False Witness

by Patricia Lambert

  In the movie, Stone not only had Costner identify Shaw as a CIA conspirator to the jurors, he crafted Shaw’s final appearance to make him look like a perfumed parlor snake. Surrounded by reporters after his acquittal, Shaw handles a cigarette in a long black holder. Smugly victorious, he makes a limp-wristed comment about the fancy culinary dish he is going to whip up when he gets home. The real Clay Shaw, a relieved and grateful man, made no statements that night. He thanked his attorneys. He thanked the jurors. Then a circle of deputies whisked him out of the courtroom through a back door.

  Stone also invented the final scene with Garrison. But, unlike the one with Shaw, Stone rendered it with pathos. We see Garrison in a long shot after the verdict leaving the Criminal District Court building with his wife and son.* He has lost the battle but not the war, rehabilitated now in the minds of fifty million-plus moviegoers. By ending at that point, Stone sidestepped the last act of Garrison’s real-life drama, the Christenberry hearing two years later that named Garrison the guilty party. Stone wasn’t interested in that. He needed a hero to sell his complex bill of goods—a conspiracy so immense that virtually no one is beyond suspicion.

  But it is not the purpose of this book to object to Stone’s film for saying that President Johnson did it; that elements of the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans, war profiteers, military, and Dallas police did it; and that some elements of the FBI, Secret Service, and the rest of the government not directly involved beforehand helped to cover it up afterwards, with a boost from major media representatives. I have no personal knowledge that would exonerate any of those named, any more than Jim Garrison and Oliver Stone had personal knowledge of their complicity. The purpose of this book is to object to the film saying that Clay Shaw did it, and depicting Jim Garrison as a splendid fellow, a hero for our times.

  Stone said the Garrison in his film was a metaphor for all those writers and researchers who disagree with the Warren Report. But Garrison is too particularized, too hopelessly who he is to stand for anything more. Costner theorizing about various Dealey Plaza scenarios didn’t humanize Garrison’s actions or enlarge his person. Garrison set himself apart from most of those who have labored in this field by his unyielding godlike certitude.* Near the end of his life, he did acknowledge that he had “made some mistakes” but he never said what they were and he maintained that he was right to try Clay Shaw. “If it was an error,” Garrison said, with a typical rhetorical ring, “then it was an error that I was obliged to make.”21

  The error Garrison was obliged to make caught up with Oliver Stone while he was filming his movie. In April he was in Dallas “having a ball,” he told an interviewer. “I like the people. The extras have been great. The crew has been good. People have been very generous and open.” But when he shifted to New Orleans, he encountered the ghost of Clay Shaw. People who had known him and Garrison protested in articles, on the news, and in letters to the editor. “I know for a fact that Garrison deliberately proceeded with a fraudulent case against Clay Shaw,” wrote Rosemary James, one of those who broke the original story about Garrison’s investigation. “He knew he had nothing, his key assistants—Jim Alcock, Al Oser, and John Volz—knew he had nothing and yet [Garrison] proceeded in the most Machiavellian fashion to abuse the power entrusted to him.” Stone she called a “gullible from La-La Land with a 60 million budget who wants to regurgitate all of that garbage.”22 In a later interview, James went further: “There are any number of theories as to why Garrison singled Clay out, but I don’t pretend to know what goes on in the mind of someone who I think needs psychiatric help.” She did have a suggestion though. “It was widely known that Clay was homosexual. He didn’t flaunt it; he was very discreet in his personal life. At the same time, he led a very active social life. Some people felt that Garrison was actually jealous of Clay’s success and the fact that he lived as a homosexual without any repercussions.”23

  Stone seemed surprised by the intensity of the reaction to “the Clay Shaw business,” as he called it. But he dismissed it as “local” and “personal,” like concerns in Dallas about its image. He, on the other hand, was grappling with a more important problem, one whose import was “universal.” “I’m not that concerned,” Stone said, “about whether [Shaw] was innocent or guilty. I don’t think [he] was a particularly important figure in this thing.”24 Neither knowing nor caring if Shaw were innocent or guilty, Stone presented him to the world as a conspirator who plotted President Kennedy’s murder. In real life, Garrison’s entire case depended on Shaw’s guilt. So does Stone’s film. And it leaves the clear-cut understanding that, though acquitted, Shaw was guilty as sin. This is the necessary premise on which Garrison’s story and Stone’s deep inner truth are constructed.

  When asked by film critic Roger Ebert if he thought he knew the “names of the guilty,” Stone said he thought he did but declined to reveal them because “that’s a very heavy thing to lay on somebody—to accuse them of killing the president.”25 But not where Shaw was concerned. Earlier, Stone drew a chilling comparison when he was again discussing Shaw, the issue that wouldn’t go away, with another journalist. “Garrison was trying to force a break in the case,” Stone said. “If he could do that, it was worth the sacrifice of one man. When they went onto the shores of Omaha Beach, they said, ‘We’re going to lose five, ten, fifteen thousand people to reach our objective.’ I think Jim was in that kind of situation.”26 By this interpretation—in a maneuver that shoots the American justice system in the heart—Garrison selected Clay Shaw to serve as his legal cannon fodder. Stone saw nothing wrong with that.

  Stone did admit that his hero had his faults. “[Garrison] had hubris, he had arrogance,” Stone said, “he was blind like King Lear was blind, and he trusted too many people.”27 (In reality, it was those who trusted Garrison who came up empty-handed, or worse.) Stone was saying that Garrison was flawed the way everybody is. But Garrison’s flaws weren’t like everybody’s. They were stranger. After the film was released, writer David Ehrenstein focused on one of Garrison’s more disquieting secrets, which has long been common knowledge to many in New Orleans and to students of the case but went virtually unmentioned in the debate that raged over the film.

  It was the “fondling charge” first reported by Jack Anderson on February 23, 1970, in a column that was published nationally but not in New Orleans. Probing the why of that, Ehrenstein questioned reporter David Snyder. “The boy came from a very prominent family,” Snyder said, “and they never came forward.” Snyder recently added that “no one wanted to drag the boy’s family through the mud.” Rosemary James told Ehrenstein that “there was an effort made to protect the child, which was why nothing came of it.” Garrison has had “a very stormy personal life,” James said, and “used to slap his wife around in public all the time.” James also commented on the gap between the real Garrison and the film hero. “To cast someone like Kevin Costner to play him as Mr. Untouchable Robin Hood and to have scenes with him as this big family man sitting around the dinner table—it’s just a big sick joke.”28

  Yet for most of the worldwide moviegoing public, Garrison has been more than resurrected; he has been transformed. In that magical way that movies work, Kevin Costner and Jim Garrison are now one.

  * In September 1997, A Child’s Night Dream, Stone’s revised novel, was published by St. Martin’s Press.

  † This point of view overlooks the tendency of serious glitches to take up residence in one’s “gut,” making it a risky guide to truth seeking.

  ‡ Stone also optioned another book, Jim Marrs’s Crossfire, an encyclopedia of assassination theories, which enabled Stone to draw on a wealth of information without spending more money on rights to other books.

  * As Garrison had done in his book, Stone used this episode to introduce the anti-Castro activities of Banister and his alleged confederates, Lee Harvey Oswald and Clay Shaw.

  * Stone’s basis for this scene was Louis Ivon’s recollections of the evening he spent with Ferrie at the
Fontainebleau Motel (“Oliver Stone Talks Back,” Premiere, Jan. 1992, pp. 69-70). But what Ferrie actually said that night is, to say the least, unclear (as discussed in note 10).

  † No one seeing this film would guess that this easy-to-hate villain created by Stone was actually a funny and fun-loving (if flawed) human being, liked by virtually everyone. Or that aside from Clay Shaw he is probably the most sympathetic of Garrison’s victims.

  * Over the years the tramps have been the subject of endless commentary and research. Their pictures are like a conspiratorial Rorschach test. People see in them whatever they are inclined to see, usually Watergate burglars E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis and convicted hitman Charles Harrelson (the actor Woody Harrelson’s father). In some quarters the effort to unravel the assassination by ‘identifying’ the tramps continues today.

  † Alcoholism ended Wood’s CIA career.

  * William Gurvich and Tom Bethell, who did defect and turn material over to Shaw’s defense team, were not infiltrators; they simply came to realize an innocent man was being railroaded.

  † Russo was on the set. Stone gave him a small part in the film and, according to Russo, hired him as a technical advisor for the homosexual scenes, particularly those involving sadomasochism.

  * Perry Russo said that in one of those party scenes (which didn’t make it into the movie) Joe Pesci (Ferrie) was beating Tommy Lee Jones (Shaw) with a chain and Stone pushed Pesci to the point where he finally complained that if he didn’t stop he was going to end up hurting Jones (Russo, interview with author, Feb. 7, 1994).

  † In a print of the original picture, Brannon’s “eyebrows” were “not quite as prominent” as they were in the published version (report on “Citizens’ Council Newspaper The [Councilor],” regarding investigation conducted May 18, 19, and 23, 1967, on behalf of Shaw’s attorneys). This suggests that the picture was touched up to make the Ferrie resemblance more pronounced.

  * Among others, ABC television newscaster Sam Donaldson challenged Stone on this. “I made a dozen calls during that time from the Capitol to the White House and elsewhere in Washington,” he said. “The telephone system wasn’t out.” “I’ll have to look into that,” Stone replied (Sam Donaldson, interview with Oliver Stone, “Prime Time,” Jan. 1992).

  † Innocent people often benefit from crimes they didn’t commit. If one follows Stone’s paradigm, Aristotle Onassis would be a legitimate suspect.

  ‡ As writer Edward Epstein pointed out, while Prouty had worked in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Operations (which supplied hardware for covert actions), unlike his fictional counterpart, Prouty did not provide security, additional or otherwise, for the president (Epstein, “The Second Coming of Jim Garrison,” The Atlantic Monthly, March 1993).

  * Apparently still unaware it was a hoax, Stone later described the “fabled” Iron Mountain report as “based on a study commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in August 1963 to justify the big, planned changes in defense spending contemplated by Kennedy” (Oliver Stone, “Introduction,” to Prouty’s JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, pp. x, xi).

  * This is the fingerprint card episode, involving Officer Habighorst, described in chapter 11.

  * The real Garrison wasn’t in the courtroom when the verdict came down and wasn’t seen publicly in the building afterward.

  * Most researchers have their theories but they also have their doubts. This case is too thick with contradictions and ambiguity for any honest truth seeker to be without them. And the majority of Americans who reject the Warren Report reflect that. There is neither consensus nor certainty among them either, except perhaps for the true believers created by Stone’s film.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  GARRISON WAS NO KEVIN COSTNER

  Kevin was the perfect choice for Jim Garrison because he reminds me of those Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart qualities—a moral simplicity and a quiet understatement. . . . I will never regret having visited Jim Garrison’s soul; it made me a better man.1

  —Oliver Stone, 1991

  The minds of most humans are a labyrinth and Garrison’s mind is more labyrinthine than most.2

  —Clay Shaw, 1969

  Oliver Stone has stamped his vision of Jim Garrison indelibly on the collective consciousness of the moviegoing world. For the millions who have seen the film JFK, and all those in the future who will, Jim Garrison is as Kevin Costner portrayed him: an ordinary, decent and caring, mild-mannered family man and truth-seeking district attorney. Using logic, dogged determination, and customary investigatory techniques, with a small band of loyal aides, he battled the federal government, the biased media, and a variety of sinister forces that conspired to prevent him from bringing the killers of President Kennedy to justice. He had but a single flaw. He neglected his wife and children, an unfortunate but understandable consequence of his all-consuming commitment to the Kennedy investigation. Garrison is also infused with the qualities and general star glow of Kevin Costner’s past performances. The quiet courage and incorruptibility of Eliot Ness, the spiritual true-heartedness of Dances with Wolves, the selflessness of Robin Hood. Garrison now embodies all that, too. Reinvented by Hollywood, he shines like a new penny.

  In what follows, I have tried to suggest the chasm that separates the real man from Stone’s invention.

  The real-life Garrison didn’t behave like a reasonable person’s idea of a district attorney. He wasn’t sensible, responsible and just. He didn’t exercise care in his public statements or actions, and his thinking was decidedly odd. In strikingly similar language, several observers have remarked on Garrison’s peculiar attitude toward evidence. Former First Asst. D.A. Charles Ward described it best. “Most of the time you marshal the facts, then deduce your theories,” said Ward, in a 1983 interview. “But Garrison deduced a theory, then he marshaled his facts. And if the facts didn’t fit he’d say they had been altered by the CIA.”3 Years later, Garrison’s old friend and former chief investigator, Pershing Gervais, made an almost identical comment. “Garrison inverted the criminal investigatory process,” wrote Gervais in a letter to the Times-Picayune. “You should begin by assembling the facts and from the facts you may deduce a theory of the crime. Pure deductive reasoning. Garrison did the opposite. He started with a theory and then assembled some facts to support it. Those facts that fit the theory, he accepted. Those that did not, he either ignored or rejected as CIA misinformation.”

  Garrison himself cast some light on his method of investigating in a July 18, 1977, letter he wrote to a Select Committee staffer. In the letter, Garrison explained that the typical investigatory methods employed by law enforcement were a waste of time when applied to the mysteries of the assassination. Conventional techniques wouldn’t work there, he said, because ordinary evidence (he mentions confessions, footprints, and fingerprints) was unavailable due to the hidden nature of the crime. A different tactic was required, and Garrison had devised one. His alternative was something he called “the application of models.”4

  Basically, this meant Garrison matched his suspects against a batch of categories he found suspicious: unconventional religions, military service, aerospace work, post office boxes, to name a few. Garrison tried on evidence the way he tried on clothes, and somewhere he was bound to find something that fit. He said just that in another memo that spoke of applying one model after another until the one that fit was located.5 To find a guilty party, Garrison only needed to select a suspect; he was sure to hit upon the incriminating evidentiary pattern eventually. Assuming that no real evidence existed, Garrison had invented a system to generate presumed evidence to serve in its stead.

  Using a variation of it, Garrison deciphered certain numbers that he claimed were encoded. He did this by finding through trial and error a mathematical sequence that would convert the number into another. An example is the entry he found in Shaw’s address book: “Lee Odom, P.O. Box 19106, Dallas, Texas.” The number 19106 coincided with one found in Lee
Harvey Oswald’s notebook, but Oswald’s was preceded by two Russian letters. Garrison insisted the entries were identical and were actually a coded form of Jack Ruby’s unlisted telephone number, though his brother said Ruby’s telephone number had never been unlisted. Nevertheless, Garrison converted the post office box number, 19106, into the allegedly unlisted telephone number, WH-1-5601, through the following entirely arbitrary steps. First, he rearranged the numbers (anything is allowed in this procedure), subtracted 1300, matched the two letters (PO) to numbers on the telephone dial, added those two numbers together and fudged a bit.6 Unimpressed, Shaw’s attorneys noted the obvious, that this system—in which the beginning number and the ending number are both known and the only mystery is how to move numerically from one to the other—could be used to convert any number into any other number. Garrison found that beside the point. If he could do it, it meant something.

  Lee Odom, the man to whom the post office box belonged, was quickly located and interviewed. He described his one-and-only business meeting with Clay Shaw in 1966, when Odom was attempting to promote a bull fight in New Orleans. Neither Odom nor his mailing address had any connection to Ruby, Ruby’s telephone number, or to Oswald. The similarity to his notebook entry was a coincidence. But, of course, in Garrison’s world, unlike the real one, coincidences didn’t exist.

  Garrison arrived at many of his empty ideas through his application of models. To Garrison’s way of thinking, the very absence of “traditional evidence” supported his suspicions.

  Understandably, many found the nebulousness of Garrison’s “facts” a cause for concern. One writer referred to them as “a mélange of coincidences and circumstances which have some kind of wispy relationship.” Max Lerner called them “unlikely details” woven into “a hair-raising pattern of concern.” Journalist James Phelan was more blunt about it. “I realized Garrison was a fraud, an ignoramus, or a crazy man,” he said, describing his reaction after Garrison laid out his case in Las Vegas. “The legal charge for the things he had dug up on Ferrie,” Phelan quipped, “is moping and gawking with intent to maneuver.”7