The JFK 100

Who is "Bill Broussard"? George Lardner, Jr., explains:

Two days after [David] Ferrie's death, with the international press snapped to attention, Garrison announced that he had solved the assassination "beyond any shadow of a doubt." Not a conspirator would escape, Garrison declared. "The only way they can get away from us is by killing themselves."

It was only after these surreal pronouncements that Garrison stumbled across his star witness, a 25-year-old salesman named Perry Russo. Russo knew Ferrie and, after prodding under hypnosis, claimed to have been at a party in September 1963 that wound up with Ferrie, Oswald and a New Orleans businessman named Clay Shaw discussing an assassination plot. The name "Clay" was first mentioned to the hypnotized Russo by the hypnotist.

On this flimsy pretext, Shaw was arrested on a charge of conspiring to kill Kennedy and, 22 grueling months later, brought to trial. It lasted 34 days and contained numerous embarrassments for the prosecution. Chief among them was Charles I. Spiesel, a New York accountant presented by Garrison's men as a surprise witness. He told of a June 1963 party in the French Quarter where, he said, Ferrie and Shaw talked freely about why Kennedy should be killed and how it could be done.

On cross-examination, it turned out that Spiesel, a short balding man in his fifties, had filed civil suits demanding millions of dollars from New York police, the Pinkerton detective agency, a psychiatrist and others, for conspiring to keep him under hypnosis and torture him until confidential information had been extracted. He estimated that 50 to 60 enemies had hypnotized him in the past few years, planting wild ideas in his head. It took jurors less than an hour to find Shaw not guilty.

How does Oliver Stone explain this and still make it a heroic Garrisonian struggle against the feds? Well, for one thing, the script eliminates Perry Russo; he doesn't exist. That is certainly a convenient device. I can remember conversations with Russo in June 1967. He invited me to bribe him to disclose "weaknesses" in his testimony.

"If you say anything about this," Russo added, "I'm going to have to call you a liar." I wrote a story about it anyway. Garrison showed no interest in it, at least none that I know about. But some two weeks later, he accused Walter Sheridan of NBC of "public bribery" for what appears to have been a similar set of conversations with Russo. Of course, nothing ever came of the charges.

For Stone, the dilemma is clear. The Shaw trial was a disaster, so the movie needed a villain to explain it away, a double agent on the DA's staff. Get ready to meet Bill Boxley, a very strange case indeed. He is also conveniently dead. He can't sue.

In Oliver Stone's script, Bill Boxley [renamed "Bill Broussard"] is depicted as an insidious insider who keeps scoffing at the idea of a conspiracy on the part of intelligence community. At one point, Boxley tells Garrison he could buy the idea that the Mafia did it "a hell of a lot easier," then walks out when Garrison insists that "this was a military-style ambush from start to finish . . .a coup d'etat with Lyndon waiting in the wings."

"You're losing your marbles, chief," screenwriter Stone has the faithless Boxley saying.

Boxley's real name was William C. Wood, a gun-toting, former CIA officer who was forced to leave the agency in 1953 because of alcoholism. A sometime journalist, salesman and private detective, he became interested in the investigation as an editor of a Texas weekly and was eagerly signed up by Garrison in May 1967 as a special investigator. Garrison gave him the alias of Boxley "to keep it quiet that we had a former agency man aboard." He saw in Wood/Boxley a chance to understand the "mentality of the agency."

The two grew quite close, but about 18 months later, Garrison fired him. The DA attributed Boxley's abrupt dismissal in a press release to "evidence recently developed by the District Attorney's staff [that] indicated current activity by him as an operative of the Central Intelligence Agency."

What Garrison didn't say then, or in his book, was that he was, with Boxley's help, about to indict for Kennedy's November 1963 murder a man who had committed suicide in August 1962.

That's right. Garrison, in his Alice-in-Wonderland world, was convinced that a construction worker named Robert L. Perrin was "the man on the grassy knoll" who really shot JFK. He just wouldn't believe that Perrin was dead, even though a Louisiana state police employee who knew Perrin identified his arsenic-laden corpse. The dutiful Boxley dredged up some downstairs neighbors who had never had a close look at Perrin to say they didn't recognize the morgue photo.

From there, the plot thickened. Neighbors identified one of the men in the celebrated "tramp photo" as someone who lived right across the hall from the man who was -- or wasn't -- Perrin!

Every student of the assassination knows about the three "tramps," probably local winos. [Since this article was written, the three men have been identified.] They may have been guilty of mopery, but they had nothing to do with the assassination. They were found in a boxcar three blocks away, still hanging around 90 minutes after Kennedy was killed, and then were marched by police across the tracks in front of the Book Depository. They have been suspects ever since -- "positively" identified as anyone and everyone from Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt to LBJ's farm manager. "You have no idea of what's happened to those three poor men," says author Harold Weisberg.

According to Weisberg, who worked closely with Garrison and his staff until he became disgusted with the inquiry, Garrison was bent on indicting Perrin and the "tramps" on Nov 22, 1968, to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the assassination. The DA's regular staff, alarmed that their boss was about to blow himself out of the water, tried to talk him out of it, but all they could do was win a delay and appeal to Weisberg for help.

"Almost all of Boxley's nuttiness was feedback," Weisberg says. "He'd go out and make up the evidence to suit Garrison's theories."

Weisberg flew to New Orleans, holed himself up in the DA's office and wrote a lengthy report demolishing Boxley's claims. He also brought with him Philadelphia lawyer Vincent Salandria, an assassination critic full of far-out theories whom Garrison regarded highly. While Weisberg worked, Salandria met with Garrison to convince him that Boxley was "sent in by the CIA to destroy Garrison."

"I would see anybody trying to destroy Garrison as a CIA agent," Salandria recalled in a recent telephone interview. "In fact, I saw CIA when Oswald was killed by [Jack] Ruby. Even before. That weekend, I said if a Jew comes in and kills Oswald -- and I'm not being antisemitic, I'm married to a Jew -- but if a Jew comes in and kills Oswald, then it's CIA."

"I never met Boxley," Salandria told me. "I based my conclusions on standard operating procedure for intelligence agencies."

In the script, Garrison gets the news about Boxley from one of his prosecutors with the Shaw trial about to begin: "He [Boxley]'s working for the federal government," the aide tells Garrison. "It means they have everything, Jim. All our witnesses, our strategy for the trial." This serves as the excuse for the disastrous testimony of Charles Spiesel. "He was one of Boxley's witnesses, Chief," the Stone script quotes one of Garrison's prosecutors as saying. "I'm sorry. He was totally sane when we talked."

In fact, Boxley had nothing to do with Spiesel or his comeuppance. And there is no evidence that Boxley was working for the feds. But for Garrison, facts were irrelevant once he seized on an idea, as he demonstrated for his staff the day after Boxley was fired.⁽¹⁾

 

Rather than confront the truth about his hero, however, Oliver Stone relies upon fictionalized scapegoats to explain why Garrison's conspiracy probe went nowhere.

NOTES:

1. George Lardner, Jr., "On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland," Washington Post, May 19, 1991, reprinted in Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar, JFK: The Book of the Film (New York: Applause, 1992), pp. 193-95.

2. Patricia Lambert, False Witness (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), pp. 132-35, 284. "But he's crazy": Tom Bethell, The Electric Windmill (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1988), p. 70.