by Joan Mellen
At the end of March, Jim Garrison found himself in Washington, D.C., in the company of Louisiana congressman Hale Boggs, who had been a member of the Warren Commission. Garrison expressed his doubts. Boggs then confided to Garrison that during a closed January 22, 1964, session of the Commission, Oswald’s FBI number and FBI wages had been examined. “I would hope none of these records are circulated to anybody,” Boggs had told Earl Warren and the former CIA director fired by John F. Kennedy, Allen Dulles.
Then he revealed what had been said to Jim Garrison. From his own experiences as a hunter alone, Boggs believed, one man could not have fired those shots. Boggs told Garrison that no notes, no transcription had been made of the hours of interrogation of Oswald by the Dallas police, which also claimed to have no record of the calls received and made by Oswald while he was in custody.
It was Hale Boggs who nurtured Jim Garrison’s doubts about the Warren Report and encouraged his investigation. Later, Jim Garrison would insist that it was Senator Russell Long who had motivated him to investigate the Kennedy assassination, but it wasn’t so. That Garrison was guilty of saying too much to the press would be another myth perpetrated by his detractors. To the day of his death, he protected Hale Boggs’ role in inspiring his investigation into the murder of John F. Kennedy.
John McKeithen, an iron pragmatist with a soft-spoken demeanor, jammed a bill through the legislature allowing him to succeed himself, a feat accomplished not even by Earl Long. Jim Garrison moved on to what was in fact a reinvestigation. Four days after the assassination, he had interviewed a disgraced Eastern Airlines pilot named David W. Ferrie about his relationship with the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. The tip had come from a CIA asset named Jack Martin, who had broadcast it all around New Orleans that Ferrie knew Oswald and had been enlisted to fly the assassins out of Dallas.
Garrison, “a somewhat messianic district attorney,” as Ferrie would later describe him, turned David Ferrie over to the Secret Service and the FBI, who let him go. Now Garrison began to study the twenty-six volumes published by the Warren Commission. He would become the sole law enforcement official to investigate the assassination, a quest, messianic indeed, that would cost him his political career. He was the father of four children, with a fifth and last, Eberhard Darrow, to be born in 1966, and the husband of a woman with conventional political ambitions. Garrison forged ahead nonetheless.
“It was my jurisdiction,” Garrison would explain. “Should I leave well enough alone and disregard the apparent possibility that the men who planned the terrible murder are among us today? Should I say that the death of John Kennedy is not my affair?”
Jim Garrison was born Earling Carothers Garrison in Denison, Iowa, on November 21, 1921. Imagination and curiosity were a birthright. His forebears were rebels and free thinkers, among them the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, a family reprobate, as one Judge Thomas Garrison Stansbury would write: “He was a talented man, but rather eccentric in his views with regard to the African race in America.”
Jim Garrison grew up to be six feet six inches tall, courtesy of his mother’s side, the Robinsons. His two irreverent seven-foot Robinson uncles one day joined a circus. When people asked how the weather was, the Robinson boys would spit and say it was raining. Further back there were Irish rebels, one of whom fought in the American Revolution.
At the age of two, while his mother Jane was distracted by a telephone call, Garrison escaped from the bathtub, only to be found at Cushman’s, a local store, stark naked but for his mother’s picture hat. A babysitter on another day was alarmed to discover that little Carothers had disappeared; he was found hiding in the oven. By four he could read. At five, he was in kindergarten when one day Jane Garrison arrived to collect him. Stern and square-jawed, six feet three inches tall, Jane demanded of the teacher, “Where’s my Earling?”
“There is no Earling in my class,” the teacher said. Brushing past her, Jane strode into the room. Soon she spied her son.
“Oh, you mean Jimmy!” the teacher said. Earling Carothers Garrison had changed his name, borrowing “Jimmy” from the newspaper boy. So he would be “James Carothers” until, in politics, he changed his name legally to “Jim.”
Jane left her alcoholic husband, with Jimmy and his sister Judy in tow. Soon Earling Garrison, a feckless younger son, kidnapped Jimmy back to Iowa. But Jane had her way, hiring a private investigator to kidnap her son back. She moved from Chicago to Vincennes to Evansville, Indiana, surviving the Depression by supporting herself and her children with jobs, from selling corsets to real estate to brokering oil leases. Jane Garrison ended up at that dead end for those fleeing the mid-West, the Port of New Orleans.
There her fatherless son grew up solitary, a poor child unable to afford a bicycle. He amused himself by reading, or drawing pictures, for which he had considerable talent. “You’re putting too much blue on the man,” his elementary school seat mate, Walter Gemeinhardt, observed of the tall boy whose oversized foot stuck out in the aisle.
Jimmy kept silent. He was shy, and at Alcee Fortier High School, he invariably ate lunch by himself. “I don’t relate to real easy,” he remarked later. But if he got to know you, you might become the butt of his practical jokes, like Alvin Gottschaull, who found himself arrested for twenty-one nonexistent parking violations before a laughing district attorney confessed.
He developed his lifelong appreciation for the Big Bands, his favorite, Glenn Miller, and fell in love with Peggie Baker, whose home became his, although he was too poor to take her to the movies or to dances at the Roosevelt Hotel. Jimmy was the most intellectual of his group of friends, talking about religion and politics. “Everybody’s a Unitarian,” Jimmy said one day, “everyone interprets the Bible just the way they want to.” He was contemptuous of Governor Huey Long.
Before the United States entered World War II, he joined the Army to escape from his overly possessive mother. Not to be denied, Jane followed him to Fort Sill, Oklahoma. For the Army Air Force, unarmed but for a .45 pistol, Jim Garrison flew thirty-five reconnaissance missions in France and Germany. Enlisting his childhood talent for drawing, he painted the Flying Tiger insignia on his tiny “Grasshopper” plane. He named his plane: “Roger The Dodger.” On April 30, 1945, Jim Garrison, armed with a small camera, entered the Dachau concentration camp one day after its liberation. “What I saw there has haunted me ever since,” Garrison told Playboy in 1967. The photographs he took at Dachau, including a grisly one of a decapitated head, he was to keep in a home-made album close by his side until his death.
He had become a man who kept his feelings to himself, so that his Tulane law school classmate and lifelong friend Jimmy Gulotta concluded he was afraid of people. He never mentioned to his Jewish classmates at law school that he had even been at Dachau. Instead, at law school he developed a zest for king making, an escape from boredom. Making Law Review, he declined the honor as too much trouble. His most imaginative scheme was an attempt to have elected as class president Wilmer Thomas, the class buffoon, and a practical joker himself. Wilmer’s mischief included stealing one book a day from the school library, to begin, he said, his own collection, a peccadillo he made up for in later years as the most generous of benefactors to the Tulane School of Law.
“I’ll take the class renegade and I bet I can get him elected student body president,” Garrison said. He ran Wilmer on the “Nazi ticket,” a mockery of the Louisiana political system where at that time you could not run for office unless someone put you on their “ticket.” “Hotsy-totsy, I’m a Nazi,” became the chant of these mostly World War II veterans whose patriotism was unquestionable.
Garrison constructed the “Wilmer board,” on which were soon posted Garrison-authored telegrams from Eleanor Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover, Joe Stalin, General Franco and Hitler himself. “Lay off my younger brother,” John L. Lewis ostensibly wrote as Garrison needled one of Wilmer’s rivals, Floyd Lewis, among the school’s humorless elite. A message to the Wilmer bo
ard arrived referring to a professor named Nabors who taught oil and gas law: “We’ll can Nabors’ ass/In oil and gas.” The authorities made them take that one down. Its author was indubitably Jim Garrison, who called his close friend Nigel Rafferty “Duck Butt,” because Rafferty was only about five feet four inches tall to Garrison’s six six.
Wilmer won in the first primary, only to lose in the run-off by a scant seven votes.
Among the devastating events of Jim Garrison’s post–law school years was that Peggie Baker, whom he had assumed would become his wife, married another man. With Peggie married, no one else would ever matter in the same way and no one could take her place. Twenty years later, on a Delta Airlines flight in the early 1970s, Jim Garrison, by now a national celebrity, received a note from one of the flight attendants. “I’m Peggie Baker’s daughter, Mindy,” it read. The district attorney grabbed the startled air hostess and pulled her onto his lap. Tears streamed down his cheeks.
He received a master’s degree, joined the law firm of Eberhard Deutsch, then spent a desultory few months as an FBI agent in the Pacific Northwest. He took six months off to pursue his lifelong ambition, writing. One of his short stories of that time, “The Assassin,” was eerily prescient: Gomez attempts to uncover the killer of a politician, suspecting “the loyal bodyguards,” while a man named Zapato is falsely accused. All Gomez can do is wait and see which of the bodyguards will rise to power, following the criterion of cui bono (who profits?), a criterion Jim Garrison would enlist in his investigation of the Kennedy assassination.
He consulted a New York literary agent named A. L. Fierst, who told him the stories were “decidedly promising.” He “handle[d] language well” and had a “fresh imagination.” “Give your work your best efforts, please,” Fierst wrote, “I believe you will hit the mark in not too long a time.”
Jim Garrison kept a complete set of Shakespeare (whom he preferred to the Greeks) on his office desk in later years. He had written a modernization of “The Taming of the Shrew” for WDSU-TV’s live drama program, “Theatre 6.” His Petruchio wears “blue denim trousers, a wrinkled sweat-shirt” and a “baseball cap or denim hat” with fishing flies pinned to it. The script didn’t sell, and he moved on. Whoever publishes first, Jim Garrison bet his friends, Jack Grayson and Jay Teasdel, will buy the others dinner at Antoine’s. Only a few years before his death, Jim Garrison was insisting he had won, having inscribed his 1976 novel The Star-Spangled Contract, his second book, “to my old friend Jay Teasdel, America’s most distinguished unpublished author.”
He became a lawyer because he could not earn his living as a writer and returned to the firm where Eberhard Deutsch introduced his young disciple Jim Garrison to Mayor Chep Morrison. So Garrison’s political career began. In 1952 he became deputy safety commissioner, handling a backlog of more than 200,000 unpaid traffic tickets, including one belonging to his friend Jack Bremermann’s wife, Mickey. “Ask Jim, he’ll fix it,” Mickey said.
“Yes, I’ll help Mickey,” Jim said. He paused. “I’ll get her to the head of the line.” Yet when Morrison offered to appoint him as a traffic court judge, Jim Garrison turned him down. “I don’t want to be a traffic court judge,” he said. “I want to be district attorney one day.” As an assistant district attorney, uniquely, he allowed police reporters like Herman Kohlman to view his files. “Just close the door when you’re finished,” he said.
He continued to write. In the summer of 1956 at the Practicing Law Institute in New York for a month, bored with the lectures, he outlined a story he called “The Witness” or “The Juror.” It would be about “one man’s dramatic involvement in a situation,” as once more he predicted his fate.
Then he was ensnared in corrupt Louisiana politics as legal adviser to the grand jury. Malfeasance charges had been brought against Mayor Chep Morrison and police superintendent Provosty A. Dayries. Garrison, on Morrison’s instructions, paid an overnight visit to New York where he collected the police report of an arrest at a gay party of grand jury foreman Marc Antony. The best efforts of self-styled chairman of the Metropolitan Crime Commission Aaron Kohn, who had orchestrated the charges against Morrison and Dayries and who numbered Marc Antony among his string of informants, had been in vain.
Garrison bided his time and when in 1964 Morrison ran for governor for the third time, he threw his considerable support to John McKeithen. He had taken to keeping a little black book and if you had done something to him that he deemed unfair, your name would go down. But because he was a forgiving man, it was easy to get your name erased.
He began to run for office. He ran for assessor, an effort so futile that on election day he overslept, not bothering to get out of bed by six A.M., the deadline for posters to be put up. “If I had only listened to your suggestion that I post additional signs,” he told fellow assistant Milton Brener, “I would have won.” Later Garrison remarked to his friend Robert Haik, “Posters don’t vote.” His presence was dynamic, and he would ever after rely on television, on which he appeared to be even handsomer than he was, earnest, intellectual, and sincere, his wandering eye not apparent.
In 1960, back to practicing law, he ran against criminal court Judge George A. Platt. Platt was known to frequent the racetrack, always firmly in his seat in time for the first race. Platt “may be a sitting judge, but he is not sitting in the court room,” Garrison quipped.
He lost, but he would not lose another election for thirteen years. He was a liberal and as assistant city attorney, a plum Chep Morrison had thrown his way, he refused to prosecute civil rights demonstrators charged with disturbing the peace and loitering.
One Friday afternoon in 1961, five young attorneys, dubbing themselves the “Nothing Group” because they possessed neither money nor favor, sat drinking the twenty-five-cent martinis at Brennan’s. Jim Garrison and his law partner Denis Barry were among them as they discussed the vulnerability of district attorney Richard Dowling, whose office was known to sell cases “like crazy.”
Soon Jim Garrison was a candidate, enlisting his verbal facility as his best weapon. When Dowling bragged of having two hundred and twenty-five narcotics convictions, “more than the whole state of Louisiana,” Garrison quipped, “That’s just like saying a Plaquemines Parish fisherman catches more oysters than the whole state of Arizona.” Haik tried to secure Mayor Victor Schiro’s endorsement for Jim Garrison, but Schiro had made a deal with Dowling that they not oppose each other; Schiro’s name now went down in Jim Garrison’s black book.
For a television debate among the candidates, prominent attorney F. Irvin Dymond, fresh from a cocktail party and half-drunk, slouched in his chair and puffed away on a cigarette. No, he would not be a full-time district attorney, he declared: “If the people of New Orleans want a $17,500 per year man as their district attorney, I’m not their boy!” Back at the cocktail party, Dymond’s supporters gasped, knowing the only issue that remained was the timing of Dymond’s withdrawal. Jim Garrison would become the first district attorney in Orleans Parish to run without being on a ticket, but as an independent, beholden to no faction.
“We will do no favors,” he told his newly assembled staff. He saw New Orleans as mired in “tolerance of the status quo” and the “smog” of its dubious ethics. Louisiana is “one of the few states which treats defendants with . . . little regard,” Garrison found. Under his regime, no one would be above the law. Lottery operators were charged. “This time,” he said, “it was not Parish Prison but the pen.” Dowling had run his office like a “Chinese whorehouse in a hurricane,” Garrison said, as he searched for more than a hundred missing files.
He renovated the office and built himself a private elevator. It was big enough only for one person—himself—and led directly to his private bathroom. He had the law books removed from his office: “A good lawyer doesn’t need law books,” he said. He kept only “Criminal Procedure.”
Cherishing his time in the military, he ran his office like the field artillery unit he ha
d served, he the “commanding officer,” delegating the details. The staff was on call twenty-four hours a day and there was no overtime. His executive officer was Frank Klein, who hung a gruesome picture of the electric chair behind his desk, where he kept a model of the guillotine.
Garrison himself was cheerful. In the office, they called him Giant. Sometimes, ungainly and unathletic as he was, he swung a hula hoop around his hips. Office administrator D’alton Williams was inefficient, and one night Garrison emptied all the trash cans himself, putting the refuse in Williams’ office. “I really appreciate your keeping the office so neat. Thank you,” he told Williams. He was sensitive and indirect, and he would not embarrass you if he could help it.
“Just another day at Tulane and Broad,” was his mantra, no matter what happened. He didn’t like being called “The Jolly Green Giant,” but when someone hung a poster of the green giant on secretary Joyce Wood’s door, he eyed it sardonically. “I see you have my photograph on your door,” he said.
A young lawyer named Ross Scaccia wrote asking for a job. He had no connections and never pressured for any. “I’m trying to do it on merit,” he said.
“You’re hired,” Garrison wrote back. He hired the first woman assistant district attorney in New Orleans history, Louise Korns, who had been first in her class at Tulane, and entrusted most of the research to her. Lacking any desire for notoriety, he surprised Korns by allowing her to do oral arguments for the office before the U.S. Supreme Court. Personal ambition was alien to him, Korns noted. Jim Garrison did enjoy dispensing patronage. “Those who support us in the first primary get the jobs,” Governor Earl Long said, famously. “Those who support us in the run-off get good government,” a double entendre since “good government” was the name of an anti-Long political faction. Dealing in favors was a refined Louisiana pastime.
Garrison’s was the first office to employ full-time police investigators, among them Louis Ivon—tough, taciturn, fair-minded, and “Buck” to his boss until the day of Garrison’s death. Lean, hard-eyed Raymond Comstock signed on because Dowling had not prosecuted Frances Welch, the abortionist he had arrested who had committed a murder. Comstock had made an anonymous call to candidate Garrison, who then went on television excoriating Dowling for not prosecuting Welch. If Dowling is reelected, I would rather ride a horse in City Park than be a police officer, Comstock thought.