Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (32 page)

When Garrison was at his worst off, I went to George McGovern and said, “We’re in a terrible spot. We want the truth, whatever it is. Doesn’t have to be our truth, but we want the facts.” He listened to me, and he said, “I’m sorry, Mort, but, your hero Jack Kennedy wasn’t a very good president.” I said, “Is that
punishable by death?” That was the end of my relationship with George McGovern.

I was an unlikely guy to be a comedian. America’s an unlikely country to emerge, but I took it at its word. That’s why I’m here, and that’s why I won’t abandon it. It will sink us all. I may have a temporary financial advantage out of it, but that isn’t going to do it—that’s nothing you can leave your kids. You can leave them money, but you’ve got to leave them more than that. You’ve got to leave them a thirst for the potential of this country. The president was willing to do that and become a traitor to his class to do it. That guy I met on a very random afternoon I didn’t think would have that influence.

I’m surprised that all the people who benefited by being there didn’t speak up. Schlesinger, McGeorge Bundy—they didn’t behave like his friends. On one very sorrowful night, Garrison said to me, “None of us ever knew him, Mort, except you.” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Well, for God’s sake, didn’t he have better friends than that?” I asked that of the audience too.

Cynthia Wegmann

In November 1963 Cynthia Wegmann was a fourteen-year-old student at the Academy of Sacred Heart School in New Orleans. Four years later her father, Edward Wegmann, defended family friend Clay Shaw against charges brought by District Attorney Jim Garrison that named Shaw as a ringleader in a conspiracy to kill the president. Cynthia assisted her father in preparing the case; she is now a successful New Orleans defense attorney.

I
was at Sacred Heart—third prep or fourth prep, we called it—seventh or eighth grade, and we were getting ready for what is a Sacred Heart tradition of bringing Christmas baskets and presenting them to the archbishop to give away to the poor. Every family or every girl at the Heart would make a basket that would feed a family for Thanksgiving and then give them something for breakfast and lunch the next day. We were sitting there on the bleachers in the gym, and Mother Johnson came out with her little wooden clacker and said, “Excuse me, quiet, quiet,” and told us that the president had been shot. I do believe that we were then sent home, so we went home and watched the TV for the next—forever.

The president had come here before, and I think I was one of the girls who presented him with roses, but we felt like
we were all giving him flowers. It was like you’d lost a friend. He was so handsome, and she was so beautiful. It was just terrifying.
What’s going to happen to the world? What’s next? How can this happen?
Just terrible—and then the poor children, little John with his little salute and black jacket with the boots on backwards? That was just not good.

I don’t know. It let LBJ do what LBJ did, but Kennedy himself was a great equalizer. He could talk his way out of anything or end anything, and I think the civil rights movement might have been easier if people could have looked at him and followed his lead. The country was totally stunned. We’d won two world wars, and then we named our first young president, who didn’t like to wear a hat. It definitely changed the way the world thought or the way we felt. We no longer felt invincible. If somebody could kill our president on our streets in the South, then what else could happen? And then what?

Clay Shaw at Tulane

Clay Shaw was very much a gentleman. He had a wonderful booming voice—we sometimes call it the old-fashioned “Creole voice,” with that modulation I wish I could imitate. He was brilliant. He wrote plays. He restored the French Quarter—he really started it. He was, along with friends, responsible for them not tearing down the French Market. He restored, I think, at least seven houses. That’s how my father and he came to know each other, because Daddy was an estate lawyer and transactional lawyer. He was Clay’s attorney to do all the real estate turns that he did. He’d buy one, flip it, spend the money on the next one, and restore that one. He really had a sense of style.

Clay tried to figure out why he was targeted, and the only thing he could think of was, OK, he had an international reputation, which would
make Garrison’s persona or reputation go all across the newspapers internationally. More particularly, he describes in his diary—and he did in
Esquire
magazine as well—two incidents: One, he witnessed Garrison throw a glass of wine in his wife’s face at Galatoire’s—a serious faux pas, a no-no. The other was that he stopped Garrison from molesting a twelve-year-old boy at the New Orleans Athletic Club.

Who knows what Garrison thought? All you know is that he concocted this miasma of lies and stories, a lot of which was based on Mark Lane’s “triangulation of crossfire” stuff. He had to have a scapegoat. Because Clay Shaw was such a ginormous man in international circles, as well as in stature, and because Garrison knew that Clay was alone but for his mother, who was in Ruston, he went after him, hoping he could hound him and that he might commit suicide or something before Garrison could be shown up to be a fraud.

What he [Perry Raymond Russo] did afterward in the press was to say, “I was under hypnotic suggestion.” They put Perry Raymond Russo under sodium pentothal and hypnosis three times by the then-coroner, whose name was Chetta. He said in the beginning, and you can read the transcripts that he said, “I don’t remember,” “No, I don’t know any Clay Shaw,” “No, I don’t know any Clem Bertrand,” “I don’t know.” Finally, by the third time, he was like, “Okay, okay. I give up.” But Russo did recant. It was three times under hypnosis, and if you read those transcripts, it’s pretty incredible. Russo being put under hypnotic suggestion not once, not twice, but three times before he put him on the trial was pretty amazing. All of that came because Bill Gurvich, who was working in the DA’s office, said, “I can’t take it anymore.” He quit his job—he had five children or more—and brought Daddy this information. He was pretty phenomenal.

The man [Garrison] came on television during the trial and before, and he just looked so earnest. Everything he said sounded so convincing. I remember asking my daddy, saying, “Daddy, he doesn’t look like he’s lying,” and Daddy said, “He makes it up on one side of his head, shuts that side off, and believes it on the other.” I went to law school after Clay was acquitted to save the world from the likes of Jim Garrison. My only problem was, when I went to work in criminal court, I believed everybody.

I can’t say [why Garrison did it]. I should know better than to say what I think somebody else thought, but I think Garrison had cleaned up the prostitution in the French Quarter, and he needed some other mission. In ’67, four and a half years later, he comes across this Mark Lane book that connects Castro to New Orleans and comes up with this story. Kennedy was killed on November 22, 1963, and Garrison arrested Clay on February 27, 1967—I think he was only booked on March 1, 1967. But by that time, Garrison’s sweep of the prostitution on Bourbon Street was over, so he had a new mission.

Clay actually talked about the fact that he didn’t know why he had been targeted. There was, if you read the transcripts, some mention of some “Clem Bertrand” meeting with Oswald and this guy [David Ferrie] with carpet fibers glued to his head to make eyebrows. Somehow or another, “Clem B” and “Clay S” became “Clay Shaw.”

Daddy had gone to Atlanta or right outside of Atlanta to open or to seal the deal for the building of a restaurant, Brennan’s of Atlanta, which I think subsequently burned. He came back, he’d been on the plane, it was raining, he had walking pneumonia, and Mother greets him at the front door. We all did. Daddy didn’t take his hat off—and Daddy always took his hat off when he came in the house. He goes to the phone because Mother had told him, “Clay’s been calling you. Billy’s been calling. You have to answer the phone.” Daddy picks up the phone, and he says, “I’m in no mood!” and hangs up.

The phone rings back, and whoever’s on the other end—I assumed it was Clay—says, “Don’t hang up, Edward. This is no joke. I’m at the DA’s office. They’re about to arrest me for conspiring to assassinate the president of the United States.” Daddy says, “Okay, I’ll be right there,” walks out the door, and goes two blocks, and comes back around, and he goes, “Where’s the DA’s office?” He was a civil lawyer.

When Clay was arrested, I was seventeen. I was a senior at the Academy of the Sacred Heart, which is on St. Charles Avenue—wide-eyed and innocent. It seriously made life different. I was followed by two men in Garrison’s employ. Daddy was followed. Even my brother, who was twelve, was followed. I think they gave up on Dirk after a while. They sat outside Sacred Heart, and of course the first thing I did when I got out of Sacred Heart was—didn’t even change my shoes—just took my bag and went over to Ottoman Stables, where I rode and taught every afternoon. They sat outside the barn and waited for me to come out. I don’t know what they thought I was going do. But once you realized who it was, it would be too much fun to get on my little fat red Arabian and take off the other direction and leave them like,
“Ahhhhh!”
They never turned around, though, and went the wrong way, down this street. I don’t get it, but they didn’t. You know, you have these suspicions. Like, okay, so the seventeen-year-old-at-the-convent girl is going to be doing what?—smoking pot? I have no idea. Instead I was riding horses and chewing hay straws.

It [Shaw’s trial] was like a three-ring circus. It was in Judge Haggerty’s court, and there was Daddy, Billy Wegmann, Irving Diamond, who had this wonderful voice too, and the jury. It took them a long time to seat a jury, but after the jury was seated, I think the whole thing lasted six weeks. Garrison gave the opening statement, but Jim Alcock, Garrison’s assistant DA, ran the trial and did the closing statement. It was amazing because, as it went on, more and more news people became more and more on the side of right, not of might. I met some very nice people, lots of reporters. I don’t think Mom went except maybe to hear some piece that Daddy did.

When you heard Garrison after the trial was over in the afternoon, I said, “Daddy? How can he say that?” Daddy said, “Just don’t worry. Just wait.”

I believed in Clay’s innocence completely. What did I think when the jury went out? I said, “I’m pretty sure it will be fine.” Then I called my friend who was sitting there with me at that time, Tennessee Lynn, and she was like, “We were holding hands and praying and promising God that if he’d just get Clay off, we’d do charity work for the next twenty years.” She said, “I didn’t do any of it, but I think you did some.”

The jury went out, and forty-five minutes later, enough time for everybody to go to the bathroom, have a cup of coffee, and take one vote, he was acquitted. Three weeks or so after that, Garrison arrested him for perjury. Then Daddy started, and luckily I was able to help him with that—even though I wasn’t a lawyer yet—to do a civil rights complaint, which was filed in federal court, an injunction against him for going forward with this next heinous trial.

Daddy thoroughly believed in what he was doing. He believed him. He believed in him, and he was going to stand there and stand between Clay and anybody who wanted to smear him. So for two years, from the time that Clay was arrested until the trial was over, and then even further, when we filed the complaint in federal court for the injunction to stop Garrison from persecuting him for alleged perjury, that’s all Daddy did. He asked me not to go away to college because he wanted me to stay here. He wanted the family to be together. It took a little longer than we thought.

The trial to enjoin Garrison from going forward, it was based on a civil rights violation, where Garrison had to know that he was wrong and that Clay was telling the truth because of this, that, and the other thing. I think Daddy’s complaint was fifteen, twenty pages. It lays it all out. Christenberry took testimony. Christenberry was a very careful
judge, and he wrote a thirty-page opinion that ripped Garrison up one side and down the other and said, “No, you can’t go forward.” Then that was appealed by Garrison.