ON SEPTEMBER 4, 1967, Chief Justice Earl Warren announced from Tokyo, Japan, that I had presented “absolutely nothing” publicly to contradict the findings of the Warren Commission report on President Kennedy’s assassination. Warren, speaking at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, said that he had not heard “one fact” to refute the Commission findings that Lee Oswald was the lone killer.
This was strange behavior for the Chief Justice of the United States. Clay Shaw’s trial had not begun. The first juror had yet to be selected. Yet here the highest judge in our land already was testifying as the first witness in the case. He was not testifying under oath, which gave him a unique freedom from the laws of perjury which witnesses following him would not have. And he plainly was loading the dice in Shaw’s favor. No witness was going to be eager, in front of all the world, to make the Chief Justice appear to be a liar, or at least mistaken.
But Warren’s wholly inappropriate statement was mild compared to the attacks in the media on our case against Clay Shaw and on me personally. Ever since Shaw’s arrest the media assault had been vicious and relentless.
Some long-cherished illusions of mine about the great free press in our country underwent a painful reappraisal during this period. The restraint and respect for justice one might expect from the press to insure a fair trial not only to the individual charged but to the state itself did not exist. Nor did the diversity of opinion that I always thought was fundamental to the American press. As far as I could tell, the reports and editorials in Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, the New York Post, the Saturday Evening Post and on and on were indistinguishable. All shared the basic view that I was a power-mad, irresponsible showman who was producing a slimy circus with the objective of getting elected to higher office, oblivious of any consequences.
I offer several examples as representative of the American press treatment of our case against Clay Shaw.
In Newsweek’s May 15, 1967, issue under the heading “The JFK ‘Conspiracy’,”[50] Hugh Aynesworth wrote:
Jim Garrison is right. There has been a conspiracy in New Orleans—but it is a plot of Garrison’s own making. It is a scheme to concoct a fantastic “solution” to the death of John F. Kennedy, and to make it stick; in this case, the district attorney and his staff have been indirect parties to the death of one man and have humiliated, harassed and financially gutted several others.
Indeed, Garrison’s tactics have been even more questionable than his case. I have evidence that one of the strapping D.A.’s investigators offered an unwilling “witness” $3,000 and a job with an airline—if only he would “fill in the facts” of the alleged meeting to plot the death of the President. I also know that when the D.A.’s office learned that this entire bribery attempt had been tape-recorded, two of Garrison’s men returned to the “witness” and, he says, threatened him with physical harm.
Aynesworth, who seemed a gentle and fair enough man when he interviewed me for several hours in my home, never did get around to revealing whose life our office had shortened. As for the $3,000 bribe, by the time I came across Aynesworth’s revelation, the witness our office had supposedly offered it to, Alvin Babeouf, had admitted to us that it never happened. Aynesworth, of course, never explained what he did with the “evidence” allegedly in his possession. And the so-called bribery tape recording had not, in fact, ever existed.
If this article was a typical Aynesworth product, one could hardly help but wonder how a newsman with so rampant an imagination continued to find a market for his stories. Yet, in fairness to Aynesworth, I must say that this “news” story was all too typical of what my office staff found itself reading in newspaper and magazine articles by writers from distant cities who had not the remotest awareness of what my office had been attempting to accomplish.
James Phelan, who had written a highly supportive lead article for the Saturday Evening Post about my office’s successes in fighting crime in New Orleans (“The Vice Man Cometh”), returned to do an article about the J.F.K. investigation. In a piece entitled “Rush to Judgment in New Orleans,” Phelan claimed that Perry Russo never told Assistant D.A. Andrew Sciambra about any conspiracy until he was “drugged.” The clear implication was that our office had drugged Russo and then planted the conspiracy story in his brain while he was in a highly suggestible state. The truth, of course, was quite different. In fact, Phelan himself was aware of what Russo had told us about the conspiracy well before it occurred to me that we might be able to verify Russo’s testimony with medically supervised hypnosis and Sodium Pentothal. I knew this because I was the one who first told Phelan about Russo’s story. Phelan’s colorful fiction later fell apart at Clay Shaw’s trial when it was made clear that Russo had provided Sciambra with a full description of all significant events prior to any medical treatments. (See Chapter 18.) Moreover, as was obvious to the reporters in Baton Rouge (see Chapter 12), Russo gave interviews to the press in which he discussed a conspiracy—although he did not know at the time that Shaw and Bertrand were one and the same—before he had ever met with Sciambra.
The simple truth is that public officials really do not go unobserved so long by the people who elect them. I have never heard of a district attorney who was able to build a career on drugging witnesses so that they would say whatever he ordered them to say. If a prosecutor was so deranged that he resorted to such measures, the word would get around quickly enough and he would not be a prosecutor much longer. It would be much the same if he sought to enhance his career with the aid of thumbscrews and other torture devices.
It is fair to say that the people of New Orleans closely watched the well-publicized charge that their district attorney intentionally drugged a witness to influence his testimony. They listened to the expert testimony of Doctors Esmond Fatter and Nicholas Chetta. They understood that what was sought under controlled medical supervision was the refreshing of memory, if possible. And in the following election of 1969 I was again re-elected to office, this time in the first primary. No previous district attorney ever had been re-elected in New Orleans.
The attacks did not end with Phelan. Without any warning, Dick Billings, the friendly editor from Life magazine, suddenly flew in from New York. He seemed amiable enough, but he appeared to have lost a great deal of weight. He had deep circles under his eyes. His Ivy League clothes hung loosely on his thin frame. He informed me that Life would no longer be able to support me and work with me in the investigation. The magazine, he said, had come to the conclusion that I was not the vigorous opponent of organized crime that it had first thought I was.
“What on earth are you talking about?” I asked. He then mentioned a name, asking me if I knew of the man. I shook my head and answered that I had never heard of him. The editor held out his hands. “There you are,” he said. “You should have had a dossier on him by now.”
I pulled over a phone directory and located the name he had mentioned in the small town of Covington, a listing which indicated that he lived immediately north of the lake. “Is this who you mean?” I asked.
“That’s the man,” he said. “He’s one of the top racketeers down here.”
“And you’re the starting quarterback for the Green Bay Packers,” I responded. If that fellow had been engaged in any extended criminality in and around New Orleans, I would have known his name well. As it turned out, I could find no one in the office who ever had heard his name. Nor did the name ever come up again.
I studied my visitor. It was obvious that he was an unhappy man executing a bad assignment which he had been ordered to carry out. I was angry, but not at him. He was considerably more sensitive and intelligent than most of the media representatives I had encountered. Soon he would be assigned to stories about the birth of quintuplets in Bangor, Maine, or a scientific breakthrough in increasing the fertility of rabbits.
Apparently, the Life magazine gambit had been planned for some time, if not from the very outset. Within a few weeks my name appeared in the second of two Life articles about organized crime. It gave particular attention to me as a free-wheeling visitor at Las Vegas casinos from time to time. The writer of the article had some problems working me into the scenario because, as it happens, I do not gamble at all. It is not that I am too virtuous. I simply observed a long time ago that the house always wins.
However, that detail did not inhibit the editors of Life. I was described as having a special Las Vegas connection who was a “lieutenant” of a New Orleans “mobster.” I reportedly was “granted a $5,000 credit in the cashier’s cage.” The implication was that I used this credit to sign chits during my alleged forays at the gambling tables.
It was true that I filled out a form once when I had to cash a check at the Sands Hotel. This apparently is where I acquired such credit, if indeed I had that much. It was also true that I took trips to Las Vegas about twice a year, but they were entirely for the purpose of getting out into the dry western climate, which I happen to love, and catching up with some sunshine. That was all that was needed for me to become Life’s version of The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.
Around the time of the Life article about my fictional gaming proclivities at Las Vegas, Time magazine—a sister publication of Life’s and a part of the Luce empire—ran a series of articles on our investigation. It was pictured as an indefensible sham, and I as a demented buffoon, hungry for headlines.
None of the publications I read seemed to consider the possibility that our investigation might have some legitimate evidentiary basis and that John Kennedy may indeed have been the victim of a conspiracy. The New York Times Magazine once—and then very briefly—did confront the issue of a conspiracy. The article appeared under the catchy title “No Conspiracy, But—Two Assassins, Perhaps?” The author, an Englishman named Henry Fairlie, stated, incredibly enough, that neither in Europe nor in America had he found much popular interest in the possibility that the Warren Commission had reached the wrong conclusions. He did acknowledge, however, that “doubt has been aroused” and went on to express his concern that such doubt “may become an obsession in at least some quarters—perhaps eventually in the popular mind, which has so far been resistant.”
The thesis of the article eventually emerged in the following sentences:
The fact that more than one person is engaged in an enterprise does not necessarily make it a conspiracy. This is the leap which alarms me, and it is a leap (I do not wish to imply any conscious motive) which ambitious authors perhaps find a little too easy to take.
If I understood it correctly, the reasoning here in the newspaper of record was that just because more than one individual may have been shooting at President Kennedy at the same time, this did not necessarily mean that a conspiracy had occurred.
After the early harassing fire which we had been receiving from the print media, the big guns of TV news moved in. In the spring of 1967, local sources alerted us that the advance men of a special N.B.C. investigative team had arrived in New Orleans. The ostensible chief investigator was a man named Walter Sheridan. He was quartered at the Royal Orleans, and it soon became clear that he was in New Orleans to stay a spell.
Sheridan was a poised man of apparent substance whom I passed several times in the hotel lobby, each of us giving a casual nod to the other. After a while it occurred to me that he did not quite fit the picture of a man simply on his way up in the business of gathering news. In time I would learn that our visitor had unusually high connections, not merely in New York but in Washington, D.C., as well. He often made reference to his service in the Office of Naval Intelligence, Guy Banister’s alma mater.
The N.B.C. news team did not seem interested in interviewing anyone from the office, which was fine with us. We were naive enough to assume that they were investigating the President’s murder. The continued absence of any signs of real curiosity from the N.B.C. team about the facts of Kennedy’s murder simply indicated to us that another fictional pre-fabricated “lone killer” product was in the making.
However, we were beginning to wonder why Sheridan and the various people working on his project were staying so long in town. We kept seeing the blue and white cars of WDSU—the local N.B.C. TV affiliate—parked for hours at a time in the vicinity of the courthouse where our office was located.
In time we learned that the N.B.C. investigators had found their way to the State Penitentiary at Angola, where they had been questioning Miguel Torres, a professional burglar, and other inmates.
It was just about then that we suddenly realized that N.B.C. was not investigating the assassination at all. It was investigating us—me, my office, my staff, and our investigation. One of the sources who told us of N.B.C.’s plans was Marlene Mancuso, who had once been married to Gordon Novel.[51] She wrote in a memo to us that she had been contacted by a reporter for N.B.C.:
Richard Townley told me that he had been trying to contact me for a couple of weeks. He said that he worked for N.B.C. and that his intuition told him that I would be involved eventually. …
He said Mr. Garrison would get a jail sentence. He said he figured that I was going to be Mr. Garrison’s star witness, and that Mr. Garrison was going to use me to discredit Gordon and make him appear as a second Oswald. He kept going back that he wanted a taped interview that would show me in a good light. He said that otherwise I would probably be subpoenaed and there would be a lots [sic] of newspapermen around me and a state of confusion and I would look very bad …
Townley kept telling me that it would be more intelligent to be presented nicely than to be shown in a bad light coming out of the courtroom … He said they are going to expose Mr. Garrison as a fraud and that he is working with N.B.C., out of WDSU, on this…
Even bolder was N.B.C.’s approach to Perry Russo. Russo told Andrew Sciambra that before the program he had been contacted repeatedly in an effort to persuade him to change his recollection of having heard Clay Shaw discuss President Kennedy’s assassination with David Ferrie.
While the facts were fresh in his mind, Sciambra wrote a memorandum based on what Russo had told him. Here are some representative paragraphs summarizing Perry Russo’s statements about what the N.B.C. people were up to:
Over the past few weeks, I have been in constant contact with Russo discussing N.B.C. personnel and agents who have been coming to his residence to discuss with him the Garrison probe in general and the N.B.C. Television White Paper Report on the probe in particular. In regard to this, Russo has informed me that during the past few weeks Richard Townley of WDSU Television has been to his house twice and James Phelan of the Saturday Evening Post has been to his house four times. Some of the highlights of those conversations are as follows…
Townley also told Russo that he would contact him in a few days and let him know what moves Clay Shaw’s attorney had in mind, as they were working together. Russo also said that Townley told him that he and N.B.C. had contacted all of the witnesses that they know about and that they would try to find out what else the District Attorney’s office had but that it was getting harder to get information out of the District Attorney’s office because now the District Attorney’s office is insulating the leaks…
Russo said that Walter Sheridan of N.B.C. News told him that the President of N.B.C. contacted Mr. Gherlock who is in charge of management at Equitable’s home office in New York and Gherlock assured the President of N.B.C. that if Russo did cooperate with N.B.C. in trying to end the Garrison probe, that no retaliation would be taken by Equitable [Russo’s employer] against Russo by the local office on instructions from the home office.
Russo said that he told Sheridan that he needed a rest as the news people have been bothering him day and night and that he would take a seven to ten day vacation in California after the baseball season was over. Sheridan then asked him if he would like to live in California. He advised him that if he did side up with N.B.C. and the defense and bust up the Garrison probe that he would have to run from Garrison and move from Louisiana. Sheridan, Russo continued, said that they could set him up in California, protect his job, get him a lawyer and that he could guarantee that Garrison could never get him extradited back to Louisiana. [Emphasis added.]
Sheridan then told him that N.B.C. flew Novel to McLean, Virginia, and gave him a lie detector test and that Garrison will never get Novel back in Louisiana. Russo said that Sheridan told him that what he wants Russo to do is to get on an N.B.C. National television show and say, “I am sorry for what I said because I lied, some of what I said was true but I was doctored by the District Attorney’s staff into testifying like I did”…
Perry said that James Phelan of The Saturday Evening Post told him that he was working hand in hand with Townley and Sheridan and they were in constant contact with each other and that they were going to destroy Garrison and the probe …”
By now I was becoming concerned about the severe intensity of N.B.C.’s assault on the case we had developed, not to mention the corresponding effort to smear my office. We had already been the targets of numerous distortions, exaggerations, and even fabrications in the news media. But these “media” people were going far beyond word games. They were engaged in an organized effort to derail an official investigation of a major city’s district attorney’s office. They were attempting to persuade witnesses to alter their testimony, even attempting to move major witnesses permanently to another part of the country.
When the White Paper entitled “The Case of Jim Garrison” was broadcast nationwide to an audience of millions in June 1967, it required only a few minutes to see that N.B.C. had classified the case as criminal and had appointed itself as the prosecutor.
The three lead-off witnesses were John Cancler, a convicted burglar and pimp better known to local law enforcement officials as “John the Baptist”; Miguel Torres, a convicted burglar serving time at the State Penitentiary at Angola; and a man named Fred Leemans, whom I had never heard of, who turned out to be the proprietor of a “turkish bath” in downtown New Orleans.
On the program, “John the Baptist” announced that he had been a cellmate of Vernon Bundy’s. Bundy, he confided, had told him that his story concerning Clay Shaw and Lee Oswald was untrue. This, of course, was an outright lie, but it was merely the first of many to follow.[52] Cancler also described a callous attempt of the district attorney’s office to get him to place false evidence in Clay Shaw’s home. Cancler said he rejected out of hand such a questionable suggestion.
In his interview, Torres claimed that the district attorney’s office had tried to get him to testify falsely that Clay Shaw had made indecent advances towards him. Even worse, he said, the D.A.’s office tried to get him to say that he knew Shaw to be Clay Bertrand. To help induce him to tell these lies, he revealed, the D.A.’s men had offered him a supply of heroin and a three-month vacation in Florida. Torres, according to the rest of his story, preferred to return to cutting sugar cane at the Louisiana State Penitentiary rather than accept such an unethical vacation.
Then there appeared Leemans, who informed the network interviewer that the D.A.’s office had offered him $2,500 if he would testify that Clay Shaw had visited Leemans’ downtown steam emporium with Lee Harvey Oswald. At first he had agreed to the proposal, he indicated. However, after he thought it over, the idea of participating in such an immoral act had begun to eat away at him and he could not go along with it.
And then the round face of Dean Andrews filled the screen as he announced solemnly that it had not been Clay Shaw who had called him the day after the assassination to be Lee Oswald’s lawyer. In fact, he said, he would not know Clay Shaw if he fell across him lying dead on the sidewalk.
After the program was over, in view of John Cancler’s demonstrated willingness to discuss the veracity of Vernon Bundy, the Orleans Parish Grand Jury wanted to hear Cancler under oath. Its members asked him to repeat what he had told N.B.C. about Bundy having testified falsely concerning Oswald and Shaw. The Grand Jury also wanted to hear him confirm under oath his N.B.C. allegations of improprieties by my office.
Cancler, now citing the Fifth Amendment, refused to repeat his charges on the ground that to do so might cause him to incriminate himself. At the request of the Grand Jury, he was then brought before one of the Criminal Court judges, who again asked him to repeat the charges he had made in front of the entire country. Once more, he took the Fifth Amendment and refused. The judge found him guilty of contempt of court and sentenced him to six months in jail in addition to the servitude awaiting him on his burglary conviction.
Also in response to the Grand Jury’s request, Miguel Torres was brought down from the State Penitentiary at Angola to appear before it. Torres, as well, was asked to repeat under oath the accusations he had made nationwide on N.B.C. Like Cancler, Torres refused to respond under oath on the ground that it might incriminate him. In court he took the Fifth Amendment again and also received an added jail sentence for his contempt.
The Grand Jury gave so little credence to Fred Leemans’s outlandish steambath story that it did not even bother to call him. As for Dean Andrews, shortly following the N.B.C. program, he was indicted by the Orleans Parish Grand Jury for committing perjury when he testified before it that Clay Shaw was not the “Clay Bertrand” who called him about being Lee Oswald’s lawyer. Subsequently, in August 1967, Andrews was found guilty of perjury by a jury of New Orleans citizens.
Within several days after N.B.C. aired the program, I sent off a furious letter of complaint to the Federal Communications Commission. I requested equal time to reply personally to the network’s rapacious attack on my office.
The F.C.C. made N.B.C. provide me with a half hour to reply to the hour-long White Paper. Not exactly equal time, but all I needed. I made my reply live from the network’s local affiliate, WDSU-TV, and it was broadcast across the country.
Afterwards, I felt I had communicated my message, but I was not left with a satisfied feeling. I kept asking myself, why had N.B. C. worked so long and hard to tear our case apart? Indeed, to tear our office apart.
I had known for years, without having ascribed any particular significance to it, that N.B.C. was a subsidiary of Radio Corporation of America. Now I wanted to know, just what was Radio Corporation of America?
At the public library, I learned that R.C.A. had become an integral part of the American defense structure during World War II with its development of the expanded use of radio by the armed forces. This partnership had grown even stronger as R.C.A. went on to develop a new, extremely effective altimeter for high-altitude bombing missions. From there it had moved on into advancing of radar and other sophisticated machinery for the armed forces. Like the American military, R.C.A. had grown from a relatively simple service into a powerful colossus. Its prime military contract awards had increased more than one billion dollars from 1960 to 1967. It no longer was a mere “radio business.” Now it was a part of the warfare machine. And its chairman, retired General David Sarnoff, was well known for his belligerent, pro-Cold War public pronouncements and activities.
Given this background, it made more sense to me why R.C.A. and its subsidiary N.B.C. might want to discredit a local district attorney who kept raising the unpleasant possibility that the President had been assassinated by the cold warrior establishment of the United States intelligence community.
Compared to the brutality wrought on the facts by N.B.C., the Columbia Broadcasting System’s documentary was civilized—although much of it was untrue. It was aired on four successive evenings in June and, unlike N.B.C.’s White Paper, focused on the assassination rather than on me and my office.
I had been invited by C.B.S. to participate in its epic presentation. I was reluctant because I knew that, one way or another, I would once again receive the shaft from the media. However, I knew of no one else who had been invited to present the case against the lone assassin scenario, so I went.
To my surprise, the network interviewed me extensively, for at least half an hour, during which I explained how President Kennedy had been removed as the result of a conspiracy and described the probable reason.
When the C.B.S. program was shown across the nation, my half hour had been reduced to approximately 30 seconds. This gave me just about enough time to be a discordant bleep in the network’s massive four-hour tribute to the Warren Commission.