Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, & the Garrison Case

by DiEugenio, James

  They were counting on Herbert Christenberry. Christenberry was the federal judge who presided over this hearing. To understand what happened there, one must understand who Christenberry was. It was not possible to do that before the releases of the ARRB or the work of Professor Donald Gibson. Attorney Christenberry had been a political operative in the state since the 1930’s. As Professor Gibson made the case in the pages of Probe Magazine, it appears that Christenberry and his brother Earle were undercover agents in the camp of populist Senator Huey Long. Herbert Christenberry was the source for a story that has been repeated many times over the years about a plot to kill Long by state backers of Franklin Roosevelt. Long was planning to run for president in 1936. Roosevelt’s state backers had a meeting in July of 1935 at the DeSoto Hotel in New Orleans. Somehow, some way, Herbert Christenberry and two friends knew when and where this meeting was to take place. They even knew the room where it was held. One of them got a job as a desk clerk and booked the room next door. Christenberry said he placed a dictograph to the wall and managed to overhear the meeting, which he took down in shorthand.9 Long was assassinated on September 8. The day after the shooting, Earle Christenberry declared that his assassin, Carl Weiss, was at the DeSoto Hotel meeting.

  The reason this story has been recycled is that, as Gibson notes, there was a huge cover-up of the true circumstances of Long’s murder. As he writes, “Almost all of the records disappeared for almost 60 years. In 1991 the gun allegedly used to kill Long and a 600 page police report turned up. . . . A complete reconstruction of the events on the night of the assassination is now—for the above reasons—impossible.”10 Because of this evidentiary vacuum, historians like Arthur Schlesinger have utilized the DeSoto story as a way to explain Long’s murder. Therefore, according to Christenberry’s eavesdropping, Carl Weiss was part of a plot to kill Long arranged by in state Democrats. Therefore it was part of an internecine party feud. Christenberry had given his transcription to a Long Democrat who was under indictment at the time of the assassination. Yet, after Long’s murder, the indictment was suddenly dropped. Earle Christenberry had been Long’s secretary. He was also in charge of Long’s treasury. Which disappeared after Long’s death. Further, Earle insisted that Weiss’s name actually appeared on his brother’s transcript. But when Long’s biographer, T. Harry Williams, found the man who had it, he refused to show him the transcript. He then said, no one would ever see it. But he had told someone else that Weiss’s name was not in the transcript.11 If this is so, then Herbert Christenberry probably put out a cover story. The purpose of which was to confuse what actually happened to Long. For the really vicious enemies of Long, who had actually hatched a plot to take over the state capitol and kill Long, was a group from Standard Oil.12

  Gibson’s thesis gains credibility when he traces what happened to Herbert Christenberry after Long’s murder. One would expect that since he allegedly exposed a plot by backers of Roosevelt to kill a state legend, FDR’s administration would blackball him forever. One would be wrong. In 1937, Christenberry became U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana. In 1942, he was nominated to be U.S. attorney at New Orleans. He was quickly confirmed in January of that year. As Gibson notes, “Apparently, no one asked him to explain his role in blaming Roosevelt supporters for murder.” Then, in 1947, he was elevated to U.S. District Judge. The position he held when the Shaw perjury case arrived in front of him.13 As Gibson notes, this would seem to suggest that Christenberry was not really a Long loyalist. This is especially likely since a true Long follower, Sidney Songy, went to jail after he exposed the Standard Oil plot to kill Long.14

  The other piece of information that helps elucidate what Christenberry did was found in the National Archives as part of Shaw’s personal papers. It is a letter from Christenberry’s wife Caroline to Shaw which was sent a week after his acquittal. It begins like this: “Our most sincere congratulations! We shared your anxieties over the past two outrageous years.” The reader should note the plural pronoun which denotes that Herbert is in complete agreement with his wife’s sentiments. The note goes on with: “Should your case have eventually found its way to Federal Court and been allotted to my husband you most certainly would have had a fair trial. He felt we should not risk the possibility of being considered “prejudiced” in advance. This is our reason for not openly expressing these sentiments earlier.” As if Shaw did not have a fair trial the first time around? The reader should note the quotes around the word prejudiced. That usage and the sentence’s meaning clearly denotes that Christenberry was ferociously biased for Shaw and against Garrison. But he did not want anyone to know that. And surely, Shaw was not going to reveal this letter since it would have forced Christenberry to rescue himself from his case, which is the last thing Shaw and his lawyers wanted. But the fact this was sent in 1969 clearly influenced his lawyers’ strategy for the perjury case. Which was likely done with former political operative Christenberry’s connivance. As one could predict from all this, once the case got to Christenberry’s court, this hidden bias manifested itself throughout the proceeding.

  That three day hearing might have been scripted by Hugh Aynesworth. This proceeding was not in any way a preliminary hearing on the viability of the perjury charges. In other words, the many witnesses to Shaw’s perjury statements were not called and cross-examined. If that had occurred, a trial would have to have been held. This hearing was a review of both Shaw’s trial and Garrison’s investigation. Except, as indicated in Caroline Christenberry’s letter, the review was as wildly biased as Walter Sheridan’s special. For example, William Gurvich was allowed to testify as to the fraudulence of Garrison’s investigation.15 Perry Russo’s meeting with Andrew Sciambra in Baton Rouge and his subsequent sodium pentothal session was presented exactly in James Phelan’s terms. In fact, in some ways, Christenberry went beyond Phelan. Consider: “A fair inference to be drawn is that these ex parte procedures were used to implant into Russo’s mind a story implicating the plaintiff in an alleged conspiracy plot. This could have been accomplished by post-hypnotic suggestion.”16 Garrison, not Shaw, was actually placed on the witness stand and asked to explain why he ever called in Shaw for questioning in the first place. In other words, at the Wegmanns’ request, Christenberry was asking the DA to give away his planned upcoming case against the defendant. As the reader can see, in Christenberry’s court, Garrison was now the defendant, the Wegmanns were the prosecutors, and Christenberry was sitting at their table. Christenberry, well-schooled in political subterfuge, turned his court into a political arena. But he still had one serious problem. He had to find a way to characterize the bringing of the perjury charges as an act of bad faith. He ended up lying on his point. He wrote that after Shaw’s acquittal, Garrison charged Shaw with perjury without any other witnesses except those had used at the trial.17 This was not accurate. To use just one example, Garrison had an interview of a man named David Logan who had told his office that he had met Ferrie at a gathering at Shaw’s home.18 Logan did not appear at the conspiracy trial. As the author has made clear, a mistake Garrison made at the trial was not to use all of his witnesses against Shaw.

  The man who may have misled the public about the conspiracy to murder Senator Huey Long was now ending the first and only criminal prosecution of the conspiracy to murder President John F. Kennedy.

  In relating the following sorry story, one should remember the directions for the Garrison Group. The CIA was making long-term plans that went to the point of beyond the Shaw trial. We should also recall, that in particular CIA cases, the attempt is not just to jail or assassinate a target, but to destroy its reputation so no one will ever follow that person or trail again. This is why the Helms-Angleton plan was always contingent on continuing after the Shaw trial. The strategy was not devised just to end Garrison’s case against Shaw. That was just the beginning. The overall objective was multi-leveled. It was to end Garrison’s career, ruin his reputation, place him in jail, take over his office, and th
en incinerate his evidence. All this to guarantee that no indictments would ever come out of New Orleans again. How was this accomplished?

  After Garrison charged Shaw for perjury, Aaron Kohn and the Justice Department went to work to manufacture a criminal case against the DA. Kohn began to send over material from the Metropolitan Crime Commission files about alleged laxity by Garrison over crime in Orleans Parish. But even the attorney who would prosecute the case against the DA, Gerald Galling house, complained to Kohn about the quality of the material he had been sent. He characterized it as weak.19 Therefore, the Justice Department recruited Pershing Gervais, a former friend of Garrison and a man who had worked in his office as an investigator. But who Garrison had later fired. The charge was that Garrison was participating in a kickback scheme from illegal payoffs for pinball machines. There was a legitimate case in all this. A group of pinball operators were bribing a police officer to let them get away with their illegal payoffs on machines. This was done by alerting the operators as to when the machines would be checked.20 These funds were then secretly forwarded to the police superintendent.21 But Garrison was not involved in the scheme at all. And as the trial dragged on, this became obvious. Garrison, who decided to defend himself, would question each operator on this point. And each testified that not only did they never pay him or his assistants any money for this protection racket, they did not even know him.22 The closest association Gallinghouse could get was that the operators had donated to Garrison’s campaigns. But they had also donated to the campaigns of other DA candidates who were not involved.23

  Realizing they had a large problem in this case regarding Garrison, the Justice Department had tried to solve it in two ways. They first organized a phony task force they called Strike Force and moved some men into New Orleans. This was to give the illusion that crime was running rampant there and they had to take care of it since Garrison could not. Second, they put pressure on Gervais to turn state’s witness against Garrison. Gervais had been running a little private business by telling family members who were indicted that he could fix their cases for them. He was actually playing a little gamble on which cases were strong and which were weak. When he guessed correctly, he would collect a fee which he said was used in part to pay off the lead attorney. Since this was a form of fraud, Gervais could not report the money on his taxes. When the Justice Department found out about this, they turned him over to the IRS.24 They now had leverage over Gervais to become their witness against the man they wanted out of the DA’s office: Garrison. With Gervais in tow, Garrison was charged on June 30, 1971. He pleaded not guilty on December 15, 1971. In the meantime, one month after Garrison’s arrest, Gervais was shipped to Canada and given a job doing very little with General Motors.

  By September of 1971, Gervais was in Vancouver. In the local newspaper there, Gervais had confessed that he was recruited to frame Jim Garrison.25 In fact, to reporter Rosemary James he stated that he was picked to go to Canada and get a fake job since he was the one who could get Garrison.26 He was employed under the assumed name of Paul Mason. And he showed up at “work” and signed in once a week. When the Vancouver Sun called General Motors in Canada about this arrangement, they refused to answer any questions.27 In addition to getting a salary from GM, he was also given a company car and an annual stipend from the Justice Department. Apparently, Gervais did not like Vancouver. After he gave out interviews to both James and the Canadian papers, he decided to sneak back into the United States. Which defeated the purpose of the subterfuge. The original idea was to get him out of the country under an assumed name so that Garrison could not find him or question him. Therefore, his appearance at the trial would be a total surprise. The exposure of all this skullduggery created a mini-scandal in Canada. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau ordered an investigation of the whole affair.28 At the end of May, many Canadian newspapers were running summaries of Gervais’s exposure of Canada’s role in a scheme to place Jim Garrison behind bars.

  Garrison was allowed to listen to the undercover tapes Gervais had made of him in advance of the trial. He deduced that the Justice Department was arranging a charade in which Gervais would drop by his house to repay money he had borrowed from Garrison. He would be wired for sound. The bug in his pocket was personally authorized by Attorney General John Mitchell, who apparently did not like having to limit the testimony of Regis Kennedy at the Shaw trial.29 The bills returned would be marked.30 But since Garrison had no part in the scheme, the tapes had to be altered. Which they were.31 The effect was to transform the debt being repaid to Garrison into a payoff for his complicity in the pinball protection racket.

  In addition to not being able to get the pinball operators to link him to the scheme, Garrison brought in people from his office, and formerly with his office, to testify that they knew nothing about this kickback affair. Also that Gervais had been fired for trying to sell off a case, and he owed Garrison money.32 So Gallinghouse’s case against Garrison rested on the tapes and the testimony of Gervais. Gervais created a problem for himself by saying that Garrison had collected 150,000 dollars in the scheme. This did not correspond with what was on the tapes. As Garrison had loaned him just 5000 dollars.33

  Armed with the previous disclosures in the Canadian and local newspapers, Garrison gave Gervais a blistering cross examination. The witness was read back a transcript in which he stated he had been forced to lie for the Justice Department. And that the whole point of him being pressured into being a witness and then exiled to Canada was to silence Jim Garrison. Gervais even admitted that he had participated in a frame up. And he called the case against Garrison a fraud based purely on politics.34 Garrison even got Gervais to admit he had offered a lawyer friend of the DA’s to “write the script” for the trial for 50,000 dollars.35

  With Gervais reduced by his own words, Garrison now turned to exposing the tapes. He called Dr. Louis Gerstman, a professor of speech and hearing science at City University of New York. Gerstman found technical disparities and inconsistent noise levels on the tapes which showed that Garrison’s voice had been spliced into certain conversations from elsewhere.36 The DA concluded his case by calling other law enforcement officials who testified that his office had done as much or more to prosecute pinball operators than other DA’s in the past, or others in neighboring areas.37

  Garrison’s summation lasted for three hours. He was acquitted on the first ballot. Even though the judge was Herbert Christenberry. Referring to that ironic fact, Gervais said “You can bet it’s not an accident.”38 The Strike Force now left the state. This is how badly Washington wanted to punish Garrison for bringing a criminal case for the murder of President Kennedy. They were willing to send a DA who never had any record of bribery, not even a trace of it, to jail on completely manufactured charges.

  But it was a winning plan anyway. Because the actual priority was to get Garrison out of office and the man they had wanted into office. A man who they could rely upon never to bring any charges in the Kennedy case. Even though, if one looked for it, New Orleans was honeycombed with evidence of Oswald being manipulated in the summer of 1963. But if you had a man who was actually part of the Justice Department that covered up that case, who was actually aiding Shaw’s defense, then you could rest assured: No case would ever be brought. That man, of course, was Harry Connick.

  Connick began to gear up for his first race against Garrison after Shaw’s acquittal. Because of the fact that both major newspapers continually pilloried Garrison over the Shaw trial, much of the power elite in the city backed and contributed to Connick’s campaign. Along with allies of Shaw. For instance, the Gurvich brothers, William and Louis, both gave Connick 10,000 dollars each. About a month before the election, a poll put Garrison ahead by a wide margin, more than thirty percentage points. About three weeks later, on the eve of the election, a St. Louis company called DeWitt announced the results of another poll. This one would put Connick ahead by twenty points. WDSU television, severe critics of Garrison’s prosecu
tion of Shaw, did a much publicized segment trumpeting that poll’s results. Garrison won handily. The day after the election, even the Times-Picayune, wondered if the poll was a hoax intended to help Connick.39

  Five months after Christenberry stopped Garrison’s further prosecution of Clay Shaw, Garrison was arrested on the phony pinball protection charges. Gallinghouse, who worked in the same office as Connick, was in no hurry to go to trial. In fact, the trial did not occur until two years after Garrison’s initial arrest. In the interim, Connick again challenged Garrison. This time around, Garrison’s name was now in the news in a derogatory way for an extended period of time. Connick again began to raise a war chest to retire Garrison. The backers of the Superdome project were all on board, since Connick’s brother was the secretary for that fund drive. Among others, Clay Shaw and Carlos Bringuier also contributed.40 Since the trial dragged on well into the election season of 1973, Garrison was still getting bad publicity into the campaign. Then, after he was acquitted, he only had about two months to put together a positive push. The compacted time frame caused him to lose the election by a bit more than 2,000 votes. Connick now took office.

  During the 1969 race, when asked about Garrison’s inquiry into Kennedy’s assassination, the challenger replied that although he tended to think there was little value to Garrison’s assassination probe, he would evaluate each case on its individual merits.41 There is no evidence that this happened. In fact, thanks to a hearing in New Orleans by the ARRB, we know what one of Connick’s prime objectives was once he got into office. It was to literally set fire to the evidence Garrison left behind. Therefore, the world would never see the primary documents of the only criminal prosecution ever brought in the JFK case.

  On June 28, 1995, Connick testified before the Review Board in New Orleans. He said he felt they were doing the right thing by putting all the records of the JFK assassination in one place. Therefore scholars of the future could clarify “clouded areas of the past and make sense of what happened.”42