False Witness

by Patricia Lambert

  As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Garrison called the Clinton lead “slim” and spoke of it poetically as a “whisper in the air.” But its real genesis was neither slim nor poetic. A long-time Louisiana political reporter recently described the State Sovereignty Commission as “the Gestapo” of its day. “If they wanted to kick in your door,” he said, “they kicked in your door.” And Palmer outlined in his tip virtually the entire tale later recited in Judge Haggerty’s courtroom: Lee Harvey Oswald, arriving in a Cadillac accompanied by Clay Shaw and David Ferrie, attempted to register to vote in Clinton; Oswald also sought employment at the hospital. Garrison had implied what one would expect if the Clinton story were authentic, that it grew one step at a time, as first one person then another recounted his or her recollections. It didn’t. When Anne Dischler jotted that brief message from the Sovereignty Commission in her steno pad, she was inscribing the essential elements of the final story.14

  Moreover, in identifying the source, she was also identifying the key Clinton player, Henry Earl Palmer, the interrogator of Oswald. And while someone else seems to have slipped Palmer’s information into the bureaucratic maze, instigating Palmer’s interview, I later learned otherwise. Jack Rogers, the original conduit,15 was married to Palmer’s former wife. So anyone mapping the real course of this tip would draw a short circular line beginning and ending with Palmer.

  In her notes, dated and written in a rapid but lucid hand, Dischler chronicled a broad and intense search for information to corroborate Palmer’s tip, recording a remarkable number and variety of names. The Congress of Racial Equality is mentioned, as is Ned Touchstone, publisher of the [White] Citizens Council newsletter, The Councilor. In addition to Jack Rogers, other prominent Louisiana political figures (such as Judge John Rarick) are there, and an occasional visitor from Washington, D.C. Governor McKeithen, Dischler said, sometimes made an appearance at their meetings. But most of them are ordinary people, contacted because they were somewhere when something occurred or knew someone who was. She entered long lists from Palmer’s voting rolls, individuals to be questioned in the hope one would remember Oswald, his companions, or the Cadillac. Five other Clinton witnesses appear: Lea McGehee, Reeves Morgan, John Manchester, Corrie Collins, and Bobbie Dedon. Dischler said she recognized the name of another, Maxine Kemp, but recalled nothing about her. Only William Dunn, one of the two black CORE workers, was entirely new to her.16 In all, Dischler filled three shorthand notebooks that she turned over to Garrison’s office where they were copied and returned to her. Deeply committed to the work she and Frugé were doing, Dischler remembers it vividly.

  During our two-day interview, she delivered four surprises, three of them shockers. Her description of what she and Frugé were seeking was the relatively minor one. “Garrison’s office gave us the report,” she said, “that these four men—Ferrie, Shaw, Oswald, and [Guy] Banister—had been [to Clinton] and we were supposed to dig up information as to what Oswald was up to there.” Garrison’s official version (and the trial testimony) placed only three men in Clinton, and Banister wasn’t one of them. Richard Billings did indicate in his notes that the number of men in the car was four, but no one in Garrison’s office ever claimed that publicly, nor that the fourth man was Banister. That would fit with Garrison’s thinking, however. He believed what occurred in Banister’s office was the key. Dischler also said that when she and Frugé arrived in Clinton, some of the people they spoke to had already seen one of the pictures they were using.17

  Dischler’s first stunner was her description of that picture. It was a three-by-five, black-and-white photograph of the Cadillac supposedly taken while the car was parked across the street from the registrar’s office. Inside were the four men. “Clay Shaw was in the driver’s seat—it looked like him to me,” she said. “I remember the white-haired man in the picture and the small face of Oswald. It seems like Oswald was on the passenger side of the front seat but I’m not sure. And it seems like I remember a darkened area in the back of the car where [Ferrie and Banister] were supposed to have been.” This picture came from the district attorney’s office, she said, perhaps from Sciambra. She recalls it being in a folder and Sciambra, she said, always had a folder, though it could have been one of Frugé’s. The picture received special treatment. Dischler never had it in her possession, and Frugé had it and “showed” it but only at the beginning and only for a short while.18

  No one ever claimed that any picture of the black Cadillac taken in Clinton existed, much less one with Shaw and Oswald inside.* But anyone with a composite such as that would have possessed a powerful brainwashing tool. And someone with that picture, Dischler said, had been there ahead of them. Who it was remains a mystery.

  Dischler’s second stunner was what their informant, Henry Earl Palmer, had to say. He told them Oswald actually registered to vote and signed the register. Palmer showed them where Oswald had written his name and the signature had been erased and another name written over it. But when they returned the next day to get a copy, Palmer told them the page was “missing.” He showed them the book, which Dischler believes was bound in some way, and said, “You see this is all that’s left.” He couldn’t or wouldn’t tell them who he thought had erased the name in the first place, Dischler said, nor who he thought had removed the page.19

  Startled by the dramatic conflict here with Palmer’s courtroom testimony (and the implications), I pressed Dischler about this. “It looked like where Oswald had signed his name,” she stated firmly. “You could make out part of the ‘O’ and, while I was looking at the signature, Henry Earl Palmer was saying to me that ‘this is where Oswald signed.’ ” I told her that Palmer didn’t testify to any of that in court. (He said Oswald couldn’t meet the registration requirements.) “Someone else told me that too,” she replied.20

  Apparently, someone had second thoughts about the Oswald-signed-the-register story. Henry Earl Palmer is deceased and the register has not survived—the current registrar of voters, barber Edwin Lea McGehee, recently stated that his files contain no such book.*

  The last jolt came straight from Dischler’s notes and it, too, strikes at the heart of the Clinton story. At Shaw’s trial, Corrie Collins described one man, Lee Harvey Oswald, stepping out of the black Cadillac. That isn’t what he said to Frugé and Dischler. According to Dischler’s notes, Collins told them that “two casually dressed men got out of [the black] car” and went to the registrar’s office.21 Collins believed they “got in line.” One of them, he said, was possibly wearing “blue jeans,” the other was “in white.”

  The question is: who were the two men—one in blue jeans, the other in white—Collins saw exit the car? And what was their role in the Clinton scenario?

  Collins told Frugé and Dischler that he knew one of them, and his name may have been “Morgan.” But Morgan’s first name is unclear. In her notes Dischler mentioned both Estus Morgan, who died in a car accident in 1966, and “Zip” Morgan, a local resident who operated a hardware business; she also indicated that the man may not have been “a Morgan.”22

  The man Collins described as wearing “white” Dischler managed to definitely identify. He was “Winslow Foster,” an employee at the hospital.23 Shortly after Dischler recorded that in her steno pad, Garrison took her and Frugé off the case, in effect burying the Foster–Morgan lead for twenty-seven years, until I began pursuing it in 1994. What I discovered indicates that the second man Corrie Collins saw exit the car was, indeed, Estus Morgan.

  I began my search with Winslow Foster. From his employment records, I learned that Foster, a WWII veteran born in Eudora, Arkansas, was forty-eight years old in 1963; he worked at the hospital eleven years and left the area in 1969. Eventually, I located two people in the Clinton–Jackson region who knew Foster, and another (now residing in Mississippi) who linked him to Estus Morgan. One said Foster was living in Sondheimer, Louisiana, when he died sometime in the 1970s. He recalled Foster as a husky five feet eleven inches, 2
40 pounds, with a fair complexion and sandy hair. The other said Foster was unmarried and called him “a country boy” and “a good man.” Both remarked on Foster’s work at the hospital—he was an attendant in the alcoholic ward. I asked one of them what sort of clothes Foster wore and he said that because of Foster’s job he “had to wear white.”24

  The individual who tied Foster to Estus Morgan was Morgan’s second wife, Nellie Louise Morgan. She described her former husband as about six feet tall, 180 pounds, with a dark complexion, black hair turning grey, and a glass eye. Born in Monticello, Mississippi, in 1907, Morgan also joined the Army during WWII; in 1963 he would have been fifty-six years old. When asked how Morgan usually dressed, she replied, “most of the time he wore blue jeans.” Before he and Nellie Louise Morgan were married, he, too, had worked at the hospital. One of his friends there, she said, was Winslow Foster.25

  Foster’s name was unknown to me until I encountered it in Dischler’s notes. But Estus Morgan was linked to the Clinton tale from the first day of Shaw’s trial. That’s when Henry Earl Palmer took the witness stand and named Estus Morgan as one of two white men, the other being Oswald, who stood in the registration line in late August or early September 1963, and attempted to register. In light of the new information we now have, it seems virtually certain that those two white men waiting in line were actually Estus Morgan and Winslow Foster.

  Their innocent trip to the registrar’s office in 1963 apparently laid the foundation for the Clinton scenario. The unfamiliar black car that brought them to town, in particular, would be remembered. The recollection of it may have been the catalyst that led to the story’s development in the first place—a black car was essential to the scenario because Clay Shaw was known to have access to one.* Who conceived this story is unknown, and precisely how they implemented it is unclear. What is known is that the neatly designed testimony recited at Shaw’s trial was meant to be the only version of the events in Clinton that the public ever heard. The story’s real roots, buried twenty-six years in Anne Dischler’s notes, were never meant to be revealed.

  Because of those notes, we know an unfamiliar black car really did appear in Clinton at the registrar’s office the summer of 1963. Corrie Collins saw it.† Collins also saw Winslow Foster and his friend Estus Morgan exit that car and join the registration line. We know, too, that neither Foster nor Morgan came close to resembling Oswald and could not have been mistaken for him.‡ How, then, did Oswald enter the picture? The answer, I believe, involves Estus Morgan.

  Since Henry Earl Palmer first mentioned him at Shaw’s trial, Estus Morgan has been a mysterious presence in the Clinton saga. His official role, for instance, has changed dramatically over time. First he was Oswald’s companion. Then he was demoted to bystander status.§ But the strangest aspect of Estus Morgan’s actual situation was the unlikely way it paralleled Oswald’s story: Morgan, too, wanted a job at the hospital;* he, too, was trying to register to enhance that possibility; he, too, was told to see Representative Reeves Morgan, and he showed up at the registrar’s office at the same time Oswald did.26 These remarkable similarities suggest that whoever was shaping the Clinton scenario simply appropriated the entire “profile” of Estus Morgan, who really did appear at the registrar’s office in 1963, and attributed it to Lee Harvey Oswald, who never appeared there at all.

  For what is most important about Corrie Collins’s first statement to Frugé and Dischler is what Collins didn’t say. He didn’t say he saw Lee Harvey Oswald exit the car that day. He didn’t mention Oswald.

  When Corrie Collins later testified on the witness stand, one of the items he retained from his statement to Frugé and Dischler was the hat he said the driver of the car was wearing.† Since Shaw never wore one, Collins’s insistence that the driver did has always seemed odd. Why he kept the hat is unclear.‡ But it is one of the few details in his testimony supported by Dischler’s notes.

  Frugé and Dischler interviewed Corrie Collins on October 3, 1967, and Dischler identified Winslow Foster as the man in white that same day. On October 9, Dischler made her last working entry in her steno pads when she recorded additional information about Winslow Foster. Four days later, she wrote her final note: “To New Orleans” it reads, “to turn in last report to Louis Ivon.” Without explanation, Garrison had abruptly removed Frugé and Dischler from the case. One of their contacts in the D.A.’s office told Dischler the investigation had to be “shut down” because of threats against Garrison’s family. But Garrison didn’t shut it down. He turned it over to Andrew Sciambra.

  Shortly before Garrison dismissed Frugé and Dischler, who had conducted an energetic and honest effort, James Alcock told Tom Bethell that “the Clinton angle ‘wasn’t working out.’ ”27 Perhaps Garrison jettisoned Frugé and Dischler because they had failed to find the witnesses he needed. But more likely, it was because of their unwitting pursuit of unwanted information about the real occupants of the black car. For while Estus Morgan was conveniently dead, Winslow Foster was alive and still working at the hospital. The next step for Frugé and Dischler was to interview him. By shutting down their investigation, Garrison prevented that interview from ever taking place.

  Over the next fifteen months preceding the trial, under Andrew Sciambra’s supervision, Henry Earl Palmer finalized his story.28 John Manchester overcame his hesitancy (his first statement contained fourteen I don’t recalls). William Dunn stepped forward for the prosecution.* And Corrie Collins overhauled his recollections:29 He identified the driver of the black car as Clay Shaw. Recalled David Ferrie sitting next to him. And replaced the two men he saw exiting the car with one, and identified him as Lee Harvey Oswald.30

  Who was really driving the black car (which may or may not have been a Cadillac) is unknown. But the possibility that it was Clay Shaw ranges from zero to somewhere deep in the minus column. The same applies to the presence of Ferrie and Oswald.†

  The House Select Committee conducted a lengthy inquiry into the Clinton matter. It even had an investigator living there for a while. Why its staff failed to locate and interview Anne Dischler is unclear.31 But as a result, the committee experienced an information gap that allowed it to embrace the Clinton witnesses. They, it turns out, did some heavy carrying for the committee in its report. By tying Ferrie to Oswald, they bolstered the theory that the assassination was committed by members of organized crime and anti-Castro Cubans. Since Ferrie was associated with both, linking him to Oswald linked those groups to Oswald as well, and thereby to the assassination itself. To create this connection, though, the committee relied on a nebulous and suspect linkage, much like those favored by Jim Garrison. But that was the best the committee could do.

  Yet by embracing Garrison’s case even limitedly, the committee put itself in a bind. For it wanted only the Ferrie–Oswald piece of the Clinton pie, not Clay Shaw, and even made a half-hearted assertion in Shaw’s defense aimed at sparing him, which only called attention to its quandary. The committee was “inclined to believe,” it stated in its Report, that Oswald was in Clinton “in the company of David Ferrie, if not Clay Shaw.”* But since Shaw supposedly told the town marshal he was with the International Trade Mart in New Orleans, Shaw’s identification was stronger than Ferrie’s. The committee could not subdivide the Clinton tale. They were all there, or none were. If the pie were poisoned, the toxins run throughout. The committee knew better, and regretted what it meant to Clay Shaw, but couldn’t resist devouring the pie. Why is clear enough.

  Without Clinton, the committee had next to nothing tying Ferrie to Oswald. The two may have crossed paths in the Civil Air Patrol when Oswald was fifteen. David Ferrie didn’t remember it, but he never denied the possibility. There was also the 544 Camp Street address Oswald stamped on some of his literature, which Garrison and later Stone made much of. It supposedly linked Oswald to Ferrie’s associate, Guy Banister, because his office was in the same building. Yet many find the 544 Camp Street address unconvincing as an Oswald—Ferrie link. F
or one thing, Oswald worked near the building and would have been familiar with it if he were looking for a phony business address to use on his leaflets.† For another, there was no access to Banister’s office from the Camp Street side. One had to exit the building, walk around the corner and enter through the door on Lafayette.32 So while a person inside 544 Camp was technically in the same structure as Banister’s office, for all practical purposes, he was in a separate building. As the committee noted, Oswald never rented that office and no one ever identified him as being there. Nor did any credible testimony ever place him in Banister’s.

  Anyway, in 1963 Banister didn’t have the resources of a big-time intelligence operation. He couldn’t even pay his rent. The owner of the building let him stay only because no one else wanted the space.33 Banister did keep a file on Oswald but maintaining files on people is what Banister did. He was a rabid anti-communist who conducted political monitoring of various individuals and groups. If he had not had a file on Oswald, it would have been strange. According to two people who saw it, the file contained the sort of material (clippings) that Banister would collect on someone he was watching, not the sort he would have on an operative he was running.

  The committee’s other evidence of a Ferrie–Oswald connection amounted to even less—the tall tale that Oswald, when he was arrested, had in his possession David Ferrie’s library card. Jack Martin invented that story during his alcoholic telephoning rampage the weekend of the assassination. He admitted that to the FBI. But in its Report, the House Select Committee inexplicably repeated the story without mentioning Martin’s role.34 The committee’s overall treatment of Martin, who was interviewed after he contacted the committee, was odd. Omitting his mental problems and criminal past, it presented him as less than reliable but motivated by “sincere concerns and some legitimate suspicions.”35 But Martin was simply doing with this committee what he had done the weekend of the assassination and during Garrison’s investigation—spinning tall tales and manipulating people. That worked to this committee’s advantage. For in its sympathetic interpretation of Martin, as with the Clinton witnesses, the committee was promoting its view of David Ferrie, a view remarkably similar to Jim Garrison’s. In some of its supporting volumes, the language even echoes the flimsy linkages Garrison used. All this leaves the impression that parts of the committee’s report were somehow Garrisonized.*