I think you’ll have to understand that kids at age 15 don’t sit listening to the radio talk shows constantly. They have school and other social things going on. I have related what I heard. I obviously didn’t hear all that was going.
I do believe the Clay Shaw problem was contrived. Perhaps all of Garrison’s claims were contrived. I would have to lean that direction based on his lack of charges being brought, the brash claims he made in the day that never panned out. I don’t believe I’m under any delusion with regard to Garrison.
Does it seem rather strange that Garrison would even bring charges against Shaw? What was up with that? There was some strange stuff going on there, whether Garrison was a total nut job or not. I’m a little sketchy on it right now, but didn’t one witness die shortly before the trial, removing what was to be his most powerful resource? I may be wrong about that, but it seems I remember something being mentioned along those lines.
The guy he was left with seemed like a real nut job, or he was being manipulated by Garrison. Either way that evaporated.
I still have to ask myself, why does a guy put his reputation and job on the line for as flimsy a case as he wound up with against Shaw? Very strange.
“Does it seem rather strange that Garrison would even bring charges against Shaw? What was up with that?”
Publicity.
Plus, he had to have something to show for his troubles, didn’t he? That way he can convince some people he wasn’t wasting the taxpayers’ money willy-nilly.
He also might have believed his own BS. He had this legal theory of “propinquity,” which is geographical proximity, whereby demonstrating that people were close to eachother at some point in their lives is evidence of their being in cahoots. Either Garrison was desperate for any threads with which to tie his general notions of conspiracy to a (barely) prosecutable case, or he really thought having post office boxes in the same building meant you were assassin-buddies.
“I’m a little sketchy on it right now, but didn’t one witness die shortly before the trial, removing what was to be his most powerful resource?”
David Ferrie was the crazy-looking guy played by Joe Pesci in Stone’s movie. He lived is supposed to have participated in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy with Shaw and Oswald. Their connection, so far as I can tell, is that they were all gay. Another version of Garrison’s propinquity. Not only were Oswald, Shaw, and Ferrie all in New Orleans at one time, two of them were homos, so I gues that means they conspired together. Oh, and that Oswald’s gay, too.
Ferrie was reportedly a rabid anti-communist, which fit in with Garrison’s picture of the assassination as the job of right-wingers, in this case an anti-Castro cabal backed by the CIA. Oswald was the pro-Castro patsy, whom the reactionaries used to distract the public from the Military-Industrial Complex’s rise to power.
I spare you the details, but some fella named Jack Martin went around telling stories about Ferrie’s ties to Oswald and his part in a conspiracy to carry out the murder. Garrison heard about it, investigated, and cooked up various complex interrelationships in his head. Ferrie was hounded by Garrison but never confessed. Never agreed to be a witness. Was, in fact, afraid he’d be arrested. Then he died.
Died before the trial! Must have been murder, huh? Or suicide. Either They shut him up—just like Oswald was “shut up” 2 days after he was in police custody and Ruby was “shut up” years after he was arrested—or he shut himself up. Only there’s no evidence of murder. Suicide is possible, and there were present what some people think are suicide notes (it’s open to interpretation). If he did commit suicide, it wasn’t necessarily because he was afraid of being discovered. It could be that Garrison hounded him to death. He was a sick man, and could have been sick enough to want to die, the Kennedy-related hoopla not helping.
“The guy he was left with seemed like a real nut job, or he was being manipulated by Garrison”
Garrison’s main witness after Ferrie’s passing, Perry Russo, testified that he was present when Ferrie, Shaw (whom he knew as “Clay Bertram”) and Oswald plotted to kill Kennedy. It wasn’t until after Ferrie died that he came forward with this gem. His story was demonstrated to have changed over time, suggesting coaching.
There was another witness, I forget who, who first came up with his testimony while under hypnosis.
“He lived is supposed to have participated in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy with Shaw and Oswald”
Scratch that “lived”.