Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  As if the above is not outrageous enough, the preternaturally audacious Stone wrote in the January 1992 edition of Premiere magazine that he used his movie “as a forum for presenting all the evidence in the JFK case across the board.”157

  5. In a similar vein to the above, several scenes in Stone’s film show Dealey Plaza witnesses telling Garrison and his staff that the shots came from behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll. Not one witness is shown telling Garrison and his staff that the shots came from the Book Depository Building, where Oswald was. Stone’s unenlightened audience could only assume from this that no witnesses to the assassination thought the shots came from the Book Depository Building, when in fact many witnesses did. Once again, Stone was changing reality for his unsuspecting audience.

  6. With respect to the murder of Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit, JFK’s audience is told that “one witness constituted the totality of the witness testimony identifying Lee Oswald” as Tippit’s killer.

  Stone has one scene where Oswald is shooting Tippit, and another where someone else is shown murdering him.† This, of course, is a monstrous deception. The reality is that a total of ten witnesses either saw Oswald kill Tippit or saw him with a gun at the Tippit murder scene or saw him running away—armed with a gun—from the vicinity of the murder scene.158 Naturally, Stone never told his audience that four cartridge cases found near the Tippit murder scene were conclusively determined to have been fired in Oswald’s .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver.

  7. In the movie, the actor portraying Lee Bowers is shown testifying before the Warren Commission that at the time of the shooting in Dealey Plaza he saw a “flash of light and smoke” coming from behind the area of the picket fence. The audience is not told that in two statements made to the authorities on the day of the assassination, and in his Warren Commission testimony, Bowers said no such thing. Bowers, as we saw earlier in the text, made these claims for the first time more than two years later when he fell into the nimble hands of Mark Lane.

  8. Julia Mercer, one of the zanies who emerged to tell their crazy stories about the assassination, is presented in the film as a perfectly believable witness who saw Jack Ruby behind the driver’s seat of the truck parked on Elm before the assassination—the truck was holding up traffic—and saw another occupant of the truck take a rifle from the truck up the grassy knoll. (To clean up Mercer for his audience so she wouldn’t come across as she was, goofy, Stone didn’t have the actress portraying Mercer say, as Mercer did years earlier, that she thought the man with the rifle was Oswald. After all, Oswald was supposed to be inside the Book Depository Building at the time of the assassination, not the gunman behind the picket fence.)

  Later in the film, the audience is told that Kennedy was killed by “professional” assassins. But what professional assassins, or any killer for that matter, would draw attention to themselves by parking halfway up on a curb on a street heavy with traffic as Elm was before the assassination? Or would such a “professional,” right in front of three police officers—Stone never told his audience about the officers—and witnesses in many passing cars, take the murder rifle off the truck and carry it up to the grassy knoll in plain view of all these people an hour and a half before Kennedy was scheduled to be driving by? Since this is a story that no one, not even a ten-year-old, would believe, why, Oliver, did you put it in your film? Is it because you subscribe to H. L. Mencken’s observation that no one has ever gone broke overestimating the unintelligence of the American people, and your audience was a microcosm of the American people? Or is it because you knew that your audience’s mind, at that point, would be so anesthetized by the avalanche of conspiracy preachments issuing from the mouths of Costner, Lemmon, Sutherland, and Matthau, all accompanied by seductively sinister and ominous background music, that none of them would see how your professional assassin story and Mercer’s story were absurdly inconsistent? But even if you insisted on having the loony Mercer tell her story to your audience, shouldn’t you have had the decency to also tell them that Dallas police officer Joe Murphy, one of the three officers, identified the stalled truck as belonging to a nearby construction company, that Murphy said there were three construction workers in the truck and none walked up the grassy knoll with a rifle or anything else, and that the truck, with all three men inside, was pushed away by another truck from the construction company?

  9. Along with Julia Mercer, the even more pathetic Jean Hill, whom everyone, even her own husband, laughed at, is presented in the film as a totally credible witness. As discussed earlier in this book, she made a statement on the day of the assassination to the Dallas sheriff’s office and later gave testimony to the Warren Commission, and in neither instance did she claim to have seen anything of significance, other than thinking she saw someone who looked like Jack Ruby running from the direction of the Texas School Book Depository Building toward the grassy knoll. Neither did she say that she saw anyone firing a gun from the grassy knoll. Twenty-six years later she told the story, for the first time, that she “saw a man fire from behind the wooden fence” and added that she also saw “a puff of smoke.”159 But in the movie, Stone has Hill telling all of these things just twenty minutes after the assassination. “I saw a flash of light in the bushes,” Hill’s character, played by Ellen McElduff, tells the movie audience, “and that shot just ripped his head off. I looked up and I saw smoke coming from over there on the knoll.” Stone then shows a scene where Hill is in an office being grilled by an intimidating plainclothes officer, not identified. When she tells him, “I saw a man shooting from over there, behind the fence. Now, what are you going to do about that? You gotta go out there and get him,” he responds loudly, hovering over her in a threatening way, “We have that taken care of.” He goes on to instruct her, almost angrily, “You only heard three shots [all of which, he had told her, “came from the Book Depository Building”], and you’re not to talk about this with anybody. No one. Do you understand me?”

  How does Stone get around Hill’s not telling the Dallas sheriff’s office on the day of the assassination or the Warren Commission about seeing a man shoot Kennedy from behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll and seeing the flash of light and smoke there too? Easy. He does not tell the movie audience about the actual statement she made to the sheriff’s office. As far as Hill’s testimony before the Warren Commission is concerned, Stone has Hill tell his audience, “When I read my testimony as published by the Warren Commission, it was a fabrication from start to finish.”

  Stone is so bad he makes the Mark Lanes and Robert Grodens of the world look like exemplars of honesty and rectitude.

  10. In Stone’s movie, U.S. Senator Russell B. Long of Louisiana tells Garrison, while on a plane flight with him, that three experts tried to duplicate what Oswald did, and “not one of them could do it.” This, of course, is not true. As we have seen, one of the three not only duplicated what Oswald did, but fired better than Oswald did.

  11. In the movie, Garrison’s assistant, at the sixth-floor window with Garrison, tells Garrison, “Try to hit a moving target at eighty-eight yards through heavy foliage? No way.” But the eighty-eight-yard shot is the fatal shot that hit the president in the head at the time of Zapruder frame 313. And from the window there’s absolutely no obstruction, heavy foliage or otherwise, at frame 313. In fact, even as early as frame 210 all obstruction to view is gone.160

  12. Garrison’s assistant adds, “There was a tree there blocking the first two shots.” Wrong. The oak tree was not an obstruction at all for the shot at around frame 160 (only becoming an obstruction around frame 166), and the consensus of most experts who have studied the Zapruder film is that the second shot, the first shot that struck the president (in the upper right back), was fired between frames 210 and 225. By those frames, the leaves of the oak tree no longer obscured the view from the sixth-floor window.161

  13. Garrison’s assistant in the movie tells him that Oswald was “at best a medium shot.” Senator Russel
l Long tells Garrison that Oswald was “no good” as a rifleman. Stone, of course, doesn’t tell his audience that Oswald qualified as a sharpshooter with a rifle in the Marines.

  14. Garrison’s assistant also tells Garrison that it “takes a minimum of 2.3 seconds to recycle this thing [the Carcano],” that is, to pull the bolt back to reload, reaim, and fire. Stone does not tell his audience that the HSCA concluded that the 2.3-second minimum was only if a shooter of the Carcano used the telescopic sight on the rifle. “The committee test-fired a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle using the open iron sights. It found that it was possible for two shots to be fired within 1.66 seconds.”162

  Clearly, judging from all of this so far, one has to be impressed with the superb work of the twelve people who Stone said diligently researched the facts and evidence for his film.

  15. The audience in JFK is told that there were “three teams” of killers of Kennedy, all “professional riflemen” flown in from out of the country. One team, Garrison says in the movie, was in the Book Depository Building, another in the Dal-Tex Building, and the third team on the grassy knoll. He doesn’t make it clear how many members there were for each team but says that there were “ten to twelve men,”* but only “three shooters.” In addition, he speaks of “spotters” and men coordinating the shots by radio and by the signal of opening an umbrella. The three shooters, he says, fired six shots in a “triangulation of fire.”

  As the reader of this book knows, the Warren Commission concluded that the overwhelming evidence was that only three shots were fired in Dealey Plaza. And only three cartridge casings were found in Dealey Plaza. Even Warren Commission critic Josiah Thompson, in a study of 190 persons who were present at the time of the shooting and either testified before the Warren Commission or gave affidavits to the Commission on the number of shots fired, found that of the 172 who said they had an opinion, the overwhelming majority, 136, heard three shots. Do you know how many heard six shots, Oliver? Are you ready? Just one. And that was Jesse Price163 (see endnote). But even if Price were as sober thinking as a judge, if 136 people in Dealey Plaza that day heard three shots, and only one heard six, whom is it more reasonable to believe? Everyone (except, apparently you, Oliver) would say the 136 people. How did you come up with your six shots, Oliver? What inside information did you have that no one else has?

  Then Stone really outdoes himself. As indicated, Stone, in his movie, maintains that the three shooters were “professional riflemen.” And we know that these shooters would have been firing at relatively short distances—the two shots that hit Kennedy from the Book Depository Building being around only 59 and 88 yards; any corresponding shots from the grassy knoll being around 57 and 35 yards; and any from the Dal-Tex Building, around 80 to 110 yards. When a soldier “qualifies” with his rifle on the range, the shortest distance is 100 yards, and the distances go up to 500 yards. So, as Garrison tells the jury in the film, with the short distances and the limousine only traveling 11 mph, it was a “turkey shoot” to hit the president. In other words, to use another bird metaphor, the president was a “sitting duck.” But Oliver, did you take the time to read your own script? Remember that only the upper part of the president’s body was visible in the limousine, and the shooters would obviously be aiming at the president’s head, the most vulnerable part of his body. Now listen to what, in your movie, your protagonist, Garrison, tells the Clay Shaw jury about how Kennedy’s “professional riflemen” did in their “turkey shoot.” “The first shot misses the car completely.” Not only didn’t the bullet fired by one of the professional hit men hit Kennedy’s head, or even his upper body or torso, it missed the presidential limousine completely! “The second shot hits Kennedy in the throat” (still missing the target head). “The third shot hits Kennedy in the back” (again, missing the target head). “The fourth shot misses Kennedy and hits Connally in the back” (again, missing not only the target head, but even Kennedy’s upper body). “The fifth shot misses the car completely.” What? The professional hit men missed that very big car a second time? “The sixth shot,” which Garrison says was fired from the grassy knoll, was the “fatal shot” that “hits Kennedy in the head.” So Oliver, at a very short distance for any shooter, much less a professional, your “professional riflemen,” firing, as you say, at a very easy target to hit, actually missed the car completely on two out of six of their shots, missed Kennedy’s body three out of six times, and missed the target (Kennedy’s head) five out of six times! And these, Oliver, were the professional assassins hired, you say, by the military-industrial complex and the CIA to kill Kennedy? Oliver, didn’t this make you wonder if all your imaginings were silly beyond belief?*

  16. Stone shows his audience a sketch drawn by Robert Groden of Kennedy and Connally in the presidential limousine in which Connally is seen seated directly in front of Kennedy. In the movie, Garrison then ridicules the “magic bullet” passing on a straight line through Kennedy’s body and then making a right turn in midair and left turn to strike Connally. But Oliver, even though Groden probably lied to you as he lied to his readers, if your twelve researchers had bothered to open up their eyes and look at any of the great number of photos of Kennedy and Connally in the presidential limousine, they would have seen that Connally was seated to Kennedy’s left front. And therefore, the “magic bullet” didn’t have to do anything magical at all in midair in order to go on and hit Connally. All it had to do, Oliver, is continue traveling on a straight line.

  17. Although, as we know, there is absolutely no evidence that the so-called magic or pristine bullet (Commission Exhibit No. 399) that the Warren Commission concluded struck Kennedy and Connally was planted on Connally’s stretcher at Parkland Hospital, not to worry. Since conspiracy theorists firmly “believe” this, Stone validates their belief for his audience and removes all doubt by simply having a mysterious figure deposit the bullet on what appears to be Connally’s stretcher at the hospital.

  18. Louis Witt was standing† on the edge of the grass next to the sidewalk on the north side of Elm Street close to the Stemmons Freeway sign at the time of the shooting in Dealey Plaza. As the president rode by, Witt opened his black umbrella and held it up over his head.164‡ Even though Witt, the “umbrella man,” was located by the HSCA in 1978 and identified as a supervisor for a nearby insurance company who was on a lunch break waiting to heckle the president, Stone does not disclose this to his audience. Instead, Stone depicts the umbrella man as a member of the conspiracy who was never identified and who opens his umbrella as a signal to the assassins for them to start shooting at the president. In a statement to HSCA investigators and in testimony before the HSCA Witt said that he was a “very conservative Republican” who “never liked the Kennedys,” and the whole purpose of the umbrella incident was “to heckle the president’s motorcade…I just knew it [umbrella] was a sore spot with the Kennedys.” Witt explained that when JFK’s father was the ambassador to England, he and the prime minister (Neville Chamberlain, whose position at Munich Joe Kennedy had supported) were accused of appeasing Hitler, and the umbrella the prime minister brought back to England from Germany came to be a symbol, in Britain, of that appeasement. Witt had heard that people in Tucson or Phoenix had brandished umbrellas when “some members of the Kennedy family came through.”165*

  19. The movie audience is told that while William S. Walter, an FBI security clerk at the New Orleans field office, was on duty on the evening of November 17, 1963, five days before the assassination, he received a Teletype from FBI headquarters addressed to all special agents in charge of FBI field offices around the country, warning of a possible assassination attempt against President Kennedy during his trip to Dallas, and instructing them to contact criminal, racial, and hate-group informants in order to determine whether there was any basis for the threat. But, Garrison tells his staff in the film, Walter said that “nothing was done.” The audience isn’t told that Walter never came forward with his story about a Teletype until five years after the as
sassination, or that the FBI instituted an investigation at each of its fifty-nine field offices, which yielded no evidence indicating the existence of such a Teletype. Nor is the audience told that none of the more than fifty FBI employees of the New Orleans FBI field office stated they had any knowledge of the Teletype. Nor are they told that when Walter came up with an alleged replica of the Teletype, the FBI determined it was fraudulent because it varied in format and wording from the standard Teletype used at the time. The audience also was not told that the HSCA asked Walter in a March 23, 1978, deposition if he knew of anyone who could substantiate his allegation, and he mentioned his former wife, Sharon Covert, who worked at the New Orleans office with him at the time, but when the HSCA contacted her she said that Walter had never mentioned any such allegation to her. The HSCA concluded “that Walter’s allegations were unfounded.”166 Unfounded to the FBI and HSCA, but certainly not to Oliver Stone or, for that matter, to the millions in his audience, who only heard Walter’s obviously fabricated and unchallenged story.

  20. Students of Jim Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw know that one of the key elements of Garrison’s case against Shaw, which was emphasized in Stone’s film, was Garrison’s allegation that Shaw’s homosexual alias around New Orleans was Clay Bertrand,† the name Shaw used when he allegedly conspired with Oswald and David Ferrie to assassinate Kennedy, and the name he used when he allegedly contacted New Orleans attorney Dean Andrews the day after the assassination to ask Andrews, who was in a hospital bed with pneumonia at the time, to represent Oswald. Garrison tried desperately to prove, during his investigation of Shaw and at Shaw’s trial, that Shaw, indeed, was Bertrand, but he failed miserably, not presenting one witness other than the completely discredited Perry Russo to testify that Shaw was Bertrand.

  Dean Andrews was a very colorful, rotund, New Orleans attorney with a penchant for dark glasses and jive talk whom everyone liked and no one took too seriously. Andrews’s testimony before the Warren Commission was what started the entire speculation that Clay Shaw was Clay Bertrand. Andrews told the Warren Commission he represented Oswald in the summer of 1963 in Oswald’s effort to get rid of his “dishonorable discharge” from the Marines, adding that Oswald discussed with him his status as a citizen (since he had renounced his citizenship in Russia), as well as his wife’s status in America. He said Oswald came into his office “accompanied by some gay kids…Mexicanos.” Andrews said he assumed that Clay Bertrand had sent Oswald to him since Bertrand regularly called him on behalf of gay kids “either to obtain bond or parole for them,” adding that he had done “some legal work” for Bertrand in the past, saying that he was “bisexual, what they call a swinging cat.” Andrews, who allowed he had a “pretty vivid imagination,” said that he didn’t think he’d be able to find Bertrand (even though Bertrand was supposedly a law client of his), that he had last seen him about six weeks earlier in a New Orleans bar (whose name he couldn’t recall) where “this rascal [Bertrand] bums out. I was trying to get past him so I could…call the Feebees [FBI]…but he saw me and spooked and ran.”167