JFK

 

by Oliver Stone

FLETCHER PROUTY is a man whose name will go down in history. Not as a respected Establishment figure, no. He will be erased from the present history books, his version of history suppressed, his credibility denied, his integrity scorned.

Yet in time he will endure. Young students in the twenty-first century (given the planet’s capacity to reform and revive itself before then) will come back to his writings in the alternative written press (small publishing houses, low-circulation magazines) and discover through Colonel Prouty no less than the “Secret History” of the United States, circa 1944 to the present. With this single volume, Colonel Prouty blows the lid right off our “Official History” and unforgivably, sadly, inexorably, for anyone who dares enter this cave of dread and shame, shines his torch forever onto the ugliest nest of vipers the civilized world has probably seen since the dreaded Mongol raiders of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

This is scary stuff. The MK Ultra of espionage books,
JFK
will anger you and make you sad. You will never view the world again in the same light. Behind everything you read or see from this point on will flicker forever your most paranoid and darkest fears of the subconscious motives beneath the killer ape that became man.

Was Stanley Kubrick right in his revelation of the warrior ape in
2001,
throwing the bones of the slain into the air, becoming the spaceship baby of tomorrow? Will we transmute our killer instincts to peace and the search for light? Or will we tread the path of war, not only between tribes, but between us and our environment?

My mother was French, my father American. I had the opportunity young in life to spend summers in France in the 1950s and never once heard anyone young or old ever allude to the massive French collaboration with the Nazis in World War II. In every aspect—even my mother’s tale—the truth was denied, ignored, and mostly forgotten. Of such is “history” made—until, of course, contrary events like the Klaus Barbie trial in Lyons, France, surface and tear and remind. Like my film
JFK.

Such was my experience in writing
Platoon
—out of a feeling that Vietnam was an Orwellian memory hole, to be forgotten, realities distorted by newsmen and official “historians,” official body counts, and the official lies that devastated the American character.

I experienced it again in the mid-1980s in Central America, talking to fresh-faced American troops in green uniforms with no memories of Vietnam, save for embarrassed stares, once again lining up to shoot Nicaraguans in the invasion of 1986 that never was. And again in Russia, in the early 1980s, on another screenplay, talking to youngsters with no knowledge whatever of Stalin’s crimes, and old people who denied their past out of fear.

Such is the memory of man—at best a tricky one, per Orwell. “Who controls the past controls the future.” There is about us a wall, alone, beyond which our conscious mind will not let our unconscious go. That margin, however, fades with the quotient and fashion of time because as time changes so do our mind-sets. The loss of fear allows the mind to drop its censors and think the unthinkable. Such a golden moment. We all know it. The exciting liberation of our own thought process. It is that access point to history which every filmmaker, poet, artist, seeks entry to. To collide with the forces of history—to merge with the backbeat of its onward push. Jack London, John Reed, Upton Sinclair, clashing with the stormy forces of early-twentieth-century history. Glorious cavaliers.

The key question of our time, as posed in Colonel Prouty’s book, comes from the fabled
Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace
by Leonard Lewin (based on a study commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in August 1963 to justify the big, planned changes in defense spending contemplated by Kennedy):

In illustrating this proposition, Colonel Prouty traces the divergent paths of early 1950s Vietnam—the Saigon Military Mission, Ed Lansdale, Lucien Conein, Tom Dooley, Wesley Fishel, and Archbishop Spellman. How Mao with his guerrilla-war ideology deeply influenced our “civic action” paramilitary concepts in Vietnam and Central America. How the helicopter and its econo-military needs drove us to Vietnam. How the TFX fighter battle between Boeing and General Dynamics split the Kennedy administration. He explains clearly for the first time the vast errors of South Vietnam–appointed President Ngo Dinh Diem—his failure with the Buddhists and his own army; the disastrous “hamlet” program that ruined the South Vietnamese peasant economy; the expelling of the Chinese mercantile society; the influence of Lansdale; the arrogance of America’s racist Third World attitudes that blinded us to the true vacuum we created by dividing and marginalizing a wholly artificial client state called South Vietnam in conflict with Vietnam’s post—World War II right to determine its own independence.