1

I WAS WORKING AT MY DESK in Criminal Court, as district attorney of New Orleans, when the door flew open and my chief assistant rushed in. “The President has been shot!” he yelled. It was just past 12:30 p.m., Friday, November 22, 1963.

Today, a quarter of a century later, I remember my shock, my disbelief after I grasped what Frank Klein was telling me, I clung to the hope that perhaps Kennedy had merely been wounded and would survive.

Frank and I headed for Tortorich’s on Royal Street in the French Quarter. It was a quiet, uncrowded place where they kept a television set in the dining room. On the way, the car radio announced that John Kennedy had been killed. The remainder of that trip was spent in absolute silence.

At the restaurant the midday customers were staring solemnly at the television set mounted high in the corner of the room. I felt a sense of unreality as the unending reportage flooded in from Dallas. There was very little conversation at the tables. A waiter came up, and we ordered something for lunch. When it arrived we toyed with our food, but neither of us ate anything.

The information coming from the television was inconclusive. Although the Secret Service, the F.B.I., and the Dallas police, along with an enormous crowd of onlookers, had all been at the assassination scene in Dallas, for at least two hours the crisp voices of the newscasters provided no real facts about who the rifleman or riflemen had been. However, we were hypnotized by the confusion, the unending snippets of trivia, the magic of the communications spectacle. Concerned with what had happened to the President and with our own hurt, no one left the restaurant that afternoon. The business and professional men who had come for lunch cancelled their appointments. Frank and I made our calls to the office and returned to the television set.

Then, well into the middle of the afternoon, the arrest of the accused assassin suddenly was announced. Approximately 15 Dallas police officers had caught him while he was seated in a movie theatre a considerable distance from the assassination scene. The delayed arrest burst like a bomb on the television screen, and the long silence in the restaurant ended. You could feel the sudden explosion of fury, the outburst of hate against this previously unknown young man. His name was Lee Harvey Oswald.

While Frank Klein and I were transfixed in front of the television set at Tortorich’s, a most unusual incident occurred at Guy Banister’s office about 12 blocks away, on the other side of Canal Street. At least, it was unusual for Banister, a former special agent in charge of the Chicago office of the F.B.I., a deputy superintendent of police in New Orleans, and a man who had a lifetime reputation as a rigid exponent of law and order.

I knew Banister fairly well. When he was with the police department, we had lunch together now and then, swapping colorful stories about our earlier careers in the F.B.I. A ruddy-faced man with blue eyes which stared right at you, he dressed immaculately and always wore a small rosebud in his lapel.

Although he enjoyed an occasional martini at the International House, Banister had never been known to drink heavily during the day. He was an austere, highly composed individual. However, on the long afternoon of television coverage of the assassination in Dallas, the ex-F.B.I. man made a noble effort to polish off all of the liquor in the Katzenjammer Bar on the 500 block of Camp Street. As the sun was setting over the nearby Mississippi River, he made his way back to his office with Jack Martin, who had been drinking with him. There Banister became embroiled in a heated argument with Martin, a sometime private detective and hanger-on at Banister’s office.

The imbroglio erupted after Martin made an injudicious observation. He informed Banister, during the course of their quarrel, that he had not forgotten certain unusual things that had been happening at the office during the summer. At this point Banister whipped out his .357 Magnum pistol and began to massage Martin’s head with it.

A .357 Magnum is not an ordinary handgun. It is extraordinarily heavy in order to support its increased muzzle velocity. The brief altercation converted Martin, in a matter of a minute or two, into a bloody, battered mess, and a police patrol car carted him off to Charity Hospital on Tulane Avenue.[2] Like a tiny seed, the planting of which went unnoticed at the time, that unusual and explosive act by Guy Banister ultimately would lead to the only prosecution ever brought in the case of President Kennedy’s murder. Stung by the pain and outrage of his injury, Jack Martin within a day or so would confide to a friend his murky suspicion that David Ferrie, an associate of Guy Banister’s and a frequent habitué of his office, had driven to Dallas on the day of the assassination to serve as the “getaway” pilot for the men involved in the assassination.

As Jack Martin sat groggily in the hospital on Friday night, the news scarcity from Dallas abruptly ended. Bulletins were cascading out of the television set. By the following day, the name of Lee Harvey Oswald had been repeated so relentlessly in the media that it had become a household name throughout the world. His resume was proliferating almost as swiftly, including more and more details about his stay in New Orleans through the summer preceding the assassination. Although I personally had no argument with the official lone assassin scenario so rapidly taking shape in the media, I was not free to ignore Lee Harvey Oswald’s unexplained three months in the city. The New Orleans connection meant that, however peripheral the effort might turn out to be, my office had to inquire into Oswald’s possible associations in our jurisdiction.

I immediately arranged for a special meeting of a half dozen key members of my staff. On Sunday afternoon, the senior assistant district attorneys and investigators and I gathered in my office. Such weekend meetings had become our custom whenever a crime on the national scene had leads trailing to New Orleans.

In the course of checking out all possible associates of Oswald’s in the city, we discovered that the alleged assassin had been seen during the summer with a man named David Ferrie. I got my people on the telephones right away to investigate a possible Oswald–Ferrie relationship.

I had met David Ferrie once. The encounter had been casual but unforgettable. Shortly after my election as district attorney I had been walking across Carondelet Street, near Canal. Half-conscious that the waiting traffic was about to head my way, I began to quicken my step. Just then, a man grabbed me by both arms and stopped me cold.

The face grinning ferociously at me was like a ghoulish Halloween mask. The eyebrows plainly were greasepaint, one noticeably higher than the other. A scruffy, reddish homemade wig hung askew on his head as he fixed me with his eyes. The traffic was bearing down on us as he gripped me, and I hardly could hear him amidst the din of the horns.

I remembered that he was shouting congratulations on my recent election. As I dodged a car, at last escaping his clutch, I recall his yelling that he was a private investigator. Our brief street encounter had taken place sometime in 1962, the preceding year.

This recollection stirred up others. I remembered Ferrie’s reputation as an adventurer and pilot. Because I had been a pilot myself during World War II, the legend that he could get a plane in and out of the smallest of fields had stuck in my mind. And so had other vague fragments—his involvement in the abortive 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, his anti-Castro activities, and his frequent speeches to veterans’ groups about patriotism and anti-communism. The name of David Ferrie was well known in New Orleans.

Soon one of my assistant D.A.’s, Herman Kohlman, came in with some startling news. He had learned that Ferrie had made a precipitate journey to Texas just 48 hours before—on the very day of the assassination. The source, whom Kohlman verified as thoroughly reliable, was the man to whom Jack Martin had confided after he had been pistol-whipped by Guy Banister. Martin had told this source of his dark suspicions about Ferrie’s sudden Texas trip.

A routine review of our files revealed a police report based on a complaint against Ferrie. The complaint, a misdemeanor, had been refused for prosecution, but the report led us to Ferrie’s present address on Louisiana Avenue Parkway. I sent Frank Klein and a team of investigators to the place. In Ferrie’s unkempt rabbit hutch of an apartment they found an assortment of Army rifles, ammunition clips, military canteens and web equipment, and, on the wall, a large map of Cuba. Adding to the general confusion were two young men awaiting Ferrie’s return. They said that Ferrie had headed for Texas in his car early Friday afternoon—approximately an hour after the assassination.

Their account of the timing was confirmed later by other witnesses who had seen Ferrie in New Orleans as late as midday on November 22. This meant that Ferrie probably had not been a “getaway” pilot as Jack Martin believed, but it did not mean that we could regard him as clear of any connection with the assassination.

I left a round-the-clock stakeout at his apartment to await his return. On Monday morning Ferrie appeared and was brought to my office for questioning. He was dressed, as usual, as if he had been shot by cannon through a Salvation Army clothing store. He looked every bit as disconcerting as when I had last seen him on Carondelet Street back in 1962. He denied ever having known Lee Oswald but admitted that he had driven to Houston early Friday afternoon.

Considering his exuberant confidence at our last encounter, he was distinctly ill at ease and nervous. And the more he talked, the less his story held together. For example, when I asked him the reason for his departure from New Orleans only one hour following the assassination, he responded that he had driven to Houston to go ice skating. When I then asked him why he had chosen one of the heaviest thunderstorms in many years as the occasion for his ice skating trip, he had no adequate reply.

Later we would learn that at the skating rink he had never put on ice skates but had spent all of his time at a pay telephone, making and receiving calls. We also learned later that Ferrie continued on from Houston to Galveston, Texas, where he happened to be when Jack Ruby called there the night before he shot and killed Lee Oswald. Needless to say, these details hardly were forthcoming from Ferrie when I questioned him.

From his answers, I did not find anything directly connecting Ferrie with the assassination, but I concluded that further investigation of this odd individual and his curiously timed junket was necessary. I ordered my investigators to take him to the First District Police Station, there to be booked and held in jail for questioning by the F.B.I.

I was confident that an F.B.I. investigation of David Ferrie and any other matters even remotely related to the President’s murder would be exhaustive. That faith probably was typical of most Americans in 1963. However, it was particularly strong in my case because of my background. My father had been an attorney as had his father before him. Thus, I had, through osmosis or acculturation, acquired a reverence for the law.

Thomas Jefferson Garrison, my paternal grandfather, had been general counsel of the Northwestern Railway, headquartered in Chicago. One of the members of his staff—a young lawyer named Clarence Darrow—had caused my grandfather much displeasure with his inclination to rebel against some of the more rigid strictures of the law. I have been told that Grandfather Garrison was vastly relieved when Darrow resigned from the railroad’s legal staff to represent the Socialist leader Eugene Debs. Darrow, as is well known, went on to become one of America’s greatest trial attorneys. Ironically, as much as I admired my grandfather, I developed a high regard for Darrow’s unparalleled ability as a trial attorney and his great passion for justice. For this reason (and perhaps because of his relationship with my grandfather) one of my sons is named Darrow.

My maternal grandfather, William Oliver Robinson, was a most patriotic man. He came from a predominantly Irish family and stood seven feet three inches in height. (His two brothers were each seven feet tall.) He had no patience for fools or for anyone who did not believe that the United States of America was the greatest country in the world. Successful in real estate and the coal business, he stood straight as an arrow, wore a magnificent turn-of-the-century moustache, and dressed elegantly, having his clothes tailor-made and sent to him from New York. (There were, of course, no tall men’s clothing stores in those days.)

As one of the leading businessmen of Knoxville, Iowa, and undoubtedly as one of its leading characters, he often would represent the town at the railroad station when an important dignitary passed through on the cross-country train. When he did so, he wore a red, white, and blue Uncle Sam costume—including the stovepipe hat—exemplifying the patriotism of the citizens of Knoxville. I have a photograph of him, imposing in this grand regalia, greeting President William Howard Taft, who has just dismounted from the train.

I was born with that Knoxville patriotism in my blood and grew up in New Orleans, but the important formative years of my youth were spent in the military. I entered the Army a year before Pearl Harbor, at the age of 19, and liked it so much that it became a surrogate family to me. After being commissioned a lieutenant in the field artillery in 1942, I volunteered for training as a pilot to fly grasshopper planes for observation of enemy targets. Following tactical flight training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, I was sent to Europe where I flew in combat over the front lines in France and Germany.

Like the other men in my unit, I had become an artillery pilot primarily for the adventure of it. However, I was also flying to support the United States government’s effort to defeat the Nazis and the evil they represented. I was never so conscious of this as when I arrived at Dachau the day after the infantry, supported by my artillery unit, took that Nazi concentration camp and saw the gaunt, starved bodies of the dead inmates piled high alongside the waiting crematorium with its great, heavily sooted brick chimney stacks.

During my five years in the Army in World War II and another 18 years as a field artillery officer in the National Guard, I never encountered deception of any kind. To me, the Army was synonymous with the United States government. I should add that I was still in the National Guard, and still equating the Army with the United States government, when President Kennedy was assassinated and I arrested David Ferrie.

Upon my return to civilian life after World War II, I followed my family tradition and went to law school at Tulane, obtaining both Bachelor of Laws and Master of Civil Laws degrees. Shortly thereafter I joined the F.B.I. As a special agent in Seattle and Tacoma, I was very impressed with the competence and efficiency of the Bureau. However, I was extremely bored as I rang doorbells to inquire about the loyalty and associations of applicants for employment in a defense plant. So I decided to return to the law profession.

My arrival in the position of district attorney of New Orleans was something of an accident. Richard Dowling, the incumbent in the late 1950s and the early 1960s when I was in private practice as a trial lawyer, had been an excellent attorney in civil and domestic litigation. However, the administration of his prosecutor’s office left a great deal to be desired. As a former assistant district attorney, a job I had held from 1954 to 1958, I felt a strong concern about that particular office. When Dowling ran for re-election in 1961, I ran against him along with a number of others.

I was given no chance of winning. However, I thought my participation in the election might help one of the others who would produce a better office. For my campaign, I did not go through the streets shaking hands and slapping backs. I did not attempt to have rallies organized for me. I did not have circulars handed out in my behalf. I did not solicit the support of any political organizations. I simply spoke directly to the people on television. And inasmuch as I truly did not have any organizational support except for a handful of friends, I always made it a point to appear on television alone, to emphasize my independence, to turn my lack of political support into an asset.

I ended up in the runoff against Dowling, unexpectedly received the support of the local newspaper, and in the second round campaigned exactly as I had in the first.

To my surprise—and to the astonishment of a good many others—I was elected and took office as district attorney on March 3, 1962. This was the first time in New Orleans history that any public official ever had been elected citywide without any political organization support.

Consequently, I brought to the city a brand new and truly independent D.A.’s office. From the beginning I chose my assistant D.A.’s from among the top graduates of the neighboring law schools and from among the best of the city’s young trial attorneys. There was not a single political appointment on my staff. Thus, we were able to operate without obligations to any outside individual or organization.

I was 43 years old and had been district attorney for a year and nine months when John Kennedy was killed. I was an old-fashioned patriot, a product of my family, my military experience, and my years in the legal profession. I could not imagine then that the government ever would deceive the citizens of this country. Accordingly, when the F.B.I. released David Ferrie with surprising swiftness, implying that no evidence had been found connecting him with the assassination, I accepted it.[3] I assumed that the Bureau had thoroughly examined Ferrie’s trip and found it to be of no importance. It irked me a bit that the special agent in charge of the New Orleans office had issued a gratuitous statement saying that the arrest of Ferrie had not been the F.B.I.’s idea but that of the district attorney. It was an unprecedented comment for one law enforcement official to make about another.

I might have expected such an observation from Ferrie’s attorney but hardly from another government official. I had assumed that the federal government and I were on the same side. However, I ignored the comment and turned my attention back to the prosecution of burglaries, armed robberies, and other local crimes.