Reclaiming History (384 page)

^*
Garrison’s given name was Earling Carothers Garrison. The Iowan legally changed his name to Jim Garrison in the early 1950s.

^*
Where else but Louisiana would a sitting governor, Huey Long, the “kingfish” of “every man is a king” fame, feel free to joke that “one of these days the people of Louisiana are going to get good government—and they aren’t going to like it.” Long was the Depression-era Louisiana politician who, as governor and then U.S. senator, “dominated every level of Louisiana government by bullying or buying off anyone who got in his way.” He was shot to death in Baton Rouge in 1935 by a Baton Rouge doctor, the son-in-law of a judge who was a bitter enemy of Long’s, and against whom Long, then a U.S. senator, had engineered a bill that would have gerrymandered the judge into a district that would not reelect him. Huey’s brother, Earl, kept the Long dynasty going into the 1960s as a three-time governor, part of his last term being spent in a mental institution his wife had him committed to after he openly started romancing Blaze Starr, a stripper. Earl once said that the voters of Louisiana “don’t want good government. They want good entertainment.” Four-time Louisiana governor Edwin (“Fast Eddie”) Edwards, though not related to the Long family, was just as colorful. Despite his open gambling and deep suspicions of his corruption, the silver-haired, smooth-talking Edwards was very popular with the people, causing him to once boast that the only way he could lose at the polls was if he were “caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.” When he ran for reelection in 1991 against former Ku Klux Klan member David Duke, his supporters had bumper stickers that read, “Vote for the crook. It’s important.” After surviving twenty-two grand jury investigations and two trials, Edwards was finally convicted on corruption charges (taking bribes for riverboat gambling licenses) in 2000 and is now in federal prison. (Miguel Bustillo, “Louisiana Tires of Its Rogues,”
Los Angeles Times
, January 27, 2006, p.A24; Williams,
Huey Long
, pp.861, 865–866)

^*
It all started in Havana in 1988. Stone was there to accept an award for his movie
Salvador
, to be presented by Colombia’s Nobel laureate Gabriel García Marquéz. In a “creaky” elevator of Havana’s old and venerable Nacional Hotel, which once hosted a big conference of American Mafia leaders, Ellen Ray recognized Stone. She was the New York City publisher of Sheridan Square Press, a very small, now defunct house that published Garrison’s book and the
Covert Action Information Bulletin
, which featured exposés on the CIA. She handed him a copy of
On the Trail of the Assassins
. Stone initially assumed Ray was “just another sandal-wearing advocate of a cause,” but he took the book with him to the Philippines, where he was wrapping up filming for
Born on the Fourth of July
. The high-stakes tale woven by Garrison of a presidential assassination, with intrigue that in part reminded him of a Raymond Chandler thriller, immediately excited Stone, who thought it a great story. (Robert Scheer, “Oliver Stone Builds His Own Myths,”
Los Angeles Times
, December 15, 1991, Calendar section, p.34; Lambert,
False Witness
, p.208) In its hardcover edition by Sheridan Square Press, Garrison’s book made no splash at all and was mostly ignored by the critics. But the paperback edition by Warner Books, which came out in December of 1991 in virtual conjunction with the movie
JFK
, spent thirteen weeks on the
New York Times
best-seller list, several at number one, and has had twenty printings. (Lambert,
False Witness
, p.208 footnote 2)

^*
Stone wrote the screenplay for
JFK
with Zachary Sklar, the editor of Garrison’s book,
On the Trail of the Assassins
.

^*
The mesmerizing power to influence viewers that inheres in the movie experience is summed up in a joke comic Mort Sahl tells about a guy who went to see the late Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, and said, “The good news is that Oliver Stone wants to do a movie on your life. The bad news is that Kevin Costner is going to play Hitler” (
USA Today
, December 20, 1991).

^*
Stone’s director of photography, Robert Richardson, said that he and Stone tried to create “a strong documentary feel” for much of the movie. In a diary entry during the filming, Richardson wrote, “Utilize the opening documentary material to establish a concrete foundation of factual reality. Let the audience move through the material, never doubting its authenticity.” (Fisher, “Why and Hows of
JFK
,” p.45)

† To convince his audience they were seeing the truth, Stone used every timeworn, cinematic trick in the book. Just one of many examples: As
Entertainment Weekly
pointed out, “In
JFK
’s hierarchy of good and evil, hero Jim Garrison and his staff are uniformly attractive, stalwart, earnest, and often bathed in golden light. Villains Shaw, Ferrie, Jack Ruby and Guy Banister are evasive, unsavory thugs with bad skin, often shown in shifty-eyed close-up” (Daly, “Camera Obscura,” p.17).

^*
Harry Connick Sr., who was the New Orleans district attorney at the time the movie was made, told me that before Stone started filming in New Orleans, he and Kevin Costner paid him a courtesy visit. Near the end of the visit, Stone asked him, “What about the Clay Shaw case? How do you feel about it?” Connick replied, “I think it stinks, a terrible abuse of prosecutorial power.” Stone, he says, became agitated by this, and fired back, “How do you explain someone being able to fire three rounds within…?” Connick forgets the number of seconds Stone mentioned, or the degree of accuracy Stone said Oswald supposedly had. Connick retorted, “I don’t know what that has to do with Mr. Garrison bringing charges against Mr. Shaw.” Connick said the conversation became heated (Costner, he recalls, said very little throughout and did not join in the dispute), and he tried to explain to Stone the role of a public prosecutor to be fair and seek justice, which, he told Stone, Garrison did not do. When I asked Connick if Stone was interested enough in the true facts of the Shaw case to ask if he and his people could look at whatever files the DA’s office had on it, he said, “No, he never asked me. It was clear he had his agenda, and his mind was already made up.” (Telephone interview of Harry Connick Sr. by author on March 13, 2000)

^*
Stone
did
have at least one legitimate and knowledgeable adviser during the filming in Dallas, Jim Leavelle, the Dallas police detective who headed up the Tippit investigation and to whom Oswald was handcuffed at the time he was shot by Ruby. The only problem is that Stone would never take Leavelle’s advice. Leavelle said that Stone would ask him how something happened and then change the facts and film it differently. When Stone asked him one time whether he liked what Stone had done, Leavelle, who said he otherwise had a cordial relationship with Stone, told Stone, “It’s okay if it’s just a movie, but if you want to depict what actually happened, it’s not worth a damn.” Stone kept pestering Leavelle to play his own part in the movie but the respected former detective declined, telling Stone, “I don’t want me or my name attached to the movie because someone might see it and think I approved of this picture.” When I asked Leavelle, “I take it you didn’t think very much of the movie?” he responded, “Well, they got the city right and the person killed right, but there’s not much else that’s correct.” (Telephone interview of James Leavelle by author on April 11, 2002)

† Although there has been no prior in-depth analysis of Stone’s movie
JFK
, which, as indicated, was built around New Orleans DA Jim Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw, Garrison’s prosecution of Shaw has itself been the subject matter of several books in which Garrison’s outrageous and foundationless pursuit of Shaw has been successfully eviscerated and exposed as a fraud. Actually, the first in-depth exposé of Garrison’s case was an excellent, thirty-six-page article, “A Reporter at Large,” by Edward Epstein in the July 13, 1968, edition of the
New Yorker
. The most in-depth examination of Garrison’s entire fraudulent case against Shaw is Patricia Lambert’s 1998 book,
False Witness
, which also has a very good section on the movie
JFK
. What follows in these pages concerning Garrison’s investigation and prosecution of Shaw is a condensed history of the Garrison-Shaw affair with new material and many new inferences.

‡ For those who wonder why I didn’t make it easier on myself by simply using Stone’s
JFK: The Book of the Film
to get all of the dialogue and scenes in the movie as well as Stone’s alleged evidentiary support for everything,
The Book of the Film
does not, as its title might suggest, contain the actual word-for-word dialogue in the movie. On unnumbered page sixteen of the book, Stone acknowledges that it’s not a book of the film but of one of the earlier drafts of the script. I found it varied in a number of places from the words in the film, so it could not be relied on. As for Stone’s evidentiary support, his chief researcher for the book as well as the film (Jane Rusconi, a recent Yale graduate) for the most part simply used statements made in the past by the very same kooks and nuts Stone presents in the movie, and relied on books and articles previously written by Stone’s pro-conspiracy advisers and others of like mind, virtually ignoring the wealth of credible evidence to the contrary.

^*
For any reader searching, item number 2 does not appear until page 1381.

†It should be noted that Stone
did
find time in his movie to bring out to his audience not just once, but twice, the biographical fact that his hero, Garrison, was a pilot in World War II.

^*
Because the
States-Item
disclosure on February 17 had caused Garrison to sharply curtail using DA funds to pursue his fantasy, on the very day he announced he had “solved” the case, February 24, a group of at least fifty New Orleans businessmen, calling their organization “Truth and Consequences, Inc.,” each pledged $100 per month to help Garrison fund his investigation (
New York Times
, February 25, 1967, p.56;
Los Angeles Times
, February 25, 1967, p.1).

^*
In addition to all the various conspiracies to murder Kennedy that sprouted from Garrison’s pregnant and paranoid mind, Garrison spoke of a massive and ever present second conspiracy by the U.S. government to suppress the truth from the American people. “It did not occur to me,” he told a Dallas TV audience in December of 1967, “that the President [LBJ] would have federal agencies conceal the truth from the people. That they would frame a man, Oswald, who had never fired a shot, and that they would knowingly protect the assassins” (Interview of Jim Garrison by Murphy Martin, WFAA-TV, Dallas, Texas, on December 9, 1967). And in a May 29, 1968, press release from his office, Garrison said that “the federal government is a party with a special interest in this case. Our investigation has shown that the federal investigation was faked and the Warren Commission inquiry was faked to conceal the fact that President Kennedy was killed in a professionally executed ambush.” Because Garrison’s investigation and his allegation of a federal cover-up received national attention, what he was saying was affecting the views of many Americans. A national Harris Poll in early 1967, before Garrison’s probe became well known, showed 44 percent of Americans believing Kennedy was murdered as a result of a conspiracy (
Washington Post
, March 6, 1967). By May of 1967, after three months of publicity about Garrison’s charges, a Harris Poll showed 66 percent of Americans now believed there was a conspiracy (
Washington Post
, May 29, 1967), representing an increase of approximately 30 million Americans. (Epstein,
Assassination Chronicles
, p.276)

†Garrison confided in greater detail to famed investigative journalist Jack Anderson, who interviewed him for six hours at Garrison’s home in New Orleans. In a long verbal report to the FBI’s Cartha D. DeLoach at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., on his interview of Garrison, Anderson said it was Garrison’s firm belief that Shaw “had been approved by the CIA to engineer a plot that would result in the assassination of Fidel Castro.” Garrison said Shaw and his partner Ferrie “conceived the idea of sending Oswald to Mexico in a fake attempt to reenter the Soviet Union” as a device to “gain ready access to Cuba,” where Oswald had agreed to kill Castro. Garrison said Oswald returned to New Orleans from Mexico (Oswald went to Dallas, not New Orleans, after traveling to Mexico) and advised Ferrie and Shaw he was backing out of the Castro plot, whereupon Shaw and Ferrie, guided by several anti-Castro Cubans in their midst, then conceived the idea, mostly because of the Bay of Pigs debacle, of having Oswald go to Dallas for the purpose of being a “patsy” for their new plot to kill Kennedy. In a switch from the belief of almost all conspiracy theorists, Garrison told Anderson that Ferrie and Shaw, not organized crime, instructed Ruby to kill Oswald. (Memorandum from FBI Deputy Director C. D. DeLoach to Assistant Director Clyde Tolson, April 4, 1967, pp.1–2;
New York Times
, February 25, 1967, p.56)

^*
To get a fuller impression of just how crazy Garrison was, let’s look at his December 9, 1967, interview by reporter Murphy Martin on WFAA-TV in Dallas for a further description of how the assassination from the sewer took place: “Just a little bit in front of where the president was killed there is a sewer opening. Dealey Plaza used to have a bunch of houses and they were taken down to make the plaza. You have a surface drainage system with pipes through which a man can crawl. The small ones are fifteen inches wide, and the large ones are thirty inches wide. One of the assassins went…through the subsurface drainage system…[He] was the one who killed the president, [the one] who fired the .45 from right by the side of the car and tore the president’s head off. Now, we went into the sewer one morning early…and we found a man fits in there very easily. We also found that after shooting from it, it’s easy to crawl under the street through the fifteen-inch pipe, then you’re in the thirty-inch sewer which leads out of Dealey Plaza to another part of town. Entrance can be gained…to the sewer area…through a manhole.” Garrison said he and some members of his staff had gone to the sewer area “in the dark hours of the morning, and waited till the sun came up, and…you could see so clearly to the occupants inside the [presidential] car.” Garrison added that the Warren Commission “refused to look at the [Zapruder] film because they knew [Kennedy] was shot from the front at least twice…They fooled the American people, consciously, knowingly…They [the U.S. government] ratified the execution, and concealed evidence wherever possible. They destroyed evidence in every possible way.”