Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (33 page)

Edward Wegmann

We sided with Christenberry of course, and that went up to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. They decided with us and stopped the perjury trial. Then we filed a complaint—I think I was a lawyer by this time—to recover damages from Garrison and his buddies, Truth or Consequences, which had put up money for the prosecution or persecution, if you prefer, of Clay. In the midst of that, seeking damages to restore Clay to the finances he had lost during all this time, Clay’s mother died, and then Clay died, and since Clay had no children, no descendants and no direct ascendants, under a quirk of Louisiana law the perjury action or the defamation action was considered a personal action, which could only be pursued by ascendants or descendants directly. That has been changed since then, but if not [for that] we would have won. We made it through the Fifth Circuit, and the decision was very heavily weighted in our favor. They said no because it’s a civil rights action; Louisiana law doesn’t govern who can inherit. Then the next thing was to go to the US Supreme Court. We lost by one vote, five to four. It [Christenberry’s language] was extremely strong, and he excoriated him. It was like a vindication.

In the beginning, he [Shaw] was fine. He once described it as a Kafkaesque experience. He couldn’t live in his house for two months because Garrison had people stationed outside of his house. The news people
were hounding him too, so he lived with a widow woman, as she described herself. He said everybody was very kind to him. He said he wasn’t a religious man, but he ended up going to The Sentinel, which is a retreat house, and felt a great lifting of his spirit during the middle of this persecution. Toward the end, he lost his spirit, but during it he was sure that he would be acquitted and that he might be able to get back some of his calm and go back to writing plays and short stories. He had retired in order to write.

He had an off-off-Broadway play. He then sold one of the properties he had in the Quarter in order to fund the costs. He meant to travel and enjoy his life before that long. His mother was older of course, and she died the year before he died. Clay died in ’74. The stress is definitely attributable. He died of lung cancer; the stress probably exacerbated that. His chain-smoking didn’t help, but the stress certainly had an enormous effect on that. He was quite a good man.

Daddy had Clay cremated because he knew, given Garrison’s propensity and what Garrison had claimed all along, that Garrison would have had the body exhumed in order to try to prove he was killed or committed suicide—because he kept saying, “Everybody’s dead. This person’s dead, this person’s dead.” They were all old. They were dying. That’s why Clay was cremated, and he was buried in an unmarked grave near his mother in Ruston. I don’t know if it’s still unmarked, because the stigma has left, but he was buried in an unmarked grave next to his mother. People were still making threats as Clay was dying of lung cancer. Daddy didn’t want him to be disturbed in any way.

They reelected him [Garrison], just “Yep, no problem.” Then they elected him to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, on which he served,
but I don’t think he ever wrote an opinion. I appeared in front of him once, and he didn’t ask me a single question.

People thought he must have something. The conspiracy theorists abound, and where it comes from, I don’t know. How can you think the most heinous crime of the century could be committed by a group of Looney Tunes and one nice man? But they did, and I still, since this time, have gotten phone calls from people saying, “Explain this.” It’s like, “All I can tell you is: It’s wrong.” How can you keep something like this under wraps with that many people involved? You can’t. Clay was so well known that, if you and I were in a restaurant and he walked in, he would tower over us. I think he was six-foot-four, giant shoulders, big barrel chest, a shock of white hair, and a voice that had this wonderful timbre to it. You couldn’t mistake him for anybody else. I don’t get it.

Rosemary James

In 1963 twenty-six-year-old reporter Rosemary James was in Charleston, South Carolina, working for the
News and Courier.
Afterwards she moved to New Orleans and became a reporter for the
New Orleans States-Item
and WWL-TV. From 1966 to 1969 she covered District Attorney Jim Garrison’s trial of her friend Clay Shaw. She later cofounded t
he Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society
and wrote a book about the Big Easy. Today she and her husband, Joe, own
Faulkner House Books
, an independent bookstore, and live in William Faulkner’s old apartment in Pirate’s Alley.

I
didn’t move to New Orleans until the end of December 1963, about a month after the president was assassinated. I had come down here to visit friends and fell in love with the city, went by the
States-Item,
asked for a job. When I got home, I had one, so I arrived here and went to work on the first day of 1964. When the president was killed, I was in Charleston. I was working for the
Charleston Evening Post
and the
Charleston News and Courier
at the time. I was on my way home for lunch, and I turned the radio on. That was the first knowledge I had of it. I didn’t believe it at first. I was shocked. I just didn’t believe it at first. I was sort of like Walter Cronkite; he didn’t want to believe it when Dan Rather called him and said that he was dead.

It all happened because New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, a very flamboyant character, who had national ambitions, was on a plane ride back from Washington with Senator Russell Long, and Long was on the Warren Commission and wasn’t satisfied with the conclusions of the Warren Commission. He thought they didn’t go far enough with the investigation, and he suggested to Garrison that he should pick
up this investigation and go full speed ahead with it. He told him he thought that the New Orleans jurisdiction would work because Oswald had been here. He told Garrison quite frankly that this could make his national reputation, so that’s how it got started.

Jack Dempsey was our police reporter at criminal district court, and every day he sent these little dispatches by teletype—that’s how long ago it was—and he said, “Such and such is going on, and I keep hearing that Garrison is investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy.” After about three of these messages, the then–city editor and managing editor suggested that we look into it more seriously. We tried to talk to Garrison, and he wasn’t available; he wouldn’t make himself available. The criminal district court judges had what’s known as a “finds and fees” fund, and the district attorney had access to that fund. He was using that fund to finance trips to Dallas and for investigative purposes, and we were able to go to the records of that fund and find that he was indeed spending a lot of time in Dallas and other pertinent places. We did a very brief story, not much longer than a couple of pages. I finally got him on the phone. I said, “I have something I would like to show you. May I come and visit with you?” He said yes. I gave him the story. He read it, and he smiled and said, “I will neither confirm nor deny.” That’s all he would say.

I said, “Well, we’re going to publish this story.” Then he said, “I’ll neither confirm nor deny.” So we went with it the next day, and we believed that he wanted us to publish this story. If I had to do it all over again, we probably wouldn’t have published. I would have said, “You know, this is a bunch of—”

All the news people came in from various and sundry places, even from
Izvestia
and
Pravda.
He had a major news conference, and then
everything died down. People went back to their respective news organizations. He really loved a headline, he really did love it. He loved all the attention, so he would have a new news conference, and he would give us a new theory about what actually happened. This went on and on and on. I didn’t make a judgment that he was really nuts until he arrested Clay Shaw, and then my suspicions were confirmed by that action.

Garrison had a very convoluted, byzantine sort of mind, but he had a history that wasn’t particularly pleasant. First of all, for many Garrison was considered a closet gay. That wasn’t generally known in the community, but a lot of people who knew him thought he was. Here’s Clay Shaw, whom I knew; he’s socially acceptable, he’s doing all kinds of wonderful things business-wise. He’s getting a lot of positive attention, and he’s gay. Even though that was not a subject that was generally discussed, there’s a feeling that Garrison was maybe a little jealous. Also, Garrison had a known reputation for beating up his wife. He was a wife abuser. One night, Garrison and his wife were having dinner at Brennan’s, which was at the time operated by Ella Brennan, as opposed to the other branch of the family. Ella and Clay were very close friends, and they were having dinner together. Garrison slapped his wife rather brutally, and Clay got up and went over and stopped it and asked them to leave. Garrison was very abusive. There were harsh words then.

Garrison was the kind of guy who craved headlines. For example, it was well known in the city that he had a relationship with and hung out with working girls, but in order to get crusader kind of headlines, every once in a while he would round them up and put them in jail, which is about as hypocritical as you can get, because the next night he’d be drinking with them, and Bourbon Street had classy drinkers back in those days and classy strippers. He spent a lot of time down there. We all knew that side of Garrison, that he was hypocritical and also that he was a headline chaser.

There were two people I knew very well who were very good sources of mine when I was covering Garrison. One was an investigator, an ex-cop named Pershing Gervais, who was a really interesting character. He had been Garrison’s chief investigator, and he was the first person who told me the whole thing was a crock. The next person who told me that was a criminal district court judge who had been Garrison’s first assistant DA, and he said, “That is such a crock; I can’t even begin to tell you how stupid you all are to be covering it at all.” Those were his words, but the coverage went on because he would come up with some exotic new theory.

He had a triangulation of crossfire. Then he had some right-wing Texans. Another theory was that David Ferrie, an ex-pilot, was part of a conspiracy, that he had been killed off. In fact, Ferrie probably killed himself by his diet. He did nothing but drink black coffee and eat Jell-O. That was his total diet. I interviewed him, and I know he was a real kook. At first Garrison had dismissed him, but once he died of a heart attack according to the coroner, Garrison said he was the most important witness and maybe his case had been destroyed. That brought a whole new flock of headlines. Those were just a few examples. There must have been at least twenty different theories that he proposed, and that’s why people with any judgment early on thought the guy was a kook. Then when Clay Shaw was arrested, they washed their hands of the whole thing because he [Shaw] was so respected in the community in so many ways. The people Clay Shaw hired to represent him were first-class and had a great reputation in the community. Half the community, at least, abandoned Garrison as a serious investigator.

The reason it came to trial? You need to look at the law of Louisiana, which gives district attorneys enormous power, more so than most states. For example, a district attorney without a grand jury indictment can file a bill of information against someone and bring that person to trial. Generally speaking, district attorneys can do what they want in Louisiana. There are few stops on their power. Another reason was that it was entertaining news coverage for the general populace—this has been a community and a state that really enjoyed politicians who would entertain them. Garrison, whatever else he was—nuts, cynical, whatever—he was very entertaining. I think it was allowed to get that far because of his personal charisma.

New Orleans history was a great piece of it. When he arrested Clay Shaw, you got a real dichotomy in the community: those who thought he was seriously nuts, and those who were still in his corner for whatever reason. For example, there was a group of businessmen that formed something called Truth or Consequences to fund the DA’s investigation so that he wouldn’t have to get money that had to be reported. This was strictly against the law, but they went forward with it anyhow, and that’s how he was funded for a lot of his foolishness. I think they were just political supporters of Jim Garrison’s frankly. They were actually formed before Clay Shaw was arrested, but it may have been that Garrison talked to them and asked them to fund him so that he could continue his investigation without oversight.

Every time someone would mention that possibly the Mob was involved in this, Garrison got all out of sorts with them, tried them before the grand jury, and got them cited for contempt or jail for something or another. Garrison was threatening to haul a
New York Times
reporter before the grand jury who strongly believed that the entire conspiracy was initiated and funded by that whole crowd. They had a great motive because they had lost a lot of property in Havana and had put a lot of faith in the Bay of Pigs event, which turned out to be a disaster. There was strong feeling that they had the best motive of all, but if you mentioned that, Garrison would get all up in arms and try to punish you. He came to me and said that he was going to bring me before the grand jury. I said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t. I have a lot of stuff I’ve never reported about you.” That was the end of that.

The day after Clay was acquitted, Garrison filed a perjury charge against him, and federal judge Herbert threw that out. After it was all
over, I never had harsh words with him again. In fact, I once had some dealings with a civil court judge representing a client; I remarked that this judge would sign anything that was put before him on behalf of the opposition, and he cited me for contempt. By that time, Garrison had become an appeals court judge, and he ruled in my favor. He could have been really mean. He had a great ability to keep a conversation going with a person, but it was a terrible miscarriage of justice against Clay Shaw.

After Clay was acquitted, he died not long thereafter, a broken man. He was worn out from the whole thing. Clay had been ready to retire as a gentleman. He wasn’t wealthy, but he had put aside a lot of money; he had restored a lot of properties and had them as income-producing properties. He planned to spend the rest of his life writing. He had written a couple of plays, and he was actually a good writer. That’s what he wanted to do with his life, but this investigation and the ultimate trial and the cost of attorneys bankrupted him. He was just worn out, and I think the stress possibly caused him to succumb to cancer earlier than he would have otherwise.

Regarding the movie
JFK,
Oliver Stone and I had some verbal confrontation via the
Times-Picayune
. He bought Garrison’s line of garbage hook, line, and sinker, and the film he produced was exactly what I expected—a travesty. First thing he did was cast Kevin Costner, who is known as a kind of all-American good guy, as Jim Garrison, which was the beginning of the travesty as far as I’m concerned. It was a terrible film. Oliver Stone is another nut. He and Garrison were in good company.

I never spoke to Stone personally after the film was made. My only exchanges with him were through letters to the editor of the
Times-
Picayune,
but if I had been able to see him personally after seeing the film, I would have told him what I thought. I’ll tell you what Pershing Gervais said. He and I went to see the film together at the
Times-Picayune
’s request. Pershing Gervais had been Garrison’s chief investigator at one time, an ex-policeman, someone who had been a great information source
throughout my journalistic career, and a great critic of Garrison. They wanted us to go and see it and then be interviewed after the film.

When the film was over, the
Times-Picayune
reporter said, “Mr. Gervais, what did you think of the film?” He said, “It was a pile of shit.” Those were his exact words, excuse my French. Then he asked me my thoughts, and I said, “Ditto.” Those were our comments about the film. It portrayed Clay in a way that wasn’t indicative of the man. It made him seem like a flamboyant queen who was involved in orgy-type dinner parties and things of that nature. It gave a false impression of a really decent man. Not that he would have been against costuming for Mardi Gras or anything like that—and in fact he did. He was a full member of the community, but Oliver Stone just completely distorted the truth.

The whole thing now seems so surreal; it really does. I think about all the Damon Runyon-esque sort of characters who were part and parcel of the whole drama, one of whom was Dean Andrews, who was a two-bit lawyer who probably couldn’t earn a living if it hadn’t been for representing lesser Mob figures or Mob-oriented figures at least. I’m completely convinced that Dean Andrews was called by someone and told to go to Dallas and represent Jack Ruby. I’m completely convinced that he told the truth about that. I’m also convinced that he made up the “Clay Bertrand” name to avoid telling the FBI and other investigators who questioned him who actually called him. I think he knew precisely who that person was, and he was trying to protect that person, but it backfired in that Clay Shaw was judged to be Clay Bertrand by Garrison for whatever reason. Before he died, Dean Andrews told me it definitely wasn’t Clay Shaw. The other thing was that no one ever looked for another candidate other than Clay Shaw because they believed that Garrison just made it up on the spot.