Garrison - On the Trail of the Assassins: One Mans Quest to Solve the Murder of President Kennedy

ON
THE
TRAIL
OF THE
ASSASSINS

MY INVESTIGATION AND PROSECUTION OF THE MURDER OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY

By Jim Garrison

Paperless Publishing, LLC.
609 Greenwich Street, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10014

Copyright 2012 by The Estate of Jim Garrison

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Paperless Publishing, 609 Greenwich Street, New York, NY 10014

Second Paperless Publishing eBook edition September 2012

PAPERLESS PUBLISHING is a registered trademark of Paperless Publishing, LLC.

Design: Darren Davis

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 978-0-9857654-7-7

THIS BOOK IS dedicated to the following members of the New Orleans district attorneys staff who served during the 1960s: the late Frank Klein, Andrew Moo Moo Sciambra, James Alcock, Louis Ivon, DAlton Williams, Alvin Oser, and Numa Bertel.

They never stopped fighting to bring out the truth. They only ran out of time.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR:

A Heritage of Stone

The Star-Spangled Contract

I WANT TO EXPRESS my good fortune in having had Zachary Sklar as my editor, in having benefited from the gifts of his uncommon insight, skills and dedication. I want to express as well my gratitude to my publishers, Ellen Ray and William Schaap, for their unflagging support and confidence, support which in Ellen Rays case has extended over twenty years. In a time when the hidden machinery of government intelligence intimidates many publishers, the loyalty of Sheridan Square Press was heartening. I also owe a special debt to their researcher, Dan Kryder, for his able and detailed fact-checking. And my sincere thanks to Mary Howell, who first put me and Sheridan Square Press in touch with each other.

I also owe thanks to Louis Wolfson, Cecil M. Shilstone, Willard E. Robertson, Joseph Rault, Jr., and a small band of New Orleans citizens, the last under the title Truth and Consequences, who helped greatly when it counted.

Others, too numerous to mention, have also had faith in me over the years, and I hope you understand that each of you mattered to me.

Finally, I am deeply grateful to my childrenJim, Virginia, Lyon, Elizabeth, and Darrownot merely for their sustained efforts, even on school nights, to double-check the manuscript, but especially for their relentless affection during this project.

THIS IS NOT just another of the many books analyzing the dry evidence in the assassination of President Kennedy. It is, instead, a chronicle of the experiences of one man who tried to get to the truth about the murder and prosecute those responsible for it. I write not as a critic but as a participant, a prosecutor and an investigator.

At the time of the assassination on November 22, 1963, I was district attorney of New Orleans. Because the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had resided in New Orleans the summer before the assassination, I was immediately drawn into the case. More than three years later, in March 1967, my investigation culminated in the arrest of Clay Shaw, director of the International Trade Mart and fixture of New Orleans high society, on charges of conspiracy to murder John Kennedy.

In the months leading to Shaws trial in 1969 I publicly suggested that members of the United States governments intelligence community, including Shaw, were responsible for the assassination and had carried it out in order to stop President Kennedys efforts to break with Cold War foreign policy. While the jury accepted my argument that there had been a conspiracy, it was not then aware of Shaws role as a clandestine C.I.A. operative. Unconvinced of his motivation, the jury acquitted him of the charges.

History has a way of changing verdicts. Twenty-five years ago most Americans readily accepted the governments contention that the assassination was a random act of violence. A lonely young man, his mind steeped in Marxist ideology, apparently frustrated at his inability to do anything well, had crouched at a warehouse window andin six seconds of world class shootingdestroyed the President of the United States.

When that explanation was announced, shortly after the assassination, the country was in profound shock. We had suddenly lost a very special leader whose personal attributesfreshness, youth, humor, style, intelligence, warmthhad made each of us feel renewed pride in the presidency. The whole country mourned as we watched the now-familiar images of Lyndon Johnson being sworn in as President, the solemn funeral, the grieving first family, Oswald shot by Jack Ruby in the basement of the Dallas police station on national television. Saddened and outraged, Americans wanted an answer. And we got one. The Dallas police closed the case almost immediately, convicting Lee Harvey Oswald without trial. The F.B.I. agreed, virtually closing the case in a matter of weeks. And the Warren Commission, appointed shortly after the assassination, added its official stamp of approval less than ten months later.

But time has undone the official explanation that most Americans at first believed. There were too many contradictions, too many witnesses, too many photographs and motion pictures taken at the scene, too many skeptics. As time passed, previously unheeded witnesses were located, investigative reports of the assassination were found to be false, and other evidence was found to have been altered or destroyed. Even the concealment of assassination evidence for 75 years by the federal government could not prevent independent critics and researchers from uncovering gaping holes in the Warren Commission report. By 1967, two-thirds of the public did not accept the conclusion that Lee Oswald was the lone assassin.

In the 1970s the new Freedom of Information Act opened more doors. Material that federal agencies had stored away in their filesbelieving it would remain secret foreverbecame available to the public. Since that time able critics have done considerable research. Many books have raised incisive questions about the official story and disclosed new and troubling evidence. Yet much of this information remains unknown to the majority of Americans. For example:

Five days before the assassination the New Orleans F.B.I. office received a telexed warning that an attempt would be made to assassinate the President in Dallas at the end of the week. The Bureau did not pass on the warning to the Secret Service or other authorities. Shortly after the assassination, the telex message was removed from the file drawer of the New Orleans office of the Bureau.

The great majority of witnesses at Dealey Plaza in Dallas heard repeated rifle fire coming from the grassy knoll in front of Kennedy. In the chase that followed, the Dallas police apprehended three men and marched them away under shotgun arrest. However, the numerous news photographs of their arrest were never published and no record remains of their mug shots, their fingerprints, or their names.

On the day of his arrest, Lee Oswald was given a nitrate test, the results of which showed that he had not fired a rifle in the previous 24 hours. This fact was kept secret by both the federal government and the Dallas police for ten months.

For more than five years, the film of the assassination taken by eyewitness Abraham Zapruder was concealed from the public and kept locked in a vault by Life magazine. This moving picture showed Kennedy being slammed violently backwardsdear evidence of his being struck by a rifle shot from the front.

Approximately an hour before the arrival of Kennedys motorcade, Jack Ruby, the man who later murdered Lee Oswald, was observed alongside the grassy knoll, unloading a man carrying a rifle in a case. The statement of Julia Ann Mercer, the witness to that event, was altered by the F.B.I. to make it appear that she had been unable to identify Ruby as the man. This fraudulent alteration has never been explained or even denied by the federal government.