Authors: Patricia Lambert
False Witness (43 page)
Jack Anderson personally spoke to the boy's father, described in the column Anderson wrote as “a prominent member of the New Orleans âestablishment.' ” Anderson also spoke to two other family members, one of whom Anderson said “is one of the most respected men in the South.” Anderson's column, long the most infamous unexplored landmark in Garrison's background, gave only a bare-bones account of what occurred. The grand jury was investigating a charge, Anderson reported, that “on a Sunday in June, 1969,” Garrison had “fondled” a thirteen-year-old boy in the New Orleans Athletic Club.
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But Anderson wrote nothing more about it, and Garrison supporters have long claimed that the story was merely an effort to smear him. Yet some in New Orleans who know the family involved have insisted over the years that the episode occurred. An author of a recent book on the case verified the story with a family member. Until now, however, no one has heard from the victim.
In September 1993 I contacted one of his relatives and he confirmed the incident. But he discouraged the idea of an interview with either the victim or his older brother who had been present when it happened. Eventually, though, after a pledge of anonymity, both men agreed to be interviewed. I first spoke by telephone to the victim, then a thirty-seven-year-old professional man. Two days later I met with his older brother in his office. Both told the same story from different perspectives.
“It was a family ritual,” the older brother said, explaining why the two boys and their father were at the New Orleans Athletic Club that day. They were not members but a relative was and he had been inviting them on Sundays since their early childhood. Occasionally, a friend would accompany them, but on this particular Sunday it was only the father and two of his sons. The three were alone in the swimming pool area when Garrison approached them.
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The father was lying on a leather-covered bed and the two boys were in the shallow end of the marble pool. “I remember Garrison walking into the pool area and there was no one else there but us,” the older brother recalled. “He proceeded to lie down next to my father.” The younger brother also recalled Garrison and his father, whom he described as “very social,” talking and how “nice and polite” the conversation was.
Then “after a while,” the older brother said, “my dad came to me and said âJim Garrison has invited us up to the Slumber Room to take a nap.' I thought that was like torture because I don't sleep in the day.” His younger brother had a similar reaction. “I don't want to go up there,” he recalled, “I'm thirteen years old. I don't want to take a nap, you know, it's Sunday morning.” But the father said, “No, we ought to go, he's talking about the Kennedy assassination and we might find out something.”
So they accompanied Garrison to the Slumber Room. “There was a strict protocol in this club,” the older brother said. “And we were now Garrison's guests. Garrison was now running the show. He was in control. We had never been privy to this area before. Here's this big star and now we were going into the secret place in the club.” The room resembled a “dormitory bunk room,” he said. It was rectangular with an aisle
down the middle and along the wall on either side a row of beds. On each were two sheets. Both men spoke about how dark it was. “You shut the door,” the older brother stated, “and it was black.” The younger brother remembered, “It was very very dark because it has no windows.” He also recalled the air conditioner was on and “it was freezing cold.” Standing at the door, Garrison said, “Everybody get into bed and I'm going to turn off the light.” They all got into a bed. “I don't know where everyone was,” the older brother said, “except that I was closest to the door and everyone else was deeper into the room.” The younger brother remembered taking “a cot way to the back.” Garrison took the one next to him. The father and older brother were on the other side of the room. The younger brother described what occurred.
I don't know if Garrison set it up that way or not. Because all he had to do was sit on the edge of his bed, reach across, which he did you know, and lift the blanket. When Garrison first did itâmy eyes were not adjusted to the dark and I saw, I could just make out the image of somebody. And it was . . . when somebody just lifts up a blanket and sticks their hand under thereâand he didn't really grab. He just fondled a bit and then he sat back down and I jumped up and I went over to my brother and said, “[name deleted], are you playing a joke on me?” You knowâa brother. I mean, I didn't know what was going on. I was oblivious anyway. And [his brother] said, “[name deleted], go back to bed. Daddy's going to be really mad at you if you cause any trouble in here.” So I went back. He thought I was just being a little kid, you know. So then when [Garrison] did it again and I could tell who it was . . . then I went back to my brother and told him and he said, “Get the hell out of here.”
The older brother went to his father and told him that they had “to leave right now.” His father, unaware of anything out of the ordinary, objected at first but when his son again urged him to leave he realized something was wrong. The older brother then left the room and got dressed, which the younger brother had done already. A few minutes later, their father came out. “I told him what happened,” the older brother recalled, “and he was visibly shaken.” The father's clothes were
in a different location and he left to get dressed. While the father was gone, Garrison came out. The older brother described his reaction.
I walked up to him and I said, “You son of a bitch, you pervert, you queer.” I was livid. I couldn't believe this guy tried to molest my little brother. I was really into Garrison's face. I was really threatening him. I was enraged. I may have put my hands on him. I know I scared him because he said, “You're assaulting me and I'm going to have to defend myself.” And he went back toward his locker and I remember I could see in his locker there was a gun hanging in thereâlike a 38 snub nose revolverâhanging in a shoulder holster on a hook in his locker. At that point I became very concerned that Garrison was going to shoot me and I remember seeing, to my surprise, that there was another man who witnessed this. A man in his sixties, by the lavatories. I remember thinking, oh good, there's a witness to this, but he left the area because he didn't want to get involved. By this time my father had gotten dressed and sort of caught me at the tail end of this altercation. He was five-feet-ten-inches and I vividly remember him walking up to Garrison and he took his finger and he started poking him in the stomach and he said, “You fooled with the wrong people this time. You're not going to get away with this.” Garrison said, “You're crazy. I don't know what you're talking about.” And he said something to the effect that “I'm going to have your son arrested for assaulting me.” At that time we left. We went home.
The phone began “ringing off the hook” as soon as they arrived home. The word already had spread. “It was a Sunday and Sundays were a festive time in our home,” the older brother said. “My mother cooked dinner and we had friends over and we'd all go to church. I remember this electrical atmosphere in the house that Sunday because of this stuff going on.” The first caller was Aaron Kohn, who had heard about what had happened. “You have to pursue this,” Kohn said. “Your son must testify. This man has got to be stopped.”The father called a relative, a local attorney, who advised against taking any action. He thought “terrible harm” would come to the boy and that the family “would never prove anything.” A great deal of discussion ensued. The family was “warned” about the boy's safety. And the
possibility of his being “kidnapped from school.” Everyone, the brothers were told, “had to keep an eye on him until this thing calmed down.”
As I sat in the pleasant suburban office listening to this twenty-seven-year-old story, the barely concealed outrage of this obviously compassionate and successful man was apparent. But it wasn't until he described what they next heard that I glimpsed the depth of the fear this family had suffered. “
They are going to bury the ax, and they are going to bury it last
, someone had warned them,
and it is going to be in
[
my brother's
]
back
. I remember my father telling us this,” the older brother said, “and that is why we would have to be very careful.” The younger brother remembers the precautions that were taken. He had to be “at a certain spot” at the end of the school day, where he was picked up. “They thought something was going to happen to me,” he said. “I went to see the Kevin Costner movieâwhich made me sick, to glorify him like that. I saw Stone in the Napoleon House [cafe] one dayâI wanted to tell him about this. But it's so awkward.”
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What Garrison did in the Slumber Room that day may have been the tip of the iceberg. David Chandler, speaking from what he twice described as “firsthand knowledge,” said Garrison was “basically a pedophile.” That didn't necessarily mean he avoided older partners but, according to Chandler, Garrison preferred very young ones. His “overt preference,” was adolescent girls, “around sixteen and younger,” Chandler said. While he had no firsthand knowledge of “the boys,” Chandler stated that he believed Garrison was “indifferent” to gender, that he didn't care “whether it was a boy or a girl.” He wanted them “inexperienced and compliant” so he could be “the teacher.” Garrison, Chandler said, had to be “in control.”
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Why Garrison would make such a move with other family members present in the same room is an unresolved question. Chandler thought Garrison might have been drunk when he did it. Nothing indicates that, however, and the victim rejected the idea. “I don't think it was alcohol,” he said. “I think it was more like pills. That's just my opinion. I mean I was just a little bitty kid but [after they left the Slumber Room] he looked like somebody who was on drugs not alcohol.
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He had that glazed kind of look on his eyes. I mean, he looked like a real lunatic.”
A psychologist I spoke with (one of several mental health professionals
consulted) suggested that the risk involved may have been part of the attraction. Or maybe Garrison simply felt safe in the dark. He was on extremely familiar turf at the New Orleans Athletic Club. He had made it his second office. He relaxed there. He held meetings there. He worked there. He ate there. He may have felt he could do anything he wished there. He was, after all, the district attorney, and Garrison clearly felt he was above the law. A well-known psychiatrist attributed it to thatâGarrison's sense of his own power. He was accustomed to having his way and to being protected. If he had gotten away with something like this in the Slumber Room in the past and expected to get away with it again, he was right.
The older brother said that he is “still angry about what happened.” Another family member, who wasn't at the Club that day but experienced the tumult that followed, as everyone in this family did, spoke with intensity about Garrison, calling him “a psychotic Darth Vader.” Whether or not the boy actually was in physical danger, as the family believed he was, is a question no one can answer. But if the family had taken action, Garrison certainly would have gone on the offensive. Most likely he would have issued some outrageous countercharge. This family was in a no-win situation and the psychologists and psychiatrists I spoke to agreed that the family chose the correct course.
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But the family members paid a price for permitting it to be swept under the rug. They seem a proud, close clan with considerable standing in the community. Yet they were forced to accept in silence this indignity. At the very least, that left behind feelings of powerlessness, especially for the men. By speaking out today, they are correcting in some small measure the wrong that was done to them. In setting that record straight, they also have exposed long-rumored and telling facets of Garrison's make-up.
For the Slumber Room episode means that Garrison had a homosexual side, as the psychiatrist mentioned earlier pointed out. Additional support for this comes from the State Attorney General's chief investigator, Frank W. Manning, who conducted a secret investigation of Garrison's office during his first term. Manning later told the FBI, in the words of the agent he spoke to, “[that] Garrison himself might be a sex deviate or at least he is a participant in some deviate activities
with other homosexuals.” Manning also said that Garrison and a couple of others had been “shaking down” the homosexual community. Hundreds were arrested, Manning said, and then released after making payoffs to have their cases cleared up.
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These actions by Garrison against gays, the psychiatrist said, would have been part of his cover. That also applies to Garrison's description in his book of the odd incident that supposedly occurred in the men's room at LAX.
More important is what all this suggests about Garrison's underlying, perhaps unconscious, motivationâthe possibility that he was driven to pursue Clay Shaw by his discomfort with his own sexuality. Perhaps the strangest example of Garrison's homophobia appeared in a 1986 letter he wrote reacting to Warren Report critic Paul Hoch's reference, in his newsletter, to Clay Shaw's sexual orientation. (Hoch's reference was part of a critical comment about Garrison, which Garrison ignored.) He recommended that Hoch immediately use soap to clean his mouth. He, himself, Garrison declared, had never publicly commented on the allegation that Shaw was homosexual, and, amazingly, Garrison dismissed that charge as a false rumor directed toward a dead man who could no longer speak for himself.
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The pretense and denial there are glaring, since Garrison did everything in his power to exploit Shaw's homosexuality to the media, talking it up privately whenever he felt like it. Garrison's transparent pose in that letter suggests the depth of his fear of this subject: labeling Shaw a homosexual was for Garrison worse than accusing him of treason.
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