Jim Garrison and me

Jim Garrison was an enigma. He had a brilliant mind, but his mind was not analytical. He had a great sense of humor, but often others humor was lost on him. He was reasonably well read, but yet was confounded by well-known quotes from well-known sources. He was politically savvy; yet one of the most naïve elected officials when political savvy was most needed by him.

I first met Jim in late 1964 or early 1965 and instantly liked him. One of my good friends, Max Mercer was an assistant district attorney in his office and he introduced me to the “Giant;” a nickname given to him because of his massive size.

When the Clay Shaw trial arose in 1967, and Jim attempted to implicate him in the Kennedy assassination, I was practicing law in New Orleans. For about seven or eight years, I had coffee every morning with Irvin Dymond, who was the primary lawyer for Clay Shaw, the man charged by Garrison with conspiring to kill President Kennedy. Irvin had a beautiful mellifluous voice which offset the basso profondo of Jim Garrison. The anticipation of a brawl between those two legal titans was greatly anticipated by the locals and by the national media alike. What a disappointment when Garrison made an opening statement and then turned the trial over to his assistants, Jim Alcock and Al Oser. He was not seen again until he made one of the prosecution’s feeble closing arguments.

Al Oser was a fraternity brother of mine, and I met Alcock through Max Mercer; both were adequate lawyers but lacked the gravitas of the Giant. The trial lasted about three weeks and over fifty witnesses testified. Thanks to Irvin Dymond, I was able to sit through five or six days of this embarrassing display of justice, and like most people at the time, judged Jim’s case a farce. After three weeks of testimony from over fifty witnesses, it took the jury less than an hour to arrive at their not guilty verdict. It was hardly sufficient time for the jury to choose a foreman and take an up-or-down vote. Obviously, they were not impressed with the prosecution’s evidence.

I knew several witnesses, such as, Andrew Moo-Moo Sciambra, an assistant district attorney and Dean Andrews, a local hack lawyer, among them. It made no difference who testified, the case was flawed from the first. This judicial disgrace was beneath the lowest standard of any district attorney’s office.

Later, in 1971, Max and I attempted to goad Jim into running for the Senate of the United States and wrote a paper outlining the reasons he should run. The incumbent, Allen J. Ellender, was a long time member of that body and was firmly entrenched in the good-ole-boy network in Washington. North Louisiana’s Baptist majority was enamored with Garrison because he had attacked the drug and prostitution rings on Bourbon Street and in addition, his stature among the greater New Orleans population was never stronger. Only the Cajun areas were strongly for the reelection of the incumbent.

Ultimately, Jim shied away from the race, even though we thought he could easily have defeated Ellender. Suddenly, a North Louisiana politician, Bennett Johnson entered the race. Ellender dropped dead during the primary and the rest is history. Johnson served in the U.S. Senate from November of 1972 until January of 1997. Had Jim been more aware he would have been one of a hundred members of an august body and not one of the many thousands of D.A.’s throughout the country. Jim once told me, long after the jury had acquitted Shaw, that he had chosen the wrong venue for the trial. “The stage in New Orleans was too small. I needed the national stage in Washington if I could pull it off,” he said. I never knew if Jim believed Shaw was guilty or not, but I assumed he ultimately convinced himself of the man’s guilt. I saw Jim almost daily at the New Orleans Athletic Club, but never spoke to him again about the trial.

Later, after I supported Harry Connick’s successful run for DA against Jim, and before Jim ran for the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals in Louisiana, he was practicing law a few blocks from my office and asked if I would help him prepare a brief he was writing. It seems, Jim was a patient in a local hospital; fell out of bed, reinjured his bad back, and brought a malpractice case against the hospital. He represented himself at the trial and the jury awarded him a large sum of money. I worked with him on his brief to the Court of Appeals, but it was hopeless; the law was against us.

I often wonder whether Jim would have brought his Kennedy conspiracy theory before the United States Senate had he been elected to that body. But I do know one thing; if he was standing at the lectern on the floor of the senate, it would have been damned interesting to find out.