Did Clay Shaw Get the Help He Deserved?, Part Ten
- Fred Litwin
- 5 hours ago
- 9 min read
Conclusion
No one came to help Clay Shaw. The Department of Justice could have investigated the bribery allegations against Garrison and charged him with a variety of crimes. Perhaps that would have stopped the entire investigation and ended the prosecution of Clay Shaw. But President Johnson told Attorney General Ramsey Clark not to interfere, and he never pushed back against that order.
JFK conspiracy books have quite a different take on what actually happened. James DiEugenio, author of Destiny Betrayed, believes that everyone was after Garrison and that he was harassed and obstructed at every turn.
Here is an excerpt from my book, On the Trail of Delusion: (pages 361 - 364)
Of course, the real reason Garrison lost his case against Shaw was not his lack of evidence. No, DiEugenio believes there was a “three-stage program to destruct Garrison’s case and to be make sure Shaw would be acquitted.”
The first stage consisted of “singleton” penetrations of his office to disrupt from within. William Gurvich was Garrison’s chief investigator who quit in disgust in June 1967. But really, it is claimed, he was CIA. The evidence? Well, his father was an FBI agent, but here’s the kicker: Gurvich’s niece told a JFK critic whom she had met on holiday that “he did some work for the CIA.” Gordon Novel, the scam artist who tricked Garrison into hiring him as his electronic security chief, was an “experienced CIA operative” who “became a good target for Allen Dulles to hire to infiltrate Garrison’s office.” Nice story, just no evidence. DiEugenio tries to make the case that Novel’s lawyers were paid by the CIA. But the papers of Elmer Gertz, Novel’s lawyer in his libel case against Playboy magazine and Jim Garrison, contain hundreds of letters demanding payment from Novel and threatening to end the case.
Elmer Gertz, Gordon Novel's lawyer, had significant trouble getting paid by his client.
The second stage was the use of “intelligence assets/journalists” like James Phelan, Hugh Aynesworth, and Walter Sheridan to wreck Garrison. Sheridan produced the NBC documentary on the Garrison investigation. DiEugenio believes that the CIA funneled money to him to defer production costs and that a “covert team was assembled” around Sheridan. But Sheridan was a long-time “trusted Kennedy family operative, loyalist, and staffer for three decades.”
When Garrison charged Sheridan with bribery after interviewing Perry Russo in New Orleans, Robert Kennedy released this statement:
When Sheridan died, Edward Kennedy said he was “an extraordinary investigator and an extraordinary human being. His courage and dedication to justice and the public interest were unmatched by anyone.”
Incredibly, DiEugenio believes that a long-time friend of the Kennedy family would let JFK’s murderers go free.
James Phelan was the journalist Garrison confided in in Las Vegas. He realized that Perry Russo’s initial statements in Baton Rouge did not contain the conspiracy story he had later spun in New Orleans. But had Phelan wanted to harm Garrison, he could have gone straight to Shaw’s attorneys with this information. Instead, he went back to Garrison to confront him with the inconsistent stories. To DiEugenio, Phelan was “on a mission” and was an “intelligence asset.” Another nice story and, again, no evidence.
Hugh Aynesworth was one of the finest journalists of our time. He covered every angle of the JFK assassination, from Dealey Plaza to Jack Ruby’s trial, and he was also an early confidante of Jim Garrison’s. His big crime was helping Shaw’s attorneys, and so naturally DiEugenio believes Aynesworth was CIA. His proof? Aynesworth tried to get into Cuba in 1962 and told the domestic contact division of the CIA he would provide information:
Harold Weisberg wrote to Joan Mellen in April 2000 and said, “The CIA did not have to penetrate Garrison. He provided his own endless insanities.” In another letter to her, he wrote, “Nobody had to do a thing to him. He did more than enough to himself.”
David Reitzes, one of the best researchers of the Garrison fiasco, sums it up best.
“Faced with the fact that several people who worked with Garrison quit and went public with their disagreement, the Garrisonites explain that these people were spies anyway. Faced with Big Jim's wild, constantly changing theories and enthusiasms, they explain that the spooks were feeding him disinformation. Faced with the negative press coverage he garnered, they explain that this was a "media campaign" against him. Faced with witnesses who fled New Orleans and refused to cooperate, they see the nefarious hand of conspirators undermining the DA's case. To vindicate Garrison, they have to implicate virtually everybody else as a spook.”
The last stage, according to DiEugenio, was run by the CIA itself through people like James Angleton and Richard Helms. They set up a “Garrison Group” within the CIA, and they “quashed subpoenas,” “flipped witnesses,” and “physically assaulted witnesses.” This was all in CIA documents “that originated in the office of [CIA Director] Richard Helms.” Robert Tanenbaum, former deputy chief counsel of the HSCA, told DiEugenio he had seen these documents. Unfortunately, they have simply vanished into thin air.
Of course, the Garrison Group did nothing of the sort. The group was organized to think about how the Clay Shaw trial might affect the CIA:
Here is the truth about the allegations surrounding Garrison's witnesses.
The closest DiEugenio comes to proving his case is that Herbert Miller, the lawyer that tried to introduce Shaw's attorneys to the CIA, did pass on some of their material.
Beauboeuf was taken by his lawyer Burton Klein to Washington to meet with Walter Sheridan and to take a polygraph examination. It does not appear that he met with anybody from the Department of Justice and, as we know, the Department of Justice did not investigate his bribery allegations.
To DiEugenio the Lansdale memo is incriminating: (page 238 in the Kindle edition of Destiny Betrayed)
The earliest known declassified document in this regard is dated May 8, 1967. This is a summary of two phone calls between Miller and Richard Lansdale. Lansdale was the assistant to CIA Chief Counsel Lawrence Houston. The topic of conversation was the trip arranged to Washington by Sheridan for Al Beaubouef [sic], one of Ferrie’s companions to Texas the weekend of the assassination. After talking to Sheridan and Miller, Beaubouef became quite malleable. For Miller advised Lansdale that, “Beaubouef would be glad to talk with or help in any way we want.” This is an example of technique number one: the reversal, or flipping, of a Garrison witness. For as Garrison noted in his Playboy interview, after his trip to Washington, “a change came over Beaubouef; he refused to cooperate with us any further and he made charges against my investigators.” The routing of this Lansdale memo prefigures the third phase of the subversive effort against Garrison by the Agency. For, among other places, the memo went to both the Office of Security and James Angleton’s Counterintelligence unit. But, what makes this so interesting is that Angleton already seemed aware of Beaubouef’s journey to Washington.
The flipping of a witness? Of course Beauboeuf stopped cooperating with Garrison -- he was offered a bribe, and when he went public, he was then threatened.
Of course, DiEugenio ignores the last sentence of the memo:
I told him I doubt we would want anything because this matter is not within our authority, notwithstanding that we obviously are involved.
And, of course, DiEugenio has to throw in Angleton as the universal boogeyman.
There is no evidence that Goodwin called Sheridan or that they even met. But even if they did, so what?
DiEugenio brings up this memo: (page 238 in the Kindle edition of Destiny Betrayed)
Just seventy-two hours after this communication about Beaubouef, Miller wired another message to Angleton. Lansdale now wrote that Miller had told him that Sheridan would be willing to meet with CIA “under any terms we propose.” Further, Sheridan would be willing to make the CIA’s view of Garrison, “a part of the background in the forthcoming NBC show.”
From viewing the final product, there can be no doubt that this happened. And, in fact, because Sheridan’s show took awhile to produce—it was actually once planned to be in two parts—the CIA seems to have been eager to help defray production costs. William Martin had learned from Clay Shaw’s friend David Baldwin, that some of the money for Sheridan’s show was being funneled through the large law firm of Monroe and Lemann in New Orleans.
DiEugenio is certain that the CIA met with Sheridan about the NBC documentary. He does not mention this sentence from the above memo:
I told Mr. Miller I would check this out, but also indicated my initial reaction is that probably the Agency might feel it undesirable to do this on the theory that anything as bizarre and unsubstantiated as the Garrison action does not warrant even this much action or reaction on the part of the Agency.
The source for DiEugenio's allegation that the CIA was funneling money for Sheridan's documentary is a memo that William Martin, Assistant District Attorney, wrote Garrison on May 24, 1967.
Overarching everything, as I have written previously, was the guidance from the Department of Justice that the CIA and the FBI not get involved with the Garrison investigation.
The "provocative actions" are described in this memo, but the second paragraph is quite clear.
Department of Justice most concerned to see we not get involved ...
And, of course, the Department of Justice, got its marching orders from President Johnson.
DiEugenio's readers will read none of these quotes from the memos he cites, nor will they see any of the material from my series on Clay Shaw.
Now on to one last point about Jim Garrison. Part Nine of my series on Clay Shaw had this paragraph from Patricia Lambert:
Their refusal to do the right thing in this instance is the first step to the larger government failure that follows, and its consequences. Garrison's glorification and Shaw's conviction by cinema are not the worst of those consequences. The worst is the widespread conspiratorial mindset of today's popular culture. That mindset wasn't born in a 1991 Hollywood movie. It was born in New Orleans in 1969 at Clay's trial when Garrison staged the first public showing of the Zapruder film and claimed to know what it meant. In that theatrical courtroom moment, Garrison defined the meaning of President Kennedy's assassination in the popular imagination. That conspiratorial mindset, which has been poisoning and dividing this country ever since, the government could have throttled in the womb.
Garrison didn't just poison American culture through the misuse of the Zapruder Film -- according to Nick Nalli, he also "traitorously exploited the change of public sentiment during the Vietnam War" and inserted conspiracy theory into the debate:
And, of course, that line of thinking went straight into Oliver Stone's JFK.
Stone has also been saying that he's less interested in the "who" and the "how" of the conspiracy than in the "why" -- that the answer to why Kennedy was killed will lead us to the truth about everything else. The most charitable interpretation of that statement is that Stone isn't a rigorous logician: how, exactly, would someone determine why a President was murdered without first knowing who did it and how it was done? You might begin to search for leads in a simple domestic crime on the basis of a hypothesis about motivation, but political assassination presents too wide a range of possibilities: there were plenty of people and groups who hated Kennedy in 1963, all for different reasons. Stone simply selects a "why" that sounds good to him, and he makes a poor choice. Yes, Kennedy had approved an order to withdraw a few American advisors from Vietnam, but there's no evidence that this limited move signaled a fundamental change in Cold War foreign policy, or even, for that matter, in policy specific to Southeast Asia.
It's one thing to misinterpret the Zapruder film and believe the head shot came from the front. But making the Vietnam War part of the conspiracy took the poison to a whole new level.
You can see the Kennedy cult all over the internet. Kennedy would have brought in an era of peace and detente with the Soviets. Reconciliation with Cuba. Withdrawal from Vietnam. And so he had to be stopped. It's a great story and it made for a good movie. The only thing lacking was truth.
And now that poison -- so popular on the left -- has infected the right. The deep state killed Kennedy, just as it went after Trump.
Thank you Jim Garrison.
The Clay Shaw Series
The setting in New Orleans
The DOJ is told not to get involved. The FBI follows suit.
Ed Wegmann goes to Washington.
The CIA gets involved.
Wegmann goes back to Washington with Irvin Dymond.
Wegmann files a civil rights complaint with the Department of Justice.
Wegmann files a forty-five-page complaint in the U.S. District Court in New Orleans.
Clay Shaw's Acquittal; New Charges; and Wegmann Goes Back to the Department of Justice.
The new Department of Justice, under President Nixon, considers Shaw's new civil rights complaint.