False Witness (46 page)

Shaw's documents, and those from Edward Wegmann's family, along with Tyler's film, are today part of the JFK Collection at the National Archives' handsome new building on grounds donated by the University of Maryland, a wooded setting adjoining the University's golf course in College Park, Maryland. The six-story glass and concrete state-of-the-art research facility is a 1.8 million square-foot structure with wide hallways and panoramic views, equipped with moveable shelving on tracks, a sophisticated computer setup, superb photographic equipment for researchers, environmental controls to protect the archival records, and cold storage vaults for photographs.

Among the articles being protected in those vaults is the Zapruder film, the collection's most famous item. The review board laid claim to the home movie by defining it as an “assassination record” under the terms of the 1992 Records Collection Act and it became part of the JFK
Collection officially on August 1, 1998.
*
At this writing, the Department of Justice and the Zapruder family have entered into arbitration to determine the price the government will pay for the film, with the ceiling set at
30 million. (The family, which under the arbitration agreement will retain ownership of the copyright, was asking for
18.5 million and the government was offering
3 million.)
^†

As required by law, the five-member review board (a panel of citizens made up of a judge from Minnesota and four academics with expertise in law, history and archives)
^‡
went out of business on September 30, 1998, simultaneously issuing its Final Report. In that 208-page document, the board noted that drawing conclusions concerning the assassination was not part of its mandate, and it drew none. It did acknowledge, however, that reaction to Oliver Stone's film prompted enactment of the “JFK Act.” While the board discovered no “smoking gun” document, advocates of both sides found ammunition for their position in the report, which described the board's achievements, travails, and recommendations.

The report began by addressing the secrecy issue. “The problem was,” the board members said in their opening chapter, “that 30 years of government secrecy” surrounding the assassination “led the American public to believe that the government had something to hide.” They returned to this theme in their concluding section, charging that “[t]he federal government needlessly and wastefully classified and then withheld from public access countless important records that did not require such treatment.”

During the board's four-year,
8 million effort, its members used their unprecedented powers boldly. They deposed witnesses, for instance, ordered the Zapruder film tested for authenticity and a bullet fragment from the presidential limousine tested for possible residue. They also obtained (over vigorous legal opposition from New Orleans District
Attorney Harry Connick) Jim Garrison's old office files and grand jury transcripts. Yet, despite their aggressive endeavors, they feared that “critical records may have been withheld” by some government agencies. So they created a “compliance program,” which required an officer from each agency “to warrant, under oath and penalty of perjury” that all relevant records had been turned over to the board.

Since taking office in April 1994, board members examined and released classified passages in more than 29,000 documents (the largest number from the CIA), processed the release of 33,000 more (the largest number from the FBI), and aided in the transmittal of many others, from various agencies and private citizens, to the JFK Collection at the National Archives.

Overall, some 4.5 million pages have poured into that collection since President Bush signed the Records Collection Act in 1992. Those documents—a virtual avalanche of paper—are today a magnet at College Park. According to Steven D. Tilley, the archivist in charge, many hundreds have examined some portion of the JFK Collection since the first big document release in August 1993. The number of school-children doing projects on the assassination and making requests is increasing, Tilley noted, and the staff has twice done presentations of forensic (autopsy) material for a group from the Bronx High School of Science in New York. Researchers can access the collection's electronic reference system on the Internet, order documents by e-mail, and obtain some items through Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis.
¹³

Because the largest contributions have come from sources that either monitored the New Orleans investigation or examined it afterwards,
*
a surprisingly large portion of the collection concerns Jim Garrison.

One Garrison document, in particular, that today resides among those millions of pages came to my attention a while back. It is a transcript of a statement Perry Russo made under hypnosis.
^†
Garrison turned this document over to the House Select Committee in 1977
with a notation. Explaining why the pages were numbered oddly (one to seventeen and one to thirteen), Garrison wrote that the session was in two parts because Dr. Fatter had apparently “interposed” a “break” or “rest period” for Russo's benefit. He did not. Garrison's “document” is actually two documents, the transcript of the first hypnosis session and another, which took place eleven days later. Garrison combined them, reversing their chronology, and labeled them “A” and “B.”
¹⁴
By so doing, he obliterated the damaging reality of both hypnosis interviews.
¹⁵
If the House Select Committee relied on this document in any way, it was misled.
*
No one should trust anything Garrison left behind.

The Garrison material, according to one unofficial guesstimate, may amount to as much as twenty percent of the overall collection. If so, of that 4.5 million, Garrison's portion amounts to some 900,000 pages.

The phoenix now has a substantial and permanent perch in America's official historical record.

*
Sylvia Meagher,
Accessories After the Fact
(New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1967), p. 457.

†
Heindel was of interest because his nickname in the Marines was “Hidell” (an alias later used by Oswald), and he spoke Russian with Oswald. This was the information Lifton transmitted to Garrison.

*
Sylvia Meagher, letter,
The New York Review of Books
, September 3, 1967.

*
Two of Posner's more serious lapses: 1) Presenting the work of Failure Analysis Associates as definitive evidence that the shots originated from the sniper's nest in the Texas School Book Depository (Posner,
Case Closed
, pp. 334–335, 477–478). What Posner didn't reveal was that Failure Analysis Associates prepared the material he used for an ABA mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald (in August 1992, as a promotional effort by the company) and that the company also prepared material for the other side that supported the
opposite
position. 2) Quoting the Warren Commission testimony of clinical psychologist Renatus Hartogs who testified that when he examined Lee Harvey Oswald (at age thirteen) he had recognized in Oswald a “dangerousness” and “potential for explosive, aggressive, assaultive acting out” (Posner,
Case Closed
, p. 12). Posner again omitted the core reality: that the Warren Commission attorney who questioned Hartogs exposed his testimony as self-serving, after-the-fact analysis, contradicted by the report Hartogs wrote at the time (WC vol. VIII, pp. 220–221).

†
For example, Posner attacked the trial testimony of “Andrew Dunn” because it conflicted with Dunn's earlier statements (Posner,
Case Closed
, p. 146). The conflict, however, was Posner's own creation. Andrew Dunn, who made the earlier statements, died in 1968, the year before the trial. The man on the witness stand was William Dunn, Sr. (The two were not related.)

‡
Stone restored seventeen minutes cut from the feature release.

*
Actually, Stone has stated that Shaw's guilt or innocence is of little concern to him.

†
Previously, Edward Wegmann had offered to donate this material to Tulane University, but the offer was declined. (Cynthia Wegmann, telephone conversation with author, September 8, 1993.)

‡
This is the document that Snyder first revealed to the public in July 1996.

*
A cab driver named Marty picked Shaw up the day after the preliminary hearing, recognized him, and insisted on serving as his personal transportation service from then on, any hour, day or night, and he refused to accept payment. “Everybody knows what that big SOB is trying to do to you,” he said. “You have enough problems on your mind.” Over time Shaw tried repeatedly to give Marty money; he refused it (Shaw Journal, pp. 71–73).

*
Researchers have been viewing the film at the National Archives since the 1960s, but the film was always privately owned. (Abraham Zapruder sold it to Time-Life, Inc., who sold it back to the Zapruder family in 1975.) In 1978 the Zapruder family placed the “camera original” in the Archives under a limited deposit agreement.

†
The review board's plan to make low-priced digitized copies of the film available to the public through the Archives was preempted by the Zapruder family in July 1998, with the release of an inexpensive version (showcased in a forty-five-minute video), now in stores nationwide.

‡
Federal Judge John R. Tunheim, Chair; Columbia University historian Henry F. Graff; Ohio State University historian Kermit L. Hall; American University historian Anna K. Nelson; and Princeton University librarian William L. Joyce.

*
The FBI, CIA, HSCA, and Church Committee.

†
Jim Garrison, memorandum to Jonathan Blackmer, regarding “Statements of Perry Russo” made under hypnosis concerning “Clay Shaw, David Ferrie and other individuals” (hereinafter Garrison Memo), dated Aug. 16, 1977. Garrison implied there was only one hypnosis and this was it. There were at least three.

*
Garrison's cooperation with that committee was highly selective. He did not, for instance, turn over to it the early interviews with the Clinton witnesses. They were among the 15,000 pages his family donated to the Review Board.