The first law enforcement agency Andrews called about the Bertrand story was the Secret Service, on November 25, 1963, from his hospital bed. The Secret Service report of its interview of Andrews says the Andrews “seemed to feel that he had been previously contacted by Clay Bertrand with another case, but he could not place him or furnish any information to assist in identifying or locating him.”168 This was considerably different from what he told the Warren Commission eight months later, on July 21, 1964. And later in the day on November 25, he told the FBI agents who interviewed him at the hospital about Bertrand calling him to represent Oswald, but dramatically changed who Bertrand was, saying that Bertrand himself was a young man between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-three, and that the only time he had seen Bertrand was when “Clay Bertrand accompanied Oswald” to his office when Oswald was seeking Andrews’s representation. There was no mention of having represented Bertrand in the past or having called him regularly on behalf of gay kids. And, oh yes, Clay Bertrand had blond hair and a crewcut and was around five feet seven inches tall.169 A week later, Andrews told the FBI that Bertrand was “approximately six feet one inch to six feet two inches tall,”170 having grown six or seven inches in eight days. But there were more miracles ahead. Andrews told the Warren Commission on July 21, 1964, that Bertrand was five feet eight inches tall,171 Bertrand somehow managing to shrink five to six inches in only seven months, a not inconsiderable feat.
When the FBI and Secret Service asked Andrews for any records to confirm that Oswald or Bertrand had ever been clients of his, he was unable to locate any pertaining to either of them, later telling the Warren Commission his office had been “rifled,” but by whom he did not know.172
No one believed Andrews’s story—that is, except Jim Garrison, who was absolutely sure that there was a man in the French Quarter using the alias Clay Bertrand. Reportedly, in the fall of 1966 Garrison began to suspect that Bertrand was Shaw because from Andrews’s testimony before the Warren Commission, one could infer that Bertrand was a homosexual and, of course, he had the same first name as Shaw—Clay. One of Garrison’s assistants, Frank Klein, had noted that Clay Shaw lived in the French Quarter and was gay. With nothing more than this, Garrison was off and running.173 And Garrison wouldn’t even listen to his own staff. In a February 25, 1967, memorandum to Garrison, DA investigator Louis Ivon wrote, “To ascertain the location of one Clay Bertrand, I put out numerous inquiries and made contact with several sources in the French Quarter area…I’m almost positive from my contacts that they would have known or heard of a Clay Bertrand. The information I received was negative results. On February 22, 1967, I was approached by ‘Bubbie’ Pettingill in the Fountainbleau Motor Hotel…whom I had earlier contacted about Clay Bertrand. He stated that Dean Andrews admitted to him that Clay Bertrand never existed.”
Andrews would later say that he had several meetings about the assassination with Garrison at the old Broussard’s restaurant in New Orleans, the first on October 29, 1966. At a second meeting shortly before Christmas, 1966, and at subsequent ones, Andrews says that Garrison put pressure on him to admit that Clay Shaw was Clay Bertrand, but Andrews said he told Garrison he wasn’t. However, Garrison continued to persist, and Andrews would later tell a national TV audience, “[Garrison] wanted to shuck me like corn, pluck me like a chicken, stew me like an oyster.” Andrews said he “wanted to see if this cat [Garrison] was kosher.” Andrews’s plan? When Garrison wanted to know the identities of the male companions who accompanied Oswald to his office, Andrews only gave him one, a name he fabricated out of thin air—Manuel Garcia Gonzales. Surely enough, Garrison bit, and charged the fictitious Gonzales with selling narcotics so he could pick him up and interrogate him on what he, Garrison, was really concerned with. As New Orleans attorney Milton Brener writes, “Garrison was to become convinced that Manuel Garcia Gonzales was one of the assassins in Dallas and, apparently, for a time believed that he was the leader of the group and the prime culprit. Writing for Tempo magazine, an Italian publication, in April 1967, Garrison stated he would gladly give up Clay Shaw if he could but get hold of the true assassin—Manuel Garcia Gonzales.” When a man with the name Manuel Garcia Gonzales was thereafter arrested in Miami on the narcotics charge, Andrews told Garrison that he was the wrong Gonzales, that Garrison had “the right ha-ha but the wrong ho-ho.”174
In On the Trail of the Assassins, Garrison only admits to having one meeting with Andrews about the Kennedy case, a lunch “in early 1967” at Broussard’s restaurant, and acknowledged that when he asked Andrews to identify Bertrand, Andrews responded, “I don’t know what he looks like and I don’t know where’s he’s at.” However, when Garrison, disbelieving Andrews, told Andrews he intended to call him before the grand jury and “if you lie to the grand jury as you have been lying to me, I’m going to charge you with perjury,” Andrews allegedly said, “If I answer that question…, if I give you that name you keep trying to get, then it’s goodbye Dean Andrews. It’s bon voyage, Deano. I mean like permanent. I mean like a bullet in my head.”175 One would think that such a statement (which was depicted in Stone’s movie) was powerful and important enough—being an implied admission that Shaw was Bertrand and reflecting Andrews’s belief that Shaw was connected to the assassination—for Garrison to memorialize in a memorandum to the file—that is, if it was actually made. But Steve Tilley, the chief archivist at the National Archives for the Kennedy assassination, said that no such record of the alleged meeting and conversation at Broussard’s appears “among the records of the New Orleans District Attorney or the papers of Jim Garrison” at the archives. In fact, Tilley said, “I was unable to locate any document that pertains to any conversation between Garrison and Andrews in a New Orleans restaurant.”176
Indeed, the only record I could find of any interview of Andrews by the New Orleans DA’s office was an April 4, 1967, memorandum from DA investigator William Gurvich to Garrison about a March 2, 1967, interview of Andrews by Gurvich and Assistant DAs James Alcock, Richard Burns, and Andrew Sciambra. Andrews told his interviewers that he had seen photos of Clay Shaw but had never met him, and when he was shown several photographs of various persons, including Clay Shaw, he could not identify any of them as being Clay Bertrand. He told his interviewers that Bertrand, like Shaw, had “grey hair” (in Andrews’s Warren Commission testimony, he said Bertrand’s hair was “sandy”) and he thought he “was bisexual” (Shaw was homosexual).177
Andrews told the Shaw grand jury on March 16, 1967, that “you all want me to identify Clay Shaw as Clay Bertrand…and I can’t…I can’t connect the two.” But then he said, “I can’t say he is and I can’t say he ain’t.”178 An angry Garrison, not believing Andrews, secured a five-count perjury indictment against Andrews that same day.179 “Personally, I like Dean,” Garrison said. “Everyone does. But I have to show him I mean business.”180 Andrews fought back, filing a $100,000 suit against Garrison for malicious prosecution, alleging that he personally told Garrison “that there was no connection between Clay Shaw and Clay Bertrand.”181
On June 28, Andrews testified again before the Shaw grand jury, this time saying that “I have never seen this man, Shaw, never talked to him. If this case is based on the fact that Clay Shaw is Clay Bertrand, it’s a joke…Clay Shaw is not Clay Bertrand.” Still hanging by a thread to part of his obvious fabrication, however, he added that Bertrand was really a friend of his named Eugene Davis, the owner of Wanda’s Seven Seas bar in the French Quarter, and it was really Davis who called him at the hospital to represent Oswald. How could Davis be Bertrand? The hipster lawyer said a woman “back in the ’50s at a fag reception…introduced me to Davis as Clay Bertrand.”182 On July 17, that thread finally broke and the pathetic Andrews called a press conference and not only confessed again that “Clay Shaw ain’t Clay Bertrand,” but finally admitted that Clay Bertrand “never existed,” saying he made the whole story up to get attention for himself. The next day, July 18, Garrison proceeded to file an
additional perjury charge against Andrews for lying to the Shaw grand jury on June 28 that Bertrand was Eugene Davis.183
Not even someone of Garrison’s rascality and deceit could find a way to use Andrews to his benefit at Shaw’s trial. Andrews testified for the defense that Clay Shaw was not Clay Bertrand, that he had never met or known Clay Shaw, and that the first time he had ever seen Shaw was “when I saw his picture in the paper in connection with the investigation” four years after Kennedy’s murder.
What about Andrews’s testimony before the Warren Commission that someone whose voice he recognized as Clay Bertrand’s called him on November 22 or 23, 1963 (“Friday or Saturday” he said), in a New Orleans hospital and asked him to defend Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas? Andrews told the Shaw jury that he “never received a phone call from Clay Bertrand” when he was at the hospital. Indeed, he added, “No one called me to say that.” Of course, the very notion that Bertrand, whom the conspiracy theorists believe to be Clay Shaw, and whom they further believe conspired with Oswald to kill Kennedy, would hire a joke like Andrews to defend Oswald is crazy. If Bertrand were Shaw, and Shaw and Oswald conspired to kill Kennedy, obviously Shaw could be expected to do anything, including selling all or most of his holdings, to pay for the best possible legal representation for Oswald.
So who, if anyone, did call him at the hospital, and for what? Andrews testified that “the phone call I received was from Gene Davis [a friend] involving two people who were going to sell an automobile and they wanted the title and a bill of sale notarized.” Andrews said he was “under sedation” and “under the influence of opiates” and “using oxygen” at the hospital, and “elected [to take] a course that I have never been able to get away from.” He said, “I don’t know whether I suggested [to Davis after the discussion about the automobile sale], ‘Man, I would be famous if I could go to Dallas and defend Lee Harvey Oswald, or whoever gets that job is going to be a famous lawyer.’” He said he never told the FBI or Warren Commission about Gene Davis because he did not want “to implicate an innocent man,” so he said, “I used the name Clay Bertrand as a cover to mentioning Gene Davis.” He had only heard the name Clay Bertrand once before in his life at the “fag wedding reception” thirteen years earlier when he claimed that Gene Davis, whom he already knew, was introduced to him as Clay Bertrand by a woman named Big Jo. But later in his testimony he acknowledged that “Clay Bertrand is a figment of my imagination.”184*
When Garrison’s own chief trial prosecutor, James Alcock, asked Andrews on cross-examination if he remembered telling Warren Commission counsel Wesley Liebeler that he saw Clay Bertrand six weeks prior to his testimony before the Commission, Andrews responded that was just “huffing and puffing.”
“Huffing and puffing under oath?”
“Bull session.”
“Do you recall making that statement under oath?”
“I assume I must have made it.”
“That wasn’t correct, was it?”
“No.”
What about Andrews telling the Warren Commission that he called a fellow lawyer, Sam “Monk” Zelden, from his hospital bed on November 24 and asked Zelden if he wanted to go to Dallas with him to defend Oswald? “No explanation,” Andrews told the Shaw jury. “Don’t forget I am in the hospital sick. I might have believed it myself or thought after a while [that I had been] retained there, so I called Monk. I would like to be famous, too.”
Throughout Andrews’s testimony, the hip-talking lawyer had the courtroom erupting in laughter to the point of the bailiff saying, “Order, please.” A few examples: “Do you speak Spanish?” the judge asked Andrews. “Poco poco, loco, judge,” Andrews deadpanned. Claiming the attorney-client privilege in his alleged representation of Oswald, he said the answer to any question about it “might, may, might, tend, would or could” incriminate him. To his “I would like to be famous, too,” answer, he added, “Other than as a perjurer.” Andrews said he saw Oswald on TV in his hospital room when “he shot this guy Ruby.” (Say what?)
And Andrews is, according to many conspiracy theorists, one of the essential keys to solving the mystery of the Kennedy assassination. Andrews is so lacking in credibility that James Alcock acknowledged before the Shaw jury that Andrews’s entire story was fraudulent. Responding to Andrews’s claim that the reason he lied to the March 16, 1967, grand jury that he had actually met a man named Clay Bertrand on two occasions was that he was “hemmed in with that Warren Commission Report” that the grand jurors “were reading from while they were asking me questions,” and “there was no way I could get off the hook,” Alcock told Andrews, “Dean, the only one that hemmed you in was yourself when you lied under oath to the Warren Commission.”
But Andrews had the last word, and it stung Alcock and Garrison before the Shaw jury. “I told the DA’s office,” Andrews testified, “that Clay Bertrand wasn’t Clay Shaw before I went there [grand jury], but nobody believed me.”* Alcock never even attempted a retort to this.185
Oliver Stone, having to know full well that Clay Shaw was not Clay Bertrand, and that Andrews’s story was a fabrication, had an easy solution for convincing his audience that Andrews’s admission at the Shaw trial that Shaw wasn’t Bertrand was untrue. He simply invented a scene, during Shaw’s booking for Kennedy’s murder, where he has Shaw say something that Shaw never said—that his alias was Clay Bertrand. “Any aliases?” Stone’s movie audience hears the booking officer ask Shaw. “Clay Bertrand,” Shaw, after a pause, answers resignedly.
21. Garrison, in his book, and Stone, in his movie, depict David Ferrie as a frenzied and erratic Kennedy hater and anti-Communist who worked in New Orleans with a fiercely right-wing former FBI agent named Guy Banister† to train anti-Castro Cuban exiles at a camp just north of Lake Pontchartrain near New Orleans. The camp allegedly operated under the aegis of the CIA. It appears that Ferrie may have done some detective work at times for Banister’s detective agency. And both Ferrie and Banister were, indeed, actively involved in the anti-Castro movement, though the extent of their involvement has never been clearly quantified. However, this is just a diversion from the only matter that counts. There is no credible evidence that Oswald, Ferrie, and Shaw (Garrison’s three co-conspirators, whom Stone shows his audience together on the screen plotting Kennedy’s murder) ever knew each other. And no one, of course, ever asked Oswald if he knew Shaw or Ferrie, Shaw denied at his trial that he knew or ever met Ferrie or Oswald, and Ferrie denied, till the day he died, knowing Oswald or Shaw.186* Granted, the denials would mean nothing if there was any credible evidence to the contrary, but there has never been. A scene in JFK showing Ferrie and Shaw cavorting at a homosexual party dressed in wild, transvestite garb is a Stone fabrication. In False Witness, Patricia Lambert writes that some pictures did surface nearly two years before the trial in a “widely read newsletter [May 12, 1967, issue of Councilor, a right-wing Shreveport, Louisiana, paper]published by a Garrison supporter” showing Shaw and a friend named Jeff Biddison, not Ferrie, “dressed in business suits with ‘mop-strand’ wigs on their heads.” In one of the pictures was “a former radio announcer who resembled Ferrie named Robert Brannon…Both Garrison and Shaw’s attorneys investigated the pictures, and Robert Brannon, who died in 1962, was positively identified by Mrs. Lawrence Fischer, who had been at the party, as well as by Robert Cahlman of radio station WYES, who knew Brannon well…The pictures were taken around 1949 (before David Ferrie had moved to New Orleans) by photographer Miles De Russey at a party given by a Tulane University student.”187
The proof, of course, that Ferrie and Shaw do not appear together in the subject photograph (or any other photograph) is that if they did, surely Garrison, who feverishly tried to link Ferrie to Shaw at Shaw’s trial, would have introduced it into evidence, but he did not. Nor did he make any reference to such a photo in On the Trail of the Assassins. Yet with Garrison himself serving as a consultant, Stone outrageously depicts Shaw and Ferrie apparently reveling in high badinage at a
French Quarter party. And in Stone’s appearance before the National Press Club on January 15, 1992, he told the assembled media, “After the [Shaw] trial we came into possession of a picture that shows that Clay Shaw and David Ferrie were at a party together.”188
When Garrison assistant John Volz asked Ferrie in a December 15, 1966, interview whether Ferrie would “be willing to submit to a polygraph” on all of his denials, Ferrie responded, “Certainly.” He said he would also “be willing to submit to truth serum. I have no hesitation at all.”189 But Garrison’s office elected not to give Ferrie a lie detector test or any other kind of test. Not only, as indicated, did Ferrie deny ever having any contact with Oswald or Shaw, but Garrison’s own book, On the Trail of the Assassins, never makes any reference to Ferrie’s telling him or any member of his staff that he was involved in the assassination, had any knowledge of it, or even knew Shaw and Oswald. (That was for Garrison’s witness, Perry Russo, to do.) Yet, unbelievably again, Stone, who says he read On the Trail of the Assassins three times, paid a quarter of a million dollars for it, and based his movie primarily on it, invents a scene in a hotel room where Ferrie, in a highly agitated state, makes—by implication—a confession to Garrison and his assistants that he was a co-conspirator in Kennedy’s assassination. “I knew Oswald. I taught him everything,” Ferrie says. Ferrie goes on that he, Shaw, and Oswald were all members of the CIA, and that Shaw had him “by the balls” because of compromising photos Shaw had of him. Ruby, he says, was “a bagman for the Dallas mob.” Garrison asks Ferrie who killed Kennedy. Ferrie, apparently angry at the naivete of the question, yells out the very incriminating words, indicating he had personal knowledge of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, “The shooters don’t even know. Don’t you get it?”
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