Can Hollywood Solve JFK’s Murder?
Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone didn’t spend $40 million and shoot 650,000 feet of film to prove that the Warren Commission was right. Says Stone: “I’m fighting the battle of my life.”
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But Morning News columnist William Murchison uses the filming of JFK to defend the old Dallas: “Oliver Stone, America’s favorite anti-American filmmaker, has downtown Dallas traffic tied up while he recreates the Kennedy assassination for his upcoming flick. Why not? The Kennedy assassination has tied up Dallas for 28 years — hogtied, hamstrung, bollixed and bumfuzzled it.” Murchison mourns the individualistic, entrepreneurial Dallas that, he says, died with Kennedy and lambastes the soft-bellied, insecure Dallas that took its place: “Oliver Stone’s traffic jams are the abasement we deserve. He gets to block traffic and insult the whole city because, well, he’s a big man and we wouldn’t want such a man thinking ill of Dallas. . . . How tame, how servile and cringing is the spirit of the old west.”
“Kennedy committed suicide”
Oliver Stone’s rise in the world of conspiracy theories came in an appropriate setting. During a break in the 1988 filming of Born on the Fourth of July, Stone got stuck in a painfully slow socialist elevator in Havana, Cuba. He was there to accept an award for Salvador at the Latin American Film Festival. In the crawling elevator at the Capri Hotel, he encountered Ellen Ray, a firebrand documentary filmmaker and publisher and editor of magazines such as Lies of Our Time, which exposes “misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda in the major media.” Ray had gone to New Orleans before the 1969 Clay Shaw trial to do a documentary film on Jim Garrison. Now she was at the film festival touting the galleys of Garrison’s upcoming book, and she seized the moment.
“Have I got a property for you!” she exclaimed. She described the thesis of On the Trail of the Assassins. Stone didn’t bite.
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” said Stone. “Send it to my office at [Twentieth Century] Fox.”
Ray sent the galleys. Two days later, Ray recalls, Stone phoned. “He said, ‘It’s a great book, but I can’t do it. I’m on my way to the Philippines to film Born on the Fourth of July. But you won’t have any trouble selling it.’ Two days later, he called from Hawaii, saying ‘I just read the book again on the plane. I can’t do it. I’m overloaded.’ Three days later, he called from the Philippines, saying, ‘I’m hooked. I’m going to option it.’”
As a movie hero, Garrison was not unblemished. During the Clay Shaw case, the district attorney had been accused of bribing witnesses, gaining testimony by hypnosis, manufacturing evidence, and much, much more. Garrison was eventually indicted for bribery and tax evasion after the Clay Shaw trial (he was found not guilty in both). He was assailed for his alleged relationship with the Carlos Marcello crime family, whose members he had never brought to trial. But Garrison had explained away many such episodes in his book. Stone was convinced that Garrison was “a protagonist of merit.” Warner Brothers committed $40 million to back up Stone’s instincts.
By the fall of 1990, Dallas was buzzing with rumors that Oliver Stone was coming back to town. In 1988 he had filmed part of Born on the Fourth of July in Oak Cliff, transforming an economically battered area into cheery 1966 Massapequa, Long Island. The first hint of Stone’s new interest came, appropriately, in Oak Cliff, after United Artists Theatres announced the closing of the 1,350-seat Texas Theater, where Oswald was arrested in 1963. Considered one of the premier theatres in the state when it was built by Howard Hughes in 1931, the Texas was being closed after years of B-movies and no profits. Immediately, a Texas Theater Historical Society was formed. The recipient of one of its first calls was Oliver Stone. Would he allow a benefit screening of Born on the Fourth of July to raise a down payment to save the theater? Stone did better than that. He paid the closing costs to buy the theater, and musician Don Henley, who filmed part of his End of Innocence video at the theater, provided the down payment.
Nobody knew that Stone’s crews were already scouting Dallas for a movie about November 22, 1963. “Usually, Oliver is sort of cagey on what he does next,” says JFK coproducer Clayton Townsend, who first got wind of the project in 1988, when Stone tossed him the Garrison book. A year and one movie lapsed before the subject resurfaced. Toward the end of shooting The Doors, Stone told Townsend, “We’re going to New Orleans to do some research on On the Trail of the Assassins.”
Stone likes to compare Garrison to a heroic Everyman seeking the truth against insurmountable odds. But from the beginning, the analogy also fit Stone. “He wanted to get to the truth,” says Zackary Sklar, a former editor at The Nation, who edited Garrison’s book and conscripted JFK. “He wanted to know who killed the president and why.” But, adds Sklar, “You don’t realize what you’re getting into.” Indeed, the world of conspiracy buffs is filled with contradictory information, turf wars, fringe operators, all of whom, it seemed, descended on Oliver Stone.
Seeking a toehold in the morass, Stone hired Jane Rusconi, two years out of Yale, as a research coordinator and built a library of practically every book and article ever written about the assassination. “Once we got to Dallas, my phone was ringing all day with people,” remembers Rusconi. Stone, meanwhile, was interviewing potential technical advisors. Among the first was renegade researcher Larry N. Howard, the founder and codirector of the oft-maligned JFK Assassination Information Center in Dallas’ West End Marketplace. When he heard about Stone’s movie, he fired off a fax: “John F. Kennedy was murdered by the people who controlled the real power base in the United States of America. In their minds he was a threat to ‘National Security’ and had to be eliminated.” Howard promised Stone sixteen revelations, from the identity of the assassin to the role of the Dallas police in the cover-up. A few days later, Stone phoned: “Come to California!” Sitting in Oliver Stone’s living room, Larry Howard let his theory rip.
“John F. Kennedy committed suicide, political suicide,” Howard told Stone. “He was getting out of Vietnam, getting rid of the Mafia, dumping Lyndon Johnson in 1964. He fired Allen Dulles from the CIA, said he was going to break up the CIA into a million pieces, make peace efforts with Castro and Khrushchev, sign the nuclear-test-ban treaty. Civil rights was going strong. He had Bobby to succeed him; he had Teddy after Bobby. So the real people who had the power in this country, the military-industrial complex, decided that Kennedy was soft on communism and was a threat to national security and worldwide peace. So they got rid of him through rogue elements of the CIA, with the Mafia as a junior partner. And from that point on, they covered it up from the top — the Warren Commission, which Johnson set up with Dulles on the panel.”
On a trip to Dallas to tour Howard’s center, Stone liked what he saw and hired the center for $80,000. Howard introduced the director to 21 people, including Marina Oswald, former Dallas district attorney Henry Wade, James Leavelle, and the ambulance driver who loaded Kennedy’s casket. When the director was ready to start filming, remembers Howard, he called Howard to his side. “He said, ‘This is a very historic film for a very historic event, and I want you to be with me when the first frame runs through the camera,’” says Howard.
Stone had more conspiracy researchers advise him as well. In Washington he met retired Air Force colonel Fletcher Prouty, 74, who was the chief of special operations for the joint staffs during the Kennedy years. Prouty provided support for clandestine CIA operations from 1955 to 1964. Now a consultant and author (The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of The United States and the World), Prouty says, “You ask two questions: Why was the president killed and who did it?” The why, Prouty told Stone, was Vietnam. He produced a declassified document that he helped draft, the last document pertaining to Vietnam that Kennedy signed before his death: National Security Action Memorandum 263. In 263, Kennedy directed the return of one thousand advisers from Vietnam by the end of 1963 and a complete withdrawal by the end of 1965. “That got him killed,” says Prouty.
“Who did it?” Prouty asks. “I would go to Lyndon Johnson for reference, when he said shortly before he died, ‘We had been operating a damned Murder, Inc.’ That’s an enormous statement coming from President Johnson. He was convinced that Oswald did not do it as an individual, that there was a conspiracy, and that the government had the capabilities to do it.” Prouty doesn’t believe that Johnson knew about the plot beforehand. “But afterwards, I think he knew.” Stone not only embraced Prouty’s Vietnam motive, but he also created a character, a MR. X (Donald Sutherland), who tells Garrison in Washington the same thing Fletcher Prouty told Oliver Stone.
Back in Dallas, Stone hit the streets, immersing himself in the assassination. He met with intimates of Oswald, Ruby, and Ferrie. He met with right-wing Cubans, gunrunners, pilots, people who claimed to be the mysterious hoboes apprehended but never identified in Dealey Plaza. He met with people who urged him to fly to Cuba, where they could prove that Castro killed Kennedy. When he finished his research, Stone had his story. It would be a tale of three cities — the Garrison story in New Orleans, the Oswald story in Dallas, and the secret political story in Washington.
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