Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  In his first book on the assassination, Heritage of Stone, published one year after Clay Shaw’s 1969 trial, Garrison, incredibly, never talks about Clay Shaw once in the entire 224 pages. (He does in his book On the Trail of the Assassins in 1988, nineteen years later.) Nor Perry Russo. In fact, Clay Shaw’s name only appears three times in the book, in three separate footnotes at the back, and then only when the source for the testimony of two witnesses at Shaw’s trial is listed as “State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw.” Since the cover of Heritage of Stone says that the book is Garrison’s “own version of the conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK,” why wasn’t Shaw, the only man Garrison prosecuted for conspiracy to murder Kennedy, mentioned?136‡

  So we see, from all of Garrison’s conduct showing what his motivations probably were for prosecuting Shaw, that Oliver Stone’s movie, at its very core, was one huge lie. Stone himself seems to have sensed what Garrison was up to, and embraced it. Though he tried, in every way he could, to convince the millions who saw his movie that Clay Shaw was an integral part of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, he told the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1961, “I have to tell you that I’m not that concerned about whether Shaw was innocent or guilty [say what?]…This movie is…about a much larger international story.”137 Stone became even bolder several months later when he told Esquire magazine, “Garrison was trying to force a break in the case. If he could do that, it was worth the sacrifice of one man [Shaw]. When they went onto the shores of Omaha Beach, they said, ‘We’re going to lose five, ten, fifteen thousand people to reach our objective.’ I think Jim [Garrison, whose strengths and faults, Stone said, made him “like King Lear”] was in that kind of situation.”138

  2. Near the beginning of Oliver Stone’s film, a woman named Rose Cherami is shown being thrown out of a moving car on a country road, then pleading with her attendants on her hospital bed, “They’re going to kill Kennedy. Please call somebody.”

  To conspiracy theorists, Melba Christine Marcades, aka (along with fourteen other aliases) Rose Cherami,* has been, for years, almost as much a part of the lore and mythology of the assassination as the grassy knoll itself. And most conspiracy theorists have not questioned Cherami’s story and have accepted what Stone depicted on the screen. But what Stone depicted was not quite what happened. The man most familiar with Cherami’s story, the late Francis Fruge, was a Louisiana State Police officer when around 10:00 p.m. on the evening of November 20, 1963 (two days before the assassination), he was called to the emergency ward of the Moosa Memorial Hospital in Eunice, Louisiana, by Mrs. Louise Guillary, the administrator of the hospital. Cherami, age thirty-nine, was under the influence of drugs and had been brought to the hospital by Frank Odom, a longtime resident of the area whom Fruge knew. Cherami had been hitchhiking when she was struck by Odom’s car. It happened on Highway 190, a strip of road “extending from Opelousas, birthplace of Jim Bowie, to the Texas border where a gas station more than likely doubled as a brothel.”139 She had sustained no fractures or lacerations, only bruises and abrasions. Fruge said Cherami was “very incoherent,” and after he locked her up at the Eunice jail for safekeeping until she sobered up, he returned to the Eunice Police Department’s annual ball, which he had been attending.

  About an hour later, he was summoned to the jail cell. Cherami “had taken all of her clothes off” and was “what we would call ‘climbing the walls,’ scratching herself, and I recognized it right away as withdrawals…from drugs,” Fruge told the HSCA. Fruge had a doctor come to the jail, “and he gave her a shot to sedate her.” The doctor, F. J. De Rouen, advised Fruge to bring her to a hospital. Fruge told the HSCA that during the two-hour ambulance drive to the East Louisiana State Hospital in Jackson, during which Cherami was in a straightjacket, Cherami related to Fruge that “she was coming from Florida to Dallas with two men who she said were Italians, or resembled Italians. They had stopped at this lounge [a house of prostitution called the Silver Slipper]…and they’d had a few drinks and had gotten into an argument or…something. The manager of the lounge threw her out, and she got out on the road and hitchhiked…and this is when she got hit by a vehicle…[So Cherami herself confirmed Odom’s story that she was struck by a passing car, not thrown out of any car as Stone showed his audience.] I asked her what she was going to do in Dallas. She said she was going to pick up some money, pick up her baby, and kill Kennedy.”140 Fruge’s deposition to the HSCA was on April 18, 1978. In an interview with an HSCA investigator eleven days earlier, on April 7, 1978, Fruge quoted Cherami as telling him, “We’re [referring to herself and the men she was with] going to kill President Kennedy when he comes to Dallas in a few days.”141

  Fruge said that he checked Cherami into the hospital at three in the morning on November 21 (Thursday). A 1978 HSCA report of a staff interview of Dr. Victor Weiss said that Weiss “verified that he was employed as a resident physician at the hospital in 1963. He recalled that on Monday, November 25, 1963, he was asked by another physician, Dr. [Don] Bowers, to see a patient who had been committed November 20th or 21st. Dr. Bowers allegedly told Weiss [there’s no reference to the HSCA having interviewed Bowers] that the patient, Rose Cherami, had stated before the assassination that President Kennedy was going to be killed. Weiss questioned Cherami about her statements…She did not have any specific details of a particular assassination plot against Kennedy, but had stated that the ‘word in the underworld’ was that Kennedy would be assassinated. She further stated that she had been traveling from Florida to her home in Texas when the man traveling with her threw her from the automobile in which they were riding.”142

  Note that as opposed to what Cherami told Fruge, in her new and evolving story neither she, nor she and the two men she was with, were going to kill Kennedy, but some other unidentified person or persons (the “word in the underworld”) were going to do so. Also, contrary to what she told Fruge, which was verified by Frank Odom (who struck the hitchhiking Cherami and brought her to the hospital), Weiss said that Cherami told him she was thrown out of the car by the man she was traveling with.

  When Fruge went back to the hospital on Monday, November 25, three days after Kennedy was murdered, Cherami now told Fruge that the two men she was with, not her, were going to Dallas to kill Kennedy. After the killing, she said, the three of them were going to go to a house in Dallas, where she was going to pick up her baby and around eight thousand dollars. From there they were going to drive to Houston, where a seaman was scheduled to arrive on a boat in nearby Galveston with eight kilos of heroin.*

  So if we’re to believe Cherami’s last story, the conspirators who plotted to kill Kennedy apparently employed two friends of Cherami’s to do the job, let her be a part of it, even though she was a disoriented drug addict, and then, after killing Kennedy, instead of trying to escape, they had more important things to do, such as pick up her baby and then drive to Houston to meet the heroin smuggler.

  Fruge testified that the next day, Tuesday, November 26, on the chance that Cherami might be telling the truth about the heroin pickup, he and several other members of law enforcement flew to Houston with Cherami. On the plane there was a newspaper with the caption of an article to the effect that the authorities in Dallas had not been able to establish any relationship between Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald. Fruge said that when Cherami saw this, she started laughing and said, “Them two queer son-of-a-bitches. They’ve been shacking up for years.” Cherami said she knew this because she used to work as a stripper for Ruby at a club of his in Dallas called The Pink Door. (There is no record of Ruby ever operating a strip club in Dallas called “The Pink Door.” In fact, it is the consensus of researchers that Ruby’s Carousel Club was the first strip club he had ever operated.) Fruge said that the Houston drug pickup never went down because the seaman never showed up. He said that “the Customs Agent [with whom they were working on the possible heroin pickup] put Cherami back on the street and we came back to Louisiana.”143

  The HSCA chased so
me of the flimsiest conspiracy allegations to the ends of the earth during its investigation of the assassination, but it did not do this with Cherami’s allegation, not even bothering, apparently, to interview Dr. Bowers or anyone at the house of prostitution from which Cherami said she was ejected before she went hitchhiking and was struck on the highway. And the reason for the inattention was equally clear. Cherami was a heroin addict who was frequently disoriented. Also, the HSCA learned she had “previously furnished the FBI false information concerning her involvement in prostitution and narcotics matters and that she had been confined to a mental institution in Norman, Oklahoma, on three occasions.”144 In addition, an FBI rap sheet on her covering the period from February 13, 1941, through October 21, 1964, lists fifty-one arrests ranging from public drunkenness, vagrancy, prostitution, and driving under the influence of narcotics, to larceny, driving a stolen auto across state lines, and arson.145 Lastly, not only was her story completely improbable, but she kept changing it every time she told it.

  But Oliver Stone, naturally, did not give his audience any of this background on Cherami. He showed her being thrown out of a car when we know she was not; he never mentioned the many inconsistent stories she told; and to make her story more credible, he changed her words from “I” and “we’re” to “they’re” going to kill the president, and did not mention her wild allegation that Ruby and Oswald were sexual partners. All the movie audience saw was a woman being thrown out of a car and pleading with hospital attendants to “call somebody” to save the president’s life.

  Later in the film, Stone compounds his gross misrepresentation of the facts about Cherami when he conveys to his audience that Cherami was thereafter killed as a result of a “hit and run,” the clear implication being that she was silenced. Indeed, virtually all the conspiracy books that mention Cherami use the same words.146 But after interviewing, on April 4, 1967, the officer who investigated Cherami’s death, Officer J. A. Andrews of the Texas Highway Patrol, Fruge wrote, “Officer Andrews stated that subject died of injuries received from an automobile accident on Highway No. 155, 1.7 miles east of Big Sandy, Upshur County, Texas, at 3:00 a.m., on September 4, 1965. Subject died at the hospital in Gladewater, Gregg County, Texas. The inquest was held by Justice of the Peace Ross Delay, Precinct No. 3, Gregg County, Texas. The accident was reported to Officer Andrews by the operator of the car [Jerry Don Moore], after he had taken the subject to the hospital. Andrews stated that the operator related that the victim was apparently lying on the roadway with her head and upper part of her body resting on the traffic lane, and although he had attempted to avoid running over her, he ran over the top part of her skull, causing fatal injuries. An investigation of the physical evidence at the scene of the accident was unable to contradict this statement.”147 Not your usual hit and run.*

  3. Unbelievably, Stone depicts Oswald throughout the movie as a right winger posing as a Marxist. (In a scene from the movie, Garrison even tells his staff that “when Oswald went to Russia, he was not a real defector. He was an intelligence agent on some type of mission for our government, and remained one till the day he died.”) But we know from all the evidence that if anyone was ever a committed Marxist—starting from when he began reading Das Kapital in his early teens—it was Oswald. Stone got this perversion of the truth directly from Garrison. To make his theory that the CIA (certainly, if anything, right wing, not left wing) was behind the assassination more believable, Garrison told his readers in On the Trail of the Assassins that Oswald was a right-wing agent provocateur for U.S. intelligence, not a Marxist. To get his readers to swallow this absurdity, he did what he did best—lie. For instance, he tells his readers that “only one man who had been at the [El Toro] Marine Base with [Oswald] testified [before the Warren Commission] that Oswald had exhibited Marxist leanings,…Kerry Thornley…This made me wonder if any member of the Warren Commission had actually read the other Marines’ affidavits, which overwhelmingly contradicted Thornley’s claims.” Speaking of one marine, Nelson Delgado (who testified for the defense at the London trial), Garrison writes, “I headed straight for his testimony [before the Warren Commission]. I found that Delgado, who bunked next door to Oswald for the better part of eleven months, had no recollection whatever of Oswald’s Marxist leanings.”148 Any reader not having volume 8 of the Warren Commission volumes, and not knowing what a mountebank Garrison was, would have no reason to disbelieve him. The reality is that Delgado’s testimony is peppered with references to Oswald’s Marxist leanings. For example: “He [Oswald] was for, not the Communist way of life, [but] the Castro way of life.” “He had one book…Das Kapital.” “Call [Richard Call, a fellow marine] used to call Oswald ‘Oswaldovich’…We would call him ‘Comrade.’”149

  Additional marines, other than Delgado and Thornley, who give the lie to Garrison’s statement that Thornley was the only marine who told the Warren Commission that Oswald exhibited Marxist leanings: James Botelho: “Oswald referred…to ‘American capitalist warmongers’…My impression is that although he believed in pure Marxist theory, he did not believe in the way Communism was practiced by the Russians.”150 Donald Camarata: “I personally observed that Oswald had his name written in Russian on one of his jackets, and played records of Russian songs.”151 Paul Murphy: “While at Santa Ana [El Toro Marine Base], Oswald had a subscription to a newspaper printed in English which I believe was titled either ‘The Worker’ or ‘The Socialist Worker.’…I am of the opinion that he was generally in sympathy with Castro.”152 Richard Call: “Many members of the unit kidded him about being a Russian spy.”153 Erwin Donald Lewis: “I know from personal observation that he read the ‘Daily Worker.’”154*

  Yet Garrison led his readers to believe that none of these statements existed, and Stone led his audience to believe that Oswald was a member of the right wing.

  4. The reader of this book already knows the enormous amount of evidence that points irresistibly to Oswald’s guilt. Everything he said, everything he did, all the physical and scientific evidence, points to him as the murderer of Kennedy. Unbelievably, other than alluding to Oswald’s connection to the murder weapon, Stone’s sense of history and honesty were such that he never mentioned even one piece of this evidence to his audience. (Evidence like Oswald carrying a large brown bag into the Book Depository Building on the morning of the assassination, his fingerprints and palm print being found at the sniper’s nest, his being the only employee of the building to flee the building after the shooting, the provable lies he told during his interrogation, etc.—Stone presented none of this to his audience.) And even with this one exception of the murder weapon, Stone proceeded to make one misrepresentation after another not only to completely negate Oswald’s connection to it, but to support Stone’s own contention of a frame-up. Early in the film, the audience is told that the murder weapon was a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that records showed had been mailed to Oswald’s alias, A. Hidell. Garrison’s assistant is shown asking Garrison why someone like Oswald would order a rifle through the mail that could be traced back to him when he could have bought it in Dallas and used a phony name. Garrison suggests, without any evidence to support him, that Oswald didn’t order the weapon, that the order was made by others “to frame him, obviously.”

  But Stone was just getting started. With respect to the background photograph Marina took of Oswald holding the Carcano, Stone shows Oswald telling the Dallas police it was a fake photograph, that his head had been superimposed on someone else’s body. He then shows Garrison’s assistant telling Garrison that two photographic experts had confirmed it was a fake photo, Oswald’s head being “pasted,” she tells Garrison, on someone else’s body. The audience isn’t told that a panel of photographic experts for the House Select Committee on Assassinations confirmed that the photograph was genuine and that “it could find no evidence of fakery,”155 nor are they told that Marina herself acknowledged that she took the photograph, nor that a copy of the photograph was determined by handwriting
experts to have Oswald’s handwritten inscription on the back of it, “To my dear friend George [de Mohrenschildt], from Lee.” It was dated April 1963 and signed “Lee Harvey Oswald.”156 So apparently the framers of Oswald made the fake photo of him holding the rifle, and when he saw it (those who framed Oswald not only put together the fake photo of Oswald but made sure that he, the person being framed, got a copy of it so he would know what they were up to), he liked it so much that he decided to join in the frame-up of himself by writing an inscription on the back of it.

  So Stone, with one falsehood after another, eliminated the Carcano rifle as a piece of evidence that incriminated Oswald.* The bottom line is that although it would be hard to find any criminal defendant, anywhere, against whom there was as much evidence of guilt as there was against Oswald, Stone never presented any of this evidence to his audience. Because nothing else demonstrates so clearly what a prodigious lie Stone’s film was, it bears repeating in italics: Oliver Stone, in his movie JFK, never saw fit to present for his audience’s consideration one single piece of evidence that Oswald killed Kennedy! So a murder case (the Kennedy assassination) where there is an almost unprecedented amount of evidence of guilt against the killer (Oswald) is presented to millions of moviegoers as one where there wasn’t one piece of evidence at all. There oughta be a law against things like this.