed" the day after the assassination.
(In fact, the "secret CIA memo" he referred to appears in
Volume XVIII of the Warren Commission's twenty-six volumes
of published testimony and evidence-- since only a State
Department copy of the memo had been destroyed in a photocopier).
He asserted that CIA documents consigned to the National
Archives proved Oswald was a CIA employee (even though this
material was available to the Warren Commission ) and cited,
as his "clincher" the ultimate missing evidence: the "consistent
refusal of the Federal government" to provide "any information"
about the CIA's role in the assassination.
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