Bill Raggio and the JFK Assassination

  

I've been fortunate over the years to have become acquainted with many interesting and accomplished people. Among those who have honored me with the title of "friend" was the late-Nevada State Senator Bill Raggio, the subject of my 2011 book, A Man of His Word. 

Before joining the Nevada Senate, Raggio exercised his brilliant legal mind and no-nonsense approach to the law as District Attorney of Washoe County. There, he not only took on notorious local crime figures but also cleaned up rampant corruption in the Reno Police Department and City Council. This put him and his family in danger from reprisals; his children were often escorted to school by trusted officers and his house was guarded at night. 

As his reputation grew, Raggio was honored by the National District Attorneys Association (NDAA) as District Attorney of the Year 1967, an honor magnified by the fact he served a small, western state county, competing with high-profile, “Big City” DAs. He was subsequently elected as president of that prestigious organization.

The elegant Monteleone Hotel in New Orleans was chosen as the site of the March 1968 meeting of the NDAA and, as the new president, Raggio hoped to make the event the most memorable in the organization’s history. It would prove to be just that, though due less to his organizational efforts, than the mercurial personality of the District Attorney of Orleans Parish, Jim Garrison.

Bill Raggio and Jim Garrison 1967

First elected in 1961, Garrison immediately established a reputation for being eccentric and flamboyant. The local media loved his regular raids on Bourbon Street bars and strip clubs. In January 1963, Garrison was convicted of misdemeanor criminal defamation during a widely publicized trial, after he publicly accused eight criminal court judges of racketeering and conspiring against him in a conflict over his office budget. Despite this, he was well-liked, not only by the public but also by Raggio and other members of the NDAA—at least at first. 

In a 2008 interview, excerpted from the book, Raggio explained:

I was a rather close friend of Jim Garrison as a result of holding offices in the association. I had taken him under my wing, if you will, to introduce him to other association members, in order to get him involved. He was, to say the least, a unique individual. 

The meeting that preceded the New Orleans affair was held in Los Angeles. My hotel room was next to his, and it was during that meeting that I first observed some strange behavior. It appeared Jim had, for want of a better word, an “obsession” with underage girls — some appearing to be as young as sixteen-years-old. Today we would call him a predator. Surprisingly, when I mentioned my concerns about this to him, he did not deny his behavior. Because of this, I rather backed off from Mr. Jim Garrison.

Throughout 1967, Garrison developed a conspiracy theory about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy four years earlier. His evidence most often consisted of information volunteered by strange, shadowy characters, including one he identified as “Mr. X,” a high-level Washington DC official (a sort of precursor to the anonymous “Deep Throat” informant a few years later during the Watergate investigation). Garrison’s theory was basically that the president’s murder represented a coup d'état at the highest levels of government aided by the Mafia and implicating members of the CIA, Secret Service, FBI, and then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who feared Kennedy wanted to dismantle the CIA and pull the United States out of the Vietnam War, the latter producing a financial blow to the bottom line of the military-industrial complex.

Raggio and other board members were becoming increasingly alarmed by Garrison’s erratic behavior. As the host-city member of the NDAA, he would have certain ceremonial duties at the event. Their concerns were somewhat assuaged when Garrison’s assistant assured Raggio that his boss would not use the convention to promote his views concerning the assassination. With that pledge, they agreed to go forward with their plans to hold the meeting in the Big Easy.  

Once the delegates arrived, problems arose. Vice President Hubert Humphrey had been invited to be the featured speaker, but on the morning of the banquet, Humphrey’s secretary called and advised Raggio that the Vice President was canceling his speech that evening. Though the secretary did not say it, Raggio sensed it had to do with Garrison's conduct. Raggio quickly called Garrison to a meeting of the executive officers and told them the Vice President has canceled.

Raggio later recalled:

Garrison then said, ‘I'm going to be the speaker instead of the Vice President.’ I asked him what he intended to talk about.  He replied that he was going to discuss the intrusion of federal courts into state affairs and the activities of President Johnson in concealing vital evidence about the Kennedy assassination.  ‘I'm going to tell them,’ Garrison fumed, ‘about the f***ing President and the f***ing Vice President.’

Raggio was shocked by the outburst, telling Garrison that, as the organization’s president, he not going to allow him to speak:

Garrison kept accusing me of censorship, but I finally made it clear to him that he was not going to address the banquet. Garrison then said, ‘In that event, I am canceling the dinner.’ He then turned to an assistant and said, ‘Cancel the banquet, bolt the doors, guard them, and don’t let anybody in.’ He then stormed out of the room.

The NDAA board of directors unanimously backed Raggio’s decision not to let Garrison speak. Raggio then requested a refund from the hotel management for the cost of the banquet. “The manager said he could not do anything about that,” Raggio said, “because Garrison had been the one who made the arrangements. I suspect many people were not in accord with Jim Garrison, but because he was so powerful in Orleans Parish, they were fearful about standing up to him.”

That night four hundred of the nation’s top prosecutors, and their spouses, went without dinner, and Garrison’s behavior toward the NDAA turned into a major news story — one highly unflattering to the state. Governor John McKeithen came from Baton Rouge to New Orleans the next day to meet with Raggio. He apologized on behalf of the State of Louisiana—but was not willing to offer any criticism of Garrison’s actions. Raggio told a reporter afterward: “Jim was a friend of mine ever since he was elected as DA… but his conduct today was completely irrational; he is an entirely changed man.”

Raggio would later remark that Garrison compulsively needed to be in the limelight, and thought he was smarter than everyone else was, adding:

Yet, I always found the mindset and the values in New Orleans to be curious. There was a certain flavor about the place. Most public officials ended up affording themselves the privilege of largess. They expected to go to restaurants, bars, any kind of services, and not have to pay for it. Jim Garrison had many friends there, and, despite everything he did, I guess it should not surprise me that he became a judge. It seemed that everyone in the state lived in fear of him.  

Raggio’s observations were echoed by many over the ensuing years, especially after DA Garrison embarrassed himself in the 1969 trial of New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw, who he had accused of being an assassination co-conspirator with Lee Harvey Oswald—and which ended in an acquittal that took the jury less than an hour to render. Garrison was defeated in his reelection bid but would recover politically a decade later when elected as a judge of the Louisiana State Circuit Court of Appeals where he served until he died in 1992.

During that time, he would be branded not only as peculiar but as a con artist, especially after he sold the film rights to his 1988 book On the Trail of Assassins to film director Oliver Stone for $250,000. Stone would use it as the basis for his 1991 film JFK starring Kevin Costner and a high-profile Hollywood cast. Stone was not reluctant to include in the film Garrison’s blatant distortion of facts and evidence, justifying that by saying he was producing a “counter myth” to the Warren Commission findings. He portrayed Garrison as a hero being undermined by members of a vast conspiracy, ranging to the highest levels of government.

Political commentator, George Will, wrote at the time that Garrison "staged an assassination 'investigation' that involved recklessness, cruelty, abuse of power, publicity mongering and dishonesty, all on a scale that strongly suggested lunacy leavened by cynicism." He added that Oliver Stone was a person of “negligible conscience,”  and bemoaned how such baseless gibberish was undermining trust in the government.  

Former Orleans Parish District Attorney Harry Connick, Sr. (father of the entertainer), who had defeated Garrison in his reelection bid, said it was “one of the grossest, most extreme miscarriages of justice in the annals of American judicial history." Connick, Raggio would later say, “proved to be an honest and highly respected public servant and member of our National District Attorneys Association.”    

Even a fellow assassination conspiracy author, David Lifton,  called Garrison "intellectually dishonest, a reckless prosecutor, and a total charlatan;"  adding that he had done great damage to those trying to establish more legitimate, fact-based, counter-arguments to the Commission findings. Journalist Rosemary James of Newsweek, when comparing the “real” Jim Garrison to Costner’s film version in JFK, supported what Bill Raggio had earlier concluded: “He went from a highly intelligent eccentric to a lunatic in the period of one year.”

Bill Raggio and Melvin Belli  1967.

The 1968 NDAA dinner debacle in New Orleans would be Raggio’s last contact with Garrison.

Another member of the NDAA during Raggio’s presidency of the organization was Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade. Wade, who could not have held a more contrary view of the Kennedy assassination than Garrison’s, missed the opportunity to try Lee Harvey Oswald for the President’s murder after Oswald was killed by Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby inside the Dallas Police Department’s headquarters. Wade did, however, receive national attention for obtaining a March 1964 conviction of Ruby, which included a sentence of death (Henry Wade would later become more famous as the respondent in Roe v. Wade).

Coincidently, Raggio’s good friend, famed San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli, acted pro bono as Ruby’s defense attorney at that trial. Despite the conviction Wade obtained, the verdict was overturned by the Texas Supreme Court in their belief Ruby was not afforded a fair trial in Dallas due to publicity surrounding the assassination. Ruby would die of cancer before his retrial began.

When later asked about Melvin Belli’s reasons for defending Jack Ruby, Raggio would say:

Mel, nor I, for that matter, ever felt there was enough real evidence of a conspiracy theory regarding President Kennedy’s assassination.  Mel sought to convince the jury that Ruby shot Oswald because he was mentally ill. More importantly, Melvin Belli was a megalomaniac, the consummate attention-grabber, and he defended Jack Ruby to get publicity.

If Oswald had lived, Melvin would have wanted to defend him. That was the kind of guy he was. As far as publicity, that would have been the ultimate prize.”

 

Raggio’s extraordinarily broad circle of personal acquaintances extended beyond the legal profession to distinguished government officials and the most famous stars in the entertainment industry. In knowing Bill Raggio, it always seemed I was only 2-degrees of separation from some of the most notable people in the world. He was larger-than-life and I am forever grateful he chose me to capture so many such stories about these fascinating connections.

More later...