False Witness

by Patricia Lambert

  One of those he visited in New Orleans was F. Irvin Dymond, an impressive, charismatic man, who later recalled their conversation. It lasted about ten minutes, with Stone asking questions. No, Dymond had said, he did not believe Garrison acted in good faith. Nor had Asst. D.A. James Alcock. Alcock was too smart not to realize that they had no case. Dymond told Stone “his idea of the whole thing was just completely contrary to the actual facts,” which Stone seemed “shocked to hear.” Not that he didn’t believe it, Dymond added, but he was shocked that Dymond would say it. When Stone left his office, Dymond recalled, Stone was not a happy man. Stone also visited the current district attorney, Harry Connick, who told him Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw “was the grossest miscarriage of justice” Connick knew about.7

  To this and the ongoing public criticism of his project, Stone reacted for the most part as though it were coming from some monolithic hostile force. That mirrored Garrison’s reaction in the sixties when he accused anyone who spoke against him of working for the federal government. Yet not all the negative signals coming Stone’s way were from the opposition. Some came from Garrison’s own camp. James Alcock for instance. He met on one occasion with Stone, Costner, and Garrison, but the session did not go well. “Jim was still going on with some of the theories that were totally contrary to what we were trying to prove in the case,” Alcock recalled recently. “I guess they could sense I wasn’t going to be part of that.”8 They never got back to him. What Alcock had to say didn’t fit with Garrison’s theories (now Stone’s) or his revisionist version of his investigation.

  That’s what Stone wanted. That’s what he filmed—Garrison discovering the plot that killed the president. Stone added some newer information, and now and then accurately portrayed a real event. His centerpiece and rationale is presented by a conspiratorial deep throat known only as “X.” His sixteen-minute virtual monologue would have buried any ordinary movie. This one survives it mostly because movies work emotionally, not rationally. The splendid actor helped, too. Donald Sutherland makes even the absurdities sound believable. Stone concluded his story with a wildly inaccurate rendition of Shaw’s trial. Costner-Garrison delivers a rousing flag-and-country closing statement to the jury that bears little resemblance to what Garrison actually said, except for the final sentence. Reportedly as a joke, Stone filmed an alternate ending in which the jury voted to convict Shaw.

  Stone opened his film with a lengthy montage of rapid-fire black and white newsreel-like footage, beginning with President Eisenhower’s famous warning about the danger of the military-industrial complex. This sequence sets up Stone’s overarching political statement, the film’s realistic this-is-history look and sound, and breathtaking pace. The latter, constructed in the editing room after the film was shot, is the principal reason the information-burdened story works. Stone launched his Garrison plot line with the Raymond Chandler-type incident that had originally captured his imagination in Garrison’s book—the pistol-whipping of Jack Martin on the evening of the assassination.9

  Martin is played by Jack Lemmon as a vulnerable puppy-dog-like-drunk savagely brutalized by tanklike Attila-the-Hun Ed Asner as Guy Banister.* Something like this incident did happen, of course. But Martin’s explanation that night to the New Orleans police that the quarrel was over some long-distance telephone calls was recast by Stone in a far more sinister light. Stone also exaggerated the viciousness of the beating; Martin received only minor medical treatment. Stone shaped the role of Martin, like all the real people in the film, to fit his story’s needs. That is to say, he created a fictional person.

  He did the same with David Ferrie. The first reporter to interview Ferrie after news of Garrison’s investigation broke, recently said he couldn’t stand to watch the movie because it was all wrong, but David Ferrie was so wrong it was pathetic. Stone committed many excesses in achieving his vision and two of the more extravagant involve Ferrie. Stone has him virtually confessing to the crime.* In reality, Ferrie repeatedly denied any involvement in it, and he repeatedly denied knowing Oswald. He even volunteered to take a lie-detector test and sodium Pentothal.10

  He wasn’t murdered by intruders in the night either. Stone’s lurid version of Ferrie’s death generated more reaction than any other individual scene. James Alcock was one of those complaining. The evening Ferrie died, according to Alcock, he and Louis Ivon were across the street keeping Ferrie’s apartment under surveillance, all night long. “I didn’t see any murder,” Alcock said recently, with an air of exasperation. He knew where the idea came from though. In the meeting he had with Garrison, Stone, and Costner, Costner referred to Ferrie’s death as “the murder.” “I knew immediately,” Alcock said, that Costner “had been talking to Garrison.” The scene in the movie “where people were pouring stuff down Ferrie’s throat and killing him—that just didn’t happen,” Alcock stated.11 He was right, of course, about the source of this idea. As Garrison’s old friend, Orleans Parish Coroner Frank Minyard explained to an interviewer, Garrison believed “that someone had passed a tube down through [Ferrie’s] mouth” through “his esophagus into his stomach and pumped in a large quantity of [the thyroid medication] Proloid.”12 Stone took that macabre notion and gave it cinematic life.

  He did the same with Garrison’s account of Dean Andrews, played by the deceased John Candy. In a restaurant scene with Garrison, a sweaty, repulsively obese, and sinister-looking Andrews stuffs his face† while flashbacks establish unequivocally that Clay Shaw was Clay Bertrand. Stone reinforced this falsehood in other scenes. At one point, Andrews blurts out to Garrison that he’s afraid of being murdered by the feds if he gives up Bertrand’s real name. He thereby acknowledged there was a “Bertrand.” The real Andrews insisted to the end of his days that Bertrand never existed. He specifically said that Bertrand was not Clay Shaw. He repeatedly told Garrison that. He told Garrison’s aides, the grand jury, writers Edward Epstein and Milton Brener, and various reporters. Weeping, he told Shaw attorney Salvatore Panzeca. He told the judge and jury at Shaw’s trial, and in interviews in later years he continued to say it. Garrison never proved otherwise. Yet Stone makes it appear as though half of New Orleans not only knew Bertrand existed but knew he was Shaw.

  He also injected life into one of Garrison’s oldest canards, the so-called tramps, the three arrested in the railroad yards after the shooting. Garrison said they were too clean and well-dressed to be real tramps. Stone repeated that in the film and, by blending their real pictures with actors re-creating them, made them appear involved in the killing. Echoing Garrison, Stone indignantly cited the “negligence” of “Dallas law enforcement [officials]” for failing to take their names. After the film was released, reporters discovered long-suppressed documents revealing that the Dallas Police did take their names and they were just what they seemed to be, tramps. The night before the assassination, they had bathed, shaved and received clean clothes at a shelter, which explained their “suspicious” appearance.13*

  “Bill Boxley” didn’t fare any better than the tramps in Stone’s hands. Boxley supposedly spied on Garrison’s investigation for the government. Stone offers him up as one of the alibis meant to explain Shaw’s acquittal. His real name was William C. Wood and he once worked for the CIA.† Dubbed Boxley by Garrison, who gladly hired him hoping to gain insight into that agency, he is shown in the film being pressured and strong-armed by an FBI agent. Boxley finally abandons Garrison. “[Now] they have everything, Chief,” moans a Garrison aide. He means that Boxley has revealed Garrison’s case to the other side. What really happened, as journalist George Lardner pointed out, was that Boxley’s devotion to Garrison drove him to come up with evidence Garrison needed to make his case, a not uncommon reaction. But when Garrison, encouraged by information from Boxley, almost indicted a dead man (construction worker Robert L. Perrin) for assassinating the president, Garrison saved face by firing Boxley and announcing he was a CIA plant.14 The joke at the heart of the Boxley affair is that he could have
given “everything” to the other side and it wouldn’t have mattered since Garrison’s case never amounted to anything but wild fantasies and vague linkages, anchored in the conjured testimony of Perry Russo.*

  Stone excluded Russo from his film. That is comparable to telling the story of the Oklahoma City Federal Building disaster and leaving out the bomb. As the witness who triggered Shaw’s arrest and furnished the entire legal basis for the trial, Russo’s absence from the film is conspicuous.* But Stone made a sly move deleting him. Among other things, he avoided scenes of Russo being drugged and hypnotized and his repeated recantations. Stone wriggled around The Russo Problem by creating an (admittedly) fictional surrogate for him in the homosexual prison inmate, Willie O’Keefe, amusingly played by Kevin Bacon.15 In one scene, O’Keefe, supposedly Shaw’s hired lover, is shown dining at Shaw’s home. Each man is seated at one end of a long table, sumptuously appointed, being served by a uniformed waiter. Stone took this dinner scene straight from Garrison’s book. Garrison had based it on unsubstantiated information from David Logan, one of those witnesses whose statement Garrison claimed was stolen.16

  Stone’s Clay Shaw is no more true-to-life than Willie O’Keefe. Stone depicted Shaw as an arrogant, elitist sybarite, a butch homosexual with a taste for elegance, younger men, and conspiracy, plotting to murder the president. In one of Stone’s most offensive sequences, he dressed Shaw in drag and shows him cavorting with David Ferrie at a homosexual party.* In defense of this scene, Stone claimed that “after the trial ended, Garrison came across two photos of Shaw and Ferrie together at a party—proof positive that they knew each other.” Stone insisted that he had merely restaged the photos and their “situations.”17 But Stone’s restaging was a gross distortion of these innocuous photographs, the racier of which shows Shaw and Jeff Biddison dressed in business suits with “mop-strand” wigs on their heads. Moreover, all of Stone’s information concerning the pictures was incorrect. They did not surface after the trial; they were published by a Garrison supporter in a widely read newsletter almost two years before the trial. And even prior to their publication, a Garrison aide showed one of them to Biddison. Garrison didn’t use them at the trial because he knew (and he knew Shaw’s attorneys knew) the “David Ferrie” in the pictures wasn’t Ferrie at all but a former radio announcer who resembled him named Robert Brannon.18 † Two decades later, Garrison revised the history of the pictures for Oliver Stone’s benefit. Stone, having swallowed Garrison whole, gave the pictures cinematic life and passed on Garrison’s version of them to the press. In real life, Garrison never linked Clay Shaw to David Ferrie except by way of the Clinton witnesses, and the obviously suspect trial appearances of the Tadins.

  He never tied Shaw to Dallas either and, except theoretically, Garrison never connected his case to Washington. Stone did both. He did it by creating the man X, a retired military officer, “one of those secret guys in the Pentagon,” as he calls himself. X provides the information about the link between the low-level New Orleans operation and the shadowy plotters in Washington, D.C. In a meeting wholly invented by Stone, Garrison and X rendezvous on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. There, in that amazingly protracted sixteen-minute discourse, Donald Sutherland proceeds to tell all about the president’s murder.

  Just before the assassination, X was sent out of the country on a phony assignment to prevent him from providing “additional security in Texas,” one of his routine duties. He recites a series of other supposedly suspicious occurrences that weekend, none of which were really suspicious at all. He claims the telephone system in Washington was shut down for a full hour “to keep the wrong story from spreading.” Telephone service was slow after the assassination because of the volume of calls, but it was never shut down.* He says the New Zealand newspapers published biographical data about Oswald too quickly, meaning the plotters were putting out a “black ops” cover story. Also wrong. When Oswald defected to Russia, the media had created files on him that were immediately available the day of the assassination.

  X assures Garrison he is closer than he thinks to the truth, and explains the why of the assassination—Kennedy’s military decisions, primarily his plan to withdraw American troops from Vietnam, alienated powerful people. He tells Garrison to consider who benefited† rather than pursuing who did it and how, which he calls “just scenery for the public.” X explains that “the organizing principle of any society is for war,” that “the authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers.” A hundred billion dollars in defense contracts were at stake and Kennedy was refusing to wage war. That led to the decision “by the people in the loop” to assassinate him.

  Stone learned about this war principle from his technical advisor, Garrison’s friend, and the real-life model for X, Fletcher Prouty.‡ Prouty first revealed its origins in a 1989 Liberty Lobby radio broadcast—it originated in a secret report assembled by a coterie of power brokers working in an underground bunker called Iron Mountain. After studying the consequences of a permanent peace, they concluded that war was essential for America’s survival. Prouty, however, had missed the point. “The Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace” that he and Stone took so seriously, and which ended up in Stone’s movie, was written in 1967 as a parody of think tanks by satirist Leonard Lewin.19 The book was a joke.*

  X finishes his speech and rejects Garrison’s request to testify at Shaw’s trial. He would be arrested, institutionalized, “maybe worse,” he says. He wishes Garrison luck and departs, leaving Garrison and the audience with the knowledge that the plot Garrison has unearthed in New Orleans was born in the corridors of power in Washington. Stone thereby created another false impression about Shaw’s trial—that if only this political insider had told his story on the witness stand, Clay Shaw might have been convicted and Garrison triumphant. In fact, if some real-life equivalent of X had related his “evidence” in a courtroom, Shaw’s attorneys would have turned him into a laughingstock. But in the film, his information stands unchallenged. And by verifying Garrison’s ideas, X gives Stone’s story a huge credibility boost.

  X also propels the action forward by telling Garrison what he must do next. “Make arrests,” he instructs. “Stir the shitstorm. Hope to reach a point of critical mass that will start a chain reaction of people coming forward. Then the government will crack.” This advice, which sounds perfectly reasonable because it’s in a movie, is Oliver Stone’s explanation for why Garrison did what he did, even though, as Costner-Garrison said, he didn’t have “much of a case.” Inspired by it, Garrison arrests Clay Shaw. Once more, Stone had found a way around the real cause of Shaw’s arrest, Perry Russo’s false testimony.

  Stone also found a way around the defense’s case. He omitted it. Dean Andrews, Charles Appel, Edward O’Donnell, James Phelan (to name a few) never take the stand in the film. What Stone did show, he misrepresented. Shaw’s attorneys, for instance, are unattractive connivers. He has Irvin Dymond discredit Willie O’Keefe in front of the jury by calling him “a confessed homosexual convicted of solicitation [and] pandering.” Thus Stone tells the audience that Shaw was acquitted in part because his attorney hypocritically exposed Willie O’Keefe’s sexual behavior. But the real Willie O’Keefe, Perry Russo, destroyed himself by what he said on and off the witness stand. Dymond never took the low road. Garrison was the one who did that. Stone finished the job. He shows us Shaw was homosexual and guilty of conspiracy as well.

  In one particularly irksome scene, repeated at the trial, Stone has Shaw at the police station telling the booking officer that his alias is “Clay Bertrand.” The real testimony was so overwhelming that Shaw never uttered those words that the trial judge (who usually ruled in favor of the prosecution) refused to allow the testimony.* In the film, when the judge rules against him, Garrison exclaims, But that’s our case! It was not their case and at the time no one claimed it was. Here again, Stone used a ploy to avoid dramatizing Garrison’s real courtroom debacle,
Perry Russo’s testimony, which sank like a rock and Garrison’s case with it.

  Stone turned Garrison’s closing argument into a soapbox for his view of Washington as a bed of snakes run by war-mongering business interests. He also used it to conclude his film and spike its emotional high point: “President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy that was planned in advance at the highest levels of our government,” Garrison tells the jurors, “and it was carried out by fanatical and disciplined cold warriors in the Pentagon and CIA’s covert apparatus, among them Clay Shaw here before you. It was a public execution. And it was covered up by like-minded individuals in the Dallas Police Department, the Secret Service, the FBI, and the White House, all the way up, including J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson, whom I consider accomplices after the fact.”

  Garrison didn’t say anything like that at the real trial. He didn’t mention the Dallas Police Department, the Secret Service, the FBI or the White House. He didn’t invoke the name of any government agency, or Hoover, or Johnson. He didn’t mention the CIA. Shaw’s attorney, Irvin Dymond, was the only one who brought up the CIA. He did it when he asked Shaw, “Have you ever worked for the Central Intelligence Agency?”20 Garrison, in his closing statement, made only an obscure reference to “domestic espionage.” Only once, in a general allusion, did he utter Clay Shaw’s name.