False Witness

by Patricia Lambert

  Garrison explained that conversations with some witnesses lacked substantiation because the original documents were “stolen.” The reader is supposed to take Garrison’s word that he is remembering them correctly. Yet even when he refers to a written statement, he presents nothing to support its allegations except his faith. One witness told of secret plane trips with Clay Shaw. Another claimed pre-assassination knowledge of the crime. One Edward Whalen told the most serious story, were it true. He said that Ferrie, Shaw, and Andrews tried to hire Garrison’s murder. Whalen disclosed this plot to kill Garrison to James Alcock. Alcock dutifully recorded it, and Garrison cited the Alcock interview in his memoir. But in 1994, when I asked Alcock about Whalen, Alcock didn’t even recall the name. To jog his memory, I had to remind him of the murder plot. At that point, his eyes wandered and he had nothing to say. Yet Garrison not only treated these tales as credible, he vouched for the men telling them. After studying one for some three hours, Garrison wrote, he was convinced that “weaving a fabricated tale was not in this man’s makeup,”16 a testimonial as empty as a moonscape, but convincing perhaps to unwary readers who trust their narrator.

  The strangest anecdote Garrison related in his book is an encounter he had at Los Angeles International Airport and it doesn’t yield to research in any ordinary sense. When waiting for his luggage, it was his habit, he explained, to spend the time sitting on a toilet in the men’s room reading a magazine. He chose that spot because there were no chairs in the baggage collection area. On this particular occasion, he purchased a copy of Time magazine, entered the men’s room, selected the first booth, sat down, and commenced to read. Then he heard someone enter the booth next to him and was immediately concerned. When he heard “whispering,” he at once rushed out of the stall and confronted two airport policemen; he quickly exited from the men’s room and encountered several others, one of whom yelled at him, asking how long he had been inside. Garrison informed the reader that his stay had been no more than two or three minutes maximum but he yelled back to the officer, telling him, basically, to mind his own business, and walked on out. Garrison claimed to believe that he had foiled a plan by the CIA to set him up for a sex charge to discredit him and his investigation. He offered an elaborate explanation of how it would have been done, involving his telephone records and an earlier phone call received from a former homosexual client.17 As related, this incident reeks of paranoia and perhaps something more complex, to be discussed further in chapter 16.

  Garrison’s propinquity theory (the idea that proximity to a person or thing implies a connection), though he never used that term in the book, rears its head from time to time.* Garrison applied this odd notion to almost any situation. He assumed a person was connected to an intelligence agency because he maintained a residence or an office near it. He imagined individuals were cohorts who rented post office boxes in the same building. He divined a connection when a woman hailing from Chicago crossed paths with a man from that same city. And while he didn’t say so in the book, he was automatically suspicious of anyone living next door to any of his suspects. Garrison didn’t believe coincidences happened. The two vagabonds arrested in the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing because their itineraries paralleled suspect Timothy McVeigh’s would have faced criminal charges if Garrison had been running that investigation.

  But perhaps the most bewildering statement Garrison made in his memoir concerns the innocence of Lee Harvey Oswald. Garrison wrote that a jury convinced of Oswald’s innocence would be forced to consider conspiracy and, therefore, would be more likely to convict Clay Shaw. Yet Garrison himself named Oswald a co-conspirator, using him to link Shaw to the crime, and also to establish the requisite overt act. Garrison’s own men tried to establish Oswald’s guilt at Shaw’s trial in order to prove their case. If Oswald were innocent, Garrison’s charge against Shaw was demolished.18

  Garrison so misrepresented his New Orleans evidence in these pages that it’s tempting to assume his Dealey Plaza evidence must be better. It isn’t. He wrote that President Kennedy was in essence hijacked on November 22, that the route of the motorcade was changed that morning from its original course, causing the cars to travel down Houston and Elm where the shooters were waiting. This last-minute switch, he claimed, was more evidence of high-level complicity.19 But no last-minute switch occurred. Both the Dallas Times-Herald and Morning News published the motorcade’s precise route through Dealey Plaza (and onto the Stemmons Freeway via Houston and Elm) a full three days before the assassination.20

  Anyone who wants to know if any particular claim Garrison made has any validity at all must trace it back to its roots. Nothing he wrote can be trusted. Not even a and the. The ordinary reader, of course, has no way of knowing that. I, too, was lulled into complacency by the book’s easy prose.

  Reading it was for me like seeing someone I knew reflected in a fun-house mirror—the story was recognizable but grossly misshaped. I didn’t identify the problem at first. It took a second, slower read to spot the first “error,” and the next, then another, and another, and another, until finally the light went on: It’s all wrong.

  The reviewer for the Times-Picayune unwittingly hit the nail on the head when she said the book “reads like a novel.”21 It should. Most of Garrison’s engaging story is fiction. He treated all events, however verifiable, as mutable and subject to his revision.* An oversight or two I might attribute to poor memory, especially if the incidents were unimportant. But they weren’t, and Garrison laced his narrative with them. (See Appendix A.) When I realized that, I was astonished, first by the fact of it, then the audacity. I found it baffling and scary—baffling that Garrison imagined he could get away with it, scary that so far he has succeeded spectacularly. He accomplished with his typewriter what he had failed to do in a court of law. He convicted Clay Shaw.

  The publisher who nurtured his effort to completion, Ellen Ray and her Sheridan Square Press,* apparently did little or no fact-checking. Perhaps that’s understandable. Her author, after all, was a former district attorney and a sitting judge. Today, her publishing house, it seems, has ceased to exist. Its one big success, though, was a far-reaching “triumph,” and its influence continues even now. Seven years after it was published, the paperback version is in its twentieth printing.† Until I assembled the facts in this book, no one had demonstrated the stunning falsity of Garrison’s account.

  Throughout his life and in these “recollections,” Garrison created the illusion that his investigation had substance by framing it in the rhetoric of American foreign policy and a high-level government conspiracy. He had no evidence for that except his empty case against Clay Shaw. In the closing passage of his book, Garrison assailed the Department of Justice for still refusing to conduct an “honest investigation.” Yet no investigation could have been more dishonest then his own. Oliver Stone had no way of knowing that to begin with and once Garrison became his mentor, the likelihood of his realizing it was slim.

  In 1990 Garrison put Stone in touch with L. Fletcher Prouty, a retired Air Force colonel, who had read Garrison’s manuscript and corresponded with him about it. Prouty, who espouses a sweeping conspiratorial view of history, was associated with, among others, the far-right Liberty Lobby.22 Stone now had a second mentor. He hired Prouty as an advisor and he became a significant player in the events surrounding the making of the film.

  After he optioned the movie rights to Garrison’s book, Stone met in early 1989 with representatives from Warner Bros. Over dinner at a Beverly Hills restaurant, Stone pitched his idea, he later told an interviewer, in fifteen or twenty minutes. The studio’s president, Terry Semel,* told that same writer “it took [me] two minutes to be totally ensconced in the whole idea.”23 Bankrolled by Warner Bros., Stone proceeded with plans to create a 20 million film. That figure soon doubled and ultimately would reach at least 60 million. By then the prospects for Stone’s enlightenment about Garrison dropped to virtually nil.

  Various factors con
tributed to Jim Garrison’s final resurrection on the silver screen. But mostly, Garrison brought it about himself through his endless drive for self-justification. David Ferrie died, spelling the end at the very beginning. But Garrison parlayed that into his biggest boost. James Phelan exposed Perry Russo’s testimony as a fraud. But Garrison sought new witnesses to support Russo’s story. Shaw was acquitted. But Garrison launched a new offensive. Judge Christenberry ended the game and convicted Garrison. But Garrison turned to his typewriter and reinterpreted his fall. Examining the real record of Jim Garrison’s investigation is like viewing up close the mangled wreckage of a high-speed car crash. In his book, Garrison reshaped that wreckage into a brand new vehicle, the latest model, irresistible, gleaming on the showroom floor.

  Oliver Stone climbed inside and drove it home.

  * A Heritage of Stone, Garrison’s first book, published in 1970, reportedly provided the basis for this memoir, which was the last of three books Garrison wrote. (The Star Spangled Contract, a novel concerning a presidential assassination, published in 1976, was the second.)

  † In addition to Edward O’Donnell’s report (Appendix B), he later testified under oath in two courtrooms (at Clay Shaw’s trial and the Christenberry hearing) and those transcripts have been preserved.

  * In 1997, after unsuccessful efforts under the Freedom of Information Act, I appealed to the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division (the agency withholding the document at the National Archives) and finally obtained a copy of this transcript.

  * Shaw’s name and a number appear in a CIA document, along with the name and number of J. Monroe Sullivan, former Executive Director of the San Francisco World Trade Center, who had been granted “a covert security approval” for Project QK/ENCHANT (Raymond G. Rocca, CIA memorandum, April 26, 1967, “Enclosure 21,” item 11, p. 4). Sullivan recently denied ever working for the CIA or having any knowledge of any such project (telephone conversation with author, Oct. 12, 1997). See also handwritten notes by HSCA staffer reviewing [Shaw] CIA documents, describing Sullivan’s “covert security approval” as for “unwitting” use (National Archives record number 180-10143-10220).

  * Garrison wrote a two-part memorandum dated February 10 and April 7, 1967, entitled, “Time and Propinquity: Factors In Phase One.” This, Tom Bethell wrote, was “predicated on the supposition that if people live anywhere near one another, they are therefore to be suspected of being associated in some way.” “I need hardly say,” Bethell remarked, “that nobody in the office takes the ‘propinquity factor’ seriously except for Garrison himself.” Bethell also quoted Garrison as saying, while he thumbed through the city directory: “ ‘Sooner or later, because people are lazy, you catch them out on propinquity’ ” (Bethell Diary, p. 23).

  * In a 1967 Foreword to Harold Weisberg’s Oswald in New Orleans, Garrison wrote that “those in control of the government machinery sometimes find it necessary to re-write history. . . . The truth becomes not what occurred but what they announce has occurred.” That is an accurate description of his own memoir.

  * A subsidiary of the Institute for Media Analysis, a small, old-fashioned leftist organization best known for the regularity of its attacks on the New York Times.

  † The hardback edition was barely reviewed but the Warner Books soft cover (published after the film was released) was thirteen weeks on the New York Times Paperback Best Sellers list.

  * Also present were Bob Daly, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, and Bill Gerber, a production executive.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  JFK: THE FILM

  Oliver Stone can’t change history. But he can take an innocent dead man and yank him out of his grave and make him look guilty. He can make this crazy prosecutor look like a matinee idol. But that isn’t going to work because the truth is mighty and will prevail.1

  —James Phelan, 1993

  Shortly before Oliver Stone began shooting his movie, Jim Garrison told a local reporter he couldn’t talk about the film because his contract with Stone prohibited it. Garrison did have something to say about the choice of Kevin Costner to portray him—“a first-class selection.” About the script—“a beautiful job.” And about Stone—“it’s like having a Eugene O’Neill write it.” Stone himself would soon be drawing parallels between his efforts and Shakespeare’s. Though, as he put it, he wasn’t saying he was “as good as Shakespeare.”2

  Born in New York City to wealth and privilege, Oliver Stone was sixteen, in a prestigious boarding school on the Ivy League track when his parents divorced, a seismic event in his life. The following summer, Stone took a trip alone to New Orleans. It was 1963, and later he would remark on the coincidence of the timing. He was walking the streets of The City That Care Forgot when Lee Harvey Oswald was there, only a few months before the assassination. Two other family traumas marked Stone’s teenage years. His father lost all his money on the stock market and Stone broke with his parents. He left Yale (after one year) and headed off on his own. After a stint in Vietnam teaching English, and a period in the merchant marine, he returned home, lived awhile in Mexico, then returned briefly to Yale. In 1966 he completed a long, autobiographical novel that was rejected by publishers.* Stone reacted by joining the Army, which returned him to Vietnam, where he later said he expected to die and welcomed the idea. Stone spent fifteen months (in 1967 and 1968) there. He did acid and smoked pot. Injured twice in combat, he was awarded a Purple Heart and Bronze Star. He returned home altered by his experiences, filled with rage, ready, he said, to grab a gun and go after President Nixon. He was back from the war only ten days when he was arrested for marijuana possession. That same year, using the G.I. Bill, he entered film school at New York University, where he studied under Martin Scorsese. Ten years later, after a move to Hollywood, he wrote the screenplay for Midnight Express and won his first Academy Award. But it was the enormous financial success of Platoon (it cost 5 million and grossed 250 million) in 1986 that transformed Stone into a major force on the Hollywood scene. The film also made him an icon for those (including this writer) who had opposed the Vietnam war. Two years later, he encountered Ellen Ray in that elevator, read Garrison’s book, and had the epiphany that started him down the path that led to JFK.3

  Stone would make a film that dealt with large historical issues, but it was a deeply personal expression. He once said about his cinematic technique that he believed in “unleashing the pure wash of emotion across the mind to let you see the inner myth, the spirit of the thing.” Asked later where reason came in, he said “reason counts for something” but could become “negative energy” and that “the deeper truths” come from one’s “gut.”† In that same interview, Stone defended Leni Riefenstahl, the brilliant German filmmaker who glorified the Third Reich, on the grounds that “she was a believer in Hitler” at the time. Riefenstahl “followed her emotions” as an artist. “This,” Stone said, “is what I do.”4

  To help him glorify Jim Garrison, Stone hired Garrison’s editor, Zachary Sklar, to co-write the screenplay.‡ For research, he brought on board a recent Yale graduate, Jane Rusconi. To play the role of Big Jim, Stone first approached Harrison Ford, but Ford was unavailable. Stone had an unsuccessful luncheon discussion with Mel Gibson, but denies offering Gibson the part. Kevin Costner, Stone claims, was always his preference. (By one account, it was Costner’s wife who read Garrison’s book and urged Costner to make the film.) Costner lacked Garrison’s dominating six-foot-seven-inch physical stature, melodious voice, and impulsive, volatile nature. He seemed to many an odd, even wimpy selection. Yet Costner fit perfectly the Capraesque All American Nice Guy and Defender of Democracy that Garrison had created in his book.

  Tommy Lee Jones as Clay Shaw was almost as unlikely, entirely devoid of the modesty and kindness that people who knew Shaw talk about. But, of course, Stone wasn’t interested in those qualities. Supposedly, he wanted the sense of menace that Jones projects. The role of Lee Harvey Oswald went to an English actor, Gary
Oldman, who re-created the look and sound of that most enigmatic of men with amazing accuracy. For several small but important parts, Stone cannily selected a group of old-timers (Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Ed Asner, and Joe Pesci) whose familiar and trusted faces brought to the film all the positive feelings and credibility that had accrued to them over the years. Jim Garrison, himself, in a cameo performance, played Chief Justice Earl Warren. The thankless role of Garrison’s nagging wife was believably played by Sissy Spacek. Stone’s characterization of her was misleading though. Elizabeth Garrison had a better understanding of the situation than her husband’s Hollywood disciple.

  Stone made some revealing comments in a series of interviews shortly before filming began: he referred to JFK as a “history lesson,” described himself as “a cinematic historian,” and admitted, “I’m trying to reshape the world through movies.” Reflecting on his earlier films, and how he would be remembered, Stone said he hoped his legacy would be “that I was a good historian as well as a good dramatist.”5 Yet he didn’t go about his investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination like a historian seeking truth but like a director looking for a good story, one that lent itself to a cinematic format and possessed maximum dramatic impact. He listened to some quite improbable people hawking their wares and incorporated some of them into his script.6 While Garrison had been somewhat restrained in his fabrications, Stone knew no bounds. He dramatized “events” that were uncorroborated or unreliably reported, and he invented people and scenes that directly contradicted the facts. Whatever the story line needed that wasn’t available, Stone concocted.

  Yet he invested great effort in achieving the look of authenticity. In Dallas he paid 50,000 for the right to film on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, site of the so-called sniper’s nest. He had part of the building that had been removed rebuilt. Ordered replicas created of 3,000 book cartons, window frames painted, trees trimmed, and railroad tracks replaced behind the grassy knoll. That authentic look was very important, Stone explained to an interviewer. But outside Stone’s circle, many were worried about the distinction between the look and the reality of Jim Garrison. A goodly number of those concerned resided in Garrison’s hometown. Stone spoke to some of them, going through the motions of hearing the other side of the story.