Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (56 page)

After plowing through the voluminous Warren Report—a study, he became convinced, designed only to “tranquilize the American public”—and the work of the leading conspiracy researchers, Garrison came to the conclusion that Kennedy was the victim of a well-organized plot with roots in New Orleans, where Lee Harvey Oswald had spent the summer before the assassination. Despite its reputation for a tropical, easygoing tolerance, the city was a hotbed of anti-Kennedy extremism. JFK himself confided to Louisiana congressman Hale Boggs, while waiting out a rain delay in the dugout during an opening day baseball game in April 1962, that he dreaded a forthcoming trip to New Orleans because of the murderous passions against him there. “I’m not sure about going to New Orleans,” the president told Boggs. “I’ve got reports that it’s so tense down there that something could happen.”

As Garrison began investigating Oswald’s ties to local Kennedy haters, he zeroed in on the peculiar office building at 544 Camp Street where a former FBI agent and far-right zealot named Guy Banister and his eccentric associate David Ferrie oversaw a buzzing beehive of anti-Castro activity that included the young man later arrested for Kennedy’s murder. The prosecutor came to the conclusion that Oswald was a pawn in a complex plot, framed as a Castro-loving Marxist to take the blame for the assassination. The real masterminds behind the conspiracy, he decided, could be found in the CIA and Pentagon. “President Kennedy was killed for one reason,” Garrison began to tell the press. “Because he was working for reconciliation with the [Soviet Union] and Castro’s Cuba…. President Kennedy died because he wanted peace.”

The United States, Garrison concluded, had been taken over by the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower had warned about. “In a very real and terrifying sense, our government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society,” he declared in 1968. “I’ve learned enough about the machinations of the CIA in the past year to know that this is no longer the dreamworld America I once believed in…. I’ve always had a kind of knee-jerk trust in my government’s basic integrity, whatever political blunders it may make. But I’ve come to realize that in Washington, deceiving and manipulating the public are viewed by some as the natural prerogatives of office. Huey Long once said, ‘Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.’ I’m afraid, based on my experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.”

Guy Banister had died of a heart attack in 1964, so David Ferrie became Garrison’s chief suspect. Ferrie was a pilot and soldier of fortune who had been fired by Eastern Airlines after he was arrested on sex charges involving adolescent boys. Ferrie had known Oswald since he was a teenage cadet in the Civil Air Patrol, where the older man was a trainer. Ferrie moved in a shadowy world of anticommunist adventurism, where intelligence types, gangsters, and Cuban exiles all intermingled. As Edward Jay Epstein mordantly observed, he “was bizarre even by the relaxed standards of the French Quarter.” The victim of a disease that had robbed him of all his hair, Ferrie wore ill-fitting, homemade reddish wigs and dabbed on greasepaint to cover his missing eyebrows, giving his face the appearance of a “ghoulish Halloween mask,” in Garrison’s estimation. His filthy, ramshackle apartment was filled with cages of squealing white mice that Ferrie was using for cancer experiments—tests, he told some, to find ways of injecting Castro with the disease.

Garrison first brought Ferrie in for questioning a few days after the assassination, when he heard that he had made a mysterious trip to Texas on the day of the crime. He was on the verge of hauling Ferrie before a grand jury in February 1967 when word of Garrison’s investigation leaked in the press, and Ferrie suddenly found himself in the eye of a media storm. Though Garrison’s suspect was growing increasingly frantic in the public spotlight, the D.A. decided to hold off on bringing him in, apparently to sweat him a while longer. It was a fateful decision. Just as Garrison was telling his staff to “stay cool, hold our fire, and wait a little longer,” he received a call that Ferrie had been found dead in his apartment. The coroner ruled that the forty-eight-year-old man had died of natural causes—Ferrie suffered from high blood pressure and some of his friends speculated that his fatal brain hemorrhage was brought on by the stress of Garrison’s investigation. But Garrison always suspected it was a suicide or murder. Ferrie, he said, was a victim of forces much larger than himself, “swept up in the gales of history.”

By now, the New Orleans D.A. was also swept up in a tempest, a political and media hurricane never seen before in his city. Hundreds of reporters and camera crews from all over the world were swarming his office. The White House, Justice Department, FBI, and CIA were intensely focused on his underfinanced investigation. With Ferrie’s death, Garrison’s key suspect was gone and he suddenly had a gaping hole in his case. But the prosecutor was riding a wild animal, and instead of getting off the snorting, steaming beast to which he was strapped, he held on and declared that he had a new suspect.

In March 1967, Garrison announced he was arresting a New Orleans civic leader named Clay Shaw for the murder of John F. Kennedy. The stunned city knew Shaw as the respected founder of the International Trade Mart. But to Garrison, he was a CIA-linked international businessmen and—like David Ferrie, a man familiar to Shaw through gay circles—he had served as one of Oswald’s handlers in New Orleans. Shaw would not be brought to trial until January 1969. But in the intervening months, Garrison’s investigation sucked virtually all JFK activity into its swirling vortex. Among the millions of Americans who were riveted by the case was Robert F. Kennedy.

ONE EVENING SOON AFTER
David Ferrie’s death, the phone rang at the home of Dr. Nicholas Chetta, the New Orleans coroner who had conducted the autopsy on the man who had been at the center of the Garrison whirlwind. The phone was answered by Chetta’s teenage son, Nicky Jr., who by then was growing fed up with the incessant calls from the press that had been set off by Ferrie’s sudden death. Garrison was not the only one who found the timing of his demise suspicious.

“Hello, this is Robert Kennedy,” the caller said. “May I speak with Dr. Chetta?”

“Yeah, and I’m the Lone Ranger,” replied the doctor’s son, who was in no mood for prank calls, slamming down the phone.

Shortly after, the phone rang again. “This is Robert Kennedy and I insist on speaking with Dr. Chetta.” This time the teenager surrendered the phone to his father, who held a hushed conversation with Kennedy for several minutes. The senator wanted to assure himself that Garrison’s key suspect was not the victim of foul play.

As Garrison sparked fireworks, Bobby Kennedy began taking steps to determine the validity of his investigation. His direct call to Chetta notwithstanding, Kennedy relied on his usual method of using surrogates to look into the New Orleans probe. Among those he pumped for information was his old friend and former press spokesman, Ed Guthman. After leaving the Justice Department in August 1964, shortly before his boss, Guthman had returned to the newspaper business, as the national editor of the
Los Angeles Times
. Guthman insists today that Kennedy did not ask him to investigate Garrison. He says that he decided on his own to put five of his best reporters on the story. He even traveled to New Orleans himself to look into the case, taking Garrison and one of his investigators—a private eye named Louis Gurvich—to lunch. Despite Guthman’s insistence today that his motivations were journalistic, the two men assumed that he was on a mission for Kennedy. “He probably was sizing up our intelligence quotient for Bobby,” said Gurvich at the time. “Bobby’s always been leery of the kooky [assassination] critics.”

Guthman’s team of reporters descended on New Orleans shortly after the news broke about Garrison’s case in February 1967 and stayed with the story into the fall. They quickly developed a scornful attitude towards the prosecutor and his case, after interviewing sources like Jack Ruby’s sister, whom they found in Southern California; Perry Russo—the handsome, twenty-five-year-old insurance trainee and self-described “sexual freak” who became Garrison’s star witness after tying Ferrie, Oswald and Shaw together in the plot against JFK; and, most important, Gurvich’s brother and investigative partner, William, who had become one of Garrison’s most damaging critics after breaking with him on the case. Fed numerous tales of Garrison’s eccentricities by William Gurvich, one
Times
reporter filed a memo with Guthman that seethed, “If it weren’t so deadly serious because of the injury it is doing to innocent people, [the Garrison investigation] would be comic, a burlesque.”

Guthman’s reporters convinced him that Garrison was “a phony.” Looking back on the case today, he says, “I sent some of our best people down there, mostly from our Washington bureau, great reporters like Jack Nelson. And I went down there myself. But all my guys concluded there was nothing to it. And they were damn good reporters.”

Guthman later met with Kennedy in Washington and reported to him what the
Los Angeles Times
team had decided about Garrison. “I talked to Bob. He wanted to know what we had found out and I told him. So he accepted that. My feeling was that it was possible [there was a conspiracy], but with Garrison, the evidence wasn’t there.”

But the man who had the most impact on Kennedy’s view of the New Orleans investigation was Walter Sheridan. The former chief of RFK’s “Get Hoffa” squad at the Justice Department played a central, yet little-known, role in Kennedy’s secret search for the truth about Dallas. There was no person in his inner circle on whom Bobby depended more to help him ferret out the full story of what happened to his brother. Sheridan’s word on Garrison was bound to carry enormous weight with Kennedy. Bobby once confided to New York reporter Jack Newfield, who had drawn close to the senator while covering him, that he had “assigned different aspects of the assassination case to Goodwin, Mankiewicz, and Sheridan.” But Newfield knew that the key player here was Walt Sheridan. He was the man whom Kennedy intimates assumed would one day lead the way in cracking the case.

Kennedy’s deep trust and affection for Sheridan had been forged during the Senate rackets investigation and then reinforced during their long quest to put Jimmy Hoffa behind bars. He was slight and soft-spoken but—like Bobby—fierce and unrelenting when on the trail of corrupt figures like Hoffa, a man to whom they both applied the word “evil.” Kennedy and Sheridan shared a black and white view of the world, rooted in their Catholic faith, when they joined forces in the 1950s. They were determined to cleanse government—which they believed, like the Church, was meant to uplift the needy and suffering—of the moral rot they feared had spread even to the loftiest echelons of Washington. “We must kindle an enthusiasm for the good and the right and the just,” Sheridan told the Adoration Society, a Catholic group in his native Utica, New York, in 1960. “It is time to reaffirm the basic toughness and moral certitude that motivated our country to its position of greatness.” Bobby’s Justice Department crusade against organized crime would become Sheridan’s vehicle for the nation’s moral revival. The crusade would take both men into the darkest corners of American power, expose them and their families to frequent physical danger, and finally bond them like soldiers who had shared the same blood-soaked trench.

Sheridan was loved “as a brother and as a member of the family,” recalled Teddy Kennedy. He and Bobby, who were born on the same day, celebrated their birthdays together. He and his family were frequent guests at Hickory Hill, where despite his unimposing build, Sheridan was an enthusiastic participant in the Kennedys’ rough and lawless touch football games, once suffering a near concussion when he bashed heads with charging former All-American Byron “Whizzer” White. Sheridan’s wife, Nancy, was equally fond of Bobby, who often invited the Sheridans’ five children to parties in the Justice Department courtyard and spoke at their daughter’s high school graduation.

And so it was the trusted Walt Sheridan to whom Kennedy immediately turned on November 22, 1963, dispatching him to Dallas to find out what he could. Even from the outset, neither man trusted the FBI to get to the bottom of the crime. At the beginning of his career, Sheridan had spent four years with the FBI, recruiting Communists as undercover agents. But he finally quit after getting fed up with Hoover’s extremism. “I was a cut liberal, and the FBI is a right-wing organization,” he later explained. He would denounce the FBI chief as “somewhat of a dictator and somewhat of a son of a bitch.” After he quit, his fellow FBI agents were warned to have no contact with him. It must have galled Hoover when Sheridan’s name began being floated in the press as a possible replacement for the aging “dictator” in a second Kennedy term. When Sheridan dug up evidence within forty-eight hours of JFK’s assassination that Jack Ruby had received a “bundle of money” from a Hoffa associate, the FBI showed no interest in pursuing this tantalizing piece of evidence.

Sheridan and Bobby Kennedy quickly came to the same conclusion: JFK was the victim of a powerful conspiracy. But for the rest of his life, Sheridan was extremely cautious in his public remarks about the assassination. Another trait the Kennedys deeply valued in the investigator was his discretion. A submarine sailor during World War II, Sheridan knew how to “swim underwater,” one Kennedy aide remarked. “Business or pleasure, secrets were safe with Walter,” an appreciative Teddy Kennedy eulogized Sheridan at his 1995 funeral. “Whether working on an investigation or planning a surprise party, nothing ever leaked. On that point we all agreed—Walter Sheridan kept his mouth shut.”