Only one other Garrison move would have agitated Sheridan and Kennedy more: steering his investigation into the dark waters of the anti-Castro plots that had been supervised by Bobby and inquiring how they might have backfired against JFK in Dallas. This is precisely what Garrison began doing, to what must have been Kennedy’s horror. The prosecutor began stumbling around the Cuba minefield, looking into whether Oswald might have been part of a CIA plot to kill Castro and whether the operation was approved by Attorney General Kennedy. Even assuming that RFK did not approve the Castro assassination schemes, there was enough in the Cuba catacombs to have haunted Bobby ever since the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza. This angle of Garrison’s investigation could only have intensified Kennedy’s feelings of guilt and his fears that the New Orleans case was going to blow up in his face.
In May 1967, Sheridan—who had discovered Garrison’s alarming line of inquiry—took the extraordinary step of approaching the CIA to see if the agency might be willing to cooperate with his NBC investigation of the D.A. On May 8, Richard H. Lansdale, a lawyer for the agency, disclosed in a memo that he had been approached by a Sheridan representative—Washington lawyer Herbert “Jack” Miller, the former criminal division chief in the Kennedy Justice Department. Miller told the CIA counsel that Sheridan had learned Garrison was trying to develop an explosive “thesis” about Oswald. The prosecutor was attempting to prove that the alleged assassin “was a CIA Agent, violently anti-Communist, recruited by the Agency for an operation approved by Robert Kennedy to kill Castro. When Oswald killed President Kennedy, the thesis is, it was necessary to show Oswald as a Communist in order to cover up the original plan.” Three days later, Lansdale reported that Miller had contacted him again on behalf of Sheridan, telling him that Sheridan “has indicated a willingness, if not a desire, to meet with CIA under any terms we propose. He would outline Garrison’s schemes and intentions as he understands them and would receive from us anything, if any, we want to say. This could become part of the background in the forthcoming NBC show.”
The fact that the Kennedy camp and the CIA—with their long, dark history of hostile relations—discussed the possibility of joining forces against Garrison shows how anxious they both were about the events in New Orleans. The agency took aggressive steps to infiltrate and disrupt Garrison’s investigation. And during the trial of Clay Shaw—who Dick Helms later admitted was a CIA asset, providing information on overseas businessmen traveling behind the Iron Curtain—the CIA director repeatedly asked his top deputies whether “we are giving [the Shaw defense team] all the help they need?”
But Sheridan had a more demonstrably damaging impact on the Garrison investigation when NBC broadcast his hour-long news special on June 19, 1967. The program ripped into the D.A. for cobbling together a rickety case against Shaw by bribing, intimidating, and manipulating witnesses. The results of Garrison’s prosecutorial mayhem, the show’s host concluded, “have been to damage reputations, spread fear and suspicion, and, worst of all, to exploit the nation’s sorrow and doubts about President Kennedy’s death.” The NBC show was a devastating blast, and it marked a turning point in Garrison’s fortunes. After Sheridan’s indictment, the D.A.’s public image began shifting from crusading to kooky.
The wounded Garrison demanded—and got—equal time from NBC to defend himself. But he also reinforced his image as an out-of-control backwater despot by turning the tables on Sheridan and arresting him for bribing witnesses. (The charges were later dropped.) The Sheridans feared that the D.A. was trying to throw Walt in jail so he could do him “some bodily harm,” said Nancy. Kennedy rushed to Sheridan’s defense, declaring that “his personal ties to President Kennedy, as well as his own integrity, ensure that he would want as much as, or more than any other man, to ascertain the truth about the events of November 1963.”
By now, Kennedy himself was aroused to oppose Garrison. When he learned that Mort Sahl had landed an appearance for the D.A. on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, Kennedy tried unsuccessfully to get Carson to withdraw the invitation. CNN political reporter Jeff Greenfield, who was a young Kennedy aide at the time, remembers walking into his Senate office and overhearing Bobby lobbying Carson on the phone. “He was telling Carson that Garrison was full of crap. Bobby was saying, ‘Don’t believe him. If I thought there was anything to this, I would have done something. Don’t you think I would’ve pursued it vigorously?’” Carson went ahead with the interview, but his questions—which Sheridan helped supply him—were surprisingly hostile for the genial talk show host and prompted numerous viewer complaints. Nevertheless, Garrison performed like the smooth courtroom lawyer he was, expertly taking the interview out of Carson’s hands and raising provocative questions of his own about the assassination. The TV host was so annoyed that he later took it out on Sahl, banning the comedian from his show.
For the rest of their lives, Garrison and Sheridan would regard each other with a poisonous contempt. Even today, among Garrison supporters, the name Walter Sheridan elicits a furious reaction. They accuse him of doing the CIA’s bidding when he went to New Orleans. Those close to Sheridan, in turn, scorn the New Orleans D.A. as a corrupt demagogue. In reality, neither man is so easy to dismiss.
It is certain that Sheridan was acting on Robert Kennedy’s behalf, not as an intelligence agent, when he went to New Orleans. His loyalty—from the time he went to work for Bobby Kennedy’s rackets investigation in the late 1950s to the final chapter of his career in the 1980s, when he worked as a Senate investigator for Teddy Kennedy—was unquestionably to the Kennedy family. Walt Sheridan brought a religious devotion to the Kennedy cause, one that he could never have divided on behalf of another master. Jack Kennedy “asked the best of all of us and we all eagerly gave it,” he once said, looking back on his service in JFK’s administration. “Politics became a noble profession again, as it had been in Ancient Greece.” He embraced this view of the Kennedy years throughout his life. In Sheridan’s mind, Bobby only took the mission higher.
It is true that Sheridan had an intelligence background when he came to work for Bobby Kennedy. After quitting the FBI in 1954, he received a security clearance to join the CIA. He decided to work for the National Security Agency instead, but after only three years, he left that organization—a covert labyrinth dedicated to the cracking of foreign codes—because, he said, “I felt cut off from the world.” There is no evidence that Sheridan continued to play an intelligence role in his career with the Kennedys. Nancy Sheridan said that her husband shared Bobby’s suspicious view of the CIA. “They didn’t trust it,” she said simply.
It is easy to understand why the approach that Sheridan made to the agency in the midst of his Garrison research raises eyebrows among his critics. But the CIA, which ordered a background check on Sheridan after hearing from him, was clearly as leery of him as he was of the agency. Langley officials might have feared that Sheridan and Kennedy were not only investigating Garrison but were on a fishing expedition to find out what the agency knew about the assassination. In any case, the incident reveals more about the two parties’ mutual distrust of Garrison than it does about their trust in one another. And there is no evidence Sheridan and agency officials did in fact end up joining forces against the D.A.
Walt Sheridan went to New Orleans for reasons that had nothing to do with U.S. intelligence. He went to size up the Garrison probe, and then—after quickly deciding it was a threat to Bobby Kennedy’s political interests and his future chances of reopening the case—to sabotage it.
If Sheridan was no spook, Jim Garrison was not simply a pawn of organized crime. He had a troubling blind spot when it came to Carlos Marcello. And he certainly was not the shining knight portrayed by Kevin Costner in Oliver Stone’s JFK. But Garrison was more heroic than Sheridan believed.
To Bobby’s incorruptible crime-hunter, Garrison carried a repellent, swampy odor because of his willingness to overlook the criminal exploits of men like Marcello. But Sheridan was too quick to dismis
s the entire Garrison enterprise because of this. The prosecutor was, after all, a creature of his environment, and this was hothouse New Orleans, where few public officials did not have to change shirts now and then to stay clean. Despite this, Garrison’s outrage over the unsolved murder of the president was genuine. And it put to shame the many public officials in Washington who were in a much grander position to do something about the crime, yet chose to do nothing.
Garrison also might have erred badly by targeting Clay Shaw after the deaths of the two more central figures in his case, Guy Banister and David Ferrie. But, as the House Select Committee on Assassinations would confirm a decade later, the New Orleans prosecutor did succeed in shining a light on a crucial corner of the conspiracy—a world of zealous CIA plotters, Cuban expatriates, far-right militants, and mercenaries, where President Kennedy was considered a traitor.
There is a tragic sense to the blood feud that broke out between Jim Garrison and Walter Sheridan. These two men probably knew more than anyone else in the country, besides the conspirators themselves, about the plot that cut down JFK. But, like the competing heirs to the Kennedy legacy—RFK and LBJ—they were doomed to clash rather than cooperate. You could not find two more different men—one big, loud-mouthed, and brash; the other slight, tight-lipped, and circumspect. Garrison was a man of outsized appetites and ambitions; Sheridan was a devoted family man and squeaky-clean public servant who had submerged his own dreams in those of Robert Kennedy. But it was not their clashing personalities that ultimately drove them to opposing corners. It was Kennedy’s need to control the search into his brother’s killing. Even without his obvious flaws, Garrison would have been unacceptable to Bobby. When it came to solving the crime, RFK trusted only himself and a few men, like Sheridan, who served him.
ONE EVENING, WHILE HE was volunteering as Jim Garrison’s media advisor, Mort Sahl was invited to a Washington dinner party by his friend, NBC News anchor David Brinkley. Sahl was seated next to Bob McNamara, while his wife, China, sat next to a nervous Bobby Kennedy. Everyone avoided The Topic hovering in the air. “The conversation was so innocuous that it had to be an effort,” Sahl recalled. “Weather was a recurrent topic, and no one ever took a position on it.” Ethel Kennedy finally broke the strained mood by getting drunk and dancing on the table. “Ethel, please, my career,” cracked Bobby.
Finally, at eleven o’clock Sahl left to do his nightclub show, leaving his wife with the jittery Kennedy, who was ripping napkins into shreds and making paper pyramids. Only after Sahl had gone did Bobby work up the nerve to ask China, in roundabout fashion, about the controversial turn her husband’s career had taken. Why was Mort fired from his popular talk show on a Los Angeles TV station? Kennedy asked her. But he already knew the answer—Sahl had been terminated for talking too much about his brother’s assassination. Finally, after Bobby kept pumping her for information, the sharp-tongued China cut him off: “You had him next to you for two hours. Why didn’t you ask him then?”
Sahl was exasperated by the reticence of Bobby Kennedy and his circle to publicly confront the subject for which he was sacrificing his career. On another occasion, while escorting the wife of NBC newsman John Chancellor, who was working that night, to a White House dinner, the comedian bumped into Ted Kennedy’s wife, Joan. When he told her that Bobby had invited him to his Senate office the next day, she burbled, “Oh, so he’s not angry at you anymore?”
“Angry about what?” Sahl erupted. “I’m destroying my career trying to find out who killed his brother!”
The next day, when the comedian visited him in his Capitol Hill office, Bobby once again assiduously avoided the topic. Kennedy wanted to know what the prevailing opinion of LBJ was on the college campuses where Sahl frequently performed. “They hate him,” Sahl said.
“It’s probably time for someone to make a move,” Bobby obliquely commented.
Sahl cut to the chase. “You might just save the country.”
It was the upcoming presidential race that preoccupied Kennedy. All his future plans depended on his occupancy of the White House.
According to Sahl and Mark Lane, who also moved to New Orleans to work on the case, the Kennedy and Garrison camps occasionally sent back-channel messages to each other despite the blazing feud between the D.A. and Sheridan. This was far from a formal arrangement, and indeed it seems to have consisted largely of gossip and bits of information passed back and forth by a colorful intermediary named Jones Harris. A New York man about town whose social circle overlapped with the Kennedys’, Harris turned himself into a dogged assassination researcher after Dallas, traveling to Dealey Plaza and later New Orleans. The out-of-wedlock son of Broadway producer Jed Harris and actress Ruth Gordon, Harris had a waspish wit and a theatrical flair, showing up in Garrison’s office in a straw hat that he rarely took off, even indoors. He had dated Jackie’s White House appointment secretary (and JFK mistress) Pamela Turnure and partied with the Kennedy crowd in Newport when Jack was still alive—he once told Jackie that her glamorous husband should go into movies and let Peter Lawford run the country. Garrison found Harris intriguing and the New Yorker became one more member of the vivid cast of characters surrounding the prosecutor.
Shuttling between New York and New Orleans, Harris would pass along information about the Garrison investigation to Kennedy clan insiders like Steve Smith—the husband of Bobby’s sister Jean and manager of the family’s finances—whom he bumped into at Manhattan watering holes like P. J. Clarke’s saloon. Harris would then relay messages from Bobby Kennedy’s circle back to Garrison.
According to Sahl, the message from Bobby was always the same: I must wait until I reach the White House. Then I will “get the guys who killed Jack.” Perhaps this was Kennedy’s way of signaling to Garrison that it was time for him to step aside—he was going to take over the investigation. But Garrison told Sahl that Bobby would not live long enough to win the nomination. The prosecutor sent back word to Kennedy that his only chance was to speak out about the conspiracy that killed his brother, which might make his enemies think twice before moving against him. But the advice was not well received by Bobby’s camp, according to Sahl. The message that came back through Harris was, “What are we going to do—listen to the people in Washington who have worked with the Kennedys forever, or to a nightclub comedian and a Southern cracker sheriff?”
Sahl shakes his head. “I don’t think he’d be under that everlasting flame today if he’d listened to us.”
Even at the height of his battle with Sheridan, Garrison never turned his fury against Bobby Kennedy. The only sharp public remark Garrison made about Bobby came after the D.A. ordered Sheridan’s arrest, when Kennedy rushed to his friend’s defense. Bobby didn’t want the “real assassins” caught, Garrison acidly commented, because it “would interfere with his political career.”
Privately, with his staff, a pained and confused Garrison would wonder out loud about the strange quiescence of the Kennedy brothers’ circle. One day the prosecutor turned to Sahl, who was the only member of his team who had ever met the Kennedys, and in “utter frustration,” asked him, “You knew them—what kind of friends did those guys have?”
“If they killed my brother,” Garrison added, “I’d be in the alley waiting for them with a steak knife, not sitting at the Kennedy Center watching a ballet with them.”
Sahl, too, was scathing in his assessment of the Camelot round table and their failure to pursue their leader’s killers. The old Kennedy crowd was so worried they would stop being invited to parties if they stirred up trouble, sneered the comedian. “Even if the party had become one long funeral party.”
Even the president’s widow—at first so righteous in her fury against her husband’s despicable killers—had gone mute. One day, while walking along Madison Avenue near Seventy-fourth, Sahl came upon Jackie, peering into the store windows and art galleries in the neighborhood. Their eyes met. She knew what Sahl had been doing for her fallen husband. “Hey,” said S
ahl. “I know, I know, I know,” Jackie muttered, and then quickly walked on.
IN THE END, JIM Garrison’s trial of Clay Shaw did exactly what Kennedy and Sheridan had feared it would. It contaminated the JFK assassination investigation for years to come.
After deliberating for less than an hour, the jury filed back into a New Orleans courtroom shortly after midnight on March 1, 1969, and declared that Shaw was an innocent man. While the jury members made it clear that they were not endorsing the Warren Report—graphic evidence like the Zapruder film, which Garrison repeatedly played in the courtroom, had made a strong impression on them—they explained that the D.A. had simply failed to present a strong enough case against Shaw. In the eyes of the media, however, the verdict was a resounding vindication for the government’s lone gunman theory. For at least another decade, until Congress finally reopened the case, research into the killing of John F. Kennedy would carry the taint of cultism or lunacy because of Garrison’s spectacular courtroom failure. Even some of the leading assassination critics who originally supported Garrison, like Harold Weisberg, turned bitterly against him in the end.
Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) Page 47