The JFK 100

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT CONFERENCE ROOM

The acting Attorney General speaks to the press.

ATTORNEY GENERAL Yes, Mr. Shaw was included in our investigation and there was no connection found at all between Shaw and the President's assassin.

GARRISON'S OFFICE - CONFERENCE ROOM (1967)

Jim confronts a packed room. Bill [fictional investigator "Bill Broussard"] is with him.

JIM If Mr. Shaw had no connection to the assassination, why did the FBI investigate him? And why, if they did, is his name not mentioned once in the entire 26 volumes of the Warren Report, even it if is to clear his name? I doubt this Attorney General would qualify for my staff.⁽¹⁾

In her landmark study of the Garrison investigation, False Witness, Patricia Lambert writes:

The day after he arrested Shaw, Garrison again benefited from the hand of fate. United States Attorney General Designate Ramsey Clark had a blundering encounter with the press in Washington and provided Garrison with another credibility boost. Emerging from a Senate confirmation hearing on his nomination, Clark answered questions about events in New Orleans by saying that Clay Shaw had been investigated by the FBI in 1963 and cleared. Clark's statement was a simple mistake. He should have said "Bertrand" had been investigated. Shaw at first took comfort in the report. Assuming he had been investigated because of Oswald's pamphleteering in front of the Trade Mart, Shaw told reporters he had not known about the FBI investigation but was delighted and pleased that he had been cleared by them. That same day, the bureaucratic snafu was compounded when a befuddled spokesman for the Department of Justice, pressed on the issue, said of Bertrand and Shaw, "We think it's the same guy."

As the government paper trail now shows, this was a sensitive matter, an error of some magnitude by the brand new Attorney General of the United States.⁽²⁾ The problem heated up when Shaw's attorney, Edward Wegmann, requested the information obtained by the FBI in its investigation of Shaw. Since there had been no investigation, both Clark and the FBI were now on the spot. As one exasperated Department of Justice employee told a friendly reporter who called asking for an explanation, "We can't very well say that Clark has wood in his head." Responding finally to Wegmann's request for a "public clarification," the Department of Justice explained that in 1963 "nothing arose indicating a need to investigate Mr. Shaw" and that Clark's statement had been in error.⁽³⁾ This innocent explanation was never accepted by Garrison. Today, the incident is part of the lore of his case, one of those quirky events that fueled the possibility he might really be on to something.⁽⁴⁾

 

NOTES:

1. Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar, JFK: The Book of the Film (New York: Applause, 1992), p. 115. All quotations are from the shooting script and may vary slightly from the finished motion picture.

2. Patricia Lambert, False Witness (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), pp. 81-82. Lambert's endnote reads: "Director, FBI, communiqué to The Attorney General, regarding Clay Shaw's attorney, Edward F. Wegmann, and the alleged FBI investigation of Clay Shaw, March 10, 1967. At the bottom of this document is the following internal Bureau 'NOTE': 'On March 2, 1967, Attorney General Clark made remarks to the press which the press had interpreted as stating that the FBI had investigated Clay Shaw in New Orleans in Nov. and Dec., 1963. This of course is not true. We did not investigate Clay Shaw in connection with our investigation of the assassination. . . . The Attorney General contacted Mr. DeLoach 3/3/67 . . . [and] stated he had been misquoted by reporters.' Clark was not misquoted, however, as the transcript of his press conference establishes ('CBS Interview with Ramsey Clark after his nomination hearing, March 2, 1967')." (Lambert, pp. 306-07 fn. 40.)

3. Patricia Lambert, False Witness (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 82. Lambert's endnote reads: "'Justice Admits Error in Shaw-Bertrand Tie,'" Washington Post, June 3, 1967. All the fault does not appear to lie with Rarnsey Clark. The record suggests that the FBI's communications with Clark on March 2, 1967, contributed to his confusion and may have been the principal source of it. That day in an early morning telephone conversation, FBI Deputy Director C. D. DeLoach, responded to Clark's inquiries about Garrison's arrest of Clay Shaw the previous day by telling Clark that Shaw's name 'had come up' in the FBI's 1963 investigation, a reference to the Bureau's search, for 'Clay Bertrand,' which was specifically mentioned in the conversation. DeLoach also told Clark that 'it had been alleged that this was an alias used by Shaw.' This may have sounded to Clark as though that allegation was made in 1963 but the comprehensive memorandum sent to Clark that same morning by J. Edgar Hoover clearly stated that the allegation about Shaw using the alias was received by the FBI on February 24, 1967, from two sources. If it had come from fifty sources, it would be just as meaningless. For the allegation originated in Jim Garrison's office. Garrison had been saying it for at least two months, since December 1966 when he proclaimed it to David Chandler. (The rumor was so widespread that, as noted earlier, Shaw himself heard it on February 26, 1967.) As for Shaw's name having 'come up' during the 1963 search for 'Bertrand,' Hoover's March 2, 1967, memorandum makes no mention of it. But Hoover's memorandum, in describing the Bureau's knowledge (dating from 1954) of Shaw's homosexuality, provides an explanation for why Shaw's name might have surfaced in the Bureau's 1963 search for Clay Bertrand -- the Bureau knew Shaw's sexual orientation fit Bertrand's alleged profile (and the first name was the same). Those, of course, were two of the factors that had led Garrison to jump to the conclusion that Shaw was Bertrand. (C.D. DeLoach, Memorandum, to Mr. Tolson, March 2, 1967; J. Edgar Hoover, memoranda, concerning Garrison-Shaw matter, March 2, 1967 and March 3, 1967 [attachments to letter from Hoover to Dir., Bureau of Intelligence and Research, State Department, dated March 9, 1967].)" (Lambert, p. 307 fn. 41.)

4. Patricia Lambert, False Witness (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 82.