False Witness (41 page)

Stone also found a way around the defense's case. He omitted it. Dean Andrews, Charles Appel, Edward O'Donnell, James Phelan (to name a few) never take the stand in the film. What Stone did show, he misrepresented. Shaw's attorneys, for instance, are unattractive connivers. He has Irvin Dymond discredit Willie O'Keefe in front of the jury by calling
him “a confessed homosexual convicted of solicitation [and] pandering.” Thus Stone tells the audience that Shaw was acquitted in part because his attorney hypocritically exposed Willie O'Keefe's sexual behavior. But the real Willie O'Keefe, Perry Russo, destroyed himself by what he said on and off the witness stand. Dymond never took the low road. Garrison was the one who did that. Stone finished the job. He
shows us
Shaw was homosexual and guilty of conspiracy as well.

In one particularly irksome scene, repeated at the trial, Stone has Shaw at the police station telling the booking officer that his alias is “Clay Bertrand.” The real testimony was so overwhelming that Shaw never uttered those words that the trial judge (who usually ruled in favor of the prosecution) refused to allow the testimony.
*
In the film, when the judge rules against him, Garrison exclaims,
But that's our case
! It was not their case and at the time no one claimed it was. Here again, Stone used a ploy to avoid dramatizing Garrison's real courtroom debacle, Perry Russo's testimony, which sank like a rock and Garrison's case with it.

Stone turned Garrison's closing argument into a soapbox for his view of Washington as a bed of snakes run by war-mongering business interests. He also used it to conclude his film and spike its emotional high point: “President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy that was planned in advance at the highest levels of our government,” Garrison tells the jurors, “and it was carried out by fanatical and disciplined cold warriors in the Pentagon and CIA's covert apparatus, among them Clay Shaw here before you. It was a public execution. And it was covered up by like-minded individuals in the Dallas Police Department, the Secret Service, the FBI, and the White House, all the way up, including J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson, whom I consider accomplices after the fact.”

Garrison didn't say anything like that at the real trial. He didn't mention the Dallas Police Department, the Secret Service, the FBI or the White House. He didn't invoke the name of
any
government agency, or Hoover, or Johnson. He didn't mention the CIA. Shaw's attorney, Irvin Dymond, was the only one who brought up the CIA. He did it when he asked Shaw, “Have you ever worked for the Central Intelligence Agency?”
²⁰
Garrison,
in his closing statement, made only an obscure reference to “domestic espionage.” Only once, in a general allusion, did he utter Clay Shaw's name.

In the movie, Stone not only had Costner identify Shaw as a CIA conspirator to the jurors, he crafted Shaw's final appearance to make him look like a perfumed parlor snake. Surrounded by reporters after his acquittal, Shaw handles a cigarette in a long black holder. Smugly victorious, he makes a limp-wristed comment about the fancy culinary dish he is going to whip up when he gets home. The real Clay Shaw, a relieved and grateful man, made no statements that night. He thanked his attorneys. He thanked the jurors. Then a circle of deputies whisked him out of the courtroom through a back door.

Stone also invented the final scene with Garrison. But, unlike the one with Shaw, Stone rendered it with pathos. We see Garrison in a long shot after the verdict leaving the Criminal District Court building with his wife and son.
*
He has lost the battle but not the war, rehabilitated now in the minds of fifty million-plus moviegoers. By ending at that point, Stone sidestepped the last act of Garrison's real-life drama, the Christenberry hearing two years later that named Garrison the guilty party. Stone wasn't interested in that. He needed a hero to sell his complex bill of goods—a conspiracy so immense that virtually no one is beyond suspicion.

But it is not the purpose of this book to object to Stone's film for saying that President Johnson did it; that elements of the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans, war profiteers, military, and Dallas police did it; and that some elements of the FBI, Secret Service, and the rest of the government not directly involved beforehand helped to cover it up afterwards, with a boost from major media representatives. I have no personal knowledge that would exonerate any of those named, any more than Jim Garrison and Oliver Stone had personal knowledge of their complicity. The purpose of this book is to object to the film saying that Clay Shaw did it, and depicting Jim Garrison as a splendid fellow, a hero for our times.

Stone said the Garrison in his film was a metaphor for all those writers and researchers who disagree with the Warren Report. But Garrison is too particularized, too hopelessly who he is to stand for anything more. Costner theorizing about various Dealey Plaza scenarios didn't humanize
Garrison's actions or enlarge his person. Garrison set himself apart from most of those who have labored in this field by his unyielding godlike certitude.
*
Near the end of his life, he did acknowledge that he had “made some mistakes” but he never said what they were and he maintained that he was right to try Clay Shaw. “If it was an error,” Garrison said, with a typical rhetorical ring, “then it was an error that I was obliged to make.”
²¹

The
error
Garrison
was obliged to make
caught up with Oliver Stone while he was filming his movie. In April he was in Dallas “having a ball,” he told an interviewer. “I like the people. The extras have been great. The crew has been good. People have been very generous and open.” But when he shifted to New Orleans, he encountered the ghost of Clay Shaw. People who had known him and Garrison protested in articles, on the news, and in letters to the editor. “I know for a fact that Garrison deliberately proceeded with a fraudulent case against Clay Shaw,” wrote Rosemary James, one of those who broke the original story about Garrison's investigation. “He knew he had nothing, his key assistants—Jim Alcock, Al Oser, and John Volz—knew he had nothing and yet [Garrison] proceeded in the most Machiavellian fashion to abuse the power entrusted to him.” Stone she called a “gullible from La-La Land with a
60 million budget who wants to regurgitate all of that garbage.”
²²
In a later interview, James went further: “There are any number of theories as to why Garrison singled Clay out, but I don't pretend to know what goes on in the mind of someone who I think needs psychiatric help.” She did have a suggestion though. “It was widely known that Clay was homosexual. He didn't flaunt it; he was very discreet in his personal life. At the same time, he led a very active social life. Some people felt that Garrison was actually jealous of Clay's success and the fact that he lived as a homosexual without any repercussions.”
²³

Stone seemed surprised by the intensity of the reaction to “the Clay Shaw business,” as he called it. But he dismissed it as “local” and “personal,” like concerns in Dallas about its image. He, on the other hand, was grappling with a more important problem, one whose import was
“universal.” “I'm not that concerned,” Stone said, “about whether [Shaw] was innocent or guilty. I don't think [he] was a particularly important figure in this thing.”
²⁴
Neither knowing nor caring if Shaw were innocent or guilty, Stone presented him to the world as a conspirator who plotted President Kennedy's murder. In real life, Garrison's entire case depended on Shaw's guilt. So does Stone's film. And it leaves the clear-cut understanding that, though acquitted, Shaw was guilty as sin. This is the necessary premise on which Garrison's story and Stone's
deep inner truth
are constructed.

When asked by film critic Roger Ebert if he thought he knew the “names of the guilty,” Stone said he thought he did but declined to reveal them because “that's a very heavy thing to lay on somebody—to accuse them of killing the president.”
²⁵
But not where Shaw was concerned. Earlier, Stone drew a chilling comparison when he was again discussing Shaw, the issue that wouldn't go away, with another journalist. “Garrison was trying to force a break in the case,” Stone said. “If he could do that, it was worth the sacrifice of one man. When they went onto the shores of Omaha Beach, they said, ‘We're going to lose five, ten, fifteen thousand people to reach our objective.' I think Jim was in that kind of situation.”
²⁶
By this interpretation—in a maneuver that shoots the American justice system in the heart—Garrison selected Clay Shaw to serve as his legal cannon fodder. Stone saw nothing wrong with that.

Stone did admit that his hero had his faults. “[Garrison] had hubris, he had arrogance,” Stone said, “he was blind like King Lear was blind, and he trusted too many people.”
²⁷
(In reality, it was those who trusted Garrison who came up empty-handed, or worse.) Stone was saying that Garrison was flawed the way everybody is. But Garrison's flaws weren't like everybody's. They were stranger. After the film was released, writer David Ehrenstein focused on one of Garrison's more disquieting secrets, which has long been common knowledge to many in New Orleans and to students of the case but went virtually unmentioned in the debate that raged over the film.

It was the “fondling charge” first reported by Jack Anderson on February 23, 1970, in a column that was published nationally but not in New Orleans. Probing the why of that, Ehrenstein questioned reporter David Snyder. “The boy came from a very prominent family,”
Snyder said, “and they never came forward.” Snyder recently added that “no one wanted to drag the boy's family through the mud.” Rosemary James told Ehrenstein that “there was an effort made to protect the child, which was why nothing came of it.” Garrison has had “a very stormy personal life,” James said, and “used to slap his wife around in public all the time.” James also commented on the gap between the real Garrison and the film hero. “To cast someone like Kevin Costner to play him as Mr. Untouchable Robin Hood and to have scenes with him as this big family man sitting around the dinner table—it's just a big sick joke.”
²⁸

Yet for most of the worldwide moviegoing public, Garrison has been more than resurrected; he has been transformed. In that magical way that movies work, Kevin Costner and Jim Garrison are now one.

*
In September 1997,
A Child's Night Dream
, Stone's revised novel, was published by St. Martin's Press.

†
This point of view overlooks the tendency of serious glitches to take up residence in one's “gut,” making it a risky guide to truth seeking.

‡
Stone also optioned another book, Jim Marrs's
Crossfire
, an encyclopedia of assassination theories, which enabled Stone to draw on a wealth of information without spending more money on rights to other books.

*
As Garrison had done in his book, Stone used this episode to introduce the anti-Castro activities of Banister and his alleged confederates, Lee Harvey Oswald and Clay Shaw.

*
Stone's basis for this scene was Louis Ivon's recollections of the evening he spent with Ferrie at the Fontainebleau Motel (“Oliver Stone Talks Back,”
Premiere
, Jan. 1992, pp. 69-70). But what Ferrie actually said that night is, to say the least, unclear (as discussed in note 10).

†
No one seeing this film would guess that this easy-to-hate villain created by Stone was actually a funny and fun-loving (if flawed) human being, liked by virtually everyone. Or that aside from Clay Shaw he is probably the most sympathetic of Garrison's victims.

*
Over the years the tramps have been the subject of endless commentary and research. Their pictures are like a conspiratorial Rorschach test. People see in them whatever they are inclined to see, usually Watergate burglars E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis and convicted hitman Charles Harrelson (the actor Woody Harrelson's father). In some quarters the effort to unravel the assassination by ‘identifying' the tramps continues today.

†
Alcoholism ended Wood's CIA career.

*
William Gurvich and Tom Bethell, who did defect and turn material over to Shaw's defense team, were not
infiltrators
; they simply came to realize an innocent man was being railroaded.

†
Russo
was
on the set. Stone gave him a small part in the film and, according to Russo, hired him as a technical advisor for the homosexual scenes, particularly those involving sadomasochism.

*
Perry Russo said that in one of those party scenes (which didn't make it into the movie) Joe Pesci (Ferrie) was beating Tommy Lee Jones (Shaw) with a chain and Stone pushed Pesci to the point where he finally complained that if he didn't stop he was going to end up hurting Jones (Russo, interview with author, Feb. 7, 1994).