Dr. Mary’s Monkey Read online

  “Oh, yes. They worked together for years. She was older and considerably higher up the ladder than he was, but Daddy always said that she was one of the top people in her field. He had a lot of respect for her. Professional respect, I mean.”

  “Did you ever meet her?”

  “Yes, we had dinner at her apartment one night. A strange woman, but very sophisticated and very well travelled. And very into theatre and literature. I felt very out of place. All I could talk about was my children. I remember that her friends were very strange.”

  “What do you mean by strange?”

  “Oh, they were not the type of people we were used to associating with. They lived in the French Quarter and were involved in the theatre and all that. Mary was somewhat of an outcast at the medical school. Most of the doctors we knew had wives and children. Everyone respected Mary professionally, but she ran in different social circles. I remember driving home after the dinner. The normal protocol, like we used to do in the Navy, said the next step would have been for us to invite her over to our house for dinner. So I asked your father if he wanted to do that. He thought about it for a while and said, ‘No,’ adding that Mary’s social circle was a little weirder than he wanted to be associated with. That was the last time we discussed it.”

  Suddenly I felt exhausted. I shook my head in dismay and breathed deeply. This was stranger and more disturbing than even Nicky’s story had been. It’s one thing for a crackpot to be doing home-brewed cancer experiments in his apartment, but it’s something else to have the involvement of a highly respected and professionally competent cancer researcher working in the crackpot’s lab. What was going on here? And to have it all so close to my family! I didn’t know what else to say. I thought again about my wise-crack: “If there’s a bizarre global epidemic ... at least we’ll know where it came from”. I was depressed. We were silent. My mother went back to her task down the hall. I changed clothes and walked over to a friend’s house, trying to forget about it.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  1 “Jolly Green Giant in Wonderland,” Time, August 2, 1968, p. 56.

  2 Davy, Bill “License & Registration Please,” Probe, June 1994, p. 5 & July 1994, p. 1. The Clinton incident is discussed in detail later. Probe is the newsletter from the CTKA, Citizens for the Truth about the Kennedy Assassination.

  3 Actually, much of the information which Nicky discussed had been disclosed by Garrison in Playboy in October 1967. It was startling to us, because most of it had been systematically ignored by the press.

  4 How extreme is extreme? In the Playboy interview Garrison said Ferrie had belonged to the Minutemen, an ultra-right-wing paramilitary group. Ferrie claimed that he left the group because they were too moderate. On the other hand, the Minutemen may have simply objected to Ferrie’s mental instability, or his personal life, and kicked him out.

  5 Robert F. “ Bobby” Kennedy was President John F. Kennedy’s younger brother, and served as U.S. Attorney General during his presidency. After the JFK assassination, Bobby was elected U.S. Senator from New York, and was then himself assassinated in 1968 as he sought the Democratic nomination for President.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  CHAPTER 3

  Jimbo

  JIM GARRISON WAS ONE OF THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL figures in modern American history. Attitudes about him tend to be polarized. To his supporters, he was a hero, the only public official to have the courage to dig for the truth about President Kennedy’s assassination and to confront the American government and the American people with it. To his critics, he was a politically ambitious tyrant whose ruthless use of power was driven by his wild imagination. We do not need to judge Garrison, but we do need to understand him, because his statement recorded in an interview with a national magazine was for a long time the only documentary evidence we had in hand connecting Dr. Mary Sherman to David Ferrie’s underground medical laboratory. So who was he?

  Jim Garrison was born in Iowa in 1921.1 His father abandoned his family when he was three. His mother moved him to Chicago and then to New Orleans. His original name was Earling Carothers Garrison. He changed it to “Jim” in 1946. His nickname “Jimbo” was a friendly corruption of the words “Jim” and “jumbo,” based on his enormous size, six-feet six-inches. His other nickname, “The Jolly Green Giant,”2 was also based upon his size, but was intended to ridicule him in the press.

  In 1940 Garrison joined the U.S. Army at the age of nineteen and became a pilot. During World War II he few missions over France and Germany, acting as a forward observer for artillery units. At the end of the war, his unit liberated the infamous Dachau Concentration Camp, where he witnessed the horrors of Nazi incarceration first hand. It was there that he came to understand what one human being was capable of inflicting upon another in the name of a fag. It solidified his hatred of fascism, and his fear of autocratic governments.

  After the war, he returned to New Orleans and earned a law degree from Tulane University. Soon he started working for the FBI, knocking on doors for background checks in the Northwest. Preferring combat to boredom, he re-enlisted in the army for the Korean War and, when that was over, returned to New Orleans. There he joined the National Guard and, like many young attorneys in New Orleans, became an assistant DA for a few years before starting a private practice.

  In 1960, Garrison mounted his first political campaign: to become a judge in Criminal District Court; he lost. In 1961, he mounted a second political campaign, for the District Attorney of Orleans Parish, and surprised the political establishment by winning. Re-elected twice, he held that position for twelve years, until 1974 when he was defeated by Harry Connick, father of the popular singer/musician Harry Connick, Jr.

  As District Attorney, Garrison positioned himself as “a tough-on-crime enforcer.” He cracked down on prostitution and gambling in the French Quarter. Self-righteous and outspoken, he criticized police for being soft on crime and criminal court judges for refusing to finance his investigations into organized crime. His moralistic stance made him popular with some groups and unpopular with others. (The drummer in Jack Ruby’s nightclub told me, “Garrison was a terrible man who ruined a lot of people.”)

  Perhaps his most important contribution to American law was a landmark victory in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1964. The New Orleans criminal court judges he criticized for being soft on crime had sued him for defamation. Garrison counter-sued on the grounds that he, as a citizen, had the right to criticize public officials. It was, as he called it, “the essence of self-government.” The high court agreed.

  A second indication of Garrison’s penchant for rights of the individual against the state was his intervention in a racial-integration crisis on behalf of a New Orleans merchant who had been arrested for selling books by black author James Baldwin. The New Orleans Police Department felt the book, Another Country, violated the prevailing political and racial sensibilities, and should not be sold. To Garrison, it was just another book burning. Politically, this event solidified his support among the black population in New Orleans, since they had never seen anyone from the District Attorney’s office intervene on their behalf before.

  These actions gave Garrison strong political viability across all Louisiana. He was a potential candidate for any statewide office, such as State Attorney General, Governor, or U.S. Senator.

  Garrison moved swiftly into the JFK probe. The day after Kennedy’s death, the press announced that Lee Harvey Oswald had spent the summer before the assassination in New Orleans. Before Oswald was even buried, Garrison was tracking down New Orleanian David Ferrie on a tip that Ferrie was a getaway pilot in a larger assassination plot. Garrison’s office raided David Ferrie’s apartment, picked up Ferrie for questioning, and turned him over to the FBI. The FBI promptly released Ferrie, and Garrison dropped the matter.

  Three years later, in November 1966, Garrison was persuaded to re-open his investigation into the JFK assassination by U.S. Senator Russell Long. Senator Long arranged to fina
nce Garrison’s inquiry secretly through an organization called Truth and Consequences, formed specifically for that purpose at Long’s request by New Orleans oil man Joe Rault. In February 1967, a press leak concerning Garrison’s secret investigation into the JFK assassination, followed immediately by the death of his prime suspect David Ferrie, catapulted Jim Garrison into the world media spotlight overnight. If it was fame he sought, he got it. And with it, the focus of assassination speculation shifted from Dallas to New Orleans.

  In March 1967 Garrison arrested New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw for conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy. At first Garrison called the assassination a crime organized by extremist elements of the anti-Castro community, and to prevent any misinterpretation, he specifically pointed out that his team had not found any evidence of involvement by the CIA itself. But in May 1967, all that changed.

  Garrison upped the stakes by announcing on national television that Kennedy’s death was a coup d’etat organized by elements inside the CIA, particularly in its Plans Division.3 What followed was two years of heavy character assault on Garrison.

  The heart of Garrison’s case was that he had associated Clay Shaw with Lee Harvey Oswald during the summer of 1963. Garrison believed Shaw’s contact with Oswald was part of a deliberate attempt to set up Oswald to take the blame for Kennedy’s impending assassination.4 In particular, Garrison claimed that Shaw tried to help Oswald get a job at a mental hospital in Jackson, Louisiana, near the town of Clinton. According to Garrison, Shaw drove Oswald to Clinton so Oswald could register to vote in hopes of improving his chances of getting the job at the hospital.

  As luck would have it, the Congress for Racial Equality was sponsoring a voter registration for black voters that day. When a black Cadillac drove into the center of the small Louisiana town, folks watched closely and curiously. Were these FBI agents? The press? Outside agitators? A young white man emerged from the back of the Cadillac and got in line to register. He made a memorable impression, since he was the only white person in the line and since he was not a resident of the area. Numerous eyewitnesses identified the person who got out of the Cadillac as Oswald, and, of course, the man had given his name to the registrar of voters as Lee Harvey Oswald.

  The more difficult question: Who was driving the car? Witnesses said he looked like Clay Shaw, a white male in his fifties with wavy gray hair and a stern face. This described Shaw well enough, but it also described other people equally well. There was less difficulty identifying the other passenger in the car. His orange hair and painted-on eyebrows made seeing David Ferrie a truly unforgettable experience for anyone. Since it was already established that Ferrie knew Guy Banister and Oswald (all of whom were dead by ‘69), it was difficult for Garrison to prove that the man driving the car was actually Clay Shaw and not someone else, like Banister. Shaw, of course, claimed he never knew Oswald or Ferrie and had never been to Clinton. Garrison failed to prove the connection to the satisfaction of the jury. Shaw was acquitted.

  Garrison counterattacked, claiming that Shaw had lied under oath and charged him with thirteen counts of perjury, confident that he would win the perjury conviction in the next trial. The federal government intervened, however, and dismissed the perjury charges; thus with the acquittal of Clay Shaw in 1969, Garrison was neutralized as a political force.

  A decade later, the U.S. Congress’s House Select Committee on Assassinations took a second look at the Clinton incident. On March 14, 1978, they took the testimony of Clinton town marshal John Manchester in Washington.5 Manchester said that he approached the black Cadillac from which Oswald had emerged that summer day in 1963 and, acting as the town’s law enforcement officer, instructed the driver to identify himself and to produce his driver’s license. The driver gave his name as “Clay Shaw from the International Trade Mart” and produced a driver’s license which matched. For some reason, the HSCA took his testimony in “Executive Session” and kept this information secret from the American public for sixteen years.

  We only know about it today because of documents released through the JFK Assassination Materials Act of 1992.6 With information of this magnitude continuing to come to light, it will be tomorrow’s historians, and not yesterday’s press, who will have to judge Jim Garrison and his assassination theory. To call him “discredited” is extremely premature, despite the numerous attempts to make him appear so. We may owe Garrison an apology before it’s all over.

  In 1971, Garrison’s life grew still more entangled. Based on information from a disgruntled former DA-office employee named Pershing Gervais, attorneys for the federal government charged Garrison with accepting kickbacks in exchange for not prosecuting illegal pinball operations. The trial lingered until August of 1973. Garrison defended himself, arguing that the charges against him were fabricated and that the evidence had been tampered with. The jury found him not guilty.7

  The federal attorneys immediately struck back, charging Garrison with failing to pay income taxes on the same alleged kickbacks. Again, Garrison defended himself and was found not guilty. But the years of negative publicity had been too much for any publicly elected official to survive. He was now politically destroyed, and subsequently lost the 1974 election.

  After four years of low visibility in private practice, he ran for a prestigious (yet lower profile) office, a judgeship on Louisiana’s 4th Circuit Court of Appeal. He won the ten-year term and was re-elected in 1988.

  During these post-investigation years, he wrote several books about the JFK assassination, the last of which was On the Trail of the Assassins, which Oliver Stone used as one basis for his movie JFK. Garrison even made a cameo appearance in JFK, ironically playing the role of U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren.

  Jim Garrison died in 1992 after a long illness, at the age of seventy-one.

  At the height of his media visibility in 1967, Playboy magazine offered Garrison an interview.8 Distrustful of the press and their motives, Garrison accepted the interview on the condition that Playboy present his whole story unedited. The 12 hour interview covered 25 pages, and presented his complex case to the American public for the first time. Playboy cannot be accused of being sympathetic. They began their interview with a series of questions, not about the assassination, but about the accusations that Garrison had bribed, drugged, and threatened witnesses. Even the title of the interview referred to him as “the embattled district attorney” [italics and lower case in original].

  We find the first mention of the Ferrie-Sherman cancer experiments in this interview, in the midst of a barrage of questions about Jack Ruby.9 Garrison was busy baffling his interviewer with answers like: “In Jack Ruby’s case, his murder of Lee Harvey Oswald was the sanest act he ever committed.” We pick up the interview there, right before the critical section:

  GARRISON: ...and he (Ruby) became the prisoner of the Dallas police, forced over a year later to beg Earl Warren to take him back to Washington, because he wanted to tell the truth about “Why my act was committed, but it can’t be said here ... my life is in danger here.” But Ruby never got to Washington, and he’s joined the long list of witnesses with vital information who have shuffled off this mortal coil.

  PLAYBOY: Penn Jones, Norman Mailer and others have charged that Ruby was injected with live cancer cells in order to silence him. Do you agree?

  GARRISON: I can’t agree or disagree, since I have no evidence one way or the other. But we have discovered that David Ferrie had a rather curious hobby in addition to his study of cartridge trajectories: cancer research. He filled his apartment with white mice — at one point he had almost 2,000, and neighbors complained — wrote a medical treatise on the subject and worked with a number of New Orleans doctors on means of inducing cancer in mice. After the assassination, one of these physicians, Dr. Mary Sherman, was found hacked to death with a kitchen knife in her New Orleans apartment. Her murder is listed as unsolved. Ferrie’s experiments may have been purely theoretical and Dr. Sherman’s death completely unrelated t
o her association with Ferrie; but I do find it interesting that Jack Ruby died of cancer a few weeks after his conviction for murder had been overruled in appeals court and he was ordered to stand trial outside of Dallas — thus allowing him to speak freely if he so desired. I would also note that there was little hesitancy in killing Lee Harvey Oswald in order to prevent him from talking, so there is no reason to suspect that any more consideration would have been shown Jack Ruby if he had posed a threat to the architects of the conspiracy.

  Let’s go back through this passage carefully. First, who are Penn Jones and Norman Mailer?

  William Penn Jones, Jr. was a retired U.S. Army officer who became an editor of a local newspaper in a small town outside of Dallas. He was famous for his “stir-the-shit” editorial style, particularly when it came to the JFK assassination. I asked two people who worked for him over the years if they knew anything about this claim. They said they did not, adding that Penn frequently said things that he could not back up. I tried to contact him, but was told that, due to his frail health, his wife no longer let people interview him. He died in 1998.

  Norman Mailer is a New York-based writer whose strand of credibility traces back to a Pulitzer Prize he won for his World War II combat novel, The Naked and the Dead. He is a colorful character who is as famous for his personal behavior as for his stunning prose style.

  I did contact Mailer and asked him what was behind his comment about Ruby’s cancer. He emphatically, thoroughly, and completely denied ever having made any such comment about Jack Ruby or his cancer. So either Playboy’s interviewer was operating from bad information, or perhaps Mailer forgot what he had said. Either way, I was not able to gain any helpful information by tracking down Penn Jones and Norman Mailer.

  Back to the interview:

  GARRISON: But we have discovered that David Ferrie had a rather curious hobby in addition to his study of cartridge trajectories: cancer research.