I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN that things had been going too well for us. Since that lucky weekend when I stumbled on the fact that Oswald’s rubber-stamped address, 544 Camp Street, happened to be located in the very heart of the local intelligence community, we had found crucial evidence and witnesses that the Warren Commission and the media, whether intentionally or not, had ignored. Stumbling from one unpredictable discovery to another, we had managed to move steadily forward.
But now the Ides of February arrived, or so we would describe it until even darker days, yet to come, wiped out this briefly meaningful title. Internal problems had developed and were beginning to hold back the investigation.
From the very outset, the two most dynamic individuals in my office were Frank Klein, my chief assistant D.A., and Pershing Gervais, my chief investigator. Klein had a first-rate legal mind, meticulous and precise. A blue-eyed, blond-haired man who took great pride in his German blood, he believed strongly in discipline and loyalty. His emphasis on order, system, and responsibility, and his attention to detail were the primary reasons for my prompt appointment of him to the number two position in the D.A.’s office.
Pershing Gervais was totally different from Klein not only in appearance but in background and values. Like Klein, he was highly intelligent and had a sense of humor as quick as a lightning bolt, but there all similarity ended. Whereas Klein tended to be stolid, Gervais was mercurial. Of French extraction, he was black-haired, dark-eyed, restless. His temper was volatile, at times explosive.
Perhaps the greatest difference between the two men was revealed in their attitudes toward authority. Klein tended to welcome it, to support it, to see it as a kind of mortar which held things together. Gervais, on the other hand, was deeply suspicious of it. He tended to distrust it until he had tested it. And even more deeply, so deeply that I could not see it until it was much too late, he was drawn in an animalistic sense toward rebellion—almost for the sake of rebellion.
I had known Gervais since 1941, when we had gone into the Army together as members of the Washington artillery unit of the National Guard. During World War II we had served together on the big guns (155 mm Howitzers), and together we had gradually risen to become sergeants. By the time I left our unit to go to officers’ training school, we had become fast and firm friends.
Many years later, when I was elected district attorney, I put this old friend at the head of my investigative staff for routine investigations— which is to say, violations of the law in rackets where citizens might be bilked.[45] I knew then that he had been involved in some questionable activities years before when he was an officer in the notoriously crooked New Orleans Police Department. But Gervais’s testimony had contributed substantially to ending the era of police corruption in the city, and by the time I appointed him, he had become an undercover source of information for the Metropolitan Crime Commission. I felt that a completely honest, “square” D.A.’s office like ours could use a man like Gervais who had once gone wrong and was “born again.” We needed some firsthand knowledge of the hidden underworld of the city, and Gervais seemed to know what was happening everywhere from Bourbon Street to the farflung edges of town.
I was sworn in at the beginning of 1962, and I recall nothing during our first years in office to indicate that my top assistant district attorney and my chief investigator did not get along. During that time, Gervais had been a virtual tour guide for us as we began to strike at the strip joints, gambling operations, and other racketeer activities that had become synonymous with New Orleans. We hit the B-drinking joints, which were shaking down tourists and offering prostitutes in the back booths. We closed down the last house of prostitution in New Orleans. For the first time in over a century, we ended the lottery operation which had fed upon the poor people of the city. The combination of Klein’s efficiency and Gervais’s knowledge helped accomplish all this.
By 1966, even as I did become aware of personal differences between Klein and Gervais, I regarded this as a solvable problem. But once we began the Kennedy investigation, the conflict between them escalated. I knew from talking to Gervais that he was indifferent to the assassination. What I did not know at the time, though, was that ever since late 1966 Gervais had been pressuring Klein to try to get me to stop the Kennedy investigation. Klein, who shared my passion for getting at the truth in the case, resented Gervais’s intrusions.
I found out just how deep the division was between the two men one weekend afternoon in mid-February 1967. I was returning to the office tired and dusty after three days of special duty with the National Guard at an Army Division staff exercise. Still in my Army field uniform, I found on top of my desk a short note from Frank Klein. The thrust of it was that he could no longer tolerate serving in the same outfit as Pershing Gervais. He said he was informing me reluctantly that if I did not drop Gervais, he would resign. I had to make a choice.
I am afraid that I was very much conditioned from my years in the Army, and one thing that a commander absolutely never allowed was an ultimatum to be issued to him from a lower-ranking officer. I put down the letter, walked to my filing cabinet, and pulled out the evaluations of the work of my various assistant district attorneys. I found that one of the trial attorneys, Charles Ward, stuck out because of his effective record in court. I phoned him and offered him Klein’s position. Although surprised, he accepted. With that, I gathered up the rest of my mail from my desk and drove home.
I dismissed the matter from my mind, satisfied that I had handled it the only way an administrator could, and was unaware of what I had really done until I awoke the next morning. Then, however, I realized that my knee-jerk military response had resulted in my letting go the single most important man to our investigation, our best mind.
Within a few days my sense overcame my pride. I called Frank Klein and suggested that we meet for lunch. He was the same old Frank, a little disappointed in me but understanding my reluctance to make a decision based on personalities. I admitted that I had made a mistake, and asked him to return to the office, but he refused as long as Gervais was there. Why he did not tell me then about Gervais’s pressure to end the Kennedy inquiry I will never know. But Frank left no doubt about his own continued dedication to the investigation.
I indicated to him that I would find a modus operandi which would permit him to continue to be a part of the Kennedy investigation. What we worked out before we parted was that initially he would keep in touch with me or others in the office through Lou Ivon.[46] And there the lunch ended, curiously enough, with Frank Klein and I as close friends as ever.
As for Pershing Gervais, he remained on as chief investigator for the time being. An old service buddy blinded by sentimentality, I had no idea until it was much too late what his love of money eventually would drive him to. (See Chapter 19.)
Shortly afterwards, on February 17, 1967, I was jolted again. That was the unforgettable day the New Orleans States-Item broke its “big story.” Jim Alcock was in the midst of showing me how we could use computers to monitor our case load and cut our operating costs when a grim-faced Lou Ivon burst into my office. He ceremoniously laid a copy of the newspaper in front of us. “Happy Valentine’s Day!” he said.
Although I knew such a story was coming because a reporter had contacted me, the headlines and leading paragraphs hit me in the face like ice water.
DA HERE LAUNCHES FULL JFK DEATH PLOT PROBE
Mysterious Trips
Cost Large Sums
The Orleans Parish district attorney’s office has launched an intensive investigation into the circumstances surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The States-Item has learned that the DA’s office is pouring out-of-the-ordinary sums of money into a probe of a possible assassination plot.
Dist. Atty. Jim Garrison refused to confirm or deny the existence of such an investigation or to discuss information received by the States-Item …
Trial assistants and investigators assigned to the DA have spent more than $8,000 on unexplained travel and “investigative expenses” in the period since Nov. 25, 1966.
“Damn it to hell,” muttered Alcock. For Jim, who confined any displays of anger to courtroom confrontations, this was close to a deckhand’s profanity.
“I wonder if those guys dream,” growled Lou Ivon, “of how much they’ve gotten for that $8,000.”
We continued to read in silence. The reporter, Rosemary James, having sensed that our office was up to something, had gone through our vouchers requesting judicial approval for withdrawals from our fines and fees account. This was how we had been financing our investigation. We had operated as secretly as possible, assuming this was the most efficient and responsible way to handle such a potentially explosive situation. However, the voucher requests were public records, so they could not legally be concealed.
Finished with the story, Ivon and Alcock shoved their newspapers aside. They were looking at me for my reaction.
I glanced briefly at each of them, saw the anger in their eyes. They expected my contribution of fury.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“That’s it?” Ivon exploded.
“They hunted down the news,” I said calmly. “That’s their business. In any event, getting angry doesn’t accomplish a damn thing.”
Jim Alcock stared in disbelief. “Excuse me a moment,” he said. “I’ve got to go outside and take another look at the front door. I think I might have wandered into the wrong D.A.’s office.”
The next morning, coming down Broad Street toward Tulane Avenue, I could see the media people piling on top of each other, trying to get through the narrow entrance to the second floor of the Criminal District Court Building where our office was. I told my driver to circle around the huge, fortress-like structure and come in the other entrance by the coroner’s office. This led us to the unmarked door in the basement where the small elevator went straight up to the private bathroom in my office. In my 12 years as district attorney, the press never was able to figure out how I got into my office when they had all the entrances covered.
The early edition of the paper was on my desk, and I immediately began reading the editorial entitled “Garrison Plot Probe.” It reminded readers that the federal government had already thoroughly looked into the matter, and then, about halfway through, I saw these words:
Mr. Garrison’s own silence on the subject has itself raised some interesting questions, particularly since more than $8,000 has been spent on unexplained travel and “investigative expenses” since last Nov. 25.
Has the district attorney uncovered some valuable additional evidence or is he merely saving some interesting new information which will gain for him exposure in a national magazine?
Mr. Garrison, it seems, should have some explanation.
I read these lines several times. For a brief moment I thought about throwing the paper up in the air and walking out of the office for good, without a backward glance. Then I reached for one of the long, gold pens from the office set that had been given to me when I was first elected. As Ivon and Alcock sat around me in silence, I carefully bent the pen into a perfect “U”. Then, without a word, I dropped it into the wastebasket.
“Is it my imagination,” asked Ivon, “or didn’t someone tell us yesterday that getting mad didn’t accomplish anything?”
“That was yesterday,” I said.
Mad hardly was the word for what I felt. Until that moment I had hoped, in spite of continuing signs to the contrary, that the media would understand what I was about, what I was trying to do. More important, I had assumed that they sensed—and cared—that there was something terribly wrong with the Warren Commission’s impossible conclusions. Now I saw how naive I had been.
My secretary’s voice came over the intercom on my desk. “Mr. Garrison,” she said, “I have to tell the press something. They’re really piling up outside in the hall. They say they need a statement from you.”
“Tell them they got their statement yesterday. It was on the front page of the States-Item.”
I filled a briefcase full of reference books. Then I took the bathroom elevator express and headed home for an afternoon of uninterrupted work.
Immediately following the States-Item articles came a deluge of publicity. I was inundated with requests for interviews. People on the street stopped me day after day. Letters of support arrived at the office from all over the world. Apparently public skepticism about the Warren Commission’s official story was far deeper and more widespread than I had realized. The mere fact that I, as an elected official, shared that skepticism and was willing to act on it had sparked a public response the like of which I had never seen.
An unusually strong letter of support came from John Miller, who described himself as an oil man from Denver. It arrived on elegant pale blue stationery, with the small embossed inscription “oil and gas” beneath the name, and hinted that Miller wanted to offer the office financial help to continue our investigation.
Soon Miller came down from Denver. When he arrived, the receptionist brought him back to my office, where Andrew Sciambra and I were waiting.
Our visitor wore a well-cut gabardine suit which had not come off any department store rack. He was a self-assured, impressive man a few years older than I.
Sharon, my secretary, brought coffee for everyone. He savored his. “Your coffee’s almost Turkish down here,” he said. “But I think I could get used to it very quickly.”
Then he turned his attention to me. “You know,” he said, “I’ve been an admirer of your office for a long time now.”
He seemed to have no objection to Sciambra’s presence—he had not even acknowledged it—so I indicated to Andrew that he should stay.
I had gathered some newly treated photographs to show to Miller. They revealed the shooting of President Kennedy in precise, heartrending detail. After the small talk was over, I held one out for him to see.
“These have been enlarged,” I said, “but they have been specially treated so they show much of the original detail.”
“Splendid,” he said. “I’d love to see them.”
But by this time he was on the other side of the room, picking up some of my war photographs from the credenza.
“Where were you?” he asked. “Europe or the Pacific?”
“Germany,” I replied.
“You were lucky,” he said. “I spent three years in the Pacific.”
“I doubt if you’ve ever seen these blow-ups before,” I said, reaching for some others to show him as well. “We just got them yesterday from New York.”
Now our visitor was at the window. He separated some of the blinds so that he could look down on Tulane Avenue.
“I’ve never seen an avenue,” he said, “with such a profusion of bail-bonding companies. Why is that?”
“I imagine it’s because this is the Criminal District Court Building,” I replied, becoming a little nettled. I had never had a visitor with such mobility.
“All those little places, all that clutter of signs. They make that entire avenue look like a side street.”
He had happened to wander back near my desk. I held up the large photograph showing the moment of the fatal shot and, leaning forward, thrust it into his hand. “You may want to see this one,” I said. “In this enlargement the explosion looks like it actually was caused by a frangible bullet.”
“I know about that shot,” he said. He laid the picture back on my desk. “A terrible tragedy.”
He leaned across my desk and slid all of the enlarged photographs over to one side. He stacked them neatly in a pile. Then he sat down and faced me. “You don’t have to show me these things,” he said with a wave of the hand. “It’s perfectly obvious to me that you have conducted a most effective investigation, considering your resources.”
He studied me reflectively, his fingertips touching together. “I notice where the local press has been working you over the last few days,” he said. “Isn’t that going to hurt you?”
“Without any question,” I responded.
“How much do you have for carrying on your investigation?”
“If you must know,” I said, a little unprepared for his sudden assertiveness, “virtually nothing.”
“How many men are working with you on this?”
“Less than you would guess,” I said. “Most days two assistant D.A.’s, occasionally three. And a handful of police investigators.”
“That’s all you’ve had all this time?” he said in disbelief.
“That’s it.”
“Then how did you manage to make your way into Guy Banister’s operation?” he asked.
I hesitated. There had been nothing about Guy Banister in the States-Item story. Nor had I mentioned Guy Banister. This man had just told me a great deal more than he reasonably should have known. I could feel Andrew Sciambra’s eyes on me, but I did not look back his way. “Shoe leather,” I said as casually as possible. I sat back and waited for Miller’s next move. Now I was alert and suddenly very curious about why he really was there.
He stood up once more and was pacing the room, only this time more slowly. He continued to ignore Sciambra as if he were a piece of furniture. This was fine with Andrew, who was watching the man quite openly now. Finally Miller spoke up.
“I’m going to be very frank with you,” he said. “You’ve done a great job, an astounding job considering the limited resources available to you. But the best you can ever hope for is to stir up a lot of confusion. You’re not going to do this country any good, and you’re not going to do yourself any good.”
He came back to his seat and sat down, now looking directly at me.
I said nothing.
“You don’t belong here,” he continued. “You’re too big for this job. On this Mickey Mouse street with that cluster of bail-bond shops lined up across the way.”
“The job manages to keep me pretty busy,” I said.
“Nonsense. You should be in a job where you can make decisions that have impact, that affect the world. Here you’re trying to climb up the steep side of Mount Everest.”
He leaned forward and spoke with intensity, tapping a manicured right index finger on my desk as he made his point. “I suggest that you accept an appointment to the bench in federal district court and move into a job worthy of your talents.” He leaned back in his chair and studied me. Half a smile played around his lips. “Do you have any idea,” he asked, “do you have any conception of how easily such an appointment can be arranged?”
I remained silent and watched him. “I’m not just saying you can move on to the federal bench,” he said, “I’m guaranteeing it.”
“And what would I have to do to get this judgeship?”
With cool aplomb he said simply: “Stop your investigation.”
For a moment no one said anything. Then Miller broke the silence. “The investigation was a magnificent effort. But it’s over and done with. Your own local newspaper is already on your behind, and that’s only the beginning, my boy, only the beginning.”
“How long do you think it would take for me to be appointed?” I asked.
“Ordinarily, these things take a long time. But in your case, with your record, it easily can be expedited. Trust me.”
I leaned back in my chair and put both feet on the corner of my table. I looked him over for a long moment before I spoke.
“Mr. Miller,” I said, “you and I have met under a great misunderstanding. I haven’t the remotest interest in becoming a federal judge. And nothing is going to keep me from going ahead with my investigation of John Kennedy’s murder.”
I remained where I was so the man couldn’t attempt to shake hands with me. I turned to Sciambra. “Andrew, Mr. Miller and I have finished our conversation. Would you mind escorting him to the side door?”
Miller was startled at the sudden change in the course of events. I could see that his jaw bones were tight.
Sciambra guided him out the door and a minute later was back. “Those bastards,” Sciambra sneered. “They think they can buy everybody off. Did you see the guy’s Annapolis ring?” he continued. I had not noticed it. Sciambra shook his head. “Well, they offered you the carrot, and you turned it down.” He paused for emphasis. “You know what’s coming next, don’t you?”