Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (102 page)

Today it can be clearly seen that the sins of the Commission included
investigating from a preconceived idea (Oswald's sole guilt), failing to
substantiate evidence from the FBI, the intimidation of selected witnesses,
the stifling of internal dissent, and the misreporting of its own information.
These methods were actively employed to subvert a truthful investigation
and to present flawed and inadequate conclusions to the unsuspecting
public.

The evidence available today suggests the Commission slowly became
aware of the massive power behind the assassination and simply could
not-or would not-come to grips with it.

The Commission, like subsequent inquiries into the Kennedy assassination, released a slanted and timid version of the tragedy hoping to appease
the public long enough so that commissioners would not have to face the
full ramifications of a truthful and incisive investigation. And their plan
worked well. For more than two decades much of the American public has been content with the palatable-but implausible-Warren Commission
version of the assassination.

Only in recent years, with firm evidence of a second assassin available
and a continuing history of government deceit, have growing numbers of
citizens begun to reevaluate the official government assassination theory of
one lone gunman.

The Warren Commission was in part the result of an attempt by
President Lyndon Johnson and his close advisers to blunt independent
assassination investigations both in Texas and in Congress.

Johnson hand-picked Commission members-all of whom had longstanding connections with either the military, defense industries, or U.S.
intelligence.

Gerald Ford-who was selected at the insistence of Richard Nixonbecame a "spy" on the Commission for the FBI. He heard more testimony
than any other commissioner.

Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren first rejected service on the
Commission as unconstitutional, but was pressured into the job by Johnson, who told him that if he didn't find Oswald a lone assassin, World
War III might result.

Johnson paid for the Warren Commission from an "Emergency Fund
for the President."

At no time did the Warren Commission seem to consider the basic legal
rights of Oswald-the assumption of innocence until proven guilty, the
right to legal representation, or the right to cross-examine witnesses and
evidence against him.

The Commission was acutely troubled by the FBI, beginning with
Bureau leaks to the press that portrayed Oswald as the lone assassin prior
to any Commission investigation through questions concerning the legitimacy of evidence presented by the Bureau. They also were at a loss as to
how to determine the validity of allegations that Oswald worked for the
Bureau as an informant.

And there were serious conflicts between the Commission's pat report
and its attendant twenty-six volumes of testimony and evidence. Likewise,
there were serious conflicts between witness testimony as published by the
Commission and statements to newsmen and researchers by those same
witnesses.

There is now firm evidence that not only the FBI and CIA lied about
important assassination evidence, but that the Warren Commission itself
participated in making serious omissions (more than a dozen critical witnesses);
alteration of evidence (the reenactment surveyors' map figures); and intimidation of witnesses (Tammi True and Jean Hill).

The single-bullet theory of the Commission-necessitated by the wounding of bystander James Tague-prompted widespread skepticism of Commission findings. This theory-which flies in the face of most of the
witness testimony and physical evidence-was obviously only necessary to
maintain the official "lone assassin" theory.

Today-Gerald Ford and David Belin notwithstanding-national polls
indicate most Americans have doubts about the basic tenets of the Warren
Commission.

Some long-cherished illusions of mine about the great free press in our
country underwent a painful reappraisal during this period.

-New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison

On the afternoon of November 22, 1963, two men sat drinking in the
Katzenjammer Bar, located in New Orleans next door to 544 Camp Street,
where a puzzling parade of anti-Castro Cubans and intelligence agentsincluding Lee Harvey Oswald-were seen the previous summer.

One of the men was Guy Banister, the former FBI man who was
running a private-investigation firm with intelligence connections out of an
office at 544 Camp Street. The other man was one of his investigators,
Jack Martin.

According to a police report prepared that day, the two men returned to
Banister's office where an argument erupted. Banister, his irritability
inflamed by alcohol, accused Martin of stealing files whereupon Martin
reminded Banister that he had not forgotten some of the people he had
seen in Banister's office that summer. Banister then beat Martin over the
head with a heavy .357 magnum pistol.

In the heat of the moment, Martin screamed out: "What are you going
to do-kill me, like you all did Kennedy?"

A police ambulance was called and carried the bloodied Martin to
Charity Hospital.

An angered Martin soon whispered to friends that Banister had often
been in the company of a man named David Ferrie, whom Martin claimed
drove to Texas the day of Kennedy's assassination to serve as a getaway
pilot for the assassins. He hinted at even darker associations.

Martin's words soon reached the ears of New Orleans district attorney
Jim Garrison, who quickly arrested Ferrie and began an investigation into
the JFK assassination that eventually turned into a worldwide cause celebre.

Because of the Garrison investigation much new assassination information became known and the assassination was addressed for the first time
in a courtroom-even though the defendant was finally acquitted.

Garrison claimed that the entire weight of the federal government was
moved to block and ridicule his investigation, and indeed there were many
strange aspects to this entire episode, including an attack by some in the
national media before Garrison even had a chance to present his case.

A giant of a man, standing six-foot-six, Earling Carothers Garrison had
shortened his name to simply "Jim," but was widely known to both
friends and foes as the "Jolly Green Giant. "

Born on November 20, 1921, in Knoxville, Iowa, Garrison grew up in
New Orleans and enlisted in the U.S. Army a year before Pearl Harbor. In
1942, he was commissioned a lieutenant in the field artillery.

After the war, Garrison followed a family tradition in law by enrolling
in the Tulane University Law School. He eventually earned bachelor of
laws and master of civil laws degrees.

Garrison then joined the FBI, serving briefly in Seattle and Tacoma,
Washington. He wrote:

I was very impressed with the competence and efficiency of the Bureau.
However, I was extremely bored as I rang doorbells to inquire about the
loyalty and associations of applicants for employment in a defense
plant. So I decided to return to the law profession.

He served as an assistant district attorney in New Orleans from 1954 to
1958, resigning with a scathing attack on Mayor Victor H. Schiro. In
1961, Garrison decided to make a run for the district attorney's job, again
blasting Mayor Schiro for corruption and failure to enforce the law. His
attacks included incumbent district attorney Richard Dowling, whom he
called "the great emancipator-he let everyone go free."

Not believing he had much of a chance, Garrison ran a meager campaign, comprised mostly of some television talks. To the surprise of many
people Garrison managed to defeat Dowling in a run-off election, and he
took office as district attorney on March 3, 1962.

Although Garrison did begin to clean up some of the more disreputable
gambling and prostitution dens of New Orleans, his critics noted that he
did not share that same enthusiasm against the leaders of organized crime-a
force that Garrison has maintained did not exist during his years as New
Orleans district attorney.

In 1962, Garrison was angered by the refusal of eight criminal-court
judges to approve funds for investigating organized crime. He went so far
as to publicly state that their refusal "raised interesting questions about
racketeer influences." The judges sued him for defamation of character
and won a $1,000 state court judgment. Garrison, however, fought this
action all the way to the Supreme Court, which reversed the decision in a
landmark case on the right to criticize public officials.

After hearing the remarks of Jack Martin, Garrison moved quickly
enough. Over the assassination weekend, New Orleans lawmen vainly
sought David Ferrie. On Monday, November 25, Ferrie turned himself in.

Garrison, who had met the bizarre Ferrie once before, could hardly
forget the man. Ferrie suffered from alopecia, a rare disease that causes
total baldness. He wrote:

The face grinning ferociously at me was like a ghoulish Halloween
mask. The eyebrows plainly were greasepaint, one noticeably higher than the other. A scruffy, reddish homemade wig hung askew on his
head as he fixed me with his eyes.

Ill at ease, Ferrie admitted his Friday trip to Texas, claiming he wanted
to go ice skating in Houston. However, he had no adequate answer for
why he had chosen to drive through one of the worst thunderstorms in
years and why, instead of skating, he had spent his time at the rink's pay
phone. Ferrie also denied knowing Lee Harvey Oswald.

Garrison was unsatisfied with Ferrie's story. He ordered him and two
friends held in jail for questioning by the FBI. He later told interviewer
Eric Norden:

When we alerted the FBI, they expressed interest and asked us to turn
the three men over to them for questioning. We did, but Ferrie was
released soon afterward and most of [the FBIJ report on him was
classified top secret and secreted in the National Archives .. .

In On the Trail of the Assassins, Garrison wrote:

I was 43 years old and had been district attorney for a year and nine
months when John Kennedy was killed. I was an old-fashioned patriot,
a product of my family, my military experience, and my years in the
legal profession. I could not imagine then that the government ever
would deceive the citizens of this country. Accordingly, when the FBI
released David Ferrie with surprising swiftness, implying that no evidence had been found connecting him with the assassination, I accepted
it.

Over the next three years, Garrison's attention was centered on his job
and family. Vaguely aware of contradictions in the assassination story,
Garrison nevertheless chose to believe the official version. He wrote:

By this time [1966] our military was deeply engaged in the war in
Southeast Asia. Like most Americans, I took it for granted that our
government had our troops over there to bring democracy to South
Vietnam. Like most Americans, I also took for granted that our government had fully investigated President Kennedy's assassination and had
found it to be indeed the result of a random act by a man acting alone.
Certainly, it never crossed my mind that the murder of President Kennedy and the subsequent arrival of half a million members of the
American military in Vietnam might be related.

Garrison's view began to change after a chance meeting with the
powerful senator from Louisiana, Russell Long. Garrison said Long told
him: "Those fellows on the Warren Commission were dead wrong. There's no way in the world that one man could have shot up John Kennedy that
way."

It was a comment that was to put Garrison and his office back on the
assassination investigation trail.

First Garrison went back and studied the Warren Commission Report
and volumes in detail. He was aghast:

Considering the lofty credentials of the Commission members and the
quality and size of the staff available to them, I had expected to find a
thorough and professional investigation. I found nothing of the sort. The
mass of information was disorganized and confused. The Commission
had provided no adequate index to its exhibits. . . . The number of
promising leads that were never followed up offended my prosecutorial
sensibility. And, perhaps worst of all, the conclusions in the report
seemed to be based on an appallingly selective reading of the evidence,
ignoring credible testimony from literally dozens of witnesses.

Garrison, with his military background, was particularly shocked to read
in the Commission volumes where a Lt. Col. Allison G. Folsom, Jr.,
reported on a grade made by Oswald in a Russian examination. Garrison
knew that the mere fact that Oswald had been tested in Russian indicated
intelligence training.

Fired by growing suspicions, Garrison took another look at Oswald's
activities while in New Orleans in the spring and summer of 1963.

He began to discover the odd and mostly unexplained relationships
between Oswald and anti-Castro Cubans, Oswald and intelligence agents
including the FBI, and Oswald and 544 Camp Street.

Quietly he began to assemble some of his most trusted assistants, whom
he dubbed his "special team," and his investigation grew.

Garrison reinterviewed Jack Martin and found that Oswald had been part
of that strange entourage of agents in and out of Banister's Camp Street
office. He found that Banister and his associates were involved in activities
far afield from normal New Orleans activity-honest or otherwise. There
were tales of burglarized armories, missing weapons, raided ammunition
caches and gun-running operations. Garrison wrote: "The Banister apparatus . . . was part of a supply line that ran along the Dallas-New
Orleans-Miami corridor. These supplies consisted of arms and explosives
for use against Castro's Cuba."

By 1966, Banister was dead-he suffered a reported heart attack in June
1964-and Garrison was looking for a living person to prosecute in the
conspiracy that he had begun to unravel.