by Joan Mellen
Garrison attacked the judges for laziness, and for taking more than two hundred holidays, “not counting the legal holidays like All Saint’s Day, Long’s Birthday and St. Winterbottom’s Day.” Yet they carried on unimpeded, like “the sacred cows of India.” Worse, they were subject to “racketeer influences.” Judge Haggerty was close to Francis Giordano, a Marcello associate. Judge Brahney’s heavy stakes card game partner was Frank Caracci.
Jim Garrison himself, despite J. Edgar Hoover’s later strategy of undermining his Kennedy investigation by spreading the rumor that he was close to the Mafia, had no Marcello connections. Carlos Marcello confided to Governor McKeithen, who was beholden to him, that he wanted Jim Garrison out of office. Garrison was unreliable, Marcello complained. The judges felt the same way.
The prosecutor in the case against Garrison would be Louisiana attorney general Jack P. F. Gremillion, not much of a lawyer. “If you want to hide anything from my attorney general,” Governor Earl Long had once confided, “just put it in a law book.” Gremillion’s chief investigator, Frank Manning, concocted that file against Jim Garrison, “proving” that Garrison was “shaking down” hundreds of sex deviates, and “might be a sex deviate or at least he is a participant in some deviate activities with other homosexuals”—the gossip that had found its way into the hands of Mark (“Deep Throat”) Felt— no matter that Garrison did not believe in charging people with victimless sex crimes. Garrison was defended by a masterful attorney named Donald V. Organ, who constructed the defense on first amendment grounds.
In court, as each judge testified, Garrison sat writing a three thousand-word parody of Shakespeare’s Richard the Third, titled “King James the First.” In a forest, Lord Bernardo (J. Bernard Cocke) and seven dukes denounce James. They fear that “our lives, families, holidays are in jeopardy and may not last the year.” Platt is afraid of losing “our lawful claim to lay witness to the daily double.” Bernardo hates this “upstart king” who has surrounded himself with “silken drapes and chartreuse rugs,” a reference to the color of Garrison’s new office carpet.
“What of our Fridays?” Sir Oliver (Schulingkamp) demands; the criminal court judges rarely sat on Fridays. Garrison calls himself a “long-legged jack-a-napes, this raggedy-ass James,” and ridicules the criticism that he sought power and would be “saint” as well as “king.” The judges repair to their “en banc discourse,” as Lord Bernardo, the leader, in art as in life, threatens “woe upon him whose tragic fate is sealed by our vote of five out of eight.”
In court, among the facts emerging was that Judge Platt had lied about his mother owning a lottery business. Judge Schulingkamp had paroled people for Frank Costello, who had brought big-time gambling to New Orleans. But this was Louisiana and Garrison lost, and lost again on his appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court. When the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the case, he dismissed Don Organ and allowed Eberhard Deutsch, ever eager for notoriety, to argue for him. He told Organ that Deutsch would be refunding five thousand dollars of his expenses, and Organ wondered what expenses those might be since he had not been paid.
Deutsch was known for raiding other lawyers’ clients, having made his name in a grandstanding ambulance chase when a munitions ship had exploded in Galveston Harbor and he had filed a class action suit.
“Your name will appear on the case,” Garrison added, indicating that Deutsch would pay all future expenses, including the trip to Washington. It was clear to Organ that more than five thousand dollars was involved.
“Don, you know my situation,” Jim added. Organ did know. Jim lived from hand to mouth.
“Jim, go ahead,” Organ said. “But I won’t be on a case with Eberhard Deutsch.” Garrison was clearly relieved.
In Washington, Gremillion reminded the justices that federal judges had been “criticized vociferously in my state,” a reference to Judge Skelly Wright, who had been much abused in Louisiana for ordering desegregation of the New Orleans schools. Jim Garrison sat in the audience with Robert Haik. “You lost,” Haik told Garrison, but Garrison was confident. “How many former district attorneys were up there?” he said. “Three. I had three going in. . . .” Pershing appeared at the hotel with his collar open, his belly hanging over his pants. “Isn’t this a wonderful day to fuck a little boy in the ass!” Pershing said.
For Garrison v. Louisiana, Justice William Brennan wrote the majority opinion, rejecting Louisiana’s defamation statute as antiquated. Now the Supreme Court enlarged the right to criticize public officials, an important expansion of New York Times v. Sullivan. Even an “erroneous statement,” inevitable in free debate, was to be protected.
On upholding the Bill of Rights, Jim Garrison never wavered. He refused to charge the manager of a Doubleday bookstore for selling James Baldwin’s novel Another Country, no matter that the head of the vice squad, Frederick A. Soule, called it “filthy and pornographic.” When the powerful (White) Citizens’ Council attacked Garrison, he welcomed the challenge. “The Bill of Rights lives in a kind of oxygen tent,” Jim Garrison said. “And a 24-hour watch is needed because someone is always turning off the oxygen—always in the interest of justice—of course.”
Malcolm O’Hara’s 1965 campaign to unseat Jim Garrison was so well financed that Garrison wondered whether the money came from right-wing Louisiana senator Allen Ellender, and behind him Lyndon Johnson. At once O’Hara made Pershing Gervais a major issue. Implicated in the theft of illegal football cards from a safe at Clarence’s Bar, Pershing was forced to resign from the district attorney’s office. Jim Garrison bid the single most vicious nemesis of his life an official, if not yet an actual, farewell.
Pershing set up shop at the Fontainebleau Motor Hotel where he extorted money from the families of defendants, pretending to have influence sufficient to prevent charges from being filed by the district attorney’s office. He would, Pershing promised, return the money if he failed. At least half the time, he would collect, even as he had nothing to do with the decision of whether or not to prosecute. So Pershing “played results.” He grew even more virulent, summoning lawyer Lou Trent one day and threatening, “You’re on the verge of going to the bottom of the Mississippi River!”
O’Hara played another card: he produced Jim Garrison’s military records, and claimed that Garrison, given a “medical discharge” by the Army for “neurosis” and an “anxiety reaction,” was unfit for public office. In 1951, given a choice between remaining with the FBI or going back into service in Korea, Garrison had chosen to serve. Then, on his first day at Fort Sill, he found that he “just couldn’t make it.”
“I know this sounds crazy, but this is how I feel,” he said. The Korean conflict was ending as Garrison was admitted to Brooke Army Hospital at Fort Sam Houston in Texas.
Garrison remembered his wartime service in Europe, flying toward the enemy as closely as possible until he was shot at. He was apparently suffering now from what has been termed “post-traumatic stress syndrome.” Just before he had entered law school, suffering from an inexplicable exhaustion following a trip to Mexico, a Dr. Matthews at LSU had said “his trouble was a deep-seated, chronic, severe psychoneurosis.”
The Army concurred. Jim Garrison was a garden variety neurotic, with “no signs of pathologic personality.” He was an “introverted” man, who could be “anti-social,” even as he had never suffered fools gladly. He was prone to allergies that were psychogenic in origin, but only a “moderate” degree of “neurasthenia or a hypochondriasis.” The cause was his “over-solicitous mother,” who “made every effort to monopolize his affections.”
Anyone who knew Jim Garrison was aware of this “marked mother dependency.” Jane Garrison had remarried, and was now “Mrs. Lyon Gardiner of Laurel, Mississippi.” When she wrote to her son at the hospital, he did not reply. Yet he would always admire his mother for how during the Depression she had managed to find jobs so that she could take care of him and his sister, even as many men remained unemployed. Watching on
e of the women’s films of the 1940s with his son, Lyon (Snapper), years later, Garrison remarked that the strong heroine reminded him of his mother.
Out of an essentially innocuous Army medical report, O’Hara fashioned a nasty personal attack. There is an “ugly force” that “drives him to destroy everyone who fails to bow to his will,” O’Hara said, a “Napoleonic complex,” an amusing vulgarism given Garrison’s great height.
“Possessing another man’s army record carries a federal penalty of up to ten years in prison,” Garrison pointed out, “just about the length of time remaining in O’Hara’s term [as judge].” He demanded to know the source of the report. A “close friend” of yours, O’Hara lied.
The source of the report was Raymond Huff, a regional commissioner for the U.S. Customs Office in New Orleans, and a former commander of the Louisiana National Guard. Huff was another Kohn informant, and a close friend of right-wing anti-Communist and former FBI Special Agent in Charge in Chicago, Guy Banister, now running a detective agency at 531 Lafayette Street in New Orleans. Jim Garrison’s strong stand against a series of Klan-inspired nighttime fire bombings following a CORE march for voting rights had angered Huff. Huff had visited segregationist leader Leander Perez, who had been a Garrison supporter dating from the time of Garrison’s successful prosecution of a reckless driver who had killed Perez’s daughter-in-law. “I consider him very dangerous,” Huff said of Jim Garrison. “Something ought to be done about it.”
Yet another campaign issue was Garrison’s sexual infidelities. At thirty-seven, his mother had pressured him to marry for the sake of his political future. He chose a file clerk at the Deutsch law firm named Leah Ziegler, nicknamed “Liz.” His friends were astonished. In his signature white dinner jacket, Jim Garrison had long been a Quarter habitué; Tuesday afternoons he and Denis Barry had participated in orgies in a rented apartment, once a slave quarters, where strippers stripped and women were shared. Settling down seemed anathema.
His marriage also seemed a mismatch, since Liz lacked his education and his intellect. He had been dating others, among them cement company heiress, Evelyn Jahncke.
Nor was Garrison certain of his feelings. He had run into Peggie Baker one day and told her he was thinking of getting married, but was not sure. “How do you know if you’re in love?” he asked. When Liz told him she was pregnant, he married her, he confided to Denis Barry, to Robert Haik and soon to his new girlfriend Phyllis Weinert. On the honeymoon at Jane Gardiner’s house in Mississippi, Liz announced that she had a miscarriage, and she had spoken so matter-of-factly that Jim and Jane both had to wonder.
On the day of the run-off for district attorney, Jim Garrison was with an airline attendant named Judy Chambers, dubbed “scrambled eggs” by Haik because she had appeared at breakfast. But at the moment of his victory, yet another rival had appeared, pushing Liz aside as Jim made his way to the podium. “I belong up there,” Jane Gardiner said, “I’m responsible for him being here today. You’ve been only a hindrance. Get out of my way!”
It was with “scrambled eggs,” and not his wife, that Garrison traveled to Washington, D.C., with Denis Barry for the purpose of meeting President John F. Kennedy. The trip had been arranged by Chep Morrison, now Kennedy’s representative to the Organization of American States. After a raucous night, Garrison overslept. The next day he had to face an irritated attorney general, the president’s brother.
“How did it go?” Haik asked on his return.
“Well, I met Bobby,” Garrison said. “Bob, you can always meet a president. But you can’t always get a piece of ass like that!”
“Sex has nothing to do with morality,” Garrison told John Volz. Liz was “sweet”; she was like a little pixie, beautiful, blonde, effervescent. But he saw no reason to mend his ways, even as their family grew. He adored his children and gave them affectionate nicknames. “We’re going to have a Snapper,” Jim reassured Liz during her difficult fourth pregnancy. He was referring to Edward H. (“Snapper”) Garrison, a late-nineteenth-century jockey famous for lagging behind only to sprint to victory for a “Garrison finish.” Ever after Lyon Garrison would be known as “Snapper.”
Garrison soundly defeated Malcolm O’Hara in the first primary, 82,460 to 47,324. Then he took up his pen and wrote an essay about evil entitled “A Heritage of Stone” as the introduction to his former assistant Ralph Slovenko’s book, Crime, Law and Corrections. “In the looking-glass world produced by the Nazi culture,” Garrison writes, “truth was an enemy, compassion a stranger, only the innocent were punished, only the guilty were rewarded and the meek inherited the earth.” He closed with the image of a passer-by picking up a human skull, and peering “through the goggled sockets at the dusty hollow where a handful of grey tissue once took the measure of the universe.” The illustration was that photograph snapped by Garrison at Dachau. He submitted “A Heritage of Stone” to Commentary magazine, but they turned it down.
Through the spring, the summer, and the autumn of 1966, Jim Garrison studied the Warren Commission volumes. After he finally received his three copies, it seemed as if reading about the Kennedy assassination was “all that he did.” “Most of the people they called had nothing to do with it,” he concluded. He read Harold Weisberg’s Whitewash, Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment and Edward J. Epstein’s Inquest.
A Life magazine stringer, who had authored a favorable article about him published in the Saturday Evening Post under the byline of “James Phelan,” encouraged him. “You’re in a unique position to get to the bottom of this,” David Chandler said, “because you can subpoena people. A lot of the principal people involved hung around New Orleans. You can ask questions. You can do something.” Soon Chandler reported to Aaron Kohn that Jim Garrison was working on the Kennedy assassination.
Garrison had long opposed his office’s intervention in pardons, yet that year he supported the pardon of the sexiest stripper in the Quarter, a diminutive beauty named Linda Brigette, known as “the cupid doll.” Linda did her “Dance of a Lover’s Dream” at Frank Caracci’s 500 Club; she liked Frank, who had warned her against Pershing Gervais. “Don’t mess with him because he ain’t no good,” Caracci said. The law was that a stripper could not put her hand into any part of her vagina. One night police officers Robert Buras and Norman Knaps saw Linda touch herself and arrested her for lewd dancing. It was her second arrest.
Before long, Linda faced the prospect of serving two fifteen-day sentences. Her lawyer Louis Trent requested that Jim Garrison “use your influence” in having a pardon signed by Governor McKeithen. Garrison sent his assistant James Alcock to the pardon board hearing and when Brigette’s name came up, he was to advocate the pardon. (The New Orleans rumor was that there had been a private party, where Jim Garrison, intoxicated and playing a ukelele, sang, “I can yodel in the canyon if I want to,” a sexual preference he recounted frankly to male friends.)
On the day Linda was to go to jail, a taxi sped from Baton Rouge with Governor McKeithen’s pardon. It was this pardon that provided fuel for the first attacks on Garrison’s fledgling investigation into the murder of John F. Kennedy. At first Garrison took the criticism with his usual sardonic disdain. “Mr. Garrison, I cannot believe that you helped that stripper get a pardon!” a woman told him one day. “Well, Madam, obviously I was paid $50,000,” Garrison said.
Aaron Kohn now opened a full attack, insisting to anyone in the press who would listen that the pardon of Brigette, who was married to a Garrison friend named Larry Lamarca, proved that Jim Garrison had Mafia connections. Kohn sent a telegram to Governor McKeithen asserting “the economic importance of Linda Brigette to organized crime,” since “Carlos Marcello is behind Lamarca.” Even public relations man and CIA asset, and another Kohn informant, Jesse Core, had to tell Kohn it was silly “to think that a dancer could be important to organized crime.” Kohn’s real target was Jim Garrison.
At first Garrison did not take Kohn seriously. Connecting him to the mob through Brigette wa
s “the silliest thing to come along since the Flat Earth Society’s latest press release,” he quipped. When Kohn persisted, Garrison called the Metropolitan Crime Commission a “Big Brother operation right out of George Orwell’s 1984 . . . a kind of super Soviet-type NKVD.”
Undeterred, Kohn continued to construct his dossier against Jim Garrison, one based on innuendo, lies, and half truths. On his list was that Garrison had invited Lamarca and Brigette to sit at his table at a press club dinner. Included as well was that Garrison had bought a new house on Owens Boulevard from a Mafia-connected builder named Frank Occhipinti, no matter that the $52,000 mortgage was so onerous it would take Garrison virtually the rest of his life to pay it off. Garrison had gotten Brigette a divorce, Kohn charged, although in fact, it had been Garrison’s law partner, Denis Barry. Garrison had been involved in a mortgage loan to a dubious person named Mike Roach, another false accusation, as Barry explained to Kohn: Garrison had merely witnessed the signatures, and had received no financial benefit from the transaction.
A vendetta against Garrison had begun, one in which the U.S. Attorney Louis LaCour joined to insist that Carlos Marcello had “interests” in New Orleans, as well as in Jefferson Parish, and hence should have been brought to justice by the Orleans Parish district attorney. When Garrison called him to testify before a grand jury, Lacour pleaded executive privilege. Garrison subpoenaed Kohn as well, even as he scoffed at Kohn’s charges: “We will undoubtedly learn that I have been seen on a street car at the same time as Bugsy Schwartz, the famous burglar, or that I was in New York City at the same time as Machine-Gun Brady.”
“Put up or shut up!” Garrison demanded of Kohn on the front page of the Times-Picayune.
Kohn testified before the Orleans Parish grand jury for three hours, but could produce only the innuendo that there was a relationship between Carlos Marcello and a municipal court judge named Andrew Bucaro. Furious, Garrison ordered that his staff mark all mail from the Metropolitan Crime Commission MCC “return to sender.”