'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.
