Bourbon Street Rococo

In his five-year career as an elected official, Jim Garrison, 45, the larger-than-life (6 ft. 6 in.) district attorney of New Orleans, has tilted at windmills and gin mills, chastened Bourbon Street's once-famed B-girls, scourged the judiciary and battled with the mayor. More recently, he added the Warren Commission report to his mandate. Predictably, Garrison's investigation of "several plots" to kill President Kennedy has yielded the most rococo tale yet to emerge from that tragic day in Dallas.

Garrison, who looks like TV's Perry Mason but all too clearly writes his own scripts, announced last week that he had long since "solved" the identities of the plotters, who--said he--had launched their conspiracy in New Orleans. "We know," he told reporters, "what cities were involved, how it was done in the essential respects, and the individuals involved. We are going to be able to arrest every human involved," adding conspiratorially, "that is, every human involved who is still alive."

The Way It Is. Why had he made no arrests? Well, said Garrison, there was a lot of "work on details of evidence" that had yet to be done before he could be sure of obtaining convictions. Arrests might take place, he predicted, in a few months or in 30 years. "I don't mean to be cryptic," he said cryptically, "but that is the way it is." Besides that, arrests of some of the conspirators might cause the others to commit suicide, and how could he arrest a dead man?

Garrison faced that problem when one of his prime suspects, David Ferrie, 48, a onetime airline pilot, expired. The D.A., naturally enough, called it suicide and pounced upon an apparent suicide note that had been written some time before. Coroner Nicholas Chetta, however, labeled the death the result of a cerebral hemorrhage, most likely brought on by "overexcitement and hypertension." Indeed, Ferrie, nervous, sick, probably homosexual--with thick rug-like pieces of fabric replacing eyebrows, lost either by accident or disease--had known that Garrison was after him and, said his physician, had been "disturbed and depressed."

A Bumper Crop. Garrison immediately proclaimed him "one of history's most important individuals" and said that he would have arrested him this week. The District Attorney, Ferrie had told reporters, believed that he had been the getaway pilot for Lee Harvey Oswald's coconspirators. What was Garrison's evidence? He refused to say, but--in what must rank as one of the most brilliant non sequiturs of the year --referred to a pleasure trip that Ferrie had made to southern Texas a few hours after the assassination: "We felt that it was rather peculiar that a man would suddenly take a trip to south Texas when everybody else in the country was home watching television." In fact, a former staff member of the Warren Commission disclosed that Ferrie, whose name came up only briefly in the 26 volumes of testimony, had been thoroughly checked out, his innocence so well established that he was not mentioned in the report itself.

Whatever else it may do, the probe into the assassination has already garnered a bumper crop of publicity for Jim Garrison. Reporters from all over the U.S. and Europe converged on New Orleans, soon to be joined by the assassination buffs who have haunted Dallas for more than three years. From most indications, Garrison's whodunit casts Cubans, both pro-and anti-Castro, as the heavies. But he was not talking any more--no more, that is, than it took to keep his name in the papers.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.