January, 1961:
President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation.
Now, this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new
in the American experience.
The total influence,
economic, political, even spiritual,
is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the federal government.
We must guard against the acquisition
of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought
by the military-industrial complex.
We must never let the weight of this combination
endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
November, 1960:
Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy of Massachusetts
wins one of the narrowest election victories in American history
over the Vice President Richard Nixon by a little more than 100,000 votes.
Alongside his beautiful and elegant wife, Jacqueline Bouvier,
Kennedy is the symbol of the new freedom of the 1960s,
signifying change and upheaval to the American public.
"...that all men are created equal."
Every degree of mind and spirit that I possess will be devoted
to the cause of freedom around the world.
Today, the proudest boast is:
"Ich bin ein Berliner!"
He inherits a secret war against the communist Castro dictatorship in Cuba,
a war run by the CIA and angry Cuban exiles.
Castro is a successful revolutionary
frightening to American business interests in Latin America.
This war culminates in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion
in April, 1961,
when Kennedy refuses to provide air cover for the exiled Cuban brigade.
Kennedy, taking public responsibility for the failure,
privately claims the CIA lied to him
and tried to manipulate him into ordering an all-out American invasion of Cuba.
In October, 1962,
the world comes to the brink of nuclear war
when Kennedy quarantines Cuba
after announcing the presence of offensive Soviet nuclear missiles
90 miles off American shores.
Soviet ships with more missiles sail towards the island,
but at the last moment, they turn back.
The world breathes with relief.
In Washington, rumors abound that JFK has cut a secret deal
with Russian Premier Khrushchev
not to invade Cuba in return for a Russian withdrawal of missiles.
Suspicions abound that Kennedy is soft on Communism.
Kennedy also finds himself embroiled in Laos and Vietnam.
We've got our difficulties there, quite obviously.
Unless a greater effort is made by the government
to win popular support, I don't think the war can be won out there.
In the final analysis, it's their war. They're the ones who have to win it or lose it.
Early that fateful summer,
Kennedy speaks of his new vision at the American University in Washington.
What kind of peace do I mean,
and what kind of peace do we seek?
Not a Pax Americana
enforced on the world by American weapons of war.
We must re-examine our own attitudes towards the Soviet Union.
Our most basic, common link
is that we all inhabit
this small planet;
we all breathe the same air;
we all cherish our children's futures;
and we are all mortal.
You fucking assholes!
Don't leave me here!
They're going into Dallas
Friday.
They're going to kill
Kennedy.
Call somebody
and stop them.
These are serious fucking guys!
She's high as a kite on something, been that way since they brought her in.
Help!
Please!
Here is a bulletin from CBS News.
In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired
at President Kennedy's motorcade in downtown Dallas.
The first reports say that President Kennedy
has been seriously wounded by this shooting.
What's wrong, Lou?
Boss, the President's been shot...
in Dallas five minutes ago.
Oh, no!
How bad?
There's no word yet but they think it's in the head.
Come on.
Napoleon's has a TV set.
Apparently, three bullets were found. Governor Connally also appeared to have been hit.
The President was rushed by Secret Service to Parkland Memorial Hospital, four miles from Dealey Plaza.
We are told a bullet entered the base of the throat and came out of the back side,
but there is no confirmation.
Blood transfusions are being given. A priest has administered the last rites.
Plenty of arrests have been made here today.
Well, there's still a chance, damn it.
Come on, Jack, pull through.
From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official:
President Kennedy died
at 1:00 p. m. Central Standard Time,
2:00 Eastern Standard Time,
some 38 minutes ago.
Vice President Johnson has left the hospital.
Presumably he will bee taking the oath of office shortly
and become the 36th President of the United States.
He did so much for this country, for colored people. Why?
...he's dirty!
Good-bye, you sorry bastard! Die!
Hey, shut the fuck up!
- Mind your own business. - God, I'm ashamed to be an American today.
The President of the United States is dead.
I have just talked to Father Oscar Hubert of the Holy Trinity Catholic Church.
He and another priest tell me that
the pair of men have just administered the last rights to President Kennedy.
Shortly after 12:30
as the President's motorcade neared the freeway entrance
near the park on the west side of downtown Dallas
those terrible shots rang out.
The President is dead.
The bullets were coming up over our heads
from that fence up on the knoll.
I seen his face when it hit. He just...
His ear blew off and he turns this real white,
and kind of flopped over on his stomach
and, uh...
with his foot sticking out.
He w... Excuse me.
None of us thought it could happen in America or any place else. And yet...
All this blubbering over that no-count son of a bitch!
They're bawling like they knew the man. Makes me want to puke.
For God's sake, Chief, the President was shot.
A bullshit President!
I don't see anybody crying for all those thousands of Cubans
that bastard condemned to death and torture at Bay of Pigs.
All these goddamn peace treaties!
I heard shots from over there.
- Well, I heard some shots from right over there. - How many shots?
That's what happens when you let the niggers vote.
They get together with the Jews and the Catholics,
and elect an Irish bleeding heart.
Well, Chief, now maybe you had too much to drink.
Bullshit!
Here's to the New Frontier:
Camelot in smithereens.
I'll drink to that.
A flash bulletin: Dallas Police have just announced that
they have a suspect in the killing of a Dallas Police officer, a J.D. Tippit,
who was shot at 1:15 in Oak Cliff. That's a suburb of Dallas.
Police are saying there could be a tie-in here to the murder of the President.
The suspect, identified as a Lee Harvey Oswald,
was arrested by more than a dozen police officers
after a short scuffle at the Texas Movie Theater in Oak Cliff.
Officer Tippit was killed apparently
by a revolver which was found on Oswald.
There is apparently...
They ought to just shoot the bastard!
Give him a medal for shooting Kennedy!
No, sir, I didn't.
I don't know what I am charged with,
but I emphatically deny these charges.
Well, the kid must have gone nuts, right?
I said, Oswald must have flipped,
- right? - Yeah.
Just went ahead and did this crazy thing before anybody could stop it, right?
I think I'll get out of here. I've got to get home, Chief.
The hell are you talking about?
Who'd have ever thought
that goofy Oswald kid would pull a stunt like an assassination?
Just goes to show you can never can know about some people. Am I right, Jack?
- Yeah. - Am I right, Jack?
Well, bless my soul.
Yeah, all these years, I thought you were on my team.
Sometimes I don't know... Are you kidding?
I couldn't be more serious, Jack.
Those little red eyes of yours have me wondering about your loyalty.
Look at that, Martin.
Who's been going through my files?
You've been looking through my files, haven't you, you little weasel!
You're starting to get paranoid. You really are!
You were going through all my files.
You're a goddamn spy!
Why the hell would I want to look through your files, Chief?
I've seen enough here this summer already to write a book.
I always lock my files!
You were the only one here today.
What do you mean, you bastard?
What do you mean, you're going to "write a book"?
What? No, I mean.... Well, you know what I mean.
I've seen a lot of strange things here,
strange people.
You didn't see a goddamn thing!
You hear me, you little weasel?
You didn't see a goddamn thing!
Full name is Lee Harvey Oswald.
O-s-w-a-l-d.
- Did you shoot the President? - I didn't shoot anybody, no, sir.
They have taken me in because of the fact I have lived in the Soviet Union.
I'm just a patsy!
God, he sure looks like a creep.
I protested at that time I was not allowed legal representation
during that very short and sweet hearing.
I uh... I really don't know
what this situation is about.
Nobody has told me anything except that I am accused of
murdering a policeman.
I know nothing more than that,
and I do request someone to come forward
to give me legal assistance.
Were you ever in the Free Cuba Movement, or whatever that's called?
That's the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
What did you do in Russia? And what happened to your eye?
He seems pretty cool to me for a man under pressure like that.
A policeman hit me.
He gives me the willies.
Okay, come on, sugarplums, it's past your bedtimes.
Oh, Mattie, honey, get a hold of yourself.
That's a fine man...
- a fine man. - After a stint in the Marines, he apparently
became fascinated by Communism.
He is still believed to be a dedicated Marxist
and a fanatical supporter of Fidel Castro and ultra left-wing causes.
He spent last summer in New Orleans and was arrested there
in a brawl with anti-Castro Cuban exiles.
And apparently, Bob, Oswald has been passing out pro-...
- Hello, Lou? - Hey, Chief.
- Yeah, sorry to disturb you this late. - That's alright, I'm watching it too.
Yeah, matter of routine but we'd better get on this Oswald connection in New Orleans right away.
I want you to check out his record. Find any friends or associates from last summer.
Let's meet with the senior assistants and investigators day after tomorrow, alright?
It will be on Sunday.
Sunday, yeah, at 11:00.
- Alright. - Alright, thanks, Lou.
I would say that, without any doubt he is the killer.
The law says "beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty."
I thought it was a motorcycle backfired and I looked over to my left,
and a second shot hit him in the face.
Police say the rifle, a cheap World War ll, Italian-made Mannlicher-Carcano,
was ordered from a Chicago mailing house
and shipped to Oswald's alias, A. Hidell,
a post office box in March of 1963.
This is same rifle was used to assassinate the President.
That ties it up.
Another nut. Jesus Christ, anybody can get a rifle in Texas!
As far as Oswald's associates, boss, the one name keeps popping up is David Ferrie.
Oswald was seen with him several times last summer.
I know David. Strange character.
Yeah, he's been in trouble before. He used to be a hot-shot pilot for Eastern Airlines,
but got canned after an alleged homosexual incident...
These backyard photos were found yesterday among Oswald's possessions...
Get Coleman.
He told somebody the Texas trip.
Yesterday, he mentioned somebody about Ferrie? Find them out.
He no shoot anyone.
He good, good man. Good husband.
So, it seems David Ferrie drove off on Friday afternoon for Texas.
A source told Coleman he might have been a getaway pilot for Oswald.
A getaway pilot?
Hold your horses.
What kind of source?
The anonymous kind, Chief.
I think I remember this guy, Ferrie, speaking at a meeting of some veterans' group,
ranting against Castro, extreme sort of stuff.
Susie, back up.
They're bringing him out. Numa, turn it up.
Here he comes!
Come on, here he comes Get that stuff!
Come on, let's get him!
Is there anything you want to say in your defense?
Oswald!
- He's been shot! - He shot him!
He's been shot!
He shot him on TV!
There's a man with a gun!
Seventy cops in that basement. What the hell were they doing?
Be no trial now.
Looks like somebody's just saved the Dallas DA a pile of work.
Pandemonium has broken loose here in the basement of the Dallas Police...
Lou...
Lou, let's get David Ferrie in here anyway.
It's wrong. This is crazy!
Yesterday, in the midst of sorrow, the business of government went on.
The President meeting with Henry Cabot Lodge, our Ambassador to Vietnam,
and members of his Cabinet.
The major subject was Vietnam,
a crisis that does not pause for bereavement.
And from this meeting
came affirmations that the United States would continue its policy of aiding
the new government of Vietnam in its war against the communist insurgents.
Chief,
David Ferrie.
Come on in, Dave.
Thank you for coming.
You remember me, Mr. Garrison?
I met you on Carondelet St. right after your election. I congratulated you.
How could I forget? You make quite a first impression.
And I've heard over the years you're quite a first-rate pilot, Dave.
- Really? - Yeah, legend has it you can
get in and out of any field no matter how small.
I'm a bit of a pilot myself, flew grasshoppers for the field artillery in the war.
Hey, have a seat. Make yourself comfortable.
Mind if I smoke, Mr. Garrison?
How could I?
Dave, as you know, President Kennedy was assassinated on Friday.
A man named Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested as a suspect,
and was then murdered yesterday by a man named Jack Ruby.
We've had reports that Oswald spent the summer here in New Orleans
and we've been advised that you knew Oswald pretty well.
I never met anybody named Oswald. Anybody who told you that has to be crazy.
But you are aware he served in your Civil Air Patrol unit when he was a teenager.
No. If he did, I don't remember him.
I mean, there were lots of boys in and out, you know?
Well, I'm sure you've seen this. Perhaps you knew this man under another name.
No, I never saw him before in my life.
Well, that must have been mistaken information we got, then.
Thanks for straightening it out for us.
There's one other matter that has come up, Dave.
We were told that you took a trip to Texas shortly after the assassination on Friday.
Yeah, now that's true. I drove to Houston.
What was so appealing about Houston?
I hadn't been there ice-skating in many years and I was with a couple of young friends and,
we decided we wanted to go ice-skating.
Dave, may I ask why the urge to ice-skating in Texas
happened to strike you during one of the most violent thunderstorms in recent memory?
Spur-of-the-moment thing.
- Storm wasn't that bad. - I see.
And where did you drive?
We went to Houston,
and Saturday night we drove to Galveston, and stayed over there.
And then Sunday?
In the morning, we went goose hunting.
You bag any geese on this trip?
I believe the boys got a couple.
But the boys told us they didn't get any.
Come to think of it, they're right.
We got out there were the geese were,
and there were thousands of them all over the place,
but you couldn't approach them. They're a wise bunch of birds.
Your young friends also told us you had no weapons in the car, Dave.
Isn't it a bit difficult to hunt for geese without a shotgun?
Yes. I remember now. I'm sorry, Mr. Garrison.
I got confused.
We got out near the geese, and only then did we realize we had forgotten our shotguns.
Stupid, right?
So, of course, we didn't get any geese.
I see, Dave. Well, thank you for your time.
I'm sorry that this has to end inconveniently for you,
but I going to have to detain you for questioning by the FBl.
Why? What's wrong?
Dave, I find your story simply not believable.
Really?
Come on.
What part?
Gentlemen, this afternoon the FBI released David W. Ferrie
of New Orleans.
After extensive questioning and a thorough background check,
the Bureau found no evidence that Mr. Ferrie knew Lee Harvey Oswald,
or has had any connection with the assassination of President Kennedy.
The special agent in charge would like to make clear
that Mr. Ferrie was brought in for questioning
by the District Attorney of Orleans Parish,
- not by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. - And I thought we were on the same side.
What the hell business is it of theirs to say that?
Pretty fast, wasn't it, the way they let him go?
They must know something we don't.
Let's get on with our lives, gentlemen.
We've got plenty of homegrown crimes to prosecute.
President Johnson has announced
the creation of a blue ribbon presidential commission to probe the events in Dallas.
The commission will be headed by Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Earl Warren,
and is expected to head off several Congressional and Texas inquiries into the assassination.
On the panel are Allen Dulles, ex-chief of the CIA,
Representative Gerald Ford, John J. McCloy,
former head of the Chase Manhattan bank.
Fucking out of control! All these hippies running around on drugs.
The way young people look you can't tell a boy from a girl anymore.
I saw a girl the other day. She was pregnant. You could see her whole belly.
And you know what she had painted on it?
"Love Child."
Oh, it's a mess down there, Jim.
We've bitten off more Vietnam than we can possibly chew.
Of course, it figures with that polecat Lyndon in the White House.
You know, I sometimes think things have gone downhill since John Kennedy died, Senator.
Oh, don't get me started on that.
Those Warren Commission fellows were picking gnat shit out of pepper.
Nobody's going to tell me that kid did the shooting job he did from that damn bookstore.
- Here you go, Senator Long. - Oh, thank you, honey.
I thought the FBI test-fired the rifle to see if it could be done.
Sure, three experts and not one of them could do it.
They're telling us that Oswald got off three shots with world-class precision
from a manual bolt-action rifle in less than six seconds.
And according to his Marine buddies, he got Maggie's drawers.
You know what that means? Wasn't any good.
Average man would be lucky to get two shots off.
And I tell you, the first would always be the best.
Here the third shot's perfect.
Then, they got that bullet zigzagging all over the place
so it hits Kennedy and Connally seven times.
One pristine bullet? That dog don't hunt.
You know, something's always bothered me about that from day one, too.
You think there were other men involved, Russel?
If I were investigating the case, I'd round up 100 of the world's best riflemen
and find out which ones were in Dallas that day.
You been duck hunting! I think Oswald's a good, old-fashioned decoy.
What did he say? "I'm just a patsy!" You'd better believe it.
Jim, honey?
Dinner's just about ready.
Got a surprise for you tonight. Tried something new.
Jim?
Jim!
- What? - Dinner.
Smells good, but, honey, do you realize that Oswald
was interrogated for 12 hours after the assassination
with no lawyer present, and nobody... nobody recorded a word of it?
I can't... I can't believe it. A police captain with 30 years' experience and a crowd of federal agents
just had to know that with no record, anything Oswald said is gonna be inadmissible in court.
Well, honey why don't we talk about it at the dinner table. It's getting cold.
Jasper, what are you doing in here?
Daddy said it's alright if I was real quiet.
Sure it is.
Honey, if I were to handle a minor felon like that it'd be all over the papers,
and this is the alleged murderer of the President.
Again and again credible testimony's ignored.
Leads are never followed up, it's conclusion-selective, there's no index.
It's one of the sloppiest, most disorganized investigations I've ever seen.
Dozens and dozens of witnesses in Dealey Plaza that day are saying they heard shots
coming from the grassy knoll area in front of Kennedy,
and not the book depository behind him.
But it's all broken down and spread around, and you read it, and the point gets lost.
I never did believe it.
Mattie, I'll do the dishes. You take Eb up.
Night, baby.
Elizabeth, honey, your bedtime too!
Honey, that was three years ago. We've all tried so hard to put it out of our minds.
You just keep digging it up again.
You're the DA of New Orleans.
Don't you think the Kennedy assassination a little bit out of your domain?
I mean, all those important people already studied it.
I just can't believe a man as intelligent as Earl Warren ever read what was in those volumes.
Well, maybe you're right.
I'll give you one hour to solve the case so I can get these kids in bed.
And then you're mine. Mr. Kennedy will have to wait until morning.
Look, Daddy. Look what I drew.
Well, that's something, Jasper. What is it?
It's a rhino in a cage.
- Can I stay up another hour? - I don't think so, son.
Pickle and Snapper, my two
dancing partners.
Alright, good night, doodlebugs.
-Good night. - One hour, you hear?
Some Saturday night date you are.
Mama warned me this would happen if I married such a serious man as you.
Oh, she did, huh?
Well, when I come up, I'm gonna show you how Saturday night got invented, alright?
I sealed off the area and I held off the trains till they could be examined.
And there were some transients taken on at least one train.
Mr. Bowers, I believe you already talked to us about this matter before your deposition. Is that correct?
Yes. Mr. Bowers, I believe you already talked to us about this matter before your deposition. Is that correct?
Yes.
Now, is there anything else you told us
that I haven't asked you about that you can think of?
Nothing that I can recall.
Witness is excused.
Well, we got a long freight that was in there.
We pulled some people off there. Took them to station.
Do you mean some transients?
Tramps and hobos.
Were all those questioned?
Yes, sir. They were taken to the station and questioned.
And... ask the question. Ask the question.
Alright, let's go back to that Amos Euins matter.
Uh, yes, sir.
Traffic had been cut off into the area since about 10:00.
But there were three cars that came in during this time
from around noon till the time of the shooting.
The cars circled the parking lot and left.
Like they was checking the area.
And one of the drivers seemed to have
something he was holding up to his mouth.
That last car came in about seven to ten minutes before the shooting.
It was a white Chevrolet four-door Impala,
muddy up to the windows.
Towards the underpass, I saw two men.
They were standing behind a picket fence.
They were looking up towards Main and Houston, following the caravan as it came down.
One of them was middle-aged,
heavyset.
The other man was younger.
There were two other men. They were on the eastern end of the parking lot,
and each of them had uniforms.
At the time of the shooting
there seemed to be some commotion.
I just am unable to describe a...
flash of light or smoke... something,
which caused me to feel that something out of the ordinary
had occurred there on the embankment.
Goddamn.
No!
Jim?
- You all right? - Honey, it's incredible!
What?
The whole thing.
A Lt. Colonel testifies that
Lee Oswald was given a Russian language exam as part of his Marine training
only a few months before he defects to the Soviet Union.
- A Russian exam! - I can't believe it!
Honey, it's 4:30 in the morning!
- I have five kids gonna be awake in an hour! - Honey, in all my years in the military,
I never knew a single man who was given a Russian test.
Oswald was a radar operator. He'd...
He'd have about as much use for... for Russian as a cat has for pajamas.
These books have gotten to your mind, Mr. Garrison!
And this... this colonel, he makes it sound like nothing.
He says, Oswald did badly on his test.
He got only two more Russian words right than wrong.
That's like me saying, Touchdown, here, is not very intelligent
because I beat him three games out of five the last time we played chess.
Are you going to stay up all night every night? For what?
So you'll be the only man in America that's read all 26 volumes of the Warren Report?
Do I have to spell it out for you?
Lee Oswald was no ordinary soldier. He was...
He was probably military intelligence, that's why he was trained in Russian.
It was no accident he was in Russia.
- Go back to sleep. - God damn it, Lil, I've been sleeping for three years!
Morning boys. Ready for a walking tour?
7:30 Sunday morning is not exactly fresh blood we're sniffing here, boss.
Old stains, Bill, but just as telling.
531 Lafayette Street.
Remember whose office this was in '63?
Sure, Guy Banister.
Ex-FBI man. Died couple of years ago.
Bannister headed the Chicago office. When he retired he became a private eye here.
I used to have lunch with him. John Birch Society, Minutemen.
- Oh yeah, I remember - Slightly to the right of Attila the Hun.
He used to recruit college students, infiltrate radical organizations on campus.
Headed the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean.
All out of this office.
Come around here, I want to show you something.
See that?
Now, take a look here.
544 Camp Street.
531 Lafayette Street.
Same building, right?
But with different addresses, and different entrances, both going to the same place
to the office upstairs.
Guess who used this address.
Lee Harvey Oswald.
Now, how do we know he was here?
'Cause this office address was stamped on the
pro-Castro leaflets he was handing out in the summer of '63 down on Canal Street.
Now, these are the same leaflets they found in his garage in Dallas.
What's this? What the hell is this doing on this piece of paper?
After the arrest, 544 Camp St. never appeared on the pamphlets again.
Asshole.
He was arrested that day for fighting with some anti-Castro Cubans,
but actually he'd contacted them a few days earlier
as an ex-Marine trying to join their anti-Castro crusade.
When they heard he was now pro-Castro, well, they paid him a visit.
What is this Fidel shit? You lied to me, you hypocrite!
Lying son of a bitch!
People, do not take this paper! This is communist propaganda!
Hey, fella, if you want to hit me, hit me.
Come on, you pinko shit!
You go back to Moscow, communist!
There was no real fight,
and the arresting Lieutenant later said he felt it was a staged incident.
In jail, Oswald has a private session
with Special Agent John Quigley of the FBl.
Oswald is released,
and Quigley destroys his notes from the interview.
The arrest gets him a lot of publicity, and as a result,
Oswald appears on a local TV debate.
...but you, uh... you are a communist, are you not?
No, Mr. Bringuier. I am not a communist. I'm a Marxist-Leninist.
You are not a communist, but you are a Marxist-Leninist. What is the difference?
And here's another one for you: What would you say if I told you
Lee Oswald was trained in the Russian language when he was a Marine?
I'd say he's probably getting intelligence training.
Well, Lou, you were in the Marines, who would be running that training?
Office of Naval Intelligence.
Take a look across the street.
Post Office.
Upstairs, in 1963, that was the Office of Naval Intelligence.
Just by coincidence, Banister, before he was FBl, was ONl.
What's that little saying they have?
"Once ONl, always ONl."
Well, he likes working near his old pals.
Bill...
Lou, we are standing in the heart
of the United States government's intelligence community in New Orleans.
That's the FBl, there.
Alright, that's the CIA.
That's the Secret Service.
That's the ONl.
Now, doesn't this seem to you a rather strange place
for a communist to spend his spare time?
What you driving at, boss?
We're going back into the case, Lou,
the murder of the President.
Good Lord, wake me up. I must be dreaming.
No, you're awake, Bill, and I'm deadly serious.
We're gonna start by tracking down your anonymous source from three years ago.
Now, how'd you find out David Ferrie drove to Texas that day?
Hell, I can't remember last night, let alone three years ago, boss.
You're not under cross-examination here, Jack.
What I need is a little clarification about the night Guy Banister beat you over the head.
Now, don't tell me you don't remember that.
'Cause you called our office. You called our office from your hospital bed,
and you were hopping mad about it.
Now, here's my problem:
you told me you and Guy were good friends for a long time.
- More than ten years. - And he never hit you before?
No, he never touched me.
Yet, on November 22nd, 1963,
the day of the President's murder...
the police report says...
says he pistol-whipped you with a .357 Magnum.
It also says you an argument about the phone bill. Here, take a look at it!
Well, does a simple argument over a phone bill sound like a believable explanation to you?
There's more to it than that.
How much more?
I don't think I shouldn't talk about it.
Well, I'd ask Guy. We were friendly, you know? Heart attack, wasn't it?
Well, you buy what you read in the papers.
- You have other information? - I didn't say that!
All I know is that he died suddenly, just before the Warren Report came out.
Why did Guy beat you, Jack?
You were the only one in the place!
You were the only one here!
You didn't see a goddamn thing!
Oh hell, I guess, Guy's dead, it don't matter no more. It was all about those...
people that was hanging around the office that summer.
See, I was never part of the operation.
You know, I was just there taking care of their private-eye work, you know, as it came in for Guy.
Not much did, but that's why I was there.
It was a nuthouse,
all the Cubans coming, going. Christ, they all looked the same to me.
You going to play with this rifle or you gonna pack? Come on.
Dave Ferrie.
- You know about him? - Yeah, we know Dave. Was he there?
Christ, he practically lived there!
See, the whole thing of his was...
all cloak-and-dagger stuff, you know?
They called it "Operation Mongoose."
Whole idea was they were gonna train these Cuban exiles, you know, for another invasion of Cuba.
Hell, Banister's office, that was part of the supply line,
you know, from Dallas through New Orleans to Miami.
They were stockpiling arms, explosives...
All this right under the noses of the intelligence community in Lafayette Square?
Hell yeah! Everybody knew everybody, you know? They were all part of the network.
All working for the CIA.
You know, pilots and black operators and civilians and the military.
Hell, everybody in those days was running guns somewhere.
Ft. Jefferson, Bayou Bluff, Morgan City, you name it.
Oh, McAllen, Texas? Yeah, big gun-running operation.
F1-A1, selector switch, fully automatic, like a machine gun.
Bannister... where does he fit in all of this?
He was running his camp, up north of Lake Pontchartrain, there.
You know, Ferrie was doing a lot of the training.
They had a shooting range and lot of tropical territory, you know, like you got in Cuba?
Some Americans were trained there, too... a few...
Nazi types, mercenaries.
That Ferrie, though, Jesus, he was the craziest. He...
Anyway, late summer the whole... the party was over.
You know, 'cause Kennedy didn't want another one of them Bay of Pigs.
He told the FBl, "Shut up the camps," you know,
and confiscate the napalm, C-4, you know, stuff like that.
So, I think the G-men... they were just going through the motions for Washington, see?
Their hearts were still with their old FBI buddy Banister.
Oswald?
Yeah.
- Yeah, what? He was there? - He was there, too.
He was there, you know, sometimes meeting with Banister...
with the door shut.
Other times, you know, shootin' the bull with Ferrie, whatever. But he was there, all right.
Anything more specific, Jack?
It's important.
One time, the secretary got upset.
I can't believe it, Mr. Banister. Lee Oswald is down on Canal Street
handing out communist leaflets supporting Castro.
It's okay, Delphine, he's with us.
It's uh... it's okay.
Was anyone else involved at
Banister's level?
Oh, yeah, one guy. I don't know...
Big. White hair.
I saw him come in the office once, and he looked out of place.
You know, like a society guy.
And I can't remember his name, but Oswald was with him.
But, he had something to do with money, 'cause Banister, you know, he'd never kiss anybody's ass.
Oh, he kissed his.
Clay something.
Yeah, that was his name, Clay. Clay.
- Bertrand? - Bertrand, yeah.
- Clay Bertrand? Clay Bertrand. - Yeah, that wa.... Well, I don't know.
- I don't know. Maybe not. I gotta go. No, I gotta go. - No, that's right, Clay Bertrand. No, no, that's right.
He was in the Warren Report. He got Oswald a lawyer.
Was Kennedy ever discussed, Jack?
I don't know.
- The assassination, Jack? - No.
- Never, not with me. Look, I've got to go. - Hold on.
- That's all I'm gonna say. - Hold on. Hold on, Jack. Hold on. What's the problem?
- What's the problem? - What's the problem?
Do I have to spell it out for you, Mr Garrison?
Nobody knows what we're talking about here, Jack.
Oh, you are so naive.
When did you first do business with this Bertrand?
Pipe the bimbo in red!
- Mmm-mmm. Lawdy. - Yeah, she's cute alright,
- but not half as cute as you, Deano. - Thank you!
You should try a legitimate line of business.
Why are you dancing on my head for, my man?
- We've been thick as molasses pie since law school. - Because you're conning me, Dean.
- I read your testimony at the Warren Commission. - There you go again, grain of salt.
You tell them, the day after the assassination, you're called on the phone by this Clay Bertrand
and asked to fly to Dallas and be Lee Oswald's lawyer.
Right.
That's pretty important, Dean.
You also told the FBI that when you met him, he's 6' 2". Then you tell the Commission he's 5' 8".
Now, how the hell does a man shrink like that, Dean?
They put the heat on my man, just like you doing. I gave them anything that popped in my cabeza.
Truth is, I never met the dude.
Well, wonderful.
- One likes friends that have friends. - Indeed.
I don't know what that cat looks like, and furthermore, I don't know where he's at.
All I know is sometimes he sends me some cases.
So, one day he's on the phone, talking to me about going to Dallas reppin' Oswald.
- You ever speak to Oswald in Dallas? - Hell, no.
Like I told that Bertrand cat right off, this ain't my scene, man.
I deal in Muni Court. I'm a hack...
Then how the hell did your name get in the Warren Commission, Dean?
Like I told to the Washington boys,
Bertrand called that summer and asked me to help the kid upgrade his Marine discharge.
Well, I was led to believe that
- Mr. Bertrand said that he would take care of any... - Oh, that's fine.
- Hello, to whom am I speaking? - I'm Clay Bertrand. Whatever they owe, I'll guarantee.
There wasn't no conspiracy, Jim. If there were, why the hell didn't Bobby Kennedy prosecute it as Attorney General?
He was his brother, for Christ's sake!
How the fuck all those people could keep a secret like that, I don't know.
- It was Oswald! He was a fruitcake... - I think we're having a communication problem, Dean.
I know you know who Clay Bertrand is, alright?
Now, stop eating that damn crab meat a minute and listen!
I'm aware of our friendship,
but I want you to know I'm gonna call you in front of the Grand Jury,
and you lie to the Grand Jury as you've been lying to me,
I'm gonna charge you with perjury.
Alright? Now, I took nine judges on right here in New Orleans, Deano.
I beat them all. So, am I communicating with you?
Is this off the record, daddy-o?
Good. In that case, let me sum it up for you real quick.
If I answer that question you keep asking,
if I give you the name of the big enchilada, you know,
then it's bon voyage, Deano! I mean like permanent!
I mean, like a bullet in my head, you dig?
You're a mouse fighting a gorilla. Kennedy's as dead as that crab meat!
The government's still breathing. You want to line up with a dead man?
Read my lips, Deano: either you dance into the Grand Jury with the real identity of Clay Bertrand,
or your fat behind's going to the slammer. Now, you dig me?
You're as crazy as your mama! Goes to show, it's in the genes.
You have any idea what you're getting yourself into, daddy-o?
The government's gonna jump all over your head, Jimbo, and go cock-a-doodle-doo.
Good day to you, sir.
District Attorney Garrison to see Prisoner 5388,
ward block 237B.
We don't need no gates out there with that swamp.
Many of them gone in there, ain't none of them come out.
Hey Willie!
O'Keefe!
You got visitors, here. You don't give them no trouble, now. You hear me, boy?
- How you doing, Mr. Broussard? - Hey, let's go, Willie.
Keep it going, boys! No slow fucking.
Grab the get-back over here. Get in line there.
I want to thank you, Mr. O'Keefe, for this time.
Yeah, I ain't got nothing but time, Mr. Garrison.
Minutes, hours, days... years of them.
Time just stands still here, like a snake sunning itself on the road.
Clay Bertrand, Willie.
Yeah, Clay.
I met him sometime in
June of '62. The Masquerade Bar?
Dave Ferrie took me there for the expressed reason to meet him.
For sexual purposes?
Well, yeah.
Did he pay you for this?
$20 each time. Hell, ain't no secret. That's what I'm in here for.
Anything else unusual about him you'd be able to describe in a court of law?
I remember he had some kind of thing wrong with his leg, a limp.
You know, don't get me wrong. He's not one of those limp wrists.
He's a butch John. I mean, you meet him on the street, you'd never snap.
You could play poker with him, go fishing with the man, you'd never snap in a million years.
One night we was over at David Ferrie's place having a party.
That was sometime late near the summer of '63.
There was about nine to ten people there.
Cuban, you know. Friends of Dave's, and doing some stuff in the bush with him.
Place was a mess, man. Dave's mind was a mess. There's all these mice cages all over
'cause he's working on his cure for cancer.
Dave's smart, though. He's sharp. Speaks five languages.
He knows philosophy, medicine, military history, politics.
Said he wanted to be a priest, but
they defrocked him 'cause he was queer.
And that's where you met Oswald for the first time?
Yeah, strange guy. Dave introduced him as...
Willie, I want you to say hello to Leon Oswald.
Hey, how you doing, man?
What the fuck is he doing here?
Well, fuck you, motherfucker.
Okay, okay. Come on. Come, come, come.
Leon's in a bad mood. Don't get excited. He's alright.
You said that this Leon was actually Lee Harvey Oswald?
Fuck yeah. Hey man, I got no reason to lie to you.
I'm already in jail.
Go on, Willie.
Finally, they got out of there and I found myself alone with Dave,
and this Leon,
two of the Cubans, and this guy Bertrand.
Dave pulled out these clippings he'd been carrying around.
You know, he'd been obsessed with Castro and Kennedy for months,
and he started in again.
Fucking little ass-wipe closed down the camps, took all our C-4,
took 10,000 fucking rounds, 3,000 pounds of gunpowder,
all our fucking weapons!
I tell you...
shit, you want a free Cuba? You gotta whack out the fucking Beard!
Yeah, well, that faggot Kennedy won't let us. Our hands are empty. How can we kill him?
The real problem getting at him: Castro has informers on every block.
Bullshit! They got all kinds of new stuff.
I could show you dozens of fucking poisons! Just stick it in his food! He'd die in three days!
No trace!
We could put something in his beard, make his beard fall out. He'd look fucking ridiculous without his beard!
The other problem is, is that fucking Kennedy. He's doing all kinds of deals with that bastard Khrushchev.
Licking his ass.
An inspired act of God should happen here, okay, and put a Texan in the White House!
Then the Cubans left. Dave was drunk, now. Really drunk.
He started in on Kennedy again.
...'cause I will kill. Right in the White House! I'll stab him right in his fucking heart!
Somebody gotta get rid of this fucker!
Come on, Dave. You ain't ever gonna get that son of a bitch.
No? It won't be long. Mark my words. That fucker will get what's coming to him.
It could be blamed on Castro. The whole country will want to invade Cuba.
- All we gottta do is get Kennedy in the open. - David! David!
Always some harebrained scheme or another.
Oh! What have we here?
Let's have some more champagne, shall we?
What about the Secret Service? The cops?
If it's planned right, it's no problem. Look how close they got to De Gaulle.
Eisenhower was always riding around in an open top.
We need three mechanics, three different locations.
An office building with a high-powered rifle.
Triangulation of crossfire, that's the key.
That's the key.
A diversionary shot gets the Secret Service looking the other way.
Boom! You get the kill shot.
The crucial thing is, one man has to be sacrificed.
Then, in the commotion of the crowd the job gets done.
The others fly out of the country to some place with no extradition.
Why don't we drop this subject? It's one thing to engage in banter with all these youngsters,
but this sort of thing could be so easily misunderstood.
I didn't think much about it at the time. It's just bullshit, you know.
Everybody likes to make themselves out to be something more than they are,
especially in the homosexual underworld.
But when they got him, man,
I got scared,
real scared,
and that's when I got popped.
You realize the things you're saying, Willie, are gonna be attacked by a lot of different people.
Oh, bring all those motherfuckers on, man! Bring their college degrees in here. I got nothing to hide.
You can't buy me. They can't buy me.
- I don't even need this damn parole! - What are you talking about, "parole"?
You a goddamn liberal, Mr. Garrison. You don't know shit 'cause you never been fucked in the ass!
This ain't about justice! You think this is about justice? No, this is about order!
Who rules? 'Cause, see, fascism is coming back.
Alright, nobody wants to buy you. Nobody wants to buy you, and no one's promising you a parole, here.
I want to be perfectly clear about that.
What I need to know is, why. Alright? Why are you telling us this.
'Cause that motherfucker, Kennedy,
stole that motherfucking election, that's why.
Nixon was going to be one of the great Presidents till Kennedy wrecked this country.
Got niggers all over the place asking for their damn rights! Why do you think we got all this crime, now?
He promised those motherfuckers too goddamn much, you ask me.
Revolution's coming. Bullshit, man! Fascism is coming back!
I'm gonna tell you this: the day that communist son of a bitch died was a great day,
a great day for this country,
and I just hate to think that they blame it on some silly, fucking Oswald,
didn't know shit, anyway, man.
People got to know. People got to know why he was killed:
because he was
a communist.
Go ahead, man. You go ahead and you put me on the stand, man. I'll tell the same goddamned story!
Don't matter, fuck all to me!
Alright, Willie. Thank you.
We'll be in touch.
Alright.
Hey, you know, you're not a bad-looking man, Mr. Garrison.
Not bad looking at all.
I get out of here, I'm gonna come see you. We can have some fun!
None of their testimony's gonna hold up in court, Chief.
Hell, all three of them have reputations lower than crocodile piss.
That bother you, Bill?
I always wonder in court why it is, because a woman's a prostitute, she has to have bad eyesight.
Go find this Clay Bertrand. Start by checking around the Quarter.
And the six of us, with almost no budget and in secret
are gonna solve a case that the Warren Commission couldn't solve?
I didn't pick you because of your legal skill, you know?
Gee, thank's, Boss.
It's because you're a fighter. I like a man who's not afraid of bad odds.
Mr. Garrison, how are you?
- Remember me? - I surely do. Did you vote for me?
I certainly did, sir. We sang together at the Royal Orleans, remember?
Oh, yeah, we sang:
"You're the cream in my coffee"
Mr. Garrison, we haven't seen enough of you lately.
Been too busy, Paul. Elected men, they can't have as much fun as they used to.
It's always nice to see you. Pleasure to serve you, always.
- Hey, Jim! - How are you? Nice to see you.
- Hey, Jim. - Al.
- Jim. - Welcome back, Lou.
- Paul, you think I could get a martini? - Yes? They're waiting for you, sir.
Perfect.
- Keep that table open for us, will you Paul? - Yes, sir.
Find anything out on those hobos?
Photographer from the Dallas Times Herald got some great shots of them.
Never published.
Can't say that comes as a surprise anymore.
They took them to the sheriff's office, and they let them go,
and no record of them ever being questioned.
Take a good look, Chief. Any of them look like the hobos you remember?
These two look pretty young.
Not a single frayed collar or cuff. New haircuts, fresh shave,
clean hands, new shoe leather.
Well, who the hell are they, then?
- Hi, Susie. - Hello.
- I'm sorry I'm late. - Come on, sit down.
This could be it. This could be it. Let's start looking for them.
What about that railroad man, Lee Bowers, who saw those men at the picket fence?
Graveyard, dead... August this year.
Single-car accident on an empty road in Midlothian, Texas.
The doctor said it was some kind of strange shock when he died.
We need to find more witnesses, Lou.
Well, there was Rose Cheramie, a whore.
She said she was a dope runner for Jack Ruby,
and she said that Ruby knew Oswald for years.
Can we talk to her?
She's dead, too. Hit and run.
Why don't we go right to the horse's mouth, Chief?
Jack Ruby's been rotting away in a Dallas jail cell for three years. Maybe he's ready to crack.
Can't do it, Bill. If I go to him our investigation will hit the front pages by sunrise.
Alright? It'll blow up right in our face. Susie, what did you find out on Oswald?
Negative on his tax records: classified.
First time I know a DA can't get a tax record.
So, I put together a list of all the CIA files on Oswald that were part of the Warren Report and asked for them.
There are about 1,200 documents,
and can't get one of them.
All classified as secret on the grounds of national security.
They gave me his grammar school records!
It's a study of his pubic hairs!
Lonely kid, no father.
Joins the Marines at 17.
He learns Russian. He acts overtly Marxist,
but he's stationed at a top-secret air base in Japan
where U-2 spy flights over Russia originate.
He's discharged from the Marines, supposedly because his mother's sick,
stays home three days,
and then, with a $1,500 ticket from a $203 bank account, he goes to Moscow.
Mr. Oswald, do you understand the severity of the action that you're about to take?
Yes, I do, sir, and I am also very familiar with the arguments that...
I wish to renounce my citizenship
and become a Soviet citizen.
I'm going to make known to them all information I have concerning the Marine Corps.
And he disappears for six weeks, presumably with the KGB.
Finally, they shuttle him to a radio factory in Minsk,
where he lives as high on the hog as he ever has.
He's given 5,000 rubles, a roomy apartment with a balcony,
has affairs with local girls.
Makes sense: he's a spokesman.
But... but he never writes, speaks, or does any propaganda for the Russians.
He meets Marina,
whose uncle is a colonel in Soviet intelligence, at a trade union dance.
She thinks he's Russian by the way he speaks.
Six weeks later they marry, have a daughter.
The only explanation for the royal treatment can be that he did gave them radar secrets,
or fake secrets.
Six months after he arrives in Russia,
Francis Gary Powers' U-2 spy flight goes down in Russia.
That plane was untouchable.
Powers hinted that Oswald
could have given the Russians enough data to hit it,
and as a direct result,
the peace summit between Khrushchev and Eisenhower failed.
I can't help thinking,
maybe someone in our military didn't want the peace conference to happen.
- Susie, come on. - Maybe Oswald was part of that!
- Susie, you are an assistant DA, remember? - It gets weirder!
- Just stick to what you can prove in court. Please. - Facts? You want facts?
Susie, don't get sidetracked.
How does he get back to the States? That's the point.
Alright? Does he have any problems with Uncle Sam?
No! None! The State Department issues him a new passport within 48 hours
and loans him the money to travel.
He's never investigated or charged by the Navy for revealing classified information
or, as far as we know, debriefed by the CIA!
Son of a bitch should have been prosecuted as a traitor the minute he stepped off the boat.
What about Marina, she have any problems getting out?
No! None, either. No, it's bizarre. It's next to impossible to get Russian sweethearts out.
This is a man who has defected once already. It's crazy. Ordinary people
they get blacklisted for having leftist affiliations.
Doesn't add up, does it?
Next thing we know, he's living in Dallas-Fort Worth, October '62,
working six months at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall.
This is a photographic firm that contracts to make maps for the US Army.
Oswald becomes chummy with the White Russian community of Dallas,
all rabid anti-communists. It's odd.
His closest friend is an oilman, named George DeMohrenschildt,
who's about 35 years older than Oswald, who is only 23 and supposedly broke.
DeMohrenschildt is a member of the Dallas Petroleum Club, speaks five languages,
and was a French Vichy intelligence during the war.
Also, rumored to have been a Nazi sympathizer.
DeMohrenschildt draws a picture of Oswald as an intellectual,
well read, speaks excellent Russian, a man who adored JFK.
Well, I think he's made some mistakes regarding Cuba.
I think he's doing a pretty good job. If he succeeds, in my opinion,
I think he'd make a great President and a handsome one, too.
That's scenery, Susie. Now, don't get sidetracked.
This is the same man that, bottom line, nailed Oswald to the Warren Commission
as a potentially violent man and linked him to the rifle.
Well, in that sense, Castro is an experimenter.
It could go any way with that country.
- It could go the way of the Communism... - What you got there?
Do you have rifles in there?
Lee, tell me what are you shooting at, rabbits or Fascists?
- I hunt. - You hunt... hillbillies.
We don't know he's CIA. Let's circle him very probable.
Call him Oswald's handler.
The Oswalds are introduced by George DeMohrenschildt to Janet and Bill Williams.
It's through Janet Williams in October, '63, that Lee gets the job
at the warehouse right smack on Elm Street at the book depository.
Presumably, so he can now exercise his intellect stacking school texts at $1.25 an hour.
Marina fights often with Lee about many things.
His secrecy, their lack of money.
She says that Lee is not sexually adequate.
Lee hits her on several occasions.
Now, at the age of 24,
he rents a small room in Dallas under the alias of O.H. Lee.
Do you want to look at television? Are you alright, Mr. Lee?
No, thank you.
All I can find out about the Williams is that their tax returns are classified
and that Bill Williams has links through his family to the CIA
and does classified work for Bell Helicopter.
Bill's convenient separation from Janet allows Marina to move into her house
where she suddenly becomes Marina's best friend,
and there, Marina and Lee have a second daughter.
I have to go away. Just for a short while.
What is the matter with this family?
I love Lee,
and I sorry him.
You're sorry?
When he's arrested, Marina buries him with the public.
Her description of him is that of a psychotic and violent man.
I have too much facts,
and facts tell me that Lee shot Kennedy.
After they kept her locked away for two months surrounded by federal people
and fearing she'd be deported back to Russia.
Alright, the poor woman was probably suffering from nervous exhaustion.
They taught her how to answer.
And when they think she's ready, they buy her new dresses,
polish her appearance, and wheel her out on cue.
- I would like to thank the Warren Commission. - Now, Oswald was no angel, that's clear.
But who was he?
I'm lost, Boss. What are we saying, here?
We're saying that when Oswald went to Russia, he was not a real defector,
that he was an intelligence agent on some kind of mission for our government
and remained one until the day he died. That's what we're saying.
Therefore, because Oswald pulled the trigger,
the intelligence community murdered their own Commander-in-Chief?
Is that what you're saying?
I'll go you one better, Bill.
Maybe Oswald didn't even pull the trigger.
Nitrate tests indicate he hadn't even fired a rifle on November 22nd.
And on top of that, they didn't bother to see if the rifle had been fired that day.
- They had his palm print on the weapon. - Well, it went to the FBl, Bill.
FBI didn't find a goddamn thing.
It comes back a week later and one guy in the Dallas Police Department suddenly finds a palm print?
For all we know, it could have been taken off Oswald in the morgue. There's no chain of evidence.
I never could figure out why this guy orders a traceable weapon
to this post office box, when he can go into any store in Texas,
give a phony name, and walk out with a rifle which can never be traced.
To frame him, obviously!
There's a lot of smoke there, but there's some fire.
We're talking about our government, here.
No, we're talking about a crime, Bill, pure and simple.
Y'all gotta start thinking on a different level like the CIA does.
Now, we're through the looking glass, here, people.
White is black,
and black is white.
Just maybe Oswald is exactly what he said he was:
a patsy.
It's unbelievable. You were here?
Yes, sir. This is where I was sitting.
Shots came from near that wooden fence over there,
near the overpass,
and I saw a man run from the fence toward those railroad cars.
I made it very clear to the Warren people that
one of the shots came from behind that picket fence.
I heard the report and saw the smoke come out six or eight feet above the ground
right out from under those trees.
We, all four of us, all the railroad men,
seen about the same thing.
The smoke came from behind the hedge.
I was standing next to my friend, Mary Moorman, who took the photograph when he was killed.
I stepped down to the curb and yelled,
Hey, Mr. President, look over here!
And then, shots rang out.
Mary fell to the ground right away. She was yelling, "They're shooting! They're shooting! Get down!"
I just stood there watching.
The driver had stopped.
I don't know what was wrong with that driver.
Then,
out of the corner of my eye,
I saw a flash of light in the bushes,
and that last shot
just ripped his head off.
I looked up, and I saw smoke coming from over there, on the knoll.
We came around here to look for tracks.
It rained that morning, and we found a bunch.
Cigarette butts.
And someone had stood about here.
That's a good spot, Chief,
for the head shot.
Everything was just frozen.
Seemed like people weren't even breathing, like you were looking at a picture,
except for this one man.
I saw this one man running from the corner of the book depository
over towards the parking lot.
It was about 11:00 in the morning,
and I was driving west on Elm Street toward the triple underpass in a rented car,
a light-blue Valiant.
I will never forget that day. There was quite a bit of traffic
and I stopped alongside this green pickup truck,
and I remember it being very noticeable because it had one of its wheels parked up on the side of the curb,
and then, when I saw the gun, I thought,
well, the Secret Service is not very secret.
Then, the next morning on Saturday, I went down to the FBI office
and the agents showed me some photographs
and I picked out three pictures that looked generally like the driver of the truck.
That's the man.
You mean you identified Jack Ruby on Saturday?
That's right.
The day before he shot Oswald?
That's right. When I saw him on TV, I was shocked.
I turned to my family and I said, "That's the man I saw in the truck."
But you didn't seem nearly so sure in your statement to the Warren Commission.
What about these others? You said one of them might be him?
They look a bit like him, but I'm sure this is the man.
Well, it was him I was chasing up the grassy knoll.
I thought maybe our guys had shot back, and maybe we got one of them.
When I got up to the parking lot,
all I saw were railroad workers and Dallas' finest.
Ma'am, you're coming with us.
I am not! I don't know you! We've gotta find the shooter!
I said you're coming with us. I want those pictures in your pocket!
I don't have any, son of a bitch!
He put a hurt on me, but good.
But they must have been watching the whole thing, 'cause they knew everything Mary and I had done all day.
Of course, I guess I wasn't too hard to find, wearing that red raincoat.
- How many shots did you say you heard? - Four to six.
That's impossible!
You heard echoes!
Echoes!
We have three bullets and three shots that came from the book depository.
That's all we're willing to say!
No, sir!
I saw a man shooting from over there behind that fence. Now, what are you going to do about that?
- You gotta go out there and get him! - We have that taken care of!
You only heard three shots, and you're not to talk about this with anybody.
No one, do you understand me?
Which is strange 'cause it's less than 20 minutes after the assassination.
Get her out of here.
I knew something was crooked as a dog's hind leg.
Sure enough, when I read my testimony as published by the Warren Commission,
it was a fabrication from start to finish.
That's what bothers me, Mr. Garrison, is they've been altered, my statements.
See, this one here says,
"Mercer could not identify any of the photographs as being identical with the person that she had observed
"slouched over the wheel of a green Ford pickup truck." Well, that is not true.
I never said any such thing. I recognized him and I told them so.
Just take your time. Be sure.
I'm sure.
And then here on the Dallas Sheriff's report...
this is really strange.
You see that notarized signature right there at the bottom of each page?
That's not my signature,
and there never was any notary present during any of my questioning.
Mrs. Mercer, as a former FBI man, it's...
it's difficult to accept this.
Beverly, tell Mr. Garrison about the Carousel Club.
Okay.
Well, I used to go over there a lot to see Jack, and especially my friend, Jatta, who danced there.
It was a real swinging spot in town.
Everybody came!
Businessmen, politicians from Austin, LBJ's friends...
Dallas was a slowpokin' town back then, I mean...
You chewed toothpicks, played dominoes, spit, dated policemen.
But Jack was always exciting. There were always cops there.
Jack liked them around, even though he used to throw out the drunks himself.
He was kind of a violent-tempered man, actually.
You know, everybody in those days knew Jack was in the mob.
Cops back then... they were bad.
They'd shake you down for the money in your pocket.
- You know, there was this one case I'll never forget. - Well, um, Beverly, what about Lee?
Oh, well, one time I came in and Jack introduced me to these two guys.
He says, "Beverly, I'd like you to meet my friend, Lee and..."
I don't remember the other guy's name,
but he was a weird looking guy! He had these eyebrows.
He kind of looked like a buzzard!
Well, Lee didn't make much of an impression. He was, um...
Well, he really wasn't very good looking, and...
and he didn't look like he had any money, and he was in a bad mood.
So, I didn't pay him much mind.
You know, I may not remember a name, but I always remember a face.
Then a couple weeks later when I saw him on the television,
I screamed, My God, that's him!
That's Jack's friend!
Will you testify, Beverly?
I don't think so.
Now, I thought when we came here, we had an agreement.
I don't want to become another statistic.
Now, we could call you in, Beverly. We could call you in.
If they can kill the President of the United States,
do you think they're gonna think twice about a two-bit showgirl like me?
I understand the pressure you're under, Beverly.
Don't think for a minute I don't.
We both do.
Mr. Chief Justice, do you understand that I can not tell the truth here, in Dallas?
There are people here who do not want me to tell the truth,
who don't want me to have a retrial?
Mr. Ruby, I don't see why don't you just tell us now?
My life is in danger!
If you request that I go back to Washington with you,
that is, if you want to hear further testimony from me...
Can you do that? Can you take me with you?
No, that could not be done.
There would be no safe place for you.
We're not law enforcement officers.
Mr. Ruby, there's a great deal at stake in this matter.
See, if I am eliminated,
there won't be any way of knowing any bit of the truth pertaining to my situation,
and consequently, a whole new form of government is gonna take over this country...
Yeah!
And I know that I won't live to see you some other time,
because I want to tell the truth,
and then,
I'm gonna leave this world.
The Zapruder film establishes three shots in 5.6 seconds?
Here...
I'm Oswald.
Time me.
Go.
Time?
Between six... seven seconds.
And that's without really aiming.
Key is, the second and third shots came almost right on top of each other.
It takes a minimum
2.3 seconds to recycle this thing.
The other problem is, there was a tree there
blocking the first two shots at the time they come in the Zapruder film.
Didn't J. Edgar Hoover say something about that... leaves are falling in November?
It's a Texas live oak, Chief.
It sheds its leaves the first week of March.
So, you take this Carcano, world's worst shoulder weapon,
and you try to hit a moving target at 88 yards through heavy foliage.
No way.
Here.
FBI tried two sets of tests.
Not one of their sharpshooters could match Oswald's performance,
not one.
And Oswald was at best a medium shot.
The scope was defective on it, too.
I mean, this is the whole essence of the case to me.
The guy couldn't do the shooting.
Nobody could,
and they sold this lemon to the American public.
The Zapruder film was the proof they didn't count on, Lou.
We gotta get our hands on it.
That means we'll have to subpoena Time-Life.
Let me ask you something, Lou.
Why not just shoot Kennedy coming up Houston?
There's plenty of time.
- He's out in the open. - I know, I keep asking myself the same thing.
- It's a frontal shot. - Even if you miss him for the first shot,
if he accelerates, you still got him for the second shot.
No, the only reason for waiting to get him on Elm
is you got him in a triangulated crossfire.
You put a team there down at the fence
for a frontal shot, flat, low trajectory.
Put a third team down here in this building
here on a low floor.
When Kennedy gets in the kill zone there, it's a turkey shoot.
How many men?
Okay.
One shooter. One spotter on a radio. Maybe three teams.
And I'd say these are professional riflemen, too, Chief. They're serious people.
Hunters.
Patient.
Takes skill to kill with a rifle, Chief.
You gotta figure that's why there's been no execution of a chief executive with one in 200 years.
Three,
two,
one.
Main Street's over there, right?
Original parade route on the way to the Trade Mart.
That's too far, right?
Too far.
Impossible shot. So, they change the parade route.
Bring him down here. Moving at a normal 25 mph.
They knew the motorcade would have to slow down to about 10 mph
to make that turn there, and that's where they got him.
Who do you think changed the parade route, Lou?
Beats me. Secret Service, city officials, Dallas Police.
You know who the mayor was at the time?
Earle Cabell.
- Guess who his brother is? - Who?
- General Charles Cabell, - Whoah!
Deputy director of the CIA.
Kennedy fired him in '61 because of the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
Moved back to the Pentagon and called Kennedy a traitor.
When he came to New Orleans to address the Foreign Policy Association,
- you know who introduced him? - Who?
Our friend, Clay Shaw.
Didn't the Warren Commission call him?
His boss was the one on the Warren Commission
who handled the leads in the intelligence community.
- Allen Dulles? - Head of the CIA since '53.
Kennedy fired them both.
Cabell was his Deputy for nine years.
Talk about the fox investigating the chicken coop.
Now, we'll have to subpoena them both.
Clay Bertrand? Sure, I know him.
Comes around the Quarter.
Well, who is he, Joe? I've been to all the bars. Nobody wants to talk.
Why should they talk to you?
I told your uncle, I never met a lawman who wasn't a punk.
A big-shot businessman. I seen him on the TV news, lotta...
with all the other big shots.
The guy's a fag, you know?
Goes by another name.
What's the other name?
Shaw.
Clay Shaw.
Clay Bertrand is Clay Shaw?
Guy who used to run the International Trade Mart?
Yeah.
What's the big mystery? Everybody down here knows the guy.
Then why does he call himself Bertrand?
Who gives a shit what he calls himself?
Hey, what about that Grand Jury thing? You think you're gonna give us a little help on that?
I hope so, 'cause we could use it.
Your hunch was right, Boss, but...
it's even spookier than we thought.
Starting in September '63 on, two months before the assassination,
there are sightings of Oswald all over Dallas,
buying ammunition, getting a teles... getting a... getting a telescopic sight fixed,
going to rifle ranges.
Early November, at a Dallas downtown Lincoln-Mercury dealership,
- where he tells the salesman, Albert Bogard... - Let's take it over for a test drive.
Despite the fact he has no license, and from what Marina says, doesn't know how to drive,
he hits the curves like A.J. Foyt at the Indy 500.
Bogard later told his boss he drove like a madman.
Hey, 300 bucks down, now, Mr. Oswald, you can drive out of here.
What? For this heap?
No honest working man can afford to buy a car in this goddamn country anymore.
Maybe I'll have to go to Russia and buy a car.
Really dumb dialogue, like he's trying to draw attention to himself,
a real moron. He walks out.
Salesman remembers him as about 5'7", but we know from Oswald's draft card that he was actually 5'11".
Other witnesses see him on several separate days at different firing ranges.
One time, November 9th,
he decides he needs to practice on the target of the guy next to him.
I didn't pay two bits for a target just to have someone else shoot at it!
Hey, I'm sorry, buddy.
I thought I was shooting at that son of a bitch, Kennedy.
As subtle as a cockroach crawling across a white rug, isn't it?
Then he shows up at Sylvia Odio's,
a Cuban lady in Dallas working in the anti-Castro underground.
The two Cubans introduce him as Leon Oswald.
Something about the man bothers her.
About 48 hours later, one of the Cubans calls her back.
What did you think of Leon Oswald last night?
I don't care. I don't know Oswald.
You know what he said to us?
He said, "You Cubans don't have any guts, 'cause Kennedy
"should have been killed after the Bay of Pigs."
It's like he's giving her information she doesn't even ask for.
She's scared, doesn't see him again
till she sees Oswald's picture in the paper.
But the Warren Commission says that Sylvia
has bad eyesight because they have Oswald in Mexico
at this time trying to get back into Cuba.
The CIA has a camera outside the Cuban Embassy,
and they say that this...
is Oswald in Mexico. Now...
If this is Oswald it must be our third Oswald.
It's interesting, the extent to which the Warren Commission went to make him a communist.
I'm beginning to think the point of the Mexican episode was to lay the blame at Fidel Castro's door.
I mean, if Oswald, or someone purporting to be Oswald
had gotten into Cuba, come back, then killed the President,
the American public once again would have supported Cuban invasion.
I even have doubts about this photo, Boss.
This pretty much convicted Oswald in the public's mind,
but Oswald told Captain Fritz during his interrogation that the photo was a fake.
This is not me!
- That came from Janet Williams' garage. - Well, I never saw this picture.
That is my face, but my face has been superimposed. The rest of the picture is not me at all.
I have done a lot of photographic work, and that picture was made by someone else!
I put this picture to two experts.
Look at the way the shadows on the nose
fall in a straight line, like it's high noon,
but the shadow down here on the ground reads more like late afternoon or early morning.
It's not the same time.
Also, look at the crop marks across the chin.
Seems like this head is pasted on somebody else's body,
implicating him with the rifle and the gun.
Who the hell are you, Alex Hidell or Lee Oswald?
Well, you're the policeman. You work it out.
Now, it gets positively spooky.
In January, 1961, in New Orleans, at the Bolton Ford dealership,
when the Oswald we know is in Russia,
there is a man using the name of Oswald to buy trucks
for the Friends of Democratic Cuba.
Salesman never sees him again.
But guess who's on the Articles of Incorporation of the Friends for Democratic Cuba?
Who?
Guy Banister.
Banister has someone using the name Oswald to buy the trucks.
Hoover at the FBI writes a memo dated June of 1960,
that someone could be using Oswald's passport and identity.
Goddamn, they put Oswald together from day one,
like some dummy corporation in the Bahamas. You just move him around a board.
Anybody want to quit?
Dumb question. Put your hands down.
I found Clay Bertrand.
Who?
Grab your socks and hose and pull.
Clay Bertrand is Clay Shaw.
- Shaw? Director of the Trade Mart? - Former director of the Trade Mart.
It's incredible.
Can you get some sworn statements?
Now, that's gonna be tough. Nobody's talking.
I think we should have him in for a little chat.
Oh, honey, I hate for him to get him dragged into this.
He's done so much for the city with all that restoration in the Quarter.
Remember we saw him at the Bali Hai fund-raiser? He seems like such a nice man.
Honey, it'll be off the record. I'll bring him in on a Sunday.
A quiet little chat between gentlemen.
In heavy fighting in Vietnam today,
seven more American soldiers died and twenty-three were wounded.
The body count for this week now stands at sixty-seven Americans
and 626 enemy soldiers killed in action.
Liz?
President Johnson, meanwhile, said he regretted
there is no end in sight to the war in Vietnam.
500,000 American troops are now fighting.
We face more cost,
more loss,
and more agony.
Come on outside and help the kids hunt for Easter eggs.
Aw, honey, that's the kids' job. You know I don't like these tribal rituals, anyway.
Besides, I told you I'm talking to Clay Shaw this morning.
Honey, we're going to Antoine's with the kids like we do every year.
No, I told you I was talking to Shaw.
Well, why in the world would you do it in the middle of Easter Sunday?
Because, when I scheduled it, I didn't realize it was a holiday.
Look at the calendar!
- Why didn't you say something? - You said a Sunday, not Easter Sunday!
Clay Shaw is important.
- And we're not. - I didn't say that, Liz.
I didn't say that.
You're missing most of your life and you don't know it, honey.
The kids are missing out, too.
- You're not the only one making sacrifices around here. - Look, I'll rush and I'll be there by 2:00, I promise.
Okay, now, just... You just go ahead without me.
Mr. Garrison, what can I do for you on Easter Sunday?
I'm sorry, Mr. Shaw, to interrupt this holiday, but
I feel this is conversation we might better have out of the everyday bustle in this office.
I'm not sure I understand.
Well, in an investigation we're conducting, your name has come up a number of times.
I wouldn't imagine where.
We've recently talked to a number of men who claim to know you.
Are you acquainted with David Logan?
No. Never heard of him.
A Perry Russo?
No.
A Willie O'Keefe?
No, I don't believe I know anyone by that name.
Mr. O'Keefe told us he met you at the Masquerade Bar down in the Quarter,
and several evenings later you had him over for dinner at your apartment on Dauphine Street.
- Do you recall that? - Of course not. I don't know this man.
Be still my heart.
Obviously, then, I wouldn't have him over for dinner.
Hope you like squab.
Champagne?
Perhaps a few more details about the evening will refresh your memory.
Mr. O'Keefe told us dinner was served by a uniformed waiter, a colored man.
He particularly remembered that you sat at one end and he at the other, which he found rather unusual,
because the table was so long.
How was your mousse?
Does that bring back memories of Willie O'Keefe?
Not at all.
On the other hand, I do have
a lovely Chippendale dining table,
and I often have a friend over sitting at one end while I sit at the other.
It's precisely the point of a long dining table.
The splendor of the meal adds to the enjoyment of it.
I would imagine that a uniformed waiter helps.
It adds a taste to the elegance, for which I must confess
a weakness now and then.
I call him Smedley.
His real name's Frankie Jenkins, but I could hardly imagine anything more uncouth during dinner
than my turning toward the kitchen and hollering,
"Frankie!"
Where is all this leading to, Mr. Garrison?
After dinner, you paid him to have sex.
That is absolute nonsense.
The Quarter is filled with vivid imaginations, my dear Mr. Garrison.
Grimy young hoodlums who will say and do
- anything, as you well know... - In the course of that night,
Mr. O-Keefe told us that a man named
David Ferrie stopped by the house along with another young man.
- Who? - David Ferrie.
No, I don't believe I know anyone by that name.
Of course, never having met Mr. O'Keefe, I could hardly have met Mr. Ferrie.
You're mine, Mary. You're mine.
The four of you partied early into the morning hours.
Take a look at this picture.
Well, I'm sure I've never met anyone of such bizarre appearance.
Only way you get this, do exactly what I say. I'm the man.
Does the name "Clay Bertrand" mean anything to you?
- Clay Bertrand. - Clay Bertrand.
I believe there was a man with a name similar to that, worked over at the Chamber of Commerce.
- That the man you had in mind? - No, it was not.
Mr. Shaw, can you identify this man?
Naturally. Are you claiming, Mr. Garrison, that Mr. Oswald also had dinner with me?
Mr. Shaw, have you ever met Lee Harvey Oswald?
You really have me consorting with a sordid cast of characters.
- Please answer the question. - 'Course not.
Such a pity, that assassination.
In fact, I admired President Kennedy, a man of true panache,
wife of impeccable taste.
Well, why don't we just go ahead and order without your daddy. I don't think he'll mind.
I want a Shirley Temple!
- Kids, put your water guns away. - Me, too!
When's Daddy coming, mama?
Soon. He's coming soon.
He's real sorry he couldn't start with us, but he promised he'd be here.
Daddy never keeps his promises.
I'm full!
Mr. Shaw, this Italian newspaper article is saying that
you were a member of the board of Centro Mondo Commerciale in Italy,
that this company was a creature of the CIA for the transfer of funds in Italy
for illegal political espionage activity.
Says that this company was expelled from Italy for those activities.
I'm well aware of that asinine article. I'm thinking very seriously of suing that rag of a newspaper.
It also says that this company is linked to the Schlumberger Tool Company here
in Homer, Louisiana, which helped provide arms to David Ferrie and his Cubans.
Mr. Garrison, you're reaching.
Am I?
I'm an international businessman. The Trade Mart, which I founded,
is America's commercial pipeline to Latin America. I trade everywhere.
I am accused, as are all businessmen, of all things.
I somehow go about my business, make money, help society the best I can
and try to promote free trade in this world.
Mr. Shaw,
have you ever been a contract agent for the Central Intelligence Agency?
And if I were,
Mr. Garrison, do you believe I would be here today
talking to somebody like you?
No.
- People like you don't have to, I guess. - May I go?
People like you, they just walk between the raindrops.
May I go?
Yes.
Regardless of what you may think of me, Mr. Garrison, I am a patriot first and foremost.
I've spent half my life in the United States military
serving and defending this great country, Mr. Shaw,
and you're the first person I ever met who considered it an act of patriotism to murder his own president.
Now, just a minute, sir, you are way out of line.
I'm sorry, Mr. Shaw, it's getting late. That's all the questions we have.
Thank you for your honesty and for coming in today.
I enjoyed meeting with you gentlemen,
and you, Miss Cox. It was most pleasant.
I wish to extend to each of you and to each of your families my best wishes for a Happy Easter.
"One may smile, and smile and be a villain."
Goddamn it! We've got one of them.
Did you see that?
- Hi, honey. - Hi.
Tough day.
Where you been?
My sympathies.
Liz, I'm really sorry, but the meeting took much longer than expected.
Just a second, Jasper.
We waited for hours, Jim!
Honey, you could have telephoned.
I know. I don't know what to say except I'm sorry, alright. I just... I just don't have rabbits on my mind.
You know what I think?
I think you care more about John Kennedy than your own family.
All day the kids were asking, "Where's Daddy?" What am I supposed to tell your kids, Jim?
I don't know what to tell them!
How about the truth? I'm doing my job to make sure they grow up
in a country where justice won't be an arcane, vanished idea they read about in history books,
- like dinosaurs or the lost continent of Atlantis. - That sounds real dandy!
It doesn't replace a husband or a father on Easter Sunday.
Well, it's going to get worse, Liz!
I beat you again, you'd better give me a raise.
Well, who can you brag to about beating me?
Do you know who killed President Kennedy? Was there a conspiracy here in New Orleans?
- Excuse me, gentlemen. - I don't know what you're talking about.
Clear the door! Watch out! Move!
Congratulations, Boss, you're page one.
And it ain't pretty. It says we've spent more than $8,000 on unexplained travel and investigative expenses
in a period since November, 1966.
Goddamn!
They went to the public records. They got the vouchers that we requested for withdrawals.
Shaw must have gotten them on our tail.
It could have been Ferrie, Martin, Andrews, any of them.
Dammit, we didn't talk to Ruby 'cause of them and they're on our asses for a measly $8,000?
They're hunting down the news, it's their business.
Well, you'd at least think they'd attempt to understand what we're trying to do.
Well, getting angry doesn't accomplish a damn thing. Now...
Son of a bitch.
Well, this changes everything now, doesn't it?
What do you mean?
Well,
either we pull out now or we go through some heavy flak together.
Bear in mind, each of you, this may affect the rest of your careers, your lives.
Any one of you who want to pull out now,
I assure you, I will bear you no ill feelings towards that person. I will reassign you to regular duties.
There it is, then. Thank you.
It means a great deal to me.
I'm giving this office $6,000 from my National Guard savings account,
so we can continue.
I'll make speeches where I can and pick up additional money.
Mr. Garrison, what shall I tell them? They're piling up outside the door.
They want a statement. The phones are going crazier than bugs on a cake.
Neither confirm, deny, nor discuss, Sharon.
Goodbye, ladies, gentlemen.
I'm going home to where I can get a decent day's work done.
Mr. Garrison's own silence on the subject has raised some interesting questions.
With taxpayer money, has he uncovered some valuable, new evidence,
or is he merely saving the information which will gain for him exposure at a national level?
Mr. Garrison, it seems,
- should have some explanation. - Yeah.
Did your office plant that garbage in the fucking paper?
- Who is this? - You know exactly who the fuck this is!
- Dave? - Yeah, you got it. Listen,
since you're the only straight- shooter in that fucking office,
I'd like a fucking answer from you! Did you plant it?
Dave, do you think we're out of our minds? The whole building's been a zoo since that broke.
We can't get a thing done. Reporters are everywhere. Do you think we want that?
Somebody planted that fucking story! Somebody tipped off the press!
I'm one of fucking Garrison's suspects! I can't... I can't go home!
The fucking maggots are everywhere! Do you know what you've done to me?
Hey, calm down, Dave. What?
From here on,
I am a fucking dead man! A dead man!
Dave, you weren't even mentioned in the story! Don't jump to conclusions!
Look, meet me in the lobby of the Fontainebleau in 20 minutes.
I guarantee you, the boss will protect you. He likes you. He likes your mind.
I guess, you know, I just don't know who to trust anymore, you know?
I suppose I could use a pot of hot coffee and a few packs of Luckys, huh?
So, you got anything new in the investigation?
Who are you scared of, Dave?
Me? Everybody: Agency, mob, Cubans.
That' it, follow the Cubans.
Check them out. Here, Miami, Dallas.
Check out a guy named Eladio del Valle.
He used to be my paymaster when I flew missions into Cuba.
Somewhere in Miami, you're on the right track. Hey! Hey! Don't be writing this down!
I ain't cooperating here with no one! What's going on here?
Look, there's a death warrant for me! Don't you get it?
Damn! Wait a minute!
You ain't bugged, are you? You ain't some bitch, Lou,
are you?
Dave, I always play square. No bugs.
I'd love you to go on the record, but I'm in no hurry. Whenever you're ready.
I haven't slept since that shit article come out.
Why'd you guys have to go and get me involved with this?
Did we get you involved, or did Clay Shaw, Dave?
Cocksucking faggot. He got me by the balls.
What do you mean?
You know, photographs, compromising stuff.
He'll use them, too.
Agency plays for keeps.
I knew Oswald. He was in my Civil Air Patrol unit. I taught him everything.
He was a wannabe, you know? Nobody really liked him 'cause they thought he was a snitch.
I treated him good.
He talked about his kid, you know, really wanted him to grow up with a chance, but...
What's this? What's going on, here?
Ain't nobody coming in, Dave.
It's just room service.
Black. Black. Just give it to me. Black.
Shit, my neck is killing me.
I got cancer. I've had it for years.
I've been working with mice, you know, trying to find a cure?
Did you ever work for the CIA?
You make it sound like some remote fucking experience in ancient history.
Man, you don't leave the Agency.
Once you're in, they got you for life.
Shaw?
Shaw? Shaw was an untouchable, highest clearance.
Shaw, Oswald, the Cubans, all Agency.
What about Ruby?
Jack? Jack was a pimp. He was a bagman for the Dallas mob.
He used to run guns to Castro when he was still on our side.
We almost had Castro with us. Then, we tried to whack him.
Everybody keeps flipping sides all the time.
It's fun and games, man, fun and games.
What about the mob, Dave? How do they figure in this?
Shit, they're agency too, man.
The CIA and the Mafia working together,
trying to whack out the Beard, a mutual interest. They've been doing it for years!
There's more to this than you could dream!
Check out something called, mongoose... "Operation Mongoose."
- Mongoose? - Government, Pentagon stuff.
They're in charge. But who the fuck pulls whose chain?
Who the fuck knows?
"Oh, what a deadly web we weave when we practice to deceive."
Then, who killed the President?
Oh, man, why don't you fucking stop it?
Shit! Who do you...
This is too fucking big for you, you know that? This is...
Who did the President? Who killed Kenn... Fuck, man! It's... it's a mystery!
It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma!
The fucking shooters don't even know! Don't you get it?
Fuck, man!
I can't keep talking like this. They're gonna fucking kill me!
I'm gonna fucking die!
Son of a bitch!
It's alright, David.
I don't know what happened.
Fuck!
All I wanted in the world
was to be a Catholic priest,
live in a monastery,
pray, serve God.
I had one fucking...
one... one terrible fucking weakness,
and they defrocked me!
And then I started to lose everything.
It's gonna be okay, Dave.
You just talk to us on the record. We'll protect you. I guarantee it.
They'll get to you too.
They'll destroy you.
They're untouchable, man.
I'm so fucking exhausted, I can't see straight.
A little early for Mardi Gras, isn't it?
Paris Match, the largest magazine in France.
My name is Bulgarinov from Literaturnaya Gazeta from Moscow.
Victoria Taylor, British Private Eye.
You know who shot the President? Mr. Garrison is too busy.
Boss, I'm telling you something or somebody's putting tremendous heat on David Ferrie.
If we sit on our behinds any longer, I don't think the guy's gonna hold on.
Look at this bullshit! He keeps changing what he says!
- We can't possibly call him to a grand jury! - Susie... Susie, watch your language, would you, please?
My instinct is, if Ferrie's gonna keep on deteriorating,
we'll end up getting more out of him when he finally cracks.
Oh, bullshit! Now, if you start...
If we call him in now he might freeze up. We'll lose the best shot we ever had.
You guys don't get it, do you? He can't go down any further. We've got to protect him full time.
Lou, we don't have enough guns to protect anybody full time.
I know what you're going through with Ferrie, Lou. Alright, we'll...
we'll talk tomorrow. I got a plane to catch.
I'm going to Washington.
Washington?
Yeah, interesting lead says he's closely connected to these events, but
he won't come down here.
I'm onto Ferrie's Cuban paymaster, Eladio del Valle, in Miami.
I tell you, I need more men. I got to get him in, Boss.
I can't even pull the teams to watch Ferrie. Listen, I gave this man my word!
- This is our case! - Hold it, Chief!
- Hold it! Hold it! Hold it! Don't breathe! - For God's sake, Numa, now!
I got something to show you.
- I think you'll find it very interesting. - Numa, what is that thing?
Bill Williams found this in your office.
We think the conference room is also bugged, maybe the phones.
We're gonna have to debug the whole place.
Bugging the DA's office. This is outrageous!
Mr. Ivon, it's for you. It's urgent.
Well, you can believe what you want, but we're gonna have to be more careful.
All these new volunteers? I mean, any one of them could...
Okay, Numa, you handle it, alright? I don't have...
I don't have time for this nonsense.
Well, we... we obviously got the bastards worried, now.
I'm coming to Washington!
Dave Ferrie's dead.
Found his body in his apartment a couple hours ago.
What's it look like, Nick?
I don't see any violence, Jim. Heart attack, maybe an aneurysm.
Looks like natural causes.
This is addressed to no one and no signature.
"To leave this life is, for me, a sweet prospect.
"I find nothing in it that is desirable
"and, on the other hand, everything that is loathsome."
It goes on and on.
"Daily we are propagandized more and more by the rising crime wave."
Pretty flowery for Dave Ferrie.
Proloid?
Yeah, I took it once for a low thyroid condition.
Raises the metabolism, Lou.
David Ferrie strike you as the kind of person with a low metabolism?
Hardly, I'd say the opposite. Maybe hypertension.
You know, Ferrie was the only one to express any kind of remorse about the whole thing.
I think it got him killed.
Lou? Boss?
More bad news from Miami.
They found Ferrie's Cuban friend, Eladio del Valle, today,
hacked to death with machete in his car. He was tortured,
shot in the heart at point-blank range, and his skull was split open with an ax.
Now, ain't that the devil's piss!
Found another note. Same thing. No name. No signature.
"When you receive this, I will be quite dead, so no answer will be possible.
- "I offered you love, and all I got was..." - Jesus, he must have been hard-pressed
to come up with that one.
Nick, can I have a word with you?
What would happen if a man suffering from
hypertension were to take an entire bottle of proloid?
He'd die pretty quick, either a heart storm or a ruptured blood vessel in the brain.
Can you ascertain if there's proloid in his system?
Not in a routine autopsy,
but if we looked at the spinal fluid there might be a high level of iodine,
but it's difficult to know. What you thinking, Jim?
I don't know. It doesn't make sense, Nick. I mean, the man's afraid of dying, then he...
but he kill himself in a way that leaves no trace?
But leave two unsigned suicide notes?
If it's a suicide, I've seen weirder, Jim.
The fact is, he's gone, Chief, and so is our case.
Unless we go for Shaw now.
With whose testimony? Willie O'Keefe, a male prostitute?
Jack Martin, a drunk? Vernon Bundy, a dope fiend?
Shaw's got respect, Lou. Newspaper editors, American Bar Association.
- I agree with Bill. We haven't got the goods yet! - If we wait, Shaw's gonna get whacked!
Now, how many corpses it gonna take
- before you lawyers figure out what's going on, Broussard? - Hey! You watch your mouth, see? Ferrie did this to himself!
Where are you going, Boss?
I don't know, Bill.
I just don't know.
Hey, Jim!
Hey, Bill!
Hey, where you at, Frank?
You're wasting your time, here. Big Jim gave strict orders. No FBl allowed.
Well, it's you I want to talk to, Bill.
No, no! Boss would fry me in hog fat if he knew I talked to you.
Boss got a serious problem, Bill. Real serious.
We know what's been going on over at your office.
Yeah, I guess you do.
You got nothing, Bill. I'm talking to you as a friend, now. You're riding on the Titanic.
Time to jump off before you get destroyed along with Garrison.
Frank, I don't wanna hear this.
We're talking about your career, here, Bill, your life. You're a young guy.
We know you're working that Castro thing.
- No, I'm not. - Yes, you are.
Look, we know Oswald didn't pull that trigger. Castro did.
But if that comes out there's gonna be a war, boy.
Millions of people will die, and that's a hell of a lot more important than Jim Garrison.
Goddamn it, look at me when I talk to you! You're goddamn too selfish!
- I can't! - Shut up! Shut up!
If you got a brain in your thick skull of yours, you'll listen to me. You listen real hard.
Now, get in the car.
Jim Garrison?
Yes?
Glad you came.
Sorry about the precautions.
Well, I just hope it was worth my while, Mr...?
I could give you a false name, but I won't.
Just call me, "X."
I've already been warned by the Agency, Mr. Whoever, so,
if this is another type of threat...
I'm not with the Agency, Mr. Garrison,
and I assume if you've come this far, what I have to say interests you,
but I'm not gonna name names or tell you who or what I represent,
except to say you're close.
You're closer than you think.
Okay?
Everything I'm gonna tell you is classified top secret.
I was a soldier, Mr. Garrison, two wars.
I was one of those secret guys at the Pentagon, that supplies military hardware:
planes, bullets, rifles,
for what we call "Black Operations."
Black Ops: assassinations, coups d'etat,
rigging elections, propaganda, psych warfare, and so forth.
World War ll, I was in Romania, Greece, Yugoslavia.
I helped evacuate part of the Nazi intelligence after that, just before the end of the war.
We used those guys in the fight against the communists.
In Italy, '48, we stole the elections,
France, '49, broke the strikes,
overthrew Quirino in the Philippines, Arbenz in Guatemala,
Mossadegh in Iran. We were in Vietnam in '54,
Indonesia, '58, Tibet, '59,
got the Dalai Lama out.
We were good,
very good.
Then we got into the Cuban thing. Not so good.
Set up all the bases for the invasion supposed to take place in October of '62.
Khrushchev sent missiles to resist the invasion. Kennedy didn't invade,
and we were standing out there with our dicks in the wind.
A lot of pissed off people, Mr. Garrison.
You understand?
I'll come to that later.
So, 1963,
I spent much of September, '63,
working on the Kennedy plan for getting all US personnel
out of Vietnam by the end of 1965.
This plan was one of the strongest, most important papers issued from the Kennedy White House.
His National Security Action Memo 263
ordered home the first 1,000 troops for Christmas,
but then, in November, one week after the murder of Vietnamese President Diem in Saigon,
and two weeks before the assassination of our president,
a strange thing happened to me.
Sarah, is Dave in there?
Colonel?
Excuse me, I got a note saying you wanted to see me, General.
I do, indeed.
You are going to the South Pole.
I am?
You are. Dr. Mooney's got all the details.
I want you to check with him. Have yourself a nice vacation.
I was sent by my superior officer, we'll call him "Y"...
I was sent by General Y to the South Pole
as the military escort for a group of international VIPs.
I was on my way back, in New Zealand,
when the President was killed.
Now, Oswald was charged at 7:00 p.m., Dallas time, with Tippet's murder.
That's 2:00 in the afternoon of the next day, New Zealand time,
but already, their papers had the entire history
of this unknown, 24-year-old man, Oswald.
Studio picture, detailed biographical data, Russian information,
and were pretty sure of the fact that he killed the President alone,
although it took them four more hours before they even charged him with that crime in Dallas.
It felt to me as if...
well, a cover story was being put up,
like we would in a Black Op.
Anyway, after I came back,
I asked myself, why was I, the Chief of Special Ops,
selected to travel to the South Pole at that time to do a job
that any number of others could have done,
and I wondered if it could have been because
one of my routine duties, if I had been in Washington,
would've been to arrange for additional security in Texas.
So, I decided to check it out, and sure enough, I found out that someone
had told the 112th Military Intelligence Group at 4th Army Headquarters at Fort Sam Houston
to stand down that day, over the protests of the unit commander,
- Colonel Reich. - I believe it's a mistake.
This is significant because it is standard operating procedure,
especially in a known hostile city like Dallas,
to supplement the Secret Service.
I mean, even if we had not allowed the bubble top to be removed from the limousine,
we would've placed at least 100 to 200 agents on the sidewalk, without question.
I mean, only a month before, in Dallas, UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson was spit on and hit.
There had already been several attempts on De Gaulle's life in France.
We would have arrived days ahead of time, studied the route,
checked all buildings.
Never would've allowed all those wide open, empty windows overlooking Dealey. Never!
We'd have had our own snipers covering the area.
The minute a window went up, they'd have been on the radio!
We'd have been watching the crowd: packages, rolled-up newspapers, coats.
Never would've let a man open an umbrella along the way!
Never would've allowed that limousine to slow down to ten miles an hour,
much less take that unusual curve at Houston and Elm.
You would have felt an Army presence in the streets that day.
None of this happened. It was a violation of the most basic protection codes we have,
and it is the best indication of a massive plot in Dallas.
Now, who could have best done this?
Black Ops, Mr. Garrison. People in my business. People like my superior officer could have called Col. Reich and said,
"Look, we have another unit coming from so-and-so providing security. You'll stand down."
I mean, that day, in fact, there were some individual Army intelligence people in Dallas.
I'm still trying to figure out who or why,
but they weren't protecting the client.
And, of course, Oswald. Army Intel had a Harvey Lee Oswald on file.
All those files have been destroyed.
Many strange things were happening, and your Lee Harvey Oswald had nothing to do with them.
We had the entire Cabinet on a trip to the Far East.
We had one-third of a combat division returning from Germany
in the air above the United States, at the time of the shooting.
At 12:34 p.m., the entire telephone system went out in Washington for a solid hour,
and on the plane back to Washington,
word was radioed from the White House Situations Room to Lyndon Johnson
that one individual performed the assassination. Does that sound like a bunch of coincidences to you, Mr. Garrison?
No.
Not for one moment.
The Cabinet was out country to get their perceptions out of the way.
Troops were in the air for possible riot control.
The telephones didn't work to keep the wrong stories from spreading if anything went wrong with the plan.
Nothing was left to chance.
He could not be allowed to escape alive.
Well, I never thought things were the same after that.
Vietnam started for real. There was an air of...
I don't know... make-believe in the Pentagon and CIA.
Those of us who'd been in Secret Ops since the beginning knew the Warren Commission was fiction,
but there was something...
something deeper...
uglier.
I knew Allen Dulles very well. I briefed him many-a-time in his house,
but for the life of me I still can't figure out why he was appointed to investigate Kennedy's death,
the man who had fired him.
Dulles, by the way, was General Y's benefactor.
I got out in '64,
resigned my commission.
I never realized Kennedy was so dangerous to the establishment.
Is that why?
Well, that's the real question, isn't it? Why?
The how and the who is just scenery for the public.
Oswald, Ruby, Cuba, the Mafia...
keeps them guessing, like some kind of parlor game,
prevents them from asking the most important question: why?
Why was Kennedy killed? Who benefited?
Who has the power to cover it up? Who?
In 1961,
right after the Bay of Pigs, very... very few people know about this, alright?
I participated in drawing up National Security Action Memos 55, 56, 57.
These are crucial documents, classified top secret,
but basically in them, Kennedy instructed Gen. Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs,
that from here on forward, the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be wholly responsible
for all covert paramilitary action in peacetime.
This basically ended the reign of the CIA,
splintered it as JFK promised he would, into a thousand pieces,
and now he was ordering the military
to help him do it. This was unprecedented!
I can't tell you the shock waves that this sent along the corridors of power in Washington.
This and, of course, the firing of Allen Dulles,
Richard Bissell, and Gen. Charles Cabell,
all of them sacred cows in Intel since World War ll.
They got some very upset people, here.
Kennedy's directives were never really implemented because of
bureaucratic resistance,
but one of the results was,
the Cuban operation was turned over to my department
as Operation Mongoose.
Mongoose was pure Black Ops.
It was secretly based in the south campus at Miami's University,
which was the largest domestic CIA station.
Budgeted annually over hundreds of millions of dollars.
Three hundred agents, 7,000 select Cubans,
fifty fake business fronts for laundering money;
they waged non-stop war against Castro.
Industrial sabotage, crop burning, the works.
And all of this came under the control of General Y.
All he did was take the rules of covert warfare he'd used abroad and brought them into this country.
Now he had the people, the equipment, the bases.
He had the motivation.
And don't underestimate the budget cuts that Kennedy called for in March of '63, alright?
Nearly fifty-two military installations in twenty-five states,
twenty-one overseas bases.
You're talking big money!
You know how many helicopters have been lost in Vietnam? Hmm?
Nearly 3,000 so far.
Who makes them? Bell Helicopter. Who owns Bell?
Well, Bell was nearly bankrupt when First National Bank of Boston approached the CIA about
developing a helicopter for Indochina usage. How about the F-111 fighter?
General Dynamics of Fort Worth, Texas. Who owns that?
Find out the defense budget since the war began. $75 going on $100 billion.
Nearly $200 billion will be spent before it's over.
In 1949, it was $10 billion.
No war. No money.
The organizing principle of any society, Mr. Garrison,
is for war.
The authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers.
And Kennedy wanted to end the Cold War in his second term.
He wanted to call off the moon race in favor of cooperation with the Soviets.
He signed a treaty with the Soviets to ban nuclear testing.
He refused to invade Cuba in 1962,
and he set out to withdraw from Vietnam.
But all that ended on the 22nd of November, 1963.
As early as 1961, they knew Kennedy was not going to war in Southeast Asia.
Like Caesar, he is surrounded by enemies
and something's underway, but it has no face. Yet, everybody in the loop knows.
You can forget about your combat troops.
He told McNamara he is gonna pull out the goddamned advisers!
He fucked us in Laos and now he is gonna fuck us in goddamn Vietnam!
He won't implement it before the election. He can't afford to.
I hear the NSC meeting was a real barn burner.
I wouldn't have missed it for the world. Heads are gonna roll everywhere.
Did you hear what Lemnitzer did?
What happened?
Kennedy tried to rub Lem's nose in shit,
saying if we didn't go into Cuba, which is so close,
why should we go into Vietnam, which is so far away?
Son of a bitch, there he goes again.
He's got his hands on the chicken switch.
Anyway, Lem said that the Chiefs still think we ought to go into Cuba.
Money's at stake,
big money; $100 billion.
Kennedy brothers target voting districts for those defense dollars.
They give TFX fighter contracts only to those counties that are gonna make a difference in '64,
and the people in the loop, they fight back, their way.
We have to control the intelligence from Saigon.
Well, just don't let McNamara start sticking his damn nose in this thing!
Every time he goes over to Saigon on some fucking fact-finding mission,
he comes back and just scares the shit out of the President!
Now, I want Max Taylor on him night and day,
like a fly on shit!
Now, you control McNamara,
and you control Kennedy.
I think it started like that;
in the wind.
Defense contractors, big oil bankers. Just conversations, nothing more.
Then, a call is made, maybe to someone like my superior officer, General Y.
Yeah?
We're going. We need your help.
When?
In the fall. Probably in the South.
- We want you to come up with a plan. - I can do that.
Everything is cellularized.
No one said, "He must die." There's been no vote. Nothing's on paper.
There's no one to blame.
It's as old as the crucifixion.
A military firing squad,
five bullets, one blank, no one's guilty,
because everyone in the power structure who knows anything
has a plausible deniability.
There are no compromising connections except at the most secret point.
But what's paramount, is that it must succeed,
no matter how many die, no matter how much it costs,
the perpetrators must be on the winning side,
and never subject to prosecution for anything by anyone.
That is a coup d'état.
Kennedy announces the Texas trip in September.
At that moment, second Oswalds start popping up all over Dallas,
where they have the mayor and the cops in their pocket.
General Y flies in the assassins,
maybe from a special camp we keep outside Athens, Greece,
pros,
maybe be locals, Cubans, Mafia hire, separate teams.
Does it really matter who shot from
what rooftop?
Part of the scenery, right?
I keep thinking about that day, Tuesday,
the 26th of November,
the day after they buried Kennedy.
Gentlemen, I want you to know, I'm not going to let Vietnam go like China did.
I'm personally committed.
And I'm not gonna to take one soldier out of there till they know we mean business in Asia.
Lyndon Johnson signs National Security Memo 273,
which essentially reverses Kennedy's new withdrawal policy,
and gives a green light to covert action against North Vietnam,
which provoke the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Just get me elected, I'll give you your damn war.
In that document
lay the Vietnam War.
I don't... I can't...
I can't believe they killed him because he wanted to change things
- in our time, in our country. - They've been doing it all through history.
Kings are killed, Mr. Garrison. Politics is power, nothing more!
Oh, don't take my word for it. Don't believe me. Do your own work, your own thinking.
The size of this is
beyond me.
Testify?
- Me? - Testify.
No chance in hell.
No, I'd be arrested and gagged, maybe sent to an institution,
maybe worse. You too.
No, I can give you the background.
You have to find the foreground, the little things.
Keep digging. Remember, you're the only person to bring a trial in the murder of John Kennedy.
That's important. It's historic.
I haven't yet.
I don't have much of a case.
You don't have a choice anymore.
You've become a significant threat to the national security structure.
They would have killed you already, but you got a lot of light on you.
Instead they're trying to destroy your credibility.
They already have in many circles in this town.
Be honest.
Your only chance is to come up with a case; something; anything.
Make arrests. Stir the shit storm.
Hope to reach a point of critical mass
that will start a chain reaction of people coming forward.
Then, the government will crack.
Remember, fundamentally, people are suckers for the truth,
and the truth is on your side, bubba.
I just hope you get a break.
Mr. Shaw?
Sir, you are under arrest and charged with conspiracy
and entering into agreement with other persons for the specific purpose of committing the crime of murder
of President John F. Kennedy.
We have a warrant to search the premises.
It's my duty to inform you at this time
you have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney.
Name, first, middle, and last?
Clay LaVerne Shaw.
Address?
1313 Dauphine Street, New Orleans.
Ever use any aliases?
Clay Bertrand.
Mr. Clark, are you aware of the charges filed by District Attorney Garrison?
Yes, Mr. Shaw was included in our investigation,
and there was no connection found at all.
...and why, if they did, is his name not mentioned once
in the entire 26 volumes of the Warren Report,
even if it is to clear his name?
I doubt this Attorney General would qualify for my staff.
Mr. Garrison has presented absolutely nothing publicly
which would contradict our findings.
I know of no fact which would refute
the Commission's conclusion
that Lee Oswald was the lone killer.
Jim, what's your reaction to the Chief Justice's statement?
Well, I congratulate Mr. Shaw. Most defendants have to wait for trial
before they're allowed to produce sacred cows like the Chief Justice of the land
as a character witness,
who is, of course, not under oath and free from the laws of perjury.
Mr. Garrison, even if what you're saying is partly true,
you realize that you're damaging the credibility of the country, and possibly destroying it?
Let me ask you. Let me ask you. Is a government worth preserving when it lies to the people?
It's become a dangerous country, sir,
when you cannot trust anyone anymore, when you cannot tell the truth.
Let justice be done, though the heavens fall!
The JFK Conspiracy: The Case of Jim Garrison.
- Honey, this is all about you. - After several weeks of an investigation in New Orleans,
a team of reporters has learned
that District Attorney Jim Garrison and his staff
have intimidated, bribed, and even drugged witnesses
in their attempt to prove a conspiracy involving New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw
in the murder of John F. Kennedy.
John Chancler was a cellmate of Willie O'Keefe's at Angola.
He said he'd be cut loose if he copped to the DA's office.
I sent him up for burglary.
And there's his old buddy Miguel Torres, I mean,
we sent him up, too.
They wanted me to say Shaw was Bertrand. They said they'd get me a pardon.
Janet Williams comments on Willie O'Keefe's
descriptions of having met Oswald.
...was he a homosexual?
That's not the Lee I knew, absolutely not.
I think, Mr. O'Keefe must have seen someone he thought was Lee Oswald.
I didn't talk to nobody after the assassination. I was on drugs at the hospital.
Like I told the FBI, that call was a figment of my imagination.
Personally, I think he's quite ill, mentally.
With one half of his mind, he is able to go out and fabricate evidence,
then by some osmosis he is able to convince the other half the fabrication is the truth.
Well, I wouldn't worry about it, Liz. There's only about 20 or 30 million people watching this tonight.
I guess my reputation's alright with people watching Laugh In.
...because, in some way, Mr. Garrison
is indebted and tied to the mob?
The more one looks at Jim Garrison, the more one finds
he has destroyed reputations, spread fear and suspicion, and worst of all,
exploited this nation's sorrow and doubt.
Jim Garrison has said, quote:
"Let justice be done, though the heavens fall."
He seeks the truth.
So do we.
What Dr. Martin Luther King called his "beautiful dream," expressed so dramatically
during the 1963 march on Washington,
was shattered tonight in Memphis, Tennessee, by an assassin's bullet.
Police seem to think that the single shot came from across the street.
They say that they have found the Browning automatic rifle,
fitted with a marksman's scope, on a sidewalk.
I'll get it.
Hello?
Hello, is this Jim Garrison's daughter?
Yes?
Virginia or Elizabeth?
Virginia.
Virginia, you're a lucky little girl.
Your daddy's entered you in a beauty contest. Would you like to be in a beauty contest?
I don't know.
My God! My God! What have they done?
It's lynching time.
That sounds fun.
- And you get off from school at 3:00 every day? - Honey, who are you talking to?
Okay, Virginia, that's all I need to know.
Mommy, I'm going to be in a beauty contest.
Who is this? Who is this?
Hello?
Jim, did you enter Virginia in a beauty contest?
A man just called. He wanted to know everything, her height, her weight...
Honey, it's some crackpot. Martin Luther King was killed in Memphis...
Honey, your daughter's life's just been threatened!
It's just a crank making calls. Happens a dozen times a day at the office.
Our home, Jim! A kidnapper, a murderer!
Oh, my gosh, Liz, only cowards make crank calls!
- How do you know? -Nothing's gonna happen.
How do you even know what goes on in this house anymore! You're too busy making speeches,
getting every crazed Klansman in Louisiana after us!
I'm leaving! I'm taking the kids and I'm leaving! I can't stand it anymore!
- The government wants you to be scared, alright? - You and your government!
The government wants everybody to be scared to speak out.
- You know? They count on it. - What's the matter with you?
- There's nothing to be scared of. - Don't you have feelings?
Your own daughter!
What kind of a man are you?
I'll take them up to my mother's if it makes you feel any better, alright? You spend a week.
- What's a week gonna do? - I'll change the locks, the phone lines,
I'll even get a bodyguard. Just get a hold of yourself!
Honey, before this Kennedy thing, nothing mattered in this world more than your children.
The other night Jasper tried to talk to you. You didn't even notice he was there.
He came to me bawling his little eyes out!
- I promise, alright? I promise I'll make more time for Jasper. - He's sensitive, honey. He needs more from you!
Is it such a chore?
Goddamn it! If I said I'll spend more time with him, I'll spend more time with him!
Alright? I cannot fight you and the whole world too, Liz!
I'm not fighting you! I'm trying to reach you.
- You've changed. - Well, of course I've changed!
My eyes have opened,
and what once they're opened, believe me, what used to look normal seems insane,
and now King. Don't you think... don't you think this has something to do with that?
Can't you see?
I don't want to see, goddamn it! I'm tired. I've had enough!
You're ruining this man Shaw's life. You're attacking him because he's a homosexual.
That's not why I'm attacking him!
Did you ever, for once, stop to consider what he was feeling?
You don't believe me?
- I don't know! - All this time you never believed me?
I just want to raise our children and live a normal life.
I want my life back!
So do I, goddamn it!
I had a life too, you know?
You just can't bury your head in the sand like some goddamn ostrich, Liz!
It's not about our well-being, alright? It's not about our two cars, and our TVs and your kitchen!
It's about our kids growing up in a shit hole of lies, and I'm angry about it!
And my life is fucked because of it,
and if you could see it that way, Liz, you'd see that your life is fucked too.
You never talked to me this way before, Jim.
Well, if you don't want to support me, then fine, I can understand that,
but don't go start making threats about taking the children.
I'm not making any threats! I'm leaving you!
- I'm taking the kids and I'm leaving! - Go on, then! Fine, get out!
- I am! - Go hide somewhere!
Join the rest of them! They'll tell you I'm crazy.
You'll get plenty of people to tell you I'm crazy.
You won't have any problems filling out your divorce papers on me.
But somebody's got to try, goddamn it!
Somebody!
Are we going away, Daddy?
I don't know, Jasper.
Because of Kennedy?
Are the same people gonna kill us, Papa?
No, Jasper.
Nobody's gonna kill us.
I'm scared.
I don't like it when you and Mommy fight.
I know. I don't like it either, honey.
Why do we have to leave?
Don't you love us anymore?
Daddy loves both of you, okay?
And there's nothing wrong with feeling a little scared, Jasper.
Telling the truth can be a scary thing sometimes.
It scared President Kennedy, and he was a brave man.
But if you let yourself be too scared,
then you let the bad guys take over the country, don't you?
- Yeah. - Yeah.
Then everybody gets scared.
Stay with Mom, Papa,
- please? - Please?
Damn, here's another one.
The US Attorney in Washington declines to serve our subpoenas
on Allen Dulles, Charles Cabell, CIA Director Richard Helms, any FBI agent we name!
Well, what did you expect from the pig but a grunt?
Without them it's gonna be near impossible, Chief, to prove Shaw's connection to the CIA.
Well, what the hell is going on?
And never before has an extradition request from this office been refused.
We haven't tried to get Julia Ann Mercer in here.
No, she could get hurt.
Why?
I believe what's happening is that other people know.
Yeah, but she's the best damn witness we have.
I just don't want to do it, that's all. Now, what else?
Well, you got your hate mail here, and your fan mail here.
The bad news is that the IRS requested an audit of your income from this office.
Well, I expected that two months ago, and they're wasting their time.
The bad news is the National Guard just asked me to resign after 18 years.
Yeah, well, maybe that's the good news. Never was as good as combat, anyway.
But this is.
Bill, any more on Oswald or Shaw?
Uh, yeah. Yeah.
They were seen together in Clinton in early September.
The Civil Rights Movement was running a voter's registration drive.
Rumor is, Shaw, a local boy, was working on some arms deal
to discredit the Civil Rights Movement.
Nobody really knows what they were doing there, but
hell, they stood out like cotton balls.
I got whites and coloreds that saw them but,
last time I checked, there was nothing illegal with registering to vote.
We still got the
negro junkie, Vernon Bundy, who saw them talking at the sea wall near Lake Pontchatrain,
but hell, it's tough, Boss. Nobody wants to talk about Shaw. He's just...
You keep saying... see, you keep saying that.
- You're not digging! You're not digging deep enough! - I keep saying what? I'm not digging?
You want to do my job! You do my job, I'll do your job!
I think Clinton is a breakthrough, now. Alright?
Shaw denies ever knowing Ferrie or Oswald, right?
Right.
Well, that proves he's a liar.
- Keep on it, Bill. - This is interesting:
Oswald went to see the FBI two weeks
before the assassination.
May I see Special Agent Hosty, please?
I'm sorry, he's not in. Can someone else help you?
It seems that Special Agent Hosty made three visits to Janet Williams' house,
supposedly to keep an eye on Marina. He left a note.
Hosty told a Dallas newspaperman that it was a warning
to him to stop questioning Marina at home when Oswald was not present.
She was not a citizen, so possibly he was threatening to deport her back to Russia,
but what the note really said, no one knows.
Hosty tore it up and flushed it down the toilet.
- Get rid of it, Hosty! - This is just speculation, people, but
what if the note was describing the assassination attempt on JFK?
Come on, people, think!
That's the only reason to destroy it.
Because if it was any kind of threat, like Hosty said, they would have kept it,
because it makes their case against the angry lone nut that much stronger.
Remember the New Orleans meeting with Agent Quigley
the day he got arrested?
There again, Quigley destroyed the notes from the interview.
I think we can raise the possibility that Oswald not only was an informant,
but he may well have been the original source we have for the telex dated November 17th
warning of Kennedy's assassination in Dallas on November 22nd.
File.
William Walter, the night clerk on duty in the FBI office? Here, he gave me a copy of this,
said it went all over the country. Nothing was done,
and the motorcade went ahead on schedule, and this wasn't even mentioned in the Warren Report.
"...determined that a militant, revolutionary group may attempt to assassinate President Kennedy
"on his proposed trip to Dallas, Texas."
Shortly after the assassination,
Walter says that the telex was removed from all the files in all the cities,
as an obvious embarrassment to the Bureau.
I believe Oswald was sending information through Hosty.
I have a hunch that from the get-go, Oswald had infiltrated this group:
probably Cubans or right-wing extremists.
He was told to be at the book depository that day by his handlers
to either prevent the assassination or to take part in it.
I mean, they could have told him anything. Either they were gonna close down the plotters that day,
or they were gonna simulate an attack
on Kennedy to whip up public opinion
so that Kennedy would have to reverse his policies on Communism.
It doesn't really matter what they told him.
He was under orders.
He was a foot soldier.
You can't miss. He is a dead duck.
I don't buy it, Chief.
Why would the FBI cover it up?
A telex that disappears from every single FBI office in this country?
There's a word, Bill:
- orders. - Or a cover-up. Jesus, Bill,
don't you have enough proof of the FBl's complicity yet?
Maybe I got just a little more respect this country's institutions!
You tell me how the hell you gonna keep a conspiracy going on between the
mob, the CIA, the FBl, and Army intelligence and who the hell knows what else,
when you know for a fact you can't keep a secret in this room between 12 people?
We got leaks everywhere.
I mean, we are going to trial, here, y'all!
What the hell do we really got?
Oswald, Ruby, Banister, Ferrie are dead.
Shaw, I mean, maybe he is an agent. I don't know,
but as a covert operator, in my book
he is wide open for blackmail 'cause of his homosexuality.
Shaw's our toehold, Bill. Now, I don't know exactly what he is or where he fits and I don't really care.
I do know he's lying through his teeth and I'm not gonna let go of him.
Yeah, and for those reasons, you're going to trial against Clay Shaw, Chief?
Well, you're gonna lose!
We should be investigating our Mafia leads here in New Orleans.
Now, I can buy that a hell of a lot easier than I can the government.
Ruby is all mob, knows Oswald, sets him up.
Hoffa, Trafficante, Marcellos, they hire some guns to do Kennedy.
And the government doesn't want to open up a whole can of worms there
because it used the mob to try to get Castro.
You know, Castro being assassinated by the mob, by us,
it sounds pretty wild to John Q. Citizen.
So, they close the book on JFK.
Makes perfect sense to me.
I don't doubt their involvement, Bill, but at a lower level.
- Oh, come on! - Could the mob change the parade route, Bill,
or eliminate the protection for the President?
Could the mob send Oswald to Russia and get him back?
Could the mob get the FBl, the CIA and the Dallas Police to make a mess up the investigation?
I mean, could the mob get the Warren Commission appointed to cover it up?
Could the mob wreck the autopsy? I mean, could the mob influence the national media to go to sleep?
And since when has the mob used anything but .38's for hits up close?
Mob wouldn't have the guts or the power for something of this magnitude.
Assassins need payrolls,
schedules, times, orders.
This was a military style ambush from start to finish.
This was a coup d'etat with Lyndon Johnson waiting in the wings.
Oh, okay, so now you're saying Lyndon Johnson was involved, huh? The President of the United States?
I know this, Bill: Lyndon Johnson got $1 billion for his Texas friends, Brown and Root,
to dredge Cam Ranh Bay for the military in Vietnam.
Boss... Boss, are you calling the President a murderer?
And if I'm so far from the truth, why is the FBI bugging our offices?
Why are our witnesses being bought off and murdered?
Why are federal agencies blocking our extraditions and subpoenas when were never blocked before?
I don't know! I don't... Maybe there's some rogue element in the government or something.
With a full-blown conspiracy cover it up?
You ever read your Shakespeare, Bill?
Yeah, I do.
Julius Caesar?
"Brutus and Cassius, they too are honorable men."
Who killed Caesar?
Ten, twelve Senators.
Alls it takes is one Judas, Bill.
A few people on the inside, Pentagon, CIA.
This is Louisiana, Chief!
I mean, how the hell do you know who your daddy is?
'Cause your mamma told you so.
You are way out there taking a crap in the wind, Boss,
and I, for one, am not going along on this one!
Chief, I've had my doubts all along about Bill.
He's been fighting us all along.
Well, we need him back.
Boss, Broussard wasted a whole damn lunch trying to prove
that mob boys like Jack Ruby and Brading are hooked up with Hunt Oil.
- I don't trust the guy. - I will not hear this, gentlemen!
Now, I value Bill as much as any person here!
It's time we all made room for someone else's ideas, including me.
Maybe Oswald is what everyone says he is, and I'm just...
I'm just plain dumb about it.
I've seen him copying files, leaving here late at night.
- I just plain don't trust him. - Maybe you two didn't hear what I said!
Now, I said I will not tolerate infighting among the staff!
I'm afraid I cannot work with Bill Broussard anymore.
Are you giving me an ultimatum, Lou?
What?
Are you giving me an ultimatum?
Well, if that's what you want to call it...
No, I never thought it'd come to this.
I guess I am.
Well, I will not have any damn ultimatums put to me, Lou.
I'll accept your resignation.
Well, you sure got it.
You are one stubborn son of a bitch,
and you're making a hell of a mistake.
Boss, aren't you being a little hard?
No, I don't think I am, Susie.
Anyone else?
And now, Jerry, here's Jim Garrison,
the District Attorney of New Orleans, Louisiana.
Welcome, District Attorney Garrison.
So, you're investigating the murder of President Kennedy.
You know, I must say, we've heard some strange things coming out of your office in New Orleans.
First, we heard that the Cuban exiles killed the President,
then, the mob,
and now, your latest theory seems to be that the CIA and the FBl
and the Pentagon
and the White House all combined in some elaborate conspiracy to kill John Kennedy.
Let me ask you, is there anyone besides Lee Harvey Oswald
who you think didn't conspire to kill the President?
Well, let's just say this, Jerry,
I've stopped beating my wife.
Well, maybe you should ask Lyndon Johnson. You know he has some answers.
Now, there have been a number of reports in reputable news media,
Time, Newsweek, our own NBC,
that you've gone way beyond legal means available to you as a prosecutor,
that you've intimidated, even drugged witnesses,
bribed them, urged them to commit perjury.
Do you have a response to this?
Your faith in the veracity of the major media is touching, Jerry.
It indicates that the age of innocence is not yet over.
But ask yourself,
if we'd learned on November 22nd, 1963,
that the Premier of Russia had been shot from a Moscow office building
by a lonely capitalist sympathizer,
who, himself, was then liquidated by a patriotic Muscovite within 48 hours,
while surrounded by armed police,
I think it would be pretty apparent to any free-thinking person
that a coup d'etat and a transfer of power had just taken place in the Soviet Union.
Now, we would not ask questions or attacking Jim Garrison or his record.
We would, in a free-thinking society,
be asking hard questions about why he was killed, and what forces were opposed him.
Jim, you know, there are some people who might say you're paranoid.
Maybe I'd better show you some pictures so you can begin to understand what it is
I'm talking about.
These are arrests.
Now, these arrests were photographed minutes after the assassination.
Now, they were never shown to the American public.
Jim, I'm sorry, these pictures can't show up on TV.
- Well, sure they can. - No, I'm sorry. They can't.
- The camera can pick these up. - Jim, I'm sorry.
They can't. We have libel laws, you know?
Those men you just saw were arrested in Dallas minutes after the assassination.
They were never seen again.
No record of arrest, no mug shots, no fingerprints.
Jim, hold that thought.
We're gonna be back, right after these commercials.
Who were they?
Jim!
Bill, what the hell are you doing here?
I'm sorry about the other day, Chief. I didn't mean to walk out on you like that.
Bill, you came all the way to tell me the obvious?
No, Boss. Look,
I just got word there's gonna be attempt to kill you somewhere between here and New Orleans.
A mob guy was brought down by... by Shaw from Canada.
This is serious, Chief. You're gonna need a bodyguard tonight, I think.
Bill, when you were in the Army, did you have a chance to find out what an order meant?
- Hmm? - Yeah.
You happen to remember my ordering everyone on the staff not to participate
in passing on these endless rumors about how somebody's going to be killed?
- Yes, I do, Boss, but this is... - No, there is no "but."
There is no "but" in a military situation, Broussard!
I don't appreciate you're dumping this paranoid garbage on me,
and I don't appreciate your inability to follow a simple order,
especially when it means I'm personally going to end up paying for your flight back to New Orleans.
Let's get you a ticket.
Boss, I'm sorry. I'm just looking out for you.
Get a receipt.
Come on, come on. He's out here.
Jim, where are you going? It's me, Samuel.
- Hey, how long were you in that restroom, mister? - None of your goddamn business!
Jim, bad news: Bill's turned.
I think he's given everything we've got to the feds.
We studied the memos and there was nothing there, Chief, nothing.
We went to confront him and the landlady said that the son of a bitch just took off,
left everything.
It's unbelievable. I'm sorry.
Mattie, could you get Mr. Garrison a drink, please?
Something sure scared him.
Well, Bill doesn't scare that easy. Somebody got to his thinking.
- He was never that good a thinker. - Well, he sure fooled us.
No, no, Numa, don't turn it down. Turn it up. I want to see this.
Well, you know what's happening: he's winning.
He'll never make it.
If he wins, they'll kill him. He'll stop the war.
They're gonna kill him before they let him be President.
Thank you, Mattie.
Boss, with Broussard, they have everything,
all our witnesses, our strategy for the trial.
We've got to double check all his work.
There could be false leads. We can't go to trial!
We don't have a prayer!
- I don't think so, Al. - I have to agree with Al, Boss.
This is not one we're gonna come out on.
You remember the Hemingway story, The Old Man and the Sea?
The old fisherman manages to catch this great fish,
a fish so huge, that he has to tie it to the side of the boat to get it order to back in,
but by the time it reached shore,
the fish had long since been picked apart by sharks.
Nothing was left, but the skeleton.
- And that's what's gonna happen to us. - Then what did we go to all this trouble for, Boss?
It's a means to an end!
Now, this war has two fronts.
In the court of law, we hope against the odds to nail Clay Shaw on a conspiracy charge.
In the court of public opinion, it could take another 25, 30 years
for the truth to come out,
but at least we're gonna strike the first blow.
What if you're wrong?
I never thought for a second I was, honey.
Liz,
will you come to the trial?
I don't think so.
With 53% of the precincts reporting,
Senator Kennedy continues to hold a lead of 48% to 41%
over Senator McCarthy.
CBS News has projected Senator Robert Kennedy
the winner of the crucial California primary.
And now what's with been going on within the United States over the period of the last three years,
the division, the violence, the disenchantment with our society,
the divisions, whether it's between blacks and whites,
between the poor and the more affluent, or between age groups,
or on the Vietnam, that we can start to work together.
We are a great country, an unselfish country, and a compassionate country.
And I intend to make that my basis for running...
My thanks to all of you, and now it's on to Chicago and let's...
Senator Kennedy has been shot!
We don't know how serious it is, but we do know that Senator Kennedy has been shot!
Be very careful!
Get the gun! Get the gun!
Get the gun.
Get away from the gun.
They killed him, honey.
They won,
and they killed Robert Kennedy.
No!
They shot him down.
Oh, my God!
Both of them?
Both brothers?
You were right.
It hadn't ended.
For the first time,
I feel really scared.
I wished I could have loved you more.
Sometimes I feel like I didn't ever love you
or the children enough.
I'm sorry.
Please rise.
Oyez, oyez, oyez!
Criminal District Court, Orleans Parish, Section H, is now in session.
Honorable Judge Edward A. Haggerty, Jr. presiding. Please be seated.
That's Clay Bertrand.
That's the man I saw at David Ferrie's.
That's who you say you saw.
A confessed homosexual,
convicted of pandering and solicitation.
A man who has lied about everything
and now wants to be taken at his word.
That man, right there. Yes, sir.
He was at the Pontchartrain wall
with the man who shot the President.
I remember him because of his limp.
A heroin addict injecting himself at the wall,
barely conscious of his surroundings.
- Is that the man? - That was the man, right there.
He dropped Oswald off on the voter's line.
I remember 'cause they were the only white strangers around that morning.
That big black Cadillac of his made me think they might be FBl.
...welcome to Clinton. If there's anything we can do to help you, please let us know.
He said he was a representative of one International Trade Mart in New Orleans.
More than five years ago, for two minutes?
It's fair to say you could be mistaken, isn't it?
It was just a figment of my imagination.
The cat's stewin' you. The oyster's shuckin' you, I told him.
You got the right ta-ta, but the wrong ho-ho.
Bertrand is not Shaw, scout's honor, and you can tell him I said so.
Objection, Your Honor!
This office has won a conviction of perjury against Dean Andrews on this matter.
Exception taken. That case is on appeal.
Mr. Goldberg,
you claim that you met David Ferrie and Clay Shaw on a vacation trip
from your accounting business in New York.
You had drinks,
and under the influence, discussed killing Kennedy.
- Is that not so? - Yes, I did.
Is it not also true that you fingerprinted your daughter when she went to Louisiana State University?
Yes, sir, I did.
And is it not also true that you fingerprinted her when she returned at the end off the semester?
Yes, I did.
Why?
Well, I wanted to make sure that she was the same girl I sent away.
He was one of Broussard's witnesses, Chief.
I'm sorry. He was totally sane when we took his affidavit.
Your Honor, we call Police Officer Aloysius Habighorst to the stand.
I'm gonna have to ask the jury to leave the courtroom.
- Gentlemen, will you please rise and follow me. - What?
- Name, first, middle, and last? - Clay LaVerne Shaw.
The defendant did not have his lawyer present when asked!
Jesus, Ed, from time immemorial, it's been standard booking procedure to ask an alias!
I call them as I see them!
Any aliases?
Clay Bertrand.
There's no constitutional requirement that says a lawyer be present for routine questioning!
- I'm ruling that inadmissible! - Well, hell, Ed, that's our case!
If that's your case, you didn't have a case!
I wouldn't believe anything Habighorst said anyway.
I can't believe you're saying this in the courtroom!
Well, I am saying it! Bring in the jury.
- Oswald? - No, I did not.
- Ever call Dean Andrews? - No, I did not.
And have you ever met David Ferrie?
No.
Wouldn't even know what he looked like if it hadn't been for the pictures I've been shown.
Did you ever use the alias, Clay Bertrand?
No, I did not.
Thank you, Mr. Shaw.
Well, a very great actor has just given us a great performance, Your Honor,
but we are nowhere closer to the truth.
Let it be noted that my office is charging Clay Shaw with outright perjury
on the fifteen answers he's given in this courtroom today, not one word of truth having escaped his lips.
You're out of order, Jimboy! Now, sit down!
That's the man right there. That's...
To prove there was a conspiracy involving Clay Shaw,
we must first prove that there was more than one man involved in the assassination.
To do that,
we must look at the Zapruder film which my office has subpoenaed.
The American public has not seen that...
The American public has not seen that film because it has been kept locked away in a vault for the last five years
in the Time-Life Building in New York City.
There's a reason for that.
Watch.
Picture speaks a thousand words, doesn't it?
The Warren Commission thought they had an open-and-shut case:
three bullets, one assassin.
But two unpredictable things happened that day that made it virtually impossible: one,
the 8mm home movie taken by Abraham Zapruder while standing near the grassy knoll,
and two, the third wounded man, James Teague, who was nicked by a fragment
while standing near the triple underpass.
The time frame, 5.6 seconds, established by the Zapruder film
left no possibility of a fourth shot.
So, the shot or fragment that left a superficial wound on Teague's cheek
had to come from one of the three bullets fired from the sixth floor of the depository.
That leaves just two bullets.
And we know one of them was the fatal head shot that killed Kennedy.
So, now a single bullet remains.
A single bullet now has to account for the remaining seven wounds in Kennedy and Connally.
But rather than admit to a conspiracy or investigate further,
the Warren Commission chose to endorse the theory put forth
by an ambitious junior counselor, Arlen Spector,
one of the grossest lies ever forced on the American people.
We've come to know it as the "magic bullet" theory.
The magic bullet
enters the President's back, headed downward at an angle of 17-degrees.
It then moves upwards in order to leave Kennedy's body from the front of his neck,
wound number two,
where it waits 1.6 seconds,
presumably in midair, where it turns right, then left...
right, then left,
and continues into Connally's body at the rear of his right armpit,
wound number three.
The bullet then heads downward at an angle of 27-degrees, shattering Connally's fifth rib
and exiting from the right side of his chest, wound number four.
The bullet then turns right, and reenters Connally's body at his right wrist,
wound number five.
Shattering the radius bone,
the bullet then exits Connally's wrist, wound number six,
makes a dramatic U-turn, and buries itself into Connally's left thigh,
wound number seven, from which it later falls out
and is found in almost pristine condition
on a stretcher in a corridor of Parkland Hospital.
That's some bullet.
Anyone who's been in combat will tell you, never in the history of gunfire
has there been a bullet this ridiculous.
Yet, the government says it can prove it with some fancy physics in a nuclear laboratory.
Of course they can.
Theoretical physics can prove that an elephant can hang from a cliff
with his tail tied to a daisy.
But use your eyes, your common sense.
The Army wound ballistics experts at Edward Arsenal fired some comparison bullets.
Not one of them looked anything like this.
Take a look at CE-856,
an identical bullet
fired through the wrist of a human cadaver,
just one of the bones smashed by the magic bullet.
Seven wounds, gentlemen.
Tough skin,
dense bones.
This single-bullet explanation
is the foundation of the Warren Commission's claim of a lone assassin.
And once you conclude
the magic bullet could not create all seven of those wounds,
you have to conclude that there was a fourth shot and a second rifleman,
and if there was a second rifleman,
then by definition there had to be a conspiracy,
which we believe involves the accused, Clay Shaw.
Fifty-one witnesses, gentlemen of the jury, thought they heard shots coming from the grassy knoll
which is to the right, and front of the President.
Key witnesses that day?
Charles Brehm, a combat vet.
Right behind, Jean Hill and Mary Moorman.
S.M. Holland, Richard Dodd, James Simmons,
standing on the overpass.
J.C. Price overlooking the whole plaza.
William Newman, father of two children,
who hit the deck on the north side of Elm.
Abraham Zapruder.
Each of these key witnesses has no doubt whatsoever
one or more shots came from behind the picket fence.
Twenty-six trained medical personnel at Parkland Hospital
saw with their own eyes the back of the President's head blasted out!
Doctor Peters.
There was a large 7cm opening in the right occipital parietal area.
A considerable portion of the brain was missing there.
Almost a fifth or possibly a quarter of the back of the head had been blasted out
along with the underlying brain tissue.
What is the proper time to declare one dead for the last rites?
There was also a large fragment of skull attached to a flap of the scalp.
The exit hole in the rear of his head measured about 120mm,
or five inches, across.
Not one of the civilian doctors who examined the President at Parkland Hospital
regarded his throat wound as anything but a wound of entry.
But then ,the body was illegally moved to Washington for the autopsy.
Because when a coup d'état has occurred,
there's a big difference between an autopsy that is performed by civilian doctors,
and one that is performed by military doctors under orders.
The departure of Air Force One from Love Field that Friday afternoon was not so much a takeoff
as it was a getaway, with the newly sworn-in President.
Objection, Your Honor.
Sustained.
On the plane, of course, Lee Harvey Oswald's guilt was announced by the White House Situation Room
to all passengers before any kind of investigation had started,
the "angry lone nut" solution beginning to take its shape.
- Objection, Your Honor! - Sustained!
Mr. Garrison, will you please bottle the answer!
The three Bethesda Naval Hospital doctors picked by the military left something to be desired
in so much as none of them had any experience with combat-gunfire wounds!
Through their autopsy, we've been able to justify eight wounds from just two bullets,
three to Kennedy, five to Connally,
one of them being the "magic bullet."
- FBl? - Here.
Colonel Finck, are you saying someone told you not to dissect the neck?
I was told that the family wanted examination of the head.
Oh, Christ.
Looks like half his brain is gone.
- Let's weigh it. - 653 grams.
As a pathologist, it was your obligation to explore
all possible causes of death, was it not?
I had the cause of death.
Your Honor, I would ask you to direct the witness to answer my question.
Why did Colonel Finck not dissect the track of the bullet wound?
Well, I heard Dr. Humes stating that...
That's enough. That's enough.
It's duly noted.
Okay, let's check the back, gentlemen.
There's a considerable amount of spinal fluid coming out.
Okay.
I can feel the end of the wound with my finger.
That won't be necessary, commander.
- Watch the ear! Watch the ear! - Yes, sir.
Shot in the back. Cheap crime.
He said:
Who's in charge, here?
I am.
I don't remember his name.
You must understand it was quite crowded,
and when you are called in circumstances like that to look at the wound of the President who is dead,
you don't look around a lot to ask people for their names and who they are.
But you were a qualified pathologist. Was this Army General a qualified pathologist?
No.
No, but you took his orders.
Yes.
- So, he was directing the autopsy. No? - No!
- No, no, because there were others. - There were others?
There were others. There were admirals.
- Oh, there were admirals. - Oh, yes!
And when you're a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army you just follow orders.
It is not our business to discuss this with anyone outside this room.
As I recall, Admiral Kenney, the Surgeon General of the Navy.
We were specifically told not to discuss the case.
A lot of people that day were deciding what was private,
none of the American people's business.
The chief pathologist, Commander Humes,
by his own admission, voluntarily burned his autopsy notes.
President Johnson orders the blood-soaked limousine
filled with bullet holes and clues to be immediately washed and rebuilt.
He sends Connally's bloody suit right to the cleaners.
The Justice Department denied this office access to the autopsy photos.
And when we finally get a court order to examine President Kennedy's brain in the National Archives,
in the hopes of finding from which direction the bullet came from,
we're told by the government,
your government, that the President's brain has disappeared.
That's not all that's disappeared, gentlemen. With it, I think, the concept of justice.
Objection, Your Honor! Not only is Mr. Garrison insulting the federal government,
- but he is also introducing a highly subjective... - Overruled! Overruled!
So, what really happened that day?
Let's just, for a moment, speculate, shall we?
We have the epileptic seizure around 12:15 p.m.
distracting the police, making it easier for the shooters to move into their places.
The epileptic later vanished, never checking into the hospital.
The A-team gets on the sixth floor of the depository.
Now, they were refurbishing the floors in the depository that week,
which allowed unknown workmen in and out of the building.
They move quickly into position, just minutes before the shooting.
The second spotter on the radio talking to the other two teams has the best overall view:
the "God spot".
B- team, one rifleman and one spotter with a headset and access to the building,
moves into the low floor of the Dal-Tex building.
The third team, the C-team, moves in behind the picket fence above the grassy knoll,
where the shooter and the spotter are first seen by the late Lee Bowers in the watchtower of the rail yard.
They have the best position of all.
Kennedy's close and on a flat, low trajectory.
Part of this team is a coordinator,
who's flashed security credentials at several people, chasing them out of the parking lot area.
Probably two to three more men are down in the crowd on Elm.
Ten to twelve men, three teams, three shooters.
The triangulation of fire Clay Shaw and David Ferrie discussed two months before.
They've walked the plaza.
They know every inch.
They've calibrated their sights. They've practiced on moving targets.
They're ready.
Kennedy's motorcade makes a turn from Main onto Houston.
It's gonna be a turkey shoot!
They don't shoot him up Houston,
the easiest shot for a single shooter in the book depository!
They wait! They wait till he gets to the killing zone between three rifles.
Kennedy makes the final turn from Houston onto Elm,
slowing down to some 11 miles an hour.
The shooters across Dealey Plaza tighten, taking their aim,
waiting for the radio to say, "Green! Green,"
or, "Abort! Abort!"
The first shot rings out.
Sounding like a backfire, it misses the car completely.
Frame 161, Kennedy stops waving as he hears something.
Connally's head turns slightly to the right.
Frame 193, the second shot hits Kennedy in the throat from the front.
Frame 225, the President emerging from behind the road sign.
You can see that he's obviously been hit, raising his arms to his throat.
The third shot, frame 232,
hits Kennedy in the back, pulling him downward and forward.
Connally, you will notice, shows no signs at all of being hit.
He is visibly holding his Stetson, which is impossible if his wrist has been shattered.
Connally is turning here, now.
Frame 238, the fourth shot.
It misses Kennedy and takes Connally in the back.
This is the shot that proves there were two rifles.
Connally yells out, "My God! They're going to kill us all!"
Somewhere around this time, now, another shot, that misses the car completely,
strikes James Teague down by the underpass.
The car brakes.
The sixth and fatal shot,
frame 313, takes Kennedy in the head from the front.
This is the key shot.
The President going back and to his left,
shot from the front and right,
totally inconsistent with the shot from the depository.
Again, back, and to the left.
Back, and to the left.
So, what happens then?
Pandemonium.
Let's get the hell out of here! We got him...
The shooters quickly disassemble their various weapons, all except the Oswald rifle.
Patrolman Joe Smith rushes into the parking lot behind the picket fence.
He smells gunpowder.
The character produced credentials from his pocket that showed him to be Secret Service.
Let's see your ID. You see anybody else up here?
No, keep looking.
So, I accepted that and let him go, and continued the search,
but I regretted it, 'cause this guy looked like an auto mechanic.
He had on a sports shirt and pants, but he had dirty fingernails.
Afterward, it didn't ring true, but at the time...
we were so pressed for time.
Yet, all Secret Servicemen in Dallas that day are accounted for.
None were on foot in Dealey Plaza before or after the shooting
till Dallas Secret Service Chief, Forest Sorrels, returned at 12:55.
At least twelve other individuals were taken into custody by Dallas Police,
no record of their arrest.
Men acting like hobos were being pulled off trains,
marched through Dealey Plaza, photographed,
and yet there's no records of their arrest.
Men identifying themselves as Secret Service agents were all over the place,
but who was impersonating them?
And where was Lee Harvey Oswald?
Around 12:15, on her way out of the building to see the motorcade, secretary
Carolyn Arnold sees Oswald in the second-floor snack room, where,
he said he went for a Coke.
He was in a booth on the right side of the room.
He was by himself as usual, appeared to be having his lunch.
I didn't speak to him, but I recognized him clearly.
At the same time,
Bonnie Ray Williams is supposedly eating his chicken lunch on the sixth floor.
He's there until 12:15, maybe 12:20.
He sees nobody.
Arnold Rowlands, down on the street, he's looking up. He sees two men in sixth-floor windows,
presumably after Bonnie Ray Williams had finished his lunch and left.
John Powell, a prisoner on the sixth floor of the Dallas County Jail, sees them.
Quite a few of us kind of saw them.
Everyone was hollering and yelling and all that. We thought they were security guys.
If Oswald was the assassin, he was certainly pretty nonchalant about moving himself into position.
Later, he told Dallas Police he was in the second-floor snack room,
probably told to wait there by his handler for a phone call,
but the phone call never came.
A maximum 90 seconds after Kennedy is shot,
Patrolman Marrion Baker runs into Oswald in that second-floor lunchroom.
Hey, you!
Do you know this man? Is he an employee?
Yes, he is. The President's been shot!
But what the Warren Commission would have us believe is
that after firing three bolt-action shots in 5.6 seconds,
Oswald then leaves three cartridges neatly side-by-side in the firing nest,
wipes the rifle clear of fingerprints, stashes the rifle on the other side of the loft,
sprints down five flights of stairs
past witnesses Victoria Adams and Sandra Styles who never see him,
then shows up, cool and calm, on the second floor in front of Patrolman Baker.
All this within a maximum of 90 seconds of the shooting.
Hey, you!
Do you know this man? Is he an employee?
Yes, he is. The President's been shot!
Is he out of breath?
According to Baker, absolutely not.
Assuming he is the sole assassin, Oswald is now free to escape from the building.
The longer he delays, the more chance the building will be sealed by police.
Is he guilty? Does he walk out the nearest staircase?
No, he buys a Coke,
and at a slow pace, spotted by Mrs. Reid on the second floor,
he strolls out the more distant front exit
where cops have gathered!
Oddly, considering that three shots had been fired from there,
nobody seals the book depository for ten more minutes.
Oswald slips out, as do several other employees.
Of course, when he realized something had gone wrong and the President had been killed,
he knew there was a problem.
He may have even known he was the patsy,
an intuition, maybe. The President killed in spite of his warning.
The phone call that never came.
Perhaps fear now came to Oswald for the very first time.
So, Oswald returns to his rooming house around 1:00 p.m.
a half hour after the assassination.
A man shot the President!
He puts on his jacket, grabs his .38 revolver,
and leaves at 1:04.
Earlene Roberts, the housekeeper, said she heard two beeps on a car horn,
and two uniformed cops pulled up to the house where Oswald was in his room,
like it was a signal or something.
Officer Tippit is shot between 1:10 and 1:15, about a mile away,
and though no one actually saw him walking or jogging,
the government says Oswald covered that distance.
Now, giving the government the benefit of the doubt,
Oswald would've had to jog a mile in six to eleven minutes,
and then commit the murder, then reverse his direction,
and walk three-fifths of a mile to the Texas Theater,
and arrive sometime before 1:30.
It's also a useful conclusion, after all.
Why else would Oswald kill Tippit
unless he had just shot the President and feared arrest?
Domingo Benevides,
the closest witness to the shooting,
refused to identify Oswald as the killer, and was never taken to a lineup.
Acquilla Clemons saw the killer with another man,
and says they went off in separate directions.
Mrs. Clemons was never taken to a lineup or to the Warren Commission.
At the scene of the crime, Officer J. M. Poe marks the shells with his initials
to record the chain of evidence.
Those initials are not on the three cartridge cases
which the Warren Commission present to him.
As early as 12:44, only 14 minutes after the assassination,
the police radio put out a description matching Oswald's size and build.
Oswald is next seen by shoe salesman, Johnny Brewer, lurking along Jefferson Avenue.
Oswald is scared. He begins to realize the full implications of this thing.
He goes into the Texas Theater, possibly his prearranged meeting point,
but though he has $14 in his pocket, he does not buy the $0.75 ticket,
and Brewer has the cashier call the police.
In response to the cashier's call,
at least 30 officers in a fleet of patrol cars descend on the movie theater.
Now, this has to be the most remarkable example of police intuition
since the Reichstag fire,
and I don't buy it.
They knew. Someone knew Oswald was going to be there.
Brewer helpfully leads the cops into the theater
and from the stage, points Oswald out.
There he is.
Sir, can I get you to stand up, please?
This is it!
Kill the President, will you?
I am not resisting arrest!
The police have their man.
It's already been decided in Washington.
By the time he is brought from the theater,
a large crowd is waiting to scream at him.
Lee Oswald must have felt like Joseph K. in Kafka's, The Trial.
He's never told the reasons for his arrest.
He doesn't know the unseen forces ranging against him.
By the time he reached police headquarters, he is booked for murdering Tippit.
No legal counsel was provided.
No record made of the long questioning.
By the time the sun rises the next morning,
he is booked for murdering the President.
The whole country, fueled by the media, assumes he is guilty.
Under the guise of a patriotic nightclub owner
out to spare Jackie Kennedy from having to testify at a trial,
Jack Ruby is shown into an underground garage
by one of his inside men on the Dallas Police force.
And when he is ready, Lee Harvey Oswald is brought out like a sacrificial lamb,
and nicely disposed of as an enemy of the people.
Oswald!
Who grieves for Lee Harvey Oswald,
buried in a cheap grave under the name, "Oswald"?
Nobody.
Within minutes, false statements and press leaks about Lee Oswald circulate the globe.
The official legend is created and the media takes it from there.
The glitter of official lies and the epic splendor of the thought-numbing funeral of JFK
confuse the eye and confound the understanding.
Hitler always said:
"The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it."
Lee Harvey Oswald, a crazed, lonely man who wanted attention
and got it by killing a President, was only the first in a long line of patsies.
In later years, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King,
men whose commitment to change and peace,
would make them dangerous to men who are committed to war, would follow,
also killed by such lonely, crazed men,
men who remove our guilt by making murder a meaningless act of a loner.
We've all become Hamlets in our country, children of a slain father-leader
whose killers still possess the throne.
The ghost of John F. Kennedy confronts us with the secret murder
at the heart of the American Dream.
He forces on us the appalling questions: Of what is our Constitution made?
What is our citizenship, and more, our our lives worth?
What is the future of a democracy
where a President can be assassinated under conspicuously suspicious circumstances
while the machinery of legal action scarcely trembles?
How many more political murders disguised as heart attacks,
suicides, cancers, drug overdoses,
how many airplane and car crashes will occur
before they are exposed for what they are?
"Treason doth never prosper:" wrote an English poet,
"what's the reason?"
"For if it prosper, none dare call it treason."
The American public has yet to see the Zapruder film.
Why?
The American public has yet to see the real X-rays and photographs of the autopsy.
Why?
There are hundreds of documents that could help prove this conspiracy.
Why are they being withheld or burned by the government?
Each time my office or you, the people, have asked those questions, demanded crucial evidence,
the answer from on high has always been: national security.
What kind of national security do we have when we've been robbed of our leaders?
What national security permits the removal
of fundamental power from the hands of the American people
and validates the ascendancy of invisible government in the United States?
That kind of national security, gentlemen of the jury,
is when it smells like it, feels like it, and looks like it,
you call it what it is:
Fascism!
I submit to you that what took place on November 22nd, 1963,
was a coup d'etat.
Its most direct and tragic result
was the reversal of President Kennedy's commitment to withdraw from Vietnam.
The war is the biggest business in America,
worth $80 billion a year.
President Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy
that was planned in advance at the highest levels of our government,
and it was carried out by fanatical, and disciplined cold warriors
in the Pentagon and CIA's covert-operation apparatus.
Among them, Clay Shaw here before you.
It was a public execution, and it was covered up
by like-minded individuals in the Dallas Police Department,
the Secret Service, the FBl, and the White House,
all the way up to, including J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson,
whom I consider accomplices after-the-fact.
The assassination reduced the President to a transient official.
His job, his assignment, is to speak as often as possible of this nation's desire for peace
while he acts as a business agent in the Congress
for the military and their hardware manufacturers.
Now, some people say I'm crazy,
a southern caricature seeking higher office.
Well, there is a simple way to determine if I am paranoid.
Let's ask the two men who profited the most from the assassination,
your former President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and your new President, Richard Nixon,
to release the 51 CIA documents pertaining to Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby,
or the secret CIA memo
on Oswald's activities in Russia that was destroyed while being photocopied.
All these documents are yours,
the people's property. You pay for it.
But because the government considers you children
who might be too disturbed or distressed to face this reality,
or because you might possibly lynch those involved,
you cannot see these documents for another 75 years.
I'm in my early 40s,
so I'll have "shuffled off this mortal coil" by then,
but I'm already telling my eight-year-old son to keep himself physically fit,
so that one glorious September morning, in the year 2038,
he can walk into the National Archives and find out what the CIA and the FBI knew!
They may push it back then.
Hell, it may become a generational affair,
with questions passed down father to son, mother to daughter,
but someday, somewhere, someone may find out the damn truth.
We better.
We better, or we might just as well build ourselves another government,
like the Declaration of Independence says to, when the old one ain't working,
just... just a little farther out west.
An American naturalist wrote:
"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country
"against its government."
I'd hate to be in your shoes today.
You have a lot to think about. You've seen much hidden evidence the American public has never seen.
You know, going back to when we were children,
I think that most of us in this courtroom thought that justice came into being automatically,
that virtue was its own reward, that...
that good would triumph over evil,
but as we get older, we know this just isn't true.
Individual human beings have to create justice, and this is not easy,
because the truth often poses a threat to power,
and one often has to fight power at great risk to themselves.
People like S.M. Holland,
Lee Bowers,
Jean Hill, Willie O'Keefe,
have all taken that risk. They've all come forward.
I have here some $8,000 in these letters sent...
sent to my office from all over the country.
Quarters, dimes, dollar bills from housewives,
plumbers, car salesmen, teachers, invalids.
These are people who cannot afford to send money, but do.
These are the ones who drive the cabs,
who nurse in the hospitals,
who see their kids go to Vietnam.
Why?
Because they care.
Because they want to know the truth.
Because they want the country back.
Because it still belongs to us,
as long as the people have the guts to fight for what they believe in.
The truth is the most important value we have, because if the truth doesn't endure,
if the government murders truth,
if we cannot respect the hearts of these people,
then this is not the country in which I was born, and it is certainly not the country that I want to die in.
Tennyson wrote:
"Authority forgets a dying king."
This was never more true than for John F. Kennedy,
whose murder was probably one of the most terrible moments
in the history of our country.
You the people, the jury system sitting in judgment on Clay Shaw,
represent the hope
of humanity against government power.
In discharging your duty,
and bringing the first conviction in this house of cards,
against Clay Shaw,
"Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country."
Do not forget
your dying king.
Show this world
that this is still a government of the people, for the people and by the people.
Nothing as long as you live
will ever be more important.
It's up to you.
Has the jury reached a verdict?
Yes, we have, Your Honor.
Please hand the verdict to the clerk.
Will the defendant please rise?
The clerk will now read the verdict.
New Orleans, Louisiana, March 1, 1969.
We, the jury, find the defendant, Clay Shaw,
not guilty.
We believe there was a conspiracy,
but whether Shaw was a part of it is another kettle of fish.
There's Jim! There's Jim!
The American media is reporting this as a full vindication of the Warren Commission.
Do you agree?
All I think it proves is you cannot run an investigation
in the light of day even questioning the intelligence operations of the United States Government.
We understand that the morning paper will call for your resignation,
that you're unfit to hold office,
that you've ruined Clay Shaw's reputation.
Mr. Garrison, are you going to resign?
Hell, no. I'm going to run again, and I'm going to win. Thank you.
Who do you plan to persecute next, Mr. Garrison?
If it takes me 30 years to nail every one of the assassins,
then I will continue this investigation for 30 years!
I owe that not only to Jack Kennedy, but to the country.
Hey, there's Clay! There's Clay Shaw!
- How does it feel to be acquitted? - It's been exhausting, I must say.
What will you do now, Mr. Shaw?
I shall go home and cook some étouffée.
Were you confident about the outcome, Clay?
Do you think Garrison will be back for a second round?
I'm sure he will.