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When Jim Garrison, the former district
attorney of Orleans, died of cancer on October 21,1992,
the obituaries called attention to two extraordinary events,
that occurred a generation apart--one in fact, one in fiction--
that will be forever connected in the popular imagination.
The real event, that took place in 1969, was his prosecution
of Clay Shaw in New Orleans for conspiring to kill President
John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, which gave him the
distinction of being the only prosecutor ever to try someone
for the assassination. The fictional event, which took place
in 1991 was Oliver Stone's stunning film, JFK in which Garrison,
played by Kevin Costner, achieved his celluloid immortality
as a soft-spoken truth-seeking district attorney who relentlessly
investigates the Kennedy assassination and, despite all
the obstacles thrown in his way by the federal establishment,
heroically exposes the conspiracy responsible for killing
the President. Even though this fictive rendition excited
enormous interest among a worldwide audience of some 100
million people and even led to the film's distributor issuing
new textbook supplements for a whole generation of students
unborn at the time of the assassination, the real Garrison,
and his treatment of the truth, deserves not to be forgotten.
In April 1967, I went to New Orleans
to write about District Attorney Garrison for this magazine
and inadvertently became part of his investigation. Once
month earlier, he had shocked the world by arresting Clay
L. Shaw, a socially-prominent civic leader and the founding
director of the city's International Trade Mart, for conspiring
to murder President Kennedy. He had explained to a bewildered
press conference a week before that arrest: "My staff and
I solved the assassination weeks ago. I wouldn't say this
if we didn't have evidence beyond a shadow of a doubt."
Garrison's conspiracy thesis clearly
contradicted the Warren Commission's conclusion that a lone
gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, acting without assistance, had
been responsible for the assassination. But that did not
necessarily mean he was wrong as far as I was concerned.
In the course of writing my master' thesis at Cornell, which
became the book Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment
of Truth, I had examined the Warren Commission's staff records
and found that its investigation, far from being the exhaustive
examination it was taken for, had skimmed over unresolved
issues. The Commission itself, appointed by President Lyndon
Baines Johnson, was determined to have its report out before
the 1964 election campaign began. So in June of 1963, just
three months after its staff lawyers had begun their investigation
at the assassination site in Dallas, it instructed them
were supposed "to be closing doors, not opening them". One
yawning gap in its investigation at that time was Oswald's
activities in New Orleans. So I, for one, believed it was
at least possible that a local district attorney, not hemmed
in by the time pressures, political considerations and national
security considerations that affected the Warren Commission,
might have uncovered hidden associates of Oswald's in New
Orleans.
Garrison had been born Earling Caruthers
Garrison in Denniston, Iowa on November 20, 1921, but he
legally changed his first name to plain "Jim" when he first
entered Louisiana politics in the 1950s. He had already
tried his hand as a pilot in the military in the second
world war, a FBI agent in Seattle and as a lawyer in New
Orleans. After running but failing to win election as a
judge, he ran as a reform candidate for district attorney
in a three-man race and was elected in the run-off in 1962.
He quickly made a reputation for himself, strapping on a
pistol and himself leading well-publicized raids on brothels,
after-hour bars and dice-games in the French Quarter.
"I am flamboyant," he would brag to
the press. When the eight judges who oversaw his offices
expenditures refused to authorize anymore expense funds
for these forays, he suggested that they were under "racketeer
influence," and for this unsupported charge, in February
1963, was tried and convicted of criminal defamation. Garrison
appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court that the state law on
defamation of officials was unconstitutional, and won--
thereby greatly expanding the latitude the public had in
leveling charges against public officials.
I could see why Garrison was popularly
referred to as the Jolly Green Giant when I met him for
dinner at Broussards. He stood six foot six inches tall,
with a self-conscious stoop that made him look even taller,
as if he was larger than life. As he lumbered through the
restaurant, he affably extended his political glad hand
to acquaintances at almost every table.
His welcome to me was exceedingly gracious.
He began by saying, almost solemnly, that my book on the
Warren Commission had helped shape his decision to launch
his investigation (which, as I learned later, was more or
less the standard compliment he paid to almost all critics
of the Warren Commission who soon began flocking to him
like the children of Hamelin to the Pied Piper). He fixed
me with his intense, almost walleye, stare, speaking slowly
but with great articulateness. He traced his own intellectual
development to two heroes: Ayn Rand, whose lone-wolf protagonist
in The Fountainhead had exemplified to him the need for
higher-conscious individuals acting like supermen; and Huey
Long, the assassinated Governor of Louisiana, whose speeches
attacking elite conspiracies, had attracted immense popular
support.
As the leisurely dinner progressed,
Garrison spelled out the conspiracy he had uncovered. Like
the specialities, which the chef personally delivered dish
by dish to the tables, his narrative was rich but sporadic.
Its central character was David W. Ferrie, an ex-airline
pilot and self-styled soldier of fortune, who was bizarre
even by the relaxed standards of the French Quarter. He
had orange pieces of fur glued to his head, having lost
all his body hair from the disease alopecia, making him
unforgettable in appearance. He professed to be a bishop
in a quasi-political cult called the Orthodox Old Catholic
Church of North America and worked on and off as a free-lance
pilot, a pornography trafficker, a hypnotist and gas station
operator. By the summer of 1963, when Oswald was living
in New Orleans, he had also became involved in training
anti-Castro guerrillas.
The day after the assassination, Garrison
got a tip alleging that Ferrie had trained Oswald in marksmanship
and detained Ferrie for questioning. A few hours later he
was released, after the tipster, Jack Martin, who was known
for providing false leads in other cases, completely recanted
his story. Two years later, after Senator Russell Long told
him that he had doubts about the Warren Commission's version
of the assassination, Garrison resumed his pursuit of Ferrie.
Even though Ferrie maintained that he had no connection
whatsoever with Oswald, he found other witnesses that established,
at least to his satisfaction, that Ferrie had become involved
with Oswald through his anti-Castro activities. He was deeply
suspicious of Ferrie's ice-skating trip to Houston, Texas
the day after the assassination and hypothesized to me that
he had been Oswald's get-away pilot. He then asserted with
absolute authority that Ferrie was the "evil genius" who
planned the mechanics of the assassination in Dallas.
The problem was this theory, at least
for a criminal prosecution, was that Ferrie had died some
six weeks ago. At the time, Garrison, who was getting ready
to re- arrest him, he explained. His investigation, however,
leaked to the press, and, on February 22, Ferrie's body
was found in his apartment. (It turned out, a few hours
before he died, Ferrie had complained to George Lardner
of the Washington Post that Garrison was persecuting him.)
The coroner of Orleans Parish, Dr. Nicholas Chetta, concluded
from the autopsy that Ferrie had died of natural causes--
a cerebral hemorrhage caused by the rupture of a blood vessel.
He ruled out suicide because a person ordinarily would not
be aware a weak spot exists in a blood vessel and murder
on the grounds that if the rupture had been caused by an
external blow there would necessarily be tissue damage and
none was found. Although Garrison said he believed it was
either suicide or murder, he did not challenge the coroner's
finding. Instead, one week later, he arrested another man
for the assassination: Clay Shaw.
When I asked what Shaw had to do with
the assassination, he became more elliptical. "Its exactly
like a chess problem," he said. "The Warren Commission move
the same pieces back and forth and got nowhere. I made a
new move and solved the problem." He explained that the
surprise arrest was timed to prevent Shaw from destroying
any of his personal papers, which his men gathered up from
his home in the French Quarter immediately afterwards. He
then offered to make this "important evidence" available
to me.
Early the next morning, I went with
my research associate, Jones Harris, to his office suite
in the Criminal District Court Building, where Garrison
had left word with his assistant, district attorney, James
C. Alcock, that I "should start going through the evidence."
He brought in six cardboard cartons that contained such
Shaw's personal paraphernalia as letters, photographs, manuscripts,
checkbooks, address books, calendars, blueprints for the
renovation of houses in the French Quarters (which had been
one of his civic projects) and a Mardi Gras costume and,
before leaving us alone with it, he explained that the staff
had yet to fully examine it. Even though a Judge's order
had forbidden disclosure or discussion of the evidence in
the case, Garrison apparently had no compunction about turning
it over to a journalist to peruse.
Though none of this material, as far
as I could see, had any bearing on the conspiracy Garrison
had described to me the night before, Harris discovered
a striking coincidence between a 5 digit number in Shaw's
address book and one in Lee Harvey Oswald's book. Oswald's
phone book contained the number 19106 preceded by the Cyrillic
letters DD. Shaw's book contained the same number in an
entry "Lee Odom, PO Box 19106, Dallas, Tex". It was of course
only a partial match since the prefixes were different,
but, if it proved to be more than a coincidence, it could
provide a connection between the two men. Apprised of this
discovery by Harris, Garrison immediately announced to the
press that he had linked Shaw to Oswald. He stated without
equivocation that Shaw and Oswald's address books had the
identical entry in them "PO 19106" (which was untrue), that
this number was "nonexistent" (which he had not yet determined)
and that the number was a code, which when deciphered, produced
the unlisted telephone number of Oswald's killer, Jack Ruby,
and "no other number on earth" (which was also false). When
asked by a reporter for the Times-Picayune how "PO 19106"
became Ruby's number "WH 1-5601," Garrison, without missing
a beat, explained that one simply transposed its third and
last digit (so it became PO 16901) and then arbitrarily
subtracted 1300. Since this nonsensical hocus-pocus still
did not produce the "WH" portion of the number, Garrison
added that the code was "subjective."
As it turned out upon investigation,
the Post Office Box 19106 in Dallas not only existed but
had been assigned to person listed in Shaw's book, Floyd
Odom. He had contacted Shaw in 1957 in the hope of promoting
a bloodless bullfight in New Orleans and left him his calling
card, accounting for the entry. In any case, Odom's post
office box number could not possibly have been the number
in Oswald's address book, which had to be entered before
he died in 1963, because, as the Dallas Post Office confirmed,
that Post Office box number did not exist in Dallas before
it was assigned to Odom in 1965. When caught in his own
egregious false claim, Garrison attempted to divert attention,
first by saying he wanted to find out "how many bull fights
Mr. Odom actually produced"-- as if that was relevant--
and then by claiming he had found another number in Oswald's
book which, when decoded, yielded the CIA's unlisted number
in New Orleans (even though the CIA's number had been listed
at the time in the phone directory). In each of these cases,
he had, like a true Cabalist, drawn conspiratorial conclusions
by attributing to innocent numbers, plucked out of a phone
book, the sinister properties of hidden numbers that he
claimed were encoded in them.
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