FIVE YEARS AFTER the assassination of John Kennedy, I had dinner in New Orleans with Jim Garrison, then the city’s district attorney. Garrison had gathered enough evidence to persuade three judges and a grand jury to indict a New Orleans businessman called Clay Shaw for conspiring with at least two others to murder the president.
Garrison’s case contradicted the findings of the official Warren Commission, which in 1964 handed down twenty-six volumes of patently inconclusive reassurance that Lee Harvey Oswald, the accredited assassin, had acted alone. The Commission’s report has since been largely discredited, not least by Congress, whose House Assassinations Committee in 1978 found, after a year-long investigation, that ‘President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.’
This is what Garrison concluded a decade earlier. He was a lone voice then, and a courageous one. Established forces, including Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson, had backed the Warren Commission; and Garrison himself was a prominent public official in a conservative southern city whose burghers did not mourn Kennedy. His life was threatened as a matter of routine; yet he was respected as an investigator; and he was incorruptible.
Garrison believed that Oswald was telling the truth when he announced to the world’s press, shortly before his own assassination in the Dallas police headquarters, that he was a ‘patsy’. ‘Actually,’ Garrison told me, ‘Oswald was a decoy who never knew the true nature of his job. He never expected to die. There were about seven men involved in an old-fashioned ambush of the president. Shots came from the three directions and the assassination team didn’t leave the scene until well after they had done the job. They were fanatical anti-Castro Cubans and other far-right elements with connections to the Central Intelligence Agency.’
Garrison’s theory was that Kennedy had been working for a peaceful détente with Castro and the Soviet Union and had been already thinking ahead to an American withdrawal from Vietnam. Carl Oglesby, whose lobby group successfully urged the setting up of the Congressional Select Committee on Assassinations, recently wrote that Garrison, now a judge, believed that Kennedy was killed and Oswald framed ‘by a right-wing “parallel government” seemingly much like “the Enterprise” discovered in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s and currently being rediscovered in the emerging BCCI scandal’.13
Twenty-eight years after Kennedy was shot, Jim Garrison is back on the American stage: put there by the Hollywood director Oliver Stone, whose latest film, JFK, is based on Garrison’s 1988 memoir, On the Trail of the Assassins.14 Even before he had finished filming, Stone found himself under attack. The established press, which greeted the Warren Commission’s report and barely acknowledged the congressional findings that undermined it, let fly at Stone on the basis of a leaked first-draft script, and less.
Stone’s film, raged the Chicago Tribune, was an insult to ‘decency’ itself. Indeed, there comes a point ‘at which intellectual myopia becomes morally repugnant. Mr Stone’s new movie proves that he has passed that point.’15 The writer had not seen even the script.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the ‘JFK knocking business has thus far consumed 1.2 million words’. It has filled 27 columns in the New York Times alone. It has produced a Big Brother cover on Newsweek warning the world ‘not to trust this movie’.16 Stone has been accused of almost everything bar mother molestation: he has a war neurosis, he is homophobic, he has ‘fascist yearnings’.17
The few who have defended the film have themselves been attacked. Pat Dowell, film critic of the Washingtonian magazine, wrote one laudatory paragraph and ended up having to resign after her editor killed it ‘on principle’. ‘My job’, said the principled editor, ‘is to protect the magazine’s reputation.’ These are the words that threatened his magazine’s reputation: ‘If you didn’t already doubt the Warren Commission report, you will after seeing Oliver Stone’s brilliantly crafted indictment of history as an official story. Is it the truth? Stone says you be the judge.’18
In the Washington Post, the reporter who covered the Warren Commission, George Lardner, was given a page to mock Stone and Garrison. Referring to Garrison’s suggestion that as many as five or six shots might have been fired at Kennedy, Lardner wrote, ‘Is this the Kennedy assassination or the Charge of the Light Brigade?’19 The Congressional Assassinations Committee found that at least four shots and perhaps as many as six were fired. Two-thirds of the eye-witnesses reported a number of shots that came from in front of Kennedy and not from behind, where Oswald was hiding.
When I first went to Dallas in 1968, I interviewed five people who clearly remembered hearing shots that came from the bridge under which Kennedy’s motorcade was about to pass. The trajectory of a bullet was still engraved in the pavement in Dealey Plaza; it could not have been fired by Oswald from behind.
One of the witnesses I spoke to was Roger Craig, a Dallas deputy sheriff on duty in Dealey Plaza as Kennedy’s motorcade approached. He said that not only did the shots come from in front of Kennedy, but he saw Oswald getting into a waiting station wagon in Dealey Plaza fifteen minutes after the shooting. Craig later identified Oswald at Dallas police headquarters. He said Oswald remarked, ‘Everybody will know who I am now.’ According to the Warren Commission, Oswald was nowhere near the police station when Craig saw him. After he repeated his evidence to Garrison, Craig was shot at in a Dallas parking lot. When I met him, he and his family were being constantly followed and watched. He was subsequently ‘retired’ from the Dallas police.
That was five years after the assassination, during which an estimated 35 to 47 people connected with it had died in unbelievable circumstances. Two Dallas reporters, who were at a meeting with nightclub owner Jack Ruby the night before he killed Oswald, died violently: one when a revolver ‘went off’ in a police station, the other by a ‘karate chop’ in the shower at his Dallas apartment. The columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, the only journalist to have a private interview with Jack Ruby during his trial, was found dead in her New York apartment after telling friends that she was going to Washington ‘to bust the whole thing open’. A CIA agent, who had also told friends he could no longer keep quiet about the assassination, was found shot in the back in his Washington apartment. David Ferrie, a pilot, was found dead in his New Orleans home with two suicide notes beside him. Four days earlier Ferrie had told reporters that Garrison had him ‘pegged as the get-away pilot in an elaborate plot to kill Kennedy’.
Midlothian is down the road from Dallas. When I met Penn Jones, the editor of the Midlothian Mirror, his offices had just been fire-bombed. Every week Penn Jones devoted space in his paper to evidence that the Warren Commission had ignored or dismissed out of hand. He showed me a pirated copy of the ‘Zapruder film’, shot by Abraham Zapruder, a passerby in Dealey Plaza, and the only detailed record of Kennedy being shot. It shows Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connolly, who was seated in front of Kennedy, clearly being struck by separate bullets – once again, contradicting the Warren Commission. Time-Life bought the film for $25,000 but refused to release it for public viewing until Garrison subpoenaed it.
Garrison’s efforts to build a case were frequently sabotaged. The extradition of witnesses from other states was refused; the FBI refused to co-operate. Garrison failed to convict Clay Shaw, because he could not prove Shaw’s CIA connection. In 1975, a year after Shaw died, a senior CIA officer, Victor Marchetti, claimed that both Shaw and Ferrie had worked for the CIA, and that the CIA had secretly backed Shaw against Garrison, who had been right all along.20
Perhaps this cannot now be proved; and Shaw, after all, was acquitted by a jury. But whether or not Garrison’s version of events is ‘correct’, none of the evidence he assembled deserves the orchestrated disclaimers that JFK has attracted.
Having now seen JFK, I understand the nature and gravity of Oliver Stone’s crime. He has built a convincing version of the conspiracy to kill John Kennedy, and the conspiracy to cover it up. Worse, he is in danger of persuading the masses, especially the young who don’t remember where they were on the assassination day. Worse still, he has told them through America’s principal propaganda medium, Hollywood, and they are packing in to see his film. It is, wrote Andrew Kopkind in the Nation, an ‘historic achievement’.21
You get a flavour of the achievement and the heresy from several of Stone’s attackers, notably those who miss the irony of their own words. A Washington Post columnist, Charles Krauthammer, reminded his readers that ‘early in the days of glasnost, a formerly suppressed anti-Stalinist movie, Repentance, caused a sensation when shown in Moscow. It helped begin a revolution in political consciousness that ultimately brought down the Soviet Union. That is what happens in a serious political culture.’
What he is saying is that the custodians of American Stalinism can rest easy: that although ‘JFK’s message is at least as disturbing as that of Repentance . . . it is received by a citizenry so overwhelmed with cultural messages, and so anaesthetised to them, that a message as explosive as Stone’s might raise an eyebrow, but never a fist.’ Therefore: ‘The shallowness of our political culture has a saving grace.’22
Stone’s film is an American version of Repentance; and you sense the fear of it from the Krauthammers as they deride unconvincingly the notion that the conspiracy ‘has remained airtight for 28 years’. It has not remained airtight; there is an abundance of available, documented evidence that demolishes the official version, points to a co-ordinated operation in Dallas on November 22, 1963 and to a cover-up worthy of the crime.
For all the flaws in his film – and they are the usual Hollywood gratuities – Stone’s unpardonable sin is that he has shamed a system that has not brought a single prosecution following the assassination (except Garrison’s), and he has shamed journalism and journalists. ‘Where were Newsweek, the New York Times . . . NBC et al. for the last twenty-eight years?’ wrote Kopkind in one of the few pieces to go against the tide. ‘Why didn’t they scream from the commanding heights of the media that the government’s most powerful agencies were covering up the US crime of the century? How can they blame Stone for doing what they should have done long ago?’23
Stone’s film suggests that the assassination of Kennedy allowed Lyndon Johnson to escalate the Vietnam War. After winning the presidency in 1964 as a ‘peace’ candidate, Johnson staged the ‘Gulf of Tonkin Incident’, a wholly fraudulent tale about North Vietnam attacking American ships, and began to bomb North Vietnam in 1965. The marines were soon on their way.24 The suggestion that the United States did not ‘stumble’ into Vietnam ‘naively’ or ‘by mistake’ is itself enough to enrage those who police the Authorised Truth.
However, Garrison has always been cautious about directly implicating the US government, in the form of the CIA, and agrees with the congressional committee’s chief counsel who argued that the conspiracy originated in the Mafia. But he sees no logic in leaving it there. The Mafia and the CIA have long had close ties, such as in ‘Operation Mongoose’, a CIA plot to kill Fidel Castro using Mafia assassins. If the Mafia killed Kennedy on its own, Garrison said recently, ‘Why did the government so hastily abandon the investigation? Why did it become so eagerly the chief artist of the cover-up?’25
This and other outstanding questions are raised brilliantly by Stone. Why was Alan Dulles, head of the CIA, left virtually in charge of the Warren Commission? Why did Chief Justice Earl Warren – whom columnist Krauthammer lauds as a ‘principled liberal’ – allow himself to be so manipulated that much of the report that bears his name borders on the farcical? Take, for example, the ‘magic bullet’ which managed to make a couple of U-turns on its journey from Oswald’s bolt-action rifle. Why were photographs of the dead Kennedy doctored? Why did Kennedy’s brain go missing after a Washington autopsy report contradicted that of the Dallas doctor who received the body and was in no doubt that Kennedy had been shot from the front? And so on.
Thousands of the 1.2 million words attacking Stone have concentrated on his portrayal of Kennedy as a ‘lost leader’. Kennedy was hardly that; but in any case, Stone devotes very little of JFK to his misguided admiration for Kennedy; and it is hardly relevant whether or not Kennedy was actually planning to take America out of Vietnam or to make peace with Fidel Castro. The point is, Kennedy was perceived in those days as a dangerous Catholic liberal who might.
I well remember the furore when Kennedy proposed using the anti-trust laws to break up the steel industry. For that alone, it was seriously suggested that he was a closet socialist. Stone has described this ‘blind hatred’ of Kennedy by the far right. ‘My father hated him,’ he said. ‘They hated him like they hated Franklin Roosevelt.’26
Like Stone and Garrison, the two reporters who pursued the Watergate affair were often dismissed as ‘paranoid’ and ‘conspiracy-theorists’. Watergate was a conspiracy. The Iran-Contra scandal was a conspiracy. The ‘Gulf of Tonkin Incident’ was a conspiracy. The secret bombing of Laos and Cambodia was a conspiracy. The overthrow of Salvador Allende was a conspiracy. Far from requiring ‘protection’ from film directors like Oliver Stone, Americans have apparently never been in any doubt about the Kennedy assassination. Year after year, more than two-thirds of those polled say they believe there was a conspiracy to kill him.27 These are the people the critics dismiss contemptuously. ‘They’ll forget it by the time they reach the car park,’ wrote one of them.
I don’t think they will forget it. Video-leasing has helped some fine films endure, among them Stone’s Salvador and Costa-Gavras’s Missing. Both, like JFK, offered a perspective on the secret or ‘parallel’ government in Washington – which, long before the Kennedy assassination, has helped to engineer the fall of numerous regimes. More recently, it ran America’s illegal war against Nicaragua, and was responsible for the Iran-Contra scandals. When Colonel Oliver North was acquitted the other day on a technicality, George Bush spoke the truth when he said, ‘It sounds like the system worked real well.’28
Bush has played an important part in the ‘system’. With Bush as director, the CIA intervened illegally in Angola and Jamaica, spending $10 million to get rid of Prime Minister Michael Manley, the dangerous socialist. Under Bush, a secret group called ‘Team B’ doctored facts and statistics in order to exaggerate the ‘Soviet Threat’.29
Bush’s friend, Robert Gates, the new director of the CIA, promises that the CIA will grow, regardless of the Soviet collapse.30 Perhaps the difference these days is that the secret government is secret no more. Bush is president; CIA men are now ambassadors; American covert operations are now overt. Whereas pilots’ logs once had to be falsified, this is no longer necessary – as 200,000 dead Iraqis bear silent witness. All this is now called the ‘new world order’; and ‘preserving order’ and ‘encouraging democracy’ are euphemisms used every day on both big and small screens. Clearly, when Hollywood departs from the script, something must be done.
October 4, 1991 to May 1992