Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (58 page)

It is true that Sheridan had an intelligence background when he came to work for Bobby Kennedy. After quitting the FBI in 1954, he received a security clearance to join the CIA. He decided to work for the National Security Agency instead, but after only three years, he left that organization—a covert labyrinth dedicated to the cracking of foreign codes—because, he said, “I felt cut off from the world.” There is no evidence that Sheridan continued to play an intelligence role in his career with the Kennedys. Nancy Sheridan said that her husband shared Bobby’s suspicious view of the CIA. “They didn’t trust it,” she said simply.

It is easy to understand why the approach that Sheridan made to the agency in the midst of his Garrison research raises eyebrows among his critics. But the CIA, which ordered a background check on Sheridan after hearing from him, was clearly as leery of him as he was of the agency. Langley officials might have feared that Sheridan and Kennedy were not only investigating Garrison but were on a fishing expedition to find out what the agency knew about the assassination. In any case, the incident reveals more about the two parties’ mutual distrust of Garrison than it does about their trust in one another. And there is no evidence Sheridan and agency officials did in fact end up joining forces against the D.A.

Walt Sheridan went to New Orleans for reasons that had nothing to do with U.S. intelligence. He went to size up the Garrison probe, and then—after quickly deciding it was a threat to Bobby Kennedy’s political interests and his future chances of reopening the case—to sabotage it.

If Sheridan was no spook, Jim Garrison was not simply a pawn of organized crime. He had a troubling blind spot when it came to Carlos Marcello. And he certainly was not the shining knight portrayed by Kevin Costner in Oliver Stone’s
JFK
. But Garrison was more heroic than Sheridan believed.

To Bobby’s incorruptible crime-hunter, Garrison carried a repellent, swampy odor because of his willingness to overlook the criminal exploits of men like Marcello. But Sheridan was too quick to dismiss the entire Garrison enterprise because of this. The prosecutor was, after all, a creature of his environment, and this was hothouse New Orleans, where few public officials did not have to change shirts now and then to stay clean. Despite this, Garrison’s outrage over the unsolved murder of the president was genuine. And it put to shame the many public officials in Washington who were in a much grander position to do something about the crime, yet chose to do nothing.

Garrison also might have erred badly by targeting Clay Shaw after the deaths of the two more central figures in his case, Guy Banister and David Ferrie. But, as the House Select Committee on Assassinations would confirm a decade later, the New Orleans prosecutor did succeed in shining a light on a crucial corner of the conspiracy—a world of zealous CIA plotters, Cuban expatriates, far-right militants, and mercenaries, where President Kennedy was considered a traitor.

There is a tragic sense to the blood feud that broke out between Jim Garrison and Walter Sheridan. These two men probably knew more than anyone else in the country, besides the conspirators themselves, about the plot that cut down JFK. But, like the competing heirs to the Kennedy legacy—RFK and LBJ—they were doomed to clash rather than cooperate. You could not find two more different men—one big, loud-mouthed, and brash; the other slight, tight-lipped, and circumspect. Garrison was a man of outsized appetites and ambitions; Sheridan was a devoted family man and squeaky-clean public servant who had submerged his own dreams in those of Robert Kennedy. But it was not their clashing personalities that ultimately drove them to opposing corners. It was Kennedy’s need to control the search into his brother’s killing. Even without his obvious flaws, Garrison would have been unacceptable to Bobby. When it came to solving the crime, RFK trusted only himself and a few men, like Sheridan, who served him.

ONE EVENING, WHILE HE
was volunteering as Jim Garrison’s media advisor, Mort Sahl was invited to a Washington dinner party by his friend, NBC News anchor David Brinkley. Sahl was seated next to Bob McNamara, while his wife, China, sat next to a nervous Bobby Kennedy. Everyone avoided The Topic hovering in the air. “The conversation was so innocuous that it had to be an effort,” Sahl recalled. “Weather was a recurrent topic, and no one ever took a position on it.” Ethel Kennedy finally broke the strained mood by getting drunk and dancing on the table. “Ethel, please, my career,” cracked Bobby.

Finally, at eleven o’clock Sahl left to do his nightclub show, leaving his wife with the jittery Kennedy, who was ripping napkins into shreds and making paper pyramids. Only after Sahl had gone did Bobby work up the nerve to ask China, in roundabout fashion, about the controversial turn her husband’s career had taken. Why was Mort fired from his popular talk show on a Los Angeles TV station? Kennedy asked her. But he already knew the answer—Sahl had been terminated for talking too much about his brother’s assassination. Finally, after Bobby kept pumping her for information, the sharp-tongued China cut him off: “You had him next to you for two hours. Why didn’t you ask him then?”

Sahl was exasperated by the reticence of Bobby Kennedy and his circle to publicly confront the subject for which he was sacrificing his career. On another occasion, while escorting the wife of NBC newsman John Chancellor, who was working that night, to a White House dinner, the comedian bumped into Ted Kennedy’s wife, Joan. When he told her that Bobby had invited him to his Senate office the next day, she burbled, “Oh, so he’s not angry at you anymore?”

“Angry about what?” Sahl erupted. “I’m destroying my career trying to find out who killed his brother!”

The next day, when the comedian visited him in his Capitol Hill office, Bobby once again assiduously avoided the topic. Kennedy wanted to know what the prevailing opinion of LBJ was on the college campuses where Sahl frequently performed. “They hate him,” Sahl said.

“It’s probably time for someone to make a move,” Bobby obliquely commented.

Sahl cut to the chase. “You might just save the country.”

It was the upcoming presidential race that preoccupied Kennedy. All his future plans depended on his occupancy of the White House.

According to Sahl and Mark Lane, who also moved to New Orleans to work on the case, the Kennedy and Garrison camps occasionally sent back-channel messages to each other despite the blazing feud between the D.A. and Sheridan. This was far from a formal arrangement, and indeed it seems to have consisted largely of gossip and bits of information passed back and forth by a colorful intermediary named Jones Harris. A New York man about town whose social circle overlapped with the Kennedys’, Harris turned himself into a dogged assassination researcher after Dallas, traveling to Dealey Plaza and later New Orleans. The out-of-wedlock son of Broadway producer Jed Harris and actress Ruth Gordon, Harris had a waspish wit and a theatrical flair, showing up in Garrison’s office in a straw hat that he rarely took off, even indoors. He had dated Jackie’s White House appointment secretary (and JFK mistress) Pamela Turnure and partied with the Kennedy crowd in Newport when Jack was still alive—he once told Jackie that her glamorous husband should go into movies and let Peter Lawford run the country. Garrison found Harris intriguing and the New Yorker became one more member of the vivid cast of characters surrounding the prosecutor.

Shuttling between New York and New Orleans, Harris would pass along information about the Garrison investigation to Kennedy clan insiders like Steve Smith—the husband of Bobby’s sister Jean and manager of the family’s finances—whom he bumped into at Manhattan watering holes like P. J. Clarke’s saloon. Harris would then relay messages from Bobby Kennedy’s circle back to Garrison.

According to Sahl, the message from Bobby was always the same: I must wait until I reach the White House. Then I will “get the guys who killed Jack.” Perhaps this was Kennedy’s way of signaling to Garrison that it was time for him to step aside—he was going to take over the investigation. But Garrison told Sahl that Bobby would not live long enough to win the nomination. The prosecutor sent back word to Kennedy that his only chance was to speak out about the conspiracy that killed his brother, which might make his enemies think twice before moving against him. But the advice was not well received by Bobby’s camp, according to Sahl. The message that came back through Harris was, “What are we going to do—listen to the people in Washington who have worked with the Kennedys forever, or to a nightclub comedian and a Southern cracker sheriff?”

Sahl shakes his head. “I don’t think he’d be under that everlasting flame today if he’d listened to us.”

Even at the height of his battle with Sheridan, Garrison never turned his fury against Bobby Kennedy. The only sharp public remark Garrison made about Bobby came after the D.A. ordered Sheridan’s arrest, when Kennedy rushed to his friend’s defense. Bobby didn’t want the “real assassins” caught, Garrison acidly commented, because it “would interfere with his political career.”

Privately, with his staff, a pained and confused Garrison would wonder out loud about the strange quiescence of the Kennedy brothers’ circle. One day the prosecutor turned to Sahl, who was the only member of his team who had ever met the Kennedys, and in “utter frustration,” asked him, “You knew them—what kind of friends did those guys have?”

“If they killed my brother,” Garrison added, “I’d be in the alley waiting for them with a steak knife, not sitting at the Kennedy Center watching a ballet with them.”

Sahl, too, was scathing in his assessment of the Camelot round table and their failure to pursue their leader’s killers. The old Kennedy crowd was so worried they would stop being invited to parties if they stirred up trouble, sneered the comedian. “Even if the party had become one long funeral party.”

Even the president’s widow—at first so righteous in her fury against her husband’s despicable killers—had gone mute. One day, while walking along Madison Avenue near Seventy-fourth, Sahl came upon Jackie, peering into the store windows and art galleries in the neighborhood. Their eyes met. She knew what Sahl had been doing for her fallen husband. “Hey,” said Sahl. “I know, I know, I know,” Jackie muttered, and then quickly walked on.

IN THE END, JIM
Garrison’s trial of Clay Shaw did exactly what Kennedy and Sheridan had feared it would. It contaminated the JFK assassination investigation for years to come.

After deliberating for less than an hour, the jury filed back into a New Orleans courtroom shortly after midnight on March 1, 1969, and declared that Shaw was an innocent man. While the jury members made it clear that they were not endorsing the Warren Report—graphic evidence like the Zapruder film, which Garrison repeatedly played in the courtroom, had made a strong impression on them—they explained that the D.A. had simply failed to present a strong enough case against Shaw. In the eyes of the media, however, the verdict was a resounding vindication for the government’s lone gunman theory. For at least another decade, until Congress finally reopened the case, research into the killing of John F. Kennedy would carry the taint of cultism or lunacy because of Garrison’s spectacular courtroom failure. Even some of the leading assassination critics who originally supported Garrison, like Harold Weisberg, turned bitterly against him in the end.

“Let justice be done though the heavens fall,” Garrison had thundered. And the skies did indeed crash down on him after the collapse of his investigation. Though he beat back attempts to jail him for corruption and run him out of public office, Garrison never again rode the crest of history as he did during his two-year Kennedy investigation.

By the time of Garrison’s downfall, Robert Kennedy was dead. And Walter Sheridan would never complete their mission of bringing JFK’s killers to justice. As the years went by, Sheridan avoided talking about the assassination. “He was the keeper of confidences, the sphinx of secrets,” remarked journalist Jack Newfield, who tried unsuccessfully to persuade Sheridan to appear in his 1992
Frontline
documentary about Mafia involvement in the Kennedy assassination. In public, Sheridan claimed he believed the lone gunman theory, but he clearly did not want to linger on the subject. “If there was a conspiracy, I would have been the one to find it out,” he told investigative reporter Dan Moldea, author of a book on Jimmy Hoffa. Off the record, however, he conceded that there might be something to Moldea’s suspicions about the Teamster leader and Mafia bosses Marcello and Trafficante.

As they grew older, some of Sheridan’s children found it harder to accept their father’s terse endorsement of the Warren Report. Walt Jr., who remembers playing at Hickory Hill and Hyannis Port as a child, began to suspect there was more to the crime than Oswald and was keen to hear his father’s views. “To me, it is the biggest deal politically that ever happened in my life, the biggest question that goes unanswered today,” he said. “To me, it
is
the day the music died.”

Every time Walt Jr. asked his father whether he believed the lone gunman theory, Sheridan insisted that he did. But shortly before his death, Sheridan finally told his son what he really believed. They were sitting in Sheridan’s living room after dinner one evening, when Walt Jr. raised the old question once again.

“Isn’t it realistic to think there was something else going on in Dallas besides Oswald?” he asked his father.

There was a pause, and then Sheridan simply said, “Yeah.”

“To me, it was such a major victory after all those years to hear my father finally say that out loud. Because I always knew there was something there. And when he said it, I didn’t even respond, I just sank back in my chair and said to myself, ‘Thank God.’”