He later left Western Union to pursue a career in public relations, eventually accepting a position with the Keedick Lecture Bureau.

[4] Shaw enlisted in the United States Army at the start of World War II and was assigned to the Medical Corps as a private.

[5] After World War II, Shaw helped start the International Trade Mart in New Orleans, which facilitated the sales of both domestic and imported goods.

[14][15] On 9 May 1961 Shaw introduced Charles Cabell, Deputy Director of the CIA, at a Foreign Policy Association event in New Orleans.

[16] New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison prosecuted Shaw on the charge that he and a group of activists, including David Ferrie and Guy Banister, were involved in a conspiracy with elements of the CIA in the John F. Kennedy assassination.

[17] By then Banister and Ferrie were both deceased, but Garrison believed that Shaw was the man named as "Clay Bertrand" in the Warren Commission Report.

[18][19] During the trial, which took place in January and February 1969, Garrison called insurance salesman Perry Russo as his main witness.

[32] As Shaw, a lifelong bachelor, had no heirs or surviving relatives, the United States Supreme Court dismissed the suit in 1978.

[34] Like Shaw, 150,000 Americans (including businessmen and journalists) had provided such information to the DCS by the mid-1970s "on a nonclandestine basis", and that "such acts of cooperation should not be confused with an actual Agency relationship".