False Witness

by Patricia Lambert

  Life personnel continued to flow in and out of Tulane and Broad. This alerted members of the local press, who didn’t want to be scooped by Life. Garrison’s investigation was supposed to be a closely guarded secret, but rumors of it had circulated for some time. Veteran New Orleans States-Item police reporter Jack Dempsey even referred to it once in his column. No one paid any attention to him until the rumblings grew too loud to ignore. How the story finally broke is of more than passing interest, for even as it was happening Garrison was rewriting what was occurring. Later he would revise it even more, as he blamed the press for a self-inflicted wound. Garrison’s paranoia about the media was born in these events.

  States-Item city editor John Wilds set them in motion when he decided to find out if there was anything to the rumors he was hearing. He assigned Dempsey and Rosemary James (who everyone agrees was not only a fine reporter but one of the prettiest in town) to see what they could learn from Garrison’s office. Wilds also sent David Snyder, a tall, clean-cut investigative reporter who hailed from Iowa, to examine the district attorney’s expense vouchers at City Hall.

  Rosemary James tried to make an appointment with Garrison. When he claimed to be too busy, she asked the question on the phone. “Are you investigating the Kennedy assassination?” “I will neither confirm nor deny that,” he replied. To a reporter, she later wrote, that was tantamount to saying yes but “you’ll have to get your information somewhere else.” Snyder meanwhile had hit a paper trail detailing the expenses of Garrison’s aides on all those fruitless trips. On February 16 the three reporters pieced together their information and wrote their story. At ten o’clock the next morning, James went to Garrison’s office and handed it to him. After glancing at the first page, he handed it back. She asked for a reaction and he repeated, “I will neither confirm nor deny it.” She said later if Garrison had asked her to withhold the story they would have. “All he had to do was say no,” she said. “He wanted us to print it.” The newspaper’s management told Garrison they were going to publish the piece. “Go ahead,” Garrison said.9

  It appeared that afternoon, Friday, February 17. The story centered on the hard information Snyder had dug out: the money, 8,000 that the district attorney’s office had spent so far. DA HERE LAUNCHES FULL JFK DEATH “PLOT” PROBE, the headline shouted. MYSTERIOUS TRIPS COST LARGE SUMS, informed the subhead. The article itemized thirty-two expenditures chronologically between November 25, 1966, and February 13, 1967. Garrison wasn’t interested in suppressing this news. Public disclosure was inevitable and he was plainly relishing the idea. What he didn’t expect was the unflattering slant, riveting attention not on the historic or heroic implications, but on the petty issue of grubby old money. When a reporter from the Times-Picayune asked about “the trips,” Garrison understandably “bristled” and used “an unprintable phrase.” But that same afternoon, he called the paper’s news desk and said the article “was substantially correct.”10

  Despite his role in breaking the story, Dave Snyder thought it was “nothing special.” He soon learned otherwise. He was working late that day when the phones began to ring with inquiries from all over the world about Garrison’s “probe.” The first call was from Scotland, he later said, “and that made me realize what we had.” What they had was a story with international sizzle. About 5:30 P.M. a call came in that gave it local sizzle. It was from David Ferrie, and Snyder took it, but he had no idea that he was speaking to Garrison’s primary suspect. Ferrie said he had read their article and that their story was true, that Garrison was investigating the assassination. Garrison, he said, had “staked out” his apartment, and he offered to tell Snyder about it. Ferrie said, too, that he was physically ill and his voice was barely audible, his breathing “unsteady.”11 He also expressed his fear of being arrested, which would become the principal theme of his last days. He lived close to the newspaper and told Snyder to hurry over before he changed his mind. Snyder did. As they climbed the stairs to his second floor apartment, Ferrie’s “steps were feeble” and he said he had encephalitis. He didn’t mention it then but he had also been having severe headaches. Without knowing it, he had suffered one, perhaps two, “small bleeds,” minor ruptures in a blood vessel at the back of his head.12 That evening Ferrie was living on borrowed time.

  The two talked for the next four and a half hours. Ferrie laid out what he knew about Garrison’s case and the role Garrison thought he had played. Ferrie felt persecuted and angry about his harassment and that of his friends. He poured out his bitterness. He was thinking about filing a lawsuit against Garrison and Jack Martin. And, he told Snyder, as he had all those before him, that he did not know Lee Harvey Oswald. Garrison’s investigation, Ferrie said, was “an utter waste of time.”13

  The next day, the interview dominated the front page of the New Orleans States-Item: “DEFINITE” JFK DEATH PLOT IN NEW ORLEANS, DA AIDE QUOTED: EYED AS PILOT OF “GETAWAY” CRAFT—FLIER. Accompanying the story was a large picture of David Ferrie. In back was an editorial questioning the 8,000 in “unexplained” expenses and asking “has the District Attorney uncovered some valuable additional evidence or is he merely saving some interesting new information which will gain for him exposure in a national magazine? Mr. Garrison, it seems, should have some explanation.”

  When Garrison arrived at his office, he found the newspaper on his desk. Here was David Ferrie, of all people, stealing his thunder by publicly confirming, before Garrison himself did, that his investigation was indeed underway, and terming it “an utter waste of time.” Garrison’s chief suspect had upstaged him in the most demeaning way possible. Garrison reacted typically and in accord with his oft-stated belief that “the best defense is an offense.” He held his first Kennedy assassination press conference and attacked both local newspapers for publicizing his investigation. He responded to the editorial and to Ferrie’s insult. He also officially confirmed Friday’s story. Garrison said his office had established that the Warren Commission erred in its conclusion that President Kennedy was murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, and that the plot was developed in New Orleans. “We already have the names of the people in the initial planning,” Garrison declared. “We are not wasting our time and we will prove it. Arrests will be made, charges will be filed, and convictions will be obtained.” Garrison still had nothing but the testimony of Jack Martin and David Lewis, but with those remarks he crossed the Rubicon. While he would make an even more outlandish claim six days later, this was the preemptive first strike with no possible retreat. He would spend the next four years trying to fulfill, and the rest of his life trying to justify, the note of prosecutorial certainty he sounded that day.14

  The article published Friday had stirred the world’s interest, but when Garrison’s Saturday proclamations flashed around the world, expectations soared into the stratosphere and representatives of the international media descended on Tulane and Broad. “Does District Attorney Jim Garrison really have a solid investigation brewing into the alleged New Orleans plot which led to the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas?” asked one newspaper. “The world was waiting for an answer Sunday.”15 The worldwide reaction surprised Garrison and also presented him with a problem. All those newspeople in town were clamoring for his next utterance but he had nothing to tell them. All he had was a theory based on linkages provided by a prevaricator* and his protègé. Garrison solved this dilemma by staging some theatrics at the Fontainebleau Motor Hotel where he held another press conference on Monday. The representatives from the two local newspapers he specifically uninvited. Garrison chose a private facility to avoid the legal implications of barring them from a public building.

  Act One of Garrison’s show was performed at his office. At about 1:30 P.M., the dozens of press representatives waiting for him since 10:00 that morning were asked to list their names and news affiliations. Then, except for those from the New Orleans States-Item and the Times-Picayune, they were called a few at a time into a small room and given t
he location of the press conference. This they were asked not to reveal to others, meaning those from the offending newspapers. Six of them showed up at the motel anyway, but were barred from the room. “Remove ’em by force,” Garrison shouted, “throw them out if necessary.” One reporter who tried to enter was shoved out the door and into the corridor by a Garrison aide.16 Garrison spent most of his time complaining about the premature disclosure of his probe. Arrests, which before had been “just a few weeks away,” were now “months away,” he said. As for his investigation, he added nothing to what he had said on Saturday. One reporter said afterwards that Garrison had delivered an “hour-long no comment.” The feud Garrison had manufactured between himself and the local newspapers served its diversionary function, giving him something to talk about.17

  Before Garrison could devise something further to say, he was freed of that burden by David Ferrie’s death.

  On February 22, sometime after four o’clock in the morning, the already weakened blood vessel at the base of Ferrie’s brain ruptured for the last time. At 11:40 Wednesday morning, he was found dead in his bed.18 Everyone, even Garrison skeptics, found the timing of his death ominous. Oswald had been arrested and promptly murdered; Ferrie came under suspicion and promptly died. No single event gave Garrison a greater credibility boost than David Ferrie’s untimely demise.

  He died of natural causes from a congenital condition, a berry aneurysm, according to doctors Nicholas J. Chetta, the Orleans Parish Coroner, and Ronald A. Welsh, the pathologist who conducted the autopsy.19 But Garrison, adept at exploiting circumstances, declared Ferrie’s death an “apparent suicide,” and anointed him “one of history’s most important individuals.” “Evidence developed by our office,” Garrison said, “has long since confirmed that he was involved in events culminating in the assassination of President Kennedy.” Other suicides by other conspirators might be forthcoming, he suggested. With Ferrie’s death, the district attorney’s “unexplained” expenditures vanished permanently from the news. More significantly, the individual who would have been a far more dangerous adversary than anyone left on Garrison’s playing field was gone for good.

  Who was this man whose death was such a windfall for Garrison?

  In a case cluttered with peculiar characters, David Ferrie was unique. His failure as a young man to become a priest was a great disappointment to him, and in later years he joined a sect known as the Orthodox Old Catholic Church of North America.20 Early pictures, before the disease alopecia left him hairless—and he began resorting to homemade reddish-brown wigs and eyebrows sometimes carelessly constructed—show an intense-looking dark-haired man with pleasant features. He taught high school in Ohio but soon turned to flying. He was an aviator of considerable skill, active and popular in the Cleveland Civil Air Patrol, his chief avocation and the hub of his social life. When he moved to New Orleans, he continued to work with the organization there.*

  In 1953 Ferrie’s flying talent caught the eye of famed aviator-industrialist and hero of two world wars, Eddie Rickenbacker. He was president of Eastern Airlines when he wrote in Ferrie’s file, “This man’s efforts bear watching and his qualifications justify his being used and helped whenever possible in line of duty—and even beyond.”21 Ferrie began working at Eastern in 1951, but he was out of step almost from the beginning. He resisted authority and, as one writer later put it, he had an aversion to soap. There were cumulative infractions and complaints. Then on August 11, 1961, he was arrested in New Orleans for a “crime against nature” involving a fifteen-year-old boy and indecent behavior with three others. Though the charges were dropped, the damage had been done. Eastern fired him.22 He appealed, and began working as an investigator-researcher for attorney G. Wray Gill and Guy Banister in return for a small salary and the help of both men in his case against Eastern.

  Although critical of President Kennedy’s handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Ferrie approved of Kennedy’s civil rights and fiscal programs. He was anti-Communist and anti-Castro, but the rumors of his participation in the Bay of Pigs invasion have never been proved. He claimed he had never been to Cuba, and once remarked that Castro could be a friend of the United States.23 In 1961 he participated with anti-Castro Cuban leader Sergio Arcacha Smith in the so-called “raid” of an ammunition bunker in Houma, Louisiana.† Since they had a key to the bunker and no report of theft was ever made by the company that owned it, this incident was more like a transfer. Martin’s stories and Garrison’s theories are predicated on Ferrie’s involvement with Smith and his group extending into the summer before the assassination. But it ended almost two years earlier, in October 1961, because of disapproval in the Cuban community over Ferrie’s friendships with young boys.24 During the summer in question, Ferrie was fighting for his professional life and fulfilling his duties to Banister and Gill. His appeal of Eastern’s firing, which prompted an exhaustive investigation by the FAA and two hearings in Miami, was not resolved until August 1963, when it was finally rejected.

  The stroke that killed Ferrie may have been precipitated by the extraordinary stress he experienced in the last months of his life.25 His declining physical condition was obvious the Saturday before he died when two of Garrison’s aides arrived at his apartment to interview him. He let them in, then “moaned and groaned with each step he took up the stairs” and told them “he had not been able to keep anything on his stomach for a couple of days.” Throughout the interrogation he was stretched out on the living room sofa. Nevertheless, he was relieved to see them. He had been calling their office, he explained, because he was worried about the rumors “that he was going to get arrested.”* Garrison’s men were not encouraging; when they left, he was still frightened.

  Ferrie expressed that fear repeatedly after Snyder’s interview with him was published, which turned out to be the last five days of his life. On each of those days, Ferrie telephoned either Snyder or his wife, Barbara. Some days more than once. The calls, usually long, were baffled monologues in which Ferrie tried to figure out the reason for Garrison’s campaign against him and sought reassurance that he wasn’t going to be arrested. If that happened, he asked Snyder to arrange for him to take a lie-detector test. Snyder and his wife both agree about Ferrie’s state of mind. “Ferrie was scared to death,” they say, “scared to death of Garrison, scared of being arrested.”26 Ferrie was frightened because of the newspaper reports of his 1961 “crime against nature” charge. His predilection for teenage boys was a matter of public record. Many would regard him as a child molester, and they are not dealt with kindly in prison. Those last days, Ferrie was terrified by that, not (as Garrison and later Stone depicted) the fear of being murdered because of his knowledge of the assassination. He had no such knowledge.

  In good spirits on Sunday, Ferrie called Dave Snyder and said he was going to meet with an attorney about his lawsuit. Reporters were continuing to pester him though and that evening he asked Louis Ivon (with whom he was friendly) for help to escape from them. Garrison said okay, hoping the favor might encourage Ferrie’s cooperation, and Ivon put him up for the night at the Fontainebleau “to give him some rest.”27

  Ferrie called Snyder the next day from an attorney’s office. He asked for the dates that Oswald had been in New Orleans, which Snyder supplied. Afterwards, Ferrie visited Carlos Bringuier, who had scuffled with Oswald in 1963, and inquired about Oswald’s associates and the date the alleged conspiracy supposedly began. But Bringuier, who later would recall Ferrie’s difficulty in walking, was unable to help him. That same day, Ferrie stopped by the FBI office. He later told Snyder that the agents were laughing about Garrison’s “investigation.”28

  He was at the New Orleans Public Library on Tuesday “perusing” the Warren Report, looking for facts to fill in the blanks. Talking to Barbara Snyder that evening, he spoke again of his fear of arrest and his bewilderment over Garrison’s targeting him. He also complained of headaches. Meanwhile, Snyder had heard from Washington Post reporter George Lardner,
Jr.; he wanted to interview Ferrie, who was balking. Snyder agreed to help and that evening he, too, had his final telephone conversation with Ferrie, assuring him Lardner was okay. Ferrie, “oozing good-natured confidence,” agreed to speak to him.29

  Lardner, the last man to see Ferrie alive, arrived at his apartment about midnight, stayed until almost 4:00 A.M., and found him “in a good mood.” Ferrie impressed Lardner as an “intelligent, well-versed guy [on] a broad range of subjects.”* Garrison’s probe, Ferrie told Lardner, would end up being a “witch hunt.” One last time, Ferrie declared that he “never knew Oswald and had no recollection of ever having met him.” Twice Ferrie voiced his concern about being arrested. He asked Lardner to withhold most of what he said for fear of antagonizing the district attorney, which might “trigger” his arrest. Lardner later said they parted on “a cheerful note.”30

  Ferrie was found the next morning lying on his back in bed naked with a sheet pulled up to his chest. The first Garrison aides on the scene were Asst. D.A. Alcock and Louis Ivon, who had been watching the apartment all night from across the street.31 The notion that he committed suicide was based solely on two typewritten messages found among his belongings, which were undated and unsigned. One was a bitter criticism of society, especially its judicial system; the other, an aggrieved statement about a ruined relationship.32 These communiqués were written by a tormented man, but when he wrote them, and to what end is unknown. Had Ferrie shot, hanged, or poisoned himself, thrown himself beneath the wheels of a moving vehicle, or fallen on a sword, they might be properly interpreted as “suicide notes.” But Ferrie had died of a ruptured blood vessel, sleeping in his bed. When last seen, he was cheerful. Despite the debilitated condition of his body, he spent his last two days on earth dragging himself around the city, gathering information for the 500,000 lawsuit he intended to file against his enemies. He was a man with a mission, with a reason to live.