Walter Sheridan
Former aide to Robert Kennedy who as an NBC reporter produced the network's 1967 attack on Jim Garrison, was charged by Garrison with bribery, and passed information from Garrison's office to the CIA's general counsel.
Walter Sheridan was a senior aide to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy at the Department of Justice and in 1967 a reporter for NBC News assigned to the investigation of the Kennedy assassination by the New Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison.1
The Broadcast and the Charges
NBC broadcast a program critical of Garrison's conduct on June 19, 1967. On July 7 Garrison filed an information charging Sheridan with bribing a witness, and on July 11 three more charging Richard Townley of the New Orleans station WDSU with bribing and intimidating witnesses. Townley had reported to the lawyers of the defendant, Clay Shaw, that April in company with agents of the Wackenhut Corporation. On August 10 the two newsmen sued in federal court to stop the prosecutions. They alleged that the charges were "totally lacking in substance," part of "a broad plan to intimidate those who disagree with the District Attorney's conduct as a public official," that Garrison had "threatened to 'get'" Sheridan and "attempted to have appellants physically beaten," and that he had "suppressed evidence tending to show the charges false." Their lawyers included Herbert J. Miller Jr., who had headed the Criminal Division under Robert Kennedy. The Fifth Circuit reversed a summary judgment for Garrison in August 1969 and ordered a hearing, observing that the investigation "casts doubt on the integrity of such important persons and agencies as the former Chief Justice of the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation."23
The Channel to Langley
"On 1 May, Jack Miller, a former assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, called the CIA's general counsel to offer some intelligence that had come to Miller 'from within Garrison's office,'" the agency's own journal recorded in 2001. "Miller's source was Walter Sheridan." The general counsel was Lawrence Houston, and the call is recorded in a memorandum of May 1, 1967, headed "Report Concerning Garrison-Kennedy-CIA." Miller was the same lawyer who represented Sheridan against Garrison two years later.1
In September 1967, with Sheridan "subpoenaed by Garrison to appear before the Grand Jury in New Orleans," his lawyer Jack Miller, "who also is counsel for the Slocums in the Tofte case," told the agency's general counsel that Shaw's lawyers had approached him for someone in government "who could steer them as to the true facts and circumstances." Miller had been the channel from Garrison's office to the CIA in May; in September he was the channel from Shaw's defense.4
Sources
- Holland, Max. "The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination," Studies in Intelligence, vol. 45, no. 5, 2001. https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Lie-That-Linked-CIA.pdf ↩
- Sheridan v. Garrison, 415 F.2d 699 (5th Cir. 1969). ↩
- DiEugenio, James. "The Wegmann Files," Probe, vol. 4, no. 4, May-June 1997, pp. 8-9. ↩
- Houston, Lawrence R. Memorandum for the Executive Director-Comptroller, "Garrison Investigation," OGC 67-1787, September 18, 1967, JFK record 104-10428-10024. ↩
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