Tag: ARRB

As noted at the end of Part 1, the excisions Litwin makes to whitewash David Ferrie from accusations of perjury and suspicion in the JFK case extends to key information that implicates the FBI in the JFK cover-up. In my view, what he does to exculpate Clay Shaw from any suspicion, and to eliminate his perjury, might be even worse.

To show Litwin’s plastic surgery, let us take his treatment of Shaw’s trial. One would think that if anyone were to write about that proceeding today, two things would have to be paramount in the discussion. One would be the testimony of Pierre Finck. The prosecution’s medical expert, Dr. John Nichols, had done a good job using the Zapruder film to indicate a crossfire in Dealey Plaza. In fact, this part of the case was so effective that the defense decided to call in one of the three pathologists––Dr. Finck––who performed the very questionable autopsy on President Kennedy. The author quotes Sylvia Meagher as saying that Garrison was inept and ineffective in challenging the Warren Report at Shaw’s trial. (Litwin, p. 129) Which shows how out to lunch Meagher was on the subject of anything dealing with Jim Garrison. The reason he can include that embarrassing statement by Meagher is simple: in his entire chapter on Shaw’s trial there is no mention of Finck’s testimony. I wish I was kidding. I’m not.

Finck’s testimony alone burst open the Warren Report. All one has to do to understand that is to read the reaction to his testimony in Washington. As Doug Horne and others on the ARRB revealed, Finck’s testimony was so devastating to the official story it rocked the Justice Department back on its heels. As revealed by the ARRB, the two men in the Justice Department who were supervising the disguise over Kennedy’s criminally bad autopsy were Carl Belcher and Carl Eardley. In 1966, under the direction of Attorney General Ramsey Clark, they were responding to requests by Warren Commission lawyers David Slawson and Wesley Liebeler. Those two Commission counsels requested aid in order to somehow, some way, do something to counter the mounting criticism of the Warren Report. (“How Five Investigations Got It Wrong”, Part 2) The Justice Department seemed amenable. For instance, in a photographic inventory review in that year, Belcher knew that certain autopsy pictures were missing. He got two of the pathologists and the official autopsy photographer to sign a document in which they knowingly lied about this fact. He then had his own role erased from the charade by taking his name off the document. (Horne, Inside the ARRB, Vol. 1, pp. 146-47)

Realizing what the game was, upon hearing what Finck was saying on the stand in New Orleans, Eardley hit the panic button. In the second edition of Destiny Betrayed, I spend four pages describing some of Finck’s shocking disclosures at the Shaw trial. (pp. 300-03) One of the most compelling is that the pathologists were prohibited from dissecting President Kennedy’s back wound, since they were told by one of the many military higher ups in attendance not to. Because of that failure, no one will never know if that wound transited the body, or be certain what its trajectory was through Kennedy.

According to Dr. Thornton Boswell, when Eardley heard that Finck was actually telling the truth about what happened the night of JFK’s autopsy, he was really agitated. He called another of Kennedy’s pathologists, Boswell, into his office and said, “Pierre is testifying and he’s really lousing everything up.” (DiEugenio, p. 304) The idea was to send Boswell to the Shaw trial and have him discredit Finck as “ a strange man.” Boswell actually did fly to New Orleans. When ARRB Chief Counsel Jeremy Gunn heard this testimony from Boswell, he asked: “What was the United States Department of Justice doing in relationship to a case between the district attorney of New Orleans and a resident of New Orleans?” Boswell replied that clearly, “the federal attorney was on the side of Clay Shaw against the district attorney.” (ibid) As the reader will understand by now, this crucial part of the story is missing from this book. In fact, as we shall later see, Litwin is buddies with a man, Harry Connick, who was part of the hidden political machinery that arranged it.

Connick was the US Attorney in New Orleans at the time. At Eardley’s request, Connick reserved a hotel room for Boswell. Boswell was then escorted to Connick’s office and shown Finck’s disastrous two days of testimony. The doctor spent the evening studying it, but ultimately was not called. As Gary Aguilar has said, that was probably because Finck was better qualified in forensic pathology than Boswell, and Garrison would have pointed that out with both men under oath. (DiEugenio, p. 304)

II

The other point that is extremely relevant about Shaw’s trial today is the provable perjuries that Shaw recited under oath. Many of these corresponded to things he said to the press in the lead up to his trial. One was that he did not use the alias of Clay or Clem Bertrand. What Litwin does to help Shaw escape from this lie would be funny if it were not painful to read.

As Bill Davy, Joan Mellen and I myself have enumerated, not only did Jim Garrison have witnesses to show Shaw was Bertrand; so did the FBI. When combined together, the number is in the teens. For Garrison, and others, the interest in this came through the issuance of the Warren Commission volumes and the testimony of New Orleans attorney Dean Andrews. Andrews said Oswald had been in his office with some gay mexicanos. The latter had been sent to him by a man named Clay Bertrand. (WC Vol. 11, p. 326) He was then called on 11/23/63 by Bertrand to go to Dallas to defend Oswald.

Hoover and the FBI used every trick in the book to make this phone call go away. Even though these have been discredited, on cue, Litwin rolls them back out. As Bill Davy showed with hospital records, Andrews was not drugged at the time of the call. (Davy, p. 52). The call was also not imaginary, since three witnesses who Andrews talked to corroborated that he had told them about it. These witnesses not only said that Andrews seemed familiar with Bertrand, but Oswald had been in his office also. (Davy, pp. 51-52) Further, Andrews could not have been so familiar about details concerning Lee and Marina Oswald unless someone had told him about them. (Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, pp. 375-76) It is true that Andrews changed his story about his description of Bertrand, once saying he was married with four kids, but this was clearly because of the pressure the FBI had placed on him, plus the fact his life had been threatened. (Mellen, A Farewell to Justice, p. 197) Andrews relayed that threat to both Mark Lane and Anthony Summers, in addition to Garrison. (Bill Turner, “The Inquest,” Ramparts 6/67: 24; Summers, Conspiracy, p. 340; Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 82). I don’t see how that repeated threat can be discounted. Because Andrews obviously did not.

But, beyond that, it appears the FBI was looking for Bertrand before their interview with Andrews. (Davy, p. 194) Further, in declassified FBI documents, the FBI has admitted that Shaw’s name came up in their original Kennedy inquiry back in December of 1963. That memo, written by Cartha DeLoach, said that several parties had furnished them information about Shaw at that time. (FBI Memorandum of March 2, 1967) Ricardo Davis, active in the Cuban exile community in New Orleans, told Harold Weisberg that the FBI had shown him a picture of Shaw the day after the assassination. (DiEugenio, p. 265) In a March 2, 1967 memo, the FBI admits that on February 24^th, they had gotten information from two sources that Shaw is identical with Bertrand. Larry Schiller, an FBI informant on Mark Lane, told the Bureau that he had gay sources in two cities––San Francisco and New Orleans––who said that Shaw used aliases, one of them being Bertrand. (FBI memo of March 22, 1967)

Harold Weisberg wrote an unpublished book in which he stated that Andrews told him that Shaw was Bertrand. But, consistent with the death threats, he swore him to secrecy about it. This is contained in the manuscript “Mailer’s Tales of the JFK Assassination.” (see Chapter 5, p. 13, available at the Hood College Weisberg archives) What Litwin does with this information is, even for him, bracing. He writes that Joan Mellen once wrote to Weisberg and the critic did not say this nearly as clearly as he wrote in his unpublished book. (Litwin, p. 313) What Litwin does not reveal is that one sentence later, Weisberg does make it clear. (Mellen, A Farewell to Justice, p. 197; see p. 551 for the separate references) Did Litwin stop reading before that one sentence? Mellen sources this to an interview she did with Weisberg on July 27, 2000, which Litwin ignores. I have not seen this kind of Rafael Nadal topspin since the days of Gerald Posner.

But in the Kennedy case, things are always worse than you think they are. And thanks to Malcolm Blunt, we now know the depths of dreadfulness that Shaw’s legal team was steeped in. There has long been available an FBI memo of March 2, 1967, referred to above, issued the day after Shaw was arrested. But it had only been released in redacted form. The memo was from William Branigan to Bill Sullivan. It contained a brief biography of Shaw and said the Bureau had information in their files about Shaw’s sexual tendencies, including sadism and masochism. What had been redacted was the following information: Aaron Kohn knew that Shaw was Bertrand! In fact, in this unredacted version of the memo the FBI handprinted below the first paragraph that Shaw was also known as Clay Bertrand.

This is startling in more than one way. First, as mentioned previously, the memo reveals that Kohn, along with another source, had told them Shaw was Bertrand on February 24, 1967. Did Kohn know that Shaw was going to be arrested? Secondly, this reveals that Shaw’s team had to know their client was lying. Because, as anyone who knows that case understands, Kohn was an integral part of that defense. It simply is not credible that he would not inform Shaw’s attorneys, the Wegmanns and Irvin Dymond, of this key fact. Third, this shows that, as I long suspected, Kohn created the whole Clem Sehrt mythology: that a lawyer Marguerite Oswald knew was known as Bertrand. He did this in consultation with the HSCA in order to detract from the fact that he himself knew Shaw was Bertrand. (see HSCA Vol. IX, pp. 99-101)

In other words, today it is a fact that Shaw was Bertrand. The problem with the classification of the information, the lying about it, and the threats to Andrews was that Garrison could not ask Shaw the key question: Why did you call Andrews and ask him to defend Oswald? Because of this new revelation I have a question for Litwin: Did he think he was going to find this crucial information in Aaron Kohn’s files?

III

I am not going to go through all the perjury that Shaw committed under oath. But I want to point out another instance of the HSCA trying to conceal key information about Shaw in order to bring Garrison into question. In the HSCA Final Report, the authors vouch for the Clinton/Jackson witnesses––that is, the people who saw Oswald with Ferrie and Shaw in those two villages in the late summer of 1963 about 115 miles northwest of New Orleans. Oswald first visited two persons in the area, Edwin McGehee and Reeves Morgan. He then was seen by numerous people in line to register to vote. He was then witnessed by at least four people inside the hospital at Jackson applying for a job there. This has all been established beyond a shadow of a doubt by Garrison’s inquiry, the HSCA’s further investigation, and by private interviews done by Bill Davy, Joan Mellen and myself.

But to show what the HSCA was up to, in that same report, a couple of pages later, out of the blue, they try and question whether it was really Shaw that was seen there. (HSCA Final Report, p. 145) That report was co-authored by Dick Billings, a man Litwin trusts and freely uses in his book. Originally, the HSCA secret files were classified until 2029. The furor around Oliver Stone’s film JFK opened them in the mid-nineties. What the HSCA report does not reveal is that the identification of Shaw was quite solid. And it is hard to comprehend how the authors of the report didn’t know it. This is due to a fact that, like other important evidentiary points, the HSCA decided to classify at the time. There was an HSCA executive session interview held with one of the key witnesses to the voter registration. Sheriff John Manchester testified that he approached the driver of the car and asked him to identify himself. The driver gave Manchester his license and told him he worked for the International Trade Mart. The license corresponded to the name the driver gave Manchester, which was Clay Shaw. (HSCA Executive Session of 3/14/78)

Litwin’s pal, Hugh Aynesworth––who worked for Shaw’s lawyers for two years––understood just how credible these witnesses were. Through his plants in Garrison’s office, he had a copy of Manchester’s statement to the DA. Hugh drove up to Clinton with his partner, FBI informant Jim Phelan. (DiEugenio, pp. 244-45; Mellen, A Farewell to Justice, p. 235). They located Manchester. Litwin’s “great reporter” Mr. Aynesworth attempted to bribe the sheriff. He offered him a job as a CIA handler in Mexico for $38,000 per year, quite a ducal sum back then. That offer suggests who the “great reporter” was connected to. Manchester replied negatively in a rather terse and direct manner: “I advise you to leave the area. Otherwise I’ll cut you a new asshole.” (Mellen, p. 235)

Because the HSCA found the Clinton/Jackson incident so credible, Litwin tries to say such was not the case. Like Lambert, he has to find a way to question the picture Garrison investigator Anne Dischler found. This depicted a car in proximity to the voter registration office with the New Orleans crew in it. Like Lambert, he says it could have been used as a “powerful brainwashing tool.” (Litwin, p. 121) This is ridiculous. First, that picture had to have been taken by one of the bystanders at the time of the voter registration. Under those circumstances, how could it be termed a brainwashing tool? Second, the Clinton/Jackson witnesses did not surface for Jim Garrison. They talked about the incident previously for congressman John Rarick and publisher Ned Touchstone of The Councilor. (Mellen, A Farewell to Justice, p. 227; Davy, p. 115) Reeves Morgan who, along with his two children, was the second witness to meet Oswald, called the FBI and informed them about it right after the assassination. The reply was that the Bureau was already aware of this incident. (Davy, pp. 102-03) There was clearly an agreement from the top down in the Bureau that they would deny the episode in order not to bolster Garrison and continue to hide their own negligence. But today there is little doubt that this guilty Bureau knowledge is how Oswald’s application at the hospital rather quickly disappeared. And we have this now from people in the FBI. (Mellen, A Farewell to Justice, pp. 232-34). No less than four people saw Oswald inside the hospital, directed him to the personnel office, saw him inside the office, and actually saw the employment application he filled out. (DiEugenio, p. 93)

But for me, the capper that certifies this strange but powerful episode is this: Oswald knew the names of at least one, and more likely two, of the doctors who worked at the Jackson State Hospital. And again, the HSCA secret files proved such was the case. When Oswald was questioned by registrar of voters Henry Palmer, Palmer asked him if he had any associates or living quarters in the area. As a result of the JFK Act, amid all the documentation released on the incident, we know that Oswald replied with two names: Malcolm Pierson and Frank Silva. When the HSCA retrieved the 1963 roster of treating physicians at the hospital, both those names were on the list. (Davy, p. 107) How could Oswald have known this? One way would have been through Shaw’s well established relationship with CIA asset Dr. Alton Ochsner, who had a connection to the Jackson hospital. (Davy, p. 112)

IV

As I said above, I am not going to go through the entire litany of lies that Shaw uttered in order to mislead the public prior to his trial, and the jury in his testimony under oath. If the reader is interested in that aspect, he will not find the discussion in Litwin’s book. But you will be able to find it here.

Please note that the majority of material used in that presentation was made available by the ARRB. In other words, the FBI and CIA were concealing much information which would have been valuable to Garrison. In fact, in the case of the FBI, they literally verified what Garrison was saying about both Ferrie and especially Shaw. So here is my question to Litwin: if the FBI confirmed what Garrison was investigating, then how could Garrison have been “deluded”? Was the FBI also “deluded”? Was the CIA also “deluded”? In fact, the CIA was so desperate to conceal their relationship with Shaw that they altered and destroyed much of his file. (Davy, p. 200; ARRB memo of 11/14/96 from Manuel Legaspi to Jeremy Gunn) Question: Did Litwin think he was going to find that kind of information in the files of Dick Billings or George Lardner? I think the readers can make up their own mind on that score.

But let me pose the question in a more concrete manner. As we can see from above, Jeremy Gunn was surprised by the fact the Department of Justice was interfering with a local trial conducted by a DA. The reason being that such is usually not the case. Usually, when asked, the federal authorities will do what they can to aid a local investigation. Because of the cover-up instituted by the FBI and the CIA in the Kennedy case, that did not happen here. As the reader can see from that linked PowerPoint presentation, that cover-up applied to Shaw directly.

Now, with all that in the record––which the author could not find in the papers of Irvin Dymond––here is my question to Fred: What if the circumstances had been normal? That is, what if Washington had been helping the DA instead of obstructing him? For example, consider Shaw saying he never used the alias of Bertrand. If Garrison had the FBI document referred to above and showed it to Shaw on the stand, can one imagine the reaction? Can one imagine the follow-up questions? “Mr. Shaw, would you say that Mr. Kohn has been aiding your defense?” And the follow up to that would be: “And he did so knowing you were lying?” The culminating question would have been: “Now that we know you are lying: Why did you call Andrews and tell him to go to Dallas to defend Oswald?” In this author’s measured and informed opinion, under those normal circumstances, Shaw would have been convicted. The problem with the JFK case is that the political circumstances around it make it so radioactive that it clouds the standard rules of evidence and procedure. In fact, as far as the normal rules of investigation and evidence go, the JFK case is the equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle.

My interview with Phil Dyer certifies the defendant’s knowing perjury even further. After Shaw was safe, that is after the judge had thrown out Garrison’s subsequent perjury case against Shaw––which Garrison would have likely won––Shaw met up with an interior designer he knew early one Sunday afternoon in late 1972. Dyer went along with his designer pal to meet Shaw and a female friend. Phil knew a bit about the JFK case and recalled the Shaw trial. Realizing he was out of the woods, Shaw felt free to admit what had really happened. When Phil asked him if he knew Oswald, Shaw replied yes he knew him fairly well, and he was kind of quiet around him. When asked about Oswald’s culpability, and if he could have gotten those shots off as the Warren Commission said he did, Shaw replied that Oswald was just a patsy, and also a double agent. This alone demolishes Shaw’s entire defense at his trial. And Litwin’s book along with it.

But the worst part of all of this Litwinian/Wegmann/Dymond mystification is that people in New Orleans understood it was such at the time. For example, Carlos Bringuier knew that Garrison was on to something big, and that high persons were involved in the assassination. He also knew something else. That Shaw felt confident because “he knew that these high persons would have to defend him.” (DiEugenio, p. 286) Which, as I have proven above, the FBI and CIA did. Here is the unfunny irony: Litwin uses Bringuier as a witness against Garrison in his book. (see Chapter 11: “A Tale of Three Cubans”)

This is one reason why I fail to see the point of Litwin using early Commission critics like Paul Hoch, David Lifton and Sylvia Meagher to knock Garrison (one could add Josiah Thompson to this list). To my knowledge, at that time, none of them had access to Garrison’s files, none of them had visited New Orleans to do any field investigation, and none of them could have possibly had access to the secret FBI and CIA files that were valuable to Garrison’s case. To top it off, to my knowledge none of them later used the Freedom of Information Act to try and attain them. With those qualifications, their comments amount to sheer bombast. Therefore, what was or is the forensic value of Litwin using them in his book? Very early, actually in grade school, students learn the basic axioms of arithmetic. One of them is that since zero has no value, it does not matter how many of them you add to each other: The sum at the end of the addition is still zero. Adding Hoch to Meagher to Lifton, one still comes up with the forensic value of nothing.

But in some ways, the use of these early critics is worse than that, because they not only bought into the MSM line on New Orleans, but with Meagher and Lifton, they contributed to it.

V

Which brings us to Litwin’s writings on Kerry Thornley. Litwin’s chapter on Thornley is one of the worst chapters I have read in recent years. And I don’t just mean about Thornley. It’s the worst about any subject in the recent JFK literature that I have read. The majority of his references here come from the writings of Thornley’s friend David Lifton, Adam Gorightly’s pathetic apologia for Thornley, Caught in the Crossfire, and the writings of Thornley himself. Again, what did Litwin think he was going to get from these sources? When you add in the author’s own massive bias, it makes it all the worse. For instance, Litwin tries to explain away Thornley’s extreme rightwing political views by calling him a libertarian. (p. 179) Calling Thornley a libertarian would be like calling Marjorie Taylor Greene a Republican. Thornley was so far right that an acquaintance of his in New Orleans, Bernard Goldsmith, refused to discuss politics with him. (Joe Biles, In History’s Shadow, p. 57)

Litwin also does a neat job of downplaying Thornley’s testimony before the Commission. He doesn’t quote any of it. That’s a good way to make something of important evidentiary value disappear. No one who knew Oswald in the service supplied anywhere near the psychological/pathological/political disposition for Oswald to kill Kennedy as Thornley did––no one was even close. Thornley’s deposition in Volume 11 was 33 pages long and it was separated from the affidavits of those who knew Oswald in the service, both in Japan and at Santa Ana, California. In fact, Thornley’s highly pejorative testimony was grouped with that of New Orleans radio host Bill Stuckey, who––as we have seen––helped bushwhack Oswald in a radio debate; an affidavit by Ruth Paine, whose home produced so much incriminating evidence against Oswald; and another by Howard Brennan, the man the Commission used to place Oswald in the sixth story window of the Texas School Book Depository. That should tell the reader just how the Commission viewed Thornley––what with his depiction that Oswald wanted to die knowing he was a somebody, and Oswald wanted to go down in history books so people would know who he was 10,000 years from now. (Vol. 11, pp. 97, 98)

This is what Kerry was there to do, and Commission lawyer Albert Jenner admitted it with Thornley right in front of him. (Vol. 11, p. 102) Jenner said he wanted Thornley to give them a motivation for Oswald. Which Kerry supplied in excelsis. To excise this is another example of Litwin’s plastic surgery. But in addition to milking Thornley to smear Oswald, the Commission also covered up areas that they should have investigated about the witness. This included topics like: did Thornley communicate with Oswald after they left each other in the service; did Thornley tell Oswald about Albert Schweitzer College in Europe, a place where Oswald was supposed to have applied to, but never attended; did Oswald meet with Thornley in New Orleans; and why did Thornley suggest that Oswald was about five inches shorter than he was when, in fact, they were approximately the same height? You will not find any of these key evidentiary points in Litwin’s chapter. But they help explain why Thornley was tracked down by both the FBI and Secret Service within about 36 hours of the assassination. Thornley himself said that the agencies had just cause to suspect he was involved in the assassination, though that line of inquiry was quickly dropped. But incriminating Oswald so thoroughly before the Commission gave him the opportunity to urinate on Kennedy’s grave at nearby Arlington Cemetery. (Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 78)

Litwin is so incontinent to smear Garrison that he recites the whole mildewed rigamarole about the DA suspecting that somehow John Rene Heindel––who talked to Oswald once at Atsugi air base in Japan––was lying to him and the DA was laying a perjury trap for the man through Thornley. (Litwin p. 177) This idea was furthered by Gorightly. If one reads the grand jury transcript of Heindel, it is exposed as pure bunk. What was really happening is that Thornley was so off in what he was saying about Heindel that it caused Garrison to suspect that Thornley was part of the cover-up––which he was. And Thornley did not just do his act before the Commission. In one of his many perjuries before Jenner, Thornley said that he had seen the Butler/Bringuier debate tape with Oswald while he just happened to be standing in a TV studio in New Orleans. (Volume 11, p. 100)

Wisely, Jenner did not pursue that statement. Because it turned out to be a lie. Through the testimony of radio program director Cliff Hall, Garrison discovered that Thornley was not just loitering around WDSU TV in the wake of the assassination. He was doing the same thing his pals Bringuier and Butler were doing in the immediate aftermath of Kennedy’s murder. He was smearing Oswald as a communist in a TV interview at the station. Around this opportune time, Thornley made similar pejorative statements to the New Orleans States Item newspaper. He said Oswald was made a killer by the Marines and the accused assassin was also schizophrenic and a “little psychotic.” (New Orleans States Item, 11/27/63) This is months before his appearance before the Commission.

But Cliff Hall said something that is probably even more relevant to the subject at hand, and it exposes Litwin’s avoidance even further. He said that he and Thornley went out for a drink after that TV interview. Before the Commission, Kerry told Jenner he had not seen Oswald in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. (WC Vol. 11, p. 109) He confessed to Hall that this was another lie. He had seen Oswald in New Orleans that summer. When Hall asked if he knew Oswald well, Thornley––like Clay Shaw––replied that he did. (Hall interview with Richard Burness, January 10, 1968)

But in the Kennedy case, just when you think they can’t, things always get worse. And it reveals another perjury by Thornley. As I have indicated above, Thornley’s raison d’être for testifying before the Commission was to dutifully produce his portrait of Oswald as the dedicated Marxist. He came through in spades. Yet Thornley knew that this was also false. He told two witnesses that Oswald was not a communist. (see Biles, pp. 58, 59)

As per the idea that Thornley could have been the model used in the infamous backyard photographs, no one will ever really know the truth about that aspect. But the idea that it could be Thornley was not just Garrison’s. Many years ago, in Las Vegas, it was told to a reporter for Probe magazine, Dave Manning. The information was supplied by none other than Jack Ruby’s acquaintance Breck Wall. Ruby called Wall––the local head of the American Guild of Variety Artists––four times in November of 1963. (Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, p. 469) As Bill Davy writes, “Ruby’s last long distance phone call during a weekend of frenzied phone call activity was to Breck Wall in Galveston.” (Davy, p. 46) Wall had arrived in Galveston just a few minutes after David Ferrie.

The above points out one of the worst aspects of this book. To anyone who knows New Orleans, Litwin’s portraits of important personages are simply not realistic. They are in fact cheap caricatures. This is acceptable for someone like the late Steve Ditko, who drew Marvel comic books. It is not acceptable for someone who is passing his book off as a work in the non-fiction crime genre. This caricaturing also underlines that, as others have alerted me, Litwin likes to troll on certain forums. One message he left is that Garrison did not give his files to any archives since it would have exposed them as being empty. This is a doubly false statement. Garrison gave many of his files to Bud Fensterwald at the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC). Secondly, the materials used above to impeach Thornley came from Garrison’s files. Besides Hall, there are four other witnesses who saw Oswald with Thornley that summer in New Orleans. (For a further demolition of this chapter, with more of Garrison’s files, see this article)

Thornley was lying about his association with Oswald. He was also lying about his association with those in the network around Oswald that summer in New Orleans. What is important from what I have demonstrated so far about Ferrie, Shaw and Thornley is this: When someone is lying under oath in order to exculpate themselves, those statements are not supposed to be set aside or ignored. Leaving the chimerical world of Litwin/Hoch behind, let us quote a real life colloquy from two experienced professionals on the subject:

Q: False exculpatory statements are used for what?

A: Well, either substantive prosecution or evidence of intent in a criminal prosecution.

Q: Exactly. Intent and consciousness of guilt, right?

A: That is right. (CNBC story by Arriana McLymore, 7/7/2016)

That piece of dialogue was between two veteran prosecutors: the questioner was Trey Gowdy, the respondent was James Comey. Comey was a federal prosecutor for about 18 years and then Director of the FBI. Gowdy was a federal and state prosecutor for a combined 16 years. Through their provable lies, the consciousness of guilt was there in the cases of Thornley, Shaw and Ferrie. I don’t see how it gets worse than looking for evidence that places you with Oswald, or your own defense team covering up the truth about your alias. The point was that Garrison never got to show what the intent of the lies were. But that exchange reminds us all of what proper legal procedure is, and how it has been utterly lost in the JFK case. It was distorted beyond recognition by people with political agendas. And it began with J. Edgar Hoover and those on the Commission, like Thornley’s pal Mr. Jenner.

After suffering through Litwin’s phantasmagoria with Thornley, I was ready to walk the book out to the trash bin behind my apartment. Instead, I decided to take a few days off. I had to in order to recover my damaged sensibilities. I gutted it up and got a second wind. I then managed to finish the book. I hope the reader appreciates that sacrificial effort.

VI

In the second part of the book, besides Thornley, the author deals with Carlos Bringuier, Sergio Arcacha Smith, Carlos Quiroga, Clyde Johnson, Edgar Eugene Bradley, Thomas Beckham and Robert Perrin.

All one needs to know about the first three is this: I could detect no mention of Rose Cherami in the book. Why is that important? Because Arcacha Smith was later identified as being one of the two men in the car who disposed of Cherami near Eunice, Louisiana on the way to Dallas right before Kennedy was killed. As everyone knows, including Litwin, Cherami predicted the JFK assassination before it happened. That uncanny prognostication was based upon what Smith and his cohort, fellow Cuban exile Emilio Santana, were discussing in the car. (DiEugenio, p. 182) What made this even more fascinating was that the HSCA learned that the Dallas Police had found diagrams of the sewer system under Dealey Plaza in Arcacha Smith’s apartment after the assassination. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 237) In a 1998 Coalition on Political Assassinations conference, John Judge revealed that Penn Jones actually did crawl through that sewer system in the sixties. One should then add in the evidence that Ferrie had a map of Dealey Plaza in his desk drawer at work. (DiEugenio, p. 216) To most people, right there you have more evidence of a conspiracy. All of it made possible by Garrison’s investigation. Which leads to the question one has to ponder: Who the heck is deluded here? As we shall see, it’s not Garrison.

Quiroga and Bringuier were associated with Oswald through the famous Canal Street confrontation between Oswald and Bringuier. The latter was the head of the DRE in New Orleans and Quiroga was his aide-de-camp. In early August, Oswald met Bringuier at his retail clothing store, insinuating he could help his anti-Castro organization. (John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, pp. 323-24) Later, when Bringuier heard Oswald was leafleting pro-Castro literature on Canal Street, he rode over and violently confronted him about this alleged betrayal. Oswald and Bringuier were arrested. Even though it was Bringuier who accosted Oswald, he posted bail, pleaded innocent and eventually walked. Oswald pleaded guilty, was booked and jailed, and was later fined in court. One of the flyers Oswald passed out on Canal was stamped with the address 544 Camp Street, Guy Banister’s office. Further, the DRE was conceived, created and funded by the CIA under the code name AMPSPELL. (Newman, pp. 325, 333)

As indicated above, the episode is much more interesting, much more multi-layered, than what Litwin presents it as. First off, Oswald wrote about it on August 4^th, five days before it happened. (Tony Summers, Conspiracy, p. 303) Second, Bringuier maintained that he had sent Quiroga over to Oswald’s apartment to return a couple of dropped leaflets and to infiltrate his group. Both Quiroga and Bringuier screwed up the timing of this mission to the Warren Commission. They said this event occurred after Oswald’s next street leafleting episode, on August 16^th in front of the International Trade Mart. It happened before that. (Ray and Mary LaFontaine, Oswald Talked, p. 162) This is made more interesting by another misrepresentation. Oswald’s landlady said that when Quiroga arrived, he did not just have one or two leaflets. She described what he had as a stack perhaps 5 or 6 inches high. (LaFontaine, p. 162)

As noted previously, things always get worse in the JFK case. When Richard Case Nagell, who tried to stop the assassination from happening, was first interviewed by Garrison’s office, he made a rather compelling revelation. He told Garrison’s representative, William Martin, that he had an audiotape of four men in New Orleans talking about an assassination plot against Kennedy. He named one of them as Arcacha; he would only describe another of the men as “Q”. Which would strongly denote Quiroga. (NODA Memo of 4/16/67 from William Martin to Garrison)

Instead of the above, what does the author give us? More sludge from writers like Gus Russo, Shaw’s lawyers and Aaron Kohn. This includes nonsense like the claim Gordon Novel was hired by Walter Sheridan to introduce the TV producer to people in the city, and smears of Garrison’s inquiry by FBI informant Merriman Smith, who Litwin does not reveal is working with the Bureau against Garrison. (see the letter by Smith to Cartha DeLoach of 3/6/67) Or bizarre material about Garrison’s attempt to interview Arcacha Smith in Dallas, which leaves out the prime role of Aynesworth in protecting the suspect. (see LaFontaine, pp. 341-45) The capper to it all is that Litwin writes that Ferrie’s anti-Castro activities ended in 1961, when, in fact, Ferrie admitted he was involved with Operation Mongoose, which began in 1962. (NODA Interview with Herbert Wagner 12/6/67)

As far as Clyde Johnson’s meeting with Shaw under the alias of Alton Bernard in Baton Rouge, Litwin relies on––I am not joking––Aynesworth to say Ruby was not in the city at the proper time. His other source for this, and again I am serious, is Ruby’s sister Eva Grant. (Litwin, p. 196) He also adds that there is no proper source for Johnson being beaten to a pulp on the eve of his taking the stand at the Shaw trial. In fact, the source for this is an unpublished manuscript by a former Garrison volunteer named Jim Brown. His manuscript, titled Central Intelligence Assassination, was full of inside information on the workings of Garrison’s office, including the fact that Garrison was so worried about Johnson being attacked before his appearance that he hid him outside the city at a college dormitory.

The surveillance on Garrison’s office was so thorough that, even under those conditions, the witness was located and beaten. This may have been due to either the previously noted FBI wiretapping, or the CIA’s ultra-secret ‘black tape’ operation. This was a project originating from the office of counter-intelligence chief James Angleton. It began in September of 1967 and continued until March of 1969, at the trial’s completion. According to Malcolm Blunt, the heading ‘black tape’ indicates that it was very closely held at CIA HQ––on a need-to-know basis––and there was no field office access. The folders originally stated they would not be moved from counter-intelligence (CI) and, incredibly, not released to the public until 2017––and then only with CI approval. Which means, they were most likely deep-sixed. This is a sorry part of the story that Litwin avoids at all costs: namely the surveillance and assaults on Garrison’s witnesses before, during and immediately after the trial. This included Johnson, Nagell, police officer Aloysius Habighorst, two of the Clinton/Jackson witnesses and Dealey Plaza witness, Richard Randolph Carr. (DiEugenio, p. 294; Alex P. Serritella, Johnson Did It, p. 279)

The cases of Perrin and Bradley were faux pas that were largely the result of another facet of the infiltration which permitted the harassment just described, and which again Litwin discounts. This would be the horrendous influence on Garrison by CIA infiltrator William Wood aka Bill Boxley. In fact, one can pretty much say that without Boxley those two episodes would not have occurred. There is little doubt today that Boxley was an agent. And in my review of his role in my book, where I included the Perrin and Bradley cases––along with other areas––I proffered substantial evidence that such was the case. (DiEugenio, pp. 278-85)

As per Thomas Beckham and his cohort Fred Crisman, no one will ever know the truth about them. Larry Haapanen, who––surprisingly––wrote a blurb for Litwin, was not the only investigator of the duo. Former CIA pilot Jim Rose also did work on them, especially Crisman. The problem with this subject area is a common theme with the Garrison inquiry––those files, like many others, have largely disappeared. Garrison said that Boxley had taken them. (Litwin, p. 216). The DA also referred to this in the fine John Barbour documentary The Garrison Tapes. But the late JFK photo analyst Richard Sprague told this reviewer that this was not the end of their exit from the record. Sprague said that in the cache of documents the DA donated to Bud Fensterwald and the AARC, the Crisman records also managed to walk away. (1993 personal interview with Sprague in Virginia)

I must add that I did get to see some of the late Jim Rose’s documents about Crisman and Beckham when Lisa Pease and I interviewed him in San Luis Obispo in 1996. To say the least, Crisman appeared to be an interesting character. I saw no indication in Litwin’s text describing Crisman, or in his related notes, that he ever saw these documents. Which means, to put it kindly, his analysis and conclusions in the area are incomplete. As we have seen, for Litwin, that is actually an improvement.

“One of the many blessings of this project was getting to know Hugh Aynesworth … He’s one of the great reporters in America, and it’s been an honor to know him.” ~Fred Litwin

Anybody who is familiar with the John Kennedy assassination should realize that a writer who could make the above statement has severe objectivity problems as far as the JFK case goes. Aynesworth is the man who once said that refusing a JFK conspiracy was his life’s work. Employing Aynesworth on the Kennedy case would be like using Donald Trump on the issue of where Barack Obama was born. Yet, the above statement is a quote from the Acknowledgements section of Fred Litwin’s book about the Jim Garrison inquiry. I would like to give that quote a page number but I can’t. The reason being that those pages––and some others which have text on them––do not contain numbers. Which, in my long reviewing career, is actually a first for me. But this is just the beginning of enumerating the bizarre features of this bizarre book.

For every Breach of Trust or JFK and the Unspeakable, there are at least a dozen volumes in the JFK field that are just plain shabby––or worse. Back in 1999, Bill Davy and I reviewed Patricia Lambert’s volume about Jim Garrison, False Witness. That was a particularly unpleasant experience. In fact, the estimable Warren Commission critic Martin Hay (deservedly) placed that book on his list of the ten all-time worst on the JFK case. But in light of Fred Litwin’s latest, Martin may have to revise and replace Lambert’s entry with Litwin’s On the Trail of Delusion. For Litwin has done something I did not think was possible: he wrote a book that is even worse than Lambert’s.

If the reader knows anything about New Orleans and the Jim Garrison inquiry, it is fairly easy to see what Litwin is up to. The problem is––and I cannot make this point forcefully enough––too many writers and interested parties think they know the Garrison inquiry and New Orleans, when they really do not. Many of these self-proclaimed “authorities” have never even been to the city. Many more have never even bothered to look at Jim Garrison’s files. But this never stopped them from voicing their biased and rather ignorant viewpoints: e.g., the late Sylvia Meagher. This was and is a serious problem among critics, and it has caused many people to be misled about the New Orleans aspects of the case. I will further elucidate this factor later in this review.

The above warning is apropos to what Litwin has produced. If I had to compare his latest to another volume in a related field it would probably be Thomas Reeves’ book on John Kennedy, A Question of Character. In my two part article, “The Posthumous Assassination of John F Kennedy”, I wrote that what Reeves had actually done was to compile a collection of just about every negative Kennedy book and article that came before him. He then assembled it together by chapter headings. He never fact-checked or source-checked what was in those materials and, as far as I could see, he never talked to anyone in order to clarify, or qualify, what he wrote; for example, the case of the deceitful Judith Exner. This allowed him to go exponentially further than anyone had done up to that time in smearing Kennedy. Because I knew the field and understood the game he was playing, I called it out for being what it was: so godawful that it ended up being pretty much a humorless satire.

The difference between the JFK field of biography and Jim Garrison and New Orleans is the time element. In my above mentioned JFK essay, I noted that the character assassination of Kennedy did not begin in any serious way until after the Church Committee hearings in 1975. This was not what happened with Jim Garrison. In his case it began very soon after the exposure of his investigation by local New Orleans reporter Rosemary James. As we shall see, in one way, it began with Aynesworth.

In my book, the second edition of Destiny Betrayed, I portrayed the real manner in which Rosemary James exposed Garrison’s inquiry. Contrary to what James tried to imply, it is not at all what Garrison wanted to occur (pp. 221-23). In fact, it was a serious body blow to his efforts. Yet, to this day, she still attacks Garrison. But again, to anyone who knows New Orleans, the smears are transparent. For instance, on a show she did In New Orleans with film-maker Steve Tyler and historian Alecia Long, she said that as soon as Shaw was indicted by Garrison, the wealthy Stern family of New Orleans dropped him like a hot potato. This is provably wrong. The Stern family hosted dinner parties for reporters sympathetic to Shaw’s defense once they arrived in New Orleans. What is surprising about this howler is that the contrary information is available throughout the forerunner to Lambert and Litwin, namely James Kirkwood’s obsolete relic of a book American Grotesque (see pp. 47, 88, 111). That book was published back in 1970. 

But beyond that hospitality function, the Sterns owned the local NBC television affiliate WDSU. Ric Townley, who labored on the infamous 1967 NBC hatchet job on Garrison, worked for WDSU. That show’s producer, Walter Sheridan, worked through that station while he was in New Orleans. (William Davy, Let Justice be Done, pp. 78, 156) In addition to that, the Stern family helped start the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a private local watchdog organization. They also lobbied to bring in former FBI agent Aaron Kohn to be its first manager. Kohn took a large and important role in the effort to undermine Garrison; working hand in hand with Sheridan, Townley and Shaw’s lawyers. (Davy, p. 156) As we shall see, Kohn covered up an important piece of information about Shaw that would have strengthened Garrison’s case and shown the defendant to be a perjurer. So here is my question: After all this, who could use Rosemary James as a credible source on either Shaw or Garrison? The answer is, Fred Litwin can. He uses her frequently in his book. And as Thomas Reeves did, he does so without any qualifications or reservations. In other words, he doesn’t prepare the readers by informing them of the above.

What Litwin does is a bit more ingenious than what Reeves did. In addition to his secondary sources, like James and Kirkwood, he visited certain archives. What most of these archives have in common is that they house the papers of Garrison’s critics; for instance. Life reporter Dick Billings, Washington Post reporter George Lardner, and Shaw’s friend, author James Kirkwood. He then augments this by using the papers of Shaw’s legal team, Irvin Dymond and the Wegmann brothers, Ed and William. Some of these collections, like the Historic New Orleans Collection, were found by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) to be highly sanitized. (ARRB memo from Laura Denk to Jeremy Gunn, 6/7/96) Which leads to another question: What did Fred think he was going to find in these places? Something objective? Something revelatory about Shaw’s secret intelligence background with the CIA? Something about Guy Banister’s career of covert infiltration of liberal groups in New Orleans? Nope.

There is something to this cherry picking that makes Litwin look even worse. The Wegmanns did know about the Banister undercover aspect, because Bill Wegmann worked at the law firm which handled some of Banister’s projects. In fact, Bill Wegmann notarized the papers for the incorporation of Banister’s so-called detective agency. (DiEugenio, p. 390) And that piece of quite relevant information was declassified in the nineties by the CIA, under the direction of the ARRB, even though the document dated back to 1958––that is, it took well over 30 years for it to see the light of day. This shows that Shaw’s own lawyers knew that Garrison was correct about Guy Banister. But it’s even worse than that. Bud Fensterwald later discovered through a New Orleans attorney that Banister, Shaw and former ONI operative Guy Johnson made up the intelligence apparatus for New Orleans. (Davy, p. 41) In the fifties, Guy Johnson worked with Bill Wegmann at the above-referenced law firm. Therefore, not only did Shaw’s defense team know about Banister, they likely knew about Shaw. And they still let him deny in public, and on the stand, that he was ever associated with the CIA.

In addition to James and Aynesworth, this leads to a third complaint to the reader: Try and find this rather important connection in Litwin’s book. Any objective person would understand that this declassified evidentiary point is important to Litwin’s subject matter. Both for what it says about Banister, and what it reveals about Shaw’s attorneys. Knowing that, anyone with an ounce of objectivity would realize that the Wegmanns would not have kept it in their archives.

II

Right after his acknowledgements to people like Aynesworth, and a listing of the archives the author will use, Litwin begins his narrative. He does so in a way that naturally follows from these prefatory matters. He describes a report from the military which eventually allowed Garrison to be discharged from the service on his second tour in 1951. Garrison had served on very dangerous air reconnaissance missions during World War II. At a very low altitude and speed, his team searched out enemy artillery sites. They flew so low, they could have been hit by rifle fire. And once they were sighted, they were attacked by much faster German fighter planes. (Joan Mellen, Jim Garrison: His Life and Times, pp. 18-19) They therefore sustained high fatality rates.

When Garrison reenlisted during the Korean conflict, he reported for sick call at Fort Sill. It turned out that he suffered from what used to be called “battle fatigue”, what we today call PTSD. (DiEugenio, p. 168; Mellen, pp. 36-37). What Litwin does with this is again, bizarre, but telling. He brings it up in the first paragraph of his text (p. 3, another non-numbered page). Less than one page later, Garrison is the DA of New Orleans. Clearly, what the author is trying to indicate is that somehow a mentally disabled person is now in high office. One way he does this is by leaving out the fact that after he left the service Garrison was recruited by the mayor of New Orleans, Chep Morrison. He was assigned to run the Public Safety Commission which supervised Traffic Court. (Mellen, p. 41). To put it mildly, Garrison did a crackerjack job. Mellen spends three pages showing, with facts and figures, that Garrison was such an excellent administrator that he just about revolutionized that branch. He was so good that Morrison offered him a judgeship over that court, which Garrison turned down. He said he would rather be on the DA’s staff, which Morrison then appointed him to. (Mellen, p. 44) It would appear to most objective people that Garrison had overcome any functional disability from his PTSD. Litwin eliminates this remarkable performance. I leave it up to the reader to figure out why.

At the DA’s office, Garrison handled a variety of criminal cases: burglary, lottery operations, prostitution, homicide and fraud. (Mellen, pp. 44-45) Again, this would indicate that Garrison had overcome his PTSD. Again, Litwin eliminates it.

Once Garrison enters into the DA’s office, we begin to understand why Litwin began his book as he did. Again, ignoring all the reforms and tangible improvements he made in the office and the praise he received for doing so, Litwin is going to strike two major themes in order to smear Garrison and his tenure. Both of these have been used before, they are nothing original. But Litwin tries to amplify them to the point of using chapter subheads to trumpet them. They are: 1) That Garrison spent much time prosecuting homosexuals; and 2) That the DA was a paranoiac about surveillance over his investigation.

Concerning the first, this motif was first utilized by Kirkwood in his aforementioned book. What Litwin does not reveal is that Clay Shaw commissioned that book. I discovered this through a friend of novelist James Leo Herlihy on a research trip down south. Lyle Bonge knew Herlihy from his college days. Shaw asked Herlihy to write a book about Garrison and the trial. Herlihy declined, but he suggested his young friend Kirkwood. All three men were gay, and that is not a coincidence. Shaw wanted a book that would portray Garrison as having no case against him. Therefore, the product was designed to suggest Garrison was simply out to prosecute Shaw because he was a homosexual. Anyone who reads Kirkwood’s useless relic will understand this was his mission: the denigration of Garrison, and the canonization of Shaw.

To further this concept, Litwin quotes a passage from the book on Garrison’s case co-authored by Rosemary James. The passage says that Garrison charged someone for being in a place that served liquor because the person was a homosexual. And that Garrison did this in order to attain a string of homosexual informants. (Litwin, pp. 8, 21) One would think from the reference that this information originated with reports from a primary source. When one looks it up, that is not the case. The source is Bill Stuckey. (James and Jack Wardlaw, “Plot or Politics?” pp. 21-22) Litwin does not reveal this either in his text or his references, which frees him from telling the reader who Stuckey was.

As Bill Simpich writes, Stuckey was both a CIA and FBI informant. He was the host for two interviews that Oswald did in the late summer of 1963 in New Orleans. These were originally arranged for by Carlos Bringuier of the CIA funded Cuban Student Directorate (DRE) branch in the Crescent City. The second debate featured Bringuier and CIA asset/propaganda expert Ed Butler facing off against Oswald.

Prior to the second debate, Stuckey was in contact with the FBI and they read him parts of Oswald’s file, including the information about his defection to the USSR. It was that information which was used to ambush Oswald since he was supposed to be representing the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. The defection exposed him as being not a fair participant but a communist. Stuckey crowed about how the debate ruined the FPCC in New Orleans. (DiEugenio, p. 162) Within 24 hours of the assassination, the DRE produced a broadsheet connecting Oswald to Castro and blaming the latter for Kennedy’s murder. In light of all this, would anyone besides Fred Litwin call Stuckey a neutral observer of the Kennedy case? But the reader does not know this because of Litwin’s excision.

III

The Stuckey non-mention is by no means an outlier. At the beginning of Chapter 2, Litwin prints an FBI memo. It originates with someone in Louisiana state Attorney General Jack Gremillion’s office. It strikes the same chord that Stuckey does above: Garrison was somehow doing a shakedown operation with homosexuals in New Orleans. Gremillion’s office wanted the FBI to do something about it. 

I had to giggle while reading this. For two reasons. First of all, back in 1967, who would go to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI on such an issue? If the point was genuine one would go to an agency like the ACLU. Or, since the state AG was above the local DA in New Orleans, why not pursue the case oneself? Which leads to my second reason for chuckling. Jack Gremillion was one of the most reactionary state AG’s there was at the time. Considering the era, that is really saying something (go here and scroll down). If there was a Hall of Shame for state AG’s not standing up for minority groups, he would be in it.

Again, to anyone who knows the New Orleans milieu of the period, this is clearly the residue left over from the famous James Dombrowksi case. Dombrowksi ran a pro-civil-rights group called the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF). It operated out of New Orleans. The SCEF was clearly a left-leaning group, and Dombrowski was a communist sympathizer. There was nothing illegal or unconstitutional about what he did. So the rightwing forces in the area, including Banister, Gremillion and Mississippi Senator James Eastland––encouraged by Hoover––decided to create a law in order to prosecute Dombrowksi. It was called the Communist Control Law. The idea was to somehow show that groups advocating for civil rights emanated from Moscow. So Gremillion raided the SCEF and arrested Dombrowski and two assistants. Garrison decided to take over the case since the SCEF was in New Orleans and he did not want Gremillion to do so. As Garrison critic Milton Brener later said, Garrison did as little as possible in order to get the case to the Supreme Court where he knew it would be thrown out. Which it was. Gremilion and his ilk did not like it. Hence the retaliatory smear. (Mellen, pp. 162-69).

This leads to more unintentional humor. Litwin is so desperate to do something with the homosexual angle that he displays a cover from the pulp magazine Confidential (p. 85). The cover depicts Shaw waving from a car, and the title denotes some kind of homosexual ring killed Kennedy. Litwin says the author of the article, Joel Palmer, worked for Garrison. Having gone through Garrison’s extant files, I can find no evidence for that statement. What the files reveal is that Palmer, a reporter who was planning a book on the case, worked with Bill Boxley, a CIA plant in Garrison’s office. (See Garrison blind memo of 2/21/70) And he worked on furthering certain leads with Boxley that ended up being ersatz, like Edgar Bradley. (DiEugenio, pp. 278-85)

Litwin pushes the homosexual angle so hard and down so many cul de sacs that he ends up reminding one of the Keenan Wynn/Bat Guano character in the classic film Dr. Strangelove. If one recalls, Guano thought that the attack on the military base was ordered because the commanding general had learned about a mutiny of “preverts” under him. Wynn said this with a straight face. So does Litwin. (See the first part of this film clip)

For the record, there is not one memo I have read that shows Garrison ever outlined such a homosexual-oriented plot. At the beginning of the inquiry, there is evidence that Garrison was suspecting a militant rightwing plot. And as Garrison developed cases against Shaw and Ferrie, he was checking out leads that would connect them in the gay underworld. But nothing that either Peter Vea or Malcolm Blunt ever uncovered shows what Litwin is trying to impute to Garrison. Those two men are the two best pure archival researchers ever on the JFK case. And Vea specialized in the Garrison files.

Beyond that, I have had authors who have written about Kirkwood call me in utter bewilderment about his book. They have asked me where he got some of the stuff he wrote about, since they could not find any back-up for it. And I have patiently explained to them what Kirkwood was up to, and how he deliberately distorted things, with Clay Shaw pushing him along. In fact, Shaw was indirectly putting out stories about Garrison being a homosexual to the FBI as early as mid-March of 1967. (FBI memo of March 16, 1967) Was the idea behind this to impute that Shaw was charged over some homosexual rivalry or rejection? That is how nutty this angle gets. This is how far Shaw would go to escape suspicion and denigrate Garrison.

In his further attempt to smear the DA, Litwin subheads a section of the book with the following: “The Paranoia of Jim Garrison”. This is largely based on Garrison’s belief that the FBI was monitoring his phone calls. Litwin tries to dismiss this charge through––try not to laugh––Hugh Aynesworth. (p. 32) The declassified record reveals that the FBI was monitoring Garrison’s phone. (DiEugenio, p. 264) As we shall see, so was the CIA. When I revealed the name, Chandler Josey, as one of the FBI agents involved, former FBI agent Bill Turner recognized it and said he had been directly infiltrated into certain phone companies to do the tapping. What makes this worse is that Shaw’s defense team knew this was happening early on. In a multi-layered scheme, their ally, former FBI agent Aaron Kohn, was privy to the transcripts. (DiEugenio, p. 265) The reason for this was simple: Hoover did not like what Garrison was discovering since it showed up his phony investigation of the JFK case.

Gordon Novel, who was working for Allen Dulles, had also wired Garrison’s office. (DiEugenio, pp. 232-33) Novel had sold himself as a security expert to Garrison through their mutual friend, auto dealer Willard Robertson. In a sworn deposition, Novel revealed his close relationship with Dulles. But he also said that the FBI would be at his apartment every day in order to get a briefing on what was going on at Garrison’s office. This is how worried Hoover was at the exposure of his rigged investigation of the Kennedy case. (DiEugenio, p. 233). So, in light of the declassified record, just what is there that is fanciful about Garrison saying he was being surveilled by the FBI?

There is also nothing fanciful about another statement Litwin utilizes to smear Garrison: namely, that many of the lawyers for the other side were being paid by the CIA. Again, this has turned out to be accurate. We know today that the CIA helmed a Cleared Attorneys Panel in major cities, and there was one in New Orleans. (Letter from attorney James Quaid to Richard Helms, 5/13/67) Quaid had heard about this easy employment from his law partner Ed Baldwin. Baldwin enlisted in the anti-Garrison campaign and was busy defending people like Walter Sheridan, Ric Townley and later Kerry Thornley. There is further evidence of this in another ARRB disclosure. This one was a CIA memo of 3/13/68 which reveals that Shaw’s former partner at the International Trade Mart, Lloyd Cobb, was on the panel. Corroborating this, under oath, Gordon Novel did not just admit his cooperation with Allen Dulles, he also admitted he had lawyers who were being “clandestinely renumerated” [sic]. (DiEugenio, p. 263) So again, what is the basis for implying this statement is fanciful? The CIA itself admitted it in declassified documents.

But Litwin is not done with his character smears. Another one of his subheads reads: “Garrison the Irrational Leftist”. (p. 24) Again, anyone who studies this case and knows New Orleans understands that Garrison was in no way a leftist prior to his involvement with the Kennedy case. He was a moderate. For instance, he was anti-ACLU. He once said that it had “Drifted so far to the left it was now almost out of sight.” (Mellen, p. 217) Even more demonstrative, he favored the Cold War. He once said in a speech that the US had to counteract communist aggression in Korea and Vietnam. (Mellen, p. 208) This is an “irrational leftist”? What changed his view on these matters was his investigation of the Kennedy case.

IV

As we have seen, in a variety of ways, the initial part of Litwin’s book is a rather blatant and barren attempt at character assassination. For anyone who knows New Orleans, it does not stand up to scrutiny. Therefore, we can term it an attempt to confuse the uninformed reader. We will now get to Litwin’s description of Garrison’s stewardship of the Kennedy case and the evidence underlying it. But before we do, this reviewer should comment a bit more on the format of the book.

Litwin has placed the overwhelming majority of his reference notes at the rear, with no numbers. The standard academic procedure is to link the note at the rear to the book’s pagination. Litwin does not do this. So one has to search for the proper note by the textual lead in the chapter. Because of this unusual sourcing method, I did something I found morally offensive: I bought the paperback version of the book, for it had become too time consuming to hunt for the textual references by shifting back and forth in the electronic book version. To top it off, the book has no index. Thus, for purposes of review, unless one takes notes, this makes it difficult to locate information.

But it is even worse than that. Because in his reference notes, he will often refer to his source with a rubric like “The Papers of George Lardner, Library of Congress”; or “Papers of the Metropolitan Crime Commission”. Again, this is not acceptable. In these kinds of references, the proper method is to annotate the information to a box number and folder title at that archives. Does Litwin really expect the reviewer to search through the online listing to find the information and then check if it is available? In sum, without an index, it’s hard to locate information; with this kind of nebulous referencing, it’s even harder to check out the information. With that in mind, let us proceed.

Litwin begins his assault on Garrison’s methods by writing that the DA stacked the grand jury with his friends and colleagues, many from the New Orleans Athletic Club. I expected to see some primary source back-up for this, like names and terms of service. When I looked up the reference it turned out to be David Chandler (see p. 345, not numbered). Again, because Litwin doesn’t, one has to explain why this is problematic.

Chandler was a part of the whole journalistic New Orleans wolfpack, which included Jim Phelan, Aynesworth, Billings and Sheridan. After the James disclosure, they went to work almost immediately at defaming Garrison in the press, thereby handing a pretext for governors not to extradite witnesses to New Orleans. Chandler was one of the very worst at inflicting the whole phony Mafia label on Garrison. That was another smear which turned out to be completely false. (Davy, pp. 149-67). In fact, the infamous Life magazine story of September 8, 1967 implicating Garrison with the Mob was largely written by Billings and Chandler. Chandler was a close friend of Shaw. When Garrison wanted to call Chandler in for questioning about the sources for his article, Life magazine did something rather interesting. The editors called up the governor of the state. They told him to make Chandler a part of the state trooper force thus granting him immunity. There was an ultimatum attached to the demand: if he did not do it, they would write a similar article about him. He caved. (1997 interview with Mort Sahl)

Again, for the record, urban grand juries in Louisiana are chosen similarly to the way trial juries are chosen. They are picked randomly from voting rolls. (Louisiana Law Review, vol. 17, no. 4, p. 682) Further, Garrison did not choose or run the grand juries. He assigned that function to his deputies who ran them on a rotating basis. (1994 interview with ADA William Alford)

But Litwin is not done with Chandler. He uses him to say that Garrison started his Kennedy investigation out of boredom. (p. 12) As we should all know, Garrison began his inquiry back in 1963 over a lead about David Ferrie. Ferrie had driven to Texas with two friends on the day of the assassination. His excuse was he wanted to go duck hunting and ice skating. The problem was that after Garrison investigated the strange journey he found out that Ferrie did not bring shotguns, and he never put on skates at the rink. He stood by a public phone and waited for a call. This took two hours. (DiEugenio, p. 176) What made it all the more fascinating is that Ferrie had called the rink owner a week before. (Davy, p. 46). Suspicious about Ferrie’s story, he turned him over to the FBI. The FBI dismissed it all and let Ferrie go. Three years later, on a plane ride with Senator Russell Long, the subject of the assassination came up. Long expressed extreme doubts about the efficacy of the Warren Report. This provoked the DA to order the report and its accompanying 26 volumes of evidence. As any criminal lawyer would, the DA found gaping holes, along with many unanswered questions. (Davy, pp. 57-58) The same reaction was later duplicated by experienced criminal lawyers Richard Sprague, Al Lewis and Robert Tanenbaum when they helmed the first phase of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. (interview with Bob Tanenbaum; interview with Richard Sprague; 1996 Interview with Al Lewis) This is what caused Garrison now to reject the FBI dismissal of Ferrie and reopen his own inquiry. Which would eventually cost him his office. It was not out of Chandlerian boredom.

V

The above marks a good point at which to bring up another strange presentation by Litwin. As mentioned above, in reality, Garrison was only focused on David Ferrie in his aborted 1963 inquiry. He then passed him on to the FBI. The Bureau allowed Ferrie to depart.

This is not how Litwin presents it in his book. On page 39 he writes that the FBI and Jim Garrison were trying to find Clay Bertrand in late 1963. He then repeats this on page 41. The obvious question is: How could Garrison be looking for Bertrand in 1963 if he did not know about him? As noted above, Garrison had not studied the Commission volumes at that time, for the good reason that they would not be published until a year later. The only way I could explain this Twilight Zone temporal confusion is that Litwin is so hellbent on trying to show that Garrison was bereft of any reason to suspect anything about either Shaw or Ferrie, that he mixed the two elements together. He then minimized what had really happened or just cut it out.

For example, Litwin writes that after Garrison questioned him, Ferrie told the FBI that Oswald might have been in his CAP unit at the time, he just was not sure. (Litwin, p. 37) He leaves it at that. This is stunning because Ferrie repeatedly perjured himself in his statement to the FBI. He said he never owned a telescopic rifle, never used one, and would not know how to use one––a blatant lie, since we know Ferrie was a trainer for both the Bay of Pigs and Operation Mongoose. (DiEugenio, p. 177) He also said he had no relations to any Cuban exile group since 1961. For the same reason as just given, this was another lie.

In the FBI report Ferrie––and Litwin––try to have it both ways about knowing Oswald. Let us quote the report:

Ferrie stated that does not know LEE HARVEY OSWALD and to the best of his knowledge OSWALD was never a member of the CAP Squadron in New Orleans during the period he was with that group. Ferrie said that if OSWALD was a member of the squadron for only a few weeks, as had been claimed, he would have been considered a recruit and that he (FERRIE) would not have had any contact with him. (CD 75, p. 286)

When someone says, “to the best of his knowledge,” most people would consider that a denial. Litwin doesn’t. And in his footnote he uses the work of the late Stephen Roy to say that, well, Ferrie had literally hundreds of CAP students and he might have just forgotten about Oswald. (Litwin, p. 346)

For a moment, let us forget the people who saw Ferrie with Oswald that summer, and this includes two INS agents among others. (Mellen, A Farewell to Justice, p. 48) From the day of the assassination, Ferrie was looking for evidence that would link him to Oswald. In the wake of the assassination, this happened three times. On the day of the assassination, he went to Oswald’s former landlady, Jesse Garner. He wanted to know if anyone had been to her home referring to his library card being found on Oswald. (HSCA interview of 2/20/78) Within days of the assassination he repeated this question with a Mrs. Doris Eames. Again, he wanted to know if Oswald, who her husband had talked to at the library, had shown him Ferrie’s library card. (NODA memorandum of Sciambra to Garrison, 3/1/68) On November 27^th, Ferrie was on the phone calling the home of his former CAP student Roy McCoy. He wanted to know if there were any photos at the house depicting Ferrie in the CAP. He also asked if the name “Oswald” rang a bell. Mr. McCoy called the FBI about this episode and he quite naturally told them he thought that Ferrie was looking for evidence that would depict him with Oswald. (FBI report of 11/27/63)

Attorneys call this kind of behavior “consciousness of guilt”. But that does not just refer to Ferrie, it also refers to the FBI. With the report by Mr. McCoy they knew Ferrie was lying to them. It is a crime to lie to an FBI agent while you are under investigation. The fact that Ferrie committed perjury did not interest J. Edgar Hoover. If it had, with a little initiative, he would have discovered the other instances indicating the lie, and he would have found the picture revealing Ferrie with Oswald that PBS discovered in 1993. What this clearly shows is that Hoover was not interested in the Kennedy case. In other words, right after Kennedy was killed, Ferrie was lying on numerous material points, and the FBI was covering up for him.

Try and find any of this in Litwin’s book. Let me know when you locate it.