False Witness

by Patricia Lambert

  By claiming Martin insisted on anonymity, Garrison is providing an alibi to explain (1) why this pivotal witness never told his story to the grand jury; (2) why he never took the witness stand; and (3) why (back then) Garrison was telling the press he would never be foolish enough to listen to Martin. Garrison also is using Martin’s alleged fear of exposure to heighten the drama of his narrative. But back in 1967 Jack Martin was enthusiastically promoting himself to the media (see, for example, Merriman Smith, “JFK Plot Quiz: Seamy Suspects,” Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, March 5, 1967).

  12. pp. 74–75 (85–86)—Garrison’s claim that someone else posed for the backyard Oswald-with-rifle photographs and they were altered to appear to be Oswald is disputed by the testimony of Oswald’s wife and his mother. Marina Oswald testified that she took the pictures of Oswald holding the rifle in the backyard of their Neely Street apartment in Dallas. Marguerite Oswald testified that after Oswald was arrested she saw such a photograph (inscribed “For my daughter June”), and that at the police station Marina had that picture “folded up in her shoe.” Marina later tore the picture up, burned what she could of the pieces, and what was left Marguerite flushed down the toilet (WC Vol. 1, pp. 15–16, 117–118; 146, 152).

  13. p. 80 (92)—In his first interview with the FBI, Dean Andrews did not describe Clay Bertrand as six feet two inches, as Garrison writes; Andrews said Bertrand was five feet seven inches (FBI interview, Nov. 25, 1963).

  14. pp. 85–86 (98–99)—Contrary to Garrison’s claim that his aides located several bartenders and bar owners in the French Quarter who knew Clay Shaw was Clay Bertrand, but they all refused to testify, Andrew Sciambra told Edward Epstein that he had “squeezed” the French Quarter and failed to find anyone who had ever heard of Clay Bertrand (Epstein, Counterplot, p. 50). Garrison told James Alcock and Tom Bethell the same thing (Bethell Diary, p. 11). If such witnesses had existed, Garrison would have hauled them before his grand jury and forced them to cooperate.

  15. p. 87 (100)—Patience and “plodding footwork” had nothing to do with Garrison’s notion that Shaw was Bertrand. Garrison arrived at that conclusion because of Shaw’s first name and his homosexuality. William Gurvich, James Alcock and Tom Bethell confirmed that. (See chapter 4 and note p. 47.)

  16. p. 152 (176)—Perry Russo did not make a positive identification of Clay Shaw in his first interview with Andrew Sciambra. Russo made only a vague, tentative identification, and two days later, when Russo arrived in New Orleans, he emphasized his uncertainty about it. Nor did Russo say initially that he knew Shaw as “Bertrand”: even after the sodium Pentothal session, Russo said he didn’t know anyone by that name. (See chapter 6.)

  17. p. 106 (123)—Garrison makes it sound as though hordes of residents in Clinton remembered Oswald waiting in the registration line because he was the only white man there. But only three people, of the three hundred Garrison says were interviewed, testified that they remembered Oswald. Moreover, he was never the only white man in line. There was at least one other, Estus Morgan, by the testimony of Garrison’s own witness, Henry Earl Palmer. (The number of whites probably was considerably higher than that, based on the lists of names—taken from the registrar’s rolls, with race indicated—that Anne Dischler recorded in her notes.)

  18. p. 106 (123)—Garrison’s claim that “all” the Clinton witnesses gave definitive descriptions of David Ferrie, saying he was “wearing a crazy-looking wig and painted eyebrows,” is false. None of them said that, or anything close. Only two Clinton witnesses even claimed they recalled Ferrie. Henry Earl Palmer said the man’s hair and eyebrows “didn’t seem real,” and Corrie Collins said his hair was “messed up,” his eyebrows “heavy” (trial transcript, Feb. 6, 1969, p. 84 [Palmer]; pp. 110–111 [Collins]).

  19. p. 106 (124)—Contrary to Garrison’s version of events, none of the four Clinton witnesses who claimed to recall the driver of the black car commented on his “manners,” nor called him “distinguished.” None of them said he “nodded politely”; no one claimed he “said hello.” (See trial transcript, Henry Earl Palmer, John Manchester, and Corrie Collins on Feb. 6, 1969; and William Dunn, Sr. on Feb. 7, 1969.)

  20. pp. 106-107 (124)—According to Garrison, the Clinton town marshal checked the black limousine’s license plates with the State Police and found they were registered to the International Trade Mart. But that isn’t what the marshal testified to at Shaw’s trial. He said Shaw told him he worked at the International Trade Mart (John Manchester, trial transcript, Feb. 6, 1969, p. 60). If a check on the car actually had established the tie to the Trade Mart, Manchester would have said so on the witness stand and the documentary evidence of that registration would have been entered into evidence.

  21. p. 107 (125)—Garrison writes that Oswald showed “his Marine discharge card” to barber Edwin Lea McGehee, but nothing in the earliest statements and trial testimony supports that. According to that evidence, Oswald showed a military card to Registrar of Voters Henry Earl Palmer.

  22. p. 108 (126)—Garrison’s claim that Andrew Sciambra found a woman in personnel at East Louisiana State Hospital who interviewed Oswald isn’t true. No evidence exists that Oswald was ever interviewed by anyone at the hospital. No one in personnel even remembered seeing him. The clerk who claimed she saw Oswald’s application, Maxine Kemp, went to work at the hospital the year after the assassination. Oswald, of course, was dead by then. Moreover, Kemp told this writer she was never interviewed by Sciambra, only by Francis Frugé. (See chapter 13.)

  23. p. 114 (132)—Richard Billings did not arrive in New Orleans in 1967; he arrived in December 1966. Moreover, Garrison himself prompted Billings’s trip to Louisiana and the participation of Life magazine when Garrison contacted David Chandler, the unmentioned man in this memoir. By omitting Chandler from his story, Garrison creates the impression that the overture for the “secret deal” with Life was entirely the idea of Life’s management. He also avoids the real reason Life withdrew from the arrangement: their loss of confidence in him following his arrest of Clay Shaw. (See chapter 6.)

  24. p. 115 (133)—Garrison implies that 7,000—which James Alcock found David Ferrie had deposited in his bank account in 1963—was connected to the assassination plot. But the amount is hardly in keeping with the significance of the crime. What’s more, Alcock indicated to Tom Bethell that he didn’t believe Ferrie was involved in the assassination. In 1963, Ferrie’s severance from Eastern Airlines was settled, and he received “a substantial sum of money” (Brener, The Garrison Case, p. 50).

  25. pp. 119, 319 (138, 377)—Despite Garrison’s claim that the “notes” of David Logan’s statement were “stolen,” the Logan transcript was among the material turned over to the National Archives by Garrison’s family after his death. Garrison had at least two reasons to withhold this document: (1) it contradicts Garrison’s claim that David Ferrie “introduced” Logan to Clay Shaw; and (2) its content rendered Logan noncredible.

  26. p. 137 (159)—Contrary to Garrison’s claim, the newspaper story on February 17, 1967, breaking the news of his Kennedy investigation, was neither “stunning” to Garrison, nor a “premature revelation.” Garrison was shown the text of the article before it ran, and notified by the newspaper’s publisher that it was going to appear. If he had wanted to, Garrison could have stopped it. (See chapter 5.)

  27. p. 138 (161)—The media did not sniff out the information that David Ferrie was being targeted by Garrison’s probe. Ferrie, himself, called reporter David Snyder at the New Orleans States-Item, offered to be interviewed, and identified himself as Garrison’s chief suspect. Snyder’s piece on Ferrie ran February 18, 1967. Until it appeared, no one in the media (or anywhere else outside Garrison’s circle) had any idea that Ferrie was a suspect. Since Ferrie deliberately put himself on the front page of the newspaper, the media neither can be credited with, nor accused of sniffing him out. (See chapter 5.)

  28. p. 142 (166)—Garrison’s claim that Ferrie had no low metabolism proble
m, and, therefore, no reason to take the medication Proloid, isn’t true. As a young man Ferrie had been diagnosed with a thyroid deficiency that was believed to be the cause of his alopecia (hair loss). (See three letters dated January 29, 1944, February 2, 1944, and February 4, 1944, from James Ferrie—David’s father—to the administration at St. Charles Seminary, which David was attending.)

  29. pp. 144–145 (168)—Garrison asserts that Shaw was interviewed twice before his interrogation and arrest on March 1, 1967, and that for the second interview Shaw was subpoenaed. During this second interview, in which Shaw was questioned “at great length,” Garrison concluded Shaw was lying (about what Garrison doesn’t say), and, consequently, Garrison decided to arrest Shaw “in the very near future.”

  This is entirely untrue. Prior to March 1, 1967, Shaw was questioned about the assassination only once, on December 24, 1966, and no subpoena was involved—only a telephone call to Shaw from a detective in Garrison’s office. Shaw repeatedly and publicly described that first and only pre-arrest interview on Christmas Eve, and neither Garrison nor his aides ever challenged Shaw’s statements, either with the media or at Shaw’s trial. (Shaw Journal, pp. 1–5; Shaw NBC interview, pp. 1–10; Kirkwood, American Grotesque, pp. 19–20; Phelan–Shaw Interview.)

  The first mention of this “second” interview surfaced four years after Shaw’s arrest, at the Christenberry hearing, during Garrison’s stunningly inaccurate testimony from the witness stand. Since he tied it to the Christmas season—as Shaw left the office, Garrison stated, Shaw said, “Merry Christmas”—it’s clear that Garrison was referring to Shaw’s 1966 Christmas Eve, non-subpoenaed, first and only pre-arrest interview. (As described earlier in this book, at the time, Garrison found that session exculpatory.) Garrison provided no evidence to support his claim of an incriminating, subpoenaed, second interview, none of his aides corroborated it, and when Shaw testified unequivocally under oath from the witness stand that he was interviewed “only once” prior to his arrest, none of Garrison’s men disputed him. Moreover, grand jury testimony of William Gurvich, and concurrent statements by James Alcock, confirm that Perry Russo was the basis of Shaw’s arrest—not any “second interview” with Shaw. It appears that Garrison invented this additional “incriminating” interview in an effort to obscure the fact that the sole basis for his arrest of Clay Shaw was Russo’s unsubstantiated testimony. (Christenberry transcript, pp. 219 [Garrison], 456 [Shaw]; chapter 4, note 28; Gurvich, grand jury transcripts, June 28, 1967, pp. 18–20, and July 12, 1967, p. 62.)

  30. p. 145 (168–169)—Garrison claims that he selected March 1 as arrest day. That he met with key members of his staff in his office at 5:30 P.M. and when everything was in order he obtained the necessary warrants from a judge who was expecting him. Then, he sent Louis Ivon out to arrest Shaw and also search his home; and Ivon and the others went out and brought Shaw back to the office.

  None of this is true. As described in chapter 1, the subpoena for Shaw was issued in the morning. Hearing of it, Shaw voluntarily appeared at the D.A.’s office around noon and stayed there until his arrest several hours later. There is nothing to support the claim that Shaw’s arrest was planned beforehand either. The evidence indicates it was a spur-of-the-moment decision, prompted by Shaw’s refusal to submit to the testing Garrison requested. In addition to Shaw’s unrefuted trial testimony and his testimony at the Christenberry hearing, Garrison’s version of arrest day is also contradicted in part by Louis Ivon’s testimony at both proceedings, and by the following: William Gurvich’s statements to the defense team; Salvatore Panzeca and William Wegmann in interviews with the author; and by the local newspaper accounts describing the sequence of events that day at Tulane and Broad. (Shaw, trial transcript, Feb. 20, 1969, pp. 153, 154, Christenberry transcript, pp. 456–462; Ivon, trial transcript, Feb. 19, 1969, pp. 6–8, 13–15, Christenberry transcript, pp. 369–371; Gurvich Conference, p. 15; Dymond et al. Interview; New Orleans States-Item, March 1, 1967; New Orleans Times-Picayune, March 2, 1967.)

  31. p. 145 (169)—Garrison’s men did not telephone Salvatore Panzeca. Shaw himself placed the call. After he was told he would be arrested if he didn’t take a lie-detector test, Shaw demanded that Garrison’s men allow him to speak to his attorney. Shaw first tried to reach Edward F. Wegmann, then his brother William J. Wegmann, and finally he spoke to Salvatore Panzeca.

  32. p. 162 (188–189)—Garrison’s claim that he told James Phelan what Russo said before Russo was subjected to sodium Pentothal and hypnosis is contradicted by, among other things, the chronology of events. The sodium Pentothal was administered before Phelan even arrived in New Orleans. His plane landed the evening of February 27, 1967, and the Pentothal interview occurred earlier that day. The first hypnosis session took place on March 1 and Phelan’s first meeting with Garrison was on March 3. Moreover, Garrison didn’t “tell” Phelan anything about Russo initially—he gave Phelan the transcripts of Russo’s interviews to read. That was in Las Vegas on March 5, six days after the “verification” process on Russo had begun. (See chapters 6 and 7.)

  33. p. 162 (189)—The documentary record is equally clear about Garrison’s false claim that Sciambra had obtained all relevant information from Russo before either the sodium Pentothal session or the first hypnosis took place. Russo’s plot that killed the president story was elicited in two basic steps: the sodium Pentothal interview on February 27, 1967, and the hypnosis sessions on March 1 and March 12. Prior to these “medical treatments” the assassination plot story did not exist.

  34. pp. 162–163 (188–189)—The narrative on these pages implies that James Phelan was in the picture before management at Life withdrew its support. That is not the case. Garrison turned to Phelan only after he had begun to lose his support at Life, which followed the arrest of Clay Shaw. (See chapter 6.)

  35. p. 170 (198)—Garrison dismisses the testimony of John Cancler and Miguel Torres on the grounds that they took the fifth before the grand jury. But Cancler and Torres were familiar with Garrison’s MO: they took the fifth because they knew Garrison would charge them with perjury if they answered truthfully.

  36. pp. 233–234 (272–273)—None of Shaw’s attorneys ever heard of Richard Matthews, the man Garrison describes as part of Shaw’s defense team, who supposedly engaged in whispered conversations with Shaw during the entire trial, and who Garrison speculates was Shaw’s CIA liaison. William Wegmann, in a letter to the author, dated Dec. 18, 1995, responded to Garrison’s charge as follows: “I have no idea who Richard Matthews may have been. . . . The scenario that is set forth is highly unlikely to ever have taken place for any number of reasons. Ed Haggerty ran a good courtroom. The deputy sheriffs assigned to his court would not have permitted the type of activity described because of the disruption it would have had on the trial.”

  But for Garrison, Matthews served an important literary function in this memoir by providing the otherwise missing link between Clay Shaw and the CIA. If Garrison had written his story as a screenplay, Matthews would be called a “plot point”—an indispensable factor.

  37. pp. 236–237 (277)—Since Garrison was told beforehand by one of his assistant district attorneys that Charles Spiesel was “crazy” and Garrison chose to put Spiesel on the stand anyway, it is at best disingenuous of Garrison to accuse the opposing counsel of skulduggery for exposing Spiesel’s madness.

  38. p. 238 (278)—James Phelan’s career was neither brief, nor was it based on Garrison or his key witness, Perry Russo. As a staff writer for The Saturday Evening Post, Phelan’s career was flourishing before and after his encounter with Garrison. Nor did Phelan claim that Russo had identified Clay Shaw by mistake; Phelan wrote that Russo’s initial interview by Andrew Sciambra didn’t contain Russo’s conspiracy story, which it did not.

  39. p. 243 (284)—Garrison’s description of Dean Andrews’s testimony gives the impression that Andrews said he actually received a call requesting that he represent Oswald. But Andrews testified that he in
vented the entire story, that no one asked him to go to Dallas, that it was his own idea. (See chapter 11.)

  40. note, p. 243 (284)—Garrison claims that out of concern for Dean Andrews’s health, he saved Andrews from his jail sentence first by seeing to it that he was granted a new trial and then dismissing the case when it was returned to his office. But it was Judge Shea who dismissed the charges against Andrews (New Orleans Times-Picayune, Aug. 15, 1974). Garrison wasn’t even in office at the time. (Harry Connick assumed the office on April 1, 1974).

  41. pp. 249–250 (292)—No one was surprised when Clay Shaw testified at his own trial, least of all Garrison, despite what he writes in his memoir. There was never any question that Shaw would take the witness stand. He had been waiting two years to refute Garrison’s charges and everyone knew it. Garrison’s muddled notion that Shaw should have stayed off the witness stand in order to avoid being questioned about his alleged “relationship with David Ferrie” is nonsense. Shaw based his actions on what he knew to be the truth. If he had known Ferrie, Shaw would have been smart enough to admit it at the outset knowing that the D.A.’s office might find witnesses who would expose the relationship. The D.A.’s office never found any credible witnesses to such a relationship because it never existed. Moreover, the damaging cross-examination that Garrison speaks of didn’t materialize. Quite the contrary. (See chapter 11.) Garrison here is trying to rewrite what occurred at the trial in order to justify the perjury charges he brought afterwards.

  42. p. 250 (293)—The notion that Garrison felt no animosity toward Shaw, after his acquittal, because in plotting to murder President Kennedy Shaw was simply doing his job, and in bringing him to trial Garrison was simply doing his, is either silly or chilling, depending on whether or not Garrison actually believed what he wrote. Any normal person who believed Shaw was guilty of participating in the conspiracy that killed the president would have been outraged by his acquittal.