Reclaiming History (388 page)

^*
Surely, one of the catalysts for Johnson’s decision was the run for the Democratic nomination for president by Minnesota senator Eugene J. McCarthy. Although McCarthy’s candidacy was at first thought to be quixotic, he inspired thousands of young people throughout the country with his strong anti–Vietnam War position and rhetoric, and they mobilized their support for him in the 1968 New Hampshire primary, “hordes of them” traveling there to knock on doors, stuff envelopes, and do whatever they could to help his cause. At the time, it was assumed that Johnson would seek reelection, though he had not formally declared and was not on the primary ballot. Alarmed by the increasingly popular campaign of McCarthy, New Hampshire Democratic leaders organized a major write-in campaign for Johnson and they were confident of victory. Johnson won, but not handily, getting 49 percent of the vote to McCarthy’s 42 percent, a result that shocked the political world. The president’s vulnerability suddenly becoming evident, just four days later Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who had decided earlier not to run, announced his candidacy. As with McCarthy, he tethered it to the antiwar movement. Just two weeks later, Johnson announced he would not seek reelection. (Art Pine, “Eugene McCarthy; Candidacy Inspired Antiwar Movement,”
Los Angeles Times
, December 11, 2005, pp.A1, A34)

^*
But I understand. Stone simply didn’t have room in his three-hour-and-eight-minute film for the additional seventeen words italicized above. Just like Ken Starr, in his September 9, 1998, report to Congress on the President Clinton–Monica Lewinsky scandal, couldn’t find the space in his 452-page, 119,000-word report—one that was overflowing with one sexually explicit reference after another, many of which Starr found the space to repeat—to include these seventeen words of Ms. Lewinsky’s testimony before a federal grand jury: “The president never asked me to lie, and no one promised me a job for my silence,” words that severely undercut Starr’s obstruction-of-justice charge against Clinton. But again, I understand. There was a space problem. But I wonder if Starr would have managed to find room in his extensive report if Lewinsky had testified, “The president asked me to lie, and I was promised a job for my silence.”

^*
On the issue of what Kennedy would have done, if any politician at the time was more aware of the consequences of inaction when action was called for it was Kennedy. Indeed, in his senior year at Harvard, he wrote a thesis on the British and French appeasement of Hitler at Munich that was so well received by the faculty it enabled him to graduate cum laude even though he had previously been a mediocre student. He decided to expand the thesis into a book,
Why England Slept
, that became a best seller in the summer of 1940. So Kennedy could have been expected to have all tentacles out assessing the danger to America, if it existed, of withdrawing from Vietnam.

†Someone who did know Kennedy fairly well, and whose job included studying Kennedy closely, was Sander Vanocur, the White House correspondent for NBC during the Kennedy administration. Vanocur said Kennedy “was, by temperament…a man governed at all times by a sense of restraint and proportion.” (Vanocur, “Kennedy’s Voyage of Discovery,” p.42)

‡ The late army colonel David H. Hackworth, who received seventy-eight combat awards during the Korean and Vietnam wars and was often referred to during his lifetime as “America’s most decorated living solider,” said that “most combat vets pick their fights carefully. They look at their scars, remember the madness, and are always mindful of the fallout” (
Los Angeles Times
, May 6, 2005, p.B12).

^*
Although as early as 1950, the Soviet Union and Communist China recognized Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary and Communist-controlled “Democratic Republic of Vietnam” as the sovereign government of Vietnam (Butwell,
Southeast Asia
, pp.23, 28), this doesn’t alter the fact that the United States intervened in an essentially internal civil war between North and South Vietnam, not a war intended by North Vietnam to help spread global Communism. In fact, Ho Chi Minh, though a Communist, rose to power as the leader of a nationalist (not Communist) movement to resist France’s continued rule in the country. (Butwell,
Southeast Asia
, p.23) And, as Leslie Gelb, a senior official in LBJ’s administration, writes, with the defeat of South Vietnam “no dominoes fell.” He goes on to say that three years after the fall of Saigon in 1975, “the standing and the power of the U.S. in Asia were greater than at any time since the end of World War II.” (Gelb, “Would Defeat in Iraq Be So Bad?” p.40)

^*
“This treaty is not the millennium,” Kennedy would say about the treaty that banned nuclear testing “in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water.” He said, “It will not resolve all conflicts, or cause the Communists to forgo their ambitions, or eliminate the dangers of war. It will not reduce our need for arms…But it is an important step—a step toward peace—a step toward reason—a step away from war.” The treaty, very reluctantly agreed to by Kennedy’s own Joint Chiefs of Staff, culminated five years of negotiation. It did not ban nuclear testing underground because of Soviet opposition to on-site inspection. (Joint Chiefs of Staff reluctantly agree: Schlesinger,
Thousand Days
, pp.896, 912–913) Kennedy viewed the test ban “the touchstone of his entire foreign policy,” and once told an aide who was very close to him that if he had to lose the 1964 election because of it, then he was “willing to pay the price.” (Vanocur, “Kennedy’s Voyage of Discovery,” p.45)

^*
It is by no means certain that there was any missile gap at all. Indeed, there are those who believe that if there were such a gap, it was in America’s favor, and Kennedy knew it, his political campaign allegation being disingenuous. However, this has not been proved.

^*
LBJ’s reference in an interview with Leo Janos to the CIA-backed attempted assassination of Fidel Castro (Janos, “Last Days of the President,” p.39).

^*
Manchester writes that at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Steve Landregan, the hospital administrator who was asked to call O’Neal’s mortuary for a casket for the president, couldn’t get an outside line because “Dallas’ Southwestern Bell…was crippled by overloaded exchanges and circuits.” He “ran from office to office, picking up receivers” until he finally got “a dial tone.” (Manchester,
Death of a President
, p.291)

^*
This is what Stone’s chief advisers on the movie have said about
JFK
: “The most accurate and influential depiction of the evidence in the Kennedy assassination since the Zapruder film was shown on ‘Goodnight America’” (Groden,
Killing of a President
, p.210); “What the movie has done is to annihilate the Warren Commission” (Prouty, “President Kennedy Was Killed by a Murder, Inc.,” p.37).

†In many interviews he has gone further. He told
Time
magazine in 1991, “We did a lot of homework.” He said his technical advisers went over the script with a “fine tooth-comb.
Everything
that we have in there we stand behind.” (Morrow and Smilgis, “Plunging into the Labyrinth,” p.76)

^*
There was one good fallout from the movie
JFK
. As noted earlier, it provoked an outcry by many of those who had seen the movie that all the files on the assassination be opened up and all documents be released to the American public, documents that otherwise were not scheduled to be released until the year 2039. Not just Congress, but the White House and the National Archives were inundated by phone calls and letters demanding that all assassination documents be released to the public. In fact, every Warren Commission assistant counsel still alive (twelve), as well as past presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, joined the chorus demanding the opening of the files, and Congress responded with “The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992,” which ordered the release of all assassination-related documents. (See long endnote discussion.)
If Stone’s movie had been discredited by those who were knowledgeable about the assassination, it had achieved a measure of legitimacy, thanks to Congress. To the point, in fact, that even some who recognize Stone’s movie as being a cinematic fraud wonder aloud if, in the last analysis, the movie should be looked on positively. But using the same reasoning, perhaps we should give the Third Reich credit for the creation of the state of Israel.

†At bottom, what caused Stone to believe all these groups and people were involved in Kennedy’s assassination? As I’ve said earlier in this book, he embraces the non sequitur that if someone has a motive to commit a crime, he must have done it. “If you understand ‘why’ [we believe] Kennedy was killed,” he said while filming
JFK
, “then you begin to understand ‘who’ [killed him]” (Interview of Stone in
Dallas Morning News
, April 14, 1991, p.8C).

^*
A major Hollywood studio doesn’t normally fork over $40 million blindly to fund a picture, but that appears to be what happened here. Stone got a handshake deal for a $20 million budgeted movie (later increased to $40 million) before cappuccino was even served at a 1989 dinner at The Grill restaurant in Beverly Hills. Stone, accompanied by his CAA agent, Paula Wagner, made his “pitch” to Terry Semel, president and chief operating officer at Warner Bros., Bob Daly, chairman of the board and chief executive officer at the studio, and Bill Gerber, a studio production executive. Semel did read Garrison’s book, at Stone’s suggestion, and said he was “blown away by the fact that clearly something else happened” than what the Warren Commission had concluded. (
Los Angeles Times
, December 15, 1991, Calendar section, pp.5, 28, 33)

^*
Apart from the fact that most people instinctively want to believe there was a conspiracy in the assassination, perhaps the biggest reason why the JFK conspiracy phenomenon will continue indefinitely is that nutty or huckster authors and television documentarians will keep it alive by seizing on one (or more) of the literally hundreds of erroneous and mostly ridiculous allegations that swarms of people have made in the past. The author or documentarian only has to negotiate three hurdles, two of which are disposed of in less than a second. First, the fact that the allegation is silly on its face, though it should be a problem, is no problem at all since most of the author’s or documentarian’s audience is predisposed to believing in the conspiracy theory of the assassination, and hence isn’t likely to find the allegation ridiculous. The second problem—that the person making the allegation and the allegation itself have already been completely and thoroughly discredited—is easily handled simply by not mentioning this fact to the reading or viewing audience. The third and final problem the author or documentarian has to deal with is the one that takes all his time and energy. But if he is persistent, as most are, he invariably succeeds. He tries to find the original person (or persons) who made the allegation (or, if he or she has died, their children, spouse, and other surviving relatives) as well as other people who lend support to the allegation. In this latter regard there always are more than enough people out there who are either kooky themselves (like the original alleger) or not kooky but willing to make sufficiently irresponsible remarks that in some way support the allegation and therefore warrant their being mentioned in a book or scene in a TV documentary.
The above is the basic template for the continuing life of the conspiracy movement by way of new books and television documentaries. As with much of the past, it is my belief that almost every book, movie, or television documentary on the assassination in the future will be very likely to follow, in one form or another, this template.

^*
Here’s a very small sampling of what
all
conspiracy theorists do—
have
to do—since they are unable to offer any
evidence
of a conspiracy. “I
believe
the CIA…role in the Kennedy assassination was this: they presented members of organized crime, who had a major bone to pick with the Kennedy administration, with the opportunity and plan. All the Mafia had to do was carry it out. And that’s exactly what happened” (Wecht,
Cause of Death
, p.71). “Angry talk in the corporate boardrooms
may
have grown into deadly plots on golf courses…But oilmen…could not have moved against Kennedy on their own. They needed allies within government and within the intelligence community. Such allies were there—among the anti-Castro Cubans, in the CIA, organized crime, and within the federal government. All were most receptive to the idea of a change of leadership” (Marrs,
Crossfire
, p.278). “
My personal inclination is
…that Lee Harvey Oswald fired no shots at President Kennedy or Governor Connally and that he was…a patsy, set up to take the blame while the real assassins escaped” (Kurtz,
Crime of the Century
, p.xxvii). “
My opinion
…[is that] the Mafia joined forces with a few Kennedy haters from the CIA, radical anti-Castro Cuban exiles, and others in the extreme right wing, both civilian and military. A plan was formulated to assassinate the president…Hoover and Johnson were brought into the plot. Their role was to prevent a serious investigation of the crime” (Twyman,
Bloody Treason
, pp.832–833).
Not one of the above conspiracy “theorists,” and the thousands of others exactly like them, produced for their readers one speck of evidence to support their naked conjecture.

†Note that peripheral figures in any conspiracy would be more likely to come forward because their limited role would not result in serious punishment—in fact, most likely no punishment at all because of a plea bargain in which they’d have to name higher-ups. And their inducement would be considerable financial rewards (books, TV movies based on their disclosures, etc.). And mere informants, who wouldn’t be exposed to any legally adverse consequences, would only have financial rewards for coming forward.