False Witness (5 page)

But Garrison didn't rely solely on the free flow of news to convey his
image as “an incorruptible crusader for justice.” He cultivated newsmen. A former assistant district attorney remarked recently that Garrison always had some reporter under his sway, that Garrison was good at that. A local journalist admitted that some of the reporters were much too close to Garrison and mentioned David Chandler, who was one of Garrison's best friends for awhile.
¹⁹
Recently described by a colleague as “lively and nice looking, about five-nine, with a full head of brown hair, a round face and a pleasant aspect about him that women liked,” Chandler would be the first to openly break with Garrison later. But at first this twenty-seven-year-old Pulitzer Prize–winning newsman was a strong Garrison advocate and Garrison was best man at his wedding. Chandler was so taken with the Garrison charisma and his slugfest with the judges that he suggested an article about the battling D.A. to
The Saturday Evening Post
. The editor liked the idea and sent one of his staff writers to New Orleans.

James Phelan spent ten days there, much of it in Garrison's company, and concluded that Garrison
was quite a guy
. “The Vice Man Cometh” was published in June 1963, and Garrison couldn't have asked for anything better.
²⁰
Phelan penned a valentine of sorts. He tagged Garrison “Sir Galahad” and depicted him as a reformer and a frustrated writer, with a knack for colorful speech and literary allusions. “Not since Hamlet tried to decide whether or not to stab the king of Denmark,” Garrison said about the mayor's waffling on an issue, “has there been so agonizing a political decision.” Phelan was the first to quote Garrison referring to Lewis Carroll's famous classic (a favorite later in his celebrity period). “When I was elected I fell down the rabbit hole and landed smack in the middle of Wonderland,” Garrison said. “Nothing I've seen since has surprised me.” As for the skepticism about his reform effort, Garrison insisted that he was “going to end the rackets here and the only way anyone can stop me is to kill me.” His motive was simple, Garrison claimed. “I just want to run the best D.A.'s office New Orleans ever had.”

Phelan captured Garrison's appeal—his eloquence, his belief in the individual, his maverick streak, magnetism, and his political promise. But Phelan also sensed Garrison's other side, his tendency toward excess and his enigmatic core. “Garrison himself remains something of a puzzle,” Phelan wrote. The existence of that
puzzle
would become more
apparent in the years to come and Phelan would be one of those pondering it up close. The suggestion was barely noticeable though in this light-hearted tribute, which was Garrison's first significant national publicity and started a trend. Soon readers of
Pageant, Time, Newsweek
, and the
New York Times
were seeing items about the battling New Orleans D.A.

Later on, a New Orleans writer, attorney Milton Brener, who had worked for Garrison in the D.A.'s office, observed that there was “a quality about Garrison incapable of definition that renders an abiding dislike of the man virtually impossible upon personal contact.” Brener said the quality was something close to “charm,” though that word didn't quite convey it. Brener called Garrison's sense of humor “delicious” and said it permeated all of Garrison's conversations, both private and public; Garrison's general attitude Brener described as “casual and unhurried.” But Brener also noted that Garrison tended “to make snap judgments on insufficient facts” and to “oversimplify.” His ego was “abundant” and “in his humor there could at times be detected traces of cruelty.” Yet overall, these flaws seemed relatively minor.
²¹

Brener, Phelan, Chandler, and earlier the FBI interviewers found in Garrison the same attractive qualities that would soon draw to him an extraordinary array of supporters once he became involved in the Kennedy assassination.

That began on November 22, 1963.

About 12:30 that day, Garrison was sitting at his desk when First Asst. D.A. Frank Klein ran into the office. “The president has been shot!” Klein shouted. Stunned, like the rest of the world, the two men left the building and headed for Tortorich's, a restaurant in the French Quarter with a television set in the dining room. On the way there they listened to the bulletins on the car radio.

The radio is how most Americans first learned about the shooting.
We interrupt this program for a report from Dallas, Texas: Just minutes ago something happened in the presidential motorcade in downtown Dallas . . . shots were fired . . . it's believed that President Kennedy was hit
.

For the next hour, the country held its breath, hoping. Even when the news came that he was wounded in the head, the country continued to hope, while fearing the worst. That hour served as a sort of psychological buffer, blunting the shock when the announcement finally
came.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the president of the United States is dead
.

The assassination occurred on a Friday and the funeral took place the following Monday, a time span of four days, an overlong
long
weekend. Ordinary activity ceased. Life didn't merely revolve around the television set; life it seemed
was
the television set. In the days and nights that followed, millions of tearful Americans sat in their living rooms fixated on the screen even after they had seen it all over and over and over again.

But not everyone became permanently attached to their sofas that weekend, overwhelmed by it all, anguished and passive. A few reached out and thrust themselves into the flow of events. Jack S. Martin and Dean Adams Andrews, Jr., a couple of oddities in New Orleans, were two such volunteers. They could be called the First Fathers of Jim Garrison's case. Martin and Andrews heard the news everyone else heard that Friday. They watched the television programs everyone else watched, but separately and independently of each other they saw something others did not. They saw
opportunity
.

Their individual efforts to make the most of that opportunity over the next few days would become permanently embedded in the record of the Kennedy case. Among the many would-be witnesses whose names appear in the Garrison files, none was more responsible for what ensued than Martin and Andrews. What they did that weekend laid the groundwork for Garrison's later investigation and all that followed.

Yet, surprisingly, the complete story of what actually occurred with Martin and Andrews over that long November weekend in 1963 has never before been told.

*
A father-son snapshot, recently discovered in one of Garrison's old office files, shows a well-dressed and handsome young man supporting a sturdy-looking infant standing on a porch railing.

*
He was sending fountain pens to dead people C.O.D.; relatives, believing they had been ordered, paid the charges.

†
He stole a cashier's check in the amount of
1198, and bought a car, a typewriter, and clothes.

*
A former FBI deputy director under J. Edgar Hoover recently told this writer that “there are other facts to be known” regarding Garrison's sudden departure from the FBI.

*
Sometime prior to this, he legally changed his name to “Jim Garrison.”

*
A Division Gunnery Officer on the
Bismarck Sea
, the last carrier sunk in the war (off the coast of Iwo Jima), Dymond was knocked unconscious when the first of two Japanese Kamikazes crashed into the deck. Thrown over the side by a friend, he survived four hours in the water and was wounded by a strafer.

*
But Gervais resigned his post prior to Garrison's next election.

Two days after the president was shot, First Asst. D.A. Klein telephoned Jim Garrison at home concerning a tip the office had just received about a possible New Orleans link to the assassination. What Klein didn't know was that the tipster, forty-eight-year-old Jack Martin, a thinnish, sometimes private investigator “with the red blotchy face of an alcoholic,” had been on a two-day binge. It had started the evening of the assassination.

That night Martin boozed it up in a neighborhood bar called Katz & Jammer. He was with Guy Banister, whom Martin had worked for “from time to time.” Banister, a twenty-year veteran of the FBI, former assistant superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department and dedicated anticommunist, anti-Castro activist, was the owner-operator of Guy Banister Associates, an extremely modest New Orleans investigative firm.
³
He and Martin left Katz & Jammer together and went to Banister's nearby office.

There they began discussing various “personal and political subjects,” which led to the topic of some “unauthorized” long-distance telephone calls that Banister accused Martin of making. Martin denied it. The conversation “became heated,” with Banister warning Martin not to call him “a liar” and Martin claiming he wasn't. At that point Banister “became enraged” and struck Martin on the head “five or six
times” with the barrel of a .357 Magnum. When he began to bleed, Banister stopped.
*
Martin washed up in the rest room and left.
⁴

Twice that night he received treatment for his injuries, “three small lacerations on the forehead” and “one on the rear of his head,” first at Charity Hospital, where he took himself, and later at the Baptist hospital, where a police lieutenant drove him after he reported the attack. Twice Martin refused to file charges, both times saying that Banister was “like a father” to him (which may explain Martin's troubled psyche) and remarking that the attack “was nothing to get irritated about.” But he claimed he couldn't understand why Banister had walloped him with the gun. Banister explained it later to the owner of his office building. He “had warned Martin to stay out,” Banister said, “and he didn't.”
⁵

Martin had had a busy day—a presidential assassination, drinks at Katz & Jammer, a pistol-whipping, high-level police attention, and trips to two different hospitals. For most that would have been ample excitement for one weekend. But for Martin the events of that Friday were only the beginning.

The following day, he and a close friend, W. Hardy Davis, a New Orleans bail bondsman, like everyone else were discussing the president's assassination. But their conversation was unique. It focused on a local man, a former Eastern Airlines pilot with a hairless body (due to the disease alopecia) and a checkered past. His name was David Ferrie, and Martin harbored a simmering hostility toward him. He and Davis both agreed that Ferrie was a “gun fancier.” Martin thought the rifle allegedly used to kill President Kennedy was “similar” to one Ferrie owned “several years ago.” And, Martin recalled, Ferrie once mentioned a short story plot about a presidential assassination. With nothing more than that, the two “speculated on the possibility” that Ferrie “might have had something to do with killing President Kennedy.”
⁶
This flimsy gossip would propel David Ferrie into a principal figure in this case; he would become Jim Garrison's favorite suspect and a stepping stone to Clay Shaw.

That evening, after Hardy Davis left, Martin watched a television program about the life of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. One of Oswald's classmates told an interviewer that while they attended
Beauregard Junior High School he had persuaded Oswald to join the Civil Air Patrol (CAP).
*
When Martin heard that, he completely “flipped,” as he later put it. For he knew that David Ferrie had once been active in the CAP Here was a connection—as Martin saw it—between the man he and Davis had been speculating about and the accused assassin of the president.

Martin spent the rest of that long weekend drinking and making one telephone call after another, spreading the word about Ferrie's involvement in the assassination. Many in New Orleans heard from Martin in the next two days; and many others heard his escalating accusations from the grapevine. Ferrie had taught Oswald “to fire foreign weapons.” He “had flown Oswald to Dallas.” He was “communicating with Oswald” and had been with Oswald in Dallas “within the last ten days.” Ferrie had said “Kennedy should be killed.” He had “outlined plans” to accomplish it, and he had given Oswald a posthypnotic suggestion to do the deed. Martin also claimed that when Oswald was arrested, he had in his possession Ferrie's library card.
^†
And he told virtually everyone he spoke to that Ferrie was homosexual. Except for the latter, all of Martin's information was fabricated.
⁷