In his star-studded, mesmerizing 1991 film JFK, Oliver Stone endorsed New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s theory of the Kennedy assassination. It’s a complex web implicating the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the military-industrial complex, and anti-Castro Cuban exiles, but it relies heavily on the purported guilt of one man, the only person to be criminally prosecuted for the crime: Clay Shaw. In his recent Showtime documentary, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, Stone once again makes the case for Shaw’s culpability. But this time the director leaves out its most lurid element, one that played a prominent role in JFK but which now, 30 years later, seems dated, or worse.

A highly decorated veteran of the Second World War, a published playwright, and a successful international businessman, Shaw helped found the New Orleans International Trade Mart and was renowned for restoring landmark properties in the city’s historic French Quarter. Far from being a critic of the 35th president, let alone party to a conspiracy aimed at murdering him, Shaw was a member of the official reception committee for Kennedy’s 1962 visit to New Orleans.

Physically striking at six-foot, two-inches tall, with a shock of white hair, the confirmed bachelor, who counted Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams among his wide circle of acquaintances, was a highly desirable escort—or “walker”—for prominent society women. And as these details suggest, Shaw was discreetly gay, a fact that today may strike us as irrelevant but which assumed an awesome place in the fevered imagination of Jim Garrison, and that of his latter-day acolyte Oliver Stone.

Clay Shaw, as Stone’s JFK Revisited tells viewers, remains the only person ever to be criminally prosecuted for the assassination of President Kennedy. The documentary fails to mention that he was acquitted in less than an hour.

On March 1, 1967, Garrison arrested Shaw for conspiring to kill Kennedy. Lee Harvey Oswald, whom the Warren Commission had determined to be the sole assassin, was born in New Orleans, and his presence there for several months before the tragedy in Dallas piqued the interest of the publicity-hungry prosecutor.

According to Garrison, Shaw was the elusive “Clay Bertrand,” whose name surfaced during the Warren Commission’s investigation after an eccentric New Orleans lawyer named Dean Andrews claimed that Bertrand had called him the day after the assassination to ask if he would defend Oswald. Bertrand was the “queen bee” of the New Orleans homosexual underworld, Andrews said, and had previously sent Oswald and some “gay Mexicanos” in need of legal advice to his office.

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