'JFK': Stone's Docufantasy Distorts History
The Tulsa World
Ken Neal
12/21/1991
JFK,” the movie, is rip-roaring entertainment. It is also an infuriating revision of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by a paranoid director trapped in his own Vietnam time warp.
Oliver Stone’s docufantasy presents his theory
of the assassination, which is that nearly every part of U.S. officialdom
participated in the murder of Kennedy. Those who didn’t help plan it helped
cover it up.
The cover-up continues to this day, through the
writings of the U.S. media, presumably right through this column.
We all somehow are either willing confederates
or dupes of the ephemeral “they” who killed JFK.
And further, the assassinations of Martin
Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy are parts of the same gigantic plot.
Lyndon Baines Johnson, who benefited from the
JFK assassination, seems to have been a willing partner in the plot.
JFK, Stone’s movie says, planned to pull the
U.S. out of Vietnam. “They” wanted this war to make millions out of munitions
so “they” killed him.
But “they” also wanted him dead because JFK planned
to make peace with communism. And restore relations with Fidel Castro.
The theory is at best bizarre. If JFK planned -
as some of his political friends later claimed - to get out of Vietnam, he
failed to bring his secretary of state and secretary of defense in on the
secret.
Johnson fought the entire Vietnam war with the
active advice and urging of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Secretary of
State Dean Rusk, both Kennedy appointees.
LBJ lost his presidency because he couldn’t
extricate the United States from the war. It is not an exaggeration to say that
his anguish over the war shortened his life by years.
The theory that JFK’s assassination was a
conspiracy is not exactly new. The conspiracy idea was pursued by investigators
both in and outside the government from the very beginning.
And no one has ruled out the possibility that
there was a conspiracy.
The Warren Commission, appointed by LBJ to
investigate the assassination, finally concluded that the preponderance of the
available evidence best supported the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting
alone, killed the president.
Stone says repeatedly no one could do it. But Oswald
didn’t have to fire three shots from the time of the first shot. He had plenty
of time to lock on the target for the first shot. He had only to get two rounds
off in the remaining time set by the Zapruder film.
In the almost endless analyses of the Warren Commission
findings at the time, several re-creations of the situation showed that Oswald’s
shooting wasn’t that difficult to duplicate.
And Stone leaves out of his movie the fact
that the rifle involved had been purchased by Oswald and that Oswald was seen
the morning of the assassination carrying a long package that he described as
curtain rods.
Stone makes much of the familiar
forward-then-back movement of Kennedy’s head when the president was hit by the
killing shot. Stone has no problem. He made his own film and had the actor
almost leaping backward. Never mind that the Zapruder film showed a spray of
blood and brain matter to the front of the president.
The use of the fake Zapruder film to
exaggerate elements Stone wants emphasized and the use of countless little
black-and-white segments posing as film taken at the time constitute downright
dishonesty on the part of the filmmaker. He tells us he is going to produce the
truth and then uses documentary film completely unsupported by evidence.
Some search for truth.
The “single bullet” theory adopted by the
Warren Commission is laughed off by Stone. But experts before both the Warren
Commission and the House Assassination Committee hearings said it was not
unbelievable. The unscathed bullet that is believed to have wounded Texas Gov.
John Connally is a problem, no doubt about it. But it does not support the
fantastic leaps that Stone makes.
The holes and outright misstatements of fact
are so numerous in the Stone movie that it is clear that Stone simply bought
the conspiracy theories wholesale and then set out to find (or fabricate) the
facts he wanted to support them.
That of course is the opposite of what is
expected of skillful investigators trying to determine what happened in any
criminal situation. Conclusions should be compelled by evidence, not the other
way around.
In short, “JFK” is full of suppositions, “what-ifs”
and outright misstatements of fact, most of which are readily seen by anyone
who followed the assassination and the events following it.
The really sick part of this movie is that
Stone is making an open pitch to “young people” to ascertain the truth.
He implies that he is offering truth that they”
have suppressed and continue to suppress. There are even plans to provide “study
guides” for use of the movie in schools. Any school official who elects to use
this movie except as an example of a clever and unscrupulous way to warp
history ought to be fired on the spot.
Young people of course should seek the truth.
But they should also learn early in life that truth is sometimes elusive and
that the detailed truth of an event or situation cannot always be ascertained.
An unwillingness to accept that the details of
the Kennedy assassination might never be determined with certainty perhaps is
what bedevils conspiracy and non-conspiracy buffs alike.
There are questions and coincidences in the
JFK assassination. But veteran investigators
and prosecutors know that life is full of coincidence. And that making up
monumentally paranoid scenarios to explain gaps and coincidence is
irresponsible. Unless, of course, like Stone, you are a member of a very real
conspiracy. That conspiracy is one admitted by everyone connected with the
film. It is first of all to make movies that are profitable. To be profitable,
they have to be entertaining. Who would have gone to see “JFK” if it had been a
rather stodgy straightforward film that held to the establishment view that the
president was gunned down by a crazy half-wit who got lucky?
Anyone going to the movie ought to follow
Stone’s own admonition. In any crime, first ask yourself who profits?
And Stone has an even stronger motive than
money. A Vietnam veteran, he struggles with the futility of war, especially the
Vietnam struggle. In past movies about the war, he has done a great job in
proving what anyone already knows: War is hell.
Stone can’t seem to shake the war. Everyone
can sympathize with that. But he appears driven to not only condemn the war but
to constantly relive it as if there can be some national expiation if only
everyone remotely connected with it will confess the sin.
In “JFK,” he has found the savior who would
have averted the suffering if only “they” (or is it “we”) had not murdered him.
Maybe the film will be the great catharsis Stone so badly needs.
But for many of us, it is a revisit to a
terrible event that will never be fully explained. Nevertheless, it is far more
likely that Kennedy was the victim of one lunatic than a whole country full of
them.
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