False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison's Investigation and Oliver Stone's Film JFK. (Book Reviews).

False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison's Investigation and Oliver Stone's Film JFK. By Patricia Lambert. (New York: M. Evans and Company, Inc., c. 1998. Pp. xviii, 352. $24.95, ISBN 0-87131-879-2.)

Is it the Big Lie or the engaging one that is easiest to sell? In False Witness Patricia Lambert relentlessly challenges--virtually point by point--the veracity of two tales of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The Big Lie, according to Lambert, was told by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison when he charged businessman Clay Shaw with masterminding a plot to kill Kennedy. After a two-year investigation (1967-69) and a six-week trial, Garrison failed to convict in court--Shaw was acquitted after fifty-four minutes of jury deliberation. Undaunted, Garrison would later try again, this time in the court of public opinion. In 1988 he published On the Trail of the Assassins (New York, 1988), his account of the alleged connection between Clay Shaw and Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Lambert concedes one reviewer's observation that the book "`reads like a novel'," adding, "It should. Most of Garrison's engaging story is fiction" (p. 207). Unconstrained by rules of evidence, Garrison told a compelling tale that drew many people back to theorizing on the Kennedy assassination, not the least of whom was Hollywood filmmaker Oliver Stone. In December 1991 Stone released JFK, his three-hour movie on the Kennedy assassination based largely on Garrison's book. According to Lambert, if Garrison's account was fiction, Stone's movie was fantasy. "While Garrison had been somewhat restrained in his fabrications, Stone knew no bounds. He dramatized `events' that were uncorroborated or unreliably reported, and he invented people and scenes that directly contradicted the facts. Whatever the story line needed that wasn't available, Stone concocted" (pp. 213-14).

If Lambert believed Stone was wrong to misrepresent the facts in a popular medium, she believed Garrison was evil for his unwarranted attacks on Shaw and his bullying of many others, including even his main witness, Perry Russo. The chain of events that led to Garrison's indictment of Shaw began with the lies of Jack Martin and Dean Andrews regarding David Ferrie and Clay "Bertrand." Garrison then employed "propinquity theory" (proximity implies connection; pp. 206-7), the "application of models" (matching a suspect against a batch of categories thought to be suspicious; p. 228), and a general marshaling of facts to fit his emerging version of events--to which Assistant D.A. Charles Ward added, "and if the facts didn't fit he'd say they had been altered by the CIA" (p. 228).

According to Lambert, Garrison, not interested in the truth and acting in bad faith from his own ambition, constructed a dark conspiracy tying together Lee Harvey Oswald, David Ferrie, and Clay Shaw (a.k.a. Clay Bertrand). Lambert attempts to do what Garrison did not--to let the facts, not a preconceived theory, determine the conclusion. She finds no conspiracy, only "false witness": the false witness of Garrison, the false witnesses he used, and the subsequent false witnessing of Oliver Stone. She has thoroughly researched and documented her case, supplementing the record with interviews of people who worked closely with Garrison and Shaw (both of whom are now deceased).