False Witness

by Patricia Lambert

  FALSE WITNESS

  FALSE WITNESS

  THE REAL STORY OF JIM GARRISON’S

  INVESTIGATION AND

  OLIVER STONE’S

  FILM JFK

  Patricia Lambert

  Copyright © 1998 by Patricia Lambert

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be

  reproduced or transmitted in any form or by

  any means without the written

  permission of the

  publisher.

  M. Evans and Company, Inc.

  216 East 49th Street

  New York, New York 10017

  ISBN 978-0-87131-920-3

  Book design and typesetting by Rik Lain Schell

  Printed in the United States of America

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Bill and for Terry

  To bear false witness is, of course, nothing new. But the number of instances found in this story—their variety, motivations, transformations, impact, and lingering presence—is extraordinary. It was done for money, notoriety, advancement, reward, revenge, loyalty; it was done intentionally, maliciously, nonmaliciously, accidentally; it was done in public, in private; it was done to subordinates, supporters, skeptics, audiences, and media representatives; and it was done at a lectern, in a magazine, in legal proceedings, in state court, in federal court, in a book, in a movie, and in silence by insiders who always knew the truth.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  INTRODUCTION:

  Uproar: Fraud in the Arts

  PART ONE: Fraud in New Orleans

  CHAPTER ONE:

  March 1, 1967: The Arrest

  CHAPTER TWO:

  The Jolly Green Giant

  CHAPTER THREE:

  First Fathers: The Tipster and the Lawyer

  CHAPTER FOUR:

  The “Smith” Case

  CHAPTER FIVE:

  A Tiger by the Tail

  CHAPTER SIX:

  The Friend

  CHAPTER SEVEN:

  James Phelan and The Saturday Evening Post

  CHAPTER EIGHT:

  The Preliminary Hearing

  CHAPTER NINE:

  How Garrison Neutralized the Opposition

  CHAPTER TEN:

  The Trial, Part One: Clay Shaw

  CHAPTER ELEVEN:

  The Trial, Part Two: The Warren Report

  CHAPTER TWELVE:

  Shaw vs. Garrison: The Christenberry Decision

  Garrison Expounds on the Assassination: A Sampling of his 1967 Theories

  PART TWO: Fraud Perpetuated

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN:

  The Clinton Scenario and the House Select Committee

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN:

  On the Trail of the Assassins

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN:

  JFK: The Film

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN:

  Garrison Was No Kevin Costner

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:

  The Movement and the Files

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:

  The Consequences

  AFTERWORD:

  A Grand Jury Transcript Surfaces

  APPENDIX A:

  On the Trail of the Assassins: More Anomalies

  APPENDIX B:

  Edward O’Donnell’s Report to Jim Garrison

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  PREFACE

  Thirty-two years ago, when New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was investigating President Kennedy’s murder, I was one of those excited by Garrison’s rhetoric, one of those convinced he had something. My thinking seemed logical enough. He was an elected official. Such men want to be reelected. If he weren’t telling the truth, he wouldn’t be. Therefore, he must be telling the truth. I was wrong on both points, but it was two full years before I realized that. I still doubted the official version of the assassination, but by then I knew Garrison had none of the answers.

  So it was easy to turn away from him with little thought about my earlier misguided enthusiasm, though even then I experienced a twinge of discomfort about it. Over the years, on the rare occasion when his name came up or something occurred to remind me of that time, the memory was always accompanied by that twinge. Once or twice I even engaged in some minor soul-searching about it. The small personal insights this yielded were overshadowed by the larger mystery that remained. What on earth was Jim Garrison all about? If he didn’t have something, what then did he have?

  In the aftermath of Oliver Stone’s film JFK, I witnessed history repeating itself. Garrison’s spirit, his thinking, and his certitude were loose in the land once more. I felt as though my past had overtaken me. To those other riddles, I now added another. How had Garrison managed to do it again?

  In June 1993, I suddenly realized I had to have the answers. Moved by a surprising sense of urgency, I began studying the earliest available records and a few months later was on an airplane headed for that beguiling city where it all happened.

  I would return to New Orleans four more times in the next two years and, in between, visit the National Archives. I would read thousands of pages of documents and interview many of the principals involved.

  This book tells what I learned.

  INTRODUCTION

  UPROAR: FRAUD IN THE ARTS

  Who owns our “history”? He who makes it up so that most everyone believes it.1

  —Oliver Stone, 1992

  One day in December 1988, Hollywood’s self-styled guerrilla filmmaker Oliver Stone was in Cuba, attending a Latin American film festival when he stepped onto an elevator in Havana’s old Nacional Hotel. There, an obscure New York publisher named Ellen Ray thrust a book into his hands.2 The unlikely convergence of Ellen Ray and Oliver Stone in that Havana elevator would beget, three years later, the most controversial film ever created about an American historical event and provoke a thunderous media uproar that is unresolved even now. The cause of it all was the book Ray pressed upon Stone that day. It was On the Trail of the Assassins, the story of President Kennedy’s assassination as told by former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison.

  Stone later told an interviewer that he had been doubtful about Ellen Ray at first, thinking she was just another “advocate of a cause.” But he took Garrison’s book with him to the Philippines where he was shooting Born on the Fourth of July. (Like Platoon, it excoriated the Vietnam War and it, too, would win an Academy Award.) Stone ended up reading the book three times.

  The relaxed and intimate first person narrative, which is almost seductively easy to read, described Garrison’s 1960s investigation and how he discovered the plot that had taken the president’s life. According to him, it was a CIA operation, with a contingent in New Orleans run by a local businessman named Clay Shaw, a prominent figure in the community and a closet homosexual. Arrested by Garrison on March 1, 1967, and charged with conspiring to murder the president, Shaw was the only individual ever tried for the crime. He was quickly acquitted, but Garrison blamed the verdict on a prosecution witness he said gave lunatic testimony on cross-examination and his own failure to establish Shaw’s connection with the CIA.

  Garrison told a plausible-sounding story that transported the crime from the narrow boundaries of Dealey Plaza to a larger, more appropriate stage; and he cast as villains an organization many Americans had come to believe was capable of anything. Assassination books tend to be grim and unreadable, but Garrison had written an interesting one. In the process, he transformed his prosecution of Clay Shaw, which the New York Times called “one of the most disgraceful chapters in the history of American jurisprudence,” into a righteous enterprise.

  Stone later said he was “deeply moved and appalled” by Garrison’s story. Until then,
he had thought little about the assassination and had accepted the conclusion of the Warren Report that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot the president. Garrison, Stone said, opened his eyes. It was through Garrison’s book that Stone first learned the “facts” of the case. More important was its Vietnam theme, Garrison’s claim that President Kennedy’s plan to withdraw from there triggered the assassination. For Stone, a twice-wounded Vietnam veteran, that war was the watershed experience of his adult life. In Garrison’s story, Stone had found his own personal Rosetta stone, an explanation for why he had ended up in the jungles of southeast Asia. He embraced it all as gospel. Over the next twenty-four months, he traveled to New Orleans three or four times each year, slipping into the city quietly and meeting secretly with Garrison. Like others before him, Stone fell under Garrison’s spell.

  “Anyone who has experienced the six-hour lecture from Garrison,” wrote columnist Max Lerner after a visit to Garrison’s home at the height of his assassination celebrity, “knows that, like a Merlin, he draws you into his never-never land world where everything is upside down, and you get the magical sense of a total reversal of reality.” Lerner was enthralled for awhile, he recalled, until his “sanity” was restored.

  Oliver Stone’s reality reversal was permanent. He stepped into Garrison’s magic web and never stepped out. He saw in Garrison’s experience material for a film that would reveal what he described as “the untold story” of the assassination. Stone optioned the book himself. “I wanted to get this story out,” he said. And so he did. Stone proceeded to create a movie energized by the passion he felt about the Vietnam war that turned the history of the Garrison investigation upside down and pulled fifty million moviegoers into Garrison’s “never-never land world.”

  The process was not easy. Along the way, Stone encountered a major bump in the road. During the summer of 1991, while he was still shooting the film, the media erupted with stories challenging his intentions.

  The instigator was Harold Weisberg, an aging and ill first-generation assassination investigator, best known for his Whitewash series of books. Weisberg, part of that loose-knit community of writers and researchers originally known as the critics of the Warren Report, had acquired firsthand knowledge of Garrison’s shortcomings back in the sixties when he had traveled to New Orleans and for a time assisted him. Stone was in Vietnam most of that period and had missed the Garrison phenomenon. Appalled that a film glorifying Garrison was being planned, Weisberg tried to enlighten Stone in a letter. Stone’s response, which came from his assistant, was entirely unsatisfactory to Weisberg, who then took a dramatic step that struck at the heart of Stone’s operation.

  From the outset, Stone had engaged in extraordinary security precautions. Even the name of the film, known only as “Project X,” was a secret. Crew members were required to sign nondisclosure statements. Stone had his office swept for bugs, and drafts of the screenplay were numbered and locked away. Nevertheless, Weisberg obtained a copy of the script and leaked it to columnist George Lardner, Jr., at the Washington Post.3 This ignited what would eventually become a firestorm of criticism from journalists who had covered Garrison’s investigation and retained strong opinions about him.*

  The Dallas Morning News led off with an article that labeled Stone’s plan “morally repugnant.” Lardner followed that with a scathing attack on the “errors and absurdities” in the screenplay and on Stone himself. Stone, Lardner wrote, was “chasing fiction.” Lardner also called Garrison’s investigation “a fraud.” Stone fired off a response defending his film, and, in a disquieting echo of Garrison’s reaction to criticism a quarter century earlier, implied that Lardner was working for the government’s intelligence community. Lardner threatened to sue, but reportedly accepted instead a complete retraction from Stone. Before long, others were expressing their opinions both pro and con, sometimes passionately, occasionally with a good deal of wit, mostly in letters to the editor and newspaper editorials around the country. Stone seemed genuinely wounded by this unprecedented barrage of media criticism before his film was even finished. But he benefited from all that free press coverage. As one observer noted once the film was released, Stone was riding a wave of negative publicity.

  JFK, a three-hour-and-seven-minute marathon, premiered in Los Angeles on December 17, 1991, at Mann’s Village Theater in Westwood and opened nationwide on Friday, five days before Christmas.* Audience reaction was intense. A writer for the Los Angeles Times reported “gasps” and “tears” during the Abraham Zapruder film sequence showing the moment the president died. “Nobody left to get popcorn,” he wrote. What made the movie such a powerful experience was its apparent authenticity.

  Actual film footage, some of it quite moving (Walter Cronkite fighting for composure after announcing President Kennedy’s death and the wrenching images captured on Zapruder’s home movie), was woven together so seamlessly with recreations that it is difficult at times to separate the two. Stone’s blurring of that line intensified the movie’s documentary-like quality, the sense that this is the real thing. But the chief reason for that impression is its real-life protagonist. Stone tried to deflect criticism about his choice there by claiming the man on the screen was “a fictional Jim Garrison who is dealing with facts. And, sometimes, speculation.”4 But audiences experienced the screen version as an accurate portrayal, or a close facsimile. The movie wouldn’t have worked otherwise. The American people didn’t want some screenwriter’s fantasy about the assassination. They wanted the truth. Stone understood that, for it was what he, too, wanted. He couldn’t deliver it but whether or not he realized that initially, or if he ever did, is unclear. What is clear is that he knew how to make a film that appeared to deliver it.

  Those who had not spoken up beforehand weighed in now.

  “Stone went too far,” said former Texas Governor John Connally, who was wounded in the Dallas shooting. “This was a national tragedy. [Stone] mixed fact and fiction in such a way that he’s going to convince practically every young person that the federal government, their own government, conspired to kill an American president. And I think that’s evil, frankly.” Connally ridiculed the sheer size of Stone’s conspiracy, which he called “ludicrous.” President George Bush, on tour in Australia, responded to a question by saying he had seen “no evidence” that the Warren Report was wrong but didn’t think Stone should be censured for putting his own spin on the assassination. Newsweek published an eight-page cover story that labeled the film “propaganda.” Two former aides to President Lyndon Johnson joined the fray. Joseph A. Califano, Jr., writing in the Wall Street Journal, said that JFK was “a disgraceful concoction of lies and distortions.” Jack Valenti, now president and chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America, waited until after the Academy Awards balloting* to denounce the film as a “smear” and “a hoax” on the order of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will.

  The most serious objection was voiced by Brent Staples in the New York Times who pointed out that “historical lies are nearly impossible to correct once movies and television have given them credibility.” Echoing Governor Connally, Staples predicted that “the children of the video age will swallow JFK whole.” He noted that policing art “for inaccuracies” was an impossible task and the best that society could do was to “denounce” such history as “bogus.”5 The harshest words came from Washington columnist George Will. Stone, he said, was “an intellectual sociopath, indifferent to truth” who combined “moral arrogance with historical ignorance.” The film he called “execrable history and contemptible citizenship.”6

  As debate on the subject inundated the country, talk radio and television commentators jumped into the fray; university symposiums and town hall meetings were held to discuss the controversy, and it quickly escalated into the most extraordinary war of words ever exchanged over a movie. What was missing in that great debate was Clay Shaw. Except for a few muffled voices in New Orleans, virtually no one spoke in
his defense. No national figure uttered his name. Everyone was focused on the grand conspiracy. No one seemed to care about Shaw’s reputation, his fate, or how it came to pass. No one was more indifferent than Oliver Stone. He felt “[no] responsibility to Clay Shaw because he was [acquitted],” Stone told one interviewer.

  Forty-four at the time, Stone is a brawny man with a round boyish face, a gap between his front teeth, thinning black hair and an energy level said to verge on the demonic. He admitted he had “made Garrison better” than he was and proudly referred to himself and others like him as “sons of Jim Garrison.” At the National Press Club, Stone staunchly defended his mentor. He had heard “all the horror stories” about Garrison, he said, but none of them held up on investigation, and he challenged Garrison’s detractors to show him their evidence.

  This book does that.

  Its focus is not Dallas and Washington but New Orleans and Hollywood, not the death of the president but the destruction of an ordinary citizen, who could have been anyone. That is what makes what happened in New Orleans more threatening in one sense than what happened in Dallas. The man who went gunning for Shaw didn’t do it from a hidden position. Garrison struck Shaw down publicly with assistance from many, using bureaucratic procedures. Writer Nicholas Lemann noted that Stone often referred to Kafka and Orwell but that the essence of their vision was that no government could do anything worse than “turn its powers against an innocent individual in order to advance a larger cause.” Garrison did exactly that. His was a wholly societal act that involved some of our most important institutions: the district attorney’s office, the local judiciary, the grand jury, the business community, one of the largest news organizations of its time and, later, the publishing world and entertainment industry all played a role in it. Stone and the others who dismiss “the Shaw business” as inconsequential necessarily ignore its implications and monstrousness.