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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And on May 19 most of the Post’s Opinion section was filled with a story titled On The Set: Dallas In Wonderland: Olive Stone’s Version Of The Kennedy Assassination Exploits The Edge Of Paranoia. The story was illustrated with a cartoon of Stone framing a shot in JFK’s limousine, while Jack gets his face powdered and Jackie talks on a portable phone. Asking “Is this the Kennedy assassination or the Charge of the Light Brigade?” Lardner blasted everything in the script from the number of shots fired in Dealey Plaza to the sudden, mysterious death of David Ferrie (the early script had two Cubans forcing medicine down Ferrie’s throat, while Lardner, who claims to have interviewed Ferrie on the night of his death, concurs with the coroner’s ruling of natural causes) to Garrison’s courtroom summation (“It was a military-style ambush from start to finish, a coup d’état, with Lyndon Johnson waiting in the wings”). Stone says he threatened the Post with a lawsuit for copyright infringement. “They got a stolen screenplay, which they quoted from out of context and wrongly,” he says. “They diminished the commercial value of private enterprise.”
But what irritates Stone most is Lardner’s attack on his central thesis — the Vietnam war as motive. Wrote Lardner: “There was no abrupt change in Vietnam policy after JFK’s death.”
“Absolute horeshit,” says Stone. “From the get-go, Johnson, in NSAM 273, escalated the war in Vietnam by calling for covert warfare, which Kennedy never had.”
Stone brands Lardner “a committee journalist, a lethargic journalist” and accuses him of defending the CIA and the Warren Commission. Replies Lardner: “Is he still raising that junk? He doesn’t learn very good, does he? I got a correction in the New Orleans Times-Picayune [in which Stone called Lardner ‘a CIA agent journalist’].Stone thinks any criticism of him must be part of a conspiracy. His complaints are not only groundless and paranoid, they smack of McCarthyism.”
Many other voices have reported from the Stone front. Rosemary James, formerly with New Orleans States-Item, covered the Clay Shaw trial and believed Garrison’s investigation to be a disgrace. (“Now comes a gullible from La-La Land who wants to regurgitate all that garbage.”) The Chicago Tribune noted that Warner Books, a division of Time-Warner, is paying Garrison $137,500 to reissue his book. (“Speaking of conspiracy theories, what are the odds that this transaction will influence Time magazine’s review of the book or movie, considering that Warner Bros. is distributing the film?”)
Stone counters with references to the CIA: “They bring down governments. This is their job. Why isn’t it conceivable that an outlaw organization such as the CIA that does this abroad would do it domestically?” Others support Stone by citing CIA document #1035-970, dated April 1, 1967, a month and a half after Garrison’s investigation was made public. The document advises how to combat critics of the Warren Commission: “…employ propaganda assets to answer and refute attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose.”
But if the CIA is so determined to suppress the truth, and if it could kill a president, then why would the agency allow a Hollywood director to expose its darkest deeds? “I got a lot of light on me,” he says. “To kill me would point the finger at something a little bizarre, wouldn’t it?”
He cradles his head in his hands. “They don’t kill you anymore,” he says. “They poison your food. You get sick. You don’t die. You get sick, and you get incapacitated for a year or two … and you get strychnine laced in your system. Or else they simply discredit you in the media, which is probably a more sophisticated way of doing it, like they did Garrison, you see. They just made fun of him. They ridicule you as a beast. As a monster. As a buffoon. And they do a good job of it. And the movie has to overcome.”
Stone had Camelot’s phones debugged in Dallas and Los Angeles. “No, we didn’t find anything,” he says. “But, of course, they’re into satellite taps now. You don’t have to go into the phone system.” Listening to Stone, one senses a trace of resignation. Could this be a retreat from the defiant anarchist who told the Los Angeles Times in late 1989, “The vandals are at the gate. We have a fascist security state running this country…Orwell did happen. But it’s so subtle that no one noticed. If I were George Bush, I’d shoot myself.”
Stone calls JFK “a potential minefield; I’ve bitten off a lot.” And so Oliver Stone is editing, which he calls the most intense experience of his career. “I wrote a lot of research material into the script, and I’m finding out the line as to what I can use and what I can’t use now,” he says. “I’m pulling out a lot of things that I felt would be in the movie. It’s always a painful retreat for me. I’m in my ‘Napoleon returns from Moscow’ phase, where I try to basically get out whole.”
But while Stone concedes that he doesn’t have all the answers, he won’t give an inch about the factual accuracy of JFK. Stone says his movie portrays history. “Oh, yeah,” he says. “I feel we’re very close.…I cannot include everything I would like to include. I don’t even use half of the incriminating evidence that we have, because of time. But I definitely feel that our film is close to the mood and texture of the time and to the true feelings of Oswald. We don’t come out with a strong who and how. What we come out with is a why. And I think we get very close to the truth of what really happened. The true inner workings.”
And what is the truth? “One would have to wonder about the behavior of the Dallas police that weekend,” says Stone. “Chief Curry’s and Will Fritz’s motivations are still highly questionable, as was Mayor Earle Cabell’s. I always found him to be rather strange. Especially his testimony right after the murder. Bland. Dismissive. He buys very quickly into the lone-nut assassination theory. And also you have to realize that he’s the brother of Charles Cabell of the CIA, who was a deputy chief to Allen Dulles, who hated Kennedy. You have H. L. Hunt’s bizarre behavior, leaving Dallas minutes, minutes, after the Kennedy assassination, as if it were a preplanned exit. As if. You have to wonder about them allowing Jack Ruby to be around all weekend like that. You have to wonder about the security on Lee Harvey Oswald, who had killed the president. Why was there no record of the investigation? Dallas police, as you know, at that time had a very shady reputation for corruption.”
Many of Stone’s revelations came in Dealey Plaza. “I discovered the true geography of the place,” he says. “I felt it. I smelled it. I felt the concept of echoes. I got a sense of how many shots could actually do it. I got a sense of the difficulty of shooting at Kennedy, at a moving target, handling a Mannlicher-Carcano in that environment. I saw the motorcade, reconstructed it. And I sensed the sheer pressure that the assassins must have been under — Oswald, if he in fact pulled the trigger, the difficulty of hitting somebody at that distance with that cheap shoulder weapon.”
Standing in Dealey Plaza, feeling, as he put it, “historic,” Stone says he received a sign that he was on the right track. “It was the second or third day we were shooting,” he says, “and a bunch of extras were on the sidewalk. And I’ll never forger —a seventh-floor window fell out. The whole window came down, heading for those extras. It would have really hurt someone, severed hands, killed people. And at the last second, a burst of wind came out of nowhere and carried the glass onto the intersection there, Houston and Main, where it smashed into a thousand pieces about ten feet from the nearest extra. And I felt very much at that moment that something, an overall force, wanted us to be there and wanted this thing to happen.”
No ordinary soldier
Oliver Stone heads into the editing room and tells a production assistant to screen a segment in which Jim Garrison, studying the Warren Commission report, flashes back to assorted assassination scenes, recreated by Stone in nostalgic black and white. The film rolls. And there’s Kevin Costner as the six-foot-six-inch Garrison, in a vest and sixties haircut — a protagonist, Stone describes, as someone who, although he loses the outward battle, wins his soul in the end. He is sitting alongside Sissy Spacek as his wife, Liz, who wears a bouffant hairdo and pearls, and their kids. It’s dinnertime at the Garrison home, and the menu is conspiracy.
“Honey, do you realize that Oswald was interrogated for twelve hours after the assassination, with no lawyers present, and, nobody, nobody, recorded a word of it?” asks Costner.
“Huh?” replies Spacek.
“I can’t believe it. Again and again, credible testimony is ignored. Leads are never followed up. Its conclusions are selective. There’s no index. It’s one of the sloppiest investigations I’ve ever seen. Dozens and dozens of witnesses in Dealey Plaza that day are saying they heard shots coming from the grassy knoll area in front of Kennedy and not the book depository behind him. But it’s all broken up and spread around, and you read it and the point gets lost.”
As the maid clears the dishes, Spacek says, “Honey, that was three years ago. We’ve tried so hard to put it out of our minds, and you just keep digging it up again. You’re the DA of New Orleans. Don’t you think the Kennedy assassination is a little bit out of your domain?”
But Costner presses on. Finally falling asleep after a night of reading the Warren Commission reports, he’s haunted by flashbacks. A Dallas policeman testifying about the hoboes, his badge glistening eerily. A witness recalling two men in uniform on the embankment, describing the commotion and a flash of light or smoke. …Costner bolts up in his bed, awakened by the myriad nightmares.
“Jim, you all right?” asks Spacek.
“Honey, it’s unbelievable!”
“What?”
“The whole thing. A lieutenant colonel testifies that Lee Oswald was given a Russian language exam, a Russian exam, as part of his Marine training only a few months before he defected to the Soviet Union.”
Spacek groans. “I can’t believe it! Honey, it’s four-thirty in the morning!”
“Do I have to spell it out for you?” rants Costner. “Lee Oswald was no ordinary soldier. He was probably in military intelligence … .That’s why he was trained in Russian. There’s no accident he’s in Russia.”
“Go back to sleep,” says Spacek.
“Goddammit,” snaps Costner. “I’ve been sleeping for three years.”
Costner doesn’t look like a man about to “win his soul.” Gone are his leading-man looks. His hair is a mess. His speech is babbling. Soon almost everyone will doubt him. And at this moment, he seems exactly like Oliver Stone.
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