MELODRAMA IN NEW ORLEANS—I Controversial Prosecutor, “Big Jim” Garrison

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31904, 4 February 1969, Page 12

MELODRAMA IN NEW ORLEANS—I Controversial Prosecutor, “Big Jim” Garrison

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HUGH AYNESWORTH)

Hugh Aynesworth, “Newsweek’s” Houston bureau chief, has been covering the investigations into the murder of John Kennedy ever since that baleful day in Dallas. For the last two years, his dispassionate exposure of the methods and motives of the New Orleans District Attorney, Mr Jim Garrison, have made the reporter himself a favourite target of the hulking D.A. especially because of Aynesworth’s entirely legal but embarrassing practice of seeking out and talking to Garrison’s bizarre line-up of witnesses. Despite heavy flak from Garrison’s office, Aynesworth filed this exclusive renort—the first in a five-part series—as the prosecutor began his trial of the alleged conspirator. Clay Shaw.

NEW ORLEANS. It is billed as Clay Shaw’s trial, and the matter under investigation is supposedly an alleged conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy. But the only man who counts in Orleans Parish Courthouse, New Orleans, is District Attorney Jim Garrison, aged 47, and the only show is his show.

Big Jim has been making a vote-getting spectacle of himself ever since he hove on to the New Orleans political scene as an unknown lawyer running for district attorney in 1962. Shrewdly hoarding his meagre campaign stake until the last day, he then let it all ride on a television blitz that swept him into office handily. Once installed, the “jolly green giant” ran a kind of one-man Mardi Gras in the D.A.’s office. He whooped up and down tawdry old Bourbon Street in a white dinner jacket, closing a few strip joints and driving the B-girls into honest prostitution. He accused the city’s judges, the state legislature and the police of incompetence and corruption—and if he never proved his charges, well, nobody ever disproved them either.

It was fun having the 6ft 6in prosecutor around, especially in a city that takes neither vice nor reform too seriously, and Big Jim was re-elected easily. The trouble was that he had already milked Bourbon Street for

all the publicity that was in it, and what was he going to do for an encore? Oswald Link It was at this point, in the fall of 1966, that Garrison discovered the Warren Commission Report, which had been published two years earlier without attracting his attention in the slightest. Now, however, he became fascinated by a scrap of history and a scrap of hypothe-

sis—the first being that Lee Harvey Oswald had spent five months in New Orleans in 1963, the second being Garrison’s own correct notion that the roots of a spectacular conspiracy theory could be found in that sojourn.

Garrison sent his own staff members off to run down every rumour, check every loony, accept any conspiratorial statement as true unless proven otherwise—and sometimes even then. Finally, in February of 1967 Garrison announced that he had “solved the assassination.” Some solution. Garrison took a broken-down, homosexual former pilot named David Ferrie—now dead—linked him to a wholly mythical character named Clay Bertrand, as well as Lee Harvey Oswald, and then declared that these three were the conspirators in the Kennedy assassination. But since Bertrand didn’t exist, Garrison decided that Bertrand was really a well-to-do New Orleans businessman named Clay Shaw—even though this was denied by the man who had invented Bertrand in the first place. In the two years since then, Garrison has pin-

wheeled onward, answering every challenge with a fresh wave of accusations and theories. Ho now says that “more than 20” people were involved in the murder conspiracy, but this is an extremely modest regrouping. His first three "theories” included more than 80 conspirators, and since the early months of 1967 he has come up with at least 375—always without the slightest quaver of doubt in his voice. | The “Big Splash” J I And has no one in all these! two years stood up to shout I that Big Jim, like the; ; emperor, has no clothes? : Well, yes, just about all the responsible press has, and ■ the major television networks I as well. But big-city district at-

torneys are not silenced merely by demonstrating thht . they are ludicrous publicity -• hounds. For those who wish .*i to believe in a conspiracy, Gar- j rison offers a conspiracy. He also possesses a mastery of -r. the technique that he himself "J calls the “big splash” method - —meaning that any time any- - one questions him or his * theories or his evidence he • merely floats a whole new -r armada of accusations. J* Garrison has accused al- . most every agency in the ?• United States Government of being involved in President - Kennedy’s assassination or the alleged “cover-up” of it. ' The charges have grown so » reckless that many of the D.A.’s followers in New * Orleans have fallen into an - embarrassed silence —includ- «' ing the three most prominent members of “Truth ■ and Consequences,” a citizens’ ’ group that once poured money and faith into Garrison’s in- • vestigation.

A central question is . whether Garrison himself ■ believes all or any of the ; charges he has made, or . whether the tragic buffoonery of the trial is simply his own ; novel method of getting himself elected to the United .; States Senate—an ambition ) he, has mentioned often to - this reporter and others. The difficulty here is that . Garrison’s mind works more mysteriously than most men s. The military said when it dis- ; charged him in 1951 that he I was "totally disabled from the ! I standpoint of military duty jand moderately severely in- | capacitated in civilian adapt- ! ability.”

Emotional Problems - Army doctors found Gar rison to be the victim of a “severe and disabling psycho ■ neurosis of long duration," - complicated by attacks of ■' diarrhoea and extreme fatigue. Garrison has had to • enter hospital twice because ; of the latter symptom in>recent months.

The district attorney is understandably sensitive • to references about his ' emotional problems. A reporter once used the word “paranoia” jokingly in his,-' presence, and Garrison went* running next door to fetcha police lieutenant to testify ; to his lack of paranoia. All the same, Garrison has-'-claimed that “a Havana ’ torpedo” has been stalking - him since February of The D.A. construed one tele- ! phone conversation in Los - Angeles as being a threat on ,* his life, and he tells friends ’' that “Washington will have,* somebody come at me. but they’d better be careful . because I’m always ready.”.* He carries a gun. he says,“because I know them, and • they know I know them." Somebody could be for him. of course. On the,!, other hand, even the most?’ severe of Garrison’s critics ? hope that nothing happens to * him before his “investigation” has a full ehance to be ex- £ plored by reasonable men,-* everywhere. In this regard, it would not be surprising if tha/> wildest of Garrison’s charges are still to come. If the Sirhah Sirhan and James Earl Ray<“trials drain away too much of the interest from the Shaw trial, Garrison is expected to pull almost anything to regain what he considers to be “the proper focus and importance” , of his home-grown circus ip. New Orleans. Copyright, “Newsweek” Feature Service.