Closing In

From the moment that New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison dealt himself into the Kennedy assassination controversy last fall, he has forced up the ante with one bizarre theory after another. First he announced a plot involving New Orleans Businessman Clay Shaw, ex-Airline Pilot David Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald, eventually linking them with Jack Ruby. Later he charged that a murder team of anti-Castro Cubans had planned the killing, using Oswald as a decoy. Next Big Jim claimed that the CIA and FBI were aware of these plots and were covering up. So, too, he said, were powerful interests in the Eastern Establishment and the Federal Gov ernment, which had banded together to discredit his investigation.

Last week, tired of the front-page charade of increasingly implausible accusations, Garrison's unofficial chief investigator, Private Detective William H. Gurvich, 42, quit, charging that his longtime friend "has no case against Clay Shaw--there is no case."

"My complaint," said Gurvich, "is the way people have been treated. No human being should be ruined and disgraced because of another man's irrational theories."

Garrison, claiming that Gurvich had been only a "chauffeur and part-time photographer," called his former aide before the grand jury that had indicted Shaw. After twelve hours of hearings featuring Gurvich and two members of New Orleans' Metropolitan Crime Commission, it decided that Garrison still had a case. Gurvich threatened to ask a federal grand jury to investigate.

It seemed curious that Bill Gurvich, who had eagerly made the announcement of Shaw's arrest last March and led the pursuit of other suspects ever since, should have waited so long to recant. "For months and months I was in this thing," he explained, "and all the time Jim was saying that we were just about to round the corner. Seeing how things were going, my conscience began tearing me apart."

Then, too, everyone--except Jim Garrison--could see the case closing in on the 6-ft. 6-in. district attorney. The press and TV continued to dismantle his imagined maze of Machiavellianism: secret codes that supposedly led to Ruby's telephone number, the elusive and probably fictional "Clay Bertrand," the Cuban intrigue. In New Orleans, where the ambitious D.A. is widely feared and conspiratorial theories are as highly relished as crayfish bisque, the Crime Commission demanded a sweeping state inquiry into Garrison's office.

Through it all, Big Jim wavered not a whit. More arrests, he hinted, can come before October, when Clay Shaw is expected to go on trial for conspiring to murder President Kennedy. A key defense witness at that trial is sure to be Bill Gurvich.

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