Dave Reitzes
"I have been fortunate to know and work with Walter Sheridan for many years. Like all of those who have known him and his work, I have the utmost confidence in his integrity, both personal and professional. This view was shared by President Kennedy himself, with whom Mr. Sheridan was associated for many years in a relationship of utmost trust and affection."(1)"His personal ties to President Kennedy, as well as his own integrity, insure that he would want as much as, or more than, any other man to ascertain the truth about the events of November, 1963. It is not possible that Mr. Sheridan would do anything which would in the slightest degree compromise the truth in regard to the investigation in New Orleans."(2)
Paris Flammonde writes, "Sheridan, a former official of the Department of Justice, was chief investigator for the Senate Rackets Committee was its chief counsel. He later served under the late Senator when he was the Attorney General of the United States."(3)
Milton Brener writes:
Garrison's much heralded reticence in making pretrial statements about Clay Shaw never extended to Sheridan. Walter Sheridan, claimed Garrison, on many public occasions, had been sent to New Orleans by Robert Kennedy for the sole purpose of wrecking his investigation.
Garrison was wrong. Garrison claimed to have solved the assassination and the National Broadcasting Company had sent Sheridan to cover the preliminary hearing. The reporter had, indeed, been a close friend of the former Attorney General and, as a staff member of the Department of Justice, had played a major role in the massive effort to convict James Hoffa, the Teamster boss, but his sole mission in the city was that of a reporter for NBC. Immediately following the preliminary hearing of March 1967, the network ran a one-hour objective documentary on the proceedings, prepared largely by Sheridan.
However, during the first day's proceedings, he had gone to dinner with Garrison and several of his key men at a local hotel. Sheridan talks little. Primarily, he listens. He heard the DA and his lieutenants speaking of the information that they would get from various witnesses, as soon as the witnesses could be broken down and persuaded to tell the truth. They spoke of the vast amounts of proof and corroboration of the DA's theory that was available from any number of individuals at such time as they could be persuaded to talk.
None of this sat well with Sheridan. He is a skilled professional investigator and he takes little for granted. He relies no more than necessary on his own ability to deduce or draw logical inferences. This he leaves to the philosophers. He wastes little time expounding; he digs. He runs down every rumor to the source. Almost immediately upon arrival at any assignment, he will start using the telephone. He meets with as many people as possible who may know something of the subject of his inquiry and he listens.
All talk, whether advanced as rumor, conjecture, or fact is checked out. Also, if names are mentioned, he wants to meet those individuals. Then another round of talk, names, and appointments, until he reaches the source where he finds hard information -- or nothing. His conclusions or hypotheses will yield to the facts. Sheridan is, in short, as an investigator, everything that Garrison is not.
One conclusion Sheridan did reach, however, rather quickly following dinner with the DA and his staff. Garrison had not [as he claimed] solved the assassination of President Kennedy.
Sheridan personally ran down every witness possible that was involved in the bizarre case. It was Sheridan who interviewed and first heard the stories of Carlos Bringuier, Carlos Quiroga, Fred Lemanns, the Turkish bath operator [who claimed Garrison tried to bribe him into testifying falsely against Clay Shaw], the polygraph operator who first tested Russo and Quiroga [Russo failed], and the Police Department polygraph operator who later attempted to test Russo [Russo again failed] -- Lieutenant Edward O' Donnell -- among many others. It became obvious to Sheridan that Garrison meant to use any means possible of getting "evidence" of his predetermined "truth."
Sheridan had little interest in the strange workings of Garrison's complex psychological make-up or in any deep analysis of his psyche. To him, the answer to the entire episode was simple. The Garrison case was a fraud."(4)
Garrison himself asserted that Robert Kennedy was "without any question of a doubt . . . interfering with the investigation of the murder of his brother," and was making "a real effort to stop it."(5)
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1. Paris Flammonde, The Kennedy Conspiracy (New York: Meredith, 1969), p. 322; Gus Russo, Live by the Sword (Baltimore: Bancroft, 1998), p. 407.
2. Russo, p. 407.
3. Flammonde, p. 322.
4. Milton Brener, The Garrison Case (New York: Potter, 1970), pp. 266-7.
5. Edward Jay Epstein, The Assassinaton Chronicles (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992), p. 247.
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