If that wasn’t unbelievable enough, when Shaw’s lawyer asked, “You claim you were present at a meeting where the assassination was planned and you say you did not know whether your testimony would be valuable to the Warren Commission?” Russo answered, “Now, they [“Bertrand, Oswald, Ferrie”] did not say anything about [the specific city of] Dallas,” as if their not doing so was some justification for his not coming forward. Russo, who had to know how pathetic his answers were, tried to inject some plausibility into his story by adding some other reasons why he hadn’t come forward back in 1963. One was that even though the man he saw conspire to murder Kennedy was introduced to him as “Leon Oswald,” and over TV the president’s killer was called “Lee Harvey Oswald,” the two men “did not look alike exactly.” Also, he had confidence in the FBI, and “if they wanted me, [to] ask me anything, they could,” not explaining how they could possibly contact him if he never told them he existed.114
On January 26, 1971, close to two years after Clay Shaw’s not-guilty verdict on March 1, 1969, Russo told Edward Wegmann, one of Shaw’s lawyers, that he never saw Clay Shaw in Ferrie’s apartment (“absolutely not”), and Garrison’s office had done “a complete brainwashing job” on him.115 On April 16, 1971, Russo gave a tape-recorded interview to William Gurvich (the former Garrison investigator) and two of Shaw’s attorneys, Wegmann and F. Irvin Dymond. Russo told of Garrison and his staff telling him before the trial that they had a contract with Life magazine for twenty-five thousand dollars, and that “after the Shaw conviction” they would “either give that to me or see somehow I got a lot of it for my trouble.” Saying, “I guess I always knew [Shaw] had nothing to do with anything,” Russo stated that Garrison’s staff threatened him: if he went back on what he said under hypnosis, “the courthouse [would be] planted on top of me.”116*
Jerry Cohen, a Los Angeles Times reporter I knew who covered the Shaw trial for the Times, told me when he returned to Los Angeles after the not-guilty verdict was reached, “Vince, the trial was the most unbelievable joke you could ever imagine. Though no one was confident of what the New Orleans jury would do, nearly everyone in the courtroom, including the media, knew that Shaw was innocent and Garrison had no evidence against him. The jury returned with their verdict in forty-five minutes or so [actually, fifty-four minutes]. The consensus was that they had a cup of coffee, chose their foreman, and could have returned in ten minutes, but they sat it out a few more minutes for appearance purposes.† I tell you, Garrison should be in jail for what he did. This is a sick, dangerous man.” Salvatore Panzeca, Shaw’s original defense attorney who remained on his team throughout the trial, told me, “Garrison knowingly prosecuted an innocent man. In my forty-one years as a criminal defense attorney, I have never had a client more cooperative, intelligent and innocent than Clay Shaw.”117 Milton Brener, who was a prosecutor in Garrison’s office before the Shaw case and ended up writing a book about the case, told me, “Of course Shaw was innocent. The entire case against him was a figment of Garrison’s imagination. He pulled it completely out of thin air.”118 Indeed, Garrison’s case against Shaw was so outrageous and so lacking in any credible evidence against Shaw that even Garrison’s own wife, as Oliver Stone himself acknowledged in an article, didn’t believe in his case, and she and Garrison separated right after the trial.119 When a prosecutor’s own wife isn’t on his side, that’s pretty bad, isn’t it? I mean, can it get any worse?
The media savaged Garrison, who didn’t have the courage to show up in court throughout a good part of the trial (averaging about one day a week), not even when the all-male (nine whites, three blacks) jury returned its verdict of not guilty at one in the morning on March 1, 1969, two years to the day after Shaw had been arrested in the case. In a front-page editorial on March 1, the New Orleans States-Item said, “District Attorney Jim Garrison should resign. He has shown himself unfit to hold the office of District Attorney or any other office. Mr. Garrison has abused the vast powers of his office. He has perverted the law rather than prosecuted it. His persecution of Clay Shaw was a perversion of the legal process such as has not been often seen. Clay Shaw has been vindicated, but the damage to his reputation caused by Mr. Garrison’s witch hunt may never be repaired. This travesty of justice is a reproach to the conscience of all good men and must not go unanswered. Mr. Garrison himself should now be brought to the bar to answer for his conduct.”120 The New York Times opined in an editorial that Garrison’s prosecution of Shaw was “one of the most disgraceful chapters in the history of American jurisprudence.”121
The Los Angeles Times editorial observed that “the really frightening thing” is that since Garrison only used Shaw to further his own ends, “Shaw could have been any man.” Saying “the processes of justice had been outrageously abused” by Garrison, the Times concluded that “if there is one fact proven beyond all dispute in the Shaw case it is that Jim Garrison is unfit to hold public office.”122
For his part, Shaw would later say, “If a jury could convict me on such shoddy evidence as Garrison presented, I would gladly have gone to jail—it would be the safest place in a world gone mad.”123*
Again, Garrison is the man whom Stone presented to his audience as the most solid and rational of men, one with impeccable ethics who was an intrepid fighter for justice.
Unbelievably, the shameless and unconscionable Garrison, after the irreparably grievous harm he had already inflicted on an innocent man, decided to inflict further harm on Shaw, his model obviously not being common sense and decency, but again, Victor Hugo’s maliciously tenacious Inspector Javert in Les Misérables. On March 3, 1969, the first business day after the not-guilty verdict came down, Garrison, instead of skulking away into the night with his tail between his legs, filed two counts of perjury against Shaw for denying on the witness stand that he knew Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie. (It is extremely rare, almost unheard of, for a defendant, after his criminal trial, to be prosecuted for committing perjury in his defense, whether or not he was convicted of the offense for which he was on trial. It’s just not done, even where there is no doubt in the DA’s mind the defendant committed perjury. It’s a perjury that is almost invariably overlooked and even expected by prosecutors. After all, if the defendant were going to admit having committed the crime, he would have pled guilty and there would not have been any trial.)†
On January 18, 1971, Shaw made a motion for a temporary restraining order to prevent Garrison from proceeding against him. Shaw contended that Garrison was acting “in bad faith” and was abusing his prosecutorial powers. The motion was granted, and on January 25, a three-day hearing commenced on the issue of whether Garrison should be permanently enjoined from prosecuting Shaw on the perjury charges. Numerous witnesses testified, including Shaw, who again said he had never met Oswald or Ferrie. Russo was also called to the stand but invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. U.S. federal district court judge Herbert W. Christenberry ruled on May 27, 1971, that Shaw was entitled to the relief sought, and signed a permanent injunction on June 7.
In his ruling Christenberry scathingly denounced Garrison, using words like “appalling,” “outrageous,” and “inexcusable” to describe Garrison’s conduct in different areas of the case. He said, “Garrison undertook his baseless investigation [of Shaw] with the specific intent to deprive Shaw of his rights under the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.” In one part of his written opinion, he in essence accused Garrison of subornation of perjury, writing that Garrison “resorted to the use of drugs and hypnosis on Russo, purportedly to corroborate, but more likely to concoct his story.”124
Garrison appealed, but the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal. Garrison had succeeded, however, in torturing Shaw for two years after the not-guilty verdict on the conspiracy-to-commit-murder charge. In his diaries, Shaw referred to the “Kafkaesque horror” Garrison had put him through to further some perceived greater good.
; In an address on the Bill of Rights (and its progenitor, the English Magna Carta) at Tulane Law School on October 30, 1964, Garrison had dwelled on the fact that the Bill of Rights, which he properly elevated to sacred status, was adopted “to protect the governed from the men who govern them,” and that attacks on these fundamental rights can invariably be “identified by the great superior virtue which the attackers bear inscribed on their battle flag.” The attacks are always ostensibly “for the good of the state,” some “great virtue of the day.” A twenty-four-hour watch is needed to protect our Bill of Rights, he said, because someone is always trying to deprive us of them “in the interest of justice, of course.” I believe Jim Garrison believed those words when he spoke them, but somewhere down the line, and for whatever reason, he became the precise embodiment of the villains he feared and denounced in his 1964 speech.
Harry Connick Sr. (father of the singer), the New Orleans DA who ran against and defeated Garrison in 1973, told me that the Clay Shaw prosecution was “absolutely the most terrible, gross, abominable prosecution” he has ever encountered in his many years in law enforcement. “Garrison went to extremes to prosecute an innocent man.” Connick, who was an assistant U.S. attorney at the time of the Shaw investigation and trial, said that even before the Shaw case, the legal community in New Orleans viewed Garrison “as a four flusher. He frequently made allegations and charges he couldn’t back up. So there was a suspicion down here from the moment he brought charges against Shaw—and before we learned Garrison had no evidence—that it might turn out to be a phony case.”125Newsweek reporter Hugh Aynesworth said that Jim Garrison was “right,” there was a conspiracy in New Orleans, but it was his “scheme to concoct a fantastic ‘solution’ to the death of John F. Kennedy.”126
Can anything positive be said about Garrison in his prosecution of Clay Shaw? Tom Bethell, Garrison’s chief research assistant on the case, said, “When Ferrie died, the office staff was jubilant because we all knew there was no substance to Garrison’s charges, and this gave him a wonderful opportunity to get off the hook and tell the media hordes covering the case who were questioning whether he had anything, ‘Look, I tried to find out the truth, but they silenced my main suspect.’ The public would have thought he had been on to something big, and he would have looked like a hero. Instead, he proceeds to almost immediately charge Shaw with the murder. People in the office were putting their hands to their forehead. The sense was ‘How are we going to handle this now?’” Bethell offers this insight: “If this whole Garrison crusade was only political calculation on his part, he’d have taken the opportune course and ended it when Ferrie died. But there was also madness here.” Bethell said he personally liked Garrison, saying he was “amusing, charming,” but he was “very, very irresponsible, to an extent that was just amazing.”127 In a 1991 article, Bethell wrote, “I knew Clay Shaw was innocent; in fact I think everyone in the DA’s office also knew it, except for Garrison himself, who was incapable of thinking straight on the subject.”128
John Volz, a prosecutor in Garrison’s office who was a pallbearer at Garrison’s funeral, confirmed Bethell’s rendition of events. “When Ferrie died, we [fellow prosecutors in the office] advised him to get out of all this. But Jim wouldn’t listen. Instead, he said, ‘This is just the beginning.’” Volz also agrees with Bethell that Garrison’s conduct at the time of Ferrie’s death led him to believe that Garrison “actually believed most of this craziness,” and although he believes Garrison was completely wrong in his prosecution of Shaw, he was “well-intentioned.”129*
Is one possibility simply that Stone’s hero, Garrison, had truly gone mad? There are those who think so. Warren Commission critic Harold Weisberg was one of Garrison’s strongest earliest supporters, and he went to New Orleans to help Garrison on his case. Garrison reciprocated by writing the foreword to Weisberg’s 1967 book, Oswald in New Orleans. But months before the trial, he disavowed Garrison. Although he was not inclined to elaborate, Weisberg told me he was a witness in New Orleans to Garrison “making up” a piece of evidence against Shaw, and when he saw this he said, “I knew I had to sever my association with Garrison.” Weisberg said that Garrison the man “was one of the greatest tragedies in the investigation of Kennedy’s assassination. He was highly talented, intelligent, and articulate, but somewhere down the road he lost contact with reality. I just don’t understand what he was up to. There just was no evidence of Shaw’s guilt.”130 Clay Shaw, the man whose life Garrison had destroyed, and someone who must have given considerable thought to the matter, also thought Garrison suffered from a psychological illness. “Personally,” Shaw said, “I think he’s quite ill, mentally. He was, as you know, discharged from the Army after a diagnosis of anxiety and told to take psychotherapy.† I know he has been to a number of analysts. I think, basically, he is getting worse all the time. I think there is a division of his mind. With one-half of his mind he is able to go out and fabricate evidence, and then by some osmosis, he is able to convince the other half that the fabrication is the truth.”131
My view (for whatever it’s worth, seeing that I did not know Garrison, and being aware that it conflicts with the views of some people who did know him) is that Garrison eventually came to realize that his suspicions about Shaw were unfounded, yet he persisted in prosecuting an innocent man. My sense is that Edward Wegmann, one of Shaw’s attorneys, summed up the entire case and Garrison’s motive for bringing it as well as anyone I’ve heard: “An innocent man has been the victim of a ruthless, unethical and fraudulent public prosecutor…who, with premeditation and full knowledge of the falsity of the charges brought against [Shaw]…used him for the sole purpose of obtaining a judicial forum for [his attack] upon the credibility of the…Warren Commission.”132 In other words, and pardon the play on words, Clay Shaw was “just a patsy.”
There is strong support for the conclusion that Garrison knew Shaw was innocent (hence, the argument that he used Shaw to attack the Warren Commission becomes the most plausible explanation for Garrison’s prosecution of Shaw). Although Garrison would have never admitted knowingly prosecuting an innocent man for murder, his conduct speaks quite eloquently for that proposition.
In view of the fact that Garrison had accused Shaw of conspiring to murder the president of the United States, one would expect Garrison himself to face Shaw in court and cross-examine him during his testimony on February 27, 1969. But instead, he let his assistant, James Alcock, do so. And even with Alcock, if one wasn’t told that Shaw was on trial for Kennedy’s murder, one would hardly have known this from Alcock’s cross-examination. Not only was it extremely short (consuming exactly fifty pages of transcript)—one would automatically expect the cross-examination of someone accused of conspiring to murder the president of the United States to go on for several days and take up hundreds of pages of transcript—but it couldn’t possibly have been more soft and civil. So much so that it could have been Shaw’s own lawyer asking the questions. So soft, civil, and nonconfrontational, in fact, that when Shaw’s lawyer was asked if he had any questions to ask on redirect examination, Dymond said no, seeing no need to explain away or mitigate any damage to his client’s cause that came out during cross-examination. It couldn’t have been more obvious that Alcock never had his heart in what he was doing, and knew further that there was nothing of any substance to cross-examine Shaw about. (For the record, Shaw denied on direct examination knowing or ever having met Oswald, Ferrie, or Perry Russo, ever having conspired with them or anyone else to murder President Kennedy, and ever having worked for the CIA.)133*
If Alcock’s cross-examination of Shaw, by itself, didn’t clearly demonstrate that Garrison knew Shaw had nothing to do with the assassination, and that he had committed the unpardonable sin of charging an innocent man with conspiracy to commit murder just to give him the opportunity to present evidence challenging the findings of the Warren Commission, then Garrison’s final summation to the jury on February 28, 1969, would seem to eliminate
all doubt. Instead of referring to Shaw (or “the defendant”) a great number of times as he tried to connect him to the conspiracy and murder, as any prosecutor would do if he believed the person he was prosecuting was guilty, unbelievably Garrison only referred to Shaw once in his entire summation, and then not to say that the evidence showed he was guilty. Not once did Garrison tell the jury he had proved Shaw’s guilt or that the evidence pointed toward Shaw’s guilt. (Alcock, in his summation, did.)* What he told the jury was, “You are here sitting in judgment of Clay Shaw,”134 an absolutely valueless statement since the jury, obviously, already knew why they were there.
Is there any further evidence? Yes.
As indicated earlier, the indictment only charged Shaw, Ferrie, and Oswald with conspiracy to murder Kennedy, not with murdering him. Garrison was thereby sending an important signal. Since under the law of conspiracy Shaw would be responsible for (and hence, guilty of) all crimes committed by his co-conspirators in furtherance of the object of the conspiracy, a charge of conspiracy to commit murder is virtually always accompanied by a separate charge of the murder itself. If Garrison was sincerely convinced Shaw had conspired to murder Kennedy, why not do what 99.9 percent of all DAs would have done—also charge him with Kennedy’s murder? I don’t know the answer to that question, but the only thing that makes any sense to me is that he knew Shaw was innocent or had very serious doubts about his guilt. If Shaw had been convicted of murder, Garrison knew that under Louisiana law, the punishment had to be either life imprisonment or the death penalty. But conspiracy to commit murder was only punishable in Louisiana by imprisonment “at hard labor for not less than one nor more than 20 years.”135 So perhaps Garrison, knowing he was up to no good, only wanted to use Shaw up to a certain point. He didn’t want to have Shaw’s death or life imprisonment on his conscience for the rest of his life.†
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