Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  The belief among many in the conspiracy community is that Garrison’s fiasco in New Orleans actually set their movement back several years. Up until the HSCA reinvestigated the assassination in the late 1970s, conspiracy theorists, trying to peddle their theories, more often than not had Garrison’s misadventure thrown in their face. If Garrison turned up nothing, the thinking went, why would we believe your theory has any more merit? This was particularly true since Garrison had already incorporated so many of their theories (e.g., Kennedy was shot from the grassy knoll; Oswald was a patsy; the CIA, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, military-industrial complex, Dallas Police Department, organized crime, and just about every other major group you can think of, were involved in the assassination) into his position. “The New Orleans fiasco,” wrote conspiracy author Howard Roffman, “caused the virtual destruction of whatever foundation for credibility [that] had previously been established by the critics of the Warren Report.”19 Garrison’s case against Shaw was a “grotesque charade,” conspiracy author Robert Sam Anson wrote. “Years would pass before anyone…would take the notion of conspiracy seriously again.”20 Meagher added to her earlier observation, saying that “Garrison was a dangerous charlatan.” Calling Shaw “an innocent man” (but still reiterating her belief that Oswald was likewise “totally innocent” of Kennedy’s murder), she said Garrison “did enormous harm not [only] to Clay Shaw and others but to the credibility and standing of all the critics of the Warren Report. It was Garrison’s contemptible antics that put the whole case into cold storage for many years. That some critics still believe and defend him simply astounds me.”21

  In 1978, the HSCA, with its fourth-bullet conspiracy conclusion, gave a renewed patina of credibility to the notion of conspiracy in the assassination. But Garrison himself remained a pariah to all except those on the jagged margins of the conspiracy community—that is, until maverick Hollywood film producer and director Oliver Stone (Platoon, Wall Street, The Doors, Born on the Fourth of July, etc.), an eleven-time Academy Award nominee, read Garrison’s book, On The Trail of the Assassins (three times, he says), purchased the movie rights (for $250,000), and resurrected Garrison from his legal grave.*

  In Stone’s hands, the thoroughly discredited Garrison became a courageous, Capraesque, American patriot fighting for justice and to save the country from dark and sinister forces out to subvert our American way of life. That Garrison’s reputation could not have been much worse before Stone is not a debatable point. Garrison himself told a New Orleans newspaper that his national image had become one of “a fool or a madman.” When he saw Stone’s screenplay, he commented what “a beautiful, magnificent job” it was.22 Yes, indeed.

  Stone is an unreconstructed liberal (the word liberal is not a pejorative term to me) who infuses his films with a moral indignation and passion for justice that many understandably find infectious. The only child of a Jewish father and French Catholic mother, Stone grew up in a traditional, conservative home in New York City, where his father did well as a Wall Street stockbroker. In his postadolescent years, Stone, who in his early years looked up to Barry Goldwater, disliked Hubert Humphrey, and disdained Democrats because he says “my father did,” dropped out of Yale in 1964 after his freshman year, taught English in Saigon, and drifted down to Mexico, where he wrote an unpublished novel. He enlisted in the military in 1967 and was wounded twice in Vietnam (receiving the Purple Heart and Bronze Star). He would later say, “I began to distrust the government through my Vietnam experience, when I started to see the degree of lying and corruption that was going on.”23 So he had a predilection, going in, to believe the conspiracy theorists who have blamed the nation’s power structure for Kennedy’s murder. When you couple this with a hubris that knows no bounds, the mixture was bound to be combustible. And it was.

  Stone’s $40 million, three-hour-and-eight-minute Warner Bros. production, JFK, was launched by the studio with a $15 million publicity campaign that included television spots in the fifty major markets and full-page ads in the nation’s major dailies. The movie,* released on December 20, 1991, was a box office success, 25 million people viewing it, with a domestic gross alone of $70,405,498. (The worldwide gross was $205.4 million.) Shot on location in Dallas, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., the film stirred passions and interest in the assassination by the American people more than any other event since November 22, 1963. Those who saw it who already believed in a conspiracy had their myths about the case not only confirmed, but expanded and fortified. Those who knew nothing about the case and had formed no opinion (i.e., the nation’s youth) overwhelmingly bought Stone’s cinematic fantasy—hook, line, and sinker. At the public tennis courts where I play when I can find time, a teen who had seen JFK overheard me telling a third party that there was no evidence of a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination. “Mr. Bugliosi,” he said, “I’m surprised you don’t think there was a conspiracy. They even made a movie about it.”

  The old aphorism that “a picture is worth a thousand words” not only manifests itself in a movie, but is magnified because of the emotional thrust (generated by the context, live motion as opposed to a still frame, and background music that subliminally “tells” the viewer how to feel) that drives a motion picture. Vincent Canby, film critic for the New York Times, writes that “anything shown in a movie tends to be taken as truth.” In fact, the mind and heart of the viewer are so totally captured that entire audiences of law-abiding citizens routinely and tensely hope that the protagonists on the screen are able to successfully pull off major bank robberies and other heists (e.g., the 2001 movies Ocean’s Eleven and The Score).*

  So the visual message in most instances is certainly more powerful than the written one. With respect to the latter, as I say in the introduction to this book about the misleading books on the assassination, you only know if someone is lying to you if you know what the truth is. If you don’t, and make a natural assumption that the writer is honorable and telling you the truth, you normally accept it. Obviously, that reality is even more pronounced when the purveyors of the propaganda are popular movie favorites of the audience whom they implicitly believe, like Kevin Costner (Stone’s Jim Garrison in JFK), Jack Lemmon, and Donald Sutherland. I mean, would Kevin Costner lie to his adoring public? Rejecting the message of the clean-cut, wholesome-looking Costner (Garrison) is like rejecting motherhood, apple pie, and the American flag.

  Stone, obviously, knew this, and eagerly sought Costner, believed to be a conservative Republican who would be expected to accept the establishment view of no conspiracy, as his first choice to play Garrison from the very beginning. Speaking as euphemistically as he could to veil the banality of his objective in having the audience unconsciously conclude, “I like Kevin Costner, so what he’s portraying must be true,” Stone said, “Kevin was the perfect choice for Jim Garrison because he reminds me of those Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart qualities—a moral simplicity and a quiet understatement…He anchors the movie in a very strong way…You empathize with him, and his discoveries become yours.” Costner’s agent was Creative Artists Agency president Michael Ovitz, and it helped, in getting Costner, that Ovitz, Stone said, “was a strong fan” of the projected movie and urged Costner to take the role.

  The strong supporting cast of Sissy Spacek, Joe Pesci, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Ed Asner, Donald Sutherland, and Tommy Lee Jones, among others, served to achieve the same purpose. “Familiar, comfortable faces,” Stone said, that walk the audience “through a winding path in the dark woods. Warner [Bros.] thought it was too costly to have them but those actors all waived their normal fees to help the picture.”24 As political columnist Charles Krauthammer (who nonetheless, because of the trivialization of our political culture, isn’t convinced that Stone’s propaganda will stick) puts it, “In one corner: a $40 million Hollywood film, featuring the nation’s number one heartthrob, endowed with a publicity budget of millions, showing in 900 movie theaters. In the other corner: perhaps a dozen scribblers writing in various
magazines and op-ed pages [attacking the movie and its message]. You don’t need Marshall McLuhan to figure out who’s got more clout.”25

  Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw had no pernicious influence in stifling the truth about the assassination. To the contrary, as indicated, it hurt the conspiracy movement. But JFK, the movie about Garrison’s prosecution of Shaw, has caused far more damage to the truth about the case than perhaps any single event other than Ruby’s killing of Oswald, which the American people widely view as an act by Ruby to “silence” Oswald. U.S. Senator Arlen Specter, an assistant counsel for the Warren Commission, says that “Stone’s film has done more than any other single effort to distort history and the Commission’s work.”26 This may be true for the simple reason that more people (many of whom had never, and would have never, read a conspiracy book in their life) have seen Stone’s movie than have read all the conspiracy books put together. There were far more national magazine cover stories as well as editorials and articles in the nation’s press following the release of JFK than at any time since the assassination. There were several prime-time television shows that did specials on the movie, and talk radio brimmed with comments about it. Stone’s movie had such an impact and stirred such a national debate that Congress even launched hearings (at which Stone testified) resulting in the enactment of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which mandated the release to the public of all previously sealed documents on the assassination. “In the few short months since JFK came out,” the Los Angeles Times reported, “Congress, the White House, and the National Archives have been deluged with letters, calls and visitors all demanding that the documents be made public.”

  Today in America, no name is associated in the public mind with the position that there was a conspiracy in the assassination as much as that of Oliver Stone. An example, among many, of this fact is the statement of former president Gerald Ford, the last surviving member of the Warren Commission, on his eighty-seventh birthday, that “there has been no new evidence that could undercut” the two conclusions of the Commission that Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone, “Oliver Stone notwithstanding.”27 The most famous conspiracy theorist before Stone was Mark Lane. But for every person who knows of Mark Lane’s opposition to the Warren Commission, five know of Oliver Stone’s. And surveys have shown (see later text) that the vast majority of Stone’s audience accepted the movie’s message as holy writ. Writing in the Washington Post, Senator Patrick Moynihan feared that the movie “is what citizens under thirty or forty are going to be thinking soon.”28 The London Times observed that “Mr. Stone is certain to ingrain his version on the fertile minds of millions.”29Newsweek quickly got to the kernel of the problem, writing that “more people believe the…CIA-LBJ-Pentagon plot cooked up by movie producer Oliver Stone than they do the Warren Commission.”30

  Indeed, though this may be a slightly extravagant claim, Michael L. Kurtz, professor of history at Southeastern Louisiana University, writes that “with the exception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s explosive novel dramatizing the horrors of the institution of slavery, JFK probably had a greater direct impact on public opinion than any other work of art in American history.”31 This is the precise reason why I want to spend a good deal of time on the film. In doing so, the problem I have is this: Am I elevating Oliver Stone’s movie by holding it to be worthy of denigration? Only theoretically. The denigration will be so complete that to say Stone and his movie have been elevated would be a contradiction. The better question, perhaps, is whether by even bothering to denigrate Stone and his movie, am I thereby diminishing, in however small a way, what I hope to be the stature of this book? I believe so. Serious nonfiction books don’t stoop to the discussion of wild fairy tales, which the movie JFK is. But I’m not sure I have a choice. Because of the enormous impact JFK has had on the views of millions of people about the assassination, on balance I’d rather descend a level in this book if the book and the contemplated television documentary based thereon can substantially, if not totally, reverse the damage JFK has done.

  Though Stone’s audience accepted JFK, the establishment media for the most part excoriated it. The movie created such a furor that full-blown, critical reviews came out before the movie was even in the theaters. That decent rascal Harold Weisberg, the dean of all assassination researchers, somehow got a pirated copy of the first draft (conspiracy theorist David Lifton is convinced Weisberg got the copy from his friend Robert Groden, who was on Stone’s payroll) of the script and furnished it to George Lardner, the national security writer for the Washington Post who covered the Shaw trial. When Lardner learned that the movie was going to “closely follow” Garrison’s investigation and book, he wrote in the Post, “What that means is that Oliver Stone is chasing fiction. Garrison’s investigation was a fraud.”32 Looking at the script, Lardner observed that there wasn’t space “to list all the errors and absurdities” in the film. Syndicated columnist George Will said, “Stone is forty-five going on eight. In his three hour lie, Stone falsifies so much he may be an intellectual sociopath.”33 Nicholas Lemann wrote in GQ, “I know life is supposed to be full of surprises, but…I never thought I’d see someone make an all-out effort to rehabilitate Jim Garrison…There are enough good journalists around today who covered Garrison back in his heyday to guarantee that Stone will be called on this…Garrison was a pernicious figure, an abuser of government power and the public trust.”34 Dan Rather, on CBS Evening News, rhetorically lamented, “What happens when Hollywood mixes facts, half-baked theories, and sheer fiction into a big budget film and then tries to sell it as, quote, ‘truth’ and ‘history’?” The Wall Street Journal: “What Mr. Stone is basically selling is political grotesquery itself. Thus, former New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison…becomes a relentless truth seeker. We have to say we admire Mr. Stone’s brass.” Newsweek magazine called Stone’s movie, “twisted history.”35

  Even some former allies of Garrison’s weren’t kind to Stone. In the Atlantic, Edward Jay Epstein, a Garrison foot soldier who became very disillusioned with him, wrote that the movie was a “journey from fact to fantasy,” with Garrison, to prove his point, “deliberately falsifying reality and depicting events that never happened.” The caption of the article describes the movie as “a distortion that…threatens to become the story we accept.”36 Even the inimitable Mark Lane, while saluting Stone for putting the issue of a conspiracy before the public, commented that “it was bad that he did so by falsifying the record.”37 “It would have been better had he stuck to the facts.”38

  Though I am never elliptical and always state the obvious (since so often in life things are only obvious once they are stated), the point I am about to make may seem so obvious it doesn’t have to be stated. But I’m going to state it anyway. The problem with Stone is not, really, that he egregiously fictionalized the Kennedy assassination. It’s that he tried to convince everyone he was telling the truth. I believe that for the most part writers and filmmakers have an obligation to never tamper with the important facts of historical events. But if they do, they unquestionably (it’s not arguable) have the obligation to let their audience know this. Stone didn’t, and this is the only reason why I believe he deserves all the scalding invective he has received in his attempt to rewrite history. Don DeLillo decided to fictionalize the Kennedy assassination like Stone. But unlike Stone, he had the common decency to acknowledge that his apparently fine book (I don’t read fiction), Libra, was fiction, and it appeared on best-seller fiction lists. That’s why there are two booklists, fiction and nonfiction. Although a certain amount of dramatic license in a film or book about a historical event can be excused for narrative purposes, there is never any justification for distorting the essence of what happened. Stone, minute after minute in JFK, dressed up his fiction (frequently in grainy black-and-white simulated scenes shot on 8-or 16-millimeter film to project a sense of authenticity)* as historical fact, virtually the only significant accur
acies in his film being actual excerpts of the Zapruder film (for which Stone reportedly paid the Zapruder family $40,000 to license) and other archival footage that he cannily and seamlessly interspersed—without the audience being able to tell which was real and which was not—with the reenactment footage.39

  When Stone was met with an unexpected avalanche of media criticism for the distortions and inventions in his movie around the time of its release, some of which he was forced to acknowledge, he retreated by saying that the Warren Commission was a myth and JFK was a “counter-myth,”40 but, obviously, he said this just to get him past the moment.