False Witness

FALSE WITNESS

THE REAL STORY OF JIM GARRISON'S
INVESTIGATION AND
OLIVER STONE'S
FILM
JFK

Patricia Lambert

Copyright © 1998 by Patricia Lambert

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
any means without the written
permission of the
publisher.

M. Evans and Company, Inc.
216 East 49th Street
New York, New York 10017

ISBN 978-0-87131-920-3

Book design and typesetting by Rik Lain Schell

Printed in the United States of America

9    8    7    6    5    4    3    2    1

For Bill and for Terry

Preface

INTRODUCTION:
Uproar: Fraud in the Arts

PART ONE: Fraud in New Orleans

CHAPTER ONE:
March 1, 1967: The Arrest

CHAPTER TWO:
The Jolly Green Giant

CHAPTER THREE:
First Fathers: The Tipster and the Lawyer

CHAPTER FOUR:
The “Smith” Case

CHAPTER FIVE:
A Tiger by the Tail

CHAPTER SIX:
The Friend

CHAPTER SEVEN:
James Phelan and
The Saturday Evening Post

CHAPTER EIGHT:
The Preliminary Hearing

CHAPTER NINE:
How Garrison Neutralized the Opposition

CHAPTER TEN:
The Trial, Part One: Clay Shaw

CHAPTER ELEVEN:
The Trial, Part Two: The Warren Report

CHAPTER TWELVE:
Shaw vs. Garrison: The Christenberry Decision

Garrison Expounds on the Assassination: A Sampling of his 1967 Theories

PART TWO: Fraud Perpetuated

CHAPTER THIRTEEN:
The Clinton Scenario and the House Select Committee

CHAPTER FOURTEEN:
On the Trail of the Assassins

CHAPTER FIFTEEN:
JFK
: The Film

CHAPTER SIXTEEN:
Garrison Was No Kevin Costner

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:
The Movement and the Files

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:
The Consequences

AFTERWORD:
A Grand Jury Transcript Surfaces

APPENDIX A:
On the Trail of the Assassins
: More Anomalies

APPENDIX B:
Edward O'Donnell's Report to Jim Garrison

Notes

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

Thirty-two years ago, when New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was investigating President Kennedy's murder, I was one of those excited by Garrison's rhetoric, one of those convinced he
had something
. My thinking seemed logical enough. He was an elected official. Such men want to be reelected. If he weren't telling the truth, he wouldn't be. Therefore, he must be telling the truth. I was wrong on both points, but it was two full years before I realized that. I still doubted the official version of the assassination, but by then I knew Garrison had none of the answers.

So it was easy to turn away from him with little thought about my earlier misguided enthusiasm, though even then I experienced a twinge of discomfort about it. Over the years, on the rare occasion when his name came up or something occurred to remind me of that time, the memory was always accompanied by that twinge. Once or twice I even engaged in some minor soul-searching about it. The small personal insights this yielded were overshadowed by the larger mystery that remained. What on earth was Jim Garrison all about? If he didn't have
something
, what then did he have?

In the aftermath of Oliver Stone's film
JFK
, I witnessed history repeating itself. Garrison's spirit, his thinking, and his certitude were loose in the land once more. I felt as though my past had overtaken me. To those other riddles, I now added another. How had Garrison managed to do it again?

In June 1993, I suddenly realized I had to have the answers. Moved by a surprising sense of urgency, I began studying the earliest available records and a few months later was on an airplane headed for that beguiling city where it all happened.

I would return to New Orleans four more times in the next two years and, in between, visit the National Archives. I would read thousands of pages of documents and interview many of the principals involved.

This book tells what I learned.

One day in December 1988, Hollywood's self-styled guerrilla filmmaker Oliver Stone was in Cuba, attending a Latin American film festival when he stepped onto an elevator in Havana's old Nacional Hotel. There, an obscure New York publisher named Ellen Ray thrust a book into his hands.
²
The unlikely convergence of Ellen Ray and Oliver Stone in that Havana elevator would beget, three years later, the most controversial film ever created about an American historical event and provoke a thunderous media uproar that is unresolved even now. The cause of it all was the book Ray pressed upon Stone that day. It was
On the Trail of the Assassins
, the story of President Kennedy's assassination as told by former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison.

Stone later told an interviewer that he had been doubtful about Ellen Ray at first, thinking she was just another “advocate of a cause.” But he took Garrison's book with him to the Philippines where he was shooting
Born on the Fourth of July
. (Like
Platoon
, it excoriated the Vietnam War and it, too, would win an Academy Award.) Stone ended up reading the book three times.

The relaxed and intimate first person narrative, which is almost seductively easy to read, described Garrison's 1960s investigation and how he discovered the plot that had taken the president's life. According to him, it was a CIA operation, with a contingent in New Orleans run by a local businessman named Clay Shaw, a prominent figure in the community and a closet homosexual. Arrested by Garrison on March 1, 1967, and charged with conspiring to murder the president,
Shaw was the only individual ever tried for the crime. He was quickly acquitted, but Garrison blamed the verdict on a prosecution witness he said gave
lunatic testimony
on cross-examination and his own failure to establish Shaw's connection with the CIA.

Garrison told a plausible-sounding story that transported the crime from the narrow boundaries of Dealey Plaza to a larger, more appropriate stage; and he cast as villains an organization many Americans had come to believe was capable of anything. Assassination books tend to be grim and unreadable, but Garrison had written an interesting one. In the process, he transformed his prosecution of Clay Shaw, which the
New York Times
called “one of the most disgraceful chapters in the history of American jurisprudence,” into a righteous enterprise.

Stone later said he was “deeply moved and appalled” by Garrison's story. Until then, he had thought little about the assassination and had accepted the conclusion of the Warren Report that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot the president. Garrison, Stone said, opened his eyes. It was through Garrison's book that Stone first learned the “facts” of the case. More important was its Vietnam theme, Garrison's claim that President Kennedy's plan to withdraw from there triggered the assassination. For Stone, a twice-wounded Vietnam veteran, that war was the watershed experience of his adult life. In Garrison's story, Stone had found his own personal Rosetta stone, an explanation for why he had ended up in the jungles of southeast Asia. He embraced it all as gospel. Over the next twenty-four months, he traveled to New Orleans three or four times each year, slipping into the city quietly and meeting secretly with Garrison. Like others before him, Stone fell under Garrison's spell.

“Anyone who has experienced the six-hour lecture from Garrison,” wrote columnist Max Lerner after a visit to Garrison's home at the height of his assassination celebrity, “knows that, like a Merlin, he draws you into his never-never land world where everything is upside down, and you get the magical sense of a total reversal of reality.” Lerner was enthralled for awhile, he recalled, until his “sanity” was restored.

Oliver Stone's reality reversal was permanent. He stepped into Garrison's magic web and never stepped out. He saw in Garrison's experience material for a film that would reveal what he described as “the untold story” of the assassination. Stone optioned the book himself. “I
wanted to get this story out,” he said. And so he did. Stone proceeded to create a movie energized by the passion he felt about the Vietnam war that turned the history of the Garrison investigation upside down and pulled fifty million moviegoers into Garrison's “never-never land world.”

The process was not easy. Along the way, Stone encountered a major bump in the road. During the summer of 1991, while he was still shooting the film, the media erupted with stories challenging his intentions.

The instigator was Harold Weisberg, an aging and ill first-generation assassination investigator, best known for his
Whitewash
series of books. Weisberg, part of that loose-knit community of writers and researchers originally known as the critics of the Warren Report, had acquired firsthand knowledge of Garrison's shortcomings back in the sixties when he had traveled to New Orleans and for a time assisted him. Stone was in Vietnam most of that period and had missed the Garrison phenomenon. Appalled that a film glorifying Garrison was being planned, Weisberg tried to enlighten Stone in a letter. Stone's response, which came from his assistant, was entirely unsatisfactory to Weisberg, who then took a dramatic step that struck at the heart of Stone's operation.

From the outset, Stone had engaged in extraordinary security precautions. Even the name of the film, known only as “Project X,” was a secret. Crew members were required to sign nondisclosure statements. Stone had his office swept for bugs, and drafts of the screenplay were numbered and locked away. Nevertheless, Weisberg obtained a copy of the script and leaked it to columnist George Lardner, Jr., at the
Washington Post
.
³
This ignited what would eventually become a firestorm of criticism from journalists who had covered Garrison's investigation and retained strong opinions about him.
*

The
Dallas Morning News
led off with an article that labeled Stone's plan “morally repugnant.” Lardner followed that with a scathing attack on the “errors and absurdities” in the screenplay and on Stone himself. Stone, Lardner wrote, was “chasing fiction.” Lardner also called Garrison's investigation “a fraud.” Stone fired off a response defending his film, and, in a disquieting echo of Garrison's reaction to criticism a quarter century earlier, implied that Lardner was working for the government's intelligence
community. Lardner threatened to sue, but reportedly accepted instead a complete retraction from Stone. Before long, others were expressing their opinions both pro and con, sometimes passionately, occasionally with a good deal of wit, mostly in letters to the editor and newspaper editorials around the country. Stone seemed genuinely wounded by this unprecedented barrage of media criticism before his film was even finished. But he benefited from all that free press coverage. As one observer noted once the film was released, Stone was riding a wave of negative publicity.