Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (36 page)

Oliver [Stone] is a perfectionist. He wanted to get it done as well as he could. Even though the scenes in the Depository were mostly in black and white, he changed the color of the window frames to the color they originally were back then in 1963. They’re green now, but they were sort of like pink then.

He took care with details that nobody would notice or even care about. He cared about the case. He put a lot into it, and of course the government started to attack him right away. This film was challenged, and it was attacked in the editorial pages rather than the entertainment pages. That’s never happened before or since. Oliver expected that the Hollywood community would back him and support him. They didn’t; they ran for cover. He did a movie,
JFK,
which was a very important movie historically. It’s made a tremendous difference in this case. It got the files opened in the National Archives. Oliver is owed a tremendous debt of thanks. As far as the movie goes, it is a percentage of the evidence. It starts at the time of the assassination and a little bit before and goes through to the finding of not guilty—not “innocent” but rather “not guilty”—of Clay Shaw in New Orleans.

There should be another movie. There needs to be
JFK 2
to tell the rest of the story from 1968 until now, because more has happened now than happened in the time frame covered by
JFK
. But what is told in that movie is Jim Garrison’s story. It’s based on my book
High Treason
;
it’s based on two other books, including Jim Garrison’s book
On the Trail
of the Assassins,
and it tells what happened to him, what he experienced. That’s what the movie is.

Oliver Stone’s take was actually Jim Garrison’s take. It wasn’t his own take; he was telling Jim Garrison’s story. The title of the movie is
JFK.
It could just as well have been called
The Jim Garrison Story.
Garrison lived it, he went through it, and I’m glad he got his story told before he died. His conclusion was that Clay Shaw was involved and Oswald was set up, and that I must agree with. The one thing Garrison couldn’t prove at the trial was motive. The jury was absolutely, completely convinced there was a conspiracy. What they were not convinced with was Clay Shaw’s involvement because Jim couldn’t show motive. He said, “The motive is simple, Shaw is a CIA agent. He worked for the CIA.” Of course Shaw denied it, and it was years until we found out from the director of the CIA that Shaw had lied, that in fact he did work for the CIA at the time.

The largest sacrifice I’ve made personally in all of this is giving up my career. The second biggest is giving up my career as a motion picture optical effects expert. But the biggest challenge and the biggest sacrifice was back eighteen years ago. My wife and I made the decision that I would come down here to keep the issues alive because we had lost about a dozen people in eighteen months. The other side in this case was winning by default. The Sixth Floor Museum, which has been lying through the years—telling people the Warren Commission was right even though they know better—had nobody to challenge them with any credibility. So my wife, Kris, who sadly passed away just two years ago, and I made the decision. She stayed up there with the kids and the grandkids. I moved down here to keep the issues alive. This matters to me. It really matters to everybody, but it particularly matters to me.

I would like to see the truth be known before I die. Today I’m sixty-eight years old. What can I tell you? I don’t know about how much time I’ve got left, but I will be doing this as long as I’m alive. Dallas has ticketed me eighty-one times here in the plaza. They’ve thrown me in jail twice, and I haven’t broken any laws. Two of the judges who defended my point of view in court were fired. Know what message is sent from that type of
thing to the rest of the judges? If I ever have to go back to court again, how am I going to get a fair trial?

The case needs to be reopened; there are many leads. Yes, they’re cold, but the possibility of following through on some of them is still there. We changed history when I released the film in 1975—it did the impossible. It changed the course of history in this case; it’s not over yet. There’s still a lot more to learn. I have a new book coming out that’s called
JFK: Absolute Proof,
and it is that; it is absolute proof. In it I have a lot of brand-new evidence, things that have never come out before. I found a witness who was talking to Lee Oswald when the shots went off. I’ve found documents within the government’s files when I worked for the government for the House Assassinations Committee.

There’s a lot of stuff that people haven’t seen, and they need to see it. This may be the last book I ever write. I’ve done fourteen publications already, one of them hit number one on the
New York Times
bestseller list. They said it was number two, but even so it was number one—they told me that. In any case, I don’t know where this one’s going to go, but the public needs to know; they have a right to see this evidence. It can’t go on being suppressed.

My favorite ally in all of this through the years was Congressman Thomas Downing of Virginia, who I showed the films to back in 1975. He realized there was a lot that needed to be answered, and he created the House Assassinations Committee and asked me to be on the staff himself, which I was. People like Tip O’Neill and others realized we were right. There was a legitimate question that needed to be answered. Now
people want to know the truth. They’ll go into the Sixth Floor Museum; they’ll just shake their heads. They’ll go down to the bookstore and want to find books on any side of the issue, and they won’t find anything on our side because it’s censorship. They won’t allow any of these things to be in there, and they should. They should let people know the truth. They want to know the truth. They are attracted to the questioned history. About 95 to 99 percent of the people know that there is a conspiracy. In their heart of hearts, they feel they know it. About 1 to 5 percent believe there’s an open question about it, that maybe there was, maybe there wasn’t.

I’m here Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and holidays.

Vincent Bugliosi

In November 1963 Vincent Bugliosi was the twenty-nine-year-old president of his class at the UCLA School of Law, due to graduate the following spring. He was already working in the L.A. District Attorney’s Office, where he later rose to prominence for his unparalleled conviction-success rate (105 convictions of 106 felony jury trials), including that of the Manson Family in 1969. His book on the Kennedy assassination,
Reclaiming History
, researched and written over a span of twenty years, consists of more than two thousand pages and tackles every theory of the case in minute detail.

I
was going to UCLA law school when JFK was elected. I admired him. You know why I admired him? The guy was a war hero. He talked his father into getting some doctor to prepare a phony medical report so he could fight in the war. A destroyer cut his PT boat in half, and for four hours he swam to shore, taking with him one of his crewmembers. So the fact that the guy was a war hero who didn’t have to fight at all—his father was ambassador to England—impressed me about him.

A couple years later I was trying one murder case after another down at the L.A. District Attorney’s office. I was walking down the hall at UCLA law school in front of the business office, and one of the secretaries called out, “The president’s just been shot.” Because I happened to be president of the class at that time, I went into all the classrooms and announced to the students, and the professors excused everyone for the day.

The assassination of course shocked everyone, and I was just totally shocked like everyone else. The main emotion at the time by far was shock. However, there was another emotion: of hope. You know, he didn’t die until about half an hour later, so many people were saying, “Maybe it’s not going to be fatal.”
There was also the thought that maybe, lost in the transmission, he really wasn’t shot, that someone got it messed up. But it was a terrible blow to the American people.

My life at that time was trying one murder case after another, so I hadn’t studied the assassination at all. My life seven days a week—I didn’t take vacations or anything—was going from one murder or robbery or rape case to another. Up to that point, what I had heard from the conspiracy theories was that the Warren Commission had bias, distorted the record, and fabricated evidence. What came through to me, and I didn’t have any opinion, but one thing did bother me: I kept hearing that the Warren Commission had sealed the records for seventy-five years, the natural inference among people being, “Why did they seal the records unless they have something to hide?”

I didn’t get involved until 1986 when I “prosecuted” Oswald posthumously in London. According to
London Weekend Television,
the American Trial Lawyer’s Association had their national convention in London of all places in 1985; they started taking a survey, not just in London, but they flew over here, and they went to bar groups all over the country and asked them, “Who should oppose each other?” According to them, it should be me. When they first asked me to do it, I said no because I had been asked to do other things like this in artificial courtroom settings.

But they replied, “Wait. This is totally different from anything you’ve ever been involved in. We know about your love affair with your yellow pad. There’s not going to be any script. Your yellow pad’s the script. We’re going to have the real Warren Commission witnesses, no script, a regular
federal judge, a regular federal jury chosen from the jury rows of the Dallas Federal District Court.”

I said, “This is really something.”

They promised me twenty-eight hours because, how do you put on the Kennedy assassination in a couple hours? It ended up twenty-one hours unscripted. It was a mock trial, but it was kind of like a docu-trial.
Time
magazine said it was the closest to a real trial the accused assassin would ever have.

Gerry Spence defended Oswald. His name came up as a criminal defense attorney, and I came up as a prosecutor. I have to say, though, that when they met with me they asked me, “Should we choose Spence, Racehorse Haynes, or F. Lee Bailey?”

I told them F. Lee Bailey had a brilliant criminal mind. “Tremendous experience, but he doesn’t do his homework.” I said, “Racehorse Haynes, that name is a misnomer. According to what I’ve heard, he puts people to sleep.”

They said, “We just came back from Houston, and we heard the same story.”

I said, “Spence, I’ve come up against him in a debate in Wyoming, where he’s an iconic figure. I think he’s the best one who could stand up to me in final summation.” So that’s how it came about. Twenty-one hours, no script, regular federal judge, federal jury—and the jury convicted Oswald. The trial was a mock trial, but it was totally different from any other mock trial. Where do you have a mock trial where Gerry Spence and I work for close to half a year preparing for it? Spence will tell you that he prepared for this trial as much as any other murder trial in his entire career.

One of the first things I did when I was assigned to handle this case in London is get to the bottom of the sealed-records allegation. What did I find out? The Warren Commission didn’t seal the records. The investigation was closed on September 24, 1964, and all the documents that hadn’t been incorporated into the twenty-six volumes were sent to the National Archives for safekeeping. A cover letter by Chief Justice Warren, which I found, told the National Archives that he wanted them to have the fullest disclosure possible of these documents to the American people.

So it had nothing to do with Warren and the Warren Commission. It was an old National Archives rule that whenever documents for a federal investigation were turned over to them for safekeeping, they sealed them for seventy-five years, believed to be the life span of an average person. Since that time, because of the Freedom of Information Act of 1966 and the JFK Act of 1992, this seventy-five-year rule has been totally eviscerated; 99.9 percent of those documents have been made available to the American people. People say, “What about that one-tenth of 1 percent?” G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and Judge John Tunheim, chief counsel of the Assassination Records Review Board, both told me personally that their staff was shown all 100 percent of the records. They both assured me of that, and there’s no smoking gun in there. The smoking gun doesn’t even make any sense.

If there was any group that was bold and criminal enough to murder the president of the United States, surely they’d have the lesser immorality of removing any incriminating documents from those National Archives, so it’s all just sublime silliness. There’s nothing in those archives that’s going to explode the case.

When I got into the case in 1986, I found out that it was they, the conspiracy theorists, who were guilty of the very things they accused the Commission of—distorting evidence and so forth—and I decided to do a book on it.
Reclaiming History
is a result of about a twenty-year effort. The only conspiracy in my opinion that had any merit at all—but there was no evidence—was the one with anti-Castro Cuban exiles. They were under a misimpression: Kennedy clearly said, “We’re not going to support you at the Bay of Pigs. We’ll get you there, we’ll train you, but we’re not going to get involved.” But they said, “He’s just saying that to the public. Obviously he’s going to get involved.” In their mind, Kennedy betrayed them at the Bay of Pigs by not giving them air support. So their brothers, their fathers, et cetera, died. If anyone had
a motive, it was they. But there was no evidence. Then there was a reconciliation between Kennedy and anti-Castro Cuban exiles at the Orange Bowl right before the assassination. Both Jackie and the president were there, and they presented him with the flag of their brigade. He said, “This flag is going to raise itself once again in Cuba, and I’m going to be with you.” That was the only theory that gave me any thought. All the other conspiracy theories made no sense whatsoever. Likewise, Castro didn’t have anything to do with it. Castro’s not insane. He told the House Select Committee, “You think I’m crazy? This would have been the greatest pretext in the world for them to blow Cuba off the face of the Earth.”

The House Select Committee was in existence for about thirty months. After the twenty-ninth month, with 250 investigators, what did they conclude in a draft of the draft of their final report? “No conspiracy.” That was their draft of the final report. Then two fuzzy-headed acoustics experts from Queens College came forward at one second before midnight. They told the House Select Committee—which was running out of money anyway but wanted to keep the investigation alive—that they had listened to a police Dictabelt recording from an open microphone, presumably by a Dallas police motorcycle and presumably in Dealey Plaza. They didn’t hear any sounds of gunshots, but they did discern what they said were impulse sounds, four impulse sounds, one of which, they said with a 95 percent probability because of their mathematical computations, came from the grassy knoll.

Now the HSCA already knew that three shots were fired by Oswald from the Book Depository building, so any fourth shot, of necessity, would have been a conspiracy. They sold the HSCA that incredible bill of goods, but it was a hotly contested House. Four of the members of the House Select Committee wrote strong dissents; two of them that were in favor of it were very, very weak. The conspiracy community was levitating with joy. What brought them crashing down to Earth was that in 1982, twelve of the leading scientists in the country and physicists—under the auspices of the National Research Council and headed by Norman Ramsey, a professor at Harvard—looked at those same tapes. They also discerned these impulse sounds, but what did they also find out? That at the identical moment of these impulse sounds, in the background they hear Sheriff Bill
Decker giving instructions to his troops, and that was proven to be one minute
after
the assassination, when the presidential limousine was long gone down the Stemmons Freeway on the way to Parkland Hospital. So those impulse sounds could not have been any fourth shot.

By the way, to show you how silly the conspiracy theory is, their main idea is that the CIA hired a Mob hit man to fire from the grassy knoll. Whoever fired that shot, supposedly from the grassy knoll, the head shot’s only forty yards away and the guy is so bad a shot, not only can’t he hit Kennedy, he can’t even hit the presidential limousine. It’s just crazy. I have to say this: The House Select Committee did a good job, but they really stained and blemished their record tremendously. It was very unprofessional what they did, to seize what these two acoustics experts had. That’s all they had to go on, the acoustics evidence. Twenty-nine months of investigation showed no conspiracy.

Oliver Stone shouldn’t even be invited to the table of discussion on this. I’ll give this to Oliver—you know, I’ve got to be fair to him—he did have the correct date. He had the correct city. He had the correct victim. But other than that, his movie, and I’m choosing my words carefully, was almost one continuous lie, and he had the audacity to fictionalize history. Fine, but you call it fiction. He didn’t. He bought the fringe conspiracy theories, all of their theories, even though it was rebutted by everything else. However, there are certain areas where we know flat-out that he knew he was inventing evidence. It’s the consensus of everyone except Oliver Stone that Jim Garrison framed poor Clay Shaw. How did he do it? He literally had his staff bribe, intimidate, and hypnotize witnesses. The jury came back—they had a cup of coffee of course—they came back in about twenty minutes. It was ridiculous. He’s [Garrison’s] a disgrace. Then Stone came along and resurrected him from his legal grave. There’s no merit whatsoever to the prosecution of Shaw. Totally innocent.

Billions of words have been written about the Kennedy assassination, more than any other single one-day event in world history. But to summarize it, I learned as a prosecutor, you don’t have to be a pro; it’s just common sense: If a person is innocent of a crime, chances are there’s
not going to be any evidence at all pointing toward his guilt. But now and then, because of the nature of life, the unaccountability of things, there may be one piece of evidence and in unusual, rare situations, two, three pieces of evidence that point toward guilt even though the person is innocent. But in the Kennedy case, all the evidence, without exception, points toward Oswald’s guilt. In
Reclaiming History,
I set forward fifty-three separate pieces of evidence that point toward his guilt, and under those circumstances it wouldn’t even be humanly possible for him to be innocent—not in the world in which we live, the world where there’s going to be a dawn tomorrow. Not in that world. Only in a fantasy world can you have fifty-three pieces of evidence pointing toward guilt and still be innocent.