Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  To be fair, in his interviews Stone has never expressly said that what is depicted in JFK is unquestionably the truth (although he has said exactly that in every other way), and when he said in a December 23, 1991, Time interview that he wanted his audience to “consider the possibility that there was a coup d’etat that removed President Kennedy,”41 one could, if not vigilant, be seduced into thinking that Stone, in his movie, was just tossing out an alternative scenario of the assassination for his audience’s consideration. But to do so would be to completely ignore the movie itself as well as the overall thrust of Stone’s remarks and interviews. When he says, “There is a saying: ‘A lie is like a snowball—the longer it is rolled, the larger it is.’ The Warren Commission…is that lie,” and therefore not entitled to be believed, and that his movie, on the other hand, is “a seamless jig-saw puzzle that will allow the audience for the first time, to understand what happened and why,” and that he “had to take the assassination out of Dallas and the conspiracy out of New Orleans and bring it all back to Washington, where it really began,” and that “the assassination was America’s first coup d’etat, and it worked,”42 by definition he is not saying that he is merely offering an alternative view. He is saying his view is the correct view, the only view. You can’t tell one major lie about the assassination after another for three consecutive hours, and with full knowledge that, as Vincent Canby says, “anything shown in a movie tends to be taken as the truth,” and escape responsibility for your monstrous hoax by suggesting you are only presenting an alternative view for the audience’s consideration.

  Did, indeed, Stone want his audience to believe his fiction was reality? About that there can be no dispute.† In addition to the aforementioned remarks he made, Stone told Newsweek, “I think people are more on my side than the government’s. If they don’t believe me this go-round, they’ll believe me when another shocking thing happens.”43 Stone lamented to USA Today that “instead of [the media] spending so much energy saying ‘Stone’s interpretation of history is fiction,’ which it is not, why don’t they devote the same energy to asking why Kennedy was killed?”44 He told the Dallas Morning News before the shooting of the film commenced in Dallas that he was a “cinematic historian,” his movie would be “a history lesson,” and he was confident he would be remembered as “a good historian as well as a good dramatist.”45 In fact, in newspaper advertisements for the film throughout the country were these words in bold letters: “The Truth Is the Most Important Value We Have.” As Edward Epstein wrote in the Atlantic, “From the moment [JFK] was released, its Director, Oliver Stone, so passionately defended its factual accuracy that he became, for all practical purposes, the new Garrison.”46 Unbelievably, Stone told Time magazine, “I think this movie, hopefully, if it’s accepted by the public, will at least move people away from the Warren Commission.”47 He wanted his movie, he wrote with towering arrogance in the January 1992 edition of Premiere, to “replace the Warren Commission Report.”48 Can you imagine that? A Hollywood producer wants his movie to replace the official and most comprehensive investigation of a crime in history. It’s a measure of Stone’s sense of self that such a thought, even if a vagrant one, would even enter his head. Arrogance thought it already had a bad name. That was before it met Oliver Stone. Taking his movie very, very seriously, Stone frequently praised his twelve researchers for all the arduous work they had done. He told Richard Bernstein of the New York Times that “every point, every argument, every detail in the movie…has been researched, can be documented, and is justified.”49 (Stone hardly ever uses the word speculate in the film, and when he does, it is invariably lost and forgotten by the context, the torrent of “factual” words that follow, and most of all by the acting out of the thought on screen by the evil conspirators.)

  Stone has compared his movie to the film Rashômon, the 1950 Japanese classic in which the same event is seen from several points of view as opposed to an unequivocal defense of any particular theory. Nonsense. JFK has one theme and one theme only that runs throughout: that Kennedy’s murder was the result of a massive conspiracy emanating from the highest corridors of power in America, that all we stand for as a nation is being attacked and taken over by these sinister forces, and that his fearless prosecutor, and inferentially, Stone, who has the moral courage to tell his story, are the only ones manning the ramparts—the last angry and courageous men. Shedding all pretenses and Rashômon allusions, in his commentary to the book Oliver Stone’s USA, Stone writes that his movie is “about a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy.”50

  Because Stone continuously misrepresented the facts throughout his film, is he therefore an unmitigated fraud? Yes and no. As crazy as all the nuts, rumors, and speculation are that Stone managed to shoehorn into his movie, I sense that he, like a great number of other people, honestly believes much of this nonsense.* But as we shall see, where we know that Stone is a fraud is in those critical situations in his movie where he flat-out invented scenes and characters to help him prove the point he was trying to make.

  Even in the areas of the film that I sense Stone believes to be true, I cannot exonerate him of willful duplicity without thereby convicting him of reckless stupidity—reckless in that instead of balancing out his advisers with reputable anti-conspiracy scholars, or even respectable conspiracy theorists, he had to know he was relying almost exclusively on the extreme fanatical fringe of the conspiracy community. As indicated, Stone primarily based his movie on Jim Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins. But, as noted, this is a book whose author has been completely discredited and is even an embarrassment to the conspiracy community. The second book, per the screen credits, that Stone based his movie on is Jim Marrs’s Crossfire. But Marrs is a conspiracy theorist who has rarely met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like. In his only other book, Alien Agenda, Marrs tells us that we have “non-human visitors” among us, and that our government, with full knowledge of these aliens in our midst, has conspired, with a “wall of silence,” to “hide away the alien presence” and keep the truth from the American people.51 Sound familiar? Garrison and Marrs also served as advisers to Stone on his movie.

  These were Stone’s other principal advisers: Robert Groden, the photographic expert for the conspiracy community, served as the reenactment coordinator. As pointed out earlier in this book, few, if any, have less credibility than he. Among other things, he is the fellow who insists that the backyard photos Marina took of Oswald holding a Carcano rifle are fake, and that Oswald’s head was superimposed by the authorities on someone else’s body. Larry Howard was the late, gadfly cofounder of the JFK Assassination Research Center in Dallas that became a repository for assassination memorabilia and every kooky conspiracy book that had ever been written. Howard always use to boast that he had never read any book on the assassination himself, but faxed Stone that he and his people had “uncovered the real truth behind the assassination. JFK was murdered by the people who control the power base in the United States. In their minds he was a threat to national security and had to be eliminated.” That’s all that Stone had to hear, bringing Howard aboard with a payment of $80,000 to the latter’s research center.52 L. Fletcher Prouty, a former air force colonel who worked in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Operations (which provided support for covert operations), convinced Stone, without a shred of evidence to support him, that the military-industrial complex had Kennedy killed because Kennedy wanted to withdraw American troops from Vietnam and it wanted war. Unbelievably, Prouty even flirted with the possibility that McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security adviser and former Harvard dean and Ford Foundation president, was part of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy.53

  Prouty (since deceased) was a right-wing zany who was a member of the Liberty Lobby, the middle-of-the-road, sensible group that supported neo-Nazi David Duke’s 1988 candidacy for president and embraces the notion that the Holocaust is really a Jewish hoax. He also served as a consultant to Lyndon LaRouche’s right-wing National Democra
tic Policy Committee “at a conference of which he provided a presentation comparing the U.S. Government’s prosecution of LaRouche (for conspiracy and mail fraud) to the prosecution of Socrates.”54 Prouty is clearly someone with both feet planted firmly in the air. But Prouty, who served as an editorial adviser on publications of the Church of Scientology, makes up for his perverse right-wing beliefs by apparently, per author Edward Epstein, having no personal credibility. Epstein interviewed Prouty for his book Legend, and said that the Reader’s Digest staff fact-checked Prouty and wouldn’t publish the part of Legend involving Prouty’s assertions because they found he had “falsified” so much of his military career. “He will say almost anything that someone wants to hear…He’s extremely accommodating,” Epstein said.55

  With Garrison and the rest of the aforementioned motley crew,* Stone obviously was in good hands, and JFK’s audience had every reason to take everything in the movie as the equivalent of inspired scripture.

  Because, to my knowledge, the well-earned vilification of Stone by the establishment media has never been supported by an in-depth analysis of his film,† such analysis for the most part being limited to newspaper columns and short magazine articles with only a few examples here and there of the lies in the film, and because of the film’s enormous adverse effect on millions of unknowledgeable Americans who innocently drank Stone’s moonshine and, inebriated, passed it on to countless others in their circle, as indicated, I decided to give the film a fairly thorough treatment in this book. My first step was to rent the video of the long movie and spend nine hours and twenty-four painful minutes watching it (three times) to enable me to set forth a goodly number of Stone’s lies and fabrications. Inasmuch as the movie is virtually a continuous lie, to set forth all the lies would take a book in itself.‡ But what follows, in numbered form, is an adequate list (a few other major lies in Stone’s film appear in other sections of this book):

  1.* In the movie, Garrison is depicted as a scrupulously honest DA of unimpeachable probity and morality who is only interested in the truth and unwilling to cut any corners to get it. We know, of course, that this was not the real Garrison, who, as it was said about a later, well-known prosecutor, Ken Starr, “violated every prosecutorial rule in the book” in relentless pursuit of his quarry. Even Stone has allowed, in interviews, how there was a dark side to the garrulous Garrison, but he never even hinted at it in the movie, instead rationalizing that the movie was about the assassination, not Garrison, and he didn’t want to divert the audience’s attention by getting into a “biography” of Garrison.† However, Garrison and the assassination are inseparable in the movie since Stone is presenting Garrison’s view of it. If Garrison is shown to be corrupt in his conduct during his investigation, this would inevitably compromise, in any audience’s mind, the arguments he makes and the conclusions he reaches. I mean, for most people it’s rather difficult to separate the credibility of a charge someone is making from the credibility of the person making it. Stone lied about Garrison in his movie because he had a message to give his viewers and he wouldn’t give them any truth, anywhere in the movie, that might militate against that message. So right from the start, Stone deliberately misled his audience about who the hero of his movie really was.

  Garrison’s conduct was so egregiously bad that several important members of his staff resigned in disgust when they saw that Garrison was pursuing an innocent man by having his staff bribe, intimidate, and even hypnotize witnesses. One of them, William Gurvich, ran and owned with his two brothers the Gurvich Brothers Detective Agency in New Orleans, a very prominent and reputable firm. Garrison had asked him to lead the investigation of Clay Shaw, which Gurvich did, for “$1 a year”; his real compensation was heading up a potentially historic investigation. Though one of Garrison’s strongest supporters at the start of the investigation, Gurvich became disillusioned when he saw there was no real evidence against Shaw. So troubled was he that on June 8, 1967, he flew to Washington, D.C., to meet privately with Robert Kennedy and told Kennedy that the Garrison inquiry in New Orleans had “no basis in fact” and that “we can’t shed any light on the death of your brother so you should not hope for such.” Gurvich said that after hearing this, RFK “appeared to be rather disgusted to think that someone was exploiting his brother’s death.”56 The private meeting with RFK leaked when a Kennedy spokesman said Kennedy was “extremely grateful” that Gurvich had come to see him. When a Newsday reporter asked Gurvich to comment, Gurvich allowed that “I think Mr. Garrison believes in what he is doing. He is sincere.”57 Gurvich’s disenchantment with Garrison’s probe went downhill even further from there as he became more and more aware of the unscrupulous methods Garrison and his staff were employing to develop a nonexistent case.

  At a press conference in New Orleans on June 26, 1967, Gurvich announced his resignation from Garrison’s staff and said there was “no truth” to Mr. Garrison’s contention that he had found a conspiracy in the assassination of Kennedy, and that there was “no case” against Mr. Shaw. He also urged the Orleans Parish grand jury to start an immediate investigation into the way Garrison was conducting his inquiry, and sent a telegram to the grand jury stating he was prepared “to give evidence of travesties of justice on the part of the District Attorney in the case of Louisiana vs. Clay Shaw.”58 The following evening on CBS, he said, “I was very dissatisfied with the way the investigation was being conducted…and decided that if the job of an investigator is to find the truth, then I was to find it. I found it. And this led to my resignation.”

  “Well, what then is the truth?” CBS news reporter Edward Rabel asked.

  “The truth, as I see it, is that Mr. Shaw should never have been arrested.”59

  Garrison, stung by Gurvich’s public attacks, struck back by saying Gurvich, the long-time New Orleans resident, was linked with the “Eastern Establishment,” which was trying to destroy his case. Further, he claimed that Gurvich had asked to help in the investigation, and foolishly asserted that Gurvich owned a “night-watchman service” and only played a very minor role in the investigation, mostly as a photographic expert and chauffeur. But much evidence rebuts Garrison’s assertion. For instance, the New Orleans States-Item, whose February 17, 1967, article first brought worldwide attention to what Garrison was doing in New Orleans, could be expected to know just who was who on Garrison’s staff, and it referred to Gurvich as Garrison’s “chief investigator.”60 Indeed, it was Gurvich who had announced to the world at a packed press conference on March 1, 1967, that Clay Shaw had been arrested for Kennedy’s murder.61

  Gurvich went in front of the Orleans Parish grand jury on June 28, urging it not to indict Shaw (which it ultimately did), and spoke of Garrison’s unconscionable investigation, which included putting pressure on a well-known New Orleans burglar to break into Shaw’s home and place something there.62 The burglar, John Cancler (“John the Baptist”), told a national NBC audience on June 19 that while incarcerated in the Parish prison, a DA investigator asked him to “do a job for us.” The investigator drove him to a home in the 1300 block of Dauphine Street. “What am I supposed to take out of the house?” he asked. “Nothing,” he was told. He was supposed to put something in the house. “What was it all about?” he asked. When he was told it had something to do with the assassination of President Kennedy, he became frightened and declined.63

  In addition to the above (as well as hypnotizing and intimidating Perry Russo, his main witness against Shaw, into testifying that he was present when Shaw, Ferrie, and Oswald conspired to murder Kennedy—see later text and endnote), the following is one more of the many examples of the highly improper practices that Garrison and his staff engaged in to get Shaw. Al Beauboeuf was a homosexual lover of David Ferrie’s. Garrison wanted him to testify to anything he knew about Ferrie’s alleged involvement with Shaw and Oswald in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. At a meeting on March 1, 1967, between Hugh Exnicios (Beauboeuf’s lawyer) and Lynn Loisel, a New Orleans police officer o
n loan to Garrison, that took place in Exnicios’s office, Exnicios secretly tape-recorded what Garrison was willing to give for Beauboeuf’s testimony. Loisel is careful enough to say, “The only thing we want is the truth.” But then, remarkably, he also says, “We can change the story around, you know…to positively beyond a shadow of a doubt eliminate him [Beauboeuf] from any type of conspiracy.” In return for his testimony, Loisel says, “I’m, you know, fairly certain we could put $3,000 on him (sound of snapping of fingers) just like that, you know. I’m sure we’d help him financially and I’m sure we’d…get him a job.”

  Exnicios: “Is this something you have thought up yourself or that Garrison—he knows about the situation?”

  Loisel: “That’s right.”

  Exnicios: “And he’s [Garrison] agreed that if we could in someway assist you, that you would be able to give…these things?”

  Loisel: “That’s correct.”64

  Exnicios was convinced the tape was clear evidence that Loisel, acting on Garrison’s authority, had offered Beauboeuf a bribe to testify falsely. He proceeded to try to get the DA of nearby Jefferson Parish, where his office was located, to file criminal charges against Loisel and Garrison, but the DA (Frank Langridge) declined and told Garrison about the tape. Conspiracy theorists love to point out that on April 12, 1967, Beauboeuf signed an affidavit at Garrison’s office in which he said that Loisel had not offered him a bribe to testify falsely, that all Loisel wanted was the truth. But, of course, the tape (“We can change the story around, you know”) speaks for itself. And the conspiracy theorists, predictably, don’t mention that Beauboeuf told many people thereafter that he was threatened by Loisel into signing the affidavit, claiming that Loisel and fellow DA investigator Lou Ivon came to his home the previous evening, April 11, and Loisel said they would circulate obscene photos of him seized from Ferrie’s apartment if he didn’t cooperate and sign the statement they wanted from him. Worse, he claims one of them held him while the other put a gun in his face. While the record isn’t clear which one did what, Beauboeuf is very clear that it was Loisel who said to him, “I don’t want to get into any s…, and before I do I’ll put a hot load of lead up your ass.”65