Reclaiming History (312 page)

When Garrison’s own chief trial prosecutor, James Alcock, asked Andrews on cross-examination if he remembered telling Warren Commission counsel Wesley Liebeler that he saw Clay Bertrand six weeks prior to his testimony before the Commission, Andrews responded that was just “huffing and puffing.”

“Huffing and puffing under oath?”

“Bull session.”

“Do you recall making that statement under oath?”

“I assume I must have made it.”

“That wasn’t correct, was it?”

“No.”

What about Andrews telling the Warren Commission that he called a fellow lawyer, Sam “Monk” Zelden, from his hospital bed on November 24 and asked Zelden if he wanted to go to Dallas with him to defend Oswald? “No explanation,” Andrews told the Shaw jury. “Don’t forget I am in the hospital sick. I might have believed it myself or thought after a while [that I had been] retained there, so I called Monk. I would like to be famous, too.”

Throughout Andrews’s testimony, the hip-talking lawyer had the courtroom erupting in laughter to the point of the bailiff saying, “Order, please.” A few examples: “Do you speak Spanish?” the judge asked Andrews. “Poco poco, loco, judge,” Andrews deadpanned. Claiming the attorney-client privilege in his alleged representation of Oswald, he said the answer to any question about it “might, may, might, tend, would or could” incriminate him. To his “I would like to be famous, too,” answer, he added, “Other than as a perjurer.” Andrews said he saw Oswald on TV in his hospital room when “he shot this guy
Ruby
.” (Say what?)

And Andrews is, according to many conspiracy theorists, one of the essential keys to solving the mystery of the Kennedy assassination. Andrews is so lacking in credibility that James Alcock acknowledged before the Shaw jury that Andrews’s entire story was fraudulent. Responding to Andrews’s claim that the reason he lied to the March 16, 1967, grand jury that he had actually met a man named Clay Bertrand on two occasions was that he was “hemmed in with that Warren Commission Report” that the grand jurors “were reading from while they were asking me questions,” and “there was no way I could get off the hook,” Alcock told Andrews, “Dean, the only one that hemmed you in was yourself when you lied under oath to the Warren Commission.”

But Andrews had the last word, and it stung Alcock and Garrison before the Shaw jury. “I told the DA’s office,” Andrews testified, “that Clay Bertrand wasn’t Clay Shaw
before
I went there [grand jury], but nobody believed me.”
*
Alcock never even attempted a retort to this.
¹⁸⁵

Oliver Stone, having to know full well that Clay Shaw was not Clay Bertrand, and that Andrews’s story was a fabrication, had an easy solution for convincing his audience that Andrews’s admission at the Shaw trial that Shaw wasn’t Bertrand was untrue. He simply invented a scene, during Shaw’s booking for Kennedy’s murder, where he has Shaw say something that Shaw never said—that his alias was Clay Bertrand. “Any aliases?” Stone’s movie audience hears the booking officer ask Shaw. “Clay Bertrand,” Shaw, after a pause, answers resignedly.

21. Garrison, in his book, and Stone, in his movie, depict David Ferrie as a frenzied and erratic Kennedy hater and anti-Communist who worked in New Orleans with a fiercely right-wing former FBI agent named Guy Banister
†
to train anti-Castro Cuban exiles at a camp just north of Lake Pontchartrain near New Orleans. The camp allegedly operated under the aegis of the CIA. It appears that Ferrie may have done some detective work at times for Banister’s detective agency. And both Ferrie and Banister were, indeed, actively involved in the anti-Castro movement, though the extent of their involvement has never been clearly quantified. However, this is just a diversion from the only matter that counts. There is no credible evidence that Oswald, Ferrie, and Shaw (Garrison’s three co-conspirators, whom Stone shows his audience together on the screen plotting Kennedy’s murder) ever knew each other. And no one, of course, ever asked Oswald if he knew Shaw or Ferrie, Shaw denied at his trial that he knew or ever met Ferrie or Oswald, and Ferrie denied, till the day he died, knowing Oswald or Shaw.
¹⁸⁶
*
Granted, the denials would mean nothing if there was any credible evidence to the contrary, but there has never been. A scene in
JFK
showing Ferrie and Shaw cavorting at a homosexual party dressed in wild, transvestite garb is a Stone fabrication. In
False Witness
, Patricia Lambert writes that some pictures did surface nearly two years
before
the trial in a “widely read newsletter [May 12, 1967, issue of
Councilor
, a right-wing Shreveport, Louisiana, paper]published by a Garrison supporter” showing Shaw and a friend named Jeff Biddison, not Ferrie, “dressed in business suits with ‘mop-strand’ wigs on their heads.” In one of the pictures was “a former radio announcer who resembled Ferrie named Robert Brannon…Both Garrison and Shaw’s attorneys investigated the pictures, and Robert Brannon, who died in 1962, was positively identified by Mrs. Lawrence Fischer, who had been at the party, as well as by Robert Cahlman of radio station WYES, who knew Brannon well…The pictures were taken around 1949 (before David Ferrie had moved to New Orleans) by photographer Miles De Russey at a party given by a Tulane University student.”
¹⁸⁷

The proof, of course, that Ferrie and Shaw do not appear together in the subject photograph (or any other photograph) is that if they did, surely Garrison, who feverishly tried to link Ferrie to Shaw at Shaw’s trial, would have introduced it into evidence, but he did not. Nor did he make any reference to such a photo in
On the Trail of the Assassins
. Yet with Garrison himself serving as a consultant, Stone outrageously depicts Shaw and Ferrie apparently reveling in high badinage at a French Quarter party. And in Stone’s appearance before the National Press Club on January 15, 1992, he told the assembled media, “After the [Shaw] trial we came into possession of a picture that shows that Clay Shaw and David Ferrie were at a party together.”
¹⁸⁸

When Garrison assistant John Volz asked Ferrie in a December 15, 1966, interview whether Ferrie would “be willing to submit to a polygraph” on all of his denials, Ferrie responded, “Certainly.” He said he would also “be willing to submit to truth serum. I have no hesitation at all.”
¹⁸⁹
But Garrison’s office elected not to give Ferrie a lie detector test or any other kind of test. Not only, as indicated, did Ferrie deny ever having any contact with Oswald or Shaw, but Garrison’s own book,
On the Trail of the Assassins
, never makes any reference to Ferrie’s telling him or any member of his staff that he was involved in the assassination, had any knowledge of it, or even knew Shaw and Oswald. (That was for Garrison’s witness, Perry Russo, to do.) Yet, unbelievably again, Stone, who says he read
On the Trail of the Assassins
three times, paid a quarter of a million dollars for it, and based his movie primarily on it, invents a scene in a hotel room where Ferrie, in a highly agitated state, makes—by implication—a confession to Garrison and his assistants that he was a co-conspirator in Kennedy’s assassination. “I knew Oswald. I taught him everything,” Ferrie says. Ferrie goes on that he, Shaw, and Oswald were all members of the CIA, and that Shaw had him “by the balls” because of compromising photos Shaw had of him. Ruby, he says, was “a bagman for the Dallas mob.” Garrison asks Ferrie who killed Kennedy. Ferrie, apparently angry at the naivete of the question, yells out the very incriminating words, indicating he had personal knowledge of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, “
The shooters don’t even know
. Don’t you get it?”

Ferrie’s contact at the DA’s office was Louis Ivon, one of Garrison’s investigators. Ivon worked hard to get Ferrie to cooperate with Garrison’s investigation and turn state’s evidence against Shaw. When Ferrie, within days of his death, called Ivon to complain about the media hounding him relentlessly since publication of a front-page article in the February 18, 1967,
New Orleans States-Item
with a photograph of Ferrie and captioned “Eyed as Pilot of ‘Getaway’ Craft-Flier,” Ivon put Ferrie up for two nights at a New Orleans motor hotel. The only reference to this in Garrison’s book was his writing that Ivon had rented a room for Ferrie at the “Fountainbleau Motel” under an assumed name on two separate nights, and Ivon had told Ferrie, “You call us anytime you need us, and we’ll give you a hand,” and suggested that Ferrie order whatever room service he wanted and that he try to relax. And the only reference in Garrison’s book to Ivon or anyone else in his office talking to Ferrie during this precise period about the assassination is Garrison’s saying that Ivon told Ferrie, “I only wish you were on our side. I can guarantee you that the boss would give his right arm to have your mind working with us.” No response from Ferrie is indicated, obviously meaning that nothing Ferrie said was of any significance.
¹⁹⁰
In
JFK: The Book of the Film
by Stone and coauthor Zachary Sklar, the source for the conversation wherein Ferrie allegedly indicated he had personal knowledge of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy is listed as Louis Ivon. “At times, however,
we had to put words in Ferrie’s mouth
,”
The Book of the Film
concedes on page 88 to its very small number of readers. How nice. But Stone, of course, did not acknowledge this to the millions of people who saw his film.

Garrison’s book is close to four hundred pages of fluff and nonsense in which he desperately tries to convince his readers of a conspiracy to murder Kennedy. An implied confession from Ferrie to him and his assistants would have been the very centerpiece of his book. The highly incriminating words of Ferrie in Stone’s movie (“
The shooters don’t even know
. Don’t you get it?”) are not to be found anywhere in Garrison’s book because apparently even Garrison was unwilling to say that a man admitted complicity in a murder when he did not. But Oliver Stone had no such reservation. As indicated, Stone fabricated, for his audience, this dramatic admission by Ferrie of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Since I’m not a student of Hollywood films, I don’t know if
JFK
is a reflection on Oliver Stone’s other works, some of which, I’m told, are excellent. But if it is, the question has to be asked, Has there ever been a filmmaker who has taken more liberties with the truth? And does Stone have any qualms about what he did? Here’s what he told
Newsweek
: “Is Clay Shaw violated by my work? Is he going to come haunt me at night, drive me to the edge of madness? I have to live with my conscience and if I have done wrong, it’s going to come back on me. But John Kennedy might be in my dreams, too, saying, ‘Do it, go out there, find my assassins, bring them to justice.’”
¹⁹¹

22. David Ferrie was found dead in his second-floor New Orleans apartment on the morning of February 22, 1967. In the movie, Ferrie, shortly after his “confession” to Garrison and his assistants, is shown being murdered by two Latin men who are forcing something down his throat. Suspicious, right? But that’s only if you’ve already forgotten that Ferrie didn’t confess to Garrison. Moreover, the coroner’s report on the autopsy of Ferrie, conducted by Dr. Ronald A. Welsh, a pathologist for Orleans Parish, at 3:00 p.m. on February 22, 1967, listed the “Classification of Death” as “Natural”—that is, Ferrie had died from natural causes. The cause of death was a “rupture of berry aneurysm of Circle of Willis [a circle of blood vessels located along the undersurface of the brain between the brain and the skull base] with massive hemorrhage.” Of course, aneurysms have been known to rupture from severe, blunt trauma, but the report said, “There are no external marks of violence on the body at any point” and “there are no evidences of trauma or contusions to the scalp at any point.” Walsh found evidence of “hypertensive cardiovascular disease,” indicating high blood pressure.
¹⁹²
*

As to Oliver Stone’s showing his audience two men forcing something down Ferrie’s throat, a sample of Ferrie’s blood was taken on February 22 to determine the presence or absence of “alcohol, barbiturates, cyanide, heavy metals,” or “caustic agents.” The toxicology report dated February 24 from the Orleans Parish toxicologist, Dr. Monroe S. Samuels, and chemist, Angela P. Comstock, said the blood specimen “was negative” as to the presence of these substances.
¹⁹³
Oliver Stone, naturally, did not furnish his audience with this information.

Ferrie had been under enormous stress from Garrison’s investigation of him, and was angry about Garrison’s harassment, which included staking out his apartment. “The DA’s men established a 24-hour surveillance in the basement of a house across the street from Ferrie’s apartment building where they set up motion picture cameras to record the movements in and out of Ferrie’s building.”
¹⁹⁴
On February 17, Ferrie told Dave Snyder, an investigative reporter for the
New Orleans States-Item
, in a long interview that he was giving serious thought to filing a lawsuit against Garrison. Snyder noticed that Ferrie’s “steps were feeble” and Ferrie said he had encephalitis (inflammation of the brain causing abnormal sleepiness). Ferrie told Snyder of his fear of arrest and his anger and bitterness over Garrison’s accusations against him.
¹⁹⁵

The following day, four days before Ferrie’s death, Andrew Sciambra and Louis Ivon of the New Orleans DA’s office went to Ferrie’s apartment pursuant to Ferrie’s telephone request that they do. Per their memorandum to Garrison of their interview of Ferrie, Ferrie said “that the reason he had called us was that he was getting concerned over our investigation. He had heard all kinds of rumors that he was going to be arrested and that he wanted to find out if these rumors were true.” But the memo is silent as to what, if anything, Sciambra and Ivon told Ferrie in response to his question about whether the rumors were true. Sciambra, the writer of the memo, said that Ferrie had greeted him and Ivon at the bottom of the stairs to his apartment and told them he would follow them up the stairs because “it would take him some time to climb up the stairs as he was sick and weak and had not been able to keep anything in his stomach for a couple of days. He moaned and groaned with each step he took up the stairs.” Once inside his apartment, Ferrie “laid down on the sofa…with two pillows under him” as they spoke to him. Sciambra went on to say he did not believe Ferrie was “as sick as he pretended to be,” but did not spell out why he formed this opinion. During the interview, Ferrie complained that the media was “hounding him to death” and, indeed, a reporter from the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
called him shortly thereafter while they were there.