A Farewell to Justice

by Joan Mellen

  At a Wednesday breakfast meeting, Garrison discussed how the federal government had protected David Chandler. Life magazine was “performing a vital function for the present administration . . . by withholding the Zapruder film, which showed that President Kennedy was shot from the front.” State government, Garrison suggested, was “the last defense in this country against totalitarianism.”

  The week would culminate in a Saturday night awards banquet with Vice-President Hubert Humphrey as the dinner speaker. But as soon as Humphrey heard that Garrison had criticized Lyndon Johnson for withholding the Zapruder film, he canceled his appearance. Jim Garrison, instead, would address the group. Hoover refused to allow his representative to be in the same room with Jim Garrison so that his award had to be presented on Friday afternoon when Garrison would not be present.

  The organizing committee faced a dilemma: What would Garrison say in his speech? They consulted Charlie Ward, who was chairman of the convention committee.

  “The last thing I’m going to do is tell Jim Garrison what he can say,” Ward said. “I would be wasting my time.” Garrison did agree to meet with the committee at two in the afternoon on the day of the banquet. There Bill Raggio, DA of Reno, Nevada, told him he was not to attack either the president or federal judges, and he must not discuss the Kennedy assassination at all.

  “Gentlemen, if that’s all that’s on your minds,” Garrison said, “I can put you at ease. I’m not only going to speak about it, but I’m going to speak about it at length. What would you think the delegates would like to hear me talk about—the French and Spanish influence on contemporary New Orleans architecture?” He admitted he planned to “go into the activities of Lyndon Johnson in concealing vital evidence concerning the murder of John F. Kennedy.”

  When Raggio requested an advance written copy of Garrison’s remarks, Garrison laughed. When Raggio said, “there will be no speech by you tonight,” Garrison told him not to worry because he was not going to talk at the banquet. . . . Garrison paused. “Because there will be no banquet.”

  Instead there would be a dance. Garrison shipped the banquet food to local orphanages: St. Elizabeth’s, St. Vincent’s, and the Protestant Children’s Home. He commandeered the banquet room, and no other hotel would cross the Orleans Parish district attorney by providing another. Among those that night in New Orleans who went to bed “without their supper,” as one newspaper put it, was G. Robert Blakey, now an adviser to the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement.

  Jim Garrison offered a parting word to his colleagues, each of whom had paid eight dollars for the dinner.

  “If you want the money for your tickets back,” Garrison said, “you can sue me in federal court!”

  Later, on television, Garrison said that Mr. Raggio should consider the lost $3,000 his fee for the lesson in free speech. Only one district attorney attended the dance, Charlie Marlin Moylan, who dubbed the incident the “last supper.” As a swing band played “You’re the Cream in My Coffee,” Jim Garrison took the microphone and sang. Departing, he confiscated the official flag of the district attorneys.

  “Jim, you can’t do that,” Liz protested.

  “I just did,” he said.

  As the investigation wound down, the Shaw defense sought refuge in the friendly federal courts. “How many witnesses have you intimidated?” William Wegmann dared to ask Moo Moo Sciambra on the stand.

  Tom Bethell had been assigned to compile a list of potential prosecution witnesses for the Shaw trial. It began with Perry Russo and Vernon Bundy, and included Charles Spiesel and Francis Martello. Bethell asked a volunteer named Jim Brown to write up everything that went on in the office.

  On June 6th, 1968, Tom Bethell ran into Shaw lawyer Salvatore Panzeca in the hallway of the federal courthouse. Bethell confided to Panzeca that he had just written a memorandum of the list of trial witnesses, a list the prosecution was then under no legal obligation to share with the defense. Driving off in Panzeca’s car, Bethell blurted out the names of the prosecution witnesses while Panzeca spoke them back aloud, memorizing. By the end of the day, Panzeca had a copy of Bethell’s memo in his clutches. Meeting with Bethell two days later at the Cafe du Monde, Panzeca remarked that the Shaw defense would now investigate each of the witnesses named in the memo.

  It wasn’t until January 1969 that Garrison’s staff surmised that someone in the office had provided the Shaw defense team with a list of their witnesses. Bethell feared Garrison’s staff might suspect him and subject him to a polygraph. He asked Panzeca’s advice.

  You should express your indignation and refuse, Panzeca said. And, by the way, was the prosecution planning to use Fred Leemans? By now Leemans had admitted that he had lied for Walter Sheridan.

  On January 13th, a weeping Tom Bethell confessed to Lou Ivon. Immune to the tears, Ivon inquired where Bethell got the extra copy of the trial memo. When Panzeca had driven him back to the courthouse, he had made the copy, Bethell admitted.

  Five days later, David Chandler invited Bethell to a party, his official welcome to the Shaw team. Was Perry Russo going to be the main witness for the state? Chandler wanted to know.

  With fewer leads materializing, in the hope of obtaining more evidence, Jim Garrison was not averse to making contact with foreign intelligence agencies. William Turner sent Jim Rose to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City to ask for information about the Kennedy assassination. Rose was told that a “package would arrive with everything we know.” During that trip, ever flirtatious, Rose picked up two women. He told them that in the current Newsweek they could read the name of the person who financed the assassination: the article was about Texas millionaire Gordon McClendon.

  A month later, in March of 1968, Jim Garrison had in his possession a manuscript called The Plot, which he renamed Farewell America. It came from the NKVD, Boxley declared. Farewell America was a ragtag jumble of disinformation designed for no purpose other than to distract Jim Garrison from naming the CIA as his chief suspect. “The upper sphere of the CIA were certainly not informed of the preparations for the assassination,” pseudonymous author “James Hepburn” writes. Accepting that there had been a conspiracy, Farewell America invokes a kitchen sink of sponsors, including even “agency rogue elements,” which “might” have had a hand.

  But the real sponsor was South Texas oil interests and the Hunt family. The Hemming litany of false sponsors appears: Drennan, Wheat and Gale, Minutemen and Birchites. Farewell America damns John F. Kennedy as a “socialist,” and blames his aide Kenny O’Donnell for not taking precautions to protect him. Jackie is indicted for snobbery and unseemly curtsying to the Duke of Edinburgh on the day of her husband’s funeral, while the Duke eyes her with disdain. Like Clay Shaw, “Hepburn” affects admiration for Woodrow Wilson.

  Farewell America, which contained no footnotes, was so shoddy that no American publisher would touch it. Although Garrison requested “Hepburn’s” source notes, no documentation would ever be forthcoming. The next volume would name the murderer, “Frontiers Publishing” promised. Garrison sent the greenest of his California volunteers to Geneva in pursuit of the notes, but Stephen Jaffe returned empty-handed. The author, Herve Lamarre, turned out to be not a KGB operative, but a scion of French intelligence doing the CIA a favor.

  Lamarre offered Jaffe a share of the profits should he find an American publisher for Farewell America, which would have made Jaffe a Garrison volunteer accomplishing the Agency’s disinformational work. For a film version, a Robert Kennedy acolyte named Richard Lubic put a copy of the Zapruder film into Lamarre’s hands. Bobby had so compromised himself that he was once again directly helping the CIA cover up the death of his brother. Jaffe’s youth was met by Harold Weisberg’s aging foolishness: Weisberg now showed H. L. Hunt’s man Paul Rothermel documents Garrison had entrusted to him. Rothermel then sent them off at once to J. Gordon Shanklin, SAC in Dallas, and to Congressman Earle Cabell. Carbons went to the CIA.

  Jim Garrison, at this late stage
of his investigation, wanted to believe that Farewell America was genuine, that an intelligence agency of a foreign country had been “extremely cooperative,” and, having “penetrated the assassination operation,” had provided valuable information. In fact, Farewell America was a fraud. When the film version portrayed Edgar Eugene Bradley as one of the tramps, something Garrison now doubted, he at last stepped back and repudiated it. The film echoes Boxley in blaming J. Edgar Hoover for the assassination. As one of the more sober California volunteers realized, the film of Farewell America was nothing more than “a sophisticated piece of anti-Garrison propaganda.”

  Boxleys final attempt to derail Jim Garrison’s investigation was his identifying the man who fired the fatal shot on the grassy knoll as Robert Lee Perrin, a Ruby gun runner whose wife, Nancy, had been a bartender at the Carousel Club. Nancy Perrin Rich had told the Warren Commission that she and her husband had been involved in exfiltrating Cubans and infiltrating Enfield rifles to Cuba; the group’s paymaster was Jack Ruby. Officer Tippit had been the first person she contacted when she moved to Dallas in 1961. Boxley then claimed that Tippit had been killed because he knew that Perrin was one of the assassins. He had “solved the case,” Boxley said.

  The trouble was that Perrin had died in New Orleans on August 28, 1962. Boxley had an answer for that. Perrin had not died at all, he claimed; the body found belonged to an itinerant Venezuelan sailor. Helping Boxley with this scenario, which would have destroyed Garrison’s investigation, was a Confidential magazine writer named Joel Palmer.

  Boxley termed Edgar Eugene Bradley “the most important CIA executioner.” He declared that he had located a family who lived in Perrin’s building and connected Bradley to Perrin. Boxley also named a “Bertram Norwood Youngblood” as a witness who had met Perrin, using the pseudonym Jack Starr, a month after Perrin’s purported death, not realizing that the name “Youngblood” belonged to a Dealey Plaza witness, no less than to Rose Cheramie. The Perrins had first planned to assassinate Kennedy at the Nashville wharf, Boxley and Palmer insisted.

  Lou Ivon had lost his patience. Ivon demanded that Boxley must go. When Garrison persisted in defending him, and permitted him to remain with the office, Ivon “quit.” In Oliver Stone’s JFK, Ivon makes the first move and returns to Tulane and Broad. In real life, Jim Garrison admitted his mistake, and knowing that he could not continue without Ivon, he telephoned. “Come back,” he said. Louie rested for a few days, and then returned.

  Together with Moo Moo Sciambra, Lou Ivon reinvestigated the Perrin lead, only to discover that Perrin’s landlord Kruschevski denied everything Boxley had claimed: he had not said Perrin was fifty years old, as Boxley claimed, a necessary distortion because there was a fourteen-year difference between Perrin and the “Jack Starr” he supposedly became. He had not seen a man wearing a reddish brown wig, as Boxley had attempted to throw David Ferrie into the mix. A neighbor named Mason Kittess told Sciambra and Ivon that it was Boxley who had identified Bradley, and told him that Bradley had been involved: Kittess had never identified a photograph of Bradley. Boxley had shown him the tramp photograph, himself insisting that it pictured Edgar Eugene Bradley.

  Moo Moo and Louie saved Jim Garrison from issuing an arrest warrant for the dead Perrin. Palmer then retaliated by claiming that Garrison planned further charges against Bradley, which was not true. Now Ivon compiled his evidence against Boxley: Boxley had falsely accused Barbara Reid of being an “agent.” He was inexplicably secretive, so that once, riding with Ivon, he hid his face as a car passed theirs. Boxley’s role in the charging of Bradley had been unconscionable. There was a common denominator to Boxley’s work: his fervent effort to exonerate the CIA.

  The entire California contingent with which Boxley had worked now left the investigation. Steve Burton mailed back his credentials, admitting that “certain of the actions of my colleagues” had “dramatized what inexperience can do to embarrass the investigation.” He was referring to Jaffe. “Who was Clay Shaw?” Jim Rose would say years later, as if that name were entirely irrelevant to what he was doing for Jim Garrison. On November 25th, Bill Turner sent in his final memo. Invoking the name of H. L. Hunt, he had come up with a new witness, “Elmer Robert Hyde.” He had a new fact, too: there were two hundred French agents at Dealey Plaza.

  “Flak!” Garrison wrote onto Turner’s memo. “We’re close to Berlin. Not worth follow-up!” On December 9, with the encouragement of his friend, Philadelphia lawyer Vincent Salandria, Garrison finally fired Boxley, accusing him of being “an operative of the Central Intelligence Agency.” Jimmy Alcock had become tight-lipped “with an edge of bitterness”; both he and Ivon believed it would have been better not to go public about Boxley.

  On the advice of William Turner, Boxley fled New Orleans. On December 27th, Boxley telephoned Dr. Stephen Aldrich at the CIA, offering information, and on the next day he called again. The CIA, noting that Boxley had reapplied for employment not only in February, but also in March of 1967, enlisted the FBI to visit Boxley and “request elucidation,” adding they were “prepared to listen.” CIA had been “keeping an eye on him.”

  Boxley drove to Texas and requested a job with the Hunt organization and Paul Rothermel. Rothermel was to call Jim Garrison “a most vindictive left-winger,” and claim that with Boxley’s help he had all along been attempting to “guide” Jim Garrison’s investigation. Boxley now told Rothermel Jim Garrison believed Edgar Eugene Bradley lived across the street from Robert Perrin! It was Garrison who believed that Perrin was involved in a conspiracy with Clay Shaw! Boxley offered to distribute the specious Farewell America. William Turner took on that role, even arranging for a 2002 reissue of the fraudulent book.

  In the midst of all this intrigue, Jim Garrison was accused of being connected with a bankrupt, shady finance organization called Louisiana Loan and Thrift. When they first incorporated, he had considered borrowing money to buy stock. Two days later he had changed his mind. Even the auditors had to admit, despite Aaron Kohn’s rumors: Jim Garrison “was not a stockholder.”

  Agents of the Intelligence Division of the IRS had appeared in New Orleans, threatening Garrison with “criminal prosecution.” They visited Security Homestead, which held the mortgage on his house. “I only owe $50,000,” Garrison said with his customary sardonic irony. Refusing the IRS permission to go through his papers (“I’m not going to cooperate with the federal government,” he said), he told the press that this IRS effort was connected with his investigation. “It never occurred to them,” Garrison added, “that a state would investigate the assassination.”

  In preparation for the Shaw trial, Garrison went into federal court in Washington, DC and requested forty-five photographs and twenty-four X-rays taken before and during John F. Kennedy’s autopsy. The government stalled. Judge Charles Halleck ruled that Garrison had first to produce evidence that the president was fired upon from two directions. “When is that circus in New Orleans going to end so that the real carnival [Mardi Gras] can begin?” Halleck was to say of the Shaw trial. The effort to obtain the medical evidence dragged on after the Shaw trial had begun.

  “You will see,” Garrison wrote Halleck on February 3, 1969, responding to the government’s request for a copy of his opening statement, with irony dripping from his pen, “that a substantial part of our case rests upon the actual shooting of President Kennedy in Dealey Plaza.” It would not matter: the photographs that revealed a gaping exit wound in the rear of Kennedy’s skull, to the dismay of the photographers who took those pictures, had long since disappeared from the medical “evidence.”

  The first half of State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw would be devoted to proving that a conspiracy had in fact occurred at Dealey Plaza. Then Clay Shaw’s involvement had to be demonstrated. At the heart of Garrison’s dilemma was that he was connecting Clay Shaw to Oswald, not because Oswald had been the shooter of President Kennedy, but because he had been set up to be. Nor would Garrison be able to prove that Shaw had origina
ted the plan to manipulate Oswald into assuming the blame for the murder. Yet Shaw was guilty, nonetheless, of the federal crime of treason. “Misprision of treason” includes harboring knowledge of an act of treason or a treasonable plot.

  The choice of witnesses reflected the inadequacy of Garrison’s tiny, overburdened staff. In early January of 1969, a Garrison assistant telephoned Dr. Robert N. McClelland, a surgeon who had attended John F. Kennedy at Parkland Hospital. “We want you to testify,” he said, adding, “If you won’t, we’ll subpoena you.” Dr. McClelland, who believed that his loyalty was to history and not to power, was taken aback. He was entirely willing to testify. “I wonder why you didn’t call me much earlier,” he said.

  The assistant wanted to know first if Dr. McClelland would confirm the handwritten note he had written, stating that there was “a gunshot wound of the left temple.” They planned, Dr. McClelland surmised, to suggest that there had been a gunman in the storm sewer on the left side of the motorcade. “No, I would not testify to that,” McClelland said, “I made a mistake.” He had only written that line about the wound to the left temple because Dr. Jenkins had told him so. So drenched with blood had the head been that no one could have observed such a bullet wound.

  The voice of Garrison’s assistant rose three octaves. “What!” he sputtered. Abruptly, he concluded the conversation. Had he talked with Dr. McClelland a moment longer, he would have learned that from his examination of the head, McClelland believed that the fatal shot had come from behind the picket fence at the grassy knoll, in front of the motorcade and not from the Texas School Book Depository.

  Dr. McClelland, positioned behind the head as he assisted in the tracheotomy, holding the retractor and leaning over the president’s head, had observed that the back of the president’s head had been blown out, and he had been willing to so testify. Viewing the Zapruder film later confirmed Dr. McClelland in his conviction. Someone had hit the president from behind first, so that he was leaning slightly forward before his head exploded and he was thrown violently back against the seat of the car.