1967<br />
Twenty-five Years Ago (May/June 1992 | Volume: 43, Issue: 3)

1967<br /> Twenty-five Years Ago

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Authors: Nathan Ward

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May/June 1992 | Volume 43, Issue 3

Rush to Judgment

May’s Esquire offered a review of twenty-five alternative theories grown up around the assassination of President Kennedy since the Warren Commission’s report, bringing the total to sixty scenarios in all.

The review ranged from the Warren Commission member Arlen Specter’s suggestion that original autopsy pictures had been destroyed to arguments over alleged puffs of smoke, ricocheted bullet fragments, and differing numbers of shots fired on that terrible afternoon (the historian William Manchester, the late President’s biographer, claimed there had been two shots despite some hundred witnesses in Dallas who heard three).

Wilder scenarios spun by Mark Lane and seconded by Norman Mailer asserted Jack Ruby was “injected with cancer” while in jail, and a UCLA engineer advanced the imaginative theory that multiple assassins had retreated into tunnels dug beneath the famous “grassy knoll” following the shooting. The editor of Prevention magazine recalled that witnesses saw Oswald holding a Coke bottle later that day and suggested that such a “sugar drunkard” could not be held “responsible for this action.” (A variation on this argument would help defend San Francisco councilman Harvey Milk’s accused assassin more than a decade later.) The quickie conspiracy book was an established best-seller item by 1967, with writers such as Lane and Harold Weisberg the captains of this new cottage industry.

But the most spectacular theory belonged to the New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, not because his charges of conspiracy to kill the President made a wider sweep than the others but because he actually brought someone to trial. In early May, with his case against a New Orleans businessman named Clay Shaw just heating up, Garrison announced grandiloquently that he was investigating the CIA and FBI for withholding evidence. Shaw, a respected native of New Orleans and recipient of the Bronze Star, had admired and voted for Kennedy. Nevertheless, he was arrested on March 1 for allegedly conspiring with David W. Ferrie, also of New Orleans, and Lee Harvey Oswald in September 1963 to murder the President. Garrison believed that Oswald’s avowed Marxism (though it dated at least to letters written when he was fifteen years old) was in reality a cover for his rightist, anti-Castro sponsors, who were vexed by Kennedy’s cooling attitude toward Cuba after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. He also believed that David Ferrie’s “duck hunting” excursion to Houston on the day of the assassination was a cover for a day trip into Dallas to oversee Kennedy’s murder.

The district attorney’s office had arrived at Shaw as a suspect chiefly because of his first name, his address, and the fact that he spoke Spanish. Dean Andrews, Jr., a talkative New Orleans attorney, had already become well known for telling the Warren Commission that a mysterious man named Clay Bertrand had telephoned him the day after the assassination to ask him to represent Oswald. Andrews described Clay Bertrand (whom he had