False Witness (36 page)

The individual who tied Foster to Estus Morgan was Morgan's second wife, Nellie Louise Morgan. She described her former husband as about six feet tall, 180 pounds, with a dark complexion, black hair turning grey, and a glass eye. Born in Monticello, Mississippi, in 1907, Morgan also joined the Army during WWII; in 1963 he would have been fifty-six years old. When asked how Morgan usually dressed, she replied, “most of the time he wore blue jeans.” Before he and Nellie Louise Morgan were married, he, too, had worked at the hospital. One of his friends there, she said, was
Winslow Foster
.
²⁵

Foster's name was unknown to me until I encountered it in Dischler's notes. But Estus Morgan was linked to the Clinton tale from the first day of Shaw's trial. That's when Henry Earl Palmer took the witness stand and named Estus Morgan as one of two white men, the other being Oswald, who stood in the registration line in late August or early September 1963, and attempted to register. In light of the new information we now have, it seems virtually certain that those two white
men waiting in line were actually Estus Morgan and Winslow Foster.

Their innocent trip to the registrar's office in 1963 apparently laid the foundation for the Clinton scenario. The unfamiliar black car that brought them to town, in particular, would be remembered. The recollection of it may have been the catalyst that led to the story's development in the first place—a black car was essential to the scenario because Clay Shaw was known to have access to one.
*
Who conceived this story is unknown, and precisely how they implemented it is unclear. What is known is that the neatly designed testimony recited at Shaw's trial was meant to be the only version of the events in Clinton that the public ever heard. The story's real roots, buried twenty-six years in Anne Dischler's notes, were never meant to be revealed.

Because of those notes, we know an unfamiliar black car really did appear in Clinton at the registrar's office the summer of 1963. Corrie Collins saw it.
^†
Collins also saw Winslow Foster and his friend Estus Morgan exit that car and join the registration line. We know, too, that neither Foster nor Morgan came close to resembling Oswald and could not have been mistaken for him.
^‡
How, then, did Oswald enter the picture? The answer, I believe, involves Estus Morgan.

Since Henry Earl Palmer first mentioned him at Shaw's trial, Estus Morgan has been a mysterious presence in the Clinton saga. His official role, for instance, has changed dramatically over time. First he was Oswald's companion. Then he was demoted to bystander status.
^§
But
the strangest aspect of Estus Morgan's actual situation was the unlikely way it paralleled Oswald's story: Morgan, too, wanted a job at the hospital;
*
he, too, was trying to register to enhance that possibility; he, too, was told to see Representative Reeves Morgan, and he showed up at the registrar's office at the same time Oswald did.
²⁶
These remarkable similarities suggest that whoever was shaping the Clinton scenario simply appropriated the entire “profile” of Estus Morgan, who really did appear at the registrar's office in 1963, and attributed it to Lee Harvey Oswald, who never appeared there at all.

For what is most important about Corrie Collins's first statement to Frugé and Dischler is what Collins didn't say. He didn't say he saw Lee Harvey Oswald exit the car that day. He didn't mention Oswald.

When Corrie Collins later testified on the witness stand, one of the items he retained from his statement to Frugé and Dischler was the
hat
he said the driver of the car was wearing.
^†
Since Shaw never wore one, Collins's insistence that the driver did has always seemed odd. Why he kept the hat is unclear.
^‡
But it is one of the few details in his testimony supported by Dischler's notes.

Frugé and Dischler interviewed Corrie Collins on October 3, 1967, and Dischler identified Winslow Foster as the man in white that same day. On October 9, Dischler made her last working entry in her steno pads when she recorded additional information about Winslow Foster. Four days later, she wrote her final note: “To New Orleans” it reads, “to turn in last report to Louis Ivon.” Without explanation, Garrison had abruptly removed Frugé and Dischler from the case. One of their contacts in the D.A.'s office told Dischler the investigation had to be “shut down” because of threats against Garrison's family. But Garrison didn't shut it down. He turned it over to Andrew Sciambra.

Shortly before Garrison dismissed Frugé and Dischler, who had conducted an energetic and honest effort, James Alcock told Tom Bethell
that “the Clinton angle ‘wasn't working out.' ”
²⁷
Perhaps Garrison jettisoned Frugé and Dischler because they had failed to find the witnesses he needed. But more likely, it was because of their unwitting pursuit of unwanted information about the real occupants of the black car. For while Estus Morgan was conveniently dead, Winslow Foster was alive and still working at the hospital. The next step for Frugé and Dischler was to interview him. By shutting down their investigation, Garrison prevented that interview from ever taking place.

Over the next fifteen months preceding the trial, under Andrew Sciambra's supervision, Henry Earl Palmer finalized his story.
²⁸
John Manchester overcame his hesitancy (his first statement contained fourteen
I don't recalls
). William Dunn stepped forward for the prosecution.
*
And Corrie Collins overhauled his recollections:
²⁹
He identified the driver of the black car as Clay Shaw. Recalled David Ferrie sitting next to him. And replaced the two men he saw exiting the car with one, and identified him as Lee Harvey Oswald.
³⁰

Who was really driving the black car (which may or may not have been a Cadillac) is unknown. But the possibility that it was Clay Shaw ranges from zero to somewhere deep in the minus column. The same applies to the presence of Ferrie and Oswald.
^†

The House Select Committee conducted a lengthy inquiry into the Clinton matter. It even had an investigator living there for a while. Why its staff failed to locate and interview Anne Dischler is unclear.
³¹
But as a result, the committee experienced an information gap that allowed it to embrace the Clinton witnesses. They, it turns out, did some heavy carrying for the committee in its report. By tying Ferrie to Oswald, they bolstered the theory that the assassination was committed by members of organized crime and anti-Castro Cubans. Since Ferrie was associated with both, linking him to Oswald linked those groups to Oswald as well, and thereby to the assassination itself. To create this connection, though,
the committee relied on a nebulous and suspect linkage, much like those favored by Jim Garrison. But that was the best the committee could do.

Yet by embracing Garrison's case even limitedly, the committee put itself in a bind. For it wanted only the Ferrie–Oswald piece of the Clinton pie, not Clay Shaw, and even made a half-hearted assertion in Shaw's defense aimed at sparing him, which only called attention to its quandary. The committee was “inclined to believe,” it stated in its Report, that Oswald was in Clinton “in the company of David Ferrie,
if not Clay Shaw
.”
*
But since Shaw supposedly told the town marshal he was with the International Trade Mart in New Orleans, Shaw's identification was stronger than Ferrie's. The committee could not subdivide the Clinton tale. They were all there, or none were. If the pie were poisoned, the toxins run throughout. The committee knew better, and regretted what it meant to Clay Shaw, but couldn't resist devouring the pie. Why is clear enough.

Without Clinton, the committee had next to nothing tying Ferrie to Oswald. The two may have crossed paths in the Civil Air Patrol when Oswald was fifteen. David Ferrie didn't remember it, but he never denied the possibility. There was also the 544 Camp Street address Oswald stamped on some of his literature, which Garrison and later Stone made much of. It supposedly linked Oswald to Ferrie's associate, Guy Banister, because his office was in the same building. Yet many find the 544 Camp Street address unconvincing as an Oswald—Ferrie link. For one thing, Oswald worked near the building and would have been familiar with it if he were looking for a phony business address to use on his leaflets.
^†
For another, there was no access to Banister's office from the Camp Street side. One had to exit the building, walk around the corner and enter through the door on Lafayette.
³²
So while a person inside 544 Camp was technically in the same structure as Banister's office, for all practical purposes, he was in a separate building. As the committee noted, Oswald never rented that office and no one ever identified him as being there. Nor did any credible testimony ever place him in Banister's.

Anyway, in 1963 Banister didn't have the resources of a big-time intelligence operation. He couldn't even pay his rent. The owner of the building let him stay only because no one else wanted the space.
³³
Banister did keep a file on Oswald but maintaining files on people is what Banister did. He was a rabid anti-communist who conducted political monitoring of various individuals and groups. If he had not had a file on Oswald, it would have been strange. According to two people who saw it, the file contained the sort of material (clippings) that Banister would collect on someone he was watching, not the sort he would have on an operative he was running.

The committee's other evidence of a Ferrie–Oswald connection amounted to even less—the tall tale that Oswald, when he was arrested, had in his possession David Ferrie's library card. Jack Martin invented that story during his alcoholic telephoning rampage the weekend of the assassination. He admitted that to the FBI. But in its Report, the House Select Committee inexplicably repeated the story without mentioning Martin's role.
³⁴
The committee's overall treatment of Martin, who was interviewed after he contacted the committee, was odd. Omitting his mental problems and criminal past, it presented him as less than reliable but motivated by “sincere concerns and some legitimate suspicions.”
³⁵
But Martin was simply doing with this committee what he had done the weekend of the assassination and during Garrison's investigation—spinning tall tales and manipulating people. That worked to this committee's advantage. For in its sympathetic interpretation of Martin, as with the Clinton witnesses, the committee was promoting its view of David Ferrie, a view remarkably similar to Jim Garrison's. In some of its supporting volumes, the language even echoes the flimsy linkages Garrison used. All this leaves the impression that parts of the committee's report were somehow Garrisonized.
*

The committee's senior staff writer was Richard Billings, formerly with
Life
, who arranged that magazine's “secret deal” with Garrison. According to David Chandler, Billings continued to support Garrison after management at
Life
began “to pull the plug.” In 1968 he tried to reestablish a relationship with Garrison. In a letter that said he believed in Garrison's efforts regarding the assassination, Billings asked Garrison for a meeting. But Garrison, unhappy about some articles Billings had written, harshly rejected him. Nevertheless, in 1969 Billings refused a request from Shaw's attorney to testify at the trial.
³⁶

The report Billings helped Chief Counsel G. Robert Blakey construct gave a qualified and reluctant nod of approval to Garrison's wild romp across the nation's consciousness a decade earlier.
*
But most of us who were following the case paid scant attention to the committee's half-hearted embrace of Jim Garrison. We were focused on the bigger picture—the committee's televised hearings and Blakey's momentous pronouncement that the assassination was probably the “result of a conspiracy.”
^†
Yet the country gained little practical benefit from all that, for the Justice Department declined to investigate. The media, the government and the nation moved on to other matters.

In the long run, the committee bequeathed a mixed legacy. Worst of all, it bestowed some credibility on Garrison's investigation. By endorsing his discredited ideas about Oswald and Ferrie, the committee breathed life into him. No one could have realized that all those years ago or foreseen the consequences. But today, it's clear that when the committee endorsed the Clinton witnesses, it set the stage for Jim Garrison's fourth resurrection, the most amazing of all.

The phoenix was again in motion.

In more ways than one. For he had turned into an author. Few noticed, however, until 1988, when Sheridan Square Press published what may be the strangest memoir in all of American letters, Garrison's rendition of his case against Clay Shaw.

*
In the summer of 1963, as the civil rights movement was just beginning to wrench the South, Clinton was targeted by CORE for a voter-registration drive. It was in the midst of that tumult that Oswald allegedly arrived and was observed and remembered by six people. Four of those in warring camps that summer (Manchester and Palmer on one side, Collins and Dunn the other) presented a strangely united front six years later, testifying for Garrison.

*
Garrison's battles with Washington and his anti-U.S. government pronouncements earned him strong support in these quarters (see note 28). Ironically, blacks, too, were supportive of him because of their devotion to Jack Kennedy and their perception of Garrison as his champion. A political source in Baton Rouge back then told one reporter that Garrison's JFK investigation was part of a larger political scheme, involving Senator Long, and apparently spawned by the civil-rights struggle. Reportedly, the plan called for Garrison to run for the Vice-Presidency on a ticket with Alabama Governor George Wallace as the Presidential candidate (Fred Powledge, “Is Garrison Faking?”
The New Republic
, June 17, 1967).