Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (45 page)

KAMMERER: Doesn’t seem like it was fifty years ago. I pretty much close the book on events that are of the past and try to leave them in the
past, but, as Sonny mentioned, the call to come and talk about it touched some emotions. I still stayed involved with the Kennedy family, and later on, in 1968, I was an official out at the University of Maryland, hanging the ribbons on the winners of the Special Olympics. It was just a marvelous thing the Kennedys did. I’m still involved in Special Olympics. One of my roommates, Eddie Khayat, has a Special Olympics tournament in York, Pennsylvania. I’ve been there twenty-five consecutive years.

MITCHELL: You never forget, on a yearly basis, what advancements have been made for my people. We live with everything every day, but when it comes to the National Football League, I’m very happy. From where it was when I came into the league in 1958, where we were lucky to have two blacks on a football team—when I came in it was two blacks, now it’s two whites—but what it all boils down to is that everything has changed. But it’s all been for the good, and everything is just so great now, until I get upset whenever there’s something being said against the league or whatever, because so many good things have happened to us.

Oliver Stone

In 1963 seventeen-year-old New Yorker Oliver Stone was attending the Hill School, a
college preparatory
school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. After an Army tour in Vietnam, he graduated in 1971 from New York University’s film school, where director Martin Scorsese was among his teachers. Stone won his first Academy Award in 1979 for
Midnight Express.
In 1988 he bought the film rights to Jim Garrison’s
On the Trail of the Assassins,
and directed the controversial conspiracy thriller
JFK,
which Warner Brothers released in 1991. He has won three Oscars and four Golden Globes among many other awards.

K
ennedy inherited Vietnam from Eisenhower. Eisenhower supported the French war there. We paid 80 percent of the French expenses during that war, from 1947 to 1954. After that, Eisenhower kept talking about the Domino Theory in Asia. Kennedy very much inherited a situation that was fraught with peril. It was not only Cuba; there was Laos, there was Vietnam. Ike was the older man. He was the one who was trusted. It was very hard for John Kennedy to go against Eisenhower. With the Bay of Pigs, he committed to that policy—that Allen Dulles had put into effect—of invading Cuba through proxy groups. With Vietnam, he continued the policy of containing Communism. He put noncombat advisers into Vietnam, and he took the number from eight hundred to about sixteen thousand in 1963. But there was no combat role assigned to them, and he was very clear about that. He didn’t want to put ground troops in. He said it repeatedly. He was pressured, but at the end of the day, he signaled his intention to withdraw. He was withdrawing the first thousand. He said to his friend Kenny O’Donnell, “I cannot do this, withdraw from Vietnam, until after the election of ’64. I can do it in ’65. I’ll
be very unpopular, but we won’t have a crusade like a McCarthy crusade against me. I’ll be the most hated man in America, but I can do it then.” Everything hinges on that second election of 1964, everything, the whole balance of his presidency.

Kennedy was gambler, but he would only go so far. He was very conscious of being elected, because he’d just been barely elected in 1960. However, against Goldwater, how could he have lost? You have to ask, looking back now, when you realize how unsettling Goldwater was to the majority of Americans. Kennedy would have swept in a landslide, and it would have given him far more juice for the second term.

My father was very much against Kennedy and was a Nixon man and an Eisenhower Republican conservative. He thought Kennedy was on the left. It came up at the dinner table more than once. My dad was very outspoken and a very powerful, intelligent man. I supported Goldwater in ’64. I was conservative, and Kennedy was definitely seen as a person who was selling out to the Soviets—signing the nuclear treaty, the partial test ban—and was seen as a shaker-upper and pro-Cuba even. Those feelings were in the air, and I felt them.

I liked Goldwater because he was outspoken. He was a man who said what he thought. He seemed like he wasn’t slick. He wasn’t charming. He was sort of a prototype of the rugged John Wayne Westerner. As an East Coast boy living a rather limited life, I fell for it. Goldwater was my candidate in ’64. It’s unbelievable now that I’m saying this, but you have to think about the mood of the country and where I came from. I had movie heroes, and he seemed like a movie type. He knew what he wanted. I didn’t realize the danger implicit in his words at that point. I read a few
of those John Birch manuals, and I thought,
It kind of makes sense
. Not that I was against godless atheists, but something about the United States seemed to lack a resolution, a spark. We seemed to lack will, and my father would talk about that.

I respected my father a lot, and I had those feelings probably, but as the years went on and my parents got divorced, I moved out. I went to boarding school. I saw another Kennedy. I started to see a young, handsome president, very gallant and moving. But I had no strong opinions.

This Kennedy group was something new and special. He was hatless at the inauguration. It seemed like everything was different about him. He was a young man. Nixon, Eisenhower, and Johnson, all these people were the older generation from World War II. Something about Jack Kennedy said young. The Kennedys were highly glamorous, and I fell for that too. My mother was French, and she was glamorous, and because Jacqueline Kennedy evoked France too, she was very much a darling. No, if anything, they were in the upper class of American society, because we always had a menu. We lost our upper classes at some point in the World War II era.

Kennedy’s eyes were too large in his head, but he was very handsome, and he spoke beautifully well—his oratory, the way he handled himself, the grace under pressure. As I said in my documentary
The Untold History of the United States,
he was aloof from fear. Despite all the pressure that came down on him, he stayed, like Roosevelt, above it, away from it. He didn’t seem to be bothered by it. I’m sure he took home his fears and his doubts, but he never expressed them.

I don’t think Oswald shot anyone that day. He was on the second floor, where he claimed to have been having lunch, when the shot went off. He was put there. There were people on the sixth floor, absolutely, more than one. There were people in the Dal-Tex building. I do think he shot at Walker. You have to look at Lee Oswald as a jigsaw man. He was put together, from the time he was in the Marines and he studied Russian, when he was sent to Russia, when he came back from Russia, he worked at a series of jobs that were assigned to him. Nothing is very clear. When you follow the Oswald path, you’re going to end up in a maze. But what’s
interesting about Oswald is he was definitely an informant for the FBI, and his links to the CIA are the most confusing of all. We don’t have all the information.

But there’s no question, based on other facts that have emerged, that he had a good relationship with the Office of Naval Intelligence, which is military intelligence—ONI they called it. There were phone calls made to North Carolina from Dallas when he was in detention there with the police. He was trying to get through to this guy, John Hurt, in the ONI. Oswald has a very fabulous history. Marina herself is also questionable because of her ties to intelligence in Russia. But it seems that Oswald was used, and he wanted to be. Oswald’s favorite TV show was
I Led Three Lives
with Richard Carlson. He wanted always to be one of those guys. If you really wanted to be known and you were that crazy, you would come out like a John Wilkes Booth, an assassin of a president and say, “I did it” and be proud of it.

He was in the Texas Theatre to meet somebody. Oswald was controlled all the way through, all the way through New Orleans, and all the way through Dallas. He had handlers. He had people he knew, that he was in contact with—a mysterious life, but he was definitely there to meet somebody.

I believe there was a phony defector program put together by either ONI or CIA. There were several at the time of Oswald, from around ’57 to about ’61, who went to the Soviet Union, garnered a profile as being anti-American, and came back to the United States and were used, as they were used throughout, for whatever nefarious purposes the CIA wanted to use them for.

This is a black op. Now, no one said that when Oswald went to Russia in 1959 or whatever, “He’s going to be assassinating the president.” No, no one knew about Kennedy until this decision to kill him until probably in ’62 or ’63, after Kennedy had shook up the government with a series of moves that were completely outside the mainstream of American policy up to that point. He was looking to end the Cold War. He was looking to alter our relationships in Asia with Laos and Vietnam. He was
looking to find a new relationship with Castro and Cuba but above all with Khrushchev. Khrushchev is the other key player in this drama. Kennedy’s intentions if he were reelected—and I have to say that becomes the hinge point here, the reelection of ’64—were vast. It would have been a completely new world.

There’s so many things that are off about that day. You might ask, Why so many conspiracies? CIA covert ops are war. It’s a form of war. When you deal with war, you have what they call “conspiracies” that are so bad. For example, a heroic action such as D-Day couldn’t have happened unless it had been a conspiracy by a few Allied planners to put together this very huge event, cross the Channel, land troops successfully. What they did was put decoys out all through the summer. They had false landings. They had fake intelligence. That’s the way you get things done at a high level. Conspiracy is really called “planning.”

But it’s the nature of an event where there are so many witnesses to that killing. So many people show up who know something or know a snatch of something, who have a glimpse of something that went wrong. Most of that testimony isn’t in the Warren Commission. On top of that, you have a situation where almost two and a half hours after the assassination, you have a solution. You have the killer. He’s already being announced by some hack in Washington who puts out an announcement about Lee Harvey Oswald’s profile, two and a half hours after. They hardly have apprehended the man, and they know all about him. Imagine all the people he intersected with. We never really got to know any of them in the Warren Commission. They were never really interviewed. So many people knew Oswald in so many different settings that, as I said earlier, some of them knew him as an anti-Communist. He seems to have liked Kennedy by what he told people, and if anything he was a bit of an idealist—the guy who saw
I Led Three Lives
and wanted to be an intelligence agent and work for the government. You may have known about Oswald, but you wouldn’t have known that amount of detail. It seems to have been a cover story, which is typical in black ops.

I was in the Hill School in Pennsylvania when he was killed. I was very shocked and surprised. We followed the events that weekend—the whole procession, the funeral, the shooting of Oswald. It was ingested
and we moved on with our lives. We didn’t really think about it that much. That’s not to say that when Kennedy died I wasn’t shocked and sad and like the rest of the country. I responded conventionally. I bought the whole story about the Warren Commission.

Right before Oswald was shot, on Sunday morning, Johnson was already calling Fritz and Curry (from the Dallas police office) and saying, “I want to get a full confession from this guy, Oswald.” This is the president of the United States. What’s his rush? In other words, there was a rush to judgment. We were so scared of I don’t know what, but we needed to get somebody who killed the president and who would admit to it. Then you have Oswald walking down this hallway (I love that), and he goes and he does a press conference. He denies his guilt. He says, “I’m just a patsy.” I believe that he was truly stunned. He knew that something had gone down much bigger. He was involved in this thing, didn’t quite know what it was about. But it was such a big thing, to be accused of killing a policeman first, that surprised him. Then a reporter asks, “Did you kill the president of the United States?” He’s surprised because this thing is far beyond his scope of what he thought he was getting involved in. He was a pretty scared young man at the end of that day, that Sunday.