False Witness (26 page)

The last challenge to the Clinton story came from a meteorologist. Two of the Clinton witnesses had tied their recollections to the cool weather they were experiencing at the time. But the meteorologist testified that during “late August or early September” 1963, the temperature in the Clinton–Jackson area was always in the high- to mid-nineties.
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The other half of the FBI team, ballistics expert Robert A. Frazier, now took the stand. He had examined, among other items, the president's clothing, the limousine, the bullet found at Parkland Hospital, and the fragments found in the president's car, as well as the Zapruder film and
slides. The shots, he said, came from above and to the rear.
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Col. Pierre A. Finck, the chief forensic pathologist at President Kennedy's autopsy, was the first witness the next day. Though called by the defense, his testimony appeared to help the prosecution, as he spotlighted existing conflicts in the medical evidence and added new ones. A slender man, wearing large black-rimmed glasses, Finck testified a day and a half, longer than any other defense witness. His direct examination by Dymond went well. In discussing the back wound (which he described as “on the right side in the back of the neck”) and the head wound, Finck stated unequivocally that “both bullets struck in the back, one in the back of the neck and the other in the back of the head.” And he described the characteristics of each that led to that conclusion. For the defense, in its effort to support the Warren Report, so far so good.
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But on cross-examination by Oser, Finck admitted that the wound he saw in the president's back was “higher” than shown on the autopsy drawing. And Finck could not say why, when he examined the tracheotomy (performed at Parkland Hospital), he failed to see the bullet exit wound there. He admitted that the doctors at Parkland Hospital should have been consulted during the autopsy and could not explain why they were not. But, he said, “I was not in charge.” Who then
was
in charge? Finck said that when Dr. Humes asked that question, an Army general replied, “I am.” The general's name Finck could not remember. Why didn't the doctors dissect the neck wound? “I was told not to,” Finck said, “but I don't recall by whom.” He said the same about why he failed to remove the neck organs. Pressed by Oser, Finck said he was able to “probe” the back wound only a fraction of an inch because the muscles had contracted. Finck also stated that the X-rays showed the bullet (which he said exited at the approximate level of the president's neck tie knot) passed through the body without striking “major bones.” Again pressed by Oser, Finck acknowledged that “there was no evidence of bone injury.” As for the report on the autopsy by the panel of four doctors recently released by Attorney General Ramsey Clark (which almost derailed the trial), Finck had no recollection of the small “rectangular structure” in the brain, nor the metallic fragments in the throat wound described by the panel. And Finck insisted that the panel had
placed the head entrance wound three inches too high.
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The defense had called Dr. Finck to establish that the autopsy supported the findings of the Warren Report.
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In his conclusions, Finck did that. The devil was in the details. Speaking to a writer afterwards, Irvin Dymond attributed Finck's difficulties to his unfamiliarity with the cross-examination process. While his performance was dispiriting to the defense, Shaw and his attorneys understood that any anomalies in the medical record had no bearing on the New Orleans scenario or the guilt or innocence of Clay Shaw. The worry was whether or not the jury understood that.

“First father” of the case, Dean A. Andrews, Jr., sporting his usual dark glasses and cocky air, took the stand a convicted perjurer free on bail with, as James Alcock informed the court, “another perjury case” pending. If Garrison thought this
other case
would encourage Andrews to cooperate that day, he misunderstood Andrews's determination to purge himself. Since Andrews's conviction was on appeal, the court ruled it could not be mentioned, but the subject matter, meaning “Clay Bertrand,” could be. Dymond went straight to the call Andrews received while in the hospital the weekend of the assassination. Was that call from the defendant? He had never received a telephone call from Clay Shaw, Andrews replied. He did not know Clay Shaw and had never even seen his picture until it appeared in the newspaper in connection with Garrison's investigation.
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He told of his telephone calls from his hospital bed and his encounters with FBI Agent Regis Kennedy.
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Andrews spoke about his condition that weekend, his “double pneumonia” and his sedation. Dymond tried repeatedly to elicit information about the “fictitious name” he used to identify the person who called him. Andrews, though, took the fifth (to protect himself from further perjury charges) and was sustained. Then, inexplicably, he answered one of Dymond's questions about Clay Bertrand. “No,” Andrews said, Clay Shaw was not the Clay Bertrand to whom he had referred in his conversations with Agent Kennedy.
Andrews could have pleaded the fifth again but he chose instead to clear Clay Shaw.
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On cross-examination Alcock dwelt at length on the alleged Oswald visits to Andrews's office in the Summer of 1963, and Andrews spun out one final time the details about the “swishes” and the “Mex,” unable at this low point in his life to relinquish this last bit of face-saving fantasy. Because he had answered some questions about “Bertrand,” Andrews was now forced to respond to all inquiries from Alcock about the Bertrand telephone call. But Andrews
telling all
didn't help the prosecution. The jury had already heard about the 1950s “fag wedding reception” at the Rendezvous bar where “Big Jo,” aka Helen Girt, introduced Andrews to one “Clay Bertrand.” Now Alcock forced Andrews to name “Gene Davis” as the person who had telephoned him in the hospital the Saturday after the assassination. Andrews explained, as he had two years earlier to the press gathered outside the grand jury room and then inside to the jurors themselves, that he had used the name “Clay Bertrand as a cover name” to protect Gene Davis, who was a completely innocent party.
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Andrews insisted he “didn't deliberately lie” to the Warren Commission. “I might have overloaded my mouth with the importance of being a witness in front of [it],” he said, “I call it huffing and puffing.” But he termed that testimony, “page after page of bull.” In the hospital “under sedation I elected a course that I have never been able to get away from. I either get indicted or I get charged,” he said, “I started it and it has been whiplashing ever since, I can't stop it.” When Gene Davis telephoned him that Saturday, he was calling about the sale of an automobile, not about Oswald, he explained. “I don't know whether I suggested—man I would be famous if I could go to Dallas and defend Lee Harvey Oswald, whoever gets that job is going to be a famous lawyer” or if the idea just came about in the course of the conversation.
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Alcock then nailed it down. “Are you now telling this Court,” Alcock said, “under oath that no one called you on behalf of the representation of Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas?” “Per se,” Andrews replied, “my answer is yes, no one called me to say that.” Why then did he call Monk Zelden? “Don't forget I am in the hospital sick, I might have believed it myself or thought after a while I was retained there, so I called Monk. I would like to be famous, too, other than as a perjurer.” This brought laughter in the
courtroom but, as one writer noted, Clay Shaw didn't join in. “Nobody,” Andrews said, meaning the FBI and Secret Service, would tell him what he had said in the beginning, which is why his later statements were so contradictory. “I elected in my judgment not to involve a person who has absolutely nothing to do with Kennedy, in no way, shape or form, and I got hooked with it. I elected to stick with it, and here I sit.”
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Judge Haggerty, the implications of this testimony taking hold, asked Andrews where he got the name Clay Bertrand. Andrews described searching for something to use as a cover for Gene Davis and remembering the “fag” reception and the introduction. “I got there in the middle of the thing and Big Jo says, ‘Meet Clay Bertrand.' ” Everybody, Andrews said, “burst out laughing” because it was Gene Davis. “I have been introduced as Algonquin J. Calhoun but people know me as Dean Andrews, know it is not my name.” Alcock had little success probing Andrews for answers. Yes, he made conflicting statements, he said, but “Clay Bertrand is a figment of my imagination.” Andrews said he had told “the DA's office” that Shaw wasn't Bertrand. He had told the grand jury. Nobody believed him. “If I had my life to live over again,” he declared, “I would say his name was John Jones.”
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Toward the end of Andrews's testimony, Judge Haggerty requested a five-minute conference in his chambers with the attorneys for both sides. Officially what transpired there is unknown but writer James Kirkwood was told that Judge Haggerty, “shaken” by Andrews's revelations, raised the possibility that the state might want “to make a reassessment of their position in this case.” Reportedly, the prosecution said it lacked the “authority” to do that.
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It had been over two years since Garrison first revealed his mad notion to Andrews that “Bertrand” was Clay Shaw. Nothing Andrews had been able to say had moved Garrison from that position. As Bertrand was his invention, Andrews bore some responsibility for Shaw's plight. Guilt ridden, as any person with a conscience would have been, and at no small risk to himself, that day Andrews had done everything he could to rectify that wrong.

Another witness worried about a miscarriage of justice occurring was Charles A. Appel, Jr., a graphologist in charge of FBI handwriting analysis for twenty-four years and nationally known for breaking the
Lindbergh kidnaping case. He waived his fee when told the defendant couldn't afford it. Appel had studied Clay Shaw's handwriting and the “Clay Bertrand” signature in the airport VIP lounge book. “Shaw did not write the entry in the book,” Appel testified. The entry in the book “was made by some other writer entirely.”
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Clay Shaw's friend of twenty-three years, Jeff Biddison, described by one writer as “a good-looking man in his forties,” testified that in all that time he had never seen Shaw dressed in tight pants or wearing a hat. While Shaw was in Europe, Biddison had received Shaw's mail at his office, not his home, and had never received any mail addressed to “Clay Bertrand” nor to “Clifford Boudreaux,” one of the names Dymond made up, which the mailman claimed to recognize.

James Phelan took the stand worried that the hearsay rule might prevent him from telling everything that needed to be told. His concern was unnecessary. Led by Dymond through his experiences with Jim Garrison, Andrew Sciambra, and Perry Russo, Phelan managed to tell the jury absolutely
all
of it.

He wasn't the only volunteer witness for the defense. For two years the police technician who administered Russo's second polygraph test, Lt. Edward Mark O'Donnell (Homicide Division's new Assistant Commanding Officer), had believed the case would never go to trial. Realizing he was wrong, about two weeks before it began, he called Irvin Dymond. “I couldn't sit idly by,” he told this writer, “and see an innocent man persecuted.”
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Described by one reporter as “tall, handsome, and poised,” O'Donnell was allowed to testify only in a limited way about his encounter with Perry Russo but managed to put into the record that Russo had said Shaw wasn't present at the plotting session. He also described writing his report and the confrontation it ignited in Garrison's office.
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Clay Shaw finally took the stand in his own defense that same morning. His direct examination was a chorus of denials. He had never met Lee Harvey Oswald, David Ferrie, or, until this case began, Perry Raymond Russo. He had never been to Ferrie's apartment. Never visited Clinton. Did
not own a black Cadillac (nor did the Trade Mart).
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He had never worn a hat. Had never seen Vernon Bundy prior to the preliminary hearing. Never met with anyone at the lakefront seawall. Nor given Oswald money. He had never seen Charles Spiesel. He had never been in the Eastern Airlines VIP room at the airport (and had been unaware the room existed). The signature in the guest book was not his. The only “alias” he had ever used was “Allen White” (his grandmothers' maiden names) on a play he wrote. He was never known as “Clay Bertrand” or “Clem Bertrand.” He
was
present when Kennedy spoke at the Nashville Street wharf. In fact, he was part of the city's Reception Committee but he was wearing a conservative business suit. He had never worn tight pants.
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The summer of 1963 was one of the busiest times in his career due to the proposed construction of the thirty-three-story International Trade Mart building.
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“I have never worked harder in my life,” he said. During that period, he was absent from work only one day, in late September, to visit his father in Hammond, and while he was there his secretary called him about a business matter. His trip to the West Coast was initiated in September by a telephone call from a representative of a world development conference in Portland, Oregon, inviting him to speak there on November 26 and offering to pay his expenses. “Was this trip a cover up for any assassination plot?” asked Dymond. “No, certainly not,” Shaw replied. Garrison had blasted the CIA for two years, but neither he nor any of his assistants mentioned that agency in the course of the trial. It was Dymond who asked, “have you ever worked for the Central Intelligence Agency?”
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“No, I have not,” Shaw said. He denied even jokingly or casually talking about killing a president of the United States. When asked if he had conspired with David Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald to murder John Kennedy, Shaw replied, “No I did not!” In his final question, Dymond inquired if Shaw at any time had wanted “President Kennedy to die?” “Certainly not,” Shaw said.
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