online at: https://ratical.org/hos A HERITAGE OF STONE JIM GARRISON A BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOK published by BERKLEY PUBLISHING CORPORATION Cover photo courtesy of United Press International Copyright © 1970, by Jim Garrison All rights reserved Published by arrangement with G P. Putnam's Sons. BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS are published by Berkley Publishing Corporation 200 Madison Avenue New York. N.Y.10016 BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS ® TM 757,375 Printed in the United States of America Berkley Medallion Edition, SEPTEMBER, 1975 Third Printing A Heritage of Stone Page 1 of 162 To the Younger Generation. May its members have the insight to the deceptions of the warfare state. May they have the courage to stand on the side of humanity. CONTENTS Formats: Original PDF, PDF, text-only Book Excerpts Acknowledgments vii Foreword ix ONE FRIDAY IN NOVEMBER 13 Part 1 ILLUSION 23 1. The Execution 25 2. Ornaments 31 3. Power 43 4. The Quarry 56 5. Justice 70 Part 2 REALITY 85 6. The Craft of Deception 87 7. Traces of Intrigue 112 8. The Ides of November 124 9. Nightfall 150 10. The War Machine 173 Appendix 186 Notes 199 Index 213 Editor’s note: I would like to thank Joe Martines for lending his copy of the 1975 paperback which made this project possible. Joe lives in Canada, describing when “the lights went on” for him in this way: “Working part-time at a small Italian weekly newspaper gave me the idea to write about Vincent Salandria and Gaeton Fonzi after reading Fonzi’s great book. Taking a cue from Fonzi looking up Antonio Veciana in the Miami phone book, I did the same and phoned Vince who was extremely gracious and patient as was Gaeton Fonzi. Meeting Chris Sharrett around that time during his visit to an Ottawa film studies conference was a pleasure, as was meeting Marty [Schotz] a few years ago in Boston. To say that meeting and knowing Vincent Salandria has changed my life would be something of an understatement.” A Heritage of Stone Page 2 of 162 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am especially grateful to Vincent Salandria and Andrew Sciambra. Their help in our search for the facts about President Kennedy’s assassination covered a long period of time and took too many forms to begin to describe them here. Their help continued throughout my writing of this book. I could not have accomplished it without them. I am grateful to the members of my staff who remained loyal to me in the face of pressures I have not sought to relate here. I am particularly appreciative of the efforts of James Alcock, Alvin Oser, William Alford and Louis Ivon, who continued pressing ahead for the truth even after it had become apparent that we had taken on forces which were really too great for any district attorney’s office to engage. However, what I lacked in wisdom they more than made up for in courage and loyalty. I am indebted to Ralph Schoenman for his encouragement; and to Willard Robertson, Cecil Shilstone and Joseph Rault and to the citizens who, with them, formed the organization called “Truth and Consequences,” which helped my office finance its efforts. I am grateful to my friend Mort Sahl, who at great personal sacrifice to himself has been an unceasing voice insisting that the people of America be given the truth. I am grateful to Russell B. Long, the United States Senator from Louisiana, for his courage in questioning where few others in Washington dared question, as well as for his steadfast backing of our efforts. I am grateful to John J. McKeithen, Governor of Louisiana, who supported us in every possible way, both privately and publicly. Above all, I am grateful to the people of New Orleans for the long and patient support they gave us while we sought the truth. Without their backing we never would have made it. A Heritage of Stone Page 3 of 162 FOREWORD When will the world grow weary of murder? When my sons and yours, too, are gone? Man’s rise from a poor but honest animal to his present eminence as a charter member of the Hydrogen Club is a great success story. It may turn out to be the success story to end all success stories. The descendant of the hairy Stone Age man would rebuild the earth, change the course of rivers and touch the very stars at which his ancestor stared from his cave at night. There was nothing he would be unable to do, so long as he was not asked to love his fellow man. Man has invented the cross, the gallows, the rack, the gibbet, the guillotine, the sword, the machine gun, the electric chair, the hand grenade, the personnel mine, the flame thrower, the “blockbuster,” the obsolescent atom bomb and the currently popular hydrogen bomb—all made to maim or destroy his fellow man. These inventions, combined with hate and selfishness and lust for power, are responsible for the unending destruction of humans by other humans. Yet most dangerous of all is modern man’s interest in his own self. Hate and love of power could be dealt with were it not for the license they receive from the inertia of millions. The most dangerous of all humans are the gray mice: it is their silence that kills. It was the silence of the gray mice outside the German concentration camps that killed the millions inside. Whether we survive the Thermonuclear Age may come down to the simple question of whether we learn to care about our fellow men. Perhaps our cruelty and detachment will lend to a final day of fire for the most rational creature who ever walked the earth. The computers which we have invented now tell us that our losses in a nuclear exchange will be many millions of American dead. We have come a long way from the first stone axe. Is there an alternative to the extinction of man? Those gibbets, thumbscrews, gallows, treasured hates and fond cruelties must inexorably give way to the expansion of man’s intellect and reason. Along with this, he must increase enormously his compassion for and identification with the species. Failing this, he will become silent forever. JIM GARRISON New Orleans A Heritage of Stone Page 4 of 162 ONE FRIDAY IN NOVEMBER It was a warm November day, as November days in New Orleans are apt to be, when my chief assistant bolted into the office. “The President’s been shot!” he yelled. I had been working on some long-since forgotten matter and I shoved it to the side. Soon Frank Klein and I were downtown where we could find out what had happened in Dallas. A small restaurant on Royal Street had a television set. We ordered something and watched the news coming in bits and pieces from Texas. Things were moving fast on television. Now the President was dead. The news shifted to the manhunt, to the surprisingly quick cornering of the alleged killer in the theater. As the news bulletins steadily appeared, a great amount of information about Lee Harvey Oswald was becoming available unusually fast. I recall that everything else seemed to have stopped, that everywhere people were gathered around television sets. Increasingly, the news was about Oswald. The news seemed to be very detailed for such a new personality on the scene. Now it was reported that Oswald had spent thirty months in Russia as a defector. Now it was reported that Oswald was originally from New Orleans and had spent the past summer in New Orleans. In retrospect, it is apparent that there was too much about Oswald and that it came too soon. There was a prefabricated quality about the whole affair. I was not conscious of this at the time, however, being much more conscious of my feelings for the young President who had just been murdered. The Unwanted Witness That Sunday afternoon Klein and I met at the office with a handful of other members of the District Attorney’s staff. This had become a custom of ours whenever New Orleans appeared possibly involved in any unusual case. For example, in the Chicago murders of eight nurses some years back, the knots with which they had been bound were apparently the work of a seaman. New Orleans is a seafarer’s port of call, so we spent the better part of a weekend going through arrest and conviction records of men with seagoing experience. In the Oswald case, we had a lead regarding one David Ferrie. Someone informed us that Oswald and Ferrie had been associated together in the Civil Air Patrol and that Ferrie may have taken part in the assassination. It took about 15 minutes to establish that Ferrie had not been in Dallas on the day of the murder. However, I could not get Ferrie, who had been known to our office for some time, out of my mind. After my staff checked him out thoroughly, I remained unconvinced by his explanation about a mysterious trip he had made to Texas on the day of the assassination. So I A Heritage of Stone Page 5 of 162 ordered him held for questioning by the FBI. We were about to have our first encounter with the federal government in the case. (It is somewhat analogous to bobbing for apples with your hands tied behind you.) After preliminary questioning, the FBI ordered Ferrie released and then took the surprising step of issuing a news story saying that it had not requested he be picked up.