Clay Shaw

Clay Lavergne Shaw (March 17, 1913 - August 14, 1974) was a prominent New Orleans businessman, civic figure, and founder of the International Trade Mart who became the only person ever tried for conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy. District Attorney Jim Garrison arrested Shaw in March 1967; he was acquitted after a brief jury deliberation in March 1969. Documents declassified after his death showed that Shaw had reported to the CIA's domestic contact office from 1948 to 1956.¹

Background

Shaw was born in Kentwood, Louisiana and attended Tulane University. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II, reaching the rank of colonel and earning decorations for his service in the European theater. After the war he returned to New Orleans and established himself as a key figure in the city's civic and cultural life.

His primary professional achievement was founding and directing the International Trade Mart, a permanent trade exhibition center in New Orleans that became a model for similar facilities across the country. He was also deeply involved in the preservation and restoration of the French Quarter, contributing to projects that helped define the city's cultural identity.

Shaw's personal life was private; he was gay in an era when homosexuality was criminalized, and his prosecution included overtly homophobic elements in Garrison's presentation.¹

CIA Connection

Shaw was a source of the CIA's Domestic Contact Service, the office that interviewed Americans returning from abroad. His first report, in December 1948, concerned trade with Czechoslovakia through the Trade Mart. He reported "on 33 separate occasions" through 1956, on matters such as a Peruvian devaluation, a highway in Nicaragua, and European trade with the Soviet bloc, and was not paid. The service's contact division closed the case on June 4, 1956, and he was never passed to the clandestine directorate. On March 3, 1967, two days after his arrest, the chief of the service's New Orleans office, Lloyd Ray, cabled headquarters recommending that the general counsel be briefed "to be on the safe side."²

Director Richard Helms formed a committee of six senior officers, the Garrison Group, which first met on September 20, 1967. The general counsel, Lawrence Houston, wrote on October 2 that if Shaw were to "be convicted on information that could be refuted by CIA," then "we may be in for some difficult decisions." That September Shaw's lawyers, Edward Wegmann and his colleagues, had asked the Justice Department for guidance on Garrison's claims about the agency and were refused, and the department learned that Shaw had not told them of his reporting. At the trial his lawyer Irvin Dymond asked whether he had ever worked for the agency. "No, I have not," Shaw answered.²

Garrison and later writers held that "Clay Bertrand," the name given by the lawyer Dean Andrews for the man who asked him to represent Lee Harvey Oswald, was an alias of Shaw's. Shaw denied it.¹

Trial

Garrison announced Shaw's arrest on March 1, 1967. The charges were based primarily on the testimony of Perry Russo, who claimed to have attended a meeting at which Shaw (identified as "Clay Bertrand"), David Ferrie, and Lee Harvey Oswald discussed killing Kennedy. Russo's testimony was obtained in part through hypnosis, which the defense successfully challenged as potentially shaping the witness's recollections.

The trial lasted approximately five weeks in January-February 1969. The defense presented evidence of Shaw's respected civic record and attacked Garrison's witnesses. The jury deliberated for less than an hour before acquitting Shaw.

Shaw subsequently filed a civil malicious prosecution suit against Garrison. He was in the early stages of this litigation when he died of lung cancer on August 14, 1974, at age sixty-one.³