For a course I've designed on 'politics and visual culture' I've been trying to catch up on my political movies. I've watched films by Sergei Eisenstein and Leni Riefenstahl, and the latest was by Oliver Stone. JFK left me absolutely convinced that there was a conspiracy to kill the President and that Lee Harvey Oswald (played very well by Gary Oldman) was a 'patsy', as he put it.
If even a fraction of Stone's narrative is correct then it is very worrying indeed. Here are some, though by no means all, of the claims it contains. With regard to Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO) himself, he was an army officer who had visited Russia, defected, then returned to the USA with a Russian wife. It was, to say the least, hard to arrange this during the cold war era of the 1960s unless one had official connections.
Nitrate tests on LHO suggested he had not fired a rifle on the day of the assassination, and testing on the supposed assassination weapon (the rifle left in the book depository on the 6th floor) was not carried out on the day of the shooting. Stone's narrative suggests that there were 3 separate teams of gunmen so that a triangular crossfire could be constructed around the motorcade, and that LHO did not belong to them; in fact, he had tried to warn of the plot and was deliberately ignored.
Witnesses to the Warren commission that officially endorsed the theory LHO had been acting alone and had fired only 3 shots claimed their statements had been altered. The actual shot LHO was supposed to have made was almost impossible to achieve and he would have had to fire 3 times in less than 6 seconds, a rate which made accuracy almost superhuman. A far easier shot was available from another window looking onto the street the motorcade came down before turning into Elm St but Elm St allowed a crossfire to be set up.
Several witnesses in otherwise good health died suddenly in the course of Garrison's investigation. Garrison was told by a former chief of special ops that he was posted to the South Pole with no warning while working on JFK's plan to withdraw from Vietnam by the end of 1965. He was on the way back in New Zealand when he heard of the killing but newspapers there already had full details of LHO's role before he had even been charged in Dallas. Had he been in the USA he would have had charge of JFK's security, which was inexplicably absent from the scene on the day of the shooting. The entire USA cabinet was also abroad and phones in Washington went down for about an hour at the time of the assassination.
JFK's body was then illegally moved from Texas to Washington for an autopsy attended by senior military officers who would not normally be present and who intimidated the medical personnel. The autopsy did not dissect the track of the bullet that would indicate the direction from which he had been shot, and his brain also later disappeared. Johnson ordered the limo in which he had been travelling to be washed and the clothes of others in the car to be sent to the cleaners. Untraced alleged secret service agents and railroad hobos were spotted and photographed at the scene but never subsequently identifiedl; the hobos were arrested but released without charge and no notes were kept.
Nor were any notes kept of the interviews with LHO himself after his arrest. No-one saw LHO on the 6th floor (though he was seen on the second), and he was in no hurry when he left presumably after he heard of the shooting. The circumstances of his arrest at a movie theatre were also suspicious; his behaviour suggests he was attending a pre-arranged meeting and that the authorities thus knew where he would be.
Garrison's prosecution of Clay Shaw failed, but it did emerge in 1979 that he had in fact been a CIA agent. In 1979 a Congressional investigation did find a probably conspiracy and recommended that the Justice Department pursue the findings but nothing was ever done. Stone's film, however, did pesuade Congress to order a review of the files in 1992. Stone's ultimate suggestion is that the financial losses that would have resulted from JFK's decision to end the war were the ultimate reason for his death. That is, the military, the intelligence community, and the arms industry colluded to have him killed in the knowledge that Johnson, who took over, was far more receptive to the idea of continuing the war. So far, no-one has disproved this theory.
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Apparently, there is a documentary on the theme of 'What's Wrong With JFK' which is a three-hour deconstruction of the theories about the assassination put forward in Stone's film. For anyone as impressed with the movie as I was, this should also be a must-see. I'm told it's repeated on the History Channel or similar sometimes...
