This review of the Stone film, and of the reaction to it by supposedly
progressive magazines like The Nation, was written in February 1992 and
published in The Third Decade 1992, 8.4, 14-17.
X, Y and JFK
Contrary to what the critics have been saying, there is far more fact
than fiction in Oliver Stone's movie JFK, and its thesis--that the
assassination was a coup d'état by the warmongers--is the most credible
explanation of the facts, and the lack of them, to date.
It will be good to release the remaining classified documents, as
ex-President Ford and the Warren Commission lawyers have now requested, but I
doubt that they will add anything to what is already known, namely that the
Warren Report is a pack of lies.
If the powers that be are so determined to get at the truth, why don't
they just dig up the body, like they did old Zack Taylor last spring? If there
isn't a fist-sized hole in the back of Kennedy's skull, the conspiracy theorists
will have some explaining to do. This won't happen, though, or if it does, the
skull will disappear at the crucial moment, just like the brain did, just like
a dozen witnesses did, just like a mountain of other evidence did.
One could almost get nostalgic reading the reviews of JFK, watching all
the old lies being dutifully trotted out again by the lapdog corporate press,
which hasn't raised a paw to challenge the government's "lone nut"
theory of history (extended to the murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther
King) for the past 28 years.
It is 1984+8, we must bear in mind, a difficult age to understand. Our
current president, a spook, wages war on a former employee (Noriega) and on the
reincarnation of Adolf Hitler (Saddam Hussein), killing tens of thousands but
missing the demonic bull's-eye both times, watches while another spook
(presumably for the other side), affectionately called Gorbi, ends the Cold
War, and now our spook tells us (in his State of the Union address) that we won
it, just like we won the Gulf War and yes, by God, the Vietnam War too! What's
a Magic Bullet compared to this?
Some of the worst shots at Stone are coming from the left, I'm sorry to
say, since I think Marx had some good ideas (unfortunately massively
misapplied), though if pressed I will admit more readily to being a Thoreauvian
conservative ("For government is an expedient by which men would fain
[like to] succeed in letting one another alone"--Civil Disobedience).
In The Nation (Jan. 6/13, 1992, p. 7), for example, a magazine I
usually agree with, Alexander Cockburn says, perfectly inanely, that
"there was no change in policy" regarding Vietnam between the Kennedy
and Johnson administrations. This is what the history books say, but the
history books also say Oswald shot Kennedy, which makes it the second biggest
lie of the century--No. 1 being the Warren Report. The main point of Stone's
film is that Kennedy was killed because he had decided to pull out of Vietnam
by the end of 1965, a documented fact (National Security Action Memorandum 263,
signed on Oct. 11, 1963) which Cockburn, like his establishment colleagues,
stubbornly ignores.
David Corn, another Nation columnist who even thinks he knows
something about the CIA, weighed in two weeks later with his own diatribe
against what he called Stone's "forcing and twisting facts into comic-book
format" (The Nation, Jan. 27, p. 80), but doesn't name a single
fact that Stone got wrong. He correctly recognizes Gen. Y as Edward G.
Lansdale, the real-life Ugly American (in Lederer and Burdick's novel of the
same name) and Quiet American (in Graham Greene's novel), Dirty Trickster par
excellence, maker of US-puppet leaders (Magsaysay in the Phillipines, Diem in
South Vietnam), and Kennedy's own choice to head the CIA's Operation Mongoose,
but none of this is "twisted" in the film. X says that after Mongoose
was officially disbanded, at least part of it was secretly continued and turned
on Kennedy himself. This is a theory, but it is not "twisting the
facts." What Corn means is that he believes that Lansdale was a
"creative and sometimes nutty guy" who had nothing to do with JFK's
assassination and that "Mongoose was ended by the Cuban missile crisis in
1962." That is the government line, and could have come direct from the
CIA public relations office. If Corn wants to swallow it, that's his problem.
There is a picture in Jim Garrison's book (On the Trail of the
Assassins, NY: Sheridan Square Press, 1988) of the three so-called
tramps (one obscured), two so-called policemen, and a sixth man, walking
away from the camera. None of these people, incredibly, have ever been
identified, the most logical explanation for which is that Garrison is right
and they are all government agents. Some claim the sixth man is Lansdale. Corn
would call this "twisting the facts" too, probably. But what
"facts"? They disappeared. What do you call that, and the thousand
other flagrant examples of non-investigation (to put it mildly) in this case? I
call it a coverup. We are not only entitled to speculate; we have no other
choice.
X, Corn may like to know, in real life is Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, US
Air Force, retired, who knows a hell of a lot more about the CIA and Lansdale
(who died a few years ago) than he does. Those of us who know Prouty and his
work have no trouble recognizing either him or Lansdale, whom he worked with on
many occasions during his nine years at the Pentagon as liaison officer to the
CIA (1955-64). Prouty's 1973 book The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in
Control of the United States and the World (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall) is
even more relevant and insightful today than it was two decades ago. Everything
that X says in the film Prouty has said elsewhere, in numerous articles and
interviews, and he is widely quoted in intelligence and assassination
literature. He wrote the appendix to Robert Groden and Harrison Livingstone's
High Treason (Baltimore: Conservatory Press, 1989) and the introduction to Mark
Lane's Plausible Denial (NY: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991). Strangely--or not so
strangely--his second book has been ready and waiting for years, but he hasn't
found a publisher with guts enough to put it out. Maybe the Stone film will
change that.
I feel a strong affinity with Stone. He went to Vietnam, and I spent the
war years in college and graduate school dodging the draft and hating the
politicians who wanted me to go too. I especially hated their intellectual
henchmen, like McGeorge Bundy and Rostow and Kissinger, who were supposed to
represent reason but exuded only madness and destruction. The national security
of the United States at stake in Vietnam? If that was joke, no one was
laughing. If not, what was it? A "tragic error," the historical engineers
tell us now, a well-intentioned mistake. But one thing I could never
understand: How could they could have been so stupid? They came from Harvard
and MIT (and, as I didn't realize at the time, CIA), and I couldn't even get
into Harvard. I knew I wasn't smarter than they were. It was coming to grips
with the assassination that answered this question for me. They weren't stupid,
they were lying--maybe to themselves as well as to us, but they were lying.
That realization had the same effect on me as it did on Stone, from what
I've read. The catalyst for him was reading Garrison's book in 1988. For me it
was a British TV documentary called "The Men Who Killed Kennedy,"
produced by Nigel Turner, which was broadcast in October of the same year in
England and subsequently in 30 other countries--but not in the United States
until three years later (in Sept. 1991 on the A & E cable network). I saw
it in November 1988 in Germany, where I live. I had never even been curious
about the assassination, never read a single book about it, never heard the
words "coup d'état" in connection with it before, but that film hit
me like a freight train. It didn't mention Vietnam, but later, when I read in
the assassination literature about Kennedy's withdrawal decision, my mind caught
up with my gut. I knew what had hit me: the truth.
Prouty appears toward the end of the Turner film--a big, square-jawed,
athletic-looking man with that steely glint in his eyes that earnest military
men seem to acquire as an accoutrement to their uniform. My father and brother
went to West Point, one uncle to Annapolis and another to the Coast Guard
Academy, and I spent my childhood on Army posts, so I know what I'm talking
about, and I suppose that also has something to do with the impression Prouty
made on me: I know the type. I don't trust them or distrust them, but I can
listen to them. Prouty struck me as honest, reasonable and courageous then, and
that impression didn't change when I met him or during the two and a half years
we have been corresponding. I wrote a nine-page review of the Turner film,
quoting Prouty at length, because I felt his statement said it all. I still do:
I think without any question it's what we called the use of hired
gunmen. And this isn't new. In fact, this little manual here, which is called
"the assassination manual for Latin America" [Clandestine Operations
Manual for Central America], says that, talking about Latin America, "if
possible, professional criminals will be hired to carry out specific, selective
'jobs'--"jobs" in quotes, which means murders. Well, if this manual
for Latin America, printed within the last few years, and a government manual,
says that, there's no question but that the application of the same techniques
was dated back in Kennedy's time--in fact I know that from my own experience.
You know, I was in that business in those days. So, with that knowledge, you
begin to realize that hired criminals, the way this book says, can be hired by
anybody in power with sufficient money to pay them, but, more importantly, with
sufficient power to operate the coverup ever after.
Because you see it's one thing to kill somebody; it's another thing to
cover up the fact that you did it, or that you hired someone to do it. That's
more difficult. So they used the device of the Warren Commission to cover up
their hired killers. Now, who would hire the killers? And who has the power to
put that Warren Commission report out over the top of the whole story? You see,
you're dealing with a very high echelon of power. It doesn't necessarily reside
in any government. It doesn't necessarily reside in any single corporate
institution. But it seems to reside in a blend of the two. Otherwise, how could
you have gotten people like the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to
participate in the coverup, the police in Dallas to participate in the coverup,
etc.--and the media, all the media, not just one or two newspapers, but none of
them will print the story that anybody other than Oswald killed the President
with three bullets--something that's absolutely untrue.
I wasn't able to get my review published, but I sent copies to a number
of people, including Stone, and now that I see the role that Prouty plays in
JFK (he is not mentioned in Garrison's book), I like to think I had something
to do with getting Stone and Prouty together. In any case, we're all in the
same foxhole now.
Garrison, Prouty, and Stone are courageous men, and JFK, I hope, will
prove to be a great public service. I am suspicious of Time Warner's motives
for producing the film, however. After all, Time-Life is the company that kept
the Zapruder film locked away from public view for 12 years, and is hardly a
bastion of dissent. So far, with the press feverishly toeing the "Get
Stone" line, the impact seems negligible, if not negative. What if JFK
turns out to be the assassination film to end all assassination films--and
inquiry? What will we do when all the commotion dies down? Forget it? Back to
business as usual? You can't say it any louder than Stone has said it, and if
that doesn't do it, what will? A lot of people will be asking themselves that
question.
On the other hand, the film speaks for a lot of people. According to a
recent Time/CNN poll, 68% of the 73% of Americans who thought the assassination
was a conspiracy (i.e. 49.6% of all Americans) said the CIA or the US military
may have been involved (Time, Jan. 13, 1992, European edition, p. 40). That's
125 million Americans who think Stone may be right! Maybe that's the half that
doesn't bother to vote. Certainly it is the half whose opinions are not
reflected in the "responsible" press, since all of our "opinion
leaders" are too propagandized to even think such thoughts, much less
express them.
But what if some of those 125 million people get tired of just being
cynical, and get mad? What about the vets--the victims--whose fates were sealed
with Kennedy's? The Vietnam War gave 570 billion tax dollars (accounting for
inflation) to the warmongers. What will the 24.5 million Americans now on food
stamps think of that? We saw it once, in 1968, when Martin Luther King and
Robert Kennedy were on the verge of forming a people's coalition that would
have shaken the teeth out of the power elite. That's why they were killed. The
revolution was decapitated. (Both murders, like that of the president, were
conspiracies, despite Received Opinion to the contrary.) It could happen again.