False Witness (38 page)

Shaw could have cleared this matter up at his trial and it is regrettable that he didn't. When his attorney asked if he had ever worked for the CIA, if Shaw had simply replied, “No, but I have provided that agency with information from time to time,” the subject would today be a dead issue. But reportedly, the decision-makers at the CIA wanted Shaw's association with it kept secret, fearing Garrison would misinterpret it. A late-sixties CIA report states flatly, “We have never renumerated [Shaw].”
¹⁴

Still, the full extent of his association with the agency is for now unclear. Clouding the issue is a CIA project from the 1960s known as QK/E
NCHANT
. The CIA apparently approved Shaw (perhaps without his knowledge) for this project,
*
which, by one unofficial account, was nothing more than a program for routine debriefing of individuals involved in international trade. At this point, what QK/E
NCHANT
actually
was, whether or not it ever came to fruition, and what, if anything, Shaw knew about it, also remain unknown. But Shaw's work for the CIA, whatever it was, is irrelevant. Since Garrison never connected him to the assassination, linking him to the CIA meant nothing thirty years ago, and it means nothing today.

Shaw isn't the only one Garrison maligned in his book. Based solely on
memory
, he reported dialogue, more than two decades old, which supposedly laid the bedrock for his investigation. In the most important of these reconstructed conversations, Garrison described Dean Andrews implicitly admitting to him that Shaw was Bertrand.
¹⁵
Yet if Andrews had, Garrison would have used that against him at the time with the press, the grand jury, and in the courtroom. He would not have waited twenty-one years to reveal Andrews's confession in his book. Garrison waited because until Andrews's death in 1981 he couldn't put those words into Andrews's mouth without being publicly contradicted by him.

Garrison explained that conversations with some witnesses lacked substantiation because the original documents were “stolen.” The reader is supposed to take Garrison's word that he is remembering them correctly. Yet even when he refers to a written statement, he presents nothing to support its allegations except his faith. One witness told of secret plane trips with Clay Shaw. Another claimed pre-assassination knowledge of the crime. One Edward Whalen told the most serious story, were it true. He said that Ferrie, Shaw, and Andrews tried to hire Garrison's murder. Whalen disclosed this plot to kill Garrison to James Alcock. Alcock dutifully recorded it, and Garrison cited the Alcock interview in his memoir. But in 1994, when I asked Alcock about Whalen, Alcock didn't even recall the name. To jog his memory, I had to remind him of the murder plot. At that point, his eyes wandered and he had nothing to say. Yet Garrison not only treated these tales as credible, he vouched for the men telling them. After studying one for some three hours, Garrison wrote, he was convinced that “weaving a fabricated tale was not in this man's makeup,”
¹⁶
a testimonial as empty as a moonscape, but convincing perhaps to unwary readers who trust their narrator.

The strangest anecdote Garrison related in his book is an encounter he had at Los Angeles International Airport and it doesn't yield to research in any ordinary sense. When waiting for his luggage, it was his habit, he
explained, to spend the time sitting on a toilet in the men's room reading a magazine. He chose that spot because there were no chairs in the baggage collection area. On this particular occasion, he purchased a copy of
Time
magazine, entered the men's room, selected the first booth, sat down, and commenced to read. Then he heard someone enter the booth next to him and was immediately concerned. When he heard “whispering,” he at once rushed out of the stall and confronted two airport policemen; he quickly exited from the men's room and encountered several others, one of whom yelled at him, asking how long he had been inside. Garrison informed the reader that his stay had been no more than two or three minutes maximum but he yelled back to the officer, telling him, basically, to mind his own business, and walked on out. Garrison claimed to believe that he had foiled a plan by the CIA to set him up for a sex charge to discredit him and his investigation. He offered an elaborate explanation of how it would have been done, involving his telephone records and an earlier phone call received from a former homosexual client.
¹⁷
As related, this incident reeks of paranoia and perhaps something more complex, to be discussed further in
chapter 16
.

Garrison's propinquity theory (the idea that proximity to a person or thing implies a connection), though he never used that term in the book, rears its head from time to time.
*
Garrison applied this odd notion to almost any situation. He assumed a person was connected to an intelligence agency because he maintained a residence or an office near it. He imagined individuals were cohorts who rented post office boxes in the same building. He divined a connection when a woman hailing from Chicago crossed paths with a man from that same city. And while he didn't say so in the book, he was automatically suspicious of anyone living next door to any of his suspects. Garrison didn't believe coincidences happened. The two vagabonds arrested in the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing because their itineraries paralleled suspect
Timothy McVeigh's would have faced criminal charges if Garrison had been running that investigation.

But perhaps the most bewildering statement Garrison made in his memoir concerns the
innocence
of Lee Harvey Oswald. Garrison wrote that a jury convinced of Oswald's innocence would be forced to consider conspiracy and, therefore, would be more likely to convict Clay Shaw. Yet Garrison himself named Oswald a co-conspirator, using him to link Shaw to the crime, and also to establish the requisite overt act. Garrison's own men tried to establish Oswald's guilt at Shaw's trial in order to prove their case. If Oswald were innocent, Garrison's charge against Shaw was demolished.
¹⁸

Garrison so misrepresented his New Orleans evidence in these pages that it's tempting to assume his Dealey Plaza evidence must be better. It isn't. He wrote that President Kennedy was in essence
hijacked
on November 22, that the route of the motorcade was changed
that morning
from its original course, causing the cars to travel down Houston and Elm where the shooters were waiting. This last-minute switch, he claimed, was more evidence of high-level complicity.
¹⁹
But no last-minute switch occurred. Both the
Dallas Times-Herald
and
Morning News
published the motorcade's precise route through Dealey Plaza (and onto the Stemmons Freeway via Houston and Elm) a full three days before the assassination.
²⁰

Anyone who wants to know if any particular claim Garrison made has any validity at all must trace it back to its roots. Nothing he wrote can be trusted. Not even
a
and
the
. The ordinary reader, of course, has no way of knowing that. I, too, was lulled into complacency by the book's easy prose.

Reading it was for me like seeing someone I knew reflected in a fun-house mirror—the story was recognizable but grossly misshaped. I didn't identify the problem at first. It took a second, slower read to spot the first “error,” and the next, then another, and another, and another, until finally the light went on:
It's all wrong
.

The reviewer for the
Times-Picayune
unwittingly hit the nail on the head when she said the book “reads like a novel.”
²¹
It should. Most of Garrison's engaging story is fiction. He treated all events, however verifiable, as mutable and subject to his revision.
*
An oversight or two I
might attribute to poor memory, especially if the incidents were unimportant. But they weren't, and Garrison laced his narrative with them. (See Appendix A.) When I realized that, I was astonished, first by the fact of it, then the audacity. I found it baffling and scary—baffling that Garrison imagined he could get away with it, scary that so far he has succeeded spectacularly. He accomplished with his typewriter what he had failed to do in a court of law. He convicted Clay Shaw.

The publisher who nurtured his effort to completion, Ellen Ray and her Sheridan Square Press,
*
apparently did little or no fact-checking. Perhaps that's understandable. Her author, after all, was a former district attorney and a sitting judge. Today, her publishing house, it seems, has ceased to exist. Its one big success, though, was a far-reaching “triumph,” and its influence continues even now. Seven years after it was published, the paperback version is in its twentieth printing.
^†
Until I assembled the facts in this book, no one had demonstrated the stunning falsity of Garrison's account.

Throughout his life and in these “recollections,” Garrison created the illusion that his investigation had substance by framing it in the rhetoric of American foreign policy and a high-level government conspiracy. He had no evidence for that except his empty case against Clay Shaw. In the closing passage of his book, Garrison assailed the Department of Justice for still refusing to conduct an “honest investigation.” Yet no investigation could have been more dishonest then his own. Oliver Stone had no way of knowing that to begin with and once Garrison became his mentor, the likelihood of his realizing it was slim.

In 1990 Garrison put Stone in touch with L. Fletcher Prouty, a retired Air Force colonel, who had read Garrison's manuscript and corresponded with him about it. Prouty, who espouses a sweeping conspiratorial view of history, was associated with, among others, the far-right Liberty Lobby.
²²
Stone now had a second mentor. He hired Prouty as an advisor and he became a significant player in the events surrounding
the making of the film.

After he optioned the movie rights to Garrison's book, Stone met in early 1989 with representatives from Warner Bros. Over dinner at a Beverly Hills restaurant, Stone pitched his idea, he later told an interviewer, in fifteen or twenty minutes. The studio's president, Terry Semel,
*
told that same writer “it took [me] two minutes to be totally ensconced in the whole idea.”
²³
Bankrolled by Warner Bros., Stone proceeded with plans to create a
20 million film. That figure soon doubled and ultimately would reach at least
60 million. By then the prospects for Stone's enlightenment about Garrison dropped to virtually nil.

Various factors contributed to Jim Garrison's final resurrection on the silver screen. But mostly, Garrison brought it about himself through his endless drive for self-justification. David Ferrie died, spelling the end at the very beginning. But Garrison parlayed that into his biggest boost. James Phelan exposed Perry Russo's testimony as a fraud. But Garrison sought new witnesses to support Russo's story. Shaw was acquitted. But Garrison launched a new offensive. Judge Christenberry ended the game and convicted Garrison. But Garrison turned to his typewriter and reinterpreted his fall. Examining the real record of Jim Garrison's investigation is like viewing up close the mangled wreckage of a high-speed car crash. In his book, Garrison reshaped that wreckage into a brand new vehicle, the latest model, irresistible, gleaming on the showroom floor.

Oliver Stone climbed inside and drove it home.

*
A Heritage of Stone
, Garrison's first book, published in 1970, reportedly provided the basis for this memoir, which was the last of three books Garrison wrote. (
The Star Spangled Contract
, a novel concerning a presidential assassination, published in 1976, was the second.)

†
In addition to Edward O'Donnell's report (Appendix B), he later testified under oath in two courtrooms (at Clay Shaw's trial and the Christenberry hearing) and those transcripts have been preserved.