Jolly Green Giant in Wonderland

Until 1966, New Orleans Parish District Attorney Jim Garrison was a square. He was a hawk on Viet Nam. He was satisfied that the Federal Government was made up of relatively honorable men. He even believed the Warren Commission Report. Then one day Louisiana Senator Russell Long suggested that the Warren Report had serious holes in it. Intrigued, Garrison began reading everything he could find on the presidential assassination, including all 26 volumes of the documents and reports that had been sifted by the commission. His thinking on everything changed. Others had reached similar conclusions, but Garrison was different. He was the first conspiracy addict with the power to do more than talk.

Financed by a group of New Orleans businessmen, he set to work. One assistant, Jim Alcock, concentrated on the legalities of the case; a second, Andy ("Moo") Sciambra, handled the field work. After months of investigation, Garrison finally announced that he had "solved the assassination." Lee Harvey Oswald, he said, was only a decoy and a patsy. "The key to the whole case is through the looking glass. Black is white; white is black." A right-wing conspiracy involving some 20 anti-Castroites, ex-CIA agents and members of the Minutemen had killed Jack Kennedy in Dallas' Dealey Plaza area because he was moving towards a detente with both Cuba and the U.S.S.R.

Garrison promised to name names, make arrests and get convictions. He did just that--or at least he began. He arrested Clay Shaw, a retired bachelor businessman well known at several levels of New Orleans society, high and low. Shaw, Garrison said, was really one Clay Bertrand, whose name cropped up in the Warren Report. As Bertrand, he said, Shaw had met with three men, including one Leon Oswald, and conspired to kill President Kennedy.

Jury Time. That was 16 months ago, and Garrison's allegations were so sensational and so persuasive that the Louis Harris Poll reported that the number of Americans who questioned the Warren Report rose from 44% to 66%. Garrison, whose size (6 ft. 6 in.) and flamboyance have won him the nickname "Jolly Green Giant," is a district attorney who prides himself on a high conviction rate. Yet little has happened since Shaw's arrest. Even some of his supporters are beginning to ask, just what kind of case does he have against Shaw? Does he have evidence against others? Will he have as much to say in court as he has had to say outside it?

Last week those questions seemed more timely than ever, for a three-judge federal court ruled unanimously that Garrison could proceed with his prosecution. Shaw's lawyers, trying every possibility, had asked the court to issue an injunction barring action by Garrison. Such an injunction was temporarily granted so that the arguments could be heard, but the federal judges ultimately could find no legal basis for stepping in to block what is, after all, a state criminal proceeding. As a result, Shaw must face a jury. Perhaps as important, so must Garrison.

Exceptional Crew. Inevitably, the Jolly Green Giant has become a sort of defendant himself. Critics have beaten a path to his door; TV commentators and magazine writers have accused him of bribing witnesses and threatening them or influencing them under hypnosis. Latest to join the attack has been Edward Jay Epstein, himself a critic of the Warren Report (Inquest). In a minutely detailed article in The New Yorker, Epstein systematically shredded almost every piece of evidence that Garrison has put forward. Epstein claims that Garrison even told his men at one early point in the investigation to forget about Shaw. Nonsense, reply the Garrison investigators. Epstein and the other critics could not possibly know how good the case against Shaw is, since there is a mass of evidence yet to be revealed.

Still, the critics, particularly Epstein, do raise serious questions about Garrison's tactics. Straining the likelihood of coincidence, Garrison has time and again met the publication of a major attack by dropping a bombshell to capture headlines that might otherwise have gone to the critics. On the day one critique was published, for instance, Garrison charged the CIA and the FBI with concealing evidence. When Epstein's piece appeared, Garrison announced the existence of an assassination study made by a foreign intelligence agency that agreed with the findings of his investigators. He frankly admitted that the timing of the news of the report was designed to rebut Epstein.

Insane. If some of Garrison's tactics seem dubious, some of the characters he has gathered around him seem even stranger. He has opened his files to Mark Lane, Harold Weisberg, Mort Sahl and other Warren Commission critics (they call themselves the Dealey Plaza Irregulars). And he has also based many of his verbal charges on the stories of an exceptional crew of weirdos, convicts and homosexuals.

They include such well-known members as hairless David Ferrie, the homosexual onetime pilot who died just before Shaw's arrest, and Drug Addict Perry Russo, whose story of having seen Shaw and Oswald together was severely compromised by disputed claims that he was under the influence of hypnosis and a truth serum when he final ly remembered the complete details. Others include Donald Norton, who claimed to have delivered $50,000 for the CIA to a "dead ringer for Oswald" in Mexico in 1962; Garrison eventually stopped repeating the story when it turned out that Norton was a convicted embezzler. Richard Case Nagell, an inmate in a hospital for the criminally insane, said he had got himself jailed so that he would not have to carry out his part of the plot, which was to kill Oswald; Garrison repeated the tale until he was finally convinced that Nagell was not credible.

Just as disturbing is Garrison's treatment of those who refuse to help him. He has charged no fewer than eight men with offenses that include petty thievery and bribery. A New Orleans lawyer named Dean Andrews has already been sentenced to 18 months for perjury. Each of these Garrison targets has been accused of having information useful to the investigation, but none has been accused of actually having anything to do with the assassination. Indeed, despite his boast of having solved the case, Garrison has yet to charge anyone but Shaw.

Nonetheless, as Garrison quite properly points out, until the trial takes place the only one who knows the strength of his case is Jim Garrison himself. His friends in New Orleans like to remember that he has won many a tough one before. He cleaned out the well-entrenched B-girls on Bourbon Street and also took on eight local judges, winning the right to criticize them in the U.S. Supreme Court. On the other side, local enemies, of whom he has his share, recall that he was discharged from the Army for mental reasons and that he has a sister who has been hospitalized as a schizophrenic.

Though political gain has been suggested as a motive for his undertaking, almost everyone who takes the time to talk to him comes away with the impression that he is sincere. Charming and forceful, he presses his case with compelling ease. Despite being married and the father of two, he has been working on it seven days a week, for nearly two years. "It should be evaluated in a courtroom," he says. "If it's a fraud, I should be removed from office." No matter what the outcome, a courtroom can only be an improvement on the current wonderland.

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