Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Naturally, Stone also didn’t tell his audience that the HSCA thoroughly investigated Martin’s allegations and concluded that “in light of Martin’s previous contradictory statements to authorities shortly after the assassination in which Martin made no such allegation about having seen Oswald [in Banister’s office], it may be argued that credence should not be placed in Martin’s statements to the committee.”215

  24. Without having any evidence to support their suspicions, for years conspiracy theorists have believed that the militantly anti-Communist and anti-Castro Guy Banister, who retained his connections to the intelligence community when he retired from the FBI in 1954, played some type of undefined role in the assassination, the various players in the assassination (Oswald, Ferrie, Shaw) being connected to each other through him. Stone tried his best to link Oswald to Banister and hence prove that Oswald was really right wing, not Marxist, and Oswald to the CIA, which undoubtedly had a hand in the paramilitary anti-Castro activities being partly coordinated out of Banister’s office. Garrison is shown in the movie taking two of his assistants to the corner of Camp and Lafayette streets one Sunday morning and pointing out that the office address Oswald used on his Fair Play for Cuba leaflets was 544 Camp Street in New Orleans. (Actually, Oswald only used this office address on some of the leaflets. Other addresses he used were his home address and his post office box number. Number 544 Camp Street was a block away from where he worked at the Reily coffee company.) Garrison (Kevin Costner) then notes that 531 Lafayette Street, the address for Banister’s office, is around the corner in the same building (Newman Building), and “both addresses go to the same place, Banister’s office upstairs.” But they didn’t. As Joe Newbrough, a private detective in Banister’s office, told Frontline in 1993, 544 Camp Street and 531 Lafayette had “totally separate entrances, and [were] probably 60 steps apart.” He said that once you entered 544 Camp Street, you could not, from there, get to Banister’s office. The Camp Street entrance, he said, “went strictly to the second floor of the building…You had to exit the second floor to the sidewalk, walk around the corner, and go into Banister’s office.”216

  The three-story Newman Building on the corner of Camp and Lafayette has long since been replaced by the Federal Courthouse, which takes up the whole block, but in 1996 author Patricia Lambert asked New Orleans Times-Picayune assistant metro editor David Snyder, who covered the Shaw trial and was very familiar with the old Newman Building, if Newbrough was correct, and he verified for her that Banister’s Lafayette Street offices were not linked interiorly with those of 544 Camp Street.217

  Stone’s twelve researchers, of course, couldn’t find out this information for their audience, even though much of JFK was filmed in New Orleans. In fact, when Garrison, in the film, tells the two members of his staff that both addresses led directly to Banister’s office, it is presented as a very important revelation. In any event, the Secret Service interviewed three tenants of 544 Camp Street who were there during the summer of 1963. None had ever seen Oswald at 544 Camp. Also, Sam Newman, the owner of the building, told the FBI that he had never rented an office in his building to Oswald or the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and never recalled seeing Oswald in his building.218 Newman likewise told the Secret Service that not only had he never rented an office in his building to Oswald and had never seen Oswald in the building, but he hadn’t even rented space in the building to anyone new since around September 1962, which is before Oswald returned to New Orleans.219* The Warren Commission concluded there was no evidence that either “the Fair Play for Cuba Committee [or] Lee Harvey Oswald ever maintained an office” at 544 Camp Street.220

  25. In a scene from JFK, one Beverly Oliver, who sang in a strip club (the Colony Club) located next to Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club in Dallas at the time of the assassination, tells Garrison that she used to go to Ruby’s club a lot, and one time at the club Ruby introduced her to Oswald and Ferrie. Very predictably, the Warren Commission heard allegations and rumors that Oswald was seen with Ruby at one or the other of Ruby’s two clubs in Dallas, but we have already seen that after a very thorough investigation, which included interviewing employees of Ruby’s and going to the sources of the allegations and rumors, the Commission found no merit to any of them and concluded that there was no credible evidence Ruby and Oswald knew each other or had ever had any contact with each other.221 Stone didn’t bother, of course, to tell his audience any of this. Nor did he tell them that no one, other than Beverly Oliver, had ever put Ruby and Oswald together at one of Ruby’s clubs, never mind in the presence of Ferrie too.

  Perhaps more importantly, Stone didn’t tell his audience just who Beverly Oliver (portrayed in the movie by actress Lolita Davidovich) is. She is not one of the people the Warren Commission spoke to for the simple reason that she never surfaced in the assassination conspiracy miasma until 1970, when she claimed to be the “Babushka Lady.” Around frame 55 of the film taken by Dealey Plaza spectator Mary Muchmore is seen a woman (with her back to Muchmore’s camera) standing near the curb on the south side of Elm Street right around the time of the president’s fatal head shot. Her arms are raised toward the front of her face, and the impression is that she is holding something in her hands, such as a camera or, more unlikely (since she is so close to the presidential limousine), binoculars.222 What tantalized conspiracy theorists for years was the possibility that the unidentified lady had additional motion-picture footage of the assassination. Because she was wearing a brown coat and a triangular scarf, the type of scarf popular with Russian women and known as a babushka, she became known as the Babushka Lady. Beverly Oliver met conspiracy theorist Gary Shaw at a church revival in Joshua, Texas, in 1970 and told him she was the Babushka Lady, though she has never proved to most people’s satisfaction that she was even in Dealey Plaza that day. Her story was that she was using a new, Super-8 Yashica movie camera that day, and that after the assassination two men who identified themselves as FBI agents came over to the Colony Club and asked for her undeveloped film, which they said they would return to her in ten days. She turned her film over to them without getting a receipt or their names. She said she never saw the film again nor did she make any inquiries about it.223 Among other problems with her story, such as her coming forward seven years later, assassination researcher Jerry Ruffner contacted Yashica and learned it “did not put a Super-8 camera on the [U.S.] market until 1969,” six years after the assassination.224

  When confronted with this fact, Oliver, who apparently is as elusive as mercury, responded with a written article in 1993 to those who questioned her veracity, by saying the camera “might not have even had a manufacturer’s model name on it…Yashica, Fushika, who really cares what kind of camera it was…I had a new camera a friend gave me, saying it was ‘experimental,’ a camera which no one else in Dallas had at the time.” She went on to say that she was seventeen years old at the time, and then proceeded to bury the Babushka Lady controversy by contradicting what she first told Gary Shaw and what she said, as late as 1988, in the British television production The Men Who Killed Kennedy. Oliver said the woman identified by Shaw in his book Cover-Up as the Babushka Lady “is not me.”* However, she maintained that she was in Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination, though conveniently neglecting to say where she was located on Elm Street, and “filmed the entire motorcade sequence in graphic horror as it drove through Dealey Plaza down Elm Street.”225

  About the Ruby, Oswald, and Ferrie sighting, Oliver told conspiracy researchers in 1971 that several weeks before the assassination, an acquaintance of hers, a stripper known as Jada (Janet Adams Conforto), was seated at a booth of the Carousel Club with Ruby and another man. When Oliver sat down with them to have a drink, Oliver says Ruby introduced the man as “Lee Harvey Oswald of the CIA.”226 But Jada told the FBI in 1963 that she had never seen Oswald with Ruby at the Carousel Club or anywhere else.227 Oliver later embellished her story to the conspiracy researchers by saying that David Ferrie, who we kno
w lived in New Orleans, was so frequently at Ruby’s club in Dallas in 1962 and 1963 that she took him to be the “Assistant Manager.” To my knowledge no one else has ever put Ferrie in Ruby’s club.*

  Since emerging in 1970, Oliver has been a permanent fixture with the fringe element of the conspiracy community, and when not traveling with her preacher-husband on the itinerant, Southern Baptist revival circuit, she has been a drawing attraction at some buff conventions. Among other things, she claims that she and her first husband, a well-known Texas gangster named George McGann (“a man who earned his living in the mob, killing people,” she says) who was gunned down in a gangland killing in Lubbock, Texas, in 1970, had a two-hour private meeting with Richard Nixon in a Miami hotel right in the midst of his 1968 campaign for president.228 When, on August 6, 1990, a twenty-nine-year-old unemployed Texas salesman named Ricky White called a press conference at the JFK Assassination Information Center in Dallas claiming his father, Roscoe White, a deceased Dallas police officer, was the grassy knoll gunman who had killed Kennedy, the obliging Beverly Oliver stepped forward to claim that, indeed, she had seen Roscoe White, in his uniform, walking away from the grassy knoll after the shooting that day.

  Only the lunatic fringe of the conspiracy movement listens to a word Beverly Oliver has to say. Respected and meticulous conspiracy theorist Paul Hoch referred to her as having “very low inherent credibility” in an April 3, 1977, letter he wrote to U.S. Representative Christopher Dodd of the HSCA. The HSCA, which interviewed a considerable number of nuts and kooks in its investigation of the assassination and mentioned them in its volumes, felt that Oliver’s credibility was so bad that an interview of her by a staff attorney on March 17, 1977, wasn’t worthy of mention.

  As indicated, no one had ever put Ruby, Oswald, and Ferrie together. But Beverly Oliver did. The woman who filmed the assassination with a camera that did not exist at the time, who had a two-hour tête-à-tête with Richard Nixon in the middle of his 1968 presidential campaign, who saw a fictitious assassin leaving the grassy knoll after the president was shot, whose credibility is so low that even most mainstream conspiracy theorists totally disregard her, was presented by Oliver Stone to his audience as an unchallenged, unimpeachable witness who had drinks with Ruby, Oswald, and Ferrie in Ruby’s club before the assassination. Again, there oughta be a law against this type of thing.

  By the way, Beverly Oliver co-wrote, with Coke Buchanan, her autobiography, Nightmare in Dallas, in 1994. Seeing the obvious benefit of being the Babushka Lady, she changed her story, once again maintaining that she was.229 Though Ms. Oliver is confused as to who she is, I am not. She is someone without one ounce of credibility in the Kennedy case. But not to Oliver Stone. In her book she points out that she was a paid “technical consultant” to Stone in JFK, and proudly displays a smiling Stone warmly embracing her on the Dallas set of the movie.

  26. In a JFK movie scene, Jack Ruby tells Chief Justice Earl Warren, “Mr. Chief Justice, do you understand that I cannot tell the truth here, in Dallas? That there are people here who do not want me to tell the truth. My life is in danger. If I am eliminated, there won’t be any way of knowing any bit of the truth…And consequently, a whole new form of government is going to take over the country.” Ruby begs Warren to take him to Washington, D.C., where he can tell the truth. What is the truth Ruby wants to tell? Well, if you’re watching the movie, there can be no doubt what it is. That Ruby was a part of a conspiracy, and that he silenced Oswald for those who got him to do it. And that he can identify these people and expose the conspiracy only if he is taken to Washington. But as we have seen, in his actual testimony before the Warren Commission Ruby clearly and unequivocally told Warren “there was no conspiracy,” and “I am as innocent regarding any conspiracy as any of you gentlemen in this room,” and “no one else requested me to do anything. I never spoke to anyone about attempting to do anything. No subversive organization gave me any idea. No underworld person made any effort to contact me. It all happened that Sunday morning.” Stone, naturally, didn’t show his audience Ruby telling Warren any of this, deliberately and inexcusably misleading them to further the thrust of his movie. Stone also doesn’t tell his audience, of course, about all of Ruby’s psychotic ramblings in his testimony before the Warren Commission.

  If the reader is not already completely disgusted by, and revolted with, Oliver Stone and his movie, I can’t imagine why not. But read on.

  27. Stone was confronted with a real dilemma on how to handle Perry Russo, Jim Garrison’s star witness at Clay Shaw’s trial. He very much wanted to include Russo’s testimony that he was present in David Ferrie’s apartment in mid-September of 1963 and heard Ferrie, Shaw (using the alias Clay Bertrand), and Oswald conspire to kill Kennedy. But even as outrageously dishonest about the facts as he was willing to be, Stone knew that he couldn’t present Russo’s testimony without some mention of the fact that, as previously noted, Russo only said this (and then only after leading questions) after he was put under the influence of sodium pentothal and then hypnosis. Even if Stone thought he could get by with not mentioning Russo’s first four interviews, Stone would have to at least mention the sodium pentothal and hypnosis. It just was too well known for even him to ignore. What to do? Not to worry. Stone simply eliminated Perry Russo as a character in his movie and substituted in his place a fictitious homosexual prostitute (which Russo was not) named Willie O’Keefe, who in the movie tells Garrison that Shaw had paid him for sex on several occasions. Through Stone’s device of substituting a fictitious character for Perry Russo, he thereby succeeded in putting on screen his and Garrison’s three co-conspirators together in Ferrie’s apartment in New Orleans talking about killing Kennedy, and with O’Keefe witnessing it all, without having any of the considerable baggage that Perry Russo, who has been completely discredited, would have brought to the movie.

  After excoriating the Warren Commission for its fraudulent investigation, Walt Brown, a leading conspiracy theorist, writes, “By the time of [Oliver] Stone’s December 20, 1991, release of ‘JFK,’ the public was ready for a dose of reality, and they got it.” What?! How, one may ask, could an intelligent person like Walt Brown, who has a PhD in American history from the University of Notre Dame, who has written books on the assassination, and who, I believe, does want to know the truth, write something like this? I do not have the answer to that question, except to say that, as Cole Porter lyricized about people in love (and Brown and his fellow travelers are hopelessly in love with the notion of a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination), “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”

  28. If there is a high-water mark in Stone’s tapestry of lies about the case, it is perhaps when Garrison goes to Washington, D.C. (Stone probably had in mind Jimmy Stewart’s character in Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington). There’s a scene on a bench near the Lincoln Memorial in which Garrison has a meeting (with a character who only refers to himself as “X”) that Stone admittedly invented virtually out of whole cloth. “Garrison’s meeting with X did not happen,” Stone acknowledged on Nightline on December 19, 1991. The idea of X and the military-industrial complex’s involvement in the assassination came from one of Stone’s movie advisers, former Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty, who is referred to earlier in this book and who never met Garrison in real life. “X is primarily Fletcher Prouty,” Stone told the National Press Club on January 15, 1992. Prouty, indeed, has always claimed to have the same military background that X told Garrison he, X, had. But as we saw earlier in the book, Prouty’s credibility about his background is highly suspect.

  In the movie, X (played by Donald Sutherland) presents himself as a former member of U.S. military intelligence who tells Garrison he was “one of the secret guys in the Pentagon who supplied military hardware” for, he says, “Black Operations, Black Ops—assassinations, coup d’etats, rigged elections” in foreign countries, and tells Garrison, in a fourteen-minute monologue that may be the longest peroration in motion picture history, the
“why” of the assassination. X starts by telling Garrison that because of the Bay of Pigs fiasco (the CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba in 1961 to oust Castro), Kennedy was very upset with the CIA, and shortly thereafter (June 28, 1961) National Security Action Memorandums (NSAMs) numbered 55, 56, and 57 were signed by McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s foreign affairs adviser. X said the memos provided that from that point on “the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be wholly responsible for all covert, paramilitary action in peacetime. This basically ended the reign of the CIA,” he adds, and the agency was outraged and therefore wanted Kennedy eliminated. Apart from X’s irrational non sequitur, X’s statement in the film is a lie. NSAM 55 doesn’t even deal with the issue, and NSAM 56 suggests no such thing, merely saying that “it is important that we anticipate now our possible future requirements in the field of unconventional warfare and paramilitary operations…The President requests that the Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the Department of State, and the CIA, make such an estimate of requirements.” Only NSAM 57 specifically deals with the issue, but it says the precise opposite of what Stone has X tell Garrison in the film. It provides in paragraph 2(a) that “the Department of Defense will normally receive responsibility for overt paramilitary operations. Where such an operation is to be wholly covert or disavowable, it may be assigned to CIA, provided it is within the normal capabilities of the agency.”