Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (46 page)

I went to Vietnam because I felt it was the right thing to do, to fight this war, and because my parents had divorced and there was no home for me left, really. I had very mixed feelings about attending Yale University, which I had gone to for about a year when I pulled out. George Bush was in my class—the class of ’68—so I was surrounded by people who were really privileged, who were entitled. They felt themselves smug in a way or smug to the military, smug to the whole concept of the rest of the people. I felt strongly that I didn’t have that experience in my life. I needed to get with real people. I needed to get away from this class of people around me.

I didn’t think about the Warren Commission, but when I came back from Vietnam, let’s say I was in a state of being numbed out and burned out as a person. I was a young dropout in a sense. It took me a while to integrate back into the American system. I went to NYU film school and got a sense of mission and purpose back. It took some time.

I wasn’t involved in the protests like my peers. I did a movie about Ron Kovic,
Born on the Fourth of July.
He got involved right away. I saw it happening, but I was staying outside it. I had neutral feelings. I was shocked by how the civilians in our country were indifferent to the war. That’s what shocked me—nothing different I guess than the Iraq wars and Afghanistan. People didn’t care. They were making money. The economy was booming. So I never talked about it. You never talk about it because you were considered an oddball in our society.

The problem with that war is that the middle class and the upper class didn’t send their children to that war until much later. The volunteer draft got to them, and eventually they protested. But it took many years of many casualties. I didn’t turn against Vietnam until the ’70s, around Watergate, around the revelations of the Church committee. When this rot started to come out about how corrupt some of these decisions were, I started to think about this thing. I turned around. I went to Central America. I did Salvador and Central America. I started to see the same thing as Vietnam happening again in Nicaragua and Honduras, and that turned me around. That was the mid-’80s.

By the late ’80s I met a woman who gave me Jim Garrison’s book
On the Trail of the Assassins
in an elevator in Havana. It was an amazing story, and it made me think about the Kennedy thing all over again. I took about a year and a half (I was making another film) to read as much as I could about the assassination, to talk to people. I got to know Jim Garrison and got to know a lot of people. I interviewed most of the people from the Dealey Plaza and policemen, and in 1991 we went ahead with the film. Then? Then my life changed.

Jim Garrison was going up against one of the biggest white whales of all time. He was going up against the government. He was going up against a covert operation, what they call black ops. These things are very different from what normal
civilians are used to, and they don’t understand them. Garrison was saying some things that were indeed exaggerated, but he had a case.

Jim wrote two books [about the assassination]. He went back to the same subject thirty years later, and the second book is a repeat of the first book. It’s better, but he goes into the same detail. He’s a passionate and very much liked district attorney in New Orleans. He served in World War II, and he served again in Korea. He loved this country. He, like me, didn’t have an opinion about the assassination. It was only when he was talking to Senator Russell Long in ’65 or ’66 that he came back around to thinking about this thing. He read the actual Warren Commission [report] from beginning to end, and he started as a very smart man who was a prosecuting a case, as a district attorney. He questioned the veracity of the Warren Commission.

If you read his [Garrison’s] book, he makes it very clear: His book is about the motive for killing Kennedy. Who takes power after someone is killed? He makes the point that the Johnson policy was quite different from the Kennedy policy all over the world and especially on the Cold War. Johnson went back to the old Cold War days. Garrison is looking for motive, which a prosecutor always does, and he tries to prove it in the book. It’s very hard to prove in a trial against a covert operation run by the government.

Garrison has a limited view in New Orleans, but it’s an accurate one. He found many witnesses, and I think Clay Shaw knew more than he [Garrison] ever knew. However, the movie is not just about Garrison—it’s also based on Jim Marrs’s book as well as my own research.

New Orleans was a very interesting middle ground in this whole assassination background. Garrison had quite a few of the witnesses there, including David Ferrie and Guy Banister, an ex-FBI chief. He was running the operation for the right wing in New Orleans, and also Clay Shaw. Out of those people, two of whom died before he could get to trial, he brought Clay Shaw to trial, which is probably the only chance he had left. But he is, at the end of the day, the only public official to have brought the case in the Kennedy killing.

Clay Shaw’s background was CIA. He was a contract agent for them. He worked in Italy. He was in anti-fascist organizations all over Europe. He came back to New Orleans. He ran the Trade Mart, which was often used for political purposes because it’s a huge business—you got to know everybody in South America. Shaw had a history of knowing David Ferrie, and he denied it at trial, and he has a history of knowing Perry Russo and various players who played out in this. He lied through the whole trial. The judge himself, Mahoney, who I met, tough little Irish guy, said to me, “I didn’t believe a word that Clay Shaw said through the whole trial. He perjured himself all the way through.” This is a judge talking, but Shaw was a smooth liar because he was trained to be.

Shaw’s relationship to this assassination is a very obtuse one, and it’s hard to prove these things, but there’s reason to believe he was more involved, far more involved, than the surface would let us believe. His history of using a false name—most people knew him as “Clay Bertrand”—played into our movie. That was part of the reason that he perjured himself. Garrison was onto something, but he certainly couldn’t go to Dallas because he wasn’t a Dallas person. He did interview some of the people from Dallas, but Dallas was where the playground really took place. A lot of the players showed up in New Orleans. They also show up, by the way, in Miami and Chicago—previous attempts to kill Kennedy.

The research we did for
JFK
was as good as we could get at that time. We tried to make it as exciting and different in its style as we could. We kept to what our research told us. I believe that Kennedy was killed by forces that had to be fairly powerful in order to control the mechanism that could control the parade route, control the security that he got that day, could control the autopsy. One of the things Garrison isn’t given credit for is that Pierre Fink showed up at his trial. He was at the original autopsy and told about the behavior in the autopsy, detail by detail, at the end of the movie. Watch it. It’s amazing what happens. It’s a controlled autopsy—and, by the way, the logistics of the bullet don’t match.

My life is a process, but every one of these movies,
Nixon
,
JFK
,
Salvador
,
Platoon
,
Born on the Fourth of July,
taught me something about history. I
researched each one individually. I guess by the time I was sixty years old I had decided that I’d like to just take a stab at the beginnings of my life in 1946, because that’s the year after the atomic bomb was dropped. My life was lived under the shadow of that atomic bomb. America grew very powerful, a sovereign empire based on that bomb. It was the founding myth of our new Constitution, and I wanted to go back to the beginning, to that era. My life in films is about the building up of an American empire from World War II on to today, where we’re a global security state, promising dominion over all. I’m proud of the movie
JFK
. It’s a beautifully put together piece of work, and it’s also solid in its research.

I didn’t associate the assassination and Vietnam until years later because I went to Vietnam, and I would go again. I was that kind of boy. I came back another kind of young man. I changed over the years. Life is not like the movies, where you have an overnight change. It takes time to change. I became, I suppose, in the second half of my life, more progressive, more liberal. I think back about my life, and I can see where I thought America was going in the right direction in the ’50s [when it] was going in the wrong direction.

In Vietnam, we were definitely going in a far worse direction. I didn’t see Kennedy’s killing as part of that until I read up and did my research. When you look at Lyndon Johnson, he takes office that day. Everything starts to change. The message goes out: “We’re in Vietnam. We’re staying.” He sends troops within one year of Kennedy’s death, he’s got combat troops—he’s got the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August ’64. By the next year, in ’65, he’s got combat troops in Vietnam. It’s a huge change in direction. South America, there’s a coup in Brazil. Kennedy never would have taken part in that coup. That affected the rest of South America for many years.

Some people will say, “Wow, great movie,” but some people will say, “I don’t believe it.” There’s a younger generation coming. Maybe they’ll be looking back at it. No film is the definitive version, either as a history or a book. It’s a beginning. I’m very proud of the movie, and in two or three generations from now, if someone is still taking the time to look at it as an introduction into this world, I would be very honored and proud. But it’s the beginning. There are many things more to learn. You should learn the
other side. You should learn some of the bad sides of Kennedy, but at the end of the day, the balance is in his favor.

If I hadn’t done that movie, there wouldn’t be a marker for JFK, and he needs one because he was a great president. I don’t think he
would
have been a great president. He
was.
His behavior at the ’62 nuclear crisis that we had with the near end of this world was very brave and very courageous. He looked into the abyss with Khrushchev. Khrushchev deserves more credit. But the truth is that Kennedy had been in war. He had experience with his military. Remember
Seven Days in May,
the [attempted] coup d’état? He didn’t believe them. He had doubts about their intelligence, about what their intentions were, and didn’t feel good about it. He was very conscious of his military. He was very conscious of the CIA. He fired Dulles and Cabell. That’s a huge deal. Allen Dulles was an institution in Washington, so for him to do that was to signal his intention to change things. He made huge enemies with that, and with the military, by him not going to war in Cuba, he antagonized [them] to a degree that they would have cooperated with his removal.

We made a series called
Untold History of the United States,
which was very successful. In the middle of that series is a chapter on Kennedy. We don’t go into the assassination. We go into what he did in office before and after, especially after the missile crisis of 1963. We show you the change in thinking about the military, about how he made enemies of the intelligence community, of the military, of the business community, and certainly of the racists. What he did in the South angered many people. They saw him as a guy who was changing the social order of things, and don’t forget the anti-Castro Cubans, who despised him for having backed off the Bay of Pigs invasion, which he did. At the October ’62 missile
crisis, many Americans wanted him to go ahead and invade Cuba and nuke the place. When he didn’t do that, General LeMay was furious with him. So were the other Chiefs of Staff. That’s documented. He had many enemies when he went to Dallas.

He was a great president because he had the courage to be gentle and to be soft and to be weak at a time when everyone was demanding him to act strongly and to bomb Cuba, to go in and invade. It takes great courage for a man who has all the power in the world to not use it. It was a great lesson for mankind. He’s not quite given the credit he deserves, but I’m not sure I would be alive [had we invaded Cuba] because I was living on the East Coast then. I think the world was much closer to destruction at that point than we know.