Reclaiming History (320 page)

But as preposterous and full of lies as Stone’s
JFK
was, surveys showed that the vast majority of the audience believed the movie, implicitly accepting it as the literal truth. The
Los Angeles Times
conducted a survey of theatergoers in Los Angeles and San Diego after they viewed the film. Some representative responses: “I think it should be required viewing for every person in America.” “In the past, I always felt that it would be a waste of taxpayers’ money—it’s over, leave the family alone. But I no longer feel that way. You see something like this and it makes you think anything is possible.” “Much of it was startling information I just hadn’t known before. To hear that maybe the Dallas Police were involved, the Mafia, the FBI, the CIA…Did the Government think we just wouldn’t care what was happening and that they, above all, were the higher power? I thought, more than anything, the movie was very disturbing.” “It’s certainly changed my opinion. I assumed the Warren Commission was accurate. You come away from a film like this feeling very ignorant, because you assume you knew everything there was from reading all the news accounts, and it turns out you really knew very little.”

The
Times
said that the foregoing reactions “were repeated in theaters across the country during the weekend” of the film’s release. “Only a few questioned its conclusions.” At AMC’s large Century 14 Theater in Century City (Los Angeles), reporter Deborah Starr Seibel said that “despite the film’s startling premise that some of our highest government officials had decided to eliminate their own Commander-In-Chief, not one person said they were shocked by the conspiracy theory set forth in
JFK
by co-writer and director Oliver Stone.”
²⁸⁸

New York Newsday
arranged for a large group of college students to see
JFK
and then be interviewed. Reporter John Hane wrote that they agreed the government and military “were involved in a massive cover-up.” The only student quoted who had any reservations said, “I believe that there were definitely…shots coming from the grassy knoll. But [Oliver Stone] went a bit overboard. He didn’t have the proof to incriminate everybody up to LBJ. The only proof Stone gives us is some guy coming out of the Lincoln Memorial and spilling the beans.” So even this student bought Stone’s shots from the grassy knoll (and hence, a conspiracy) and accepted Stone’s X as really existing and meeting with Garrison. This viewer merely thought that X wasn’t enough to implicate everybody.

Some representative remarks from the other students: “I knew nothing about this. I was dumbfounded by the movie. It was mind-blowing.” “I was just so taken by this movie. I’m sick of this government. Like, we elect these people?” “Why should I have to wait until 2039 to find out the truth? Why can’t something be done?” “There were too many people involved in the assassination and so they’ll continue to teach it in a way that doesn’t offend. It’s like how they teach the history of the Third Reich to students in Germany.” “I believe what I saw. I totally believe it.” “I always thought Oswald shot him. But now I’m convinced it was a plot.” “If Oswald was a patsy, why not Hinckley [referring to John Hinckley Jr., the man who shot President Reagan]?”
²⁸⁹

Reporter Robert O’Harrow Jr. wrote in the
Washington Post
, “In some two dozen interviews at three sets of theaters [in the Washington, D.C. area] yesterday and on New Year’s Eve, people coming out of the movie made it clear they believe the film’s elaborate theories.”
²⁹⁰
And so on around the country. As the
New York Times
’s Tom Wicker said, the danger of
JFK
is that for those “too young to remember November 22, 1963,
JFK
is all too likely to be taken as the final, unquestioned explanation.”
²⁹¹
David Ansen at
Newsweek
went further, saying that “an entire generation of filmgoers is hereafter going to look at these events through Stone’s prism.”
²⁹²

Although, as previously indicated, the mainstream media, for the most part, excoriated Stone’s film, how did Hollywood itself treat this abomination? It thought it was just fine. Stone won the 1991 Golden Globe Award for Best Director, and the film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. Writing a historical-drama review in which he gave
JFK
four stars out of a four-star rating, film critic Roger Ebert gushed that the movie was “a masterpiece…If Garrison’s investigation was so pitiful…then where are the better investigations by Stone’s attackers?…It’s impossible to believe the Warren Report because the physical evidence makes its key conclusion impossible: one man with one rifle could not physically have caused what happened on November 22, 1963, in Dallas.”
²⁹³
If you say so, Roger.

Since film critics aren’t necessarily historians, perhaps Ebert’s review shouldn’t be considered shocking. But what about Marcus Raskin, writing in the
American Historical Review
, the prestigious publication of the American Historical Association, an organization founded in 1884 and chartered by Congress in 1889? The
Review
is so brainy and upper crust it doesn’t even have advertisements. Raskin wrote in an issue with erudite companion articles (such as those dealing with the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization, three middle-class women’s organizations in Boston and their evolution from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, and recent rethinking of intellectual history) that “the film JFK…has had an extraordinary effect on the public consciousness.” (I agree so far. Indeed, as stated earlier, that’s the reason for this very long section on the movie in this book; absent this effect, the film would not be entitled to more than one sentence or two.) But then Raskin goes on to say that “contrary to what some would like to believe, [
JFK
] is surprisingly accurate. On the complex question of the Kennedy Assassination itself, the film holds its own against the Warren Commission.”
²⁹⁴

There are few groups, if any, in America who are more elitist than the Eastern literati—that is, except in the presence of Hollywood royalty, where many are as obsequious before Hollywood’s luminaries as the rest of America. This was never more clearly on display than at a town hall debate on
JFK
in New York City on the evening of March 3, 1992, sponsored by the Nation Institute and the Center for American Culture Studies at Columbia University. The moderator was Victor Navasky, the distinguished, longtime editor of the
Nation
(who, to his credit, did not exalt Stone), and among the participants were Stone and authors Norman Mailer, Nora Ephron, and Edward Epstein. Stone gave no inch or compliments to the other three authors, but they (even Epstein, the only one with the temerity to offer a mild criticism of
JFK
in Stone’s presence, pointing out there
is
a difference between fiction and nonfiction, and
JFK
“mixed” the two) couldn’t help weaving into their comments a fawning praise for Stone and his film. The sellout audience of fifteen hundred like-minded people gave Stone a thunderous applause when he was introduced and by far the biggest hand after his remarks, whistles and all. Epstein’s tepid attack drew little support, whereas Stone’s rebuttal to it was met with very robust applause.

But perhaps the highlight of the evening was when Ms. Ephron, defending Stone against attacks by his critics, said that when the press criticizes directors for “trivial inaccuracies” in their films about historical events, such as “breakfast that was actually dinner, a silver fork that was actually stainless steel,…this is all nonsense…There are people, however, who say that maybe there’s a special obligation in this area. That, for instance, young people will see
JFK
and think the Joint Chiefs of Staff killed President Kennedy.
But I don’t know why they’re going to think this way more than I do
.” What?!! When no one in the audience caught what she had obviously intended to be a serious laugh line—that she also believed the Joint Chiefs of Staff had murdered Kennedy—she paused, waiting for the audience to finally get it before she continued. And when they did and she got the laugh she wanted, she went on to say, “Eventually, they’ll grow up and figure it out for themselves. And if they don’t, it’s not the filmmaker’s responsibility.” I thought Ms. Ephron, an otherwise gifted intellectual, had already said quite enough, but she had more to say. She added, “The real danger is not that we’ll have an inaccurate movie,
which never hurt anyone
. The real danger is that the wholesale, knee-jerk objection” to these movies “might result in something far worse, which is a chilling effect on works of art.” But in view of the reality that people believe and are influenced by what they see on the screen, it’s too obvious to state that bad art presented as history can indeed do damage. Consider the hypothetical example of a major, important film that denies the existence of the Holocaust.

One of the people on the panel of questioners at the town hall “debate” that night, Max Holland, said it well: “I cannot accept that facts don’t matter and that all facts are equally important. And when a filmmaker invents or ignores facts to support a thesis, he crosses the line.”
²⁹⁵

It’s not enough that Oliver Stone’s movie poisoned the minds of millions of Americans about the assassination. Warner Bros., which produced the film, most likely did not know what an enormous falsehood the movie was,
*
and therefore unwittingly compounded the damage the movie had done by funding a 1991 study guide to the movie for American high school students that was prepared by Learning Enrichment Inc. of New York City. Appallingly, the study guides were sent to thirteen thousand teachers throughout the land to be used in their social studies and history classes.

The guide contains a synopsis of
JFK
(which the teachers are encouraged to have their students see), including a denigration of the Warren Commission’s “magic bullet” by a ridiculous drawing that has the bullet making a right turn in midair, an allegation that four days after the assassination, NSAM 263, calling for the withdrawal of 1,000 troops from Vietnam, was canceled, and so on. “You might want to tell students,” the study guide urges teachers, “about the intensive research Oliver Stone undertook before making the film.” The teachers are told that the guide was assembled to help them “provide both background and context for student viewing [of the film] and discussion.” The guide says, “After viewing
JFK
…invite students to begin the discussion by saying whatever comes to mind. What did they feel while viewing the movie? What questions did it raise?”

The cover of the guide includes this quote from Stone: “I hope they [the viewers of his movie] become more aware of how politics are played out
and how our kings are killed
.” The message in Stone’s movie and the study guide is that when the nation’s power structure doesn’t like the policies of an American president, it simply murders him. What a poisonous thought to put into the minds of our nation’s youth about the country they live in.

I could go on condemning the relentless perversion of reality known as
JFK
. But enough. The reason, as indicated, for all the time I have already devoted to the subject is, as the
Chicago Tribune
noted, because of “the danger that Stone’s film and the pseudo-history it so effectively portrays” will end up being the “popularly accepted version. After all, what can scholarship avail against Kevin Costner, Sissy Spacek (Garrison’s wife in the movie), Donald Sutherland, et al., on the big screen with Dolby stereo?”

I believe that history is sacred and should not knowingly be tampered with. In imposing a narrative on a historical event, obviously a certain amount of dramatic license and embellishment is unavoidable, but even this device should be used with great caution and economy. Outright fabrications of important matters that necessarily cause viewers or readers to reach a different conclusion is a cultural crime. We can only ensure the past’s future if we respect its truths.

Someone once described history as the thinnest thread of what’s remembered, stretching across an ocean of what’s been forgotten. But the history of the assassination has not been forgotten by Oliver Stone. Except for those instances where ignorance is his only defense, it’s been deliberately ignored or invented. That’s fine. But he had a moral, if not a legal obligation, to tell his audience what he was up to. Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., writing in the
Wall Street Journal
, has a more charitable view of Stone and a less menacing view of
JFK
than I. He writes that Stone “is an artist, and artists are often hopelessly loyal to their fantasies, and their fantasies often hopelessly abuse the truth. History will survive.”
²⁹⁶
The eminent historian is most assuredly correct if we define history in the narrow sense of being an exact synonym for the facts—what actually happened. Facts don’t and can’t change. Not even God can change the past. However, if we define history in the broader sense of that which succeeding generations believe and accept as the truth, then Stone, more than any other
single
American, is responsible for 75 percent of Americans currently believing that a dark and wide-ranging conspiracy involving the highest reaches of our government was responsible for the death of President Kennedy, which is only pseudo-history.

Indeed, it is in this latter sense of
perceived
history that Stone himself defines history. On the set of
JFK
, he said, “I’m
shaping
history, to a degree.”
²⁹⁷
And in his introduction to his friend Fletcher Prouty’s book, Stone, alluding to the fact that the victor writes the history of an event, asks, “Who owns reality? Who owns our history? He who makes it up so that most everyone believes it. That person wins.” For once, I agree with Oliver Stone. That is, unless the fabricator is exposed, as I trust I have done in this book.