For months, many Kennedy assassination researchers had been looking forward to
the publication of Bill Davy's book, Let Justice Be Done: New Light on the Jim
Garrison Investigation. Sadly, anyone expecting the book to live up to its promise
is bound to be let down.
In his preface, Davy assures the reader, "I have tried to use as much new information as possible and have only fallen back on previous research where necessary in order to provide context" (Davy, xxiii).
In that case, Davy's book has an awful lot of context.
Let Justice Be Done weighs in at 341 pages. Subtract the afterword and appendices, which Davy did not write and do not provide new information, and the endnotes, index, and miscellaneous front matter, and we're left with a skimpy 204 pages, approximately 27 of which are blank.
Flipping through the book page by page, one finds that only two of its fourteen chapters (Chapter 3 and Chapter 9) are based primarily on new information. Chapters 2, 4 and 5 contain virtually no new information at all, while I would estimate the remainder to consist of roughly half new information and half prior research. Therefore, Davy provides us with an estimated 5 1/2 chapters of new information, or an estimated 67.1 pages (177 divided by 14 chapters total times 5 1/2 chapters).
By my estimation, then, only about a fifth of Davy's book produces the promised new information, while around four-fifths provide what Davy calls context.
Curiously, Lisa Pease, who has published Davy's work in Probe and praised him in newsgroup posts, likes to state that she would no sooner debate one of Garrison's critics than someone who posits the equation 2 + 2 = 3. One wonders what Pease makes of Bill Davy's math.
How valuable is the 67.1 pages of new information Davy provides?
Here's a hint: The longest chapter by far, at 50 pages, is Chapter 12, "Fourth Estate or Fourth Reich: The CIA/Media Attack on Jim Garrison." (The chapters average 13.1 pages; the second-longest chapter, that dealing with the Shaw trial, is 22 pages.)
So Davy is telling us, before we've even started the book, that the vast majority of the new information he's developed concerns what he calls "the CIA/media attacks" on Garrison, and not evidence supporting or affirming Garrison's 1969 case, a case the DA lost badly, for reasons that would hardly seem to be related to any alleged resistance from the CIA and/or the media. (After a 28-month investigation and a month-long trial, the jury acquitted in 54 minutes.)
And what does the remainder of Davy's "new information" consist of? Almost entirely information from Garrison's files that was clearly not credible enough for Garrison to use in the first place, plus a few hearsay items of dubious value. Oddly enough, a number of Davy's "new" items have already been debunked on-line, in an article of mine called "Who Speaks for Clay Shaw?" Has no one pointed this out to Davy? Or, if he disagrees, why does he not explain his reasoning?
Let's look at Davy's most notable items of new information.
Does a single one of them indicate that Garrison's defendant, Clay L. Shaw, or anyone else Garrison targeted might have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy?
No.
One might be inclined to name as an exception one of the crowning glories of Davy's book, his quotation of a September 1, 1977, HSCA report written by Jonathan Blackmer: "We have reason to believe Shaw was heavily involved in the anti-Castro efforts in New Orleans in the 1960s and possibly one of the high-level planners or 'cut out' to the planners of the assassination" (Davy, 202).
Davy doesn't mention, however, that this report does not reflect the opinions of its author, but rather the statements of its interview subject: Judge Jim Garrison (see part four of "Who Speaks for Clay Shaw?"). Therefore, Davy's lone example of "evidence" that Garrison had uncovered a real live assassination conspirator is nothing more than Garrison's own opinion.
In his attempts to bolster Garrison's case, Davy tries to demonstrate that Clay Shaw used the alias "Clay Bertrand," one of Garrison's pet theories.
For this, he resorts to not only discredited claims, but old discredited claims as well, citing Jim Garrison's fictitious memoirs to state that Shaw was named as "Clay Bertrand" by a bartender at Cosimo's and various "other Vieux Carre denizens" (Davy, 119). Davy takes this on faith, as by Garrison's own admission, these alleged witnesses would not speak for the record (Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, 1991 ed., 99). Thus, we are forced to believe that Garrison would attempt the arrest of witnesses and/or suspects in far-flung places like Ohio, Nebraska, Iowa and California, but he would not subpoena a single one of the Shaw-"Bertrand" witnesses in his own parish. (At trial, not a single witness supported Perry Raymond Russo's claim that Shaw ever used such a "Bertrand" alias.)
Davy regurgitates Garrison's claim that one William Morris was introduced to Shaw/"Bertrand" by New Orleans resident Gene Davis (Davy, 120), though Davy does not explain why Garrison did not call Morris to testify at the Shaw trial, why Garrison claimed to have taken Morris' statement before Shaw was arrested (Garrison, 99) when it actually wasn't taken until over four months later (Davy, 302 fn.), why defense witness Gene Davis was not asked by the prosecution to verify or refute Morris' statement at the Shaw trial, or why DA's office records contain no indication that Morris' statement was ever followed up in any way, not even with Gene Davis.
Nor does Davy mention even once that only weeks prior to the Morris statement, Gene Davis was the individual named by attorney Dean Andrews as the person he in fact was covering for when he came up with the name "Clay Bertrand" (see part two of "Who Speaks for Clay Shaw?").
Following Garrison's lead, Davy names one David Logan as another Shaw-"Bertrand" witness (Davy, 120). Davy not only avoids the issue of why Logan was not called to testify against Shaw, but does not mention that Jim Garrison would later avoid making public the contents of Logan's story by claiming — falsely — that Logan's statement was stolen from his office (Patricia Lambert, False Witness, 218, 281). The document is now available at the National Archives. The name "Bertrand" is nowhere to be found in it.
Davy makes much of a recently declassified FBI report that reads, "On February 24, 1967, we received information from two sources that Clay Shaw reportedly is identical with an individual by the name of Clay Bertrand . . ." (Davy, 193). Davy notes that one of these informants had previously given this information to Garrison investigator Lou Ivon, and that "Ivon would not confirm this information" to the FBI (Davy, 120). Davy does not mention the memorandum that Lou Ivon wrote to Jim Garrison the very next day, stating that despite Ivon's best efforts, "I'm almost positive from my contacts that they would have known or heard of a Clay Bertrand. The information I received was negative results" (see part two of "Who Speaks for Clay Shaw?").
In this memo, Ivon went on to relate a report from one informant, "Bubbie" Pettingill, that the originator of the "Bertrand" story, Dean Andrews, had confided to him that "Clay Bertrand" had never existed, confirming the later statements of Andrews at the Shaw trial — that he had thought up the name simply to protect his friend Gene Davis, who would otherwise be in danger of being falsely implicated by Andrews' fictitious story, in which "Bertrand" purportedly called Andrews about representing Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas. This is also consistent with what Andrews told NBC, as well as author Edward J. Epstein in June 1967 (see part two of "Who Speaks for Clay Shaw?").
(Andrews explained at the trial that Davis had called him while he was in the hospital for pneumonia about a bill of sale for an automobile, and that the two had briefly discussed the fame that would await the lawyer who represented Oswald. Soon enough, Andrews was telling people that he had been phoned in the hospital by someone who asked him to represent Oswald in Dallas. Under the influence of his pneumonia and heavy sedation, Andrews seems to have actually believed this story for a time, recanted it once the FBI expressed a serious interest, then revived it for the Warren Commission. Davy tries weakly to discredit this story by claiming Andrews was not under sedation when he first came up with the tale. Not only is this contrary to the December 1963 FBI reports, but it also presumes a particular reconstruction of the day's events, a presumption that is far from certain [Lambert, 32, 297]. It also presumes that Andrews' pneumonia alone was not necessarily strong enough to warrant the administration of sedatives, something about which the record is unequivocal.)
The other information the FBI received about Shaw possibly being "Bertrand" was relayed by Aaron Kohn, managing director of the New Orleans Crime Commission, a citizens' watchdog group. Kohn's informant was, like Garrison's numerous alleged Shaw-"Bertrand" witnesses, anonymous. Had Davy named Kohn as the FBI's source, however, he would have had to explain why Kohn — who "later led a smear campaign against Garrison" (Davy, 78) and whose motives were "suspicious" (Davy, 157) — would pass along this potentially helpful information — at a time when it was common knowledge in the French Quarter that Garrison was seeking "Bertrand" — instead of sitting on the allegedly dangerous stuff.
Falling back on "previous research," Davy dwells upon Ramsey Clark's faux pas of March 1967, when he erroneously told the press that Shaw had been investigated and cleared by the FBI in 1963 (Davy, 191, leading off Davy's final chapter, "The Hidden [!] Record"). The Justice Department eventually retracted the statement (Davy, 192), but that's not good enough for Davy, who quotes an undated item from Clark reaffirming that Shaw had been investigated by the FBI (Davy, 192). Davy seems to think that Clark — who had not yet even been sworn in as Attorney General — was privy to what Davy no doubt believes to be one of the federal government's most pernicious secrets.
But Davy knows this is not true. He himself reports on what would seem to be the source of Clark's misunderstanding, a March 2, 1967, FBI memo from Cartha DeLoach to Clyde Tolson: "The AG [sic] then asked whether the FBI knew anything about Shaw [who'd been arrested the day before]. I told him Shaw's name had come up in our investigation in December 1963 as a result of several parties furnishing information concerning Shaw" (Davy, 192).
Where are the reports of this 1963 information from "several parties" to which DeLoach refers? No one has ever found a single 1963 FBI report mentioning Shaw, even an unconfirmed one. DeLoach couldn't be mistakenly referring to that FBI report of February 24, 1967, could he?
Unfortunately, Davy disdains hunting for primary sources to support his theory when he can simply misquote the anonymous Justice Department informant who allegedly told the press that "Bertrand" and Shaw were "the same guy" (Davy, 191).
What the Justice Department source actually said was, "We think it's the same guy" (New Orleans Times-Picayune, March 3, 1967; Washington Post, June 3, 1967; Lambert, 82; emphasis added). Why did "we" think that? Again, is it so far-fetched to believe this was result of the FBI report of February 24, 1967? Of course, no FBI or Justice Department employee would ever lend his name to an unconfirmed tip like the one given to the Times; but then again, none did. (How do Garrison advocates account for the fact that Clark was apparently knowledgeable about the government's deep, dark secrets, but didn't seem to be the slightest bit aware that they were secrets?)
Davy reports on other admitted "rumors" from San Francisco and Los Angeles linking Shaw to the alleged "Bertrand" alias (Davy, 193), seriously suggesting that Shaw used this presumed alias in those cities as well. Again, as with Garrison's alleged witnesses in the French Quarter, why has not a single one been identified? How come none came forward even after the success of Oliver Stone's 1991 movie JFK, which made much of the alleged "Bertrand" alias?
One last gasp at making the Shaw-"Bertrand" connection is presented in the form of "what appears to be a computer printout from the 1960's [sic] . . . written in indecipherable 'CIA-ese,'" released from Shaw's CIA file in 1994. The printout contains virtually no intelligible information, but does include a line reading, "/A [presumably "alias"] Bertrand, Clay" (Davy, 196-7). The implication is that this item substantiates the charge that Shaw was "Bertrand," where it more likely only passes along information received from the field, i.e., from press accounts of the Garrison investigation. This is supported by recently declassified documents that Davy refers to in another context (Davy, 177-8) but does not quote: internal CIA memoranda that explicitly demonstrate that CIA officers in New Orleans and Washington, DC, had no idea whether Shaw used any "Bertrand" alias or not. In fact, these memoranda consist in part of the two offices asking if the other has any information that would confirm the accusation (CIA memoranda of Lloyd A. Ray, November 15, 1967, NO-406-67, and memoranda of Donald E. Pratt, November 24, 1967; newsgroup posts of Jim Hargrove).
Davy devotes a great deal of space to trying to prove that Clay Shaw perjured himself when he denied knowing David Ferrie. Again Davy must resort to witnesses that Jim Garrison had, but were clearly not credible enough to use.
One example is Klansman Jules Ricco Kimble, whose claims include having been a CIA agent, having met David Ferrie and Clay Shaw on numerous occasions, sometimes together, and possessing first-hand knowledge of Shaw's alleged career as a CIA agent. The centerpiece of the Kimble story is that David Ferrie once flew Kimble and Clay Shaw to Montreal (Davy, 87-8; DA's office interview with Jules Ricco Kimble, October 10, 1967).
Here's what Davy does not say:
1) He does not say that early press accounts of Kimble's story mentioned flying to Montreal with David Ferrie, but did not mention Clay Shaw (Paris Flammonde, The Kennedy Conspiracy, 206-7).
2) He does not say that Kimble originally claimed the flight to have taken place a year before the assassination, then later moved the date to the summer of 1963, apparently in order to imply a more credible link to the JFK assassination (Maurice Philipps, De Dallas a Montreal).
3) He does not say that Kimble has also claimed to be James Earl Ray's infamous alleged conspirator in the Martin Luther King, Jr., assassination, "Raoul" (Covert Action Information Bulletin, Number 34, Summer, 1990, 21-7; cf. http://www.ocean.ic.net/doc/pol/MLK.txt), despite the fact that the HSCA concluded that Kimble wasn't even in Canada at the time he claimed to have known Ray there, Kimble denied knowing Ray to the HSCA, and Ray himself failed to recognize Kimble as "Raoul" (William Pepper, Orders to Kill, 298; HSCA King Report, 392).
4) He does not point out that Kimble had a long history of deception and pathological behavior, including arrests for everything from check forgery (New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 5, 1968, S2-P8; Newsgroup post by Jerry Shinley) to impersonating a doctor (New Orleans Times-Picayune, Aug 31, 1968, S2-P2; Shinley) to aggravated assault and impersonating a state police officer (New Orleans Times-Picayune, October 6, 1967, S1-P19; Shinley), and is currently serving a double life sentence for murder in an Oklahoma facility (Covert Action Information Bulletin, Ibid.).
5) And he certainly doesn't point out that, though Kimble's October 1967 statement to Garrison's office names him as a CIA agent and witness to an alleged theft of papers from the home of David Ferrie, two months earlier Kimble had a different take on such things, as discussed in a CIA internal memorandum declassified in 1977:
On 4 August 1967 the DCS office received a telephone call from a man who identified himself as Jules R. KIMBLE of 7003 Vicksburg St., New Orleans. He said that "Garrison was trying to connect him with CIA" but that he did not know why. He added that GARRISON "accused him of having taken some papers from the residence of David Ferrie on the day after Ferrie's death" and added that he would appear on WDSU-TV, New Orleans, the same day. All Headquarters checks on KIMBLE were negative. In response to inquiry, the DCS office in New Orleans reported on 21 August 1967 that Jules R. Kimble is not in the telephone directory or the city directory. The address 7003 Vicksburg St. is listed as vacant in the latter. To the best knowledge of the office no one named KIMBLE has appeared on a WDSU-TV interview (CIA Memorandum, September 7, 1967, "Memorandum #6: Garrison and the Kennedy Assassination").The DCS office was so baffled by Kimble's call that the memorandum speculates that it could have been a provocation "initiated by Garrison" (Ibid.).
Davy does at least, if somewhat incredulously, mention Clay Shaw's lifelong fear of flying, understandably without emphasizing Kimble's observation that Shaw spent the flight in Ferrie's little plane reading and napping (Davy, 88).
Other "new" factoids previously discredited by this author (see "Who Speaks for Clay Shaw?") include the allegation that Shaw — supposedly under the now-ironic alias "Lambert" — flew from Hammond, Louisiana, to Garland, Texas with David Ferrie and someone named "Hidell" (Garrison himself told the HSCA in 1978 that he couldn't remember whether the flight plan was ever authenticated and did not mention that "Lambert" might have been Shaw, and the item was never mentioned at the 1969 Shaw trial); that a "former secretary" of Shaw's at the Trade Mart had told someone who told someone that Shaw knew Ferrie (Shaw had no former secretary at the Trade Mart, and his secretary of 19 years, Goldie Naomie Moore, testified that she had never seen nor heard of David Ferrie until the Garrison investigation began); and that Shaw had a "covert security clearance" for a CIA operation called QK/ENCHANT (Davy, 288 fn.), when Shaw was actually cleared for unwitting use by the Agency (see part four of "Who Speaks for Clay Shaw?"). (Davy also mangles a CIA document when he states that Shaw had a "covert security number" of 402897-A, when the document in question actually reads that "J. Monroe SULLIVAN, #280207, was granted a covert security approval on 10 December 1962 so that he could be used in Project QK/ENCHANT. SHAW has #402897-A" [Davy, 195]. The report does not mention any "covert security clearance," only the same "covert security approval" for unwitting use, and it's not stated or implied that this relates to the number given.)
Davy also spends an entire chapter trying to redeem the so-called Clinton witnesses, who have now been completely debunked (see my article, "Impeaching Clinton.") The only new information he comes up with is that Reeves Morgan's son Van claims that Oswald arrived at the Morgan house near Jackson, Louisiana, in a black Cadillac (Davy, 117). Davy seems completely oblivious to the fact that his new witness contradicts the "classic" Jackson-Clinton story, and could only impeach the credibility of Reeves Morgan's daughter Mary, who told the DA's office in 1968 that Oswald arrived in a dark old car ("the model was somewhere in the Fifties"), not the shiny 1961 or '62 black Cadillac described by the Clinton witnesses, and there was a woman in the car (Mary Morgan, Statement of January 19, 1968), not the two men in Clinton (identified as Clay Shaw and — by one witness, Corrie Collins, at the trial — David Ferrie). This story once seemed to corroborate Edwin Lea McGehee's account of Oswald in Jackson with a young woman, a baby bassinet, and an "old dark beat up" car, possibly a Nash, Kaiser or Frazer (McGehee, Statement of June 17, 1967). Now it's exposed as just another Garrison myth.
Davy also makes an inexcusable error when he challenges the notion that the Clinton witnesses were unknown prior to the Garrison investigation. He writes that Edwin Lea McGehee and Reeves Morgan's stories were printed in The Councilor, the news organ of Shreveport's White Citizen's Council, before the Garrison investigation started (Davy, 115). Edwin Lea McGehee has been claiming this for some time (cf. http://www.ajweberman.com), and indeed, McGehee is Davy's source for the claim (Davy, 302 fn.). Davy adds, "Back issues of The Councilor are on file at the Northwestern State University Library, Louisiana" (Ibid.). The problem? A researcher who requests anonymity went through a complete collection of The Councilor from that time period and could find no such article. Why didn't Davy check this himself?
And from the I-Saw-This-One-Coming-a-Mile-Away department, Davy even trots out onetime prospective Clinton "witness" Henry Burnell Clark, whose September 12, 1967, statement had Shaw driving a black car around Clinton's main drag and Ferrie using a pay phone there (Davy, 104-5). Davy, however, specifies that Clark placed the two men in town on the same day (Davy, 105), an assertion that is not borne out by Clark's statement. Again, Davy never bothers to ask why Clark was not called as a witness, despite the fact that he was still in Clinton in 1969, where Hugh Aynesworth attempted to interview him. (When Aynesworth approached him about his statement to the DA's office, Clark would only say, "Go 'way, man. I don't know what you're talkin' about" [James Kirkwood, American Grotesque, 222].)
The David Ferrie "suicide" (actually, a natural death) is discussed in this short essay by Dr. Robert Artwohl, and in this page dealing with Ferrie's supposed "suicide notes." |
Then of course there's Davy's uncritical acceptance of such discredited Garrison "evidence" as David Ferrie's allegedly unnatural death (Davy, 66-7), despite the unequivocal findings of autopsy pathologist Ronald Welsh and coroner Nicholas Chetta (see Lambert, 60-4, for a full discussion); Perry Russo's testimony about an "assassination plot" involving a "Leon Oswald," one "Clem Bertrand" and David Ferrie (Davy, 121-2; see part three of "Who Speaks for Clay Shaw?"), a story which Russo fully recanted in a 1971 series of tape-recorded interviews with Shaw's defense lawyers (see Lambert, 173-4); the allegation that Shaw admitted using the "Bertrand" alias to NOPD Officer Aloysius Habighorst (Davy, 123), an assertion destroyed at the Shaw trial (see part two of "Who Speaks for Clay Shaw?"); that Oswald used Guy Banister's address on some of his pro-Castro literature (Davy, 37), when the address in question, 544 Camp Street, was actually around the corner from Banister's 531 Lafayette Street office, which was technically in the same building, but not accessible from 544 Camp (cf. the HSCA interview with building owner Sam Newman); that Ferrie "confessed" to Lou Ivon that he knew Oswald and Shaw, and that he and Shaw worked for the CIA (Davy, 66), when there is not a single mention of this "confession" in Garrison's files, when it contradicts Ferrie's denials of knowing Oswald and Shaw which continued literally until just hours prior to his death, when it was never mentioned at the Shaw trial or the 1971 hearing over Shaw's perjury charges (one of which contended that Shaw knew Ferrie), which Garrison did not mention in either of his two books about the assassination, and though Ivon himself apparently never said a word about it to a soul on Earth until he met Oliver Stone (cf. Lambert, False Witness, 327 fn.); that Vernon Bundy was a credible witness, despite the fact that the man he later identified as Oswald (who he claimed he saw with Shaw) was actually someone who looked like "a real junkie" and who's name apparently was Pete (Davy, 123-8); that the major media engaged in a conspiracy to discredit Garrison and interfere with his investigation (Davy, 119-69), despite the abundance of evidence to the contrary (cf. Lambert's discussions of James Phelan and Richard Billings); that Clay Shaw had once in 1966 inexplicably signed the name "Clay Bertrand" in an airport lounge guest register (Davy, 178-81), despite the fact that prosecution witness Jessie Parker initially denied she'd seen Shaw in the lounge (see part two of "Who Speaks for Clay Shaw?"), the fact that Garrison couldn't find a single handwriting analyst in Louisiana to verify this signature as Shaw's, and the fact that the prosecution's closing arguments asserted that Shaw probably disguised his handwriting anyway (Davy, 251); that it was the Kennedy assassination that precipitated Guy Banister's November 22, 1963, pistol-whipping of Jack Martin (Davy, 1-2), when it appears to have actually been an argument over some files Martin attempted to steal from Banister's office (see http://www.ajweberman.com); the claim that four of Oswald's co-workers at New Orleans' Reily Coffee Company moved to positions at NASA's Michoud plant following Oswald's departure (Davy, 36), when only two seem to have made the move, and to separate facilities at the installation (one to Chrysler and one to Boeing) lending little credit to Garrison's theory that these men were agents bound for an alleged CIA base at Michoud); that Garrison's relationship with organized crime figures in New Orleans is above question (Davy, 149-67), despite the fact that, during his years as District Attorney, Garrison claimed there was no organized crime in New Orleans, and he would later defend New Orleans Mafia kingfish Carlos Marcello on television and to the HSCA as "a respectable businessman"; and that Ferrie once phoned a friend of a Jack Ruby associate (Davy, 46), when the call could have been made by any one of at least eleven people in Ferrie's office, and could have been made to any one of 146 apartments (or one of several employee phones) connected to the building's switchboard.
In addition to these unfortunate blows to Davy's credibility, there is also the matter of the unnecessarily credulous stands he takes with his half-hearted attempt to rehabilitate nutball witness Charles Spiesel (Davy, 173-4), whom even Garrison disavowed and tried to blame the defense for "planting" in his investigation (Garrison, 276-7; see also Lambert, 134), and his admittedly cautious resurrection of Clyde Johnson (Davy, 310 fn.), who claimed to have met with Oswald, Ruby, and Shaw, in a Baton Rouge hotel in the fall of 1963, where Shaw allegedly dispensed thousands of dollars in cash to the others and offered Johnson a role in the assassination plot. Davy also presents a dubious new theory of his own when he attempts to link the mental hospital in Jackson, where Oswald allegedly was seeking a job, to the CIA's infamous MK/ULTRA mind control experiments (Davy, 111-3).
So is there anything we can thank Bill Davy for? Well, he doesn't seem to accept that mail carrier James Hardiman delivered four letters to a "Clem Bertrand" in 1966 at the residence of Shaw's friend Jeff Biddison, though the factoid does appear in the closing arguments he reprints (Davy, 249-50). (The claim was based solely on Hardiman's assertion that he recalled delivering mail to "Clem Bertrand," but he also insisted he'd delivered mail to a "Cliff Bordreaux" at the same address — even after defense attorney Irvin Dymond admitted he'd made the name up. Hardiman's 20-year-old son Terry happened to have been facing a theft indictment in New Orleans in 1968; the DA's office never seems to have sought the indictment.)
Davy admits "it appears" Shaw was never involved with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor to the CIA (Davy, 73), contrary to the routine pronouncements of Garrison defenders like Jim DiEugenio, who wrote the introduction to Let Justice Be Done.
He acknowledges that Oswald's alleged appearance in Clinton could hardly have been an FBI COINTELPRO operation as some have theorized, since COINTELPRO was not launched by J. Edgar Hoover until August 25, 1967 — four years after the alleged Clinton incident (Davy, 107-8).
He reproduces some interesting statements from Gordon Novel, who — almost a full decade before the HSCA investigated "Maurice Bishop" — linked a spooky "Mr. Phillips" with the anti-Castro activities of Sergio Arcacha Smith and Guy Banister, circa 1961 (Davy 21-2; note: Arcacha and Banister did not routinely collaborate on such operations, though it's likely they did at times).
He manages to describe Banister's career without repeating the Garrison factoid that Banister was once with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) or the allegation of unknown origin that Banister participated in the 1954 CIA-backed overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala (Davy, 11-20). Less commendable, however, is his acceptance of Daniel Campbell's assertions that Banister was a "bagman for the CIA" and "was running guns to Alpha 66 in Miami" (Davy, 40). (There is no evidence to support either claim.)
And . . . that would seem to be about all Davy can brag about. For a book attempting to shed "new light on the Jim Garrison investigation" and presumably demonstrate that Garrison really did "have something" after all, that's little indeed.
As disappointing as Davy's achievement is, however, more troubling by far is his methodology. By systematically eliminating evidence that casts doubt on Garrison's case, such as the hundreds of pages of easily accessible trial testimony and much new evidence of the sort that Patricia Lambert uncovered in 1993-98, Davy reveals himself to be an advocate first and an investigator second. This is reaffirmed by the countless instances in which he accepts Garrison's assertions at face value, even when they are contradicted by the contemporaneous record of the case, and in his refusal to credit sources that have demonstrated no bias whatsoever except an unwillingness to display the same uncritical acceptance of Garrison's claims as Davy does.
Frankly, considering that Oliver Stone's highly successful attempt to vindicate Garrison with the movie JFK precipitated the release of millions of pages of government documents that Garrison and Stone claimed to hold the key to John F. Kennedy's assassination, thousands of which Davy claims to have studied, and that he boasts "scores" of interviews to supplement that material (Davy, xxiii), the utter lack of new evidence in Let Justice Be Done may well be the most cogent argument to date that Jim Garrison, in the final analysis, had nothing at all.