False Witness

by Patricia Lambert

  Modest and well-liked, Shaw moved in the city’s wealthiest social circles. Among his friends were playwright Tennessee Williams and Sears Roebuck heiress Edith Stern. He was regarded as one of the city’s most eligible bachelors and was often seen in the company of women, but he was gay, though discreet and in the closet. Some knew, but no one seemed to care; those who did turned a blind eye. A dedicated supporter of the arts, especially music and theater, and a linguist, at ease in several languages, Shaw was basically self-taught. After graduating from Warren Easton High School, he worked for Western Union as a local manager. As with Garrison, writing was Shaw’s long-range lifetime goal,* but as a young man he found it a poor source of the income needed to sustain a life. In his early twenties, he moved to New York City, took some courses at Columbia University, and supported himself by again working for Western Union, this time as a district manager in mid-Manhattan. He turned his writing skill into free-lance work in public relations and advertising, and eventually headed one of the country’s leading lecture bureaus. What successes Shaw might have enjoyed in those fields or in New York’s theatrical world died a-borning on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He enlisted at the age of twenty-nine, a private in the Army Medical Corps. He was discharged in 1946 a major with a chest full of decorations from three countries. He had served with distinction as Deputy Chief of Staff to General Charles Thrasher, commander of United States Forces in Northern France and Belgium. Shaw later said that coordinating supplies for three armies as they fanned out across Europe had developed his organizational skills.23

  With the fighting over, he returned not to New York but to the city where he grew up. He never again left New Orleans except on business trips and vacations. The pivotal moment in Shaw’s career occurred in 1947 when a group of prominent local businessmen asked him to help create a center for international trade. To them he was a “highly decorated war hero,” and one of their own, Louisiana-born. A native of Kentwood, Shaw had lived in New Orleans since he and his parents moved there when he was five years old. His grandfather was a turn-of-the-century sheriff in Tangipahoa Parish and one of the state’s best-known lawmen. Shaw later said he had no qualifications for the job the businessmen offered him but realized no one else did either, “because the mart idea had never been attempted before in this country.” So he gladly accepted. The city’s original Trade Mart, which opened in 1948, was Shaw’s creation—he directed its financing, its construction and its operation. When he retired nineteen years later, on October 1, 1965, the legacy he left behind included the thirty-three-story International Trade Mart building at the foot of Canal Street, which was Shaw’s idea. One of his friends said recently that Shaw did everything but build it himself.24

  He could have lent a hand there as well. For years he worked restoring structures in the city’s famous but run-down French Quarter—it was his principal avocation.* Others followed his lead and today it is one of the most highly prized areas of the city. A carriage house (with a bright red door) that Shaw restored at 1313 Dauphine Street became his home. Often seen at cultural affairs, Shaw also liked to hang out at the Press Club and drink with the newsmen. Politically a lifelong registered Democratic, Shaw described himself as a Wilsonian-Franklin-Delano-Roosevelt “liberal.” He supported John Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency in 1960 and thought he was “a splendid president.”† Kennedy’s “youth, imagination, style and elan” appealed to Shaw, and so did his political programs, especially Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress for Latin America. Shaw believed it would benefit all concerned economically, and be a boon to the shipping business in New Orleans. “If there was one person in New Orleans who believed in John F. Kennedy,” a friend later said, “it was Clay Shaw.”25

  When Garrison held up Shaw’s picture and proclaimed him “Clay Bertrand,” it wasn’t just Shaw’s stature in the community that astonished David Chandler. It was Garrison’s rationale for selecting him, what Chandler called “Garrison’s silly syllogism.” Chandler found it ridiculous. Garrison cited no evidence whatever. No district attorney in his right mind would make such a leap on that basis. Chandler wasn’t the only one to think so. Dean Andrews, who had given “Clay Bertrand” life, shared that sentiment.

  Around the time Garrison staged his photographic revelation for Chandler and Billings, he treated Andrews to another dinner at Broussard’s and informed him, too, that he believed Clay Shaw was Bertrand. Andrews, as amazed as Chandler had been and alarmed, tried to dissuade Garrison, but he had made up his mind. Now he wanted Andrews to corroborate it. Andrews refused. Garrison continued to press the idea at later meetings, trying to coax Andrews into admitting it, and Andrews began to wonder about Garrison’s tactics. “[Garrison] wanted to shuck me like corn, pluck me like a chicken, stew me like an oyster,” Andrews later complained. “I wanted to see if this cat was kosher.” To test Garrison’s integrity, Andrews invented a fictitious Cuban guerrilla fighter, whom Andrews called “Mannie Garcia Gonzales,” after a client of his named “Manuel Garcia,” to which he added “Gonzales.” Not long afterwards, Garrison announced that the “triggerman” in the assassination was “Manuel Garcia Gonzales.” Garrison charged this fictitious person with selling narcotics and informed Andrews that Gonzales had been arrested. Dismayed, but with his suspicions confirmed, Andrews told Garrison that he had the wrong Gonzales. Or as Andrews put it, he had “the right ha-ha but the wrong ho-ho.”26

  Andrews regarded the “Gonzales” caper as amusing and harmless but it was worse than that. He had provided Garrison with additional false information about a Latin connection to the crime. To his credit, Andrews had not embellished his Warren Commission testimony. Most importantly, he had refused to falsely identify Clay Shaw as Clay Bertrand. There he stood firm. He would not do it. Garrison wasn’t through trying but for now he had to look elsewhere for help. He turned to the man in question.

  Early in the morning the day before Christmas, Garrison had one of his detectives telephone Clay Shaw and ask him to come down to the D.A.’s office to answer some questions. Shaw agreed, having no idea that Garrison suspected him of being the mysterious “Clay Bertrand.” Shaw assumed they wanted to ask him about the incident that occurred on August 16, 1963, when Lee Harvey Oswald had distributed Fair Play for Cuba leaflets in front of Shaw’s place of business, the Trade Mart building at Camp and Common Streets.

  The detective picked Shaw up and drove him to Tulane and Broad where he was “questioned extensively” by Andrew Sciambra. Lee Harvey Oswald knew a man named “Clay” who lived in the French Quarter, Sciambra said, and we wondered if you were that man. Shaw said he was not, that he had not known Oswald. He had “almost” met him, Shaw said, the day he passed out leaflets in front of the Trade Mart. Oswald had come to his office that day but had spoken to his assistant, asking permission to distribute them. The assistant denied the request. Later that afternoon, Shaw was on a long-distance telephone call when a “commotion” occurred downstairs. Oswald, distributing his leaflets, had attracted police and television cameras. When Shaw finished his conversation, he went outside, but by then Oswald and the police were gone and the television crews were packing up. Shaw told Sciambra that was all he knew about the incident. Most of Sciambra’s questions focused on the Cuban consulate that had been housed in the Trade Mart and Shaw’s contacts with the people there.* It was Shaw’s understanding that the consulate was the reason Oswald chose the site. Had Shaw ever joined any anti-Castro group? Shaw had not. Did he know David Ferrie? Shaw did not. Had he ever heard of a Clay Bertrand? Shaw had not.27

  Garrison entered the room and Shaw briefly repeated what he had told Sciambra. Then Shaw left and went to City Hall where a Christmas party was underway. Before he departed the D.A.’s office, Shaw later said, Garrison “thanked me profusely for being a good citizen, for being cooperative and coming in.” Shaw thought that was the end of the matter. Temporarily it was. The Jolly Green Giant had been favorably impressed by Clay Shaw, an impress
ive man. Garrison told his aides to “forget Shaw.” Earlier Garrison had mentioned Shaw’s name to two newsmen; he now told them that Shaw had “absolutely nothing to do with it.”28

  Garrison would shortly change his mind.

  * Sen. Long’s family history may have made him especially vulnerable to conspiracy theories. In 1935, his father, the legendary Louisiana political figure, Huey P. Long, was assassinated by a lone gunman, and the assassin was then shot and killed by Long’s bodyguards.

  † “Garrison just can’t stand [criticism],” an aide later said. “It drives him crazy. He forgets everything he’s doing” (William Gurvich, Conference with defense team, Aug. 29, 1967 [hereinafter Gurvich Conference], tape #2, p. 3).

  * His actions in that parole, Andrews admitted, had not been “a strictly legal move for an assistant D.A. to make,” a damaging admission that Garrison tucked away for future use.

  † Oswald’s use of the Camp Street address may mean nothing (see chapter 13).

  * Ferrie informed Volz that the CAP cadet who introduced Oswald to that organization, Edward Voebel, had said that he and Oswald, along with some other cadets, once stopped by Ferrie’s house. But, Ferrie said, he didn’t remember the visit (Ferrie, interview with Asst. D.A. John Volz, Dec. 15, 1966).

  * Ferrie’s friends got the message—being around him was an invitation to trouble. They stopped calling and dropping by, leaving him isolated (Beaubouef Interview).

  † Garrison’s contacting Chandler, who had written the most negative report published about him to date, was a peculiar move. He was using his Kennedy investigation to regain his previous stature in Chandler’s eyes, an odd priority.

  * Garrison boasted to some on his staff that his picture was going to be on the cover of Life (Gurvich Conference, tape #2, p. 12).

  † Life provided Garrison a variety of assistance. In Miami a Life researcher investigated the alleged Latin assassins supposedly hiding there; Life’s lab provided photographic enlargements and prints (whatever Garrison requested); and wherever Garrison went he was trailed by a Life photographer recording his activities for posterity. In return, Life received a copy of Garrison’s master file, which was mailed to New York “as things were printed,” and the possibility of the biggest journalistic coup in recent memory.

  * Garrison’s “insight” was inspired by notes scribbled in the margin of a paperback copy of the Warren Report by Asst. D.A. Frank Klein. Ruminating on Dean Andrews’s Warren Commission testimony, Klein had asked himself who he knew with the first name “Clay” who lived in the French Quarter and was gay, and dashed off the name Clay Shaw and a “question mark” (Gurvich Conference, pp. 13–14; Bethell Diary, p. 11).

  * By the time Shaw was nineteen he had co-written and published three one-act plays (one of them, Submerged, has been staged thousands of times) and in 1948 his first full-length play, In Memoriam, was produced in New Orleans.

  * Shaw rehabilitated and restored sixteen structures, including a house where naturalist John James Audubon lived in 1921, and the so-called Spanish Stables.

  † Clay Shaw met the president once. When the former mayor of New Orleans de Lesseps Morrison was appointed Ambassador to the Organization of American States, Shaw was one of those who accompanied Morrison to Washington for the swearing-in ceremony.

  * After Castro severed relations with the United States and fired consulate officials abroad, Shaw had agreed to the request of the aging and ill Cuban consul (Carlos Marquez) and allowed the office to remain open for three months (rent free) in the hope that diplomatic relations might be restored (Shaw Journal, pp. 4, 5).

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A TIGER BY THE TAIL

  This is not a city prone to knowing what it’s doing before it arrests people. . . .

  —David Ferrie (to George Lardner, Jr.),

  February 22, 1967

  As 1967 began, Garrison had his men on the move. Armed with the tools of the sleuthing trade and Garrison’s instructions,* they boarded planes to Dallas, Houston, Chicago, and Miami, seeking Cubans who had known David Ferrie. Finding them, Garrison believed, would provide the link to the conspiracy that had killed President Kennedy. Expecting to land the fictional Manuel Garcia Gonzales, Garrison himself joined investigator Louis Ivon in Miami. When the capture failed, Garrison concluded that his presence had been a mistake that had “flushed” their quarry and sent him fleeing to Cuba or Puerto Rico. “Things,” Garrison said, were “moving too fast.”1

  This manic scurrying about was prompted not only by the misinformation from Dean Andrews and Jack Martin but also from a Martin protégé—David F. Lewis. Martin and Lewis were so close they ended up living together. A dark-haired twenty-six-year-old in square, horn-rimmed glasses, discharged from the Navy for “psychiatric” reasons, Lewis was a baggage handler at a bus station. Working briefly in 1961 as a “leg man” for Banister, he had bolstered his image of himself as a private eye by wearing a plastic gun in a 17 shoulder holster purchased from F. W. Woolworth. Lewis claimed he met Lee Harvey Oswald in Mancuso’s coffee shop and later saw him in Banister’s office with Ferrie and two anti-Castro Cubans.* He came forward with his story at Martin’s urging. Martin had dug up a “witness” to corroborate his own testimony. Garrison embraced Lewis as enthusiastically as he had Martin. David Ferrie was now plagued by a new source of incriminating “information” about him.2

  Lewis was first certain that Ferrie was present at the meeting in Banister’s office but unsure about Oswald. Later he was positive about Oswald but denied Ferrie was there. Then he switched again and said both were present. He first said his sightings occurred in the summer of 1963. Then he said they occurred in the summer of 1962, when Oswald was in the Soviet Union or Texas. Later still, he moved them back to 1963.3 Lewis told members of the press he knew the names of five people who plotted the assassination and tried to peddle a tape recording he made with Martin “naming names” to a UPI reporter for 1,000. The reporter declined. In January Lewis was Garrison’s primary witness. Soon afterwards, Jack Martin bragged that Garrison’s investigation “was based on information ‘made up’ ” by himself and David Lewis. No one else supported it and the three accused who were still living—the two Cubans (Sergio Arcacha Smith and Carlos Quiroga) and David Ferrie—vehemently denied it. But their denials fell on deaf ears. Garrison continued to pursue Cuban conspirators, supposedly linked to Ferrie, while exercising tight control over his men. Their trips were closely managed, down to the precise time of their daily telephone reports. Alcock was to call from Houston at 11:00 A.M. “sharp.” In Dallas, John Volz was scheduled at “12:00 Noon sharp.” But they produced nothing.4

  One Cuban Garrison did locate, Miguel Torres, ended up being an embarrassment. He claimed, among other things, that the district attorney’s office had tried to bribe him. Garrison found Torres by employing his “propinquity theory,” the odd notion that the conspirators would be found living near each other, a geographical twist on guilt-by-association.† Miguel Torres fit Garrison’s criteria: he was Cuban and he once lived only a block from Oswald on Magazine Street. “Garrison always said that he was going to solve the assassination with an Esso road map and the city directory and that’s all he did all day long,” investigator William Gurvich later remarked. “I know; I got him the five city directories.” Garrison and his aides invested enormous time and energy chasing this eccentric idea but it was all for naught.5

  William Gurvich was given the job of proving that on the day of the assassination David Ferrie was in Dallas, sitting in a plane at the end of a runway, engines running, waiting to fly Oswald to safety. Gurvich was supposed to find the airfield. A pilot himself, Gurvich rented a plane and flew from one small field to another, examining records, talking to workers, and showing Ferrie’s picture. No one recognized him. When Garrison focused on a tiny airport called White Rock, Gurvich obtained its gasoline receipts for September, October, and November—4,000 of them, which Garrison ordered photocopied and checked. Again, no one fo
und anything. From the outset Gurvich was troubled by the conspicuousness of a “waiting getaway pilot.”6 His doubts were confirmed when he discovered that Ferrie was telling the truth about his whereabouts on the day of the assassination. But when Gurvich first told Garrison he had learned from a federal marshal that Ferrie had been sitting in a federal courtroom in New Orleans, Garrison dismissed the idea. You know who they work for, he said.

  The failure of Garrison’s men to uncover any evidence against David Ferrie wasn’t the only problem on Garrison’s horizon. Since the day Garrison had recited his “silly syllogism” identifying Clay Shaw as Clay Bertrand, David Chandler had been heading off the reservation. Chandler didn’t conceal his skepticism, and Billings and Garrison began regarding him with suspicion.7 They had reason to worry. So did Chandler.

  On January 25 he was served with a grand jury subpoena. At Tulane and Broad the next morning, he discovered that an investigation he was conducting into an alleged bribe in Garrison’s office had prompted it. He was running the risk of being charged with perjury, he was told. “Get yourself a lawyer,” Asst. D.A. Charles Ward said. The meaning was clear, “Shut up or go to jail.” “For the next six months,” Chandler later recalled, “I was never more than a phone call away from a Life lawyer.” Chandler’s disillusionment marked the beginning of a schism at Life over Garrison. “There was the Billings faction,” Chandler said, “that was proceeding with a positive Garrison story, and there was my faction” that was urging withdrawal of the magazine’s support, believing that Garrison had become sort of a “monster” abusing his power. “We were both filing [separate reports] to New York,” Chandler explained. But for the time being, Life’s management put their trust in their senior man in the field, and Richard Billings’s view prevailed.8