False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison's Investigation and Oliver Stone's Film JFK

"She wrote this book specifically in response to Oliver Stone’s JFK. When JFK came out in 1991, it was a massive hit, and probably if people know just one book or movie about the assassination, it’s Oliver Stone’s JFK. So that is where people get their information from, and it’s been treated by some people as if it was an authentic depiction of what really happened. It started with a very real court case brought by Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, who in 1967 decided that he was going to use his prosecutorial powers to try to deliver justice in the Kennedy case. To this day, the case that Jim Garrison brought against a New Orleans businessman called Clay Shaw is the only criminal prosecution that’s ever been brought in connection with the Kennedy assassination. In Stone’s film, Garrison was played by Kevin Costner as a sort of crusading white knight and all-round good guy. Clay Shaw was portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones as a sort of a mincing gay villain. One of the reasons that Jim Garrison prosecuted Shaw was because he was a closeted gay man, and according to Garrison that was almost good enough grounds to charge him with conspiring to murder Kennedy. In reality, Garrison was a delusional demagogue who picked an innocent man almost at random in New Orleans and prosecuted him for having conspired to murder Kennedy. In doing so, he destroyed Clay Shaw’s life. Shaw was found not guilty by the jury at his trial. It only took them 54 minutes to find him not guilty and one of the jurors said later that they would have been quicker but they needed a bathroom break before they started deliberating. So Patricia Lambert was moved to write this book because like many Americans, she remembered what had really happened down in New Orleans when Clay Shaw was prosecuted. She remembered that it had been a great scandal and an outrageous abuse of prosecutorial power. And yet in Oliver Stone’s film, viewers are given the impression that Garrison was actually right to prosecute Clay Shaw and that he really had stumbled on the secret of Kennedy’s murder. So Patricia Lambert’s book, in my view, does what books should do: She conducts original research, she goes down to New Orleans, she talks to some of the people who were involved with the trial, and in a very meticulous, footnoted account, demonstrates that the Oliver Stone version of history was a complete distortion and more or less a completely upside down version of what really happened."