False Witness (11 page)

On January 25 he was served with a grand jury subpoena. At Tulane and Broad the next morning, he discovered that an investigation he was conducting into an alleged bribe in Garrison's office had prompted it. He was running the risk of being charged with perjury, he was told. “Get yourself a lawyer,” Asst. D.A. Charles Ward said. The meaning was clear, “Shut up or go to jail.” “For the next six months,” Chandler later recalled, “I was never more than a phone call away from a
Life
lawyer.” Chandler's disillusionment marked the beginning of a schism at
Life
over
Garrison. “There was the Billings faction,” Chandler said, “that was proceeding with a positive Garrison story, and there was my faction” that was urging withdrawal of the magazine's support, believing that Garrison had become sort of a “monster” abusing his power. “We were both filing [separate reports] to New York,” Chandler explained. But for the time being,
Life's
management put their trust in their senior man in the field, and Richard Billings's view prevailed.
⁸

Life
personnel continued to flow in and out of Tulane and Broad. This alerted members of the local press, who didn't want to be scooped by
Life
. Garrison's investigation was supposed to be a closely guarded secret, but rumors of it had circulated for some time. Veteran
New Orleans States-Item
police reporter Jack Dempsey even referred to it once in his column. No one paid any attention to him until the rumblings grew too loud to ignore. How the story finally broke is of more than passing interest, for even as it was happening Garrison was rewriting what was occurring. Later he would revise it even more, as he blamed the press for a self-inflicted wound. Garrison's paranoia about the media was born in these events.

States-Item
city editor John Wilds set them in motion when he decided to find out if there was anything to the rumors he was hearing. He assigned Dempsey and Rosemary James (who everyone agrees was not only a fine reporter but one of the prettiest in town) to see what they could learn from Garrison's office. Wilds also sent David Snyder, a tall, clean-cut investigative reporter who hailed from Iowa, to examine the district attorney's expense vouchers at City Hall.

Rosemary James tried to make an appointment with Garrison. When he claimed to be too busy, she asked the question on the phone. “Are you investigating the Kennedy assassination?” “I will neither confirm nor deny that,” he replied. To a reporter, she later wrote, that was tantamount to saying
yes
but “you'll have to get your information somewhere else.” Snyder meanwhile had hit a paper trail detailing the expenses of Garrison's aides on all those fruitless trips. On February 16 the three reporters pieced together their information and wrote their story. At ten o'clock the next morning, James went to Garrison's office and handed it to him. After glancing at the first page, he handed it back. She asked for a reaction and he repeated, “I will neither confirm
nor deny it.” She said later if Garrison had asked her to withhold the story they would have. “All he had to do was say no,” she said. “He wanted us to print it.” The newspaper's management told Garrison they were going to publish the piece. “Go ahead,” Garrison said.
⁹

It appeared that afternoon, Friday, February 17. The story centered on the hard information Snyder had dug out: the money,
8,000 that the district attorney's office had spent so far. DA H
ERE
L
AUNCHES
F
ULL
JFK D
EATH
“P
LOT
” P
ROBE
, the headline shouted. M
YSTERIOUS
T
RIPS
C
OST
L
ARGE
S
UMS
, informed the subhead. The article itemized thirty-two expenditures chronologically between November 25, 1966, and February 13, 1967. Garrison wasn't interested in suppressing this news. Public disclosure was inevitable and he was plainly relishing the idea. What he didn't expect was the unflattering slant, riveting attention not on the historic or heroic implications, but on the petty issue of grubby old money. When a reporter from the
Times-Picayune
asked about “the trips,” Garrison understandably “bristled” and used “an unprintable phrase.” But that same afternoon, he called the paper's news desk and said the article “was substantially correct.”
¹⁰

Despite his role in breaking the story, Dave Snyder thought it was “nothing special.” He soon learned otherwise. He was working late that day when the phones began to ring with inquiries from all over the world about Garrison's “probe.” The first call was from Scotland, he later said, “and that made me realize what we had.” What they had was a story with international sizzle. About 5:30
P.M
. a call came in that gave it local sizzle. It was from David Ferrie, and Snyder took it, but he had no idea that he was speaking to Garrison's primary suspect. Ferrie said he had read their article and that their story was true, that Garrison was investigating the assassination. Garrison, he said, had “staked out” his apartment, and he offered to tell Snyder about it. Ferrie said, too, that he was physically ill and his voice was barely audible, his breathing “unsteady.”
¹¹
He also expressed his fear of being arrested, which would become the principal theme of his last days. He lived close to the newspaper and told Snyder to hurry over before he changed his mind. Snyder did. As they climbed the stairs to his second floor apartment, Ferrie's “steps were feeble” and he said he had encephalitis. He didn't mention it then but he had also been having severe headaches. Without knowing it, he had suffered one, perhaps
two, “small bleeds,” minor ruptures in a blood vessel at the back of his head.
¹²
That evening Ferrie was living on borrowed time.

The two talked for the next four and a half hours. Ferrie laid out what he knew about Garrison's case and the role Garrison thought he had played. Ferrie felt persecuted and angry about his harassment and that of his friends. He poured out his bitterness. He was thinking about filing a lawsuit against Garrison and Jack Martin. And, he told Snyder, as he had all those before him, that he did not know Lee Harvey Oswald. Garrison's investigation, Ferrie said, was “an utter waste of time.”
¹³

The next day, the interview dominated the front page of the
New Orleans States-Item:
“D
EFINITE
” JFK D
EATH
P
LOT IN
N
EW
O
RLEANS
, DA A
IDE
Q
UOTED
: E
YED AS
P
ILOT OF
“G
ETAWAY
” C
RAFT
—F
LIER
. Accompanying the story was a large picture of David Ferrie. In back was an editorial questioning the
8,000 in “unexplained” expenses and asking “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.”

When Garrison arrived at his office, he found the newspaper on his desk. Here was David Ferrie, of all people, stealing his thunder by publicly confirming, before Garrison himself did, that his investigation was indeed underway, and terming it “an utter waste of time.” Garrison's chief suspect had upstaged him in the most demeaning way possible. Garrison reacted typically and in accord with his oft-stated belief that “the best defense is an offense.” He held his first Kennedy assassination press conference and attacked both local newspapers for publicizing his investigation. He responded to the editorial and to Ferrie's insult. He also officially confirmed Friday's story. Garrison said his office had established that the Warren Commission erred in its conclusion that President Kennedy was murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, and that the plot was developed in New Orleans. “We already have the names of the people in the initial planning,” Garrison declared. “We are not wasting our time and we will prove it. Arrests will be made, charges will be filed, and convictions will be obtained.” Garrison still had nothing but the testimony of Jack Martin and David Lewis, but with those remarks he crossed the Rubicon. While he would make an even more outlandish claim six days
later, this was the preemptive first strike with no possible retreat. He would spend the next four years trying to fulfill, and the rest of his life trying to justify, the note of prosecutorial certainty he sounded that day.
¹⁴

The article published Friday had stirred the world's interest, but when Garrison's Saturday proclamations flashed around the world, expectations soared into the stratosphere and representatives of the international media descended on Tulane and Broad. “Does District Attorney Jim Garrison really have a solid investigation brewing into the alleged New Orleans plot which led to the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas?” asked one newspaper. “The world was waiting for an answer Sunday.”
¹⁵
The worldwide reaction surprised Garrison and also presented him with a problem. All those newspeople in town were clamoring for his next utterance but he had nothing to tell them. All he had was a theory based on linkages provided by a prevaricator
*
and his protègé. Garrison solved this dilemma by staging some theatrics at the Fontainebleau Motor Hotel where he held another press conference on Monday. The representatives from the two local newspapers he specifically
uninvited
. Garrison chose a private facility to avoid the legal implications of barring them from a public building.

Act One of Garrison's show was performed at his office. At about 1:30
P.M
., the dozens of press representatives waiting for him since 10:00 that morning were asked to list their names and news affiliations. Then, except for those from the
New Orleans States-Item
and the
Times-Picayune
, they were called a few at a time into a small room and given the location of the press conference. This they were asked not to reveal to others, meaning those from the offending newspapers. Six of them showed up at the motel anyway, but were barred from the room. “Remove 'em by force,” Garrison shouted, “throw them out if necessary.” One reporter who tried to enter was shoved out the door and into the corridor by a Garrison aide.
¹⁶
Garrison spent most of his time complaining about the premature disclosure of his probe. Arrests, which before had been “just a few weeks away,” were now “months away,” he said. As for his investigation, he added nothing to what he
had said on Saturday. One reporter said afterwards that Garrison had delivered an “hour-long no comment.” The feud Garrison had manufactured between himself and the local newspapers served its diversionary function, giving him something to talk about.
¹⁷

Before Garrison could devise something further to say, he was freed of that burden by David Ferrie's death.

On February 22, sometime after four o'clock in the morning, the already weakened blood vessel at the base of Ferrie's brain ruptured for the last time. At 11:40 Wednesday morning, he was found dead in his bed.
¹⁸
Everyone, even Garrison skeptics, found the timing of his death ominous. Oswald had been arrested and promptly murdered; Ferrie came under suspicion and promptly died. No single event gave Garrison a greater credibility boost than David Ferrie's untimely demise.

He died of natural causes from a congenital condition, a berry aneurysm, according to doctors Nicholas J. Chetta, the Orleans Parish Coroner, and Ronald A. Welsh, the pathologist who conducted the autopsy.
¹⁹
But Garrison, adept at exploiting circumstances, declared Ferrie's death an “apparent suicide,” and anointed him “one of history's most important individuals.” “Evidence developed by our office,” Garrison said, “has long since confirmed that he was involved in events culminating in the assassination of President Kennedy.” Other suicides by other conspirators might be forthcoming, he suggested. With Ferrie's death, the district attorney's “unexplained” expenditures vanished permanently from the news. More significantly, the individual who would have been a far more dangerous adversary than anyone left on Garrison's playing field was gone for good.