JFK (66 page)

To these more or less well organized groupings, we must add the new and rapidly growing hordes of assassination investigators who encountered reality and encouragement in the film and who have become interested in its challenging message. For them Stone’s film presented a comprehensive coverage of the assassination and all of its ramifications, public and private, that provided everyone with material they may not have heard before.

And, then there are the pure professionals. Many of the more prominent of this group viciously attacked Oliver Stone and his movie. Now why would they, of all people, so violently denigrate the film that supported the fact of the conspiracy? Don’t they see the truth? Have they made public their own personal beliefs? Quite frankly, I doubt it. These hard-liners comprise the most ardent sector of the assassination buff melange because they are professional writers and journalists who work for some of the most important media outlets in the country.

One of them, Leslie Gelb, is the man Robert McNamara placed in charge of the task force that produced the “Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam,” aka the Pentagon Papers. His task force is the one that came up with the following “historical fact”:

22 Nov 1963

Gelb had all but concealed Kennedy’s NSAM #263 in the Pentagon Papers, by dividing it into meaningless sections, and continued his assault on that Kennedy policy as he berated Stone for his film.

Another of these prominent writers was Tom Wicker of the
New York
Times
. He also attacked Stone’s use of Kennedy’s Vietnam policy statement, NSAM #263, with the comment, “I know of no reputable historian who has documented Kennedy’s intentions.” NSAM #263 is the official and complete documentation of Kennedy’s intentions. It was derived from a series of White House conferences and from the McNamara-Taylor Vietnam Trip Report, and it stated the views of the President and of his closest advisers as is made clear in the U.S. government publication
Foreign Relations of the United States
,
1961
-
1963
, vol. IV, “Vietnam: August—December 1963.” That source is reliable history. Wicker’s December 22, 1991,
Times
article was a lengthy and unnecessarily demeaning diatribe against Stone and his movie.

So many of these professional writers attacked the film, even well before it was on the screens of the nation, that Oliver Stone took the unusual step of publishing
The Book of the Film
in 1992. In this important work, Stone does what few others have done. He presents the full
JFK
debate by publishing the demeaning articles of his detractors and the responses of his supporters side by side in the text. This evenhanded approach is rare in such public debates.

For the record, these reactions and commentaries came from the following people (number of articles in parentheses):

This latter group, among them Robert Sam Anson, Leslie Gelb, George Lardner, Anthony Lewis, William Manchester, Arthur Schlesinger, and Tom Wicker came out of nowhere to attack Oliver Stone, Jim Garrison and myself for what the movie offered the public: much of their work was done before the film had been produced and shown to the public. This is a rare form of movie review and was almost universally adversarial, even though, in most cases, they, the writers, were in error and not the film itself. What is it that bonds these major writers together? The truth?

What is most interesting about this latter group of professional writers, most of whom work for major media bosses, is that they all wrote negatively about the film and all wrote in support of the anticonspiracy, lone-gunman, Warren Commission theory. They are a highly motived clan. . . . for money.

Here is where this remarkable film of Stone’s hits the hardest among all of these “experts.” It strengthens the arguments of those who believe that there was a massive conspiracy, and it does battle, as did David versus Goliath, against the power of the throne. To all of this, the film—for both sides—enlivened the game and created new flocks of believers.

One of the film’s major achievements was that it aroused the United States Congress to “mandate a comprehensive review of all federal government records related to the assassination of President John F Kennedy, including the records of the Warren Commission, the House Assassinations Committee, the Church Committee, and all Executive branch agencies, including the C.I.A. and the F.B.I.” This was well intentioned; but in reality it is a sham. The answers to the source of the decision to murder John F. Kennedy are not in government files.

This action alone aroused the profession of the assassination buff to its highest level, as evidenced by the activities of the Coalition On Political Assassinations and others like it.

These achievements serve to make the film exceptional; but this was not the end. It was the goal of Oliver Stone and of those of us who worked with him that the truth about the murder of John F. Kennedy be brought to as many viewers as possible, not only in the United States of America but also around the world. This has been done, and the impact upon the ordinary layman who has not made a special study of this subject has, in many instances, been far greater, proportionately, than upon the professionals.

As the reader will have noted, this has been a primary objective of this autobiographical book of mine. This is one reason why Stone used parts of it in his script.

I have tried to put the Kennedy assassination in proper prospective with a chronological time-line as a guiding star. I recall well the first acts of the Cold War that began in 1944, even before the end of the hot war known as World War II. I have underscored the beginning of the warfare in Indochina that actually began on the same day as the surrender of the Japanese on September 2, 1945, and of the Korean War that the “Big Four” at the Teheran Conference so amply provided for in November 1943.

With this time-line, it became imperative that I fit the assassination of the President into the most crucial of periods: the twenty years from 1955 to 1975 that the military-industrial complex had set for the superescalation of the warfare in Vietnam. It was then, in late 1963, that President Kennedy, in full coordination with his closest team of top-level advisers in the White House and in the Pentagon, signed his National Security Action Memorandum #263 of October 11, 1963. This directive, among many other things, ordered that 1,000 U.S military personnel be brought home by the end of 1963, and that the bulk of U.S. personnel be withdrawn by the end of 1965. NSAM #263 and its accompanying policy became the “straw that broke the camel’s back.” That carefully crafted and determined policy in the impending climate of Kennedy’s assured reelection in 1964 led directly to the consensual decision at the highest levels that the President must be killed and that control of the U.S. government must be put in other hands. In other words, Kennedy’s Vietnam policy announcements made a coup d’état necessary.

This was the burden of the Stone film. The inclusion of this little-known NSAM #263 in the film became the principal point of attack of the big guns that were leveled at Stone, Garrison, and myself. It really is amazing that the most vitriolic attacks were those that attempted to inform the public that there was no such directive. The furor over that one item, NSAM #263, was evidence that Stone had hit his target. This alone uncovered the “Why?” of the assassination.

In the film’s closing scenes between “Garrison” and “Man X,” who was a representation of this author, one could feel the tension build in every audience in every theater. When “Man X” says “Why? Why was Kennedy killed? Who benefited? Who has the power to cover it up?” the audience is forced to look at the real cause of the assassination and not at some prearranged fabrication of that terrible event. Stone had succeeded in carrying the theme from the comprehensive, widespread scope of the early and disorganized misapprehensions of the assassination lore, as typified by the Warren Commission’s report, through the specific tensions of the Garrison trial in New Orleans to the summit of activity in Washington, and then attacked the real issue, “Why was John F. Kennedy killed?”

It was altogether fitting, it was purely masterful, that Stone had those last scenes filmed on the mall in Washington, D.C., between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument with the rising dome of the Capitol building looming over Costner (Garrison) and Sutherland (Prouty) in the distance. Only a few steps farther down the road from there, the Kennedy Center itself is overlooked by the old faded yellow brick building that was CIA headquarters and the long-time office of Director of Central Intelligence Allen W. Dulles until Kennedy fired him. The setting itself was classic. This scene tells its own story. This is the heart of the District of Columbia. It is the place where so much of that fatal decision, for the U.S. government and for all of us, was made by the cabal.

And with those words about the film and its terrific impact on all assassination buffs of all kinds and all beliefs, I wish to close with a few words that have become more meaningful with the passage of the decades since November 22, 1963. During my nine years in the Pentagon, I can recall no month that was more hectic, more confused and more explosive than January 1961, the last month of the eight-year Eisenhower administration and the month during which Kennedy was inaugurated. There was something about that period that bore some special message of its own—for the future. What was happening, especially there in the Pentagon, was not simply the routine changing of the guard. That month carried its own message, a premonition of sinister things to follow.

The closely knit Eisenhower team was so confident that Nixon would be elected that they had arranged such things as the annual budget, procurement schedules and other long-range objectives, including the Vietnam War, the anti-Castro activities, and the space program, for the Nixon administration to carry out. These plans included big-ticket items such as the Air Force’s scheduled procurement of the new TFX swingwing fighter aircraft at $6.5 billion, among others. The Kennedy election, assuring a drastic change in key positions up and down the line, put all of those plans in jeopardy. No one stood more to lose than our friends in the highly dedicated industrial sector of the nation, particularly in the military-industrial group.

Then, on January 17, 1961, President Eisenhower delivered his Farewell Address to the American public. Oliver Stone chose to open his film
JFK
with a few selected lines from that memorable speech:

Two days after Eisenhower’s address, I walked into the office of Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates at the close of the business day, as had been my custom for months, prepared to give him a few brief words on what was taking place in the business of “providing the military support of the clandestine operations of the CIA”—more specifically, an update on the status of the Cuban Exile operations—later to be known as the Bay of Pigs operation. On that late afternoon, a blizzard was raging outside. From the Pentagon we could barely see the buildings of Washington across the Potomac. And, on that late hour, as I approached Mr. Gates’s office, I saw that the hallway, the anteroom, and his office were jammed with well-wishers. This was to be his last day as secretary of defense. As I look back at those nine years, I have always believed that he was the best and most qualified man ever to hold that office. As Mr. Gates was in no position for a briefing at that curtain-lowering time, his secretary ushered me into the office of Deputy Secretary of Defense James Douglas, another able gentleman. He greeted me with his characteristic smile, strolled across his office, and leaned against the window sill. As I looked over his shoulder, I saw nothing but raging snow. I said, “Mr. Douglas, I have briefed you from time to time over the past six years. I regret that this will be our last briefing.” Then I went on to give him a report on the status of the Cuban Exile program that the Eisenhower administration had started, as a formal C.I.A. activity, back in March 1960.

When I finished the brief report, I asked an essential question, “Each time I have come in here, or into Mr. Gates’s office, I have known that you gentlemen were well aware of the subject of these briefings over the years, and of their background; but tomorrow, when I come in here, there will be some new men to be briefed. Can you tell me, do I have to go back to B.C. or early A.D. with that briefing, or may I assume that they have been informed of the subjects I shall be covering?”