Opening Files on Assassination

Thanks to The Times for opposing Warner’s attempt to hype its “JFK” movie with a “study project” for our school systems. Stone miscast a discredited and paranoid district attorney, Jim Garrison, as an American hero, while portraying Garrison’s victim, Clay Shaw, as a cynical scoundrel who cheated justice. In the real world, Shaw was compelled to exhaust his life savings to win acquittal from Garrison’s preposterous charge of conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy.

After a two-year investigation and a six-week trial, a New Orleans jury took only 54 minutes and one ballot to find Shaw innocent, whereupon Garrison promptly indicted him for perjury in testifying to his own innocence. U.S. Judge Herbert Christenberry then enjoined Garrison from further prosecution of Shaw, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Garrison’s appeal.

After Shaw died in 1974, Garrison succeeded in accomplishing in his error-strewn book, “On the Trail of the Assassins,” what he could not do as a prosecutor, and unilaterally declared his deceased victim guilty. If this sad record of prosecutorial malfeasance is to be studied, it should be dissected as a manifest legal atrocity, not as an exercise in histortainment.

JAMES PHELAN

Temecula