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JFK SPECIAL REPORT HOW HUCKSTERS & CRAZIES BUILT THE BIG LIE AND WHY WE STILL BELIEVE IT

By Hugh Aynesworth |

The news sent a shudder through official Washington. On Jan. 1, 1964, less than six weeks after President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, the Houston Post published a frontpage story suggesting that Lee Harvey Oswald was an FBI operative.

Panicked members of the newly created Warren Commission quickly summoned a phalanx of senior Texas law enforcement officials to Washington for consultations. The group included Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr, Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade, Assistant DA Bill Alexander, and Bob Storey, then head of the SMU law school and a Commission advisor.

“We do have a dirty rumor,” a worried J. Lee Rankin, general counsel for the Commission, told Warren and other Commission members of the Post story, “…and it is very damaging to the agencies that are involved…”

Rankin needn’t have feared. Not only did the Post’s speculations fail to pan out, but a key piece of evidence cited in die story, Oswald’s alleged Bureau payroll number, was pure fiction: I made it up at my desk at the Morning News and shared it over die telephone with Alonzo “Lonnie”

Hudkins, the Bast reporter. Lonnie had been calling me incessantly, hoping to learn what I knew about the possibility that Oswald worked for the Bureau. Exasperated, I invented the number to get rid of him.

I had no clue what a tumult my prank would provoke, nor could I guess what the episode foretokened. Unlike any other news story I’ve ever covered, there arose in the Kennedy case a widespread predisposition to see shadows in every comer, to believe the flimsiest speculation, to credit conspiracy theories and to discredit the homely truth that Lee Oswald almost certainly was a solitary gunman on a lone journey to personal infamy.

That might have become the country’s consensus, I believe, had it not been for three individuals: Jack. Ruby, the vigilante; Mark Lane, the huckster; and Jim Garrison. the unhinged New Orleans district attorney.

These three powered the assassination-plot engine. Singly, none could have had such influence. Together, however, especially in the order they pushed themselves into the public limelight. these three practically guaranteed a permanent traffic in die conspiracy trade.

Jack Ruby set the machinery in motion by creating what many people see as the case’s central conundrum: How and why did this fringe character, a strip-club owner, shoot Oswald dead-on camera!-in the basement of Dallas City Hall?

No credible evidence has ever emerged that Jack Ruby even knew Lee Oswald or gave active thought to killing him until the moment he pulled the trigger. Other business-wiring money to a stripper in Fort Worth from the nearby Western Union office-brought Ruby to the City Hall district that morning,

He was simply walking back to his car along Main Street when he was attracted to the hoopla surrounding Oswald’s delayed removal to the city jail, an operation police had planned to complete an hour earlier. Ruby took an impromptu detour into the City Hall basement, where chance alone brought him face to face with Oswald.

The murder was a spontaneous act. Ruby later said he did it to spare Jackie Kennedy the agony of testifying at Oswald’s trial. Maybe so. Or maybe the only explanation he ever gave-and stuck to until his death-reveals his true motivation, the need to rise above a shabby life, to do something heroic, to be somebody. In one moment, with one act, Jack Ruby could show the world what Dallas thought of the Communist sonuvabitch who had shot our president.

In my view, Ruby got caught up in the swirl of excitement and emotion in the basement’s jostling crowd and acted reflex-ively (he always carried a gun). The opportunity to shoot Oswald came as a surprise; presented with it, Ruby opened fire.

It didn’t take long for the conspiracy machine to slip into high gear.

I first heard from Mark Lane by telephone less than a month after Ruby shot Oswald. By then 1 had reported several articles about the assassination, including (with my Morning News colleague Larry Grove) a step-by-step recreation of Oswald’s movements, from the time he left the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository to his arrest approximately two hours later in the Texas Theater for die murder of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit.

The Brooklyn-born Lane, a one-term New York state assemblyman and failed candidate for Congress, had published a piece in the National Guardian where he had detailed a long list of reasons why Oswald could not have killed Kennedy. While I knew the lawyer didn’t have his facts straight. Lane did impress me with his earnestness. He said his only ambition was to be devil’s advocate for Lee Oswald.

“I want to represent this boy,” Lane told me. “I don’t think he did it.”

Naively assuming Lane was well-intentioned, but also eager to show him evidence he didn’t seem to be aware of, I hauled out a Cat sheaf of eyewitness affidavits-maybe 70 in all-that had been collected by me police. No other reporter had them. As Lane glanced through the pages, I could tell he was getting excited. Like a fool, I agreed that he could take them away to photocopy.

Weeks passed. I got busy with other parts of the story and pretty much forgot about Mark Lane until one day in January, when I read an Associated Press dispatch from Europe about the fund-raising activities of so-called Who Killed Kennedy Committees across the continent. The story said that the British philosopher Bertrand Russell was involved with them and reported that Mark Lane was their executive director. The piece also described Lane at a press conference, waving a fistful of documents in the air, saying the papers proved that witnesses in Dallas contradicted the authorities.

My documents. I was livid.

A few days later there was a call from London. It was Russell’s secretary, phoning to pass on the great man’s congratulations to me for stealing the files. It took a while to explain that this was not how they came into my possession.

On Feb. 7. Lane finally responded to my irate demands for return of the files. He also offered to employ me as his investigator, assuring me that “our communications and contacts would be priviledged [sic] and I need not divulge them to anybody.”

I had already had enough of him. But he hadn’t had enough of me. Previously, 1 had told Lane about a local Dallas attorney named Carroll Jarnigan, who had contacted me with a wild story of overhearing Jack Ruby and Lee Oswald plot together in a booth at Ruby’s Carousel Club. Lane listened with great interest to the story and made sure he knew how to spell Jarnigan before we hung up.

Jarnigan, who had a drinking problem, actually told me (and also the Dallas DA’s office) several versions of what he claimed to have overheard, mixing characters and content each time. The only consistent element in his stories was their falsity. Police chief Jesse Curry had Jarnigan polygraphed on March 2. About all that he got right was his name. Nevertheless, Mark Lane testified two days later before the Warren Commission in Washington that he had an unnamed client-Jarnigan-who could put Jack Ruby together at the Carousel with- not Oswald-but J.D. Tippit!

This is the sort of evidence Lane typically has produced in support of his various conspiracy theories of the JFK case and, later, the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., which he has argued was the work of a squad of off-duty FBI agents under J. Edgar Hoover’s direct control. But to dismiss Lane’s imaginative scenarios as rubbish. as I did at first, is to completely miss the point.

Lane found that he could make almost any assertion about the assassination-even under oath- with impunity. He also almost single-handedly invented the lucrative JFK conspiracy business.

His book. Rush to Judgment, was a mishmash of unproven and unlikely allegations and speculations. Fifteen publishing houses turned it down, but only because they were far behind Lane on the manufactured-con-troversy learning curve.

Only Holt, Rinehart and Winston guessed the true potential for profits in Rush. They issued the book as a $5.95 hardback in 1966 and sold 30,000 copies in just two weeks. It was a publishing home run.

Enter Jim Garrison. As Rush skyrocketed to the top of the bestseller lists in the autumn of 1966, the New Orleans district attorney happened to meet Louisiana senator Russell Long on an airplane trip. Long. who always believed there had been a conspiracy behind the assassination of his father, the famous “Kingfish,” Huey Long, harbored doubts about the Kennedy case. too, and urged Garrison to look into the matter. In late November 1966, the district attorney began checking out volumes of the much-maligned Warren Commission report from his local library.

Fast forward to mid-January 1967. Jack Ruby had just died of cancer. I covered his funeral for Newsweek and was living in Houston, where I received a call from Garrison, inviting me over to discuss the Kennedy assassination.

Garrison, at the time, enjoyed a favorable press. Writer Jim Phelan had recently published an admiring profile of the hulking one-time FBI agent in The Saturday Evening Post. Now Garrison confirmed on the phone what I’d read in the Louisiana papers. He said he was investigating the Kennedy assassination and hoped to benefit from my close knowledge of it. Sensing this might be the start of a great story, I agreed to what would become a long series of encounters.

It was one of the strangest days of my life. Jim Garrison, tall and unkempt, a little crazy around the eyes, had a booming voice and animated manner-precisely the opposite of the sober character Kevin Costner portrayed in Oliver Stone’s JFK. He dominated conversation with a sort of zig-zag discourse that was both nutty and disturbing for the fact that a high-level elected official was capable of believing such nonsense.

He greeted me at his home, where we began by looking over some photos of Dealey Plaza together. “Now. Hugh,” Garrison would say in that deep voice, pointing at a picture, “who are those various people in this photo?”

I would identify the ones I recognized and share what I knew of their roles and actions the day of the assassination. Each time, Garrison growled, “You don’t understand, Hugh. Let me tell you how this really came down!” I argued with him a few times, then realized I was going to get thrown out on the street if I kept it up. If I wanted access to Garrison, I just needed to sit there and listen,

From time to time we were interrupted by telephone calls. Garrison would take them in die adjoining room, where I clearly heard him bellowing strange phrases like, ’Tiger Fifteen” or “Lion Three.”

“Jim,” I finally asked, “I couldn’t help but hear. What was that you were saying?”

“Ah, that’s an old Navy code,” he replied expansively, obviously very pleased with himself. “The Feebies will never break it.”

At the time, I knew of no reason why die “Feebies”-the FBI-would be interested in Garrison’s home telephone conversations, or wouldn’t know how to break an old Navy code if they were. On die evidence of that afternoon, the New Orleans district attorney was a more likely object of interest at the state mental hospital.

“Hugh,” he said at last, “you’re lucky you’re in town today. We’ve just verified this guy. and believe me, it’s dynamite!”

Explaining no further. Garrison then called one of his assistant DAs, an ex-boxer named Andrew “Moo Moo” Sciambra, who arrived a short while later with Garrison’s newly discovered star witness in tow.

He was a slight little guy from Houston, a piano player, who proceeded to relate how he knew Ruby and Oswald were longtime gay lovers.

“What do you think of that, Hugh?” Garrison asked when his witness finished. “Isn’t this it!”

I mumbled something and stared at the small man, certain thai I had seen him somewhere before. Then it came to me. He had come forward within three days of the assassination, telling exactly the same story to the Dallas police. When he failed a polygraph, angry DPD detectives told him he was going to jail. The last I’d seen of me piano player at the police department, he was crying.

“What are you going to do, Jim?” I asked, bewildered. “When are you going to announce this?”

“Due time,” he answered. “We’re putting our pieces together.”

Another of Garrison’s witnesses was a former mental patient from the West Coast, a rangy character who affected a red toga and sandals and called himself Julius Caesar. Mr. Caesar claimed to have been present at a hotel in Alexandria. La., where Oswald met with Clay Shaw-the pitiable New Orleans businessman whom Garrison would falsely prosecute for conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy-plus Jack Ruby, whom Caesar said arrived with a package of money for the other two.

Julius Caesar was the district attorney’s guest in New Orleans. When the inevitable holes developed in his story. Garrison put his witness on the street. In my one conversation with him, conducted on the courthouse steps, Caesar made the even bolder claim of having directly participated in the assassination himself. He was one of six individuals who have told me that they took part in killing Kennedy.

The case that Jim Garrison finally took to court against Clay Shaw originated with a sometime journalist who called himself Jack Martin. He was in fact a convicted felon who had changed his name from Edward Stewart Suggs.

Suggs-Martin belonged to a splinter religious group that boasted a total of three members in Louisiana; himself, a commercial pilot named David Ferrie, and one other individual. Ferrie was a bishop of the church, and, for no better reason than he coveted the position, Suggs-Martin turned Ferrie in as a suspect in the Kennedy assassination.

Ferrie, who was utterly hairless and wore a red wig with matching fake eyebrows, might have made an interesting defendant had he not suddenly expired from a cerebral aneurysm in late February 1967.

That brought the DA back to a rotund, oddball New Orleans attorney named Dean Andrews, who in late 1966 had claimed he once represented Lee Harvey Oswald in a minor legal matter. Andrews further alleged he had been contacted to represent Oswald again, just eight hours before Jack Ruby fired his shot. Andrews also identified a mystery figure, known to him as Clay Bertrand, who paid for Oswald’s earlier representation. Bertrand was a homosexual. Andrews said.

Then he recanted his whole story, which did not seem to faze Jim Garrison a bit. As the late Bill Gurvich, a Garrison assistant, would recount to me. Garrison called a staff meeting in December 1966 to announce that he was going to find this homosexual Clay fellow. Gurvich specifically recalled, in amazement, Garrison saying he knew the man’s real name was Clay, “because they never change their first name. I learned that in intelligence.”

So the group consulted its collective recall of homosexuals who lived in the French Quarter, and someone mentioned Clay Shaw. On me strength of that alone, Shaw was detained a few weeks before my first meeting with Garrison; he was then arrested and charged with conspiracy in March 1967.

Garrison was further emboldened by the testimony of yet another new witness. Perry Russo of Baton Rouge, who claimed to have known the recently deceased Ferrie and could connect him with Oswald. Russo did not, however, mention anyone named Clay or Shaw in his detailed statement to Moo Moo Sciambra, nor did he until a hypnosis session, when he was given the name, as well as a description, of Clay Shaw.

Goofier still was Charles Spiesel, a New York accountant who would testify at Shaw’s trial that he had attended a 1963 meeting in the French Quarter where Shaw and David Ferrie discussed killing President Kennedy.

However, when defense attorney F. Irvin Dymond asked Spiesel about a $16 million lawsuit he’d filed, the witness explained that he’d sued the New York police, a detective agency, and a psychiatrist for hypnotizing him and ultimately ruining his business and sex life.

“Why $16 million?” Dymond asked.

“One million dollars for every year of the conspiracy,” Spiesel replied.

“And are you the same Charles Spiesel who fingerprints his daughter every time she comes to visit?” the lawyer asked.

“I certainly am,” said Spiesel.

“Why?”

“They always disguise themselves.”

If the net effect of Jim Garrison’s lamentable foray into the Kennedy case had been confined to the complete ruin of an innocent man, then Garrison’s circus would have been just another bizarre historical footnote in a city accustomed to bizarre footnotes.

After the jury rejected Garrison in less than one hour’s deliberations, and reporters dissected and exposed his through-the-looking-glass case against Shaw, the conspiracy buffs retreated for several years. Most never mentioned New Orleans. Others accused Garrison of participating in a cover-up to assist the government.

But then Mark Lane stepped up to bat once again. By his own estimate. Lane personally visited at least 100 members of Congress in 1975 and 1976, lobbying them to form a House Subcommittee on Assassinations. The first of his converts were members of the Black Caucus, whom Lane sold on his scheme with the idea of reinvestigating not only the Kennedy killing but also that of Rev. King.

The resultant House subcommittee would eventually endorse the theory that along with the three bullets Lee Oswald fired, a fourth shot came from the grassy knoll, thus officially embracing the conspiracy theory. Although the acoustical analysis upon which the fourth-shot scenario is based was fatally flawed-and was refuted in two subsequent investigations-the theory stuck.

Thus the true-believers’ crusade was re-ignited. Oliver Stone has said that had the subcommittee not legitimized die conspiracy view, he would not have been interested in creating what became his paranoid film saga, JFK-in which Jim Garrison was lionized, and for which he was handsomely compensated.

The charlatans won.

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