Let Justice Be Done, by William Davy
Jordan Publishing, 341 pages (with index)
$14.95 U.S.

That the Jim Garrison investigation remains a lightning rod thirty years after the acquittal of Clay Shaw was made crystal clear to me this past spring. The then-current issue of Fair Play (#28, May-June 1999) contained a short article about a forthcoming biography of the late New Orleans District Attorney. That seemingly inconsequential item had barely been uploaded when a well known author wrote several scathing emails to me, attacking Garrison "the fraud," and questioning my mental state.

Be that as it may, it is a pleasure to report on Let Justice Be Done by William Davy, a new examination of the Garrison case against Clay Shaw. This important book demonstrates that Garrison was hardly a fraud; that epithet is better suited to those who attacked him.

In the book's Foreword, James DiEugenio calls Davy's work "New Orleans declassified," and this is most apt. For the strength of Let Justice Be Done lies in its use of previously classified documents related to the Garrison/Shaw affair, released by the Assassination Records Review Board.

Garrison, of course, prosecuted Shaw in 1969 for conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy six years earlier. It is now known that Shaw's name came up during the FBI's post-assassination investigation as early as December 1963. According to an FBI memo, "several parties" supplied them with information on Shaw at that time. Who those parties were, and the nature of their information, remains unknown.

What is increasingly clear, Davy says, is "a more than casual relationship between Shaw" and the CIA. Shaw's "Domestic Contact" reports to the Agency go as far back as 1948, and continued into the sixties. One CIA document refers to a covert security clearance for Shaw. Davy interviewed former CIA officer Victor Marchetti who said that such a clearance indicates Shaw worked for Clandestine Services, possibly the Domestic Operations Division --- "one of the most secret divisions within the Clandestine Services."

To this day, those in the anti-Garrison crowd deny that Shaw was anything more than a businessman, and that Shaw used the alias "Clay Bertrand". It was "Clay Bertrand" who phoned New Orleans lawyer Dean Andrews on the weekend of the assassination, asking him to go to Dallas and defend Lee Oswald. Andrews later retracted his story about the phone call, claiming he had imagined it while hospitalized and sedated --- a retraction that Officialdom was all too happy to accept.

Davy ably takes apart that story, publishing an excerpt from an FBI interview with Andrews in December 1963. The FBI report states that Andrews "feels that the telephone call was not a dream" because he had contacted the head of the New Orleans Bar Association, Sam Zelden, on November 24, asking about the propriety of defending Oswald. It was Zelden, during their conversation, "who told him that Lee Harvey Oswald had been shot." Andrews was denying the Bertrand phone call in an FBI re-interview three days after the first. But in an HSCA file, an Andrews employee says Andrews was "positive that a person named Clay Bertrand" had called him.

Among the evidence that "Bertrand" and Shaw were one and the same is an FBI document showing the Bureau had information to that effect in 1967. That same year, Garrison's office was tipped that a "Clay Bertrand" had signed the guest register at a lounge at Moisant Airport in New Orleans; a lounge employee picked out a photograph of Shaw as the man who signed the register.

Davy also relates a provocative but unconfirmed story that came from a federal prisoner named Edward Girnus, who was confined in the Atlanta penitentiary. Girnus alleged that he was in contact with Shaw in the spring of 1963 about a gunrunning operation. Girnus stated that Shaw brought him into contact with Lee Oswald.

Garrison's office also obtained, through Girnus, an FAA flight plan for an April 1963 flight from Hammond, Louisiana (where Shaw maintained a home) to Garland, Texas. The flight captain was listed as "D. Ferrie," with three passengers: "Hidell," "Lambert," and "Diaz." The name Hidell, of course, was an alias used by Lee Oswald. According to Girnus, "Lambert" was an alias used by Clay Shaw, while "Diaz" was an anti-Castro Cuban.

Incidents in Clinton, Louisiana and nearby Jackson in August 1963, where men identified as Shaw, Ferrie and Oswald were seen during black voter registration drives, have been used to link the three. Consequently the Clinton witnesses have long been under attack. But Davy is in fine form as he deals with this episode. Witnesses come across as highly credible, including John Manchester, Clinton's town marshal. Manchester approached a limousine that had been parked in town all day, rousing the suspicions of participants in the registration drive. The vehicle's driver identified himself as Clay Shaw, Manchester testified, "Which corresponded to his driver's license."

Although he was arrested and charged in 1967, Clay Shaw's trial did not take place until 1969. Bill Davy shows how the defense benefitted during this time from an unprecedented media blitz in support of the accused, and how the prosecution was infiltrated and compromised after Garrison's investigation became public knowledge. It now seems plain, with three decades of hindsight, that Jim Garrison never stood a chance.

One minor flaw in this book: it could probably have used some additional copy editing. Readers who are sensitive to the occasional mis-use of commas, for example --- or less often, the occasional redundancy --- may be a little bothered by some of the text. But these are minor technical points that in no way detract from the strength of Bill Davy's research. It is only a pity that Let Justice Be Done will not reach as wide an audience as other, less deserving, works on the same subject.

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