Also in May, he said there were “at least two pairs of men in the front—apparently two men behind the stone wall and two behind the picket fence.” The job “of the second man in each case was to pick up the actual cartridges, taken on the bounce so to speak, so that the cartridges could be disposed of as quickly as the guns. . . .” And there was “at least one man in the back who was shooting, [but not from] the sixth floor of the book depository.”5
In his television broadcast in July, Garrison stated that there were at least three assassins in Dallas at Dealey Plaza, two firing from the rear and one from the right front.6
In a letter written in August, he told Bertrand Russell that at the higher levels of the plot were conspirators with “Neo-Nazi” political views, and among them was Clay Shaw.7
“There are elements of the Dallas establishment that are deeply involved [in the assassination],” he said in September, “and some of the members of the White Russian community are part of it. Now, they had total control of Marina [Oswald].” Also deeply involved were “elements of the Dallas police,” a Minutemen controlled element, and some members of the John Birch Society. Sponsoring the operation was a group of “insanely patriotic oil millionaires.” The “corroborating evidence” to support these charges, Garrison said, “is in our files.”8
He concluded the year with descriptions of the events at Dealey Plaza. “Just a little bit in front of where the President was killed there is a sewer opening” that is accessible through a manhole, he said in early December. “The man who killed President Kennedy fired a .45 caliber pistol” from that manhole, then “fled” through the sewers “to another part of the city.”9
At a press conference the day after Christmas, Garrison said there was “an infinitely larger number [of people involved in the conspiracy] than you would dream,” and in Dealey Plaza alone, there could have been as many as fifteen, including lookouts, men operating radios, supervisors, and so on. “It was very large and very well organized,” he said.10
C. F. Weber/Joe Bergeron
Clay Shaw, the accused—
“I was inclined to tell Garrison’s men, ‘Gentlemen, this is a very bad joke.’ ”
Matt Herron/Black Star
Jim Garrison, the district attorney—
“There is a certain tendency to climb where opportunity presents itself.”
National Archives
Jack Martin, the tipster—
Described himself as: “Author, former newspaperman, professional soldier, adventurer, and philosopher.”
Courtesy Alvin Beaubouef
David Ferrie, the pilot, Garrison’s favorite suspect—
“Martin has a special vendetta for me.”
AP/Wide World Photos
Dean Andrews, the Runyonesque attorney—
“I can’t let Shaw get convicted—the Giant is trying to put the hat on this poor bastard because of me.”
National Archives
Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin—
Charged with disturbing the peace after a dispute with anti-Castro Cubans.
National Archives
Clay Shaw—
“The feeling of being a stunned animal, which marked the first part of the month, seems to have gone now.”
Pat Hill at General Media Communications, Inc.
James Phelan, the Saturday Evening Post writer—
“Garrison was humorous, witty, literate, articulate, charismatic, affable, and mean as a rattlesnake.”
Matt Herron/Black Star
Clay Shaw and Edward F. Wegmann during the preliminary hearing.
AP/Wide World Photos
Andrew Sciambra, Garrison’s point man—
“I sat down on the chair and I put my brief case on top of my legs and I put the legal pad on top of the brief case, I wrote like that.”
AP/Wide World Photos
Perry Russo, Garrison’s witness—
“Sciambra didn’t take any notes.”
UPI/CORBIS/BETTMANN
Sketch of “Leon” Oswald—
Created by drawing a beard on Oswald’s picture.
National Archives
Vernon Bundy, the prisoner—
James Kruebbe: “His testimony was incredible from day one.”
Courtesy Edward O’Donnell
Edward O’Donnell, the polygraph technician—
“I said, ‘Perry, what the hell’s wrong with you?’ ”
Paul Eberle
Jim Garrison—
“People worry about the crime ‘syndicate,’ but the real danger is the political establishment, power massing against the individual.”
UPI/CORBIS/BETTMANN
James Alcock, Garrison’s lead prosecutor—
“I wasn’t part of those fancy lunches. I wasn’t a part of the inner circle.”
AP/Wide World Photos
Charles Spiesel, Garrison’s calculated risk—
Hypnotized by “fifty or sixty” people.
Crown Portraits, Inc.
F. Irvin Dymond, Shaw’s lead trial attorney—
“I think Garrison was just totally unscrupulous. I don’t think there’s any limit to what he would have done to convict Clay Shaw.”
Greystone Photographers
Edward F. Wegmann—
“A compelling national interest is at stake in these proceedings.”
Greystone Photographers
William J. Wegmann—
“You have to understand that district attorneys in this area for years controlled the political system at Tulane and Broad.”
Courtesy Salvatore Panzeca
Salvatore Panzeca—
“I recognized Mr. Shaw’s name when he identified himself. And I simply took the position—well, I’ll be down there and we’ll straighten it out.”
Courtesy Herbert W. Christenberry, Jr.
Judge Herbert W. Christenberry, Garrison’s nemesis—
“Garrison makes several references to the Dreyfus case. When we consider Garrison’s actions toward Shaw it is small wonder that in writing his book that classic example of injustice came to his mind.”
Courtesy George Morgan
Estus Morgan, mystery man—
Unwitting “participant” in the Clinton scenario.
National Archives
Shaw (standing, back to wall) and Ferrie look-alike Robert Brannon (in overcoat). This is the picture Stone claimed Garrison discovered after the 1969 trial, which proved Shaw and Ferrie knew each other. But Garrison had the picture in 1967 and he knew then that the man in the overcoat wasn’t Ferrie.
Courtesy the author
Oliver Stone, the filmmaker—
“Thomas Jefferson urged on us the notion that when truth can compete in a free marketplace of ideas, it will prevail.”
Matt Herron/Black Star
Clay Shaw—
“My moments of absolute black despair are increasingly rare. I am trying to take the whole matter stoically . . .”
PART TWO
FRAUD PERPETUATED
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE CLINTON SCENARIO AND THE
HOUSE SELECT COMMITTEE
Clinton, that’s Klan country.1
—William Wegmann, 1993
Clinton had to be a complete fix!2
—Irvin Dymond, 1993
I was told that we could discredit these witnesses because Garrison’s men “did it wrong.” That the witnesses were told what to say and they said it.3
—Salvatore Panzeca, 1993
Three years before Jim Garrison died, a documentary filmmaker interviewed him about his Clinton witnesses. Explaining why his investigators went to that area in the first place, Garrison spoke vaguely about his office getting wind of Lee Harvey Oswald being there.4 It was a typically obscure answer. From the beginning, Garrison cloaked his Clinton investigation in secrecy. Only his closest aides knew about it and its origins have never been revealed. At the trial, none of the witnesses could say why Garrison’s men
contacted them and Garrison himself avoided a direct answer. “We picked up a lead,” he wrote in his memoir, one he called “slim,” and “a whisper in the air,” as though it wafted down from the hill country on a gentle breeze. That was not the case but that was Garrison’s story and he stuck to it. Today, those eight witnesses from that rural hamlet (located about 30 miles north of Baton Rouge and 120 miles north of New Orleans) represent what remains of Garrison’s credibility.
On the witness stand, each of them provided information that complemented the testimony that preceded it, their story progressing like a well-made play. Oswald arrived at Edwin Lea McGehee’s barber shop near Clinton one day in late August or early September with a woman in an old beat-up car.5 Seeking a job at nearby East Louisiana State Hospital, Oswald was sent by McGehee to the home of State Representative Reeves Morgan. Encouraged by Morgan to register to vote, Oswald next turned up in Clinton with Clay Shaw and David Ferrie in a black Cadillac. Town Marshall John Manchester, Registrar of Voters Henry Earl Palmer, and two black men working for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)—William Dunn and Corrie Collins—saw the car. All remembered Shaw, two remembered Ferrie and three remembered Oswald. After waiting in line more than five hours, Oswald finally spoke to Palmer who told him he didn’t need to register to vote to work at the hospital. Oswald politely left. He then appeared at the hospital asking for directions to the personnel department. Later, a clerk in that department noticed his job application in the files.
Garrison launched his case with that seamless narrative because he believed it would deliver a knockout punch for the prosecution. “Just wait til the first day, it’s gonna be all over the first day,” Andrew Sciambra boasted to Perry Russo before the trial. Sciambra was talking about “the Clinton people,” Russo explained. Sciambra also told Russo that afterwards “you won’t be all that important.”6 Garrison was confident about these witnesses because of the remarkable cohesion of their stories and the seemingly rock-solid respectability of those holding public office. The three in positions of public trust strengthened the perceived integrity of them all, as did the group’s racial mix.* But a recently released FBI report reveals that Town Marshal Manchester and Registrar of Voters Palmer were members of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1964 Palmer was the “Exalted Cyclops.”7
These two Klansmen furnished the pivotal Clinton testimony: Manchester heard Shaw say he worked for the International Trade Mart and Palmer saw Oswald’s military identification. So they provided the “unimpeachable” identification of both men. But as Klansmen, Manchester and Palmer have lost their unassailable credibility along with their mantle of civic rectitude. Instead, they interject into the Clinton story an influential and violence-prone organization with a secret membership and private agenda. From the beginning, many suspected that the black witnesses were coerced. While that may or may not be the case, the specter of the Klan supports the idea. The full meaning of this Klan connection is unclear and may never be known. But anyone looking for a pool of witnesses to draw upon, and secrecy, would have found both in the Klan’s membership rolls and its many friends.*
Skeptics of the Clinton testimony abounded from the outset. “Manchester was completely unreliable,” former Clinton District Attorney Richard H. Kilbourne said recently. “You could easily plant something in his mind and he would say it as a fact.” As for Reeves Morgan, “He would say anything,” Kilbourne remarked. “I said from the time I first heard about it that I didn’t think there was a thing on earth to it and I still feel that way. I never took it seriously. All these people were impressionable and they got to talking and pretty soon they talked themselves into it. Get a rumor started and the next thing someone is telling it as a fact. When you get to the bottom of it you find out there is nothing to it.”8 That was the benign explanation. Others thought something more calculated had occurred.
Some noticed the conspicuous repetition of phrasing, which called to mind actors reciting lines in a play. McGehee and Morgan both recalled the time of year as the latter part of August or the first part of September, which Sciambra repeated as he interviewed the others. Asked how they identified men they observed only a few brief minutes six years earlier, Manchester stated, “I don’t forget faces.” “I don’t hardly forget [a] face,” said William Dunn.9 Those describing Ferrie referred only to his “hair” and “eyebrows,” as though he consisted of nothing more. Four of them recalled Shaw’s “grey” hair and his build, and two of them said he had a “ruddy complexion.”10 Explaining why they didn’t notify the Warren Commission or any other authorities about Oswald being in Clinton, Manchester and Collins offered the same peculiar reason. “I figured if they wanted it they could come and get it,” said Manchester. “I felt like if they wanted to know they would ask me,” said Collins.11 (Neither was able to say how the Commissioners could have asked when they weren’t informed about it in the first place.)
Some critics noted the oddity of the Clinton story. Oswald seeking work in such a remote location made no sense, except to Garrison. He claimed to the end that those manipulating Oswald wanted him working at the hospital (a psychiatric facility) so they could switch his records from employee to patient to support a later charge that he was a mental case.12 Garrison found nothing preposterous about that idea. He also found nothing strange about these three “conspirators” calling attention to themselves shortly before they participated in the crime of the century.
He wasn’t bothered either by the timing of the story’s appearance. No one heard about Oswald being in Clinton (or at the hospital) until after Garrison began his investigation.* Yet once the assassination rocked the country, the local citizenry should have been buzzing about Oswald’s visit. In this small community, people know each other and talking is a way of life. Four years passed, though, before the word “got out.”
For many, all this added up to a bogus tale. But it didn’t prove much. Over the years professional and amateur sleuths alike had combed this trail and found little—a whiff of smoke here and there, but no smoking gun. I journeyed to Clinton in 1993 only because I needed to see it for myself. So low were my expectations that I scheduled only a twenty-four-hour stay. That seemed time enough until Aline Woodside, then the head of East Louisiana State Hospital’s personnel department, made an offhand remark that opened an unexpected door.
She had just described that long-ago visit to the hospital by a Garrison investigator, State Policeman Francis Frugé, now deceased. At his direction, she and others had conducted an exhaustive, fruitless search for Oswald’s job application. “No,” she replied to my question, no one in personnel remembered seeing Oswald, giving him an application, or interviewing him. “We didn’t think she saw it,” Woodside said, referring to the clerk who claimed she spotted the application in the files. Woodside had hinted as much already; so I wasn’t surprised. Moments later, I was gathering up my things to leave when she remembered something. “Frugé had an assistant with him,” she said, “a lady.”
That was a surprise. I had never seen or heard any reference to such a person.*
Woodside couldn’t remember her name but she made a telephone call and seconds later had retrieved it, along with the name of the town where she was living in 1967. Locating her was almost as easy; I found her the following week. But by then, I was home in California and she refused to speak about the case on the telephone. Yes, she said, her voice soft and southern, she would talk to me about Clinton. Not this way though. Only in person. She was polite, kind, and unmovable. If you’re supposed to use my information, she said, “it will happen.” Clearly she thought her information was valuable and, instinctively, so did I. Two months later, I trekked back to Louisiana to meet and interview this mystery lady. I found an articulate, impeccably groomed, and attractive woman in her sixties, who remains today a Garrison loyalist. Her name is Anne Hundley Dischler.†
On February 4, 1994, at her home in Eunice, Louisiana, west of Baton Rouge, Dischler, now an ordained minister in the Full Gospel Chur
ch,‡ sat on a sofa intently examining the sheaf of papers on her lap. She was looking at the twenty-six-year-old notes she had recorded during the five-month period when she and Francis Frugé wheeled along the roads of the hill country north of Baton Rouge, chasing a lead on Oswald that never quite panned out, at least not for them.
Assigned to the Garrison probe in late February, Frugé invited Dischler to assist him. They had worked together in the past and she readily agreed. For three months they followed dead-end “Oswald” leads; then a tip steered them to Clinton. In his book Garrison claimed the team there was Francis Frugé and Andrew Sciambra. It wasn’t. The team in Clinton was Frugé and Dischler. They worked with Louis Ivon and his partner at the time, Frank Meloche, but their main contact in the district attorney’s office, Dischler said, was Andrew Sciambra. They met with Sciambra periodically and fed him their information. Recalling that period as we studied her records, carefully preserved for over a quarter century, Dischler cleared up some of the mystery that has surrounded this testimony. She also, unintentionally, challenged the legitimacy of the entire Clinton scenario.
In Dischler’s notes I discovered the date that their informant launched that scenario: May 18, 1967, three weeks after James Phelan’s Saturday Evening Post article demolished the basis for Clay Shaw’s arrest. The tipster maneuvered so quietly that until now, no one outside Garrison’s innermost circle knew he was the source. Jack N. Rogers (Counsel for Louisiana’s Joint Legislative Committee on Un-American Activities) delivered the message to the State Sovereignty Commission. From there, Fred Dent, Jr., passed it on to Francis Frugé and Anne Dischler. Dischler recorded it in her abbreviated handwritten field notes, creating the first documented reference to the Clinton story. The informant was Registrar of Voters and KKK Exalted Cyclops Henry Earl Palmer.13
False Witness Page 23