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A massive body of work has been produced investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and one branch of this research focuses on Jim Garrison’s prosecution and trial of New Orleans businessman Clay Lavergne Shaw. The only person ever prosecuted in connection with Kennedy’s murder, Shaw is an intriguing personage with a contentious history. Despite all of the voluminous books, websites, and films that have been produced attempting to find answers to the lingering questions presented by the assassination and the Warren Report, relatively little is known about the particulars of Clay Shaw’s life.

Even reports of the basic facts contradict one another. For instance, of Shaw’s public school career, in 1969 attorney and Garrison critic Milton E. Brener writes,“Shaw quit before graduation”(62) and Professor Joan Mellen reports the same in 2005. Shaw, however, under oath states, I am a graduate of high school, I finished... in 1928”(“Testimony” 1). Brener claims that Shaw “took courses at Columbia University”(62). Shaw, however, when asked under oath by his attorney if he had attended college subsequently, said he hadn’t (“Testimony” 1). Did Shaw lie to Brener, or is Brener deliberately embellishing Shaw’s biography propagandistically in a book attacking Garrison subtitled “a study in the abuse of power”? Not one full-length biography of Shaw has been published, though researchers are at work. Even a pro-Shaw tome like novelist-playwright James Kirkwood’s American Grotesque (1970), which was enabled by Kirkwood’s new friendship with, and sympathy for, Shaw—brought about by Midnight Cowboy author James Leo …