Reclaiming History (311 page)

19. The movie audience is told that while William S. Walter, an FBI security clerk at the New Orleans field office, was on duty on the evening of November 17, 1963, five days before the assassination, he received a Teletype from FBI headquarters addressed to all special agents in charge of FBI field offices around the country, warning of a possible assassination attempt against President Kennedy during his trip to Dallas, and instructing them to contact criminal, racial, and hate-group informants in order to determine whether there was any basis for the threat. But, Garrison tells his staff in the film, Walter said that “nothing was done.” The audience isn’t told that Walter never came forward with his story about a Teletype until five years after the assassination, or that the FBI instituted an investigation at each of its fifty-nine field offices, which yielded no evidence indicating the existence of such a Teletype. Nor is the audience told that none of the more than fifty FBI employees of the New Orleans FBI field office stated they had any knowledge of the Teletype. Nor are they told that when Walter came up with an alleged replica of the Teletype, the FBI determined it was fraudulent because it varied in format and wording from the standard Teletype used at the time. The audience also was not told that the HSCA asked Walter in a March 23, 1978, deposition if he knew of anyone who could substantiate his allegation, and he mentioned his former wife, Sharon Covert, who worked at the New Orleans office with him at the time, but when the HSCA contacted her she said that Walter had never mentioned any such allegation to her. The HSCA concluded “that Walter’s allegations were unfounded.”
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Unfounded to the FBI and HSCA, but certainly not to Oliver Stone or, for that matter, to the millions in his audience, who only heard Walter’s obviously fabricated and unchallenged story.

20. Students of Jim Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw know that one of the key elements of Garrison’s case against Shaw, which was emphasized in Stone’s film, was Garrison’s allegation that Shaw’s homosexual alias around New Orleans was Clay Bertrand,
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the name Shaw used when he allegedly conspired with Oswald and David Ferrie to assassinate Kennedy, and the name he used when he allegedly contacted New Orleans attorney Dean Andrews the day after the assassination to ask Andrews, who was in a hospital bed with pneumonia at the time, to represent Oswald. Garrison tried desperately to prove, during his investigation of Shaw and at Shaw’s trial, that Shaw, indeed, was Bertrand, but he failed miserably, not presenting one witness other than the completely discredited Perry Russo to testify that Shaw was Bertrand.

Dean Andrews was a very colorful, rotund, New Orleans attorney with a penchant for dark glasses and jive talk whom everyone liked and no one took too seriously. Andrews’s testimony before the Warren Commission was what started the entire speculation that Clay Shaw was Clay Bertrand. Andrews told the Warren Commission he represented Oswald in the summer of 1963 in Oswald’s effort to get rid of his “dishonorable discharge” from the Marines, adding that Oswald discussed with him his status as a citizen (since he had renounced his citizenship in Russia), as well as his wife’s status in America. He said Oswald came into his office “accompanied by some gay kids…Mexicanos.” Andrews said he assumed that Clay Bertrand had sent Oswald to him since Bertrand regularly called him on behalf of gay kids “either to obtain bond or parole for them,” adding that he had done “some legal work” for Bertrand in the past, saying that he was “bisexual, what they call a swinging cat.” Andrews, who allowed he had a “pretty vivid imagination,” said that he didn’t think he’d be able to find Bertrand (even though Bertrand was supposedly a law client of his), that he had last seen him about six weeks earlier in a New Orleans bar (whose name he couldn’t recall) where “this rascal [Bertrand] bums out. I was trying to get past him so I could…call the Feebees [FBI]…but he saw me and spooked and ran.”
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The first law enforcement agency Andrews called about the Bertrand story was the Secret Service, on November 25, 1963, from his hospital bed. The Secret Service report of its interview of Andrews says the Andrews “seemed to feel that he had been previously contacted by Clay Bertrand with another case, but he could not place him or furnish any information to assist in identifying or locating him.”
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This was considerably different from what he told the Warren Commission eight months later, on July 21, 1964. And later in the day on November 25, he told the FBI agents who interviewed him at the hospital about Bertrand calling him to represent Oswald, but dramatically changed who Bertrand was, saying that Bertrand himself was a young man between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-three, and that the only time he had seen Bertrand was when “Clay Bertrand accompanied Oswald” to his office when Oswald was seeking Andrews’s representation. There was no mention of having represented Bertrand in the past or having called him regularly on behalf of gay kids. And, oh yes, Clay Bertrand had blond hair and a crewcut and was around five feet seven inches tall.
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A week later, Andrews told the FBI that Bertrand was “approximately six feet one inch to six feet two inches tall,”
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having grown six or seven inches in eight days. But there were more miracles ahead. Andrews told the Warren Commission on July 21, 1964, that Bertrand was five feet eight inches tall,
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Bertrand somehow managing to shrink five to six inches in only seven months, a not inconsiderable feat.

When the FBI and Secret Service asked Andrews for any records to confirm that Oswald or Bertrand had ever been clients of his, he was unable to locate any pertaining to either of them, later telling the Warren Commission his office had been “rifled,” but by whom he did not know.
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No one believed Andrews’s story—that is, except Jim Garrison, who was absolutely sure that there was a man in the French Quarter using the alias Clay Bertrand. Reportedly, in the fall of 1966 Garrison began to suspect that Bertrand was Shaw because from Andrews’s testimony before the Warren Commission, one could infer that Bertrand was a homosexual and, of course, he had the same first name as Shaw—Clay. One of Garrison’s assistants, Frank Klein, had noted that Clay Shaw lived in the French Quarter and was gay. With nothing more than this, Garrison was off and running.
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And Garrison wouldn’t even listen to his own staff. In a February 25, 1967, memorandum to Garrison, DA investigator Louis Ivon wrote, “To ascertain the location of one Clay Bertrand, I put out numerous inquiries and made contact with several sources in the French Quarter area…I’m almost positive from my contacts that they would have known or heard of a Clay Bertrand. The information I received was negative results. On February 22, 1967, I was approached by ‘Bubbie’ Pettingill in the Fountainbleau Motor Hotel…whom I had earlier contacted about Clay Bertrand. He stated that Dean Andrews admitted to him that Clay Bertrand never existed.”

Andrews would later say that he had several meetings about the assassination with Garrison at the old Broussard’s restaurant in New Orleans, the first on October 29, 1966. At a second meeting shortly before Christmas, 1966, and at subsequent ones, Andrews says that Garrison put pressure on him to admit that Clay Shaw was Clay Bertrand, but Andrews said he told Garrison he wasn’t. However, Garrison continued to persist, and Andrews would later tell a national TV audience, “[Garrison] wanted to shuck me like corn, pluck me like a chicken, stew me like an oyster.” Andrews said he “wanted to see if this cat [Garrison] was kosher.” Andrews’s plan? When Garrison wanted to know the identities of the male companions who accompanied Oswald to his office, Andrews only gave him one, a name he fabricated out of thin air—Manuel Garcia Gonzales. Surely enough, Garrison bit, and charged the fictitious Gonzales with selling narcotics so he could pick him up and interrogate him on what he, Garrison, was really concerned with. As New Orleans attorney Milton Brener writes, “Garrison was to become convinced that Manuel Garcia Gonzales was one of the assassins in Dallas and, apparently, for a time believed that he was the leader of the group and the prime culprit. Writing for
Tempo
magazine, an Italian publication, in April 1967, Garrison stated he would gladly give up Clay Shaw if he could but get hold of the true assassin—Manuel Garcia Gonzales.” When a man with the name Manuel Garcia Gonzales was thereafter arrested in Miami on the narcotics charge, Andrews told Garrison that he was the wrong Gonzales, that Garrison had “the right ha-ha but the wrong ho-ho.”
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In
On the Trail of the Assassins
, Garrison only admits to having one meeting with Andrews about the Kennedy case, a lunch “in early 1967” at Broussard’s restaurant, and acknowledged that when he asked Andrews to identify Bertrand, Andrews responded, “I don’t know what he looks like and I don’t know where’s he’s at.” However, when Garrison, disbelieving Andrews, told Andrews he intended to call him before the grand jury and “if you lie to the grand jury as you have been lying to me, I’m going to charge you with perjury,” Andrews allegedly said, “If I answer that question…, if I give you that name you keep trying to get, then it’s goodbye Dean Andrews. It’s bon voyage, Deano. I mean like permanent. I mean like a bullet in my head.”
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One would think that such a statement (which was depicted in Stone’s movie) was powerful and important enough—being an implied admission that Shaw was Bertrand and reflecting Andrews’s belief that Shaw was connected to the assassination—for Garrison to memorialize in a memorandum to the file—that is, if it was actually made. But Steve Tilley, the chief archivist at the National Archives for the Kennedy assassination, said that no such record of the alleged meeting and conversation at Broussard’s appears “among the records of the New Orleans District Attorney or the papers of Jim Garrison” at the archives. In fact, Tilley said, “I was unable to locate any document that pertains to any conversation between Garrison and Andrews in a New Orleans restaurant.”
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Indeed, the only record I could find of any interview of Andrews by the New Orleans DA’s office was an April 4, 1967, memorandum from DA investigator William Gurvich to Garrison about a March 2, 1967, interview of Andrews by Gurvich and Assistant DAs James Alcock, Richard Burns, and Andrew Sciambra. Andrews told his interviewers that he had seen photos of Clay Shaw but had never met him, and when he was shown several photographs of various persons, including Clay Shaw, he could not identify any of them as being Clay Bertrand. He told his interviewers that Bertrand, like Shaw, had “grey hair” (in Andrews’s Warren Commission testimony, he said Bertrand’s hair was “sandy”) and he thought he “was bisexual” (Shaw was homosexual).
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Andrews told the Shaw grand jury on March 16, 1967, that “you all want me to identify Clay Shaw as Clay Bertrand…and I can’t…I can’t connect the two.” But then he said, “I can’t say he is and I can’t say he ain’t.”
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An angry Garrison, not believing Andrews, secured a five-count perjury indictment against Andrews that same day.
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“Personally, I like Dean,” Garrison said. “Everyone does. But I have to show him I mean business.”
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Andrews fought back, filing a $100,000 suit against Garrison for malicious prosecution, alleging that he personally told Garrison “that there was no connection between Clay Shaw and Clay Bertrand.”
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On June 28, Andrews testified again before the Shaw grand jury, this time saying that “I have never seen this man, Shaw, never talked to him. If this case is based on the fact that Clay Shaw is Clay Bertrand, it’s a joke…Clay Shaw is not Clay Bertrand.” Still hanging by a thread to part of his obvious fabrication, however, he added that Bertrand was really a friend of his named Eugene Davis, the owner of Wanda’s Seven Seas bar in the French Quarter, and it was really Davis who called him at the hospital to represent Oswald. How could Davis be Bertrand? The hipster lawyer said a woman “back in the ’50s at a fag reception…introduced me to Davis as Clay Bertrand.”
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On July 17, that thread finally broke and the pathetic Andrews called a press conference and not only confessed again that “Clay Shaw ain’t Clay Bertrand,” but finally admitted that Clay Bertrand “never existed,” saying he made the whole story up to get attention for himself. The next day, July 18, Garrison proceeded to file an additional perjury charge against Andrews for lying to the Shaw grand jury on June 28 that Bertrand was Eugene Davis.
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Not even someone of Garrison’s rascality and deceit could find a way to use Andrews to his benefit at Shaw’s trial. Andrews testified for the defense that Clay Shaw was not Clay Bertrand, that he had never met or known Clay Shaw, and that the first time he had ever seen Shaw was “when I saw his picture in the paper in connection with the investigation” four years after Kennedy’s murder.

What about Andrews’s testimony before the Warren Commission that someone whose voice he recognized as Clay Bertrand’s called him on November 22 or 23, 1963 (“Friday or Saturday” he said), in a New Orleans hospital and asked him to defend Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas? Andrews told the Shaw jury that he “never received a phone call from Clay Bertrand” when he was at the hospital. Indeed, he added, “No one called me to say that.” Of course, the very notion that Bertrand, whom the conspiracy theorists believe to be Clay Shaw, and whom they further believe conspired with Oswald to kill Kennedy, would hire a joke like Andrews to defend Oswald is crazy. If Bertrand were Shaw, and Shaw and Oswald conspired to kill Kennedy, obviously Shaw could be expected to do anything, including selling all or most of his holdings, to pay for the best possible legal representation for Oswald.

So who, if anyone, did call him at the hospital, and for what? Andrews testified that “the phone call I received was from Gene Davis [a friend] involving two people who were going to sell an automobile and they wanted the title and a bill of sale notarized.” Andrews said he was “under sedation” and “under the influence of opiates” and “using oxygen” at the hospital, and “elected [to take] a course that I have never been able to get away from.” He said, “I don’t know whether I suggested [to Davis after the discussion about the automobile sale], ‘Man, I would be famous if I could go to Dallas and defend Lee Harvey Oswald, or whoever gets that job is going to be a famous lawyer.’” He said he never told the FBI or Warren Commission about Gene Davis because he did not want “to implicate an innocent man,” so he said, “I used the name Clay Bertrand as a cover to mentioning Gene Davis.” He had only heard the name Clay Bertrand once before in his life at the “fag wedding reception” thirteen years earlier when he claimed that Gene Davis, whom he already knew, was introduced to him as Clay Bertrand by a woman named Big Jo. But later in his testimony he acknowledged that “Clay Bertrand is a figment of my imagination.”
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