Jim Garrison

Earling Carothers "Jim" Garrison (November 20, 1921 - October 21, 1992) was the District Attorney of New Orleans from 1962 to 1973 who launched the only criminal prosecution ever brought in connection with the assassination of President Kennedy, focusing his investigation on a network of anti-Castro operatives, intelligence figures, and organized crime associates in New Orleans. His arrest and prosecution of businessman Clay Shaw on conspiracy charges - ending in acquittal in 1969 - was depicted in Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK.¹

Background

Garrison served in the U.S. Army during World War II, then in the FBI, before earning a law degree and entering New Orleans politics. He was elected District Attorney in 1962 and re-elected in 1965, developing a reputation for aggressive prosecution and confrontation with the New Orleans political establishment.

He was a large man - six foot six - and a skilled public speaker, qualities that served his political ambitions and his prosecution style. Before his Kennedy investigation he had conducted aggressive prosecutions of vice and corruption in New Orleans, earning both admirers and powerful enemies within the city's complex political culture.¹

The Investigation

Garrison's Kennedy assassination investigation began in November 1966, triggered by his encounter with Senator Russell Long, who expressed skepticism about the Warren Commission's lone-gunman conclusion. Garrison began reviewing materials available in the public record and became interested in the New Orleans network of anti-Castro Cuban exile operatives, intelligence figures, and associated individuals who had been active in the city in 1963.

His investigation focused on three figures: David Ferrie, Guy Banister, and eventually Clay Shaw. Garrison believed this network had organized Kennedy's assassination using Lee Harvey Oswald as the designated patsy. Ferrie died on February 22, 1967, days after Garrison's investigation became public. Banister had died in June 1964. Shaw became the only remaining figure Garrison could charge.

The investigation attracted controversy from its earliest stages. Garrison's methods - which included granting immunity to questionable witnesses, using sodium pentothal (truth serum) in interrogations, and making claims he could not prove - were criticized by mainstream journalists and legal observers. He also alleged, and produced evidence for, active obstruction of his investigation by the CIA.¹

The Shaw Trial

Garrison arrested Clay Shaw on March 1, 1967, charging him with conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. Shaw - a prominent New Orleans businessman, founder of the International Trade Mart, and pillar of the city's cultural establishment - denied any connection to the alleged conspiracy.

The trial began in January 1969. Garrison's central witnesses included Perry Russo, who testified he had attended a meeting at which Shaw, Ferrie, and Oswald discussed killing Kennedy, and a hypnosis patient whose testimony about Shaw was later challenged on the grounds that it had been shaped by hypnotic suggestion. The defense demolished much of the prosecution's witness testimony.

The jury acquitted Shaw on March 1, 1969, after less than an hour of deliberation. Shaw subsequently brought a civil suit against Garrison for malicious prosecution.

Post-trial, documents released through the JFK Assassination Records Collection confirmed that Shaw had been a CIA domestic contact - a fact denied by CIA Director Richard Helms under oath during the trial. The documents also showed CIA active involvement in monitoring Garrison's investigation and, according to some researchers, working to undermine it.²

The Federal Court

Two days after Shaw's acquittal Garrison charged him with perjury. Shaw's lawyers sued in federal court, and after a three-day hearing in January 1971 Judge Herbert Christenberry enjoined the prosecution as brought in bad faith. The Fifth Circuit affirmed in 1972. The court found that the investigation had been paid for in large part by a private fund, Truth or Consequences, formed by three businessmen in February 1967, whose money passed through an unaudited account on which Garrison drew at will. "When Shaw was arrested the money came in; when he was acquitted, it stopped." It credited the testimony of the detective William Gurvich, who had worked on the investigation for six months and resigned on June 27, 1967, calling it a "fraudulent, criminal act." It found that the chief witness, Perry Russo, had been given sodium pentothal and hypnotized before he implicated Shaw, that he had told a police polygraph examiner in June 1967 that "if pressed" he would say Shaw was not present, and that the examiner's report was withheld from the defense. It found that Garrison had a contract for three books. In July 1967 Garrison had charged the NBC reporter Walter Sheridan with bribing a witness after the network's critical broadcast, and Sheridan, it later emerged, had been passing information from inside Garrison's office to the general counsel of the CIA.³

Legacy

Garrison's investigation was widely dismissed as a conspiracy fantasy at the time of the Shaw acquittal. The 1991 Oliver Stone film JFK, based on Garrison's memoirs On the Trail of the Assassins (1988) and Jim Marrs's Crossfire, brought the investigation back to public attention and contributed to the political pressure that produced the JFK Records Act of 1992, which mandated declassification of assassination-related government records.

Garrison served as a Louisiana appeals court judge from 1978 until shortly before his death in 1992. Whether his core thesis - that a New Orleans-based conspiracy killed Kennedy - was correct remains disputed; the evidence he compiled documented the existence of a significant network of anti-Castro operatives in New Orleans in 1963 whose connections to Oswald remained unresolved by any official investigation.