False Witness (45 page)

An article Lifton wrote about his experience with Garrison contains
a number of interesting threads. Garrison's paranoia and his “evidence” parallel James Phelan's experience in Las Vegas seven months earlier. “If a man walked by with a briefcase,” Lifton wrote, “Garrison would point to him and whisper, ‘That's an FBI agent.' ” Garrison revealed to Lifton a telephone number that Garrison said was absolute proof of a link between Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby because it appeared in both Oswald's address book and on Ruby's telephone bill. Lifton hurried home, checked out Oswald's telephone book in the Warren Report's twenty-six volumes and discovered that the number (PE-8-1951) indeed was there. But it was a Fort Worth television station (KTVT, Channel 11). Oswald and Ruby were no more linked by this than they would have been by the gas company's telephone number. Anyone might have such a number in his address book; anyone might have called it and therefore have it appear on his telephone bill.

When Lifton pointed that out to Garrison the next day, he became “annoyed” and told Lifton to “stop arguing the defense.” But Lifton persisted. He inquired what Garrison thought it meant. “Is there someone at the TV station who you can prove knew both men?” “It means,” Garrison replied, “whatever the jury decides it means.” “But what do you think, Jim?” Lifton demanded, “What is the
truth
of the matter?” At that, Garrison responded with a remark that fairly stunned Lifton: “After the fact,” Garrison said, “there is no truth, there is
only
what the jury decides.” (That is, there is only what
works
.) That admission explained “much of what has happened,” Lifton wrote. “It is a convenient and accurate synopsis of Jim Garrison's approach to fact-finding, truth-finding, and justice.”
¹

After his fifteen hours with the Jolly Green Giant and Kerry Thornley's indictment, Lifton was convinced that Garrison was “a reckless, irrational, even paranoid demagogue,” as Lifton wrote, who, before he was finished, might “seriously hurt innocent people.” Lifton was an early naysaying voice raised against Garrison from the ranks of the critics. Another was Sylvia Meagher, who excoriated her colleagues for failing to carry out a “disinterested evaluation of Garrison's evidence.”
*
But most of the early critics jumped on Garrison's bandwagon and a number of them turned up in New Orleans volunteering their theories and some of them their
time. These Dealey Plaza Irregulars, as they were tagged, included Mark Lane, William Turner, Mary Ferrell, Harold Weisberg, Ray Marcus, Mort Sahl, and others. Garrison's thinking was deeply influenced by many of them, Lane and Weisberg in particular. But then, Garrison never encountered a conspiracy idea he didn't like. His constantly shifting public statements reflect that. Weisberg, who claimed he convinced Garrison of the Cubans' involvement and the CIA's, became disillusioned in time, as did others. The anti-Garrison camp grew after he revealed his evidence at Shaw's trial. Paul Hoch and many more joined it at that point. Today, Meagher is deceased and Lifton and Hoch are among the few visible members of the new movement willing to speak out against Garrison.

Oliver Stone and his organized effort to free the files created this new movement. Nothing like it existed before. The previous group of loose-knit researchers and writers, noted for their curious personalities and occasional stunning hostilities, squabbled among themselves, formed shifting alliances, and journeyed down decidedly independent paths. They agreed on little and rarely engaged in any unified action. Today's new movement nurtures consensus and organization, steered by Garrison-Stone disciples and their “Governing Boards,” “Advisory Boards,” “Executive Boards,” and “Boards of Directors.” They sponsor events, plan actions, publish newsletters, and rally the forces.

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:

When Sylvia Meagher wrote expressing her horror over his plight but objecting to the efforts of his attorneys to have the Warren Report made binding on the judiciary, Shaw made his position clear. In his four-page response, he said he found the Report's flaws understandable and its “central conclusions . . . absolutely correct and valid,” and he laid out the logic of his thinking.
¹¹

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.