False Witness
Page 31
These Garrisonites are the public face of the movement but its larger “membership” is quite diverse, ranging from “Little Jims” who worship Garrison, to Lifton, the lone crusader against him. The large group occupying the middle ground “joined” for their own reasons and have little or no interest in Jim Garrison. They either don’t know or care about him or they do know and, as Hoch says, they find “the Clay Shaw business embarrassing.” The most vocal of the new movement, the “Little Jims,” with their passionate belief in “Big Jim” and his case, have assumed his attitudes and investigatory techniques and appear determined to walk in his footsteps. They seem to believe, as he did, that all his critics were part of the government conspiracy out to stop him; that real evidence doesn’t exist in this case and that his “application of models” is a legitimate way to find an alternative. They even seem to regard his propinquity theory as viable. But Garrison adopted these odd notions because they suited his nature, not because they were useful tools. Those embracing them today and creating their own wispy connections run the risk of appearing to be conspiratorial flat-earthers.2
Some are also attempting in a clumsy way to control what is written about Garrison. One, working at a private Washington archive, instructed me about what criticism was permissible. “You may say he abused his power” (presumably because Garrison himself admitted doing so), I was told. “You may go that far but no further.” A favorite target of theirs is the media, having picked up Garrison’s kill-the-messenger stance. Like him, they regard his negative press coverage as journalists in league with each other and with Washington to sabotage his case. Topping their enemies list are those whose work was the most influential: James Phelan, Hugh Aynesworth, George Lardner, Walter Sheridan, Rosemary James, and David Snyder. Yet all these individuals were assigned to cover the story and independently of each other concluded that Garrison was perpetuating a fraud.
For some reason, James Phelan has been singled out for special attention. After a forty-plus-year career in which he produced hundreds of magazine articles (only two about the Kennedy assassination) and completed his third book (his first was an international best seller),3 Phelan died of lung cancer on September 8, 1997, at his home in Southern California. He was eighty-five. Anyone interested in this case should be grateful to him for his contribution to it. Instead, Garrison supporters have demonized him.4 But if some government connection had sent Phelan to destroy Garrison’s case, as the Garrisonites imply, he would have turned over the documents he obtained in Las Vegas to Shaw’s attorneys. Irvin Dymond then would have made mincemeat of Perry Russo at the preliminary hearing, humiliated Garrison, and the whole charade would have collapsed right there. Phelan didn’t turn the documents over because he was a reporter doing a job, not a sneak with a covert agenda.
The new movement wasn’t the only unexpected consequence of Stone’s film. It inspired a best-selling book from the opposition that challenged the conspiracy tenet—Case Closed by Gerald Posner. This 1993 examination of Oswald and the assassination was meant to restore confidence in the findings of the Warren Report and one of its major themes is that the critics of the report are the problem, not the evidence. But Posner ignored and misrepresented data,* and he didn’t close anything. He did offer a sensible, objective-sounding voice that appealed to a wide audience, especially those put off by Stone’s paranoia and his promotion of Jim Garrison. As Garrison himself had done more than two decades earlier, Oliver Stone produced a backlash and Posner reaped the benefit. But anyone who thinks Posner settled matters is overestimating his book and underestimating the legitimate arguments on the other side that over the years have created the grip the subject has on America’s psyche. (Even George Lardner believes a missed shot was fired from the front.)5 The one area where Posner might have closed a door—the Garrison—Stone New Orleans scenario—he left wide open. He dealt with Garrison in a single superficial chapter that necessarily omitted much of the story. Some of what is there is wrong.† Stone’s movie Posner mentioned only in passing. He made his only substantive comments about it in a handful of footnotes.
To believe Posner closed the door on Garrison is to deny the power of film. After more than fifty million moviegoers saw JFK in theaters around the world,6 Stone gave it a second life. In 1993 he released an inexpensive video version.‡ New viewers are now renting it and buying it with no end in sight. Every night, somewhere someone watches it. Jim Garrison today is playing on the small screen to a new generation and with no caveat. Those who saw the original movie were forewarned to some extent about Garrison by the media uproar. But all those shouting back then have fallen silent now. The video viewers today hear no dissenting opinion. Garrison is the hero. Clay Shaw is the villain.
Some of those who support that vision squared off, after a fashion, with some who don’t at the public hearing held by the JFK Assassination Records Review Board on June 28, 1995, in New Orleans. Steve Tyler, the producer-director of an interesting 1992 documentary film on the Garrison case, “He Must Have Something,” was one of those who testified. Tyler described his conversion from a pro-Shaw position when he was making the film, to anti-Shaw afterwards, from believing Shaw innocent to thinking him probably guilty of something. It was Oliver Stone who “planted the first seeds of disillusionment and doubt,” Tyler said, because despite having “access to all the available research on the assassination,” Stone felt “so strongly about Shaw’s guilt.”*
Also testifying that day was the lovely, petite, red-haired daughter of Edward Wegmann, now deceased. Cynthia Wegmann—who became an attorney because of the injustice she saw inflicted on Clay Shaw—spoke movingly on Shaw’s behalf and handed over her father’s files to the review board, saying she believed “that anyone who takes a look at these records will realize how amorphous, how little evidence, if any, there was [against Clay Shaw].”7 It was her hope, she said, that once the public saw how “little there was” to Garrison’s case that “they would allow [Shaw] to remain at rest,” a commendable, if unlikely, wish. But by relinquishing her father’s records to the National Archives, she established for Clay Shaw a small but significant beachhead.†
That was dramatically enlarged in the Spring of 1997 when a friend of Shaw, at the urging of Dave Snyder, turned over to the review board seven boxes of Shaw’s personal papers, including the journal he kept shortly after his arrest.‡ In its pages, the voice of Clay Shaw may still be heard. It is quietly desperate at times, unpretentious and humane, edged with a writer’s eye for detail. He recorded his daily life (meals, drinks, conversations, kindnesses of friends and strangers),* his impressions, ideas, anger, his sometimes black depression, and his inward journey. The “shock” of his arrest made him “think about the great issues of God and eternity,” he wrote, five days after that watershed day. “I can no longer avoid the fact that the time has come for some commitment to be made . . . and in a sense I am ashamed that it took such a catastrophe, that it took the iron of affliction to enter my soul, before making my decision. However, I begin to see now the path in which I must go.”8 His writings reveal an introspective man, intelligent and gifted, growing increasingly philosophical and spiritual as he coped with an impossible situation.
Above all, the voice in these pages is rational. That alone sets him apart from those who became his tormentors. Describing his interview at Garrison’s office on Christmas Eve 1966, Shaw wrote, “like all the DA’s assistants, and indeed the DA himself, [Andrew Sciambra] wore a pistol, which I found rather unnecessarily dramatic.” It is impossible to imagine Jim Garrison entertaining such a thought.9
About that same interview, Shaw penned this passage:
I explained to Sciambra that I had not at any time had an opportunity to see Oswald [when he was distributing leaflets at the Trade Mart], and had never met him under any other circumstances and added what turned out to be a very ironic remark—that it was perhaps unfortunate that I did not because then I might possibly have had a tiny footnote in history.10
Those who believe he was a master spy may be heartened to learn Shaw left his passports (his traveling dates and locations now may be checked) ; a file folder labeled Permindex (the alleged CIA organization), with a few letters in it and a brochure; and another file containing information about his activities during the months preceding the assassination. Others will find more enlightenment in correspondence such as that with Hale Boggs concerning Shaw’s role on the Welcoming Committee for President Kennedy during his 1962 trip to New Orleans, and clippings about Shaw himself, which chronicle his early success as a playwright.12
“We now have [Shaw’s] perspective on what happened to him,” said Thomas Samoluk, the review board’s deputy director, who traveled to New Orleans, reviewed the contents of Shaw’s seven boxes, and brought them back to Washington, “and that is a very important addition to the historical record.” Dave Snyder was more impassioned about it. “If you look at Shaw’s letters to people he knew and at his journal,” Snyder said, “you see Shaw was a very considerate, sensitive man, a very caring man. Most of the correspondence is ordinary, routine stuff—bread and butter [thank you] notes, for instance. But it shows Clay Shaw doing what Clay Shaw did, and doing it meticulously and well.” In what he left behind, Shaw seems to be saying, “Look at this—for this is who I really was.” In preserving this material, Shaw insured that his “footnote in history” will not be written entirely by others.
Shaw’s documents, and those from Edward Wegmann’s family, along with Tyler’s film, are today part of the JFK Collection at the National Archives’ handsome new building on grounds donated by the University of Maryland, a wooded setting adjoining the University’s golf course in College Park, Maryland. The six-story glass and concrete state-of-the-art research facility is a 1.8 million square-foot structure with wide hallways and panoramic views, equipped with moveable shelving on tracks, a sophisticated computer setup, superb photographic equipment for researchers, environmental controls to protect the archival records, and cold storage vaults for photographs.
Among the articles being protected in those vaults is the Zapruder film, the collection’s most famous item. The review board laid claim to the home movie by defining it as an “assassination record” under the terms of the 1992 Records Collection Act and it became part of the JFK Collection officially on August 1, 1998.* At this writing, the Department of Justice and the Zapruder family have entered into arbitration to determine the price the government will pay for the film, with the ceiling set at 30 million. (The family, which under the arbitration agreement will retain ownership of the copyright, was asking for 18.5 million and the government was offering 3 million.)†
As required by law, the five-member review board (a panel of citizens made up of a judge from Minnesota and four academics with expertise in law, history and archives)‡ went out of business on September 30, 1998, simultaneously issuing its Final Report. In that 208-page document, the board noted that drawing conclusions concerning the assassination was not part of its mandate, and it drew none. It did acknowledge, however, that reaction to Oliver Stone’s film prompted enactment of the “JFK Act.” While the board discovered no “smoking gun” document, advocates of both sides found ammunition for their position in the report, which described the board’s achievements, travails, and recommendations.
The report began by addressing the secrecy issue. “The problem was,” the board members said in their opening chapter, “that 30 years of government secrecy” surrounding the assassination “led the American public to believe that the government had something to hide.” They returned to this theme in their concluding section, charging that “[t]he federal government needlessly and wastefully classified and then withheld from public access countless important records that did not require such treatment.”
During the board’s four-year, 8 million effort, its members used their unprecedented powers boldly. They deposed witnesses, for instance, ordered the Zapruder film tested for authenticity and a bullet fragment from the presidential limousine tested for possible residue. They also obtained (over vigorous legal opposition from New Orleans District Attorney Harry Connick) Jim Garrison’s old office files and grand jury transcripts. Yet, despite their aggressive endeavors, they feared that “critical records may have been withheld” by some government agencies. So they created a “compliance program,” which required an officer from each agency “to warrant, under oath and penalty of perjury” that all relevant records had been turned over to the board.
Since taking office in April 1994, board members examined and released classified passages in more than 29,000 documents (the largest number from the CIA), processed the release of 33,000 more (the largest number from the FBI), and aided in the transmittal of many others, from various agencies and private citizens, to the JFK Collection at the National Archives.
Overall, some 4.5 million pages have poured into that collection since President Bush signed the Records Collection Act in 1992. Those documents—a virtual avalanche of paper—are today a magnet at College Park. According to Steven D. Tilley, the archivist in charge, many hundreds have examined some portion of the JFK Collection since the first big document release in August 1993. The number of school-children doing projects on the assassination and making requests is increasing, Tilley noted, and the staff has twice done presentations of forensic (autopsy) material for a group from the Bronx High School of Science in New York. Researchers can access the collection’s electronic reference system on the Internet, order documents by e-mail, and obtain some items through Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis.13
Because the largest contributions have come from sources that either monitored the New Orleans investigation or examined it afterwards,* a surprisingly large portion of the collection concerns Jim Garrison.
One Garrison document, in particular, that today resides among those millions of pages came to my attention a while back. It is a transcript of a statement Perry Russo made under hypnosis.† Garrison turned this document over to the House Select Committee in 1977 with a notation. Explaining why the pages were numbered oddly (one to seventeen and one to thirteen), Garrison wrote that the session was in two parts because Dr. Fatter had apparently “interposed” a “break” or “rest period” for Russo’s benefit. He did not. Garrison’s “document” is actually two documents, the transcript of the first hypnosis session and another, which took place eleven days later. Garrison combined them, reversing their chronology, and labeled them “A” and “B.”14 By so doing, he obliterated the damaging reality of both hypnosis interviews.15 If the House Select Committee relied on this document in any way, it was misled.* No one should trust anything Garrison left behind.
The Garrison material, according to one unofficial guesstimate, may amount to as much as twenty percent of the overall collection. If so, of that 4.5 million, Garrison’s portion amounts to some 900,000 pages.
The phoenix now has a substantial and permanent perch in America’s official historical record.
* Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1967), p. 457.
† Heindel was of interest because his nickname in the Marines was “Hidell” (an alias later used by Oswald), and he spoke Russian with Oswald. This was the information Lifton transmitted to Garrison.
* Sylvia Meagher, letter, The New York Review of Books, September 3, 1967.
* Two of Posner’s more serious lapses: 1) Presenting the work of Failure Analysis Associates as definitive evidence that the shots originated from the sniper’s nest in the Texas School Book Depository (Posner, Case Closed, pp. 334–335, 477–478). What Posner didn’t re
veal was that Failure Analysis Associates prepared the material he used for an ABA mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald (in August 1992, as a promotional effort by the company) and that the company also prepared material for the other side that supported the opposite position. 2) Quoting the Warren Commission testimony of clinical psychologist Renatus Hartogs who testified that when he examined Lee Harvey Oswald (at age thirteen) he had recognized in Oswald a “dangerousness” and “potential for explosive, aggressive, assaultive acting out” (Posner, Case Closed, p. 12). Posner again omitted the core reality: that the Warren Commission attorney who questioned Hartogs exposed his testimony as self-serving, after-the-fact analysis, contradicted by the report Hartogs wrote at the time (WC vol. VIII, pp. 220–221).
† For example, Posner attacked the trial testimony of “Andrew Dunn” because it conflicted with Dunn’s earlier statements (Posner, Case Closed, p. 146). The conflict, however, was Posner’s own creation. Andrew Dunn, who made the earlier statements, died in 1968, the year before the trial. The man on the witness stand was William Dunn, Sr. (The two were not related.)
‡ Stone restored seventeen minutes cut from the feature release.
* Actually, Stone has stated that Shaw’s guilt or innocence is of little concern to him.
† Previously, Edward Wegmann had offered to donate this material to Tulane University, but the offer was declined. (Cynthia Wegmann, telephone conversation with author, September 8, 1993.)
‡ This is the document that Snyder first revealed to the public in July 1996.