The Saturday Evening Post of May 6, 1967 ran a front-page story by James Phelan on the Garrison investigation.
Here is a copy of that article:
Money Quote:
Nine days before Clay Shaw's preliminary hearing on March 14, I met Garrison at the Las Vegas airport. My note had finally worked its way through the stack in his office, and he had called me to apologize. "I've got to get away for some rest," he said. "I'll meet you in Vegas where we can relax and get some sun. I'll tell you the whole incredible story." He came off the plane slump-shouldered and exhausted." I've been going for months on three or four hours' sleep a night, working on this thing seven days a week," he explained.
In the next two days we talked for about 10 hours. He told his story in bits and pieces, interrupted with long discursions on the shortcomings of the Warren Report. "What they did on the Warren Commission was send a hundred squirrels out to pick up leaves, acorns and sticks. Each squirrel brought something in and dumped it in a box. Then the head squirrels looked at this collection of junk and tried to reconstruct the terrain where it had been picked up. What it took to solve this puzzle was imagination and evaluation. It was like a chess game-and I once played an expert eight hours to a draw."
His interest in the Kennedy assassination, Garrison said, had originated the previous fall when he flew from New Orleans to New York with Sen. Russell Long of Louisiana. "Up to that time I had assumed that the FBI had done a competent job," he said, "but I found that Long had some doubts about the solution to the Kennedy killing. He is a knowledgeable Washington figure, so I began to have some second thoughts."
On his return to New Orleans, Garrison said, he read a number of "excellent articles and books" criticizing the Warren Report and "realized that something was wrong." He quietly opened his own investigation.
"You know how you can pluck at a thread and wind up unraveling a whole coat?" Garrison said. "The thread that unraveled this whole case was the trip that Ferrie made to Houston the day after Kennedy was killed. While everybody in the country was glued to their television sets, Ferrie takes off with two guys and drives through a thunderstorm to Houston. He told the FBI that he had this sudden desire to go skating, and he knew there was a skating rink in Houston. The FBI checked him out and found that he showed up at the skating rink, all right, and they dropped him. But you know what? They never even asked if Ferrie put on his skates! We checked and found that he just stood alongside a wall there that afternoon and told everybody who would listen, 'I'm Dave Ferrie.' We checked the rink and found that there was a phone on that wall. So it seemed plain that this was the message center."
At the end of the 10 hours, Garrison had never explained what the "message center" was for, who called Ferrie there or whom Ferrie called.
Boiled down, his version of the Kennedy assassination made it out to be the result of a homosexual conspiracy masterminded by Dave Ferrie. "You can understand his motivation," Garrison said. "Kennedy was a virile, handsome, successful man-everything Ferrie was not. In addition, there was the thrill of staging the perfect crime. Remember the Loeb and Leopold case in Chicago? It was the same thing with Kennedy."
By the wildly convoluted script that Garrison had pieced together, Ferrie had trained some "Cuban wildcats" to go in and assassinate Castro, but then had "spun them off" and directed them against Kennedy. He claimed that Oswald and Ruby were both homosexuals and were both involved in the plot. He implied that Ruby -- "his homosexual nickname was Pinkie" -- executed Oswald to prevent him from telling all. He claimed that there were at least two other gunmen, firing from the famed "grassy knoll" at Dealey Plaza. He implied-without flatly stating-that he knew who they were. He gave me two Cuban names. Several weeks later I learned that he was planning to interrogate one of them as a cooperative witness, and apparently had recast him from a bad guy to a good guy.
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