Although the CIA’s failure to inform the Warren Commission of its plots against Castro’s life was obviously wrong and a serious violation of responsibility and trust, it did not seem to inhibit the Warren Commission’s investigation, as conspiracy theorists would want us to believe. Also, two important considerations have to have been at play here. One is too obvious to state—that the CIA, for purposes of national security and geopolitical considerations, didn’t want it to be known to the outside world, or even internally in the United States, that it was involved to the sordid business of trying to murder a foreign leader. Second, the CIA and FBI, like all rational people, knew almost within hours that Oswald had killed Kennedy. And from the realization of who Oswald was as well as the surrounding circumstances (for instance, no one assisting Oswald to escape or driving him to his death), they became very confident early on that he acted alone. So concealing the collateral truth of the plot to kill Castro would not invalidate the central truth that Oswald acted alone.
No one has put the reason for the CIA’s (and FBI’s) failure to inform the Warren Commission of the Castro plots any better than writer and assassination researcher Max Holland. Concerning those members of the CIA (and FBI, attorney general’s office, etc.) who were confronted with the issue of whether to inform the Warren Commission about the plots or not, he writes,
Officials in the know faced a genuine dilemma only if they had information pointing [to the Cuban government’s involvement with Oswald in the assassination]. The Warren Commission could not [be allowed to] deliver to the American people and the world a false conclusion—that might well affect the stability of the government or shake important institutions to their foundations. But there was every reason not to spill secrets that merely echoed the finding that Oswald acted alone. The Commission, though denied important supporting information, would still publish the correct conclusion, and the U.S. Government could keep its deepest secrets. It was a convenient act of denial and dismissal, but also one perceived as necessary in the midst of the cold war. Complete candor would not have changed the Report’s two essential conclusions at all—though it might have done a great deal to prevent its slide into disrepute later.48
The bottom line is that the CIA withheld the information from the Warren Commission solely to protect its reputation, as sullied as many people believe it already was, not to conceal its involvement with Oswald in the assassination. The CIA’s dirty laundry not only handcuffed it from telling the truth, but also deterred the U.S. Department of Justice from prosecuting a member of organized crime. In a May 10, 1962, memo about a meeting he had had with RFK the previous day, Hoover, talking about mobster Sam Giancana’s unlawful organized-crime activities, wrote, “He [Kennedy] stated of course it would be very difficult to initiate any prosecution against [Giancana] because Giancana could immediately bring out the fact that the United States Government had approached him to arrange for the assassination of Castro.”49
The conspiracy theorists have tried to convert the FBI’s attempt (in destroying Oswald’s note to Hosty) to avoid the accusation it could have prevented the assassination, and the CIA’s attempt to cover up its misdeeds on another matter (plot to kill Castro), into an attempt by both agencies to cover up their participation in the assassination of President Kennedy. This is the world of non sequiturs and enormous broad jumps in which the conspiracy theorists dwell and for which they are justifiably famous.
Jim Garrison’s Prosecution of Clay Shaw and Oliver Stone’s Movie JFK
Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie, JFK, was inspired by and primarily based on New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s 1988 book, On the Trail of the Assassins, which chronicles Garrison’s investigation and unsuccessful 1969 prosecution of New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw for conspiring, the March 22, 1967, indictment said, “with David W. Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald and others to murder John F. Kennedy.” It is, to this day, the only prosecution ever arising out of Kennedy’s murder.
Clay Shaw was an urbane, accomplished, cultured man and a very respected figure in New Orleans’s civil and social life. Indeed, in the March 1967 issue of New Orleans’ Town and Country Magazine, he was listed, along with Garrison, as one of the thirty-five “most important men in New Orleans.” After serving in the Second World War, reaching the rank of major and being awarded the Croix de Guerre (the French military award for heroism in battle) and the Bronze Star, Shaw was one of the founders of the New Orleans International Trade Mart, where he served as managing director from 1946 to 1965. He was the moving force behind the eventual construction of a thirty-three-story headquarters for the Mart on Canal Street. The Mart, credited with substantially increasing trade at the port of New Orleans, was a model for cities around the world.
Shaw was also an integral force in the restoration of the historic French Quarter, one of the sixteen homes he restored being the 1821 residence of the noted naturalist John James Audubon. Shaw’s work was of such quality that it caught the attention of such publications as House & Garden, House & Home, and Town & Country. The six-foot four-inch, silver-haired, distinguished-looking man was fluent in four languages, traveled widely, reportedly once dined with Churchill, read the great books of literature, regularly attended the symphony, opera, and ballet, and became an accomplished playwright (Submerged, The Idol’s Eye, and others). He lived in a showplace home in the French Quarter with a brass-knockered red door, and his circle of friends included the likes of Tennessee Williams. It was not publicly known that he was also a homosexual. (Garrison, of course, subtly exploited this fact to give more credibility to his allegation that Shaw conspired with Ferrie, another homosexual.) Above all, Shaw was a gentleman, one who could hardly muster up more than a sense of pity for the sick man who was, without any justification, destroying his life. As someone once described Shaw, he was “the unlikeliest villain since Oscar Wilde.”
Indeed, the immediate reaction to the charges against Shaw among the great many in New Orleans who knew him was of stunned disbelief. “Garrison can’t be serious,” “Clay Shaw? Incredible,” “Impossible,” “The most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” and similar responses were heard throughout the Crescent City. Many even found it humorous that the DA actually thought a man like Shaw would be involved in a plot to assassinate “anyone, let alone a President of the United States.”1 But these responses were only from those who knew him personally. Most of the people of New Orleans didn’t, and like citizens of any city, they made the normal assumption that Garrison, the district attorney of their parish, wouldn’t bring such serious charges against anyone unless he thought he had something substantial.
As for Shaw’s politics, two New Orleans reporters at the time who were very familiar with him, said, “Those closest to him identify him as a liberal, and many say he was an ardent admirer of President Kennedy…Shaw described himself as a liberal of the old-fashioned Wilson-Roosevelt breed.”2 Indeed, Shaw said he voted for Kennedy in 1960 and felt Kennedy was an excellent president, “in the same tradition” of Wilson and Roosevelt.3
When Shaw learned from Assistant DA Andrew Sciambra on March 1, 1967, that Garrison actually intended to charge him that day with conspiracy to murder Kennedy, he exclaimed to Sciambra, “You’ve got to be kidding, you’ve got to be kidding.” Sciambra said he wasn’t and asked Shaw to take a polygraph test, which Shaw indignantly refused to do.* In his lawyer’s office the next day after being charged, Shaw told a large throng of reporters that he did not know Oswald or Ferrie, had never been to Ferrie’s apartment, and had not “conspired with anyone at any time or at any place to murder our late and esteemed president,” adding that he had “only the highest and utmost respect and admiration” for Kennedy.4†
David Ferrie was a manic-depressive, cartoonish figure who wore a scruffy, red homemade wig and fake oversized eyebrows (he was hairless due to the disease alopecia praecox)—in short, someone not normally seen outside a carnival tent. The son of a Cleveland police captain, and a Roman Catholic by birth,
Ferrie, in his frenetic existence, was, among other things, a seminary student in Cleveland for two years in his early twenties, a commercial pilot for Eastern Airlines, a flying instructor, high school aeronautical science teacher, private investigator, accomplished pianist, service station proprietor, psychologist without credentials, hypnotist, self-styled clergyman of the Orthodox Old Catholic Church of North America, and searcher for a cure for cancer, at one time sharing his book-strewn apartment in New Orleans with white mice he kept for research purposes. He was, by virtually all accounts, a “brilliant” but tormented man. Ferrie had ambivalent feelings about Kennedy in general but was highly condemnatory of the president for allegedly withdrawing air support to the anti-Castro invading force at the Bay of Pigs, and became actively involved in the anti-Castro movement in New Orleans. His anti-Communism was such that he made the irrational charge that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations had been “driving us to communism.”5 Garrison at one time believed that Ferrie, who had been fired as an Eastern Airlines pilot in 1961 because of charges pending against him that he had sexual relations with a fifteen-year-old boy, was supposed to have flown Kennedy’s real killers (not Oswald) away from Dallas after the assassination.
With respect to the third member of Garrison’s alleged conspiracy, Garrison believed that “not one” shot “was fired by Lee Harvey Oswald.”6 Oswald’s supposed role in the conspiracy was to present himself to the world as a pro-Castro Marxist, though, per Garrison, his “political orientation was extreme right wing.” Garrison maintained that Oswald was manipulated by his co-conspirators into unwittingly setting himself up as a decoy and patsy so that the real killers of Kennedy could escape. Kennedy was murdered, per Garrison, “by a precision guerrilla team of at least seven men” located at the grassy knoll, the Book Depository Building, and the Dal-Tex Building. One man fired from each location, a separate one picking up the shells. One member of the team feigned an epileptic seizure as a diversionary tactic just before the motorcade reached the ambush point.7
In Garrison’s mind, lurking behind the scenes and pulling the strings on the three marionettes—Shaw, Ferrie, and Oswald—were rogue elements of the CIA. “The Central Intelligence Agency was deeply involved in the assassination,” Garrison announced on January 31, 1968, on national television (Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show). Three weeks later he fine-tuned it. “President Kennedy was killed by elements of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States Government,” he told TV reporter Willem L. Oltmans on February 22,1968. Ferrie, Garrison told Oltmans, was a “CIA employee” and Oswald “worked for the CIA.”8 Indeed, in Garrison’s book on the assassination he goes so far as to say that Shaw’s connection with the CIA may actually have been high enough “to request that I be eliminated.”9 In a July 19, 1967, television interview with station WKBW in Buffalo, Garrison said, “The CIA knows the names of every man involved in the assassination, including the names of the individuals who pulled the triggers from the grassy knoll.”
Although Garrison, before the trial, told anyone who would listen that the CIA was behind the assassination, he produced no evidence at the trial of CIA involvement and presented no evidence that Oswald, Ferrie, or Shaw was ever associated, in any way, with the CIA or any other agency of U.S. intelligence. Remarkably, not once at the trial did Garrison or his team even mention the CIA.
Jim Garrison,* a former pilot who flew thirty-five reconnaissance missions in France and Germany during World War II and a former FBI agent (for four months), ran successfully for New Orleans DA in 1962 as a fiercely independent “reform” candidate with the image of an honest loner taking on a corrupt and entrenched establishment. Though he had little money, he used it judiciously, hoarding it until the last moment, then saturating the television screens in New Orleans with commercials during the final twenty-four hours of the campaign. (He had lost two previous political races, for assessor in 1957 and criminal district judge in 1960.) Once elected, the flamboyant, bright, and articulate forty-one-year-old immediately initiated a blitzkrieg campaign against vice on Bourbon Street by personally—with the cameras clicking—padlocking or raiding honky-tonks, striptease joints, and gay bars. He also attacked the city’s bail bond system as corrupt and assailed the New Orleans Police Department as being soft on crime.10 But Garrison never went after organized crime in New Orleans, causing some to suspect he was involved with the mob. However, almost invariably in major U.S. cities, organized-crime prosecutions are brought by federal authorities (Department of Justice, FBI, and U.S. attorneys), not state or local law enforcement.
In any event, in October of 1966, when Garrison seriously commenced his investigation into the assassination of Kennedy (he had first made a preliminary inquiry immediately following the president’s death into Oswald’s alleged connection with Ferrie, but it went nowhere), he was a popular DA among the electorate. In a city and state where corruption among oftentimes colorful public officials was so common it was accepted with bemused tolerance by the people,* Garrison, appearing incorruptible, was to many a breath of fresh air. The six-foot six-inch (some said six-foot seven-inch) prosecutor, who carried an equally outsized ego and was called the “Jolly Green Giant,” had a charismatic, populist aura, and deep mellifluous voice that even charmed some of his adversaries. As a reporter would later write, “New Orleans fell in love with him. He looked like Perry Mason and sounded like Eliot Ness,”11 and his lovely blonde wife, Leah, the mother of his five children, was considered a political asset by the city’s denizens.
When news of Garrison’s investigation became known in the conspiracy community, the buffs flocked to New Orleans like swallows to San Juan Capistrano. Though they had been screaming their conspiracy blather before the Warren Commission’s report even came off the presses in 1964, they were on the outside looking in, and no one in authority on the inside was paying any attention to them. Now someone on the inside—though not the federal government—with an institutional base and the power of subpoena was saying the same thing they were, and they were excited and delighted. The office of the New Orleans district attorney gave an immediate cachet to their allegations. Down to New Orleans came Mark Lane and Penn Jones, Richard Popkin, Tom Katen and Vincent Salandria, Edward Jay Epstein, William Turner and Jones Harris, Harold Weisberg and David Lifton, Mary Ferrell, Mae Brussel, Richard E. Sprague, Raymond Marcus, Allan Chapman and social satirist Mort Sahl, among others, to volunteer their services in aid of the investigation.
These people couldn’t have been more dedicated. Sahl, to give you one illustrative example, was at the top of his game as the premier intellectual stand-up comic of his time, an intimate of Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe who dined with the likes of President Nixon, shared the cover of Time magazine with Nixon and JFK (August 8, 1960), and made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Enduring the ridicule of his peers for identifying himself with someone as unpopular with the mainstream media as Garrison, he worked with Garrison off and on for four years without a cent of salary, even expense money, his yearly income dipping to as low as $13,000 during this period. But the cause (a “responsibility to America” as Sahl put it) transcended everything else for Sahl and his colleagues. Upon arriving in New Orleans, Sahl had taken a cab to Garrison’s home at 4600 Owens Boulevard in the city. “I walked to the door,” Sahl would later write, “and a man emerged, all six foot seven inches of him, wearing a bathrobe. I said, ‘I’m Mort Sahl, and I came down here to shake your hand.’ ‘I hope you’re available to do a lot more than that,’” Garrison replied. Sahl said he got “a desk in the DA’s office, took an apartment in New Orleans, and went out to do college concerts when I needed money to buy groceries and pay the rent.” Sahl would later tell Johnny Carson on his show that Garrison was “the most important man in America.”12
Perhaps with a bit of hyperbole, William Gurvich, a private investigator who assisted Garrison’s office in the initial phases of the investigation, told Edward Wegmann, Shaw’s civil attorney for years who help
ed put together the criminal defense team that represented Shaw at his trial, that much of the early investigative work was done, not by Garrison’s office, but by Warren Commission critics like Sahl who had descended on New Orleans. In fact, as with Sahl, Garrison actually gave several of them, who had come to be known as the “Dealey Plaza Irregulars,” DA investigator credentials. But other than Bill Turner, a former FBI agent and perhaps the only Dealey Plaza Irregular whom Garrison called to help out, not one of them had one day of experience in investigating a crime. Thomas Bethell, a member of Garrison’s regular staff, said at the time that the trouble with these conspiracy theorists “is that the only way they can make a strong impression on Garrison is by coming up with flamboyant nonsense…They, therefore, represent a serious threat to the sanity of the investigation.”13
But long before a New Orleans jury, after thirty-four days of trial testimony and argument, returned a swift verdict of not guilty against Shaw on March 1, 1969, two years to the day after Garrison had charged Shaw with conspiracy to murder Kennedy, most of the conspiracy theorists had departed from New Orleans, totally disenchanted with Garrison and his investigation (Mark Lane and Mort Sahl were among the few who stayed to the bitter end). What they had found in Garrison, to their dismay, was the embodiment of an overzealous prosecutor who wanted to get a conviction at any cost, one totally devoid of all prosecutorial ethics. The buffs may believe in crazy conspiracy theories, but they do not believe in prosecuting an innocent man (which Clay Shaw unquestionably was) for murder with perjurious testimony. Garrison had crossed the line, even with the buffs, and they denounced him. Respected assassination researcher Paul Hoch, who leans toward the conspiracy theory, said that Garrison had prosecuted someone “I believe was innocent.”14 Referring to the “persecution” of Shaw by Garrison, he said that though Shaw may have had some connections to the CIA, this in no way justified Oliver Stone “ignoring what Garrison did to him.”15 Leading Warren Commission critic and conspiracy maven Sylvia Meagher wrote that “as the Garrison investigation continued to unfold, it gave cause for increasingly serious misgivings about the validity of his evidence, the credibility of his witnesses, and the scrupulousness of his methods.”16 There is no better or substantive book on the assassination attacking the findings of the Warren Commission than Josiah Thompson’s Six Seconds in Dallas. Thompson’s assessment of Garrison’s investigation and prosecution of Shaw? “Completely without merit.”17 Even David Lifton, who took a solitary journey into dementia with his book Best Evidence, found Garrison, after only a few days’ exposure to him, to be “a reckless, irrational, even paranoid demagogue” who might, he wrote, “seriously hurt innocent people.”18
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