Nihil Obstat

Jim Garrison’s Kennedy Assassination Fairy Tale

On March 1, 1967, New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw, 54, was arrested at his home on 1313 Dauphine Street on charges that he conspired to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.  New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison said Shaw conspired with Lee Harvey Oswald, David Ferrie and Guy Bannister to kill Kennedy. Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine, shot Kennedy on November 22, 1963, from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Depository as Kennedy traveled by motorcade through Dallas.  Shot through the head, he died almost instantly.  Garrison claimed that Shaw was the man named as “Clay Bertrand” in the Warren Commission Report. Garrison said that Shaw used the alias Clay Bertrand in New Orleans’ gay circles. 

Conspirators

Guy Bannister was a private investigator in New Orleans. He was a former FBI agent and an avid anti-communist, with ties to various anti-Castro groups. David Ferrie, a former seminarian, was an airline pilot and an anti-communist activist. At the time of the assassination Guy Bannister was helping Ferrie in his dispute with Eastern Airlines and the New Orleans Police Department regarding charges of extortion and “crimes against nature”—picking up teenage boys for sex.

Homosexual Thrill Killing

Like many Americans, New Orleans District Attorney Garrison did not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone but was part of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Since Garrison needed a theory that allowed him the authority to prosecute, he produced the idea that the assassination was a “homosexual thrill killing.”  Since gay men were culturally perceived as criminal sexual deviants, they were vulnerable to blackmail and intimidation. On July 15, 1967, NBC gave Garrison a full half hour to explain his hypothesis about the assassination.  “Tonight, I’m going to talk to you about truth and about fairy tales,” he began. Garrison told journalist James Phelan of the Saturday Evening Post that David Ferrie and Clay Shaw “had the same motive as Loeb and Leopold, when they murdered Bobbie Franks in Chicago back in the twenties,” a reference to the sensational 1924 kidnapping and murder of a fourteen-year-old boy by two lovers.

Fabricating a Theory

Garrison’s spider web of conspirators were connected by gossamer threads. Shaw and Ferrie were both homosexuals.  Ferrie and Garrison were anti-Communists associated with Cuban refugees in anti-Castro groups. Lee Harvey Oswald joined a civil air patrol squadron in 1955. Oswald met Ferrie when he was a guest instructor. Under hypnosis, Perry Raymond Russo, an insurance agent, claimed that he saw Shaw, Oswald and Ferrie at a party discussing assassinating President Kennedy. The conversation also included plans for “triangulation of crossfire” and alibis for the participants. 

Russo recalled seeing Shaw on Nashville Avenue Wharf when he went to see JFK speak (May 4, 1962). “He said he particularly remembers this guy because he was apparently a queer. It seems that instead of looking at JFK speak, Shaw kept turning around and looking at all the young boys in the crowd. He said that Shaw eventually struck up a conversation with a young kid not too far from him. It was perfectly obvious to him that Shaw had stared at his penis several times…He said that Shaw had on dark pants that day that fit very tightly and were the kind of pants that lots of queers in the French Quarter wear.”  During the trial a prosecutor asked Shaw and various witnesses if Shaw had ever worn “tight pants.” Shaw said that he didn’t have any tight pants.

Like Shaw and Ferrie, Russo was a homosexual. Russo was Garrison’s star witness at Shaw’s trial.  In 1971, he admitted to members of Shaw’s defense team his story was completely made up, and he persisted with it since he was afraid of Garrison and would not “sacrifice himself” for Shaw.

Clay LaVergne Shaw was big man, six foot four and a barrel-chested 225 pounds. Quiet and soft-spoken, he moved in New Orleans’ elite social circles. Shaw was the former head of New Orleans’ International Trade Mart. He was an amateur playwright (Tennessee Williams was a friend). Shaw was also an advocate of restoring the city’s famed French Quarter, where he owned a home. His close friends knew that he was gay, but it was a carefully guarded secret so it would not affect his standing in the community.

Continuing Harassment

The jury took less than an hour of deliberation to return with a verdict of not guilty.  The date was March 1, 1969, exactly two years after his arrest. A few days after his acquittal, Garrison charged Shaw with perjury.  Shaw spent the remaining years of his life and his entire savings trying to clear his name.  The strain of the five-year ordeal took its toll on Shaw’s health. He died of lung cancer on August 14, 1974.  He was 61 years old.

Garrison’s group of conspirators eventually morphed beyond Lee Harvey Oswald (who was insinuated to be gay or bisexual) and a few gay men in New Orleans.  His theory went on to include the FBI, CIA and the whole “Military-Industrial Complex” of plotting Kennedy’s death in cahoots with anti-communist and anti-Castro extremists.  Despite the bizarre circus of Shaw’s trial, Garrison managed to keep Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories in public consciousness.

Although Clay Shaw was discreet about his homosexuality, Garrison knew about it and found it useful to portray Shaw as a criminal and a conspirator.  Shaw’s “double life” fed into that narrative. How Shaw managed his gay circle and sexual life during the trial is sad, showing a blameless and dignified man turning on himself at his core. During the trial and aftermath, he must have endured an excruciating amount of ridicule and prurient interest. Shaw wanted to protect his friends, so he told them to stop contacting him directly. He also sought counseling with a Catholic priest and began reading extensively about spirituality, including Father Adrian Van Kamm’s Religion and Personality.  Another book was Thomas Merton’s, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, which Shaw mistitled, Confessions of a Guilty Bystander in his journal and an interview.

Homophobia

Author Alecia P. Long, in her 2021 book, Cruising for Conspirators – How a New Orleans DA Prosecuted the Kennedy Assassination as a Sex Crime, includes a short vignette on pages 120-121 on Shaw’s struggle with his sexual desires. “On April 17 Shaw documented in his journal a daylong struggle with sexual temptation. ‘I have resolved, since all this happened, to change my life completely and to let die certain aspects of my personality which should have been disposed of many years ago.’ The sexual attraction he felt awakened “memories, reflections, and desires” that he found “vivid, intense and disturbing.” “At day’s end, he wrote, ‘The best defense seemed to be silent repetition of the Lord’s prayer off and on during the day, with particular emphasis on that passage asking that we be led not into temptation but delivered from evil…Empirically, it worked.  By afternoon all temptation had disappeared. I have no hope it will be that easy in the future, but at least I have found the path.”

Homophobia – never mentioned – played a huge role in Garrison’s conspiracy theory, the trial, and Shaw’s individual reckoning. Shaw fought to clear his name as an assassination conspirator until the end of his life, but in the process of doing so seems to have come to believe that his homosexuality was responsible for his predicament. He committed to celibacy to make amends. What an ugly and mournful end for a man who lived as fully, productively and authentically as society would allow until he was falsely accused of killing Kennedy.