Oliver Stoned
The “Presidential Trilogy”
With JFK, Nixon, and Dubya, director Oliver Stone has completed a presidential trilogy of sorts—three films which amount to a wicked, incendiary, and exciting mediation on the most powerful position in the world. All have provoked controversy: JFK for blurring the line between history and conjecture, Nixon for its daring dramatic licenses, and W. for taking a shot at a sitting President. What some forget is that Stone is not portraying history, he is dramatizing it. These are not documentaries, they are dramas.
JFK is murder mystery, set against the background of political intrigue. In this film Stone is not illuminating corners of history as much as he is using them as a playground. Over the years, so many bizarre conspiracy theories and misleading red herrings have popped up concerning the Kennedy assassination. With JFK, Stone serves them all up in one meaty dish, garnished and seasoned with the kind of gusto and grace only Hollywood can provide. Stone himself keenly refers to the film as a “counter-myth” to the Lone Gunman story, and regards his own restaging of the assassination as “speculation.”
Critics claim that Nixon‘s dramatics are akin to that of a Shakespearean tragedy, but in actuality Stone’s second presidential film is more similar to one of Shakespeare’s history plays. In these works real-life leaders such as Richard III and Henry V were either vilified or venerated for the sake of popular entertainment. Shakespeare, like Stone, took incredible dramatic license in his portrayal of historical figures. Indeed Stone uses many real-life Nixon speeches in his film, while Shakespeare’s “Now is the winter of our discontent,” and “Once more unto the breach dear friends,” were all fanciful concoctions of the writer’s imagination.
W. is a black comedy with so little bite that it seems Stone is getting a bit more tame as the years bear on. Maybe he believes the failures of the Bush Administration speak for themselves. The film plays hardball with Cheney and the Cabinet, but is almost reverent to Dubya himself. Yet for some, merely making a major Hollywood film about a sitting President is slander enough.
Stocked, pilloried, and stoned, a brilliant filmmaker has become the “patsy” of the conspiracy theory community. Was his prowess behind the camera hindered by the follies of his reason, or did they fuel the passion that makes his works so compelling? Whatever your opinions of his personal beliefs, Stone is certainly an unsung hero in the enduring conspiracy debate. The momentum of his controversial counter-myth was the driving force behind the declassification of many important documents previously unavailable to the public by the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The study of these documents has moved the conspiracy debate into a new, broader, and more enlightened era, beyond the red herrings and hearsay and into a legitimate historical discussion.
Stone has therefore done what any great political artist should do: keep the dialogue open.
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While Oliver Stone used some poetic license in the film JFK, it was not, as the press tried to assert and you repeat, a “mix of fact and fiction” or “blurring the lines of history and conjecture”. Stone accurately and meticulously portrayed New Orleans’ District Attorney Jim Garrisons 1968 case for conspiracy against Clay Shaw, who was acquitted but hardly innocent. Garrison was actively opposed and blocked by the CIA, the FBI and other elements of the government and media in making his case, denied access to records and to witnesses, and pilloried in the press for his courageous stand. Both Garrison and Stone have been borne out in their analysis by the release of over 6.5 million pages of classified records from the Warren Commission and House Select Committee on Assassinations investigations as well as other agencies here and abroad. That process continues to release records until 2017 when all postponements end. At least two books, Destiny Betrayed by Jim DiEugenio and Let Justice Fall by William Davey have gathered the new evidence on Shaw and other aspects of Garrison’s claims that prove him right. The release of State Department files on Southeast Asia in the 1990s confirmed the work of Peter Dale Scott and other critics regarding JFK’s clear intent to withdraw from Vietnam in 1964, another theme in Stone’s film. Garrison was assisted by many of the early critics and researchers in his case, including Mae Brussell, Maggie Fields, Lillian Castellano. A government orchestrated campaign against his character and case turned some critics against him at the time, sadly. His office was bugged and penetrated to compromise his prosecution and conclusions. Joan Mellon’s recent books on Garrison go deeper into the new files and what they tell us about his case. History has absolved Garrison, and by extension Oliver Stone. While Garrison never went to Washington to meet “Mr. X” (a character based on Fletcher Prouty), everything he is told was in correspondence to Garrison from Prouty at the time. This is dramatization but not distortion. I suggest you find a copy of JFK: The Book of the Film, which has the entire script along with exhaustive footnotes showing that almost every line was based on a documented statement by the people portrayed. When the media said Stone mixed “fact with fiction” my response was that unlike most Hollywood films which are propaganda fictions especially regarding key historical events, Stone had the audacity to make a film about the fact with very little fiction, portraying real historical events as they happened and their implications. All the best evidence points to a military coup d’etat by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on November 23 and the implementation of Operation Northwoods, a plan proposed by the Joint Chiefs that was rejected by Kennedy to create a traumatic incident that could plausibly be blamed on Fidel Castro to get public support for a military invasion of Cuba. Army troops were loaded onto transport planes on November 22, 1963 in anticipation of the invasion, and Navy Seals were sent offshore awaiting orders to assassinate Castro. Oswald had been “doubled” in Mexico City weeks before trying to get a pass into Cuba through the Soviet and Cuban embassies. It was only Oswald, who realized he was being set up as the patsy in a crime he tried to report on and prevent, and who then acted to prevent being killed during his arrest, who presented the problem of a talking head instead of a dead Red, who stopped the plan from being implemented. In his excellent analysis in History Will Not Absolve Us, Martin Schotz reprints Castro’s statement three days after the assassination of JFK making clear that he understood he was being set up to take the blame by US intelligence agencies. History will eventually absolve Garrison, the critics and Oliver Stone, who recently gave a copy of Jim Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable to Bill Maher on his show, recommending it, as do I for anyone seriously interested in ending their agnosticism or doubt about who killed JFK and why.
Hey John,
I do indeed have a well-worn copy of the JFK documented screenplay, which has a place of honor in my collection of assassination books and films—the “Presidential Library” as I like to call it. The structure and substance of that volume is a testament to to Oliver Stone’s daring as an artist, and integrity as a creative force. Did you get a chance to pick up the wonderful new DVD box set? My girlfriend was indulgent enough to buy it for me for my birthday, and I found all the additional literature and photographs to be quite compelling, though the “Emerald Kings” documentary seemed like a tacked-on afterthought. Eventually I plan on expanding this segment of the site from a discussion of Stone’s films to a broader discussion of all the films related to the assassination—from chilling prophecies of the assassination like The Manchurian Candidate, to hard hitting responses to it such as JFK and Executive Action.
I have great respect for Jim DiEugenio’s work, along with Bill Davey’s. They have done a great service in countering all the anti-Garrison slander which the mainstream media has been slinging for over forty years. I believe neither Oliver Stone nor Jim Garrison need the absolution you mention. Whatever flaws their myriad critics have identified in their work, the integrity of their mission can never be discredited. As DiEugenio points out, Garrison could have become Governor of Louisiana, or a powerful banker with the snap of a finger, but his dedication to finding the truth was paramount. The Helms admission that Clay Shaw did indeed have connections to the CIA demonstrates that there was more to Shaw than he was willing to let on. He may have even known Oswald, as we now know Dave Ferrie clearly did, but that does not necessarily put Kennedy’s blood on Shaw’s hands. The Russo testimony is intriguing, but I remain characteristically agnostic concerning its validity.
Mr. DiEugenio visited my page the other day, and like yourself, challenged my agnostic stance. I acknowledge that my position is unconventional, but because the essential truth of the assassination was either buried with Oswald or long ago covered up by whatever conspirators are complicit in the assassination, I believe an open-minded agnosticism is the only logical position I can maintain. I assure you my stance is borne neither from cynicism nor indifference, but from a willingness to hear the opinions of all reputable parties, yourself included. To close myself off from all possibilities would be disservice to my own inquisitiveness. I hope to one day be convinced of who is truly responsible for the death of President Kennedy, but until then I must maintain an open mind. I found the thesis and research of Jim Douglass to be rather intriguing, but I still maintain that the answer to the mystery of the JFK assassination is yet to be uncovered.
Thanks again for taking the time to visit my site and lending your expertise. Please encourage your friends and colleagues to do the same. All opinions are welcome here at Assassination Agnostic!
Respectfully Yours,
Lee Sanger Goldin
Lee,
” THEY ” killed JFK and ” THEY ” are still among us!
Jim Feemster
The problem is the people loves fiction more than the truth. We’d rather need documentaries than Hollywood movies about what really had happened and how conspirators really conspire. Nice tries of Oliver Stone, who at least does not fake like other Hollywood artists, but he is still Hollywood and Hollywood pastes the truth and keeps the people in a world of illusions. The same illusions Platon drew in his cave analogy.