Reclaiming History (308 page)

Harry Connick Sr. (father of the singer), the New Orleans DA who ran against and defeated Garrison in 1973, told me that the Clay Shaw prosecution was “absolutely the most terrible, gross, abominable prosecution” he has ever encountered in his many years in law enforcement. “Garrison went to extremes to prosecute an innocent man.” Connick, who was an assistant U.S. attorney at the time of the Shaw investigation and trial, said that even before the Shaw case, the legal community in New Orleans viewed Garrison “as a four flusher. He frequently made allegations and charges he couldn’t back up. So there was a suspicion down here from the moment he brought charges against Shaw—and before we learned Garrison had no evidence—that it might turn out to be a phony case.”
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Newsweek
reporter Hugh Aynesworth said that Jim Garrison was “right,” there
was
a conspiracy in New Orleans, but it was his “scheme to concoct a fantastic ‘solution’ to the death of John F. Kennedy.”
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Can anything positive be said about Garrison in his prosecution of Clay Shaw? Tom Bethell, Garrison’s chief research assistant on the case, said, “When Ferrie died, the office staff was jubilant because we all knew there was no substance to Garrison’s charges, and this gave him a wonderful opportunity to get off the hook and tell the media hordes covering the case who were questioning whether he had anything, ‘Look, I tried to find out the truth, but
they
silenced my main suspect.’ The public would have thought he had been on to something big, and he would have looked like a hero. Instead, he proceeds to almost immediately charge Shaw with the murder. People in the office were putting their hands to their forehead. The sense was ‘How are we going to handle this now?’” Bethell offers this insight: “If this whole Garrison crusade was only political calculation on his part, he’d have taken the opportune course and ended it when Ferrie died. But there was also madness here.” Bethell said he personally liked Garrison, saying he was “amusing, charming,” but he was “very, very irresponsible, to an extent that was just amazing.”
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In a 1991 article, Bethell wrote, “I knew Clay Shaw was innocent; in fact I think everyone in the DA’s office also knew it, except for Garrison himself, who was incapable of thinking straight on the subject.”
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John Volz, a prosecutor in Garrison’s office who was a pallbearer at Garrison’s funeral, confirmed Bethell’s rendition of events. “When Ferrie died, we [fellow prosecutors in the office] advised him to get out of all this. But Jim wouldn’t listen. Instead, he said, ‘This is just the beginning.’” Volz also agrees with Bethell that Garrison’s conduct at the time of Ferrie’s death led him to believe that Garrison “actually believed most of this craziness,” and although he believes Garrison was completely wrong in his prosecution of Shaw, he was “well-intentioned.”
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*

Is one possibility simply that Stone’s hero, Garrison, had truly gone mad? There are those who think so. Warren Commission critic Harold Weisberg was one of Garrison’s strongest earliest supporters, and he went to New Orleans to help Garrison on his case. Garrison reciprocated by writing the foreword to Weisberg’s 1967 book,
Oswald in New Orleans
. But months before the trial, he disavowed Garrison. Although he was not inclined to elaborate, Weisberg told me he was a witness in New Orleans to Garrison “making up” a piece of evidence against Shaw, and when he saw this he said, “I knew I had to sever my association with Garrison.” Weisberg said that Garrison the man “was one of the greatest tragedies in the investigation of Kennedy’s assassination. He was highly talented, intelligent, and articulate, but somewhere down the road he
lost contact with reality
. I just don’t understand what he was up to. There just was no evidence of Shaw’s guilt.”
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Clay Shaw, the man whose life Garrison had destroyed, and someone who must have given considerable thought to the matter, also thought Garrison suffered from a psychological illness. “Personally,” Shaw said, “I think he’s quite ill, mentally. He was, as you know, discharged from the Army after a diagnosis of anxiety and told to take psychotherapy.
†
I know he has been to a number of analysts. I think, basically, he is getting worse all the time. I think there is a division of his mind. With one-half of his mind he is able to go out and fabricate evidence, and then by some osmosis, he is able to convince the other half that the fabrication is the truth.”
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My view (for whatever it’s worth, seeing that I did not know Garrison, and being aware that it conflicts with the views of some people who did know him) is that Garrison eventually came to realize that his suspicions about Shaw were unfounded, yet he persisted in prosecuting an innocent man. My sense is that Edward Wegmann, one of Shaw’s attorneys, summed up the entire case and Garrison’s motive for bringing it as well as anyone I’ve heard: “An innocent man has been the victim of a ruthless, unethical and fraudulent public prosecutor…who, with premeditation and full knowledge of the falsity of the charges brought against [Shaw]…used him for the sole purpose of obtaining a judicial forum for [his attack] upon the credibility of the…Warren Commission.”
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In other words, and pardon the play on words, Clay Shaw was “just a patsy.”

There is strong support for the conclusion that Garrison knew Shaw was innocent (hence, the argument that he used Shaw to attack the Warren Commission becomes the most plausible explanation for Garrison’s prosecution of Shaw). Although Garrison would have never admitted knowingly prosecuting an innocent man for murder, his conduct speaks quite eloquently for that proposition.

In view of the fact that Garrison had accused Shaw of conspiring to murder the president of the United States, one would expect Garrison himself to face Shaw in court and cross-examine him during his testimony on February 27, 1969. But instead, he let his assistant, James Alcock, do so. And even with Alcock, if one wasn’t told that Shaw was on trial for Kennedy’s murder, one would hardly have known this from Alcock’s cross-examination. Not only was it extremely short (consuming exactly fifty pages of transcript)—one would automatically expect the cross-examination of someone accused of conspiring to murder the president of the United States to go on for several days and take up hundreds of pages of transcript—but it couldn’t possibly have been more soft and civil. So much so that it could have been Shaw’s own lawyer asking the questions. So soft, civil, and nonconfrontational, in fact, that when Shaw’s lawyer was asked if he had any questions to ask on redirect examination, Dymond said no, seeing no need to explain away or mitigate any damage to his client’s cause that came out during cross-examination. It couldn’t have been more obvious that Alcock never had his heart in what he was doing, and knew further that there was nothing of any substance to cross-examine Shaw about. (For the record, Shaw denied on direct examination knowing or ever having met Oswald, Ferrie, or Perry Russo, ever having conspired with them or anyone else to murder President Kennedy, and ever having worked for the CIA.)
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If Alcock’s cross-examination of Shaw, by itself, didn’t clearly demonstrate that Garrison knew Shaw had nothing to do with the assassination, and that he had committed the unpardonable sin of charging an innocent man with conspiracy to commit murder just to give him the opportunity to present evidence challenging the findings of the Warren Commission, then Garrison’s final summation to the jury on February 28, 1969, would seem to eliminate all doubt. Instead of referring to Shaw (or “the defendant”) a great number of times as he tried to connect him to the conspiracy and murder, as any prosecutor would do if he believed the person he was prosecuting was guilty, unbelievably Garrison only referred to Shaw
once
in his entire summation, and then not to say that the evidence showed he was guilty.
Not once
did Garrison tell the jury he had proved Shaw’s guilt or that the evidence pointed toward Shaw’s guilt. (Alcock, in his summation, did.)
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What he told the jury was, “You are here sitting in judgment of Clay Shaw,”
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an absolutely valueless statement since the jury, obviously, already knew why they were there.

Is there any further evidence? Yes.

As indicated earlier, the indictment only charged Shaw, Ferrie, and Oswald with
conspiracy
to murder Kennedy, not with murdering him. Garrison was thereby sending an important signal. Since under the law of conspiracy Shaw would be responsible for (and hence, guilty of) all crimes committed by his co-conspirators in furtherance of the object of the conspiracy, a charge of conspiracy to commit murder is virtually always accompanied by a separate charge of the murder itself. If Garrison was sincerely convinced Shaw had conspired to murder Kennedy, why not do what 99.9 percent of all DAs would have done—also charge him with Kennedy’s murder? I don’t know the answer to that question, but the only thing that makes any sense to me is that he knew Shaw was innocent or had very serious doubts about his guilt. If Shaw had been convicted of murder, Garrison knew that under Louisiana law, the punishment
had
to be either life imprisonment or the death penalty. But
conspiracy
to commit murder was only punishable in Louisiana by imprisonment “at hard labor for not less than one nor more than 20 years.”
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So perhaps Garrison, knowing he was up to no good, only wanted to use Shaw up to a certain point. He didn’t want to have Shaw’s death or life imprisonment on his conscience for the rest of his life.
†

In his first book on the assassination,
Heritage of Stone
, published one year after Clay Shaw’s 1969 trial, Garrison, incredibly, never talks about Clay Shaw once in the entire 224 pages. (He does in his book
On the Trail of the Assassins
in 1988, nineteen years later.) Nor Perry Russo. In fact, Clay Shaw’s name only appears three times in the book, in three separate footnotes at the back, and then only when the source for the testimony of two witnesses at Shaw’s trial is listed as “
State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw
.” Since the cover of
Heritage of Stone
says that the book is Garrison’s “own version of the conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK,” why wasn’t Shaw, the only man Garrison prosecuted for conspiracy to murder Kennedy, mentioned?
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So we see, from all of Garrison’s conduct showing what his motivations probably were for prosecuting Shaw, that Oliver Stone’s movie, at its very core, was one huge lie. Stone himself seems to have sensed what Garrison was up to, and embraced it. Though he tried, in every way he could, to convince the millions who saw his movie that Clay Shaw was an integral part of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, he told the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
in 1961, “I have to tell you that I’m not that concerned about whether Shaw was innocent or guilty [say what?]…This movie is…about a much larger international story.”
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Stone became even bolder several months later when he told
Esquire
magazine, “Garrison was trying to force a break in the case. If he could do that, it was worth the sacrifice of one man [Shaw]. 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 [Garrison, whose strengths and faults, Stone said, made him “like King Lear”] was in that kind of situation.”
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2. Near the beginning of Oliver Stone’s film, a woman named Rose Cherami is shown being thrown out of a moving car on a country road, then pleading with her attendants on her hospital bed, “They’re going to kill Kennedy. Please call somebody.”

To conspiracy theorists, Melba Christine Marcades, aka (along with fourteen other aliases) Rose Cherami,
*
has been, for years, almost as much a part of the lore and mythology of the assassination as the grassy knoll itself. And most conspiracy theorists have not questioned Cherami’s story and have accepted what Stone depicted on the screen. But what Stone depicted was not quite what happened. The man most familiar with Cherami’s story, the late Francis Fruge, was a Louisiana State Police officer when around 10:00 p.m. on the evening of November 20, 1963 (two days before the assassination), he was called to the emergency ward of the Moosa Memorial Hospital in Eunice, Louisiana, by Mrs. Louise Guillary, the administrator of the hospital. Cherami, age thirty-nine, was under the influence of drugs and had been brought to the hospital by Frank Odom, a longtime resident of the area whom Fruge knew. Cherami had been hitchhiking when she was struck by Odom’s car. It happened on Highway 190, a strip of road “extending from Opelousas, birthplace of Jim Bowie, to the Texas border where a gas station more than likely doubled as a brothel.”
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She had sustained no fractures or lacerations, only bruises and abrasions. Fruge said Cherami was “very incoherent,” and after he locked her up at the Eunice jail for safekeeping until she sobered up, he returned to the Eunice Police Department’s annual ball, which he had been attending.

About an hour later, he was summoned to the jail cell. Cherami “had taken all of her clothes off” and was “what we would call ‘climbing the walls,’ scratching herself, and I recognized it right away as withdrawals…from drugs,” Fruge told the HSCA. Fruge had a doctor come to the jail, “and he gave her a shot to sedate her.” The doctor, F. J. De Rouen, advised Fruge to bring her to a hospital. Fruge told the HSCA that during the two-hour ambulance drive to the East Louisiana State Hospital in Jackson, during which Cherami was in a straightjacket, Cherami related to Fruge that “she was coming from Florida to Dallas with two men who she said were Italians, or resembled Italians. They had stopped at this lounge [a house of prostitution called the Silver Slipper]…and they’d had a few drinks and had gotten into an argument or…something. The manager of the lounge threw her out, and she got out on the road and hitchhiked…and this is when she got hit by a vehicle…[So Cherami herself confirmed Odom’s story that she was struck by a passing car, not thrown out of any car as Stone showed his audience.] I asked her what she was going to do in Dallas. She said
she
was going to pick up some money, pick up her baby, and kill Kennedy.”
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Fruge’s deposition to the HSCA was on April 18, 1978. In an interview with an HSCA investigator eleven days earlier, on April 7, 1978, Fruge quoted Cherami as telling him, “
We’re
[referring to herself and the men she was with] going to kill President Kennedy when he comes to Dallas in a few days.”
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