Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (57 page)

Nonetheless, Sheridan shared a crucial piece of information with his wife—he and Bobby were determined to crack the assassination of President Kennedy. When first contacted for this book, Nancy Sheridan was as reticent as her late husband to talk about the assassination. But gradually, during five separate interviews extending over a two-year period, she revealed more about the two men’s collaboration on the case.

Sheridan’s widow stated that Walt and Bobby pursued leads in the years after Dallas and planned to reopen the case if Kennedy succeeded in winning the presidency. “They continued working on the case even after Bob left the Justice Department. The two of them would sometimes go back to the Justice Department to look over evidence together,” she said, sitting in her modest, one-story home in suburban Maryland. She spoke in a soft, halting voice, choosing her words carefully.

While Nancy Sheridan knew that her husband was working on the highly sensitive case with Kennedy, Walt never told her what they were finding. “He didn’t tell me anything specific,” she said. “That would have been a major obligation, a terrible burden on his family.”

“You mean that he did not want to put his family at risk?” I asked.

“Yes.”

In a later interview, she reiterated this point. “I’ve said to our children, ‘Whatever Walt knew about what went on in Dallas, he took with him.’ He would never put that responsibility on his family.”

Again, seeking to be certain of what she was saying, I asked, “Because he didn’t want to put the family in jeopardy?”

“Well,” she replied, “it would be an awful responsibility for anybody, don’t you think?”

Did Sheridan ever write down his thoughts about the case?

“No, he wouldn’t have written that down.”

In February 1965, Sheridan left Kennedy’s staff to pursue a career as an investigative journalist, taking a job as a producer with NBC News. “I want to hit people between the eyes. I want to talk about things that have not yet been talked about,” he announced. Before he started his new job, he made an agreement with Kennedy not to investigate Dallas for NBC. They would wait until they could reopen the case together. “When Walt was offered the job at NBC,” Nancy recalled, “he went to Bob and said, ‘This is what I’m going to do, what do you think about it?’ And their decision was, the only thing Walt wouldn’t do for NBC was to investigate the assassination. It was because they had something going together.”

Two years later, the Garrison probe exploded in the press. Kennedy and Sheridan were both eager to find out what the D.A. had. Bobby told Arthur Schlesinger that he thought Garrison might be onto something. But Sheridan, who decided to go to New Orleans to check out the investigation, quickly came to a different conclusion, putting the Kennedy camp and the Garrison camp on a fateful collision course.

Like Guthman, Sheridan insisted he did not go to New Orleans on Kennedy’s behalf. But soon after arriving there, he began feeding his former boss information about the investigation. Sheridan’s scathing reports on Garrison would turn Kennedy against the prosecutor, and his scorching NBC special—“The JFK Conspiracy: The Case of Jim Garrison”—would turn the media tide sharply against the New Orleans lawman.

According to Nancy Sheridan, her husband decided that Jim Garrison was “a fraud—a dishonest man, morally and intellectually” within twenty-four hours of his arrival in New Orleans. “He talked to enough people to say this guy’s crazy—and crooked,” she recalled. As with Guthman’s
Los Angeles Times
team, Garrison defector Bill Gurvich was a principal source for Sheridan as he reached his withering assessment of the prosecutor. After abandoning Garrison’s camp, Gurvich would be described in the press as the D.A.’s chief investigator. But Garrison himself would dismiss Gurvich as merely a chauffeur and photographer, one of the many people who floated through his rambling, disorganized operation, which was soon peppered with colorful personalities from all over the country, including informants for the CIA and FBI.

Sheridan thought enough of the disgruntled Garrison employee to set up a meeting for him with Kennedy at Hickory Hill on June 8, 1967. Their ninety-minute conversation continued in a cab ride to the airport and ended as the two men sat on a luggage conveyor. Gurvich later explained that he had met with Kennedy because he worried that he would think “there actually was something in New Orleans and might be overly optimistic and hopeful” about solving his brother’s murder. In their conversation, the investigator bluntly told Kennedy, “Senator, Mr. Garrison will never shed any light on your brother’s death.”

“Then why is he doing this?” Kennedy asked him.

“I don’t know,” Gurvich replied. “I wish I did.”

Walt Sheridan had his own explanation for Garrison’s media-circus investigation. He thought the D.A. was trying to deflect the spotlight from New Orleans godfather Carlos Marcello and his banker, Jimmy Hoffa—two men who were high on Sheridan’s list of suspects in the assassination. Sheridan believed that Garrison was on Marcello’s payroll. Why else didn’t the prosecutor pursue the gangster, who had more obvious ties to David Ferrie than Clay Shaw did? At the time of the assassination, Ferrie and Banister were both working as investigators for Marcello in the deportation case brought against the Mafia lord by Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department. Ferrie was also reported to have flown Marcello back from Guatemala, after Kennedy’s men grabbed him under dubious legal circumstances and hustled him out of the country in 1961. But curiously, Jim Garrison never bothered to investigate Marcello’s connections to Dallas, a city that was under his criminal dominion and whose local Mafia underboss—Joseph Campisi—was the first person to visit Jack Ruby in jail. Since Ferrie and Banister also did work for the CIA, the agency that he believed had masterminded the plot, Garrison chose to focus only on this aspect of their employment record.

Throughout his years as district attorney, Garrison gave Carlos Marcello a pass, going so far as to insist that the mobster, who called himself a tomato salesman, was “a respectable businessman.” In his 1988 memoir, Garrison wrote that he never came “upon evidence that [Marcello] was the Mafia kingpin the Justice Department says he is.” He conceded that the Mafia sometimes acted as a shadowy partner of the CIA, but the only significant role he believed the mob played in Dallas was as a convenient scapegoat for the intelligence agency. Kennedy had a more astute understanding of the way power in America worked; he recognized that institutions like the CIA sometimes became so entwined with the criminal underworld, it was difficult to tell them apart at the operational level.

Sheridan felt his suspicions about Garrison were confirmed in late June 1967, when—locked in what was now a very public brawl with the NBC producer—the D.A. leaked word to the press that he was investigating Ed Partin for a possible connection to the Kennedy assassination. Partin, the renegade leader of the Teamsters’ Baton Rouge local, had been the key witness in the Kennedy-Sheridan case against Jimmy Hoffa. After Hoffa was finally convicted and sent to jail in March 1967, the Teamsters and their organized crime allies began pulling every string they could to pressure Partin into switching sides and helping free Hoffa. Sheridan immediately concluded that Garrison’s press leak about Partin was the latest move in this campaign on Hoffa’s behalf. For Walt Sheridan and Bobby Kennedy—who had devoted much of their professional lives to hunting down Hoffa—there were few other affronts they would have taken more seriously than tampering with their hard-won conviction of the Teamster boss.

Only one other Garrison move would have agitated Sheridan and Kennedy more: steering his investigation into the dark waters of the anti-Castro plots that had been supervised by Bobby and inquiring how they might have backfired against JFK in Dallas. This is precisely what Garrison began doing, to what must have been Kennedy’s horror. The prosecutor began stumbling around the Cuba minefield, looking into whether Oswald might have been part of a CIA plot to kill Castro and whether the operation was approved by Attorney General Kennedy. Even assuming that RFK did not approve the Castro assassination schemes, there was enough in the Cuba catacombs to have haunted Bobby ever since the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza. This angle of Garrison’s investigation could only have intensified Kennedy’s feelings of guilt and his fears that the New Orleans case was going to blow up in his face.

In May 1967, Sheridan—who had discovered Garrison’s alarming line of inquiry—took the extraordinary step of approaching the CIA to see if the agency might be willing to cooperate with his NBC investigation of the D.A. On May 8, Richard H. Lansdale, a lawyer for the agency, disclosed in a memo that he had been approached by a Sheridan representative—Washington lawyer Herbert “Jack” Miller, the former criminal division chief in the Kennedy Justice Department. Miller told the CIA counsel that Sheridan had learned Garrison was trying to develop an explosive “thesis” about Oswald. The prosecutor was attempting to prove that the alleged assassin “was a CIA Agent, violently anti-Communist, recruited by the Agency for an operation approved by Robert Kennedy to kill Castro. When Oswald killed President Kennedy, the thesis is, it was necessary to show Oswald as a Communist in order to cover up the original plan.” Three days later, Lansdale reported that Miller had contacted him again on behalf of Sheridan, telling him that Sheridan “has indicated a willingness, if not a desire, to meet with CIA under any terms we propose. He would outline Garrison’s schemes and intentions as he understands them and would receive from us anything, if any, we want to say. This could become part of the background in the forthcoming NBC show.”

The fact that the Kennedy camp and the CIA—with their long, dark history of hostile relations—discussed the possibility of joining forces against Garrison shows how anxious they both were about the events in New Orleans. The agency took aggressive steps to infiltrate and disrupt Garrison’s investigation. And during the trial of Clay Shaw—who Dick Helms later admitted was a CIA asset, providing information on overseas businessmen traveling behind the Iron Curtain—the CIA director repeatedly asked his top deputies whether “we are giving [the Shaw defense team] all the help they need?”

But Sheridan had a more demonstrably damaging impact on the Garrison investigation when NBC broadcast his hour-long news special on June 19, 1967. The program ripped into the D.A. for cobbling together a rickety case against Shaw by bribing, intimidating, and manipulating witnesses. The results of Garrison’s prosecutorial mayhem, the show’s host concluded, “have been to damage reputations, spread fear and suspicion, and, worst of all, to exploit the nation’s sorrow and doubts about President Kennedy’s death.” The NBC show was a devastating blast, and it marked a turning point in Garrison’s fortunes. After Sheridan’s indictment, the D.A.’s public image began shifting from crusading to kooky.

The wounded Garrison demanded—and got—equal time from NBC to defend himself. But he also reinforced his image as an out-of-control backwater despot by turning the tables on Sheridan and arresting
him
for bribing witnesses. (The charges were later dropped.) The Sheridans feared that the D.A. was trying to throw Walt in jail so he could do him “some bodily harm,” said Nancy. Kennedy rushed to Sheridan’s defense, declaring that “his personal ties to President Kennedy, as well as his own integrity, ensure that he would want as much as, or more than any other man, to ascertain the truth about the events of November 1963.”

By now, Kennedy himself was aroused to oppose Garrison. When he learned that Mort Sahl had landed an appearance for the D.A. on Johnny Carson’s
Tonight Show
, Kennedy tried unsuccessfully to get Carson to withdraw the invitation. CNN political reporter Jeff Greenfield, who was a young Kennedy aide at the time, remembers walking into his Senate office and overhearing Bobby lobbying Carson on the phone. “He was telling Carson that Garrison was full of crap. Bobby was saying, ‘Don’t believe him. If I thought there was anything to this, I would have done something. Don’t you think I would’ve pursued it vigorously?’” Carson went ahead with the interview, but his questions—which Sheridan helped supply him—were surprisingly hostile for the genial talk show host and prompted numerous viewer complaints. Nevertheless, Garrison performed like the smooth courtroom lawyer he was, expertly taking the interview out of Carson’s hands and raising provocative questions of his own about the assassination. The TV host was so annoyed that he later took it out on Sahl, banning the comedian from his show.

For the rest of their lives, Garrison and Sheridan would regard each other with a poisonous contempt. Even today, among Garrison supporters, the name Walter Sheridan elicits a furious reaction. They accuse him of doing the CIA’s bidding when he went to New Orleans. Those close to Sheridan, in turn, scorn the New Orleans D.A. as a corrupt demagogue. In reality, neither man is so easy to dismiss.

It is certain that Sheridan was acting on Robert Kennedy’s behalf, not as an intelligence agent, when he went to New Orleans. His loyalty—from the time he went to work for Bobby Kennedy’s rackets investigation in the late 1950s to the final chapter of his career in the 1980s, when he worked as a Senate investigator for Teddy Kennedy—was unquestionably to the Kennedy family. Walt Sheridan brought a religious devotion to the Kennedy cause, one that he could never have divided on behalf of another master. Jack Kennedy “asked the best of all of us and we all eagerly gave it,” he once said, looking back on his service in JFK’s administration. “Politics became a noble profession again, as it had been in Ancient Greece.” He embraced this view of the Kennedy years throughout his life. In Sheridan’s mind, Bobby only took the mission higher.