A pack of lies
A critic called Stephen Dalton gives due warning in The Times of a film to be shown on BBC1 this evening (Sunday):
JFK (1991) BBC One, 10.55pm: Much more ambitious and controversial than his new film World Trade Center, Oliver Stone’s powerhouse essay on the mother of all conspiracy theories still feels like a bravura piece of film-making. It is packed with star names and the virtuoso editing blends newsreel footage, dramatic re-creation and wild speculation. Kevin Costner is excellent as the New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, the only man to try legally to prove a Kennedy assassination plot. (189min)
JFK presents President Kennedy's assassination as the work of a conspiracy conducted at the highest levels of government, to prevent a withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. Readers who saw the film on its release 15 years ago may recall that its thesis was rubbished by political commentators of every shade of opinion from Alexander Cockburn in The Nation to George Will in the Washington Post. (The principal exceptions to this consensus of execration were the know-nothing fringe of the know-nothing fringe, such as Michael Parenti and John Pilger.) It provoked particular outrage among writers such as the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jnr who had served in the Kennedy administration. But many of the same critics acknowledged despairingly that generations to come might gain their knowledge of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson from this film.
I don't know the age of Stephen Dalton, who writes on films for a variety of publications, but it looks to me that he bears out that prediction. Aesthetic criteria are independent of politics (which is why we value the filmic standards of Sergei Eisenstein and Leni Riefenstahl despite the politics they served), but Oliver Stone explicitly presented JFK as expressing essential historical truths. He invites judgement on that point, and the judgement must be that his film is despicably dishonest.
There is zero evidence that Kennedy planned to withdraw troops from Vietnam. There is zero evidence that Kennedy was killed by anyone other than a lone misfit. By his slightly confusing remark that Garrison was "the only man to try legally to prove a Kennedy assassination plot", Dalton means that Garrison is the only legal figure to have issued an indictment for participation in a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. This is true, but - presumably because Stone doesn't mention it, and Dalton gets his history from Stone - Dalton omits relevant information. Garrison's case, against a New Orleans businessman called Clay Shaw (played by Tommy Lee Jones in the film), was thrown out of court in less than an hour.
The real-life Garrison's principal witness, Charles Spiesel, doesn't appear in the film. This may have something to do with the fact that he was prone to take his daughter's fingerprints to check that supernatural forces hadn't replaced her with an imposter. A witness who does appear in the film, a rent-boy played by Kevin Bacon, is entirely fictitious. A third protagonist, known only as 'Colonel X' and who provides the film-version Garrison with confirmation that Kennedy's assassination was a government conspiracy, does (or did) have a real-life counterpart. He was a retired US Army Colonel called L. Fletcher Prouty, who worked as a researcher on Stone's film. He was also a regular speaker at conventions of the Liberty Lobby, a fiercely antisemitic organisation that fortunately expired in the same year as Prouty (2001). Prouty's ludicrous book The Secret Team was published in a 1990 edition by the Noontide Press. This is the imprint of the so-called Institute for Historical Review, rightly described by the Anti-Defamation League as "the world's single most important outlet for Holocaust-denial propaganda".
You might want to bear this in mind if you find yourself watching Stone's farrago of nonsense, now or at any time in the future.
