Reclaiming History (303 page)

Though Stone’s audience accepted
J
FK
, the establishment media for the most part excoriated it. The movie created such a furor that full-blown, critical reviews came out
before
the movie was even in the theaters. That decent rascal Harold Weisberg, the dean of all assassination researchers, somehow got a pirated copy of the first draft (conspiracy theorist David Lifton is convinced Weisberg got the copy from his friend Robert Groden, who was on Stone’s payroll) of the script and furnished it to George Lardner, the national security writer for the
Washington Post
who covered the Shaw trial. When Lardner learned that the movie was going to “closely follow” Garrison’s investigation and book, he wrote in the
Post
, “What that means is that Oliver Stone is chasing fiction. Garrison’s investigation was a fraud.”
³²
Looking at the script, Lardner observed that there wasn’t space “to list all the errors and absurdities” in the film. Syndicated columnist George Will said, “Stone is forty-five going on eight. In his three hour lie, Stone falsifies so much he may be an intellectual sociopath.”
³³
Nicholas Lemann wrote in
GQ
, “I know life is supposed to be full of surprises, but…I never thought I’d see someone make an all-out effort to rehabilitate Jim Garrison…There are enough good journalists around today who covered Garrison back in his heyday to guarantee that Stone will be called on this…Garrison was a pernicious figure, an abuser of government power and the public trust.”
³⁴
Dan Rather, on
CBS Evening News
, rhetorically lamented, “What happens when Hollywood mixes facts, half-baked theories, and sheer fiction into a big budget film and then tries to sell it as, quote, ‘truth’ and ‘history’?” The
Wall Street
J
ournal
: “What Mr. Stone is basically selling is political grotesquery itself. Thus, former New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison…becomes a relentless truth seeker. We have to say we admire Mr. Stone’s brass.”
Newsweek
magazine called Stone’s movie, “twisted history.”
³⁵

Even some former allies of Garrison’s weren’t kind to Stone. In the
Atlantic
, Edward Jay Epstein, a Garrison foot soldier who became very disillusioned with him, wrote that the movie was a “journey from fact to fantasy,” with Garrison, to prove his point, “deliberately falsifying reality and depicting events that never happened.” The caption of the article describes the movie as “a distortion that…threatens to become the story we accept.”
³⁶
Even the inimitable Mark Lane, while saluting Stone for putting the issue of a conspiracy before the public, commented that “it was bad that he did so by falsifying the record.”
³⁷
“It would have been better had he stuck to the facts.”
³⁸

Though I am never elliptical and always state the obvious (since so often in life things are only obvious once they are stated), the point I am about to make may seem so obvious it doesn’t have to be stated. But I’m going to state it anyway. The problem with Stone is not, really, that he egregiously fictionalized the Kennedy assassination. It’s that he tried to convince everyone he was telling the truth. I believe that for the most part writers and filmmakers have an obligation to never tamper with the important facts of historical events. But if they do, they unquestionably (it’s not arguable) have the obligation to let their audience know this. Stone didn’t, and this is the only reason why I believe he deserves all the scalding invective he has received in his attempt to rewrite history. Don DeLillo decided to fictionalize the Kennedy assassination like Stone. But unlike Stone, he had the common decency to acknowledge that his apparently fine book (I don’t read fiction),
Libra
, was fiction, and it appeared on best-seller fiction lists. That’s why there are two booklists, fiction and nonfiction. Although a certain amount of dramatic license in a film or book about a historical event can be excused for narrative purposes, there is never any justification for distorting the essence of what happened. Stone, minute after minute in
J
FK
, dressed up his fiction (frequently in grainy black-and-white simulated scenes shot on 8-or 16-millimeter film to project a sense of authenticity)
*
as historical fact, virtually the only significant accuracies in his film being actual excerpts of the Zapruder film (for which Stone reportedly paid the Zapruder family $40,000 to license) and other archival footage that he cannily and seamlessly interspersed—without the audience being able to tell which was real and which was not—with the reenactment footage.
³⁹

When Stone was met with an unexpected avalanche of media criticism for the distortions and inventions in his movie around the time of its release, some of which he was forced to acknowledge, he retreated by saying that the Warren Commission was a myth and
J
FK
was a “counter-myth,”
⁴⁰
but, obviously, he said this just to get him past the moment.

To be fair, in his interviews Stone has never
expressly
said that what is depicted in
J
FK
is unquestionably the truth (although he has said exactly that in every other way), and when he said in a December 23, 1991,
Time
interview that he wanted his audience to “
consider the possibility
that there was a coup d’etat that removed President Kennedy,”
⁴¹
one could, if not vigilant, be seduced into thinking that Stone, in his movie, was just tossing out an alternative scenario of the assassination for his audience’s consideration. But to do so would be to completely ignore the movie itself as well as the overall thrust of Stone’s remarks and interviews. When he says, “There is a saying: ‘A lie is like a snowball—the longer it is rolled, the larger it is.’ The Warren Commission…is that lie,” and therefore not entitled to be believed, and that his movie, on the other hand, is “a seamless jig-saw puzzle that will allow the audience for the first time,
to understand what happened and why
,” and that he “had to take the assassination out of Dallas and the conspiracy out of New Orleans and bring it all back to Washington, where it
really
began,” and that “the assassination was America’s first coup d’etat, and it worked,”
⁴²
by definition he is not saying that he is merely offering an alternative view. He is saying his view is the correct view, the only view. You can’t tell one major lie about the assassination after another for three consecutive hours, and with full knowledge that, as Vincent Canby says, “anything shown in a movie tends to be taken as the truth,” and escape responsibility for your monstrous hoax by suggesting you are only presenting an alternative view for the audience’s consideration.

Did, indeed, Stone want his audience to believe his fiction was reality? About that there can be no dispute.
†
In addition to the aforementioned remarks he made, Stone told
Newsweek
, “I think people are more on my side than the government’s. If they don’t believe me this go-round, they’ll believe me when another shocking thing happens.”
⁴³
Stone lamented to
USA Today
that “instead of [the media] spending so much energy saying ‘Stone’s interpretation of history is fiction,’
which it is not
, why don’t they devote the same energy to asking why Kennedy was killed?”
⁴⁴
He told the
Dallas Morning News
before the shooting of the film commenced in Dallas that he was a “cinematic historian,” his movie would be “a history lesson,” and he was confident he would be remembered as “a good historian as well as a good dramatist.”
⁴⁵
In fact, in newspaper advertisements for the film throughout the country were these words in bold letters: “The Truth Is the Most Important Value We Have.” As Edward Epstein wrote in the
Atlantic
, “From the moment [
J
FK
] was released, its Director, Oliver Stone, so passionately defended its factual accuracy that he became, for all practical purposes, the new Garrison.”
⁴⁶
Unbelievably, Stone told
Time
magazine, “I think this movie, hopefully, if it’s accepted by the public, will at least move people away from the Warren Commission.”
⁴⁷
He wanted his movie, he wrote with towering arrogance in the January 1992 edition of
Premiere
, to “replace the Warren Commission Report.”
⁴⁸
Can you imagine that? A Hollywood producer wants his movie to
replace
the official and most comprehensive investigation of a crime in history. It’s a measure of Stone’s sense of self that such a thought, even if a vagrant one, would even enter his head. Arrogance thought it already had a bad name. That was before it met Oliver Stone. Taking his movie very, very seriously, Stone frequently praised his twelve researchers for all the arduous work they had done. He told Richard Bernstein of the
New York Times
that “every point, every argument, every detail in the movie…has been researched, can be documented, and is justified.”
⁴⁹
(Stone hardly ever uses the word
speculate
in the film, and when he does, it is invariably lost and forgotten by the context, the torrent of “factual” words that follow, and most of all by the acting out of the thought on screen by the evil conspirators.)

Stone has compared his movie to the film
Rashômon
, the 1950 Japanese classic in which the same event is seen from several points of view as opposed to an unequivocal defense of any particular theory. Nonsense.
J
FK
has one theme and one theme only that runs throughout: that Kennedy’s murder was the result of a massive conspiracy emanating from the highest corridors of power in America, that all we stand for as a nation is being attacked and taken over by these sinister forces, and that his fearless prosecutor, and inferentially, Stone, who has the moral courage to tell his story, are the only ones manning the ramparts—the last angry and courageous men. Shedding all pretenses and
Rashômon
allusions, in his commentary to the book
Oliver Stone’s USA
, Stone writes that his movie is “about a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy.”
⁵⁰

Because Stone continuously misrepresented the facts throughout his film, is he therefore an unmitigated fraud? Yes and no. As crazy as all the nuts, rumors, and speculation are that Stone managed to shoehorn into his movie, I sense that he, like a great number of other people, honestly believes much of this nonsense.
*
But as we shall see, where we know that Stone is a fraud is in those critical situations in his movie where he flat-out invented scenes and characters to help him prove the point he was trying to make.

Even in the areas of the film that I sense Stone believes to be true, I cannot exonerate him of willful duplicity without thereby convicting him of reckless stupidity—reckless in that instead of balancing out his advisers with reputable anti-conspiracy scholars, or even respectable conspiracy theorists, he had to know he was relying almost exclusively on the extreme fanatical fringe of the conspiracy community. As indicated, Stone primarily based his movie on Jim Garrison’s
On the Trail of the Assassins
. But, as noted, this is a book whose author has been completely discredited and is even an embarrassment to the conspiracy community. The second book, per the screen credits, that Stone based his movie on is Jim Marrs’s
Crossfire
. But Marrs is a conspiracy theorist who has rarely met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like. In his only other book,
Alien Agenda
, Marrs tells us that we have “non-human visitors” among us, and that our government, with full knowledge of these aliens in our midst, has conspired, with a “wall of silence,” to “hide away the alien presence” and keep the truth from the American people.
⁵¹
Sound familiar? Garrison and Marrs also served as advisers to Stone on his movie.

These were Stone’s other principal advisers: Robert Groden, the photographic expert for the conspiracy community, served as the reenactment coordinator. As pointed out earlier in this book, few, if any, have less credibility than he. Among other things, he is the fellow who insists that the backyard photos Marina took of Oswald holding a Carcano rifle are fake, and that Oswald’s head was superimposed by the authorities on someone else’s body. Larry Howard was the late, gadfly cofounder of the JFK Assassination Research Center in Dallas that became a repository for assassination memorabilia and every kooky conspiracy book that had ever been written. Howard always use to boast that he had never read any book on the assassination himself, but faxed Stone that he and his people had “uncovered the real truth behind the assassination. JFK was murdered by the people who control the power base in the United States. In their minds he was a threat to national security and had to be eliminated.” That’s all that Stone had to hear, bringing Howard aboard with a payment of $80,000 to the latter’s research center.
⁵²
L. Fletcher Prouty, a former air force colonel who worked in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Operations (which provided support for covert operations), convinced Stone, without a shred of evidence to support him, that the military-industrial complex had Kennedy killed because Kennedy wanted to withdraw American troops from Vietnam and it wanted war. Unbelievably, Prouty even flirted with the possibility that McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security adviser and former Harvard dean and Ford Foundation president, was part of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy.
⁵³

Prouty (since deceased) was a right-wing zany who was a member of the Liberty Lobby, the middle-of-the-road, sensible group that supported neo-Nazi David Duke’s 1988 candidacy for president and embraces the notion that the Holocaust is really a Jewish hoax. He also served as a consultant to Lyndon LaRouche’s right-wing National Democratic Policy Committee “at a conference of which he provided a presentation comparing the U.S. Government’s prosecution of LaRouche (for conspiracy and mail fraud) to the prosecution of Socrates.”
⁵⁴
Prouty is clearly someone with both feet planted firmly in the air. But Prouty, who served as an editorial adviser on publications of the Church of Scientology, makes up for his perverse right-wing beliefs by apparently, per author Edward Epstein, having no personal credibility. Epstein interviewed Prouty for his book
Legend
, and said that the
Reader’s Digest
staff fact-checked Prouty and wouldn’t publish the part of
Legend
involving Prouty’s assertions because they found he had “falsified” so much of his military career. “He will say almost anything that someone wants to hear…He’s extremely accommodating,” Epstein said.
⁵⁵