False Witness

by Patricia Lambert

  * What Andrews didn’t know was that Oswald’s careful handling of citizenship and immigration matters while in Russia, and his returning home with U.S. government help, indicated he knew exactly where he stood on those issues.

  * When he began retreating from the “Bertrand” story, Andrews began shoring up this Oswald-was-my-client tale. He increased the Oswald visits from “three” to the possibility of as many as “five” and claimed that Oswald arrived after 5 P.M., after his secretary had left for the day. That explained why there was no record of Oswald in the appointment book and why the secretary had no knowledge that he was a client.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE “SMITH” CASE

  To me [Garrison has] always been a man of imagination who set out a broad plot at the very beginning . . . but hadn’t yet decided on his characters, and how they were going to act. When the public bought his rough script, he then started to write his book. And permitted each character, as he reacted, to write the next page for him. The mistake, of course, was that he sold the book as . . . an historic text. But actually he was writing fiction.1

  —Aaron Kohn, managing director, New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission, 1969

  On a humid evening in late October 1966, the upscale New Orleans restaurant Broussard’s was the scene of a significant meeting. That night Jim Garrison took his old Tulane law school classmate Dean Andrews to dinner there. Garrison had just discovered that Andrews was a witness before the Warren Commission and he wanted to know all about it. Andrews was flattered to be invited out by this powerful man. The office, Garrison told him, thinks very highly of you. The two shared a skepticism about the Warren Report that created a common ground, and the occasion was a pleasant social affair. Andrews had no idea an investigation was in the offing. He thought Garrison merely wanted to compare notes with him about the assassination.2

  Garrison, listening attentively, accepted without question what Andrews said about the Oswald visits and the mysterious Clay Bertrand, and prodded Andrews for everything he could recall about Oswald. Once again the compulsive talker was compelled to talk. Andrews repeated what he could remember of what he had told Liebeler. They kicked around some theories about the assassination, discussed the weapon, and Harold Weisberg’s book Whitewash, which Garrison had with him. Then Garrison “mooched” Andrews’s copy of the Warren Report.3

  That congenial get-together was Garrison’s first move on the case; soon he was talking to Jack Martin. Searching for access to the crime of the century, Garrison had found his on-ramp. Yet exactly when he turned his attention to the assassination and why are unclear. There are two accounts of how it came about. Garrison claimed his interest was kindled sometime in the fall of 1966 on a plane trip to New York with U.S. Senator Russell B. Long of Louisiana.4 During that flight, Long expressed doubts about the Warren Report’s lone-assassin theory, especially Oswald’s ability to fire so accurately in such a brief time.* This troubled Garrison, who had accepted the Warren Commission’s conclusions, and prompted a reexamination of the Report, which turned him 180 degrees in the other direction. So goes the official version.

  The unofficial one involves a stripper convicted of lewd dancing, a pardon Garrison engineered for her, and the allegation that her case was linked to elements of “organized crime.” That charge triggered a classic Garrison counterattack. “Organized crime,” Garrison proclaimed, didn’t exist in Orleans Parish (an untenable position that he never altered) and he had his principal critic subpoenaed by the Grand Jury “to put up or shut up.” A newspaper editorial followed reproaching Garrison. He reacted by turning his guns on the newspaper as well.† Then Garrison’s good friend, writer David Chandler, published an article in New Orleans magazine implying that some individuals in the district attorney’s office were taking bribes. Garrison, the article said, had lost his way. No longer the shining knight of old, Garrison had “touched off” what Chandler called an “organized crime donnybrook.” Word quickly “got back” to Chandler that his charges had put Garrison “into a complete tailspin”—that he had virtually “gone crazy” over them.5 In the midst of this escalating furor, Garrison turned his attention to the Kennedy assassination. Some believe he did so in an effort to regain his earlier hero’s image and to draw attention away from the corruption and organized crime charges. If so, Garrison selected the right issue. The assassination was the topic of the day.

  Stirred by a series of critical books and articles, people everywhere were debating the accuracy of the Warren Report. Mark Lane, in his 1966 bestseller Rush to Judgment, presented a serious challenge to the government’s conclusions. But Lane’s book was an advocate’s brief. Harvard graduate student Edward Epstein published Inquest that same year and it had no such down side. Impressed by its balance and scholarly cachet, management at a number of leading news organizations (among them Time magazine, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal) sent their own investigative teams into the field to see what they could find.6

  While Epstein influenced the members of the news media, it was the nation’s most popular magazines, those familiar and trusted publications found on coffee tables everywhere, that swayed middle America. In November 1966, a milestone article appeared in Life written by Richard Billings. Using frames from the Zapruder film and citing John Connally’s testimony disputing the single-bullet theory, “A Matter of Reasonable Doubt” raised the possibility of a second shooter and called for a new inquiry.7 No single piece published had more impact. It may have played a greater role in turning the majority of Americans away from the conclusions of the Warren Report than any book written. In those days most of the country still relied heavily on the print media for its news. Life (then part of one of the largest news organizations in the world) was still an entrenched and honored part of the American scene. For an institution as conservative and important to endorse such an idea seemed, in itself, to validate the notion of conspiracy. And Life was not alone.

  Two months later, The Saturday Evening Post, a magazine of heartland values and Norman Rockwell sentiments, asked on its cover, “Do we need a new investigation?” and the article said yes.8 As with the management at Life, those at The Post had turned away from the official lone-assassin version and were cautiously exploring the idea of conspiracy. Questioning the government’s conclusions was in vogue, and the questioning was being done by the people at the nation’s most venerable and prominent publications. Many today believe Garrison went out on a limb with his Kennedy investigation; that isn’t true. By the time he launched his boat, a news media flotilla had already left the dock. Garrison wasn’t bucking the tide, he was moving with it, and so was the rest of the country. Contrary to today’s conventional wisdom, it wasn’t a handful of cranks that drew the country into the conspiracy camp. It was the mainline media.

  But for Garrison it was Senator Long. He shaped to a surprising degree Garrison’s thinking on the case during that airborne conversation. Long speculated that the assassins used Oswald as “a fall guy,” “a decoy” whose shots from the Texas School Book Depository drew the attention of everyone “while another man fired the fatal shot.” Garrison would make those ideas the backbone of his own theory about the mechanics of Dealey Plaza. Long also triggered Garrison’s recollections of the flurry of activity in his office when tipster Jack Martin named David Ferrie as Oswald’s accomplice. Around the time of the assassination, Garrison told Long, his office had arrested and released “a very unusual type of person who made a very curious trip at a very curious time.” Garrison said he might now take another look at all that.9

  While his motives are obscure, the course Garrison pursued from then on is clear enough. He began by studying the Warren Commission Report and its twenty-six volumes, as well as the writings of some of its critics. Primarily because Oswald had studied Russian while in the Marine Corps, Garrison became convinced that he was linked to the U.S. intelligence community and that he had been engaged in undercover activities the summer before the assassi
nation. Whatever Oswald had been up to, he had spent that summer in Garrison’s jurisdiction. With that tenuous justification, Garrison opened his own investigation into the case.

  In the weeks that followed, Garrison assembled a small staff to work in secret on the project, which he called “The Smith Case,” after Winston Smith, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four protagonist. He also dreamt up code names to identify the principals involved. Oswald was “Patsy,” Ferrie “Blackstone,” and Banister “Barney.” This pseudo-clandestine game playing suggests that Garrison, at least for a time, was having fun. He was also busy. He instigated a reunion with David Chandler that would bring about Garrison’s deep but short-lived involvement with Life magazine. He had numerous sessions with Jack Martin, and he took Dean Andrews to dinner a total of three times, with conversations in between.

  Garrison told few outside the secret team that he was “reopening” the Kennedy case. But he confided in Andrews. This was after their initial dinner at Broussard’s. Garrison asked for Andrews’s help. He named three people he wanted to know about. One was David Ferrie, “whom Garrison called the ‘getaway pilot.’ ” Another was the Mexican Andrews claimed accompanied Oswald to his office. The third was Clay Bertrand. But Andrews couldn’t help. He had had contact with Ferrie only once, he told Garrison, in connection with a parole he arranged for a friend of Ferrie.* Regarding the Mexican (“Oswald’s shadow”) and Bertrand (a “voice on the phone”), Andrews had nothing new to add.10 Garrison wasn’t satisfied, but it would be several weeks before Andrews heard from him again.

  Meanwhile, Garrison spoke to the loquacious Jack Martin. Disregarding his recantation to the Secret Service, Martin enlarged and embellished that 1963 story, shaping it to fit the new situation. He told Garrison about the pistol-whipping the night of the assassination. But now he claimed it was sparked by a comment he made about the men he saw in Guy Banister’s office that summer. Whom did he see? A “bunch” of Cubans, David Ferrie (who “practically lived there”), and Lee Harvey Oswald.11 These “revelations” intensified Garrison’s interest in all manner of Cuban activities. He concluded that Oswald’s pro-Castro public stance was a pretense, that he was actually anti-Castro and working as an agent provocateur for Guy Banister. Supporting this idea was the address “544 Camp Street”† that Oswald stamped on some of the literature he handed out on the streets of New Orleans. Banister’s office was in the same building (though located around the corner at 731 Lafayette Street), and Garrison found that conclusive. Guy Banister now became central to his thinking. Oswald, Garrison decided, was working out of Banister’s office. Nefarious doings, Garrison believed, transpired there.

  At Garrison’s urging, Martin now told Garrison everything, though what that amounted to is unclear. In a series of secret conversations, Martin led Garrison inside “the sanctum sanctorum,” Garrison later called it, “that secretly had harbored Lee Harvey Oswald.”12 Garrison rewarded Martin by making him part of the investigative team.13

  Garrison was now convinced that his suspicions about Ferrie’s Texas trip were justified. In addition to the timing, there was the weather, which had been stormy and dreadful. Garrison found it unbelievable that Ferrie, though eccentric and unpredictable, would drive all night through a rain storm to go ice skating. Ferrie’s friend Alvin Beaubouef recently acknowledged that the weather was terrible but so what? he said. He and Ferrie were accustomed to flying though storms and “driving through one was no big deal.”14 It was for Garrison and he never budged from that opinion. He obsessed on that trip the rest of his life. Ferrie, he believed, had been assigned to fly Lee Harvey Oswald to safety. It stuck in Garrison’s craw that his office had had Ferrie in custody right after the assassination and released him. Though Ferrie was cleared by the Texas Rangers, the Houston Police, and the New Orleans Police Department, Garrison was soon claiming that the FBI let Ferrie “get away.”

  In mid-December Garrison ordered Asst. D.A. John Volz to interview the villain of Martin’s story. As he had three years earlier, David Ferrie denied everything* and told Volz he knew he was being questioned because of Jack Martin. Martin, Ferrie said, “somehow gets to be near the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.” When asked if he would be willing to take a polygraph, Ferrie replied “certainly” and he volunteered to take truth serum. “I have no hesitation at all,” he declared.15 Yet Garrison never gave these tests to Ferrie, his key suspect who eagerly sought them. (If Ferrie had taken them and passed, Garrison would have been left empty-handed, with no suspect, no link to Dallas, and nowhere for his investigation to go.)

  Unmoved by Ferrie’s denials and his request to be tested, Garrison immediately began harassing his friends. Layton Martens, Alvin Beaubouef, Morris Brownlee, Melvin Coffey, and others were contacted on the job, called at home at night, embarrassed in front of their employers and families, and interrogated in the district attorney’s office, some of them repeatedly. Layton Martens was questioned by the grand jury and soon charged with perjury. Morris Brownlee, Ferrie’s godson, was rearrested on an old drug charge previously dropped for insufficient evidence. Ferrie was brought into the jail, given a look at Brownlee in his cell, and told he would be released if Ferrie would “cooperate.”16 But Ferrie had nothing to tell Garrison. Nor did any of his friends. There was nothing to tell.*

  Unwavering in his certitude that Ferrie was guilty, Garrison instituted surveillance of him, which was eventually a twenty-four-hour watch. One of those Garrison asked to help with this was his estranged friend, David Chandler. Garrison reached out to Chandler through a mutual acquaintance who telephoned Chandler one night late in November. He said that Garrison was secretly reopening the Kennedy case and asked if Chandler was interested in meeting with Garrison and talking about it. Mindful of Garrison’s visceral reaction to his New Orleans article, Chandler was surprised by this invitation, but happy at the opportunity “to mend fences,”† which also promised a great story.17

  The two men met the next day. Sitting in Garrison’s comfortable office, Chandler listened as Garrison presented his view of the assassination. Basically Garrison said “the CIA did it” and he identified the two CIA operatives involved. One was Clay Bertrand; the other, David Ferrie. “The case would be broken,” Garrison told Chandler “by cracking David Ferrie, ‘a very unusual type of person who made a very curious trip at a very curious time about the date of the assassination.’ ”18

  Chandler was working as a stringer for Life magazine, which already had begun its own inquiry into the assassination. He immediately contacted its New York office, described his meeting with Garrison, and requested that “a senior editor” be sent to New Orleans. A few days later, Richard Billings, author of “A Matter of Reasonable Doubt,” arrived. “We just might have the scoop of the century,” Billings said. The two went directly from the airport to a meeting in Garrison’s office.19

  There “a secret deal” was worked out. It was agreed that Life and Garrison would “share all information” they might gather on the assassination. “It was a powerful alliance,” Chandler later wrote, “Garrison had the prosecutorial and subpoena powers” while Life had “a worldwide network of correspondents.” The arrangement was unorthodox and of arguable impropriety. Yet, theoretically, it could benefit all. Life would give Garrison free assistance and information on a global scale and in return obtain the inside story of his investigation, to be written by Richard Billings.* Chandler and Billings set up headquarters in the Richelieu apartment building in the French Quarter where they rented a suite of rooms. They formed the two-man core of the operation, which was supplemented by “a variety of reporters and photographers” who were “shuttled” in and out of New Orleans on a regular basis. On hand at any given time over the next few months were at least four additional Life reporters and as many photographers.20 Life’s management was investing heavily in Garrison’s effort.†

  The morning after the deal was struck, Chandler arrived at Garrison’s office and received his
first assignment: He was to make “undercover contact” with Ferrie. Chandler and a Life photographer drove to the lakefront airport, where Ferrie was working as a charter pilot, and wasted two days trying to bump into him “accidentally.” He wasn’t what Chandler expected. From Garrison’s description Chandler was prepared for a sideshow freak with false eyebrows and a homemade red wig. But “up close” Ferrie “didn’t seem all that garish” to Chandler. It’s an opinion some others shared.

  On the third day, they had an early-morning conversation with him in the airport coffee shop. Ferrie astonished them with what he had to say. He had a tip for them about what he called “a big secret”: The local district attorney, “Big Jim” Garrison “had hot leads to the Kennedy Assassination.” His information, Ferrie said, came from one of Garrison’s own men, who was sitting in a booth at the far end of the room “doing his best to disappear.” But the real shock came when Ferrie chuckled and said, “Garrison had me pegged as the getaway pilot in Dallas.” This knocked Chandler for a loop; he was still laughing about it years later. “Here we were working on the scoop of the century, a major secret,” he said, “and the suspect . . . was telling us all about it.” David Ferrie “just didn’t act like a CIA assassin,” Chandler said. Ferrie invited them for a ride in his plane, the first of many such flights. Chandler found him “harmless, even likeable,”21 another observation others shared.

  This “undercover” work with Ferrie stirred Chandler’s first doubts about Garrison’s case and he began “taking a hard look” at what was going on in the D.A.’s office. He didn’t like what he saw or what he was hearing about abuses by Garrison and his aides. Before long Chandler decided that what Pershing Gervais had told him was true, that Garrison had “gone nuts” over the assassination. A few days before Christmas, Chandler and Billings were summoned to Garrison’s office. What happened there left a lasting impression. As soon as they were seated, Garrison announced that he had “deduced” the identity of Clay Bertrand. “One, Bertrand is homosexual,” he said. “Two, Bertrand speaks Spanish. Three, his first name is Clay.” Then he triumphantly flipped up a photograph that was lying face down on his desk. It was a picture of Clay Shaw.* Shaw fit these criteria; therefore, Shaw was Bertrand. Chandler was astonished.22 Clay Shaw, a well-known and respected New Orleans businessman and civic leader, was the last person anyone would suspect of participating in the president’s assassination.