Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  After Stone’s movie was released, the Christchurch Star, responding to conspiracy theorists, reported that the Star “knew of Oswald’s being in custody by 10 a.m.” and immediately “began gathering information about him.” The paper said that

  Bob Cotton, Chief Reporter of the Christchurch Star…at the time, can recall clearly the events of November 1963. He says that even in 1963, global communication was fast and effective everywhere and an assassination of a U.S. President meant that everything and everyone on the Star worked doubly quick. News [at that time] came by…various wire services…Photographs were usually wired to Australia, then to Auckland and thence to Christchurch. This time, to get the photographs early, some of the geographical links were by-passed through technical ingenuity at the Star. Even so, the paper would not have been published until 1:30 p.m. or 2:15–2:30 p.m., depending on the edition. Bob Cotton says that the Star was never published in the morning during his time on the newspaper (from 1958). Bob Cotton also…says that Lee Harvey Oswald was not a stranger to the media. Information on him would have been readily available in U.S. newspapers…and would have been sent out quickly. In 1959 there had been much coverage in newspapers about young men defecting to the Soviet Union, and Oswald’s defection had been covered in detail in The Washington Post, The Washington Evening Star and The New York Times. Again, it was widely reported when Oswald, now with a Russian wife and child, returned to the United States in 1962.281

  The particular article in the Christchurch Star that Prouty referred to was an AP wire story that contained absolutely no information about Oswald that wasn’t already known before the assassination, such as that he “had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959,” that “while in the Soviet Union he worked in a factory in Minsk,” that he “returned to the United States in 1962,” had a “[Russian] wife and child,” that he was the “chairman of the ‘Fair Play for Cuba Committee,’” and so on. In fact, the photo of Oswald shown in the Christchurch Star was the photo taken of him at the Hotel Berlin in Moscow on October 16, 1959. It has come to be known as the “Moscow defection photo,” and was shown in several American newspapers in 1959, including page two of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram on November 16, 1959.

  30. X tells Garrison in JFK, “Many strange things were happening on November 22nd. At 12:34 p.m., the entire telephone system went dead in Washington [D.C.] for a solid hour…to keep the wrong stories from spreading if anything went wrong with the [assassination] plan.” But the entire telephone system did not go out for an entire hour in Washington, D.C. As author William Manchester writes in The Death of a President, there was such a mass of phone calls being made in Washington (and, of course, elsewhere) immediately after the assassination that the phone circuits were overloaded. “Lines would go dead, return to normal when a sufficient number of people had hung up, and go dead again and return to life, over and over. The pattern was repeated throughout the country.”282* But this wasn’t true with all lines in the D.C. area. In a January 1992 interview of Oliver Stone by Sam Donaldson on ABC’s Prime Time, Donaldson told Stone, “I made a dozen calls during that time from the Capitol to the White House and elsewhere in Washington. The telephone system wasn’t out.” Whereupon Stone replied, “I’ll have to look into that.” So contrary to what Stone told his audience, there was no blackout for an hour in the nation’s capital, and no one, other than Oliver Stone and some conspiracy theorists, has ever said that there was.

  But telephone lines in New York City did go out for awhile. Per the New York Times, news of the president’s murder “spread quickly” and so many “hundreds of thousands [of people] reached for so many telephones that the system blacked out and operators had to refuse calls.”283 Likewise in Boston. Per the Boston Globe, “Boston’s telephone communications were virtually paralyzed. Switchboards at newspapers, radio and television stations were clogged…Many waited 20 minutes to get a dial tone because of the overload.”284

  31. In JFK, Garrison tells his staff that “when Oswald went to Russia, he was not a real defector. He was an intelligence agent on some kind of mission for our government, and remained one until the day he died.” As further evidence for his audience that Oswald was a U.S. intelligence agent, one of Garrison’s assistants tells him that when Oswald wanted to return to the United States, “the State Department issued Oswald a passport within forty-eight hours.” Garrison: “Did Marina have any trouble getting out of Russia?” “No, none, either,” she says. We know that both of these statements are absolutely untrue, Oswald and Marina struggling with bureaucratic red tape for several months before their applications were approved by the Soviets.285

  But Stone wasn’t satisfied with these falsehoods. He wanted more groups involved in the assassination. Remarkably, to show Oswald’s connection with the KGB, Garrison’s assistant tells him in the movie that when Oswald first arrived in Russia, he “disappears for six weeks, presumably with the KGB,” and when he reappears in Minsk, he is given “royal treatment,” living “high-on-the-hog” with a good apartment and five thousand rubles per month. Garrison responds that this had to be because he gave the Soviets radar secrets that they used to shoot down U-2 pilot Gary Powers.

  So now we have the pathetically disoriented Oswald, just out of his teens, being an agent for the CIA (the principal agency of U.S. intelligence) and the KGB. But Oliver, you don’t have any evidence that Oswald was an agent for either the CIA or the KGB, only wild speculation that you passed on to your audience as reality. Not only is your speculation wild, but it’s also wildly inconsistent. You say the CIA (and the military-industrial complex) wanted to (and did) kill Kennedy because he was “soft on Communism.” But if Kennedy were, indeed, “soft on Communism,” wouldn’t he be the exact type of president the KGB and Soviets would want to keep? Have you no respect at all for your viewers, who have made you a very rich man? I know you wanted your audience to believe that everyone and their grandmother was involved in the assassination, but didn’t you go a little too far in leading your audience to believe that both the CIA and the KGB were behind Oswald’s killing Kennedy?

  32. Throughout the movie, Stone makes it clear that President Kennedy was a political martyr who was doing wonderful and noble things for this country. He is described as “the slain young king.” Garrison says, “John Kennedy was the godfather of my generation,” and Kennedy’s murder was “one of the most terrible moments in the history of this country.” With Stone’s and Garrison’s reverence for JFK, what more loathsome and reprehensible way is there to honor his memory than to deliberately distort the history of his assassination and attempt to make a kind of hero out of the person who murdered him? Under what conceivable theory would Kennedy have wanted that? Yet that’s precisely what the outrageous Stone, in contradiction of all facts and evidence, did in his picture. Throughout JFK, Garrison accepts the notion that Oswald is innocent, someone who was just, as Oswald himself proclaimed, “a patsy.” With the exception of when Oswald was resisting arrest and one time when he was physically aggressive with Marina, Stone depicts Oswald in the movie—by his words, body language, and context—as being quiet, passive, meek, never conspiratorial or menacing. (It goes without saying that Stone never showed his audience Oswald’s attempted assassination of retired Major General Edwin Walker.) Stone has Garrison saying in the movie that on the day of the assassination Oswald had “handlers” who were manipulating him, but that Oswald’s nonchalant conduct in the lunchroom, when he wasn’t even out of breath, indicated that he himself never fired a shot at Kennedy. So Oswald, per Stone, was completely innocent.

  But Stone had to go even further. He wanted his audience to have sympathy for Oswald, the audience being told that after Oswald’s arrest, “false statements about Oswald circulated the globe.” Then, to a background of sad music, and with Marina, holding her newborn daughter in her arms, crying at her husband’s grave site, Garrison laments to the Shaw jury, “Who grieves for Lee Harvey Oswald, buried in a cheap grave under the name Oswald? Nobody.
” Worse still, Stone had to try to make Oswald an American patriot and hero risking his own life (if discovered by his “handlers”) to save Kennedy’s life. Ignoring the evidence of what the essence of the note actually said (see earlier in book), Garrison says in the movie that the note Oswald left for Agent James Hosty at Dallas FBI headquarters about ten days before the assassination probably was “describing the [forthcoming] assassination attempt on JFK” to alert the authorities.

  Continuing in his quest to have Oswald be an imperfect hero, Stone has Garrison saying in the movie, “I think we can raise the possibility that Oswald may have been the original source of the [FBI] telex dated November 17th warning of the assassination in Dallas on November 22nd.” In other words, Stone wanted his audience to believe that not only didn’t Oswald murder Kennedy, he tried to prevent his murder.

  Stone’s disdain for history led him to cast the real Jim Garrison as Earl Warren, the U.S. chief justice who chaired the Commission named after him, a person whom Garrison vilified in life for his role as the head of the Warren Commission. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis wrote, “The best insight into Oliver Stone’s character, for me, was his treatment of Chief Justice Warren. Earl Warren no doubt had his faults. But he loved this country with all his heart, and the assassination tore him apart. The notion that he would cover up that assassination is contemptible, a contempt well expressed by Stone’s choice of the real Jim Garrison to play Earl Warren in the film.”286

  If one were to conclude that the above is a total recitation of all the lies, distortions, and fabrications in the movie JFK, it is not. There are many others, some of which, as previously indicated, I discuss in other parts of this book. As I said earlier, the movie is virtually one continuous lie in which Stone couldn’t find any level of deception and invention beyond which he was unwilling to go. And yet, the whole thrust of the movie is that what was being depicted on the screen was the truth, and everyone else was lying. In fact, the audience is expressly told this. Garrison tells reporters in one scene, “Is the Government worth preserving when it lies to the people?” In another scene, Garrison says, “The truth is the most important value we have.” Indeed, at the end of the movie these words appear on the screen: “Dedicated to the Young in Whose Spirit the Truth Marches On.” And in his June 1993 foreword to Robert Groden’s book, The Killing of a President, Stone thanks Groden for “ensuring the…accuracy of key scenes in Dealey Plaza” (right—like six shots being fired instead of three; three shooters instead of one; placing Connally directly in front of Kennedy instead of to his left front; etc.),* and closes by saying, “May all the truth be known…soon.” But Oliver, how can the truth be known when you did everything within your power to make sure that your audience never knew what the evidence showed the truth to be? How are you helping the truth to be known when you asked millions of people watching your film (and watching it to this very day on video or DVD) to accept your blatant inventions and falsehoods? In your topsy-turvy, Alice in Wonderland world, how are you spelling your word truth? LIE? You say you want the truth to be known soon. But as former president Gerald Ford put it so well, if it’s the truth that there was a conspiracy in the assassination, and the evidence of it is as strong as Stone and his colleagues say it is, “why would Oliver Stone [have to] resort to ignoring, distorting, and even inventing facts?”287

  Without knowing Oliver Stone personally, my sense is that he is a person with humanitarian instincts who identifies with the disadvantaged and aggrieved in our society and has a yearning for justice for all, both very admirable traits. In achieving what he perceives to be, as he says, a “higher truth” in the Kennedy assassination, he was willing to take enormous liberties with the truth, making him a classic example of one who believes that the end justifies the means. But that is only half of it. The invariable suggestion he has made when confronted with the accusation that his film was not a strictly factual rendition of the assassination is that he never invented anything that would alter the essence of what happened—that is, they were only trivializations that always become necessary when a filmmaker utilizes a narrative to present a historical event.† But this is just continuing the lie. Stone’s lies and fabrications were so serious, so gross, so outrageous, that they did totally change the essence of what happened. Moreover, since all of the evidence shows that Oswald killed Kennedy, and there’s no credible evidence that there was any conspiracy in the assassination, what possible “higher truth” was Stone attempting to serve by his deliberate lies?*

  In the process, Stone defamed the character and reputation of completely innocent people and groups by suggesting they were involved in either the conspiracy to murder Kennedy or the cover-up of the murder. I probably missed a few, but at one time or another in his film, Stone has the following people and groups (some of whose interests were the exact opposite of other conspirators’ interests) acting (or being referred to) conspiratorially in the assassination of Kennedy: CIA and KGB (bitter enemies, but they got together on this one), FBI, Secret Service, Castro, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, the Dallas Police Department, the mayor of Dallas (per Stone, the mayor, who was the brother of a CIA official Kennedy had once fired over the Bay of Pigs fiasco, was instrumental [untrue] in changing the parade route to Elm Street so the professional assassins would have a better shot at Kennedy), LBJ, military defense contractors, oilmen, bankers, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Clay Shaw, David Ferrie, Guy Banister, organized crime, the Office of Naval Intelligence, army intelligence, and the right wing of America.†

  But as preposterous and full of lies as Stone’s JFK was, surveys showed that the vast majority of the audience believed the movie, implicitly accepting it as the literal truth. The Los Angeles Times conducted a survey of theatergoers in Los Angeles and San Diego after they viewed the film. Some representative responses: “I think it should be required viewing for every person in America.” “In the past, I always felt that it would be a waste of taxpayers’ money—it’s over, leave the family alone. But I no longer feel that way. You see something like this and it makes you think anything is possible.” “Much of it was startling information I just hadn’t known before. To hear that maybe the Dallas Police were involved, the Mafia, the FBI, the CIA…Did the Government think we just wouldn’t care what was happening and that they, above all, were the higher power? I thought, more than anything, the movie was very disturbing.” “It’s certainly changed my opinion. I assumed the Warren Commission was accurate. You come away from a film like this feeling very ignorant, because you assume you knew everything there was from reading all the news accounts, and it turns out you really knew very little.”

  The Times said that the foregoing reactions “were repeated in theaters across the country during the weekend” of the film’s release. “Only a few questioned its conclusions.” At AMC’s large Century 14 Theater in Century City (Los Angeles), reporter Deborah Starr Seibel said that “despite the film’s startling premise that some of our highest government officials had decided to eliminate their own Commander-In-Chief, not one person said they were shocked by the conspiracy theory set forth in JFK by co-writer and director Oliver Stone.”288

  New York Newsday arranged for a large group of college students to see JFK and then be interviewed. Reporter John Hane wrote that they agreed the government and military “were involved in a massive cover-up.” The only student quoted who had any reservations said, “I believe that there were definitely…shots coming from the grassy knoll. But [Oliver Stone] went a bit overboard. He didn’t have the proof to incriminate everybody up to LBJ. The only proof Stone gives us is some guy coming out of the Lincoln Memorial and spilling the beans.” So even this student bought Stone’s shots from the grassy knoll (and hence, a conspiracy) and accepted Stone’s X as really existing and meeting with Garrison. This viewer merely thought that X wasn’t enough to implicate everybody.

  Some representative remarks from the other students: “I knew nothing about this. I was dumbfounded by the movie. It wa
s mind-blowing.” “I was just so taken by this movie. I’m sick of this government. Like, we elect these people?” “Why should I have to wait until 2039 to find out the truth? Why can’t something be done?” “There were too many people involved in the assassination and so they’ll continue to teach it in a way that doesn’t offend. It’s like how they teach the history of the Third Reich to students in Germany.” “I believe what I saw. I totally believe it.” “I always thought Oswald shot him. But now I’m convinced it was a plot.” “If Oswald was a patsy, why not Hinckley [referring to John Hinckley Jr., the man who shot President Reagan]?”289

  Reporter Robert O’Harrow Jr. wrote in the Washington Post, “In some two dozen interviews at three sets of theaters [in the Washington, D.C. area] yesterday and on New Year’s Eve, people coming out of the movie made it clear they believe the film’s elaborate theories.”290 And so on around the country. As the New York Times’s Tom Wicker said, the danger of JFK is that for those “too young to remember November 22, 1963, JFK is all too likely to be taken as the final, unquestioned explanation.”291 David Ansen at Newsweek went further, saying that “an entire generation of filmgoers is hereafter going to look at these events through Stone’s prism.”292